Dancing in the Moonlight

by Rita Bradshaw

  She slept with his letters under her pillow, taking them out of their envelopes at night when she couldn’t sleep and touching and kissing the words his hand had written. They were a physical link, however tenuous, with him and, as such, infinitely precious.

  By the time the summer was over and a wet and windy autumn had arrived, many areas of Sunderland had suffered considerable bomb damage and some famous landmarks had been blitzed. The Winter Gardens, Daisy’s favourite place, had been badly damaged and Binns Store on the east side of Fawcett Street was reduced to a shell, along with others. Everywhere you looked, there was devastation. The newspaper and radio reports declared that a jubilant Hitler was nearing the gates of Moscow, and General de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French, called for a national five-minute strike in protest at the German occupation, which was carrying out scores of civilian executions daily. No one in England was unaware that what was happening in France could easily happen on British soil, should the Germans invade, and the Channel seemed a very narrow barrier.

  At the end of October, with Lucy’s blessing, Ruby answered the increasingly strident calls of the government for women to enter the hitherto male domains of industry, particularly the shipyards. At the outbreak of the war such a thing would have been deemed unthinkable, but now, with the supply of men to the front becoming desperately urgent, it was a necessity. Frank and Ralph had been called up at the end of the summer, much to Enid’s despair, and more men were leaving every day. Someone had to take their place and, in spite of old-timers like Aaron complaining that the shipyards weren’t suitable places for the fairer sex, women were invading this sanctum of male labour.

  Ruby took to the work with gusto. From sweeping up and generally making herself useful, she had progressed to trainee crane-driver within weeks. Furthermore, to Lucy’s surprise and delight, her sister began walking out with a nice young man who’d been injured at Dunkirk and now worked in the yard office.

  Lucy replaced Ruby in the shop with an elderly ex-fishmonger, who was more than seventy years old but as sprightly as a young lad and, as November passed, worked longer and longer hours to keep the business ticking over.

  The garrison in Tobruk was reported to have been relieved in November, after a siege of 242 days, fifty-five days longer than the siege of Mafeking in the Boer War. Rommel had been forced to abandon his position and retreat, the radio broadcaster crowed, but when Jacob wrote to her, he wasn’t as elated as Lucy had expected:

  They’re telling us it’s the first defeat of German land forces in the war, and our defence has kept Turkey from being used as a springboard by Hitler for his attack on Russia, delaying it enough so that the Russian winter can help beat the Nazis. And we’re glad here the pressure’s off, don’t get me wrong, but the general opinion among the blokes is that the Desert Fox won’t give up so easily. He’ll be back. I tell you, lass, I wish Rommel was on our side. He might be a German, but he and his panzers fight like the dickens.

  But for now Jacob was safe. That was the main thing, Lucy thought, pressing his letter to her heart. He and his fellow soldiers must be exhausted. It seemed so strange that he was far away in a hot country and she was here in the midst of an icy winter, with the snow a foot deep and winds cold enough to cut you in two. But she would be thankful for what she had. A day at a time. It was the only way to get through the war. She had said the same to Enid, when she had visited Jacob’s mother a few days ago. Enid was a shadow of her former self, beset by remorse and sorrow, but Frank’s and Ralph’s wives and their bairns were very good to her, calling round more or less every day and spending hours with her until Aaron got home from the shipyard. No one had put it into words, but in the early days after Tom’s death they’d all been frightened of what she might do to herself, if she was left alone for any length of time. Lately, though, she was beginning to pull round, albeit slowly.

  It was in the first week of December that several things happened in quick succession that rocked Lucy’s world and caused her to remember what she’d said to Enid.

