Molly's War

by Maggie Hope

  Molly took in sewing now. She had bought herself a hand-operated sewing machine and specialised in making over clothes from others bought before the war. Mrs Jones’s skirt was cut out of a full-skirted coat, which had been her mother’s. The style looked as though it could date from the last war. Still, it was a warm tweed and when the material was turned it looked quite good.

  ‘Tell her you’ll do it the morrow, lass,’ Dora advised. ‘Go on, have a night off.’

  Molly shook her head, smiling. She couldn’t, she needed the money. She received a small allowance from Jackson’s pay every month but she didn’t use it, of course. The slips were all in the top drawer of the chest in her room. Sometimes she opened the drawer and looked at them. They were the only link she had with him now. She thought back to the last time she had seen Harry.

  He had come to see her on his last leave. He’d met her out of the factory and insisted on going with her to Ferryhill. He had nodded to Dora gravely and said hallo before going over to where Beth was lying on the couch, waving her arms in the air and cooing. Molly waited for his condemnation. He sat down beside the child, put out a finger and she clasped it tightly.

  ‘Well, will you look at that?’ he said admiringly. He put out his hands and lifted the baby in the air and she gurgled and tried to grab at the badge in his red beret. Obligingly he settled her on his knee and gave her the beret. The badge twinkled in the firelight and Beth smiled in delight, touching it with her tiny baby fingers.

  ‘Mind, you’re a bonny bairn, aren’t you?’ her uncle asked, and she chuckled and tried to pull off the medal ribbon.

  Molly relaxed. Oh, he was the best brother anyone had ever had, he was indeed. ‘Thanks, Harry,’ she said, and he smiled at her, before turning his attention back to the baby.

  ‘Well,’ he said finally. ‘We Masons have to stick together, haven’t we?’ He stood up with the baby on one arm and put the other round Molly’s shoulders, kissed her on the cheek. ‘You have had a hard time of it, little sister,’ he said without looking at her. ‘I don’t blame you for anything. Mind, that bloody Joan is spreading her poison all over Eden Hope. Jackson’s parents are bound to have heard.’

  Molly nodded. Well, she thought, she couldn’t keep Beth a secret forever and she wouldn’t want to.

  He tickled the baby under her chin and she gurgled, wetly, making a damp patch on his khaki shoulder.

  Now, as she took out her sewing machine and set it up on the kitchen table, Molly thought back on that day fondly. She would always be grateful for Harry’s love and support, but he had refused to talk about Jackson.

  ‘I don’t see him now,’ was all he had said. Had she caused a rift between the two men or was it simply that they had been separated by the war?

  ‘Are you going to Eden Hope on Saturday?’ Dora asked. ‘’Cause if you are, I’d like to know now. I thought I might go to the pictures if you’re here to look after Beth.’

  Molly thought about it. She tried to go to see Maggie and Frank whenever she could but she was sick to death of pretending to them that everything was all right. Still, if Joan had been talking she wouldn’t have to pretend. She would have to face them sometime. She quailed at the thought of going again, though. Sometimes she saw a letter from Jackson propped up on the mantelpiece and itched to take it down and devour it. But she couldn’t, of course. She found it harder and harder to conceal the fact that he never wrote to her. She had to guard her tongue at all times, in case she should let slip something about the baby, so she always made an excuse to leave early.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll go this weekend, Dora,’ Molly said now. ‘I have some jobs to do.’

  It was true, she had half a dozen orders waiting for her in a pile in the corner of the sitting room. She glanced up at the marble clock and frowned. It had stopped, she couldn’t think why. She had dragged it all over the place with her since her father was killed and it had never stopped before but now it didn’t seem to run for five minutes after she had wound it before stopping again. She would have to take it to the clock mender’s on Saturday morning, she thought.

  Dora went off to the pictures on Saturday afternoon to see Pride and Prejudice with Greer Garson and Molly got on with her sewing. But her head ached for some reason and she was glad to have a break when Beth woke from her afternoon nap and demanded attention.

