by Maggie Joel
Dad had said, Look at that sparrow trying to build her nest before her eggs are laid—do you think she cares if there’s a war going on? He must have said it more than once, for her to remember it all these years later. Funny, it sounded peaceful, almost wistful, when she said it to herself, like a homily you might see beneath a watercolour of a dove stuck on the wall of a church office. But when Dad said it, it was said angrily, resentfully, it was aimed at someone—probably Mum, as though she were the sparrow and she had no business building nests when there was a war to be won.
Yet it was Dad who had died and the war had ended and it was Mum who had lived to build her nest for another thirty-five years, so there you were.
A second burst of studio laughter erupted from the room across the corridor, accompanied, this time, by a titter of laughter from whoever was visiting the old lady in that room. Sad to think of someone coming to visit you and then sitting there and watching the television.
Where was Mr Milthorpe? She realised she hadn’t seen him for a while. Perhaps he’d gone home. The snow would be banked up on the path again by now. Little point in clearing it when she wasn’t going to be walking up the path for a while. Still, people liked to keep busy, especially at a time like this. People liked to feel they were doing something useful. She’d done it herself when Mrs Milthorpe was ill in the hospital, baking a casserole or a lasagne and leaving them on his doorstep. He’d especially liked the lasagne, she remembered.
A time like this. What sort of a time was this? There was no other time in her life when she had had a stroke and found herself helpless and uncertain in a hospital bed. It was not an experience she could draw on from her past. There was no ‘time like this’ to fall back on, it was all new.
She didn’t need new experiences at this time of life. She wanted to sit back and enjoy routine, mull over the past—well, parts of it—and know with some certainty what each day would bring. The past, somehow, had become comforting. Which was odd, when the past meant growing up in the war, and people dying.
She thought about William.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FEBRUARY 1945
THE RUSSIANS HAD CAPTURED Warsaw, Dresden was being bombarded, fighting had ceased altogether in Athens and the nightshift at the aircraft factory was finally coming off duty.
It was the last of these circumstances that had any meaning at all as Caroline stepped out of the sandbagged doorway and into the frozen dawn to begin the long trudge home.
It was Tuesday morning—just.
She waved a vague farewell to the other girls of Orange shift, not caring to whom she was waving or in what direction they were trudging, concerned only with pulling the collar of her coat up and the brim of her woollen hat down.
The factory was housed in a vast underground bunker in a disused goods yard, the remains of an aborted underground railway tunnel extension to the District Line that had been abandoned thirty years previously. The bunker now contained machinery, sandbags, workbenches and generators for forty women, a handful of engineers, two inspectors and enough propellers, undercarriages and gun emplacements to maintain a hundred Lancaster and Wellington bombers.
Caroline had worked at the aircraft factory ever since she had left school four years ago: first with Silver shift, stamping, pressing and drilling holes in small sections of aluminium, then with Red shift, riveting, wiring and sheet-metal working. Last year she had volunteered for Orange, which was the nightshift. If you were good—and she was good—you spent most of your time oxyacetylene welding and operating the lathes. It was the lathes and the welding that did the most damage to your hands. After the first week the scabs from white-hot filings and embers covered both hands, despite the gloves. After six months, the scabs had become scars and now she hardly noticed them. She had stopped wondering if she’d ever have beautiful hands again. Or if there’d be anyone left to notice them.
There was always pressure on the Mobiles to do Orange shift. Mobiles were the girls who didn’t have a family to look after, meaning they could be moved to anywhere in the country at a moment’s notice. Caroline didn’t mind Orange shift. The girls tended to talk less and the money was better too—sixty-eight shillings a week, compared to only sixty-three shillings on days. The men, of course—the few that were left—got double that.
She walked head bent, eyes narrowed against the sting of the icy cold air, and thought about lighting a cigarette, but she didn’t want to take her hands out of her pockets so instead she walked more quickly. It was three miles each way and, since her bicycle had been stolen, it was an hour’s walk home.
Who’d steal another worker’s bicycle? It was unthinkable that someone from Orange shift had taken it. Yet there seemed no other explanation given the bicycle was chained up inside the perimeter fence and all that security you had to go through just to get inside the place. Not that it mattered, she realised wearily, at the same time conceding that she really did need that cigarette. She waited till she had reached the shelter of the old iron railway bridge, fumbling in her pocket for matches and cupping her hands to stop the flame blowing out. The cigarette lit eventually but she stayed where she was, sheltered beneath the bridge for a moment or two, before starting once more on her journey.
How quickly you stopped noticing. She could recall nothing, absolutely nothing, about her walk to the factory last night, about her walk home yesterday morning, about any of her walks last week. They were gone. You just stopped remembering, or you stopped noticing in the first place. You switched off.