  She and the family had just sat down to their evening meal when there was a knock at the front door. Lucy answered it, and for a moment she didn’t recognize the woman standing on the doorstep. It was the twins’ landlady. There had been a direct hit on the factory, she explained. A number of women had been killed, Flora and Bess among them. It was a terrible, terrible tragedy, but by all accounts they wouldn’t have known a thing, which was a blessing, wasn’t it? She’d wanted to come and tell them herself, the girls had been such dear souls. No, she wouldn’t come in, thank you. Her Henry had brought her, he had his own taxi business, but time was money and he needed to get back to Newcastle to earn some proper fares. She’d brought the twins’ things with her. Perhaps someone could help Henry bring them in?

  Charley obliged. As the taxi drove off, the four of them stood numbly in the hall with the front door wide open and Flora and Bess’s belongings at their feet. It was Daisy collapsing on the floor in a heap that brought Lucy to herself. She would have given anything to be able to give way to the hysteria of shock and grief that was just below the surface, but Daisy needed her to be strong, and so did Ruby and Charley.

  The endless night passed in a haze of getting a distraught Daisy to sleep sometime after midnight, and then an hour or so later Charley, who was all for lying about his age and joining up immediately so that he could ‘bomb them filthy Nazis to hell and back’. Once they were finally alone, Lucy and Ruby sat in the kitchen and gave vent to the storm of tears they’d been struggling to hold at bay. When they were cried out, they sat numbly holding hands over the kitchen table, hardly able to believe what had befallen their family.

  ‘They had their whole lives in front of them,’ Ruby whispered after a while. ‘And they were so excited about being in Newcastle and at the hub of everything. It isn’t fair, I can’t bear it.’

  Nor could she. Lucy gazed at her sister, but in her mind’s eye she was seeing Flora and Bess when they were small. Their tiny hands, their little faces which were so ridiculously alike, and the way they’d hugged their raggy dolls before going to sleep. She had brought them up, she had been both sister and mother to them, with her own mam so poorly after their birth, and she’d been so very proud of the fine young women the twins had become.

  It seemed impossible she would never see them again. Never feel their arms round her, in one of the quick hugs they always gave her upon walking in when they came home. And to die like that.

  Please God, she prayed silently, let it be true they didn’t suffer. She wanted to believe what the landlady had told them, but folk said such things at times like this to comfort the relatives of the ones who had gone. Please, please, let it be true that it all happened so quickly they knew nothing about it.

  Dawn began to break and Lucy made a pot of tea, but neither she nor Ruby could eat anything. They sat watching the sky lighten as it brought forth a new day, but Lucy knew this day and the ones that followed would never be the same again. She would carry the ache in her heart until the day she died, the sense of loss and anger at the futility of the twins’ passing, the regret that she hadn’t stopped them going to Newcastle, that she hadn’t done something – anything – to stop their lives being cut short so horribly.

  A wan Daisy and a subdued Charley came down later that morning to find Lucy and Ruby on their umpteenth pot of tea. The panacea for all ills, her mother had used to call it, Lucy remembered. But not this ill.

  The day was a Sunday, the first in December, and the four of them spent it quietly together, trying to come to terms with the enormity of what had happened. They all felt they wanted to go to the eventide service at the local church, although they knew they would cry, but when they arrived a little late to find the service under way, it soon became apparent from what the vicar was saying that something catastrophic had happened over the ocean in America. For once Lucy hadn’t turned on the wireless and so the news had passed them by, but apparently Japanese war planes had
made a massive surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet in its home base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Japanese planes had also attacked American bases in the Philippines and on Guam and Wake Islands in the middle of the Pacific. The US was at war.

  After the service ended the congregation gathered together in hushed but excited groups talking about what a difference this might mean to Britain, but Lucy and the others made their way straight home. As she walked, Daisy’s arm linked through hers, all Lucy could think of were the many grieving families over the ocean who had lost their loved ones as unexpectedly as they had lost Flora and Bess. She had tried to pray in church, but she’d been able to form no words other than ‘My darling girls; God, my darling, darling girls.’ But perhaps He understood when words were inadequate.

  Three days later it was reported that Japanese divisions had invaded British-held Malaya and the northern Philippines. British forces were fighting hard to hold the offensive, but were being forced to retreat south. The British Army had no tanks, whereas the Japanese had more than 200, and the Japanese Air Force was also carrying out a series of air attacks on Allied positions.