  ‘We’ll go for a walk, shall we?’ she asked the child and Beth crowed with pleasure as her mother struggled to put on her siren suit. She had made the suit the night before from a remnant of cloth she’d found on the market; an all-in-one suit in yellow with a hood which she had trimmed with white. Siren suits had become all the rage since Churchill began to wear one, even for babies.

  She pushed the pram along the road to the park that looked strangely denuded with its railings chopped off at the base and gone to make tanks or something. The trees were bare, the only bird about a dejected-looking robin pecking beneath an elm. Molly shivered. She was wearing her slacks under her coat and a headscarf over her head but the wind was cutting. Only Beth looked cosy and warm, sitting up in her pram in her siren suit with an old quilt that had been Mona’s over her. She chuckled and talked in her own personal language to the bird, the trees, anyone who happened to pass. But Molly’s headache was becoming more insistent, like a hammer pounding in her temples. She longed for a hot drink and a couple of aspirins.

  Back home she was surprised to find Dora had returned from the pictures. Surely the big film wasn’t over yet?

  ‘I’ve got a headache,’ Dora explained as she blazed the fire and put on the kettle for tea. ‘I expect I’m getting that ’flu which is going around the village.’

  ‘Is it? I hadn’t heard.’ Molly gazed anxiously at Beth, dreading the thought that she might get it. There had been an epidemic the month before but it had passed by their house, thank the Lord. Beth looked back at her, her smiles turning to howls of indignation for it was time for her tea too. She held up her arms to be taken out of the pram, pumping them up and down when Molly didn’t immediately rush to do her bidding. But her yells were loud enough, her eyes bright, her cheeks flushed with health as well as temper. No, she wasn’t sickening for anything, not Beth. And Molly herself was probably only suffering from eyestrain. She had sewed on late last night, trying to finish the siren suit.

  ‘I’ll tend to her. You make the tea, will you, Molly?’ asked Dora. ‘I have to stop her making such a noise, I feel my head might burst with it.’

  Eventually the child was settled and peace reigned again. Dora and Molly sipped their tea and ate corned beef hash and cabbage, took some aspirin each. But it didn’t seem to work as it should and in the end Molly stopped sewing and folded her work away.

  ‘I think I’ll have an early night,’ she said to Dora.

  ‘That makes two of us,’ the older woman replied.

  Jackson fingered his weekend pass and even now, after all that had happened, his pulse quickened at the thought that if he wished he could be on a train in half an hour and on his way to see Molly. He didn’t want to see her, though, did he? Not after what she had done. It was what all the married and engaged men in his unit feared, and it had happened to him.

  ‘Well, Sergeant?’ The middle-aged Captain sitting behind the desk looked up at him impatiently. ‘Do you want a travel warrant or not? Come on, make up your mind, I have men waiting.’

  If he did go north he would see Molly, Jackson knew that, he wouldn’t be able to help himself. And how was he going to tell his parents? Or had they found out already? He shied away from the thought. But he should see his parents, he told himself, there was no telling when he would get back to England. Not that they had been told where they were going but there had been a short, intensive course in everyday French.

  ‘Sergeant?’

  ‘Yes, sir. A travel warrant to Bishop Auckand, sir.’

  Even as he boarded the crowded train with only minutes to spare and threaded his way through the troops sitting on their ki
tbags in the corridor until he found a space just large enough for him to dump his own small bag and stand beside it, he still wasn’t sure if he was going to go to Ferryhill. He took off his red beret and folded it, buttoned his epaulette over it and turned to gaze out of the window. Not that there was anything to see. The night was dark and soot from the engine smeared the window anyway. There was only the reflection of him standing grim-faced and those reflections of the other soldiers and airmen lounging about in the crowded corridor. It was of course impossible to get into any of the compartments with seats, they had been taken up at King’s Cross.

  Jackson flexed his shoulder muscles. They had stiffened slightly since the morning when they had practised their jumping over and over again. He could still feel the pull of the harness as the parachute opened, the rush of air against his legs as he floated down to earth. He wondered if he would be posted anywhere near Harry this time.

  The last time he had seen his friend was when he had told him he was going to volunteer for the Airborne Division. And about Molly and her baby. Jackson had watched Harry’s face for his reaction. Condemnation of his sister perhaps.