She quickened her step.
The dawn was a muddy yellow glow on the horizon. It provided little light and no warmth. Yesterday the daylight had barely scraped above the rooftops before sliding back into evening.
Reaching High Street she noticed through the gloom that the vast crater outside the post office still hadn’t been cordoned off. It had been there for over a fortnight, ever since an unexploded bomb that had probably fallen sometime in 1940 had suddenly gone off. If the ARPs didn’t cordon it off soon some poor sod would fall into it. Already a foot of frozen water had filled the bottom of the crater.
Hope the sod who took my bicycle is the one who falls into it, she thought, fleetingly enjoying this gratifying image.
As she turned into Oakton Way and approached the house her pace slowed and finally she stopped a few houses short of her own, and stood for a moment in the feeble dawn light opposite number twenty-eight.
Number twenty-eight was now vacant.
Usually she walked straight past, head down, eyes focused, her mind empty. But this morning she looked across at the house, studying its boarded-up windows, the weeds that already, in a few short weeks and despite the winter frosts, had begun to reclaim the path that led up to the front door. On that front door was a single forgotten sprig of dead holly, left over from a Christmas already six weeks past.
Number twenty-eight was a terrace in the centre of Oakton Way, not far from the corner of Nelson Avenue. The Davenports had lived there. They were a large family, the Davenports. The sort of family that seemed always to have someone coming or going and an endless supply of small children tumbling in and out of the front door, the remains of tea smeared over their faces. The Davenports seemed to have been in Oakton Way forever. Mr Davenport had been injured in the First War—you could see his limp sometimes, particularly in cold weather—and after the War he’d worked for years at the railyard round the back of Gunnersbury Lane. Mrs Davenport had been a tiny woman, all untidy hair and apron strings, a baby on her hip. She had raised that family, and kept on raising it, on railyard wages. There had been six, or perhaps even seven of them. It was difficult to recall the younger ones.
The Davenports. They had been such a fixture of Oakton Way that it seemed impossible to imagine the street without them. But the war changed that, as it changed most things, so that one moment there was Kitty Davenport in a smock, ice-cream dribbling down her chin, and little William Davenport chasing a ball across the street and a
lmost going under the hooves of the milkman’s horse, then the next minute Kitty was engaged to a corporal from Vermont, William lay dead in an airman’s uniform, and number twenty-eight stood empty and deserted.
And then quite suddenly, just before Christmas, they had gone. Of course, William Davenport had been dead two years by then.
Had Kitty gone ahead and married the corporal from Vermont? They had been such friends once, she and Kitty. All through school, and afterwards. It seemed incredible not to know. Had it been Vermont, or had it been Virginia? She couldn’t even recall the man’s name.
And two weeks after the Davenports had gone, a V-2 had landed on Nelson Avenue destroying six houses in one go. The explosion had damaged every other house in the avenue and sent debris into every street that bordered it, shattering glass as far away as High Street and the railway station. After that no one thought about the Davenports. And no one stopped to think of little William Davenport who had been born in the upstairs front room of number twenty-eight and who had once fallen from the wall of the gasworks and spent a night in the hospital with concussion and who had stood under a streetlamp—this very streetlamp—and asked a girl to marry him. William, who had been dead these two years past.
The V-2s were falling heavily again now after it had seemed in December they were over. The first one had fallen in Chiswick last September. They’d been sitting down to dinner and just as Mum had been serving out a rabbit stew all the windows had rattled. They’d all stopped and looked at each other but no one had spoken.
The rockets tended to come at night now. This was better as there seemed to be fewer casualties at night and the bombs fell mostly south of the river or in Kent and Essex and Surrey, which made you glad but then made you feel guilty for wishing it on someone else. Croydon in particular was getting it bad, she had heard from a girl in Red shift whose family lived out that way. The V-1s seemed to have petered out altogether, or at least very few were getting through. That was a relief. That horrid droning sound and the sickening, breathless wait to see if it would cut out right over your head or continue on its way was enough to snap your nerves.
The V-2s made no sound, which ought to have been more terrifying but somehow wasn’t. The first you knew about it, they said, was when your house collapsed around you.
And William was dead and had been for over two years, long before the first V-1 had fallen, before the Germans had retreated from Russia or Mussolini had been overthrown or Rome liberated. Before D-day. He’d missed so much, there was so much to tell him. And now she couldn’t remember what he looked like.
Ahead, number fifteen was in blackout still, as was most of the street. She ought not to have lit her cigarette. It was all but gone now anyway and she paused at the garden gate to light a second from the embers of the first, tossing away the finished butt and drawing on the second one.
Once, a very long time ago it seemed now, she would stand on the corner of Oakton Way hastily taking a few last