  Daisy summed up what everyone was thinking when she said, ‘Not John, too. Isn’t it enough that Flora and Bess have been killed in this horrible war?’

  ‘John will be fine.’ Lucy hugged her. ‘I know he will.’

  ‘No, Mam.’ Daisy looked at her, a long look. ‘You don’t.’

  It was true. She didn’t. Lucy stared into the young face swollen with crying, and then glanced at Ruby and Charley. ‘We can’t give up hoping for John, for them all,’ she said gently. ‘If we do that, the enemy has won. John and Matthew and Jacob, and us here in our own way, we’re all fighting for what is right. We didn’t start this war and I can’t bear it that Flora and Bess have gone, but I’ll fight the Nazis to my last breath.’

  ‘Your mam’s right.’ Ruby put her hand over that of Daisy, who was now sobbing, curled up in a corner of the sofa. ‘My Ron says that Hitler might have crushed one of his legs so it’s no good, but the Nazi scum’ll never crush his spirit. He says you have a choice about that.’

  Even in the midst of her sorrow and worry, Lucy liked the sound of ‘My Ron’. It sounded permanent. Ruby had never walked out with a fellow before; she’d had offers, but had always declared she hadn’t got time for ‘all that’, but from the minute she’d laid eyes on Ron Stratton she’d been smitten. Not that Ron was particularly handsome or charismatic, but he did have a quiet strength about him, which was immensely attractive. Certainly to Ruby.

  Daisy sat up and then flung herself at her mother’s feet, putting her head in Lucy’s lap. ‘I’m frightened,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry, but I am. I know I shouldn’t be, but I can’t help it.’

  Charley, Daisy’s hero, spoke before Lucy could. ‘There’s nowt to be sorry about,’ he said gruffly. ‘Everyone’s scared, Daisy. Manning them anti-aircraft guns regularly gives me the skitters – me bowels have never worked so well before – but it don’t mean I’m a coward. A coward is someone who runs away from what they’re frightened of and you’d never do that, same as the rest of us. Matthew told me on the day he joined up he felt sick, but it didn’t stop him doing it.’

  Daisy raised her head, sniffing and rubbing her nose. ‘I wish there was something I could do. You all do something.’

  Lucy stared at her daughter. She hadn’t known Daisy was feeling like this. She was so busy trying to cope with the refuge and the soup kitchen, and running the other two shops whilst keeping an eye on how Charley was managing the East End premises, that she hadn’t talked to Daisy – properly talked – for months. She still thought of her as a little bairn, for she was small for her twelve years and slender, but at her age Lucy had been running a home, with her mother so ill. Quietly she said, ‘I need help, Daisy, I really do. After school you could come to the refuge and help me. I’d have said something before, but there’s your homework and, war or no war, your schoolwork is important.’

  ‘I’ll fit my homework in.’ Daisy knelt on the floor, looking up at her. ‘I want to help.’

  She had none of her father’s innate selfishness and lack of compassion, Daisy was all hers. Lucy bent forward and hugged her daughter, feeling the slim arms come round her with a deep thankfulness. Thank God. Oh, thank God!

  Flora and Bess’s funeral was harrowing, but somehow they got through the day. Nine other women and one man, a foreman, had also died, but the fact that the whole factory hadn’t exploded, which would have devastated the surrounding streets, was a miracle, according to the vicar who took the service. Lucy and the other mourners couldn’t quite see a miracle in the loss of their loved ones. Christmas that year was a subdued affair, the only light on the horizon being that Britain no longer stood alone against her enemy. Backed now by powerful allies – Russia and the United States – the odds were, perhaps slowly, being stacked against the Axis forces, the government assured the people in every radio broadcast and all the newspapers; 1942 would be a year in which the tide turned. It didn’t seem that way to Lucy, who missed Flora and Bess more with each day that passed, especially when January saw the Allies failing to halt the Japanese invasion of Malaya.