  ‘Do you think they’re managing?’ he had asked. ‘Oh, why didn’t Molly tell me?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Jackson replied. ‘And don’t worry, she’ll be getting a wife’s allowance, I haven’t stopped that.’

  ‘Poor Molly. She’s had a hard fight of it since Dad died.’

  ‘Yes, well, so have a lot of women and they didn’t go completely off the rails, going with men, acting like a …’

  ‘Don’t say it, Jackson,’ warned Harry. ‘It’s not true. Molly loved you, you know she did.’

  ‘Only a few weeks after I was posted missing?’ said Jackson. ‘Oh, aye, I’m sure she must have loved me then.’ Bitterness welled up in him; it was like bile in his throat. ‘Well, I’m finished with her.’

  ‘Poor kid. All on her own. What it must have been like for her.’ Harry bit his lip, gazing at Jackson. ‘I’ll have to see her, first chance I get. I’ll go up, seek her out.’

  ‘She lied to me, Harry,’ said Jackson. He felt almost on the defensive, as if it had been he who had done the unforgivable, not Molly. ‘Well, not exactly lied but she married me without telling me about the baby.’

  ‘She must have been desperate,’ said Harry. ‘We let her down, Jackson. At least I did. I should have been there to look after her better. This isn’t her fault, it’s the fault of this bloody war.’ He sighed. ‘She must have been convinced you were dead. She was all alone, don’t you see?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Jackson replied.

  ‘For God’s sake, Jackson!’

  He said nothing but turned on his heel and walked away.

  The train was pulling into York where the platform was awash with people even though it was past midnight. Next stop Darlington, Jackson thought, and had to make up his mind what to do. Maybe he should go to see that Molly was all right, he told himself. He needn’t even look at the baby, just find out how Molly was, see if she was in need. Then he would go home to Eden Hope and tell his parents that his marriage was over. That was his best course.

  After all he would be away fighting by this time next week, he expected. He had to have his domestic problems sorted out by then.

  In his heart Jackson knew he was fooling himself as to his reasons for taking the Durham train from Darlington and alighting at Ferryhill station. But he couldn’t seem to help himself.

  He walked down the street to the house, stood irresolute before the door, his heart beating as hard and as painfully, perhaps more so, than on the occasions when he had faced the enemy. Squaring his shoulders, he knocked. And knocked again. There was no answer and he felt incredibly let down. In the distance a pit hooter sounded, signalling the end of a shift, the beginning of another. Fore shift, he thought, it must be just after twelve o’clock. Jackson knocked again, louder this time. No response. A straggle of miners in their pit black began walking down the street. One of them flashed his light over Jackson, inspected his uniform, saw the badge gleam on his red beret.

  ‘Now then, mate,’ he said respectfully, and a few of his marras spoke too. ‘Wotcher.’ ‘Good luck, lad.’ There was a lot of respect for the paratroopers among the miners. They wandered away down the street, talking to each other in low voices. A shaft of moonlight illuminated the group, which was thinning out as the men dropped away on reaching their homes. Jackson turned back to the door and raised his hand to knock.

  Suddenly there was a cry from inside. At first he thought it might be a cat. It came again, not a cat but a baby. Well, that would wake Molly at least. He waited, listening for movement, but there was none. The baby’s wailing was louder now, a continuous, furious crying out that no one was taking notice.

  Jackson tried the door handle with little expectation of the door opening but to his surprise it did. He pushed it open and stood in a narrow passage leading to a kitchen-cum-living room. Closing the door after him because of the blackout, he struck a match and looked around. There was a light switch on the wall; there was electricity then. Upstairs the baby’s wailing had subsided a little, was almost despairing.

  ‘Molly?’ he called. ‘Molly? It’s Jackson.’

  The baby cried afresh. There was a thud as though someone had fallen. Jackson took the stairs two at a time and opened the first door he came to. A woman, it must have been Dora he thought, lay there, breathing heavily. Why hadn’t she woken? But he hadn’t time to think of that. He opened the other door and switched on the light. Molly was lying half in and half out of bed, her arms moving weakly as she tried to pull herself up.

