Kath felt her heart beating quickly with excitement. She sat down at her desk, wide-eyed with wonder, bursting with pride and eagerly anticipating the words of praise Miss Foster would finally give her for what was a remarkable achievement. To her great disappointment, Miss Foster didn’t say a word.
‘What’s the matter?’ Joan asked her when she returned home that afternoon with a face like thunder.
‘I hate that Miss Foster!’ Kath stormed.
‘She’s nice, Kath,’ said Joan.
‘That’s what you think,’ Kath replied as she stomped upstairs and threw herself onto her bed. Lying there, her thoughts turned to comforting memories of her primary school, St Joseph’s, in Bermondsey.
There, little camp beds were set up in the hallway in the afternoon for the children to have a sleep, and their daily bottle of milk was warmed up on a black range in the corner of the classroom. Kath smiled to herself as she also recalled the spoonful of malt extract, given to them each day by school helper Mrs Watt, who was also known amongst the children as ‘the malt lady’. It was thought to be of nutritional benefit and they would line up every morning by the first-aid office near the dinner hall, where Mrs Watt would dip a spoon in the sweet, syrupy substance, roll it around until it had stopped dripping and then pop it into the mouth of each child in turn. It wasn’t hygienic and not everyone liked it but Kath did, and even now she could not only taste the thick sweetness but also smell the strong malty aroma. It was an enormously comforting memory but the reality of daily life at secondary school was still all too real.
Outside of school, Kath’s burgeoning career as a ‘thief’ reached a new level when one evening she saw Mary’s Land Army satchel hanging over the back of the kitchen chair. Kath knew that money was tight in the house – they all did – and she didn’t like to keep asking Joan or Mary for spare coins. Now she was faced with temptation.
She was on her own. Furtively looking about her to check that no one else was around, she peeked inside the bag and, as expected, saw Mary’s purse inside. Kath felt that familiar surge of blood to her head, just as she had in Bainbridge’s shop. Just a shilling. That’s all. Mary wouldn’t miss it. It would be easy. And so it was. Quickly dipping into the purse, light-fingered Kath took the silver coin and placed the satchel back on the chair before making a swift getaway.
Having taken the money, Kath now had no idea what to do with it. Her intention was not to spend it on herself. That would be wrong and selfish. But what would she do? The truth is Kath hadn’t thought that far ahead. In the heat of the moment, her mind had been focused simply on taking the money. She had no idea what for.
For the rest of that evening she felt her tummy knot with twin threads of guilt and nerves. What if Mary did notice? By the following morning, she was resolved about what to do and marched down to the greengrocer’s, determined to buy food for the family with the shilling.
‘It’s like Robin Hood,’ she comforted herself. ‘Stealing from the rich to give to the poor.’ Although she secretly knew that the analogy was as quivery as the outlaw’s bowstring, she felt that her actions would benefit everyone in the end.
At the shop, she shrugged off almost all of her remaining guilt by deciding that she would buy something special. A treat. Amongst the dusty greenery and earthy potatoes, a display of gleaming yellow corncobs stood out. That’s it, she thought. They had never had corn on the cob. Now was the time. Wouldn’t everyone be pleased? Kath bought a bagful with the shilling and carried it home, smiling. She had already thought of what to say when confronted with Joan’s inevitable question …
‘Where did you get them from?’ asked Joan, peering into the bag.
‘Rita gave them to me. Said her dad had loads,’ said a well-rehearsed Kath.
Joan looked at her sister. ‘That’s very generous,’ she said. ‘I must thank her mum when I see her.’
Kath froze. She hadn’t foreseen that. Recovering quickly, she said, ‘There’s no need. I thanked Rita already.’
‘Still,’ said Joan. ‘I need to thank her mum. It’s only polite.’
‘I can thank her,’ said an increasingly anxious Kath.
Joan furrowed her brow. ‘You can thank her. You should. But I will thank her too,’ she said, adding, somewhat to her surprise, ‘because that’s what mothers do.’
