Dancing in the Moonlight

by Rita Bradshaw

  Ruby’s eyes widened for a moment. ‘Oh, lass, lass.’

  ‘I’ve got a feeling on me, Ruby.’ When her sister would have taken her in her arms, Lucy gently pushed her away. ‘I’ll never see Jacob again. It’s like I know he’s already dead. I can’t explain it, except I feel it’s over and that Tom Crawford has won. If I hadn’t been so scared and stupid, if I’d gone to Enid the day after it happened instead of running away from him, Jacob and I could have had years together. Instead he’s dead, and wherever his brother is, he’s laughing at us—’

  ‘Enough!’ Ruby’s voice was sharp, and when Lucy stared at her, she said, ‘You don’t know that Jacob is dead. No, you don’t, lass, so don’t look at me like that. You don’t know, all right? And as for the other, if you’d gone to Enid Crawford, she’d never have believed her precious Tom had forced you. It would have been his word against yours. He wanted to marry you, don’t forget, so he’d have been the one with the halo, and he’d have managed it somehow, by hook or by crook. Jacob wouldn’t have survived long after leaving hospital, either. I don’t know how Tom would have managed it, but he’d have made sure Jacob was out of the picture for good the next time. You know that, Lucy. Your life would have been a misery – all our lives would – and Daisy would have grown up with an evil, murdering swine of a father. So no regrets. You did what you had to do.’

  ‘Oh, Ruby.’ Lucy’s voice was husky. ‘What would I do without you? You’re so good.’

  ‘Aye, that’s me. Saint Ruby of Sunderland. Now I’m going to make us a nice cup of tea and I’m putting a tot of something in yours, for the shock. And we’re not crossing any bridges till we come to them. I know it’s hard, lass, but all we can do is wait to hear.’

  Lucy nodded, taking a deep breath and smiling shakily. ‘I’m supposed to be the big sister who talks sense. Not you.’

  ‘A change is as good as a rest.’ Ruby hugged her. ‘And with everything that’s happened in the last months, you’re bound to think the worst. Wait till you know. Meself, I think he’s all right. Like Mam used to say, I’ve got a feeling in me water.’

  Lucy was always to remember the long, hot July of 1942 for the rest of her life. There was a respite in the air raids and the blue skies overhead seemed harmless. The American GIs were beginning to arrive, their snazzy uniforms, endless supplies of forgotten luxuries and Yankee chit-chat making them a big hit with young British girls, who were all too willing to be swept off their feet. British servicemen thought differently, deeply resenting their American cousins’ success with the women, but most of all it was the outrageous difference in pay that made them spitting mad. An American private received three pounds, eight shillings and ninepence a week, while his British counterpart earned just fourteen shillings. With beer costing one shilling and thrupence a pint, most British servicemen couldn’t afford to give a girl a good time. The Americans had brought a splash of colour and glamour to a grey and tired Britain, however, and in Sunderland as well as other towns and cities a buzz was in the air. ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ could be heard in the dance halls, and nylon stockings replaced gravy and painted-on seams on some girls’ legs.

  Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves that July, or at least Lucy felt they were, whereas for her each day was endless and the nights were worse. She barely ate and she couldn’t sleep. It didn’t help that Charley had bought Daisy a second-hand record player for her birthday in February, which had sent her into raptures and which she kept in her bedroom, and every so often he treated her to a new record for her small collection. The hot weather meant that Daisy’s windows were permanently open and the strains of ‘Kiss Me Goodnight’ or ‘That Lovely Weekend’ or ‘When They Sound the Last All-Clear’ floating on the air did nothing for Lucy’s emotional wellbeing as she waited for news about Jacob.

  She was constantly worried about Matthew, too. The British Fleet in the Mediterranean was ranged against a substantially larger enemy navy and had sustained serious losses since the beginning of the war in a number of battles. Somehow, and she thanked God for it, Matthew had come through unscathed and at present was in Alexandria. He wrote rarely, but when he did he sounded cheerful, even happy, which was amazing in the circumstances, although Lucy suspected much of that was for her benefit. Nevertheless, for the moment he was alive and he was free.