  ‘You can get shot at from six sides at once,’ John had written in his last letter, which they had received just after Christmas. ‘The Japanese buzz round you like bees and, like bees, there are so many of them you don’t know which one to swat first; and even when you get one, another ten take their place.’

  At the end of January it was reported that the Allies were in retreat across the Johore Strait to the island of Singapore, blowing up the causeway behind them as they went. Then, in the middle of February, came the news they were dreading: Singapore, the great naval base and a fortress considered to be impregnable, had fallen to the enemy. General Arthur Percival, the leading British commander, had surrendered his remaining 138,000 men to the Japanese.

  It was a week later when the telegram came, very early, at six o’clock on a bitterly cold, snowy morning. Lucy got to the door first in her dressing gown, taking the telegram with trembling fingers. She read it as Ruby and the others came pounding down the stairs. When she had finished, she couldn’t speak, handing the telegram to Ruby.

  ‘He’s a prisoner of war?’ said Charley hopefully. It was the best they could hope for.

  Lucy shook her head. All her brothers gone, and two of her sisters. There was only her and Ruby left now, of the seven of them. It seemed impossible, but it was true.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The next months were hard, but in a strange way the horror stories they were hearing regarding the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ to what they described as the ‘Jewish problem’ hardened British resolve. Whatever they were going through, it wasn’t so bad as those poor devils – that was the general opinion. Hitler needed to be stopped before he wiped out an entire race. Belzec, Treblinka, Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, along with many more camps, became household names, and freedom had never been so worth fighting for.

  For Lucy and the family, struggling to come to terms with the loss of Flora and Bess and then John so soon afterwards, daily life was coloured by deep grief and sadness. It was a dark, dark time.

  The cold months passed, spring came and then summer. The seasons continued whatever the madness of man. And then, in June, Jacob was proved right.

  Rommel returned to Tobruk, and this time there was no air support from the beleaguered Allies. The Luftwaffe pounded the fortress and, besieged on every side, the garrison surrendered; 35,000 British troops were captured by the Germans.

  Lucy heard the news when she was alone, having returned home in the middle of the day feeling unwell. The newscaster called the defeat a national disaster. For Lucy, it was something much worse. She walked out into the garden and sat down on the small stone wall that separated the concreted area near the house from Daisy’s vegetable patch. Daisy had taken to gardening like a duck to water and now kept the family supplied in seasonal veget
ables as another of her contributions to the war effort.

  But Lucy wasn’t thinking about Daisy as she sat in the hot June sunshine, utterly bereft. She cried for more than an hour until she was sick, whether from sitting in the blazing sun with no hat when she’d already been feeling ill, or from heartbreak, she didn’t know. And cared even less.

  She had lost Jacob. She felt it deep inside, and without him the future had no meaning. Her fight to survive the chain of events that had been set in motion the day her father and Ernie died so horribly would have been for nothing.

  It was her blackest hour.

  After a while she dragged herself to her feet and went into the house. She ran a shallow bath, after which she dressed in fresh clothes and took a pill for the grinding headache that had developed. Then she cleared up the mess in the garden and made a pot of weak tea.

  The nausea had passed, but she felt sick to the heart of her. Sick, lonely and frightened. Jacob had loved her as she would never be loved again. He had loved her all his life and he had waited for her as long. They were connected in a way that bypassed time and circumstances and she would never love anyone else.

  She drank two cups of tea, black and scalding hot, and by the time Daisy came in she had composed herself, but it was a fragile composure. Knowing it wouldn’t survive telling her daughter the news, she said nothing. Nor did she speak of it to Charley when he came home. It was only when Ruby walked in at gone six o’clock that she took her sister into the kitchen, shut the door so that the two of them were alone and couldn’t be overheard, and said, ‘Tobruk’s fallen, it was on the wireless. Lots of casualties and thirty-five thousand of our soldiers taken prisoner.’