Realizing that she was getting nowhere and that further debate would draw suspicion, Kath sloped off, cursing herself for not anticipating this turn of events.
Joan cooked the corn that evening and Kath’s unease about being exposed as a thief and a liar simmered temporarily, rather than boiled, as she glowed in the warmth of the golden cobs being served to her sisters, all sitting in eager anticipation of this treat, provided by her. However, her siblings’ appreciative comments as they crunched into the corn, although welcome, didn’t fill her with as much delight as might have been expected because, to her dismay, Kath found that she didn’t like the taste of the corn at all!
Kath’s lie about Rita was a good one because her friend frequently gave her food for cookery lessons at school. Kath enjoyed these classes but always fretted because the children were expected to take in their own ingredients and Kath knew that there was barely enough money at home to buy sufficient food for their daily needs. Feeling embarrassed about the situation, Kath began to tell her teacher a little lie – that she had forgotten to bring the food in.
Kath knocked customarily for Rita on her way to school and, becoming aware that Kath frequently had no food for cookery lessons, Rita would help her out whenever she could, particularly with fruit because her father had an orchard.
‘Have you got your apples?’ Rita asked, when Kath knocked for her the day that they were due to make an apple pie in class. An uncomfortable-looking Kath mumbled that she had forgotten to bring them and so Rita went back inside to get some for her.
A few days later, after the corn had been devoured by everyone else but Kath, Joan was on her way to the shops when she saw Rita’s mother on the other side of the road.
‘Oh, Mrs Wood!’ she called, and walked across to her. ‘Thank you so much for giving our Kath the vegetables.’
Mrs Wood looked at Joan blankly before realizing what she was alluding to – or rather, what she thought she was alluding to. ‘That’s all right, dear,’ she said with a smile. ‘We’ve plenty of apples.’
They parted ways, with Joan wondering what on earth apples had to do with it and Mrs Wood thinking that perhaps Joan thought apples were vegetables. Much to her relief, Kath’s little misdemeanour remained undetected.
Mary continued to find working life on the farm something of an ordeal but all that changed when, without any warning, Mr Burton told her and Barbara that he was selling out to the Co-op, explaining, ‘I’m getting too old for this malarkey.’
‘What will happen to us?’ Mary asked, concerned for her job.
‘Well, that’s up to them,’ he replied.
In the event, the new Co-op manager asked Mary to stay on – to accompany their milkman on his horse and cart, and to show him the route and houses of the customers he needed to deliver to. Mary was delighted to be back on the road and safely away from the cows. Things got even better for her when a little while later she was offered another Land Army job as a permanent milk-lorry driver at Highlands Farm in Hailsham, owned by Mr Willoughby. She was relieved to find Mr Willoughby, unlike Mr Burton, a pleasure to work for. He was always very cordial and greeted her readily with a ‘Good morning!’ and a smile. ‘He’s a real gentleman,’ she told Pierce, who nodded his approval.
But life here, too, was to have its challenges for Mary.
It was fine being on the road, doing the milk deliveries, but time spent on the farm itself was never pleasant as far as she was concerned. Not only did farm animals scare her but she was also terrified by the tiny field mice that would scurry around her feet when she was out in the fields digging up swedes and scraping them clean for cattle feeding. Even worse were the rats t
hat ran around when Mary was helping to pitchfork the crops into haystacks prior to loading them into the threshing machine. She would think back longingly to her time at Koupy Gowns, a period of relative ease that now felt like a lifetime ago.
During busy times, the Canadian soldiers would help out on the farm as part of the war effort and proved most useful in whacking the rats with sticks. In an attempt to put distance between herself and the rodents, Mary volunteered to stand on top of the haystack, dragging the crops up with a pitchfork and levelling them out on top as those below added more and more to the pile.
However, she was so intent on her work one afternoon that she didn’t realize just how high the stack had become. When it was time to come down, although one of the soldiers placed a ladder up the side of the stack for her, she was unable to reach the top rung with her foot. As she struggled in an ungainly fashion, with her leg dangling over the edge of the stack, feeling blindly for the ladder, the soldiers laughed at her predicament until one of them climbed up and gallantly helped her down.