  On the first day of August, a Saturday, Lucy and Daisy got home late after going to the cinema. The Havelock on the corner of Fawcett Street and High Street West had been showing Casablanca and Daisy had desperately wanted to go, after two of her school friends had told her about it. For Lucy it had been something of a penance. She knew she’d been short-tempered lately, nearly biting Daisy’s head off once or twice, especially when she’d played ‘We’ll Meet Again’ three times on the trot that morning.

  They walked home in the mellow summer night, taking their time and chatting and eating the last of their sweet ration as they went.

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, but Matthew, Charley and I don’t look remotely like each other,’ said Daisy, out of the blue. ‘You can see they’re brothers, just, but neither of them looks like me.’

  ‘Maybe that’s because you’re their half-sister,’ said Lucy carefully, ‘and you look so much like me, there’s no room for anyone else.’ She dug Daisy in the ribs and she giggled. ‘Matthew looks like his own mother, by all accounts, although I never met her of course.’

  ‘And Charley looks like our da.’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘Was he pleased to have a girl, my da?’

  ‘Very pleased.’

  ‘I wish he hadn’t died.’ Because of the furore at the time and the resulting publicity, she and Ruby had decided early on that it would be wrong to keep the truth from the children in case they heard it from someone else, so they had explained to each of them, when they were old enough to understand, that Perce had been attacked in the street and had died from his injuries. ‘Especially like he did.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘But if he hadn’t, you wouldn’t be able to marry Jacob when he comes home.’

  Lucy looked at her daughter. Stopping, she took Daisy’s hands in hers. ‘Your father was a very special man and will always have a very special place in my heart,’ she said softly. ‘Do you understand? No one can take that place, because it’s his.’

  ‘Did you love him as much as you love Jacob?’

  Daisy had clearly been thinking about this for a while. ‘I cared for your father in a different way from Jacob, because each person is different, but he was a wonderful man and I know we would have been happy together all our lives if he had lived. But he didn’t, and I was heartbroken. Then I met Jacob again.’

  Daisy nodded, her big eyes gleaming in the moonlight, which thankfully was bright that night. There were still a number of accidents in the blackout on moonless nights. ‘I like Jacob, but I don’t think it’s right to call him Da. He won’t mind that, will he?’

  ‘No, he won’t mind.’

  ‘Perhaps Uncle Jacob. Does that sound right?’

  Oh, the irony of it! Lucy wanted to press her hand to the ache in her chest, but she didn’t. Instead she said lightly, ‘I think that’d be fine.’

  ‘He will come back, Mam.’ Daisy’s face was very serious. ‘I know he will. God wouldn’t take my da and then Jacob as well. He wouldn’t do that to you.’

  The childlike faith was a sword-thrust through her heart, and now she was praying for Jacob’s return as much for Daisy as herself. ‘I hope he’ll come home, hinny, but God doesn’t always stop bad people doing things to good people. If He did, we’d all be nothing more than puppets, wouldn’t we? And life doesn’t work like that.’ She bent and kissed her daughter’s brow. ‘I love you so much. Let’s go home.’

  Ruby met them in the hall when they entered the house. She had clearly been waiting for the sound of the key in the front door. Lucy didn’t ask why, for she had seen the telegram lying on the hall table. ‘When did it come?’


  ‘You hadn’t been gone above half an hour. I didn’t know whether to come to the cinema and find you, but I thought . . .’ Ruby’s voice faltered.

  ‘No, you did the right thing.’

  ‘Ron’s still here. He’s in the sitting room. He wanted to wait till . . . He wanted to know . . .’ Ruby seemed incapable of finishing a sentence.

  ‘I’m sorry we’re so late. It’s such a lovely night we walked home.’ She had to pick it up. She had to open it. But she couldn’t. Such an insignificant little thing, but it held the rest of her life inside it. She looked at Ruby, who was equally transfixed.