  Jackson’s heart filled with dread. Running over to her, he picked her up in his arms, laid her back on the bed and pulled the covers over her. The atmosphere in the room was freezing, her face was blue-white with the cold. Oh, God, she wasn’t dying, was she?

  ‘Molly? Molly? Wake up, please, wake up!’ he cried, laying his face alongside hers, cradling her in his arms. She opened her eyes and tried to move.

  ‘Beth,’ she said, her voice faint and faraway. ‘I must get to her.’

  ‘No, no, you can’t! You’re not well enough,’ said Jackson. ‘Oh, Molly –’

  She looked at him properly for the first time. ‘Jackson? Oh, Jackson!’ she began to sob. ‘I prayed you would come.’ Exhausted, she lay back against the pillow, her breathing fast and shallow. She closed her eyes then opened them immediately. ‘See to her, please …’

  Reluctantly he stood up, adjusted the covers over her. ‘I will, I will, don’t fret.’

  Going over to where an old brown-painted cot stood in the corner, he looked down at the bright red face of the baby. She had stopped screaming and was now sobbing quietly, looking up at him with Molly’s dark eyes. The bedclothes had been kicked off; her feet were like ice. She lifted her arms to him and he picked her up.

  Beth was wet, very wet. She must have been lying there for a long time. Jackson looked helplessly around, he had to do something. Beth hiccuped, waved her fist at him, and where it touched his cheek it was so cold he realised he had to do something. He laid her down again, found the safety pin in her nappy and released it, drew the sopping nightie over her head. ‘Give her to me,’ said a wavering voice he hardly recognised as Molly’s and he took the baby over to the bed and laid her beside her mother.

  ‘Warm milk,’ said Molly, and closed her eyes as though the effort to speak had been too much for her.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ he said and ran down the stairs. He chopped sticks from an off-cut of pit prop he found in the coal house, built a fire in the cold grate and fanned it to life by propping a tin blazer on the top bar. Milk now, he thought, and found a baby’s bottle in the pantry and a saucepan on the shelf. He picked up a bottle of milk then saw the National Dried can of baby’s milk beside it. He heated water, read the instructions on the side of the can, found two cups and Beth’s boat-shaped bottle, and soon was carrying a tray up the stairs. He even had time t
o be amazed at how well he had managed.

  Molly took a cup and drank thirstily then sank back on the pillow as he took the baby in his arms, wrapped her in a large towel he had found on the rail over the kitchen range and offered her the bottle.

  ‘It’s not too hot?’ croaked Molly anxiously.

  ‘Do you think I’m daft?’ he asked. But all the same he shook a few drops on to his hand before Beth took the teat in her mouth and sucked with the serious expression of a dedicated drinker.

  It was when the baby had finished her bottle and pushed it away and was smiling up at him that he caught sight of the other cup of milk. Giving Beth back to her mother, he took the milk into the next room. But Dora couldn’t take the milk, she was deeply unconscious.

  ‘Dora’s very ill, Molly,’ he said as he went back into the other room. But she didn’t hear. She was sound asleep, breathing noisily, her mouth open slightly.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Jackson aloud. ‘Don’t die, Molly, please don’t die!’

  Beth started to cry. She held out her arms to him and he picked her up and rushed downstairs and outside to bang on the door of the neighbouring house. A miner just returned from the pit answered. He was in his stockinged feet, braces hanging down. But he was quickly galvanised into action when Jackson gasped out his story.

  ‘I’ll fetch the doctor, lad.’

  ‘’Flu, that’s what it was, followed by double pneumonia,’ said the doctor. It was half an hour later and Jackson and he were in the kitchen waiting for the ambulance that was to take Dora away to hospital. ‘A lot of it about, I’m afraid. I’ll write you out a prescription for … the young lady.’

  ‘My wife,’ said Jackson firmly. He held Beth lightly to his chest with one hand and the baby tried to reach up to the shining badge in his cap. She seemed to have recovered already from her cold night. She chuckled and grabbed at the beret and, like Harry had a few weeks earlier, he took it off and gave it to her to play with.