As well as being well looked after by the soldiers, Mary also felt as though she had a father at work as well as at home, for Mr Willoughby had taken it upon himself to guard her morals. As far as Mary was concerned, that was definitely one father too many. She would often walk part of the way to work with a girl who lived a few doors away from her. They had met at the Silverlight Laundry, where the girl still worked, but she had something of a reputation and Mr Willoughby didn’t like the idea of Mary mixing with her. When he asked to see Mary in his office, she wondered what he could possibly want, especially when she saw his serious expression.
‘Just wanted a quick word … in private,’ he said.
Mary waited but the ‘quick word’ took a while in coming.
‘There’s a girl,’ he began, in a lower tone, ‘who I hear you walk part of the way to work with in the mornings.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Mary.
‘She … she … isn’t your friend, is she?’ he said, squirming uncomfortably in his seat.
‘Well, we’re not best friends but we know each other and I like her,’ Mary replied.
‘But you don’t … socialize with her?’
‘No.’
Mr Willoughby took a deep breath. ‘I’d sooner you not be seen with her because she’s not a very nice girl.’
Mary knew what he was referring to. She too had heard that her old work mate worked as a prostitute. Annie had also known. In fact, most local people did. Annie had not been judgmental, though, and had liked her because she thought she was a kind girl. If she had been good enough for Annie, then that was good enough for Mary. As she didn’t feel that she could argue with Mr Willoughby, her employer, she just nodded and left his office. Nevertheless, she continued to see the girl. It wasn’t a good idea to tell a Jarman what to do. Mary was most definitely her mother’s daughter.
In early 1944, one of the Canadian soldiers gave Mary a hen, which he said they had been keeping in their camp. Mary didn’t know how they had come to have it, or quite why they wanted to get rid of it, but she thought it would be useful for supplying eggs for the family and so she took it home in a cardboard box. Pierce was pleased when he saw it and made a cage in the garden.
‘We should have a nice supply of fresh eggs soon,’ he said. However, as the weeks went on and there was no sign of any eggs, Pierce began to get frustrated. Then he thought of another use for the hen.
‘When I come down next weekend, I’ll kill that chicken and we can have it for Sunday dinner,’ he declared.
The comment was met with a stunned silence, followed by wails of protest from his daughters.
‘You can’t do that!’
‘I’m not eating her!’
‘That’s cruel!’
‘It’s a chicken!’ Pierce exclaimed. ‘It’s a meal. Don’t be silly, girls. It’ll be a nice treat for us next Sunday.’
For the rest of that week the girls were worried sick at the thought of their father killing the hen. Mary knew all too well how Daddy liked his meat and that he wasn’t always so keen to have eggs – neither she nor her sisters would ever forget the time back home in Abbey Street when he didn’t get the steak he was expecting for dinner.
On Fridays, one of Mary’s jobs had been to go to the local fish and chip shop to buy the weekly family treat. Fish was tuppence a piece and chips were a penny a portion. The shop counter was so high that she couldn’t be seen over it and so had to jump up and down, shouting out the order that Annie had written on a note for her. What’s more, she also had to suffer the indignity of being told by the woman who served there not to make such a noise.
Pierce wasn’t keen on fish and chips, and so each week he would put sixpence on the mantelpiece for Annie to buy him some steak instead. What Pierce didn’t know was that Annie, intrigued by her brother Mike’s success in betting on the horses, had started to give the sixpence to him to place a bet for her. Her early successes emboldened her until, inevitably, she lost. Worried sick about not having any money for Pierce’s steak and that he would find out she had gambled his sixpence away, she hoped she could give him egg and chips instead, and that he wouldn’t notice. Unfortunately, Pierce looked forward to his Friday-night treat more than she realized. When she’d placed his meal on the table, he’d stared at it and asked bluntly, ‘Where’s my steak?’
‘I thought you’d like a change,’ she replied.
Pierce looked up at her. ‘I don’t fancy a change. I left the money for steak.’