  In the end it was Daisy who picked the envelope up and handed it to her mother. Lucy took it, trembling, and like the day she had looked through the stained glass in the front door and seen Jacob sitting on the wall outside, all she could hear was the ticking of the grandfather clock in the dining room.

  She opened the envelope and read the few words it contained. Then she looked into the two faces in front of her, which were rent with concern and love. ‘He’s a prisoner of war,’ she said softly. ‘He’s alive.’

  Chapter Thirty

  October 1942, when General Montgomery battered down Rommel’s defences with a massive artillery bombardment and a thousand tanks, many of them lent by the Americans, and defeated the Afrika Korps at El Alamein, marked the turn of the tide of the war. As Churchill claimed, ‘Up to Alamein we survived. After Alamein, we conquered.’

  Tobruk was in the hands of the Allies again, Rommel retreated back into Libya and in the middle of November the church bells – bells of victory – were ringing out through the length and breadth of Britain. From the towers of great cathedrals to the smallest parish church, the bells sounded the nation’s joy at the news from Egypt, and the whole world heard the sound of Britain’s rejoicing through the BBC’s overseas services.

  After a peal rang out from the bomb-shattered Coventry Cathedral – where the spire and bell-tower were still standing – an announcer asked: ‘Did you hear them in Occupied Europe? Did you hear them in Germany?’

  Had he heard? Lucy was with the others in the sitting room listening to the wireless while their Sunday roast – or, thanks to rationing, their meat loaf – cooked in the oven. She wished she could believe so, but she knew it wasn’t possible. Jacob was being held in Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany and he was not allowed to write more than two letters a month by his captors. She knew that his letters to her were scrutinized by the guards, as were hers to him. Her letters could only be two sides of notepaper and no photographs or even drawings could be enclosed. She couldn’t write about anything to do with the armed forces or the war effort, not even about rationing or food, and certainly nothing connected with politics. Any infringement of these rules, she had been warned, would mean that all communication was stopped. Consequently, terrified she’d inadvertently say something she shouldn’t, her letters tended to be almost carbon copies of the ones before.

  His letters to her were similarly constrained. He couldn’t complain about his treatment, the conditions, what went on in the camp or his German guards. Even writing about his fellow prisoners wasn’t encouraged. She had no real idea of the day-to-day nightmare he was enduring, although terrible stories about the German death camps, like Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, were filtering through. It was known that massive gas chambers and crematoria capable of burning as many as 2,000 bodies at a time and reducing living and breathing human beings to ashes with insane speed were present in some of the camps, and these were called death camps and were different from the concentration camps. But in the concentration camps POWs were dying too. No one was exempt.

  She was allowed to send him a ‘next-of-kin’ parcel four times a year, but again these were opened and inspected by the guards. She had despatched her first parcel as soon as his whereabouts had been confirmed and intended to send another in time for Christmas.

  Ruby, who always seemed to know what she was thinking, leaned across and said quietly, ‘The news will filter through to him in time, lass. The Germans won’t be able to keep it quiet, however much they’d like to. And it’ll give him heart. It’ll give them all heart. And I tell you something else: we’re going to win this war, and they know it.’

  Whether they did or not, the balance of power had changed. At the end of January 1943 the Germans surrendered in Stalingrad and in February Japan abandoned the Solomon Islands. Bombing raids by the Allies began to smash the heart out of German industry, and new techniques by the Allies in the Atlantic war had the U-boats on the run. In July the Russians whipped the Germans in the greatest tank battle in history on the flat cornfields south of Moscow, and the Americans took Palermo, the Sicilian capital, setting the scene for Italy to surrender to the Allies unconditionally in September.

  And in November all communication from Jacob ceased. The last time Lucy had received a letter had been at the beginning of October and for two or three weeks she didn’t panic. The Allies had made great gains in the last twelve months, and it seemed – whether by coincidence or not – that every time there was a victory Jacob’s letters were held up. It was as though the camp guards needed to assert their authority.

  By the end of November she had written umpteen times and sent a parcel, but had heard nothing. December was the same. By Christmas she was frantic. She tried not to let her despair colour the festivities, but it was hard.

  On Christmas Eve, a Friday, she was sitting on a sofa set at an angle to the fire and thinking of Jacob. A border of snow festooned the French windows. It had been snowing for days and the outside world was white. Ruby was with Ron at his parents’ house, and Charley and Daisy had met friends to go ice-skating on a field near Springwell Farm, which had flooded earlier in the month and then frozen hard. The afternoon sky had been clear but icy cold, and now a rosy sunset was bathing the snow in a pink haze.

  Lucy turned her head and looked to the windows, the beauty outside a subtle mockery of her dark fears. Everyone had kept assuring her that Jacob was alive and well, to the point where she hadn’t wanted to talk about it any more. It didn’t do any good, not really.

  She rose to her feet, walking restlessly to the windows. A bright-eyed blackbird was busy pecking at a few morsels that she had put out earlier after she’d cleared a small space on the concrete. She wondered how he fared on a day-to-day basis now that rationing had caused everyone to tighten their belts. He caught sight of her, pausing with a chunk of the coarse-grained bread they now ate, since the baking of bread with white flour had been banned the year before, hanging out of his yellow beak. He tilted his little head to one side for a moment, summing her up, and then, deciding she was no threat, made short work of his meal.

  She smiled. The blackbird was one of the few that had no objection to the change of diet. ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said softly. And then wondered if she’d finally lost her reason, talking to a bird.

  When the doorbell rang, she thought it was Charley and Daisy, having forgotten their keys again. Stitching a seasonal smile on her face, she opened the front door.

  ‘Hello, Mam.’ Matthew stood there, balancing on crutches. No mean feat in the weather conditions. ‘Any room at the inn for a wounded sailor?’

  Christmas was transformed, the more so when it transpired that Matthew’s leg had been smashed so badly that he had been told by the Navy doctor there was no chance he’d be going to sea again.

  ‘But why didn’t you write and tell me you’d been injured?’ They were sitting together on the sofa that Lucy had recently vacated, a pot of tea in front of them and a slice of Daisy’s Christmas cake, made without eggs and with a great deal of grated carrot, raw potato and a cup or two of breadcrumbs, besides other ingredients. Matthew had taken a bite of his piece and declared it ‘interesting’.

  ‘Once I knew how bad it was, and that they were going to boot me out, I wanted to get home for Christmas and surprise you.’ Matthew grinned at her. ‘And I did surprise you, didn’t I?’

 
‘You did.’ Lucy sat, her eyes drinking him in. Amazingly, he was still the same Matthew. Tanned, taller, but still her boy. ‘Now, tell me what happened, and don’t leave anything out, mind.’

  They talked for a couple of hours until it was pitch-dark outside. Matthew had been injured during a skirmish at sea with a German U-boat at the end of November, and Lucy was so glad to see him that she didn’t have the heart to reprimand him for keeping her in the dark. She told him their news in a way she could never have done in letters, finishing with the fact that she hadn’t heard from Jacob for nearly eleven weeks.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Mam. He’s likely got up some guard’s nose and they’re not letting him write,’ said Matthew, as though he was an authority on life in the concentration camps. ‘Jacob’s a survivor, he’s proven that, hasn’t he? First when he was a young lad, and then when Tobruk was taken. If anything had happened to him they’d have let you know. They have to do that, same as we do with theirs.’

  They both knew that, with the death camps and the concentration camps, normal treatment of POWs had broken down in this war, but neither of them voiced it. It was Christmas Eve. Matthew was home and done fighting. With that she would be content. And tomorrow, and all the tomorrows following, she would believe Jacob was coming home, she told herself, watching Matthew eating his cake as though he was enjoying it. A miracle had happened: her boy was home. Not quite in one piece, perhaps, but although he would always have a gammy leg, he’d be able to lead a good life. She would believe for another miracle. It was Christmas.

  That resolve was tested over the next months when there was no word from Germany.

  The year of 1944 was a struggle for many Sunderland folk. Large areas of the town had been flattened, but people got on with their lives as best they could and without grumbling.