‘Well, I was a bit short this week,’ she said.
‘You shouldn’t have been short,’ he argued. ‘I left sixpence for steak, not eggs!’
As the row escalated, the girls all sat in silence around the kitchen table, surprised to hear their father standing his ground. However, it was Annie who, as usual, had the final word. Fed up with his moaning she took decisive action.
Picking up his plate, she shouted, ‘Well, if you don’t want it, don’t bloody have it!’ and hurled it at her husband.
Pierce had ducked just in time and the plate hit the wall above the fireplace. The girls watched open-mouthed as the fried egg slid slowly and dramatically down the wall. Pierce stormed out and time seemed to stand still in the room. The incident scared them at the time but they later giggled about it – the image of the descending egg would stay with them for a lifetime.
Now, with Pierce having set his mind on roast chicken the following Sunday, Mary and her sisters knew that their hen’s days were numbered. Drastic action was required and so they all agreed with Mary’s decision to return the hen to the Canadians.
The following weekend, when Pierce went out into the garden on Sunday morning, the girls exchanged worried looks with each other. After a few minutes, he re-entered the house with a puzzled expression.
‘Where’s that bloody chicken?’ he asked his nervous daughters.
Mary and Joan stood shoulder to shoulder.
‘It’s gone back to where it came from,’ said Mary, putting on a bold front.
‘You’ve given our dinner away?’ Pierce asked.
As Mary nodded apprehensively, Joan tried to explain to her father. ‘We couldn’t eat that chicken, Dad,’ she said. ‘It was our pet.’
Pierce just stared at her for a moment or two before shaking his head and walking away. So much for them becoming country girls!
In March 1944, Frank told Mary he had a funny feeling that the Canadian troops would be moving on soon. He was right. Plans for a secret Allied invasion of Normandy had been in discussion for some time and military manoeuvres amongst the troops had been stepped up. It wasn’t long before Frank had some firm news for Mary.
‘How long will you be gone?’ she asked him as they took a stroll through the rec, arm in arm.
‘Who knows?’ he replied. ‘Weeks, months … longer.’
They walked in silence for a while, both deep in thought about the future. Their future.
‘Maybe you won’t return
…’ Mary mused. Frank glanced at her and she quickly added, ‘You might decide not to come back.’
Frank reassured her that he would return and that he wouldn’t have given her an engagement ring if he didn’t want them to have a future together. Mary looked down at his thin signet ring on her finger, running her thumb across its surface. It lacked the romance and beauty of a proper engagement ring but she supposed it was a commitment – of sorts.
‘Let’s sit down for a while,’ she said as they came to a bench overlooking the pond.
‘Do you want to get married, Frank?’ she asked, staring out at the ducks on the water.
‘Of course. You have my ring, don’t you?’
‘But when?’ Mary pressed.
‘As soon as the war is over.’
Mary looked at him and said, ‘We have no idea when that might be. I want us to be married, Frank … before you leave.’
Frank thought about this for a few moments. ‘I don’t know if we have time, Mary,’ he said.
‘But do you want to?’
Frank smiled. ‘Of course!’ he exclaimed, leaning over to give her a kiss.
‘I want to get married in Dockhead,’ she said. ‘Where Mummy and Daddy married.’
‘But wasn’t that church bombed?’ he asked.
‘Yes, but they’re using the convent next to it for masses and weddings.’
‘Fine,’ said Frank. ‘But we’d best get a move on.’
Mary’s mind immediately filled with happy thoughts and wedding plans but she knew that the conversation with her father about it was likely to be tricky.
‘You’d be a fool to marry him right now,’ said Pierce. ‘If he’s going off fighting abroad, who knows what might happen.’ He paused. ‘You might find yourself a widow. At eighteen!’
Mary felt tears welling in her eyes at the thought but it made her even more determined to marry the man she had fallen in love with. ‘I’d regret it then, if we hadn’t married,’ she replied.
Pierce shook his head. ‘Just wait, Mary. There’s no rush.’
The Sisters of Battle Road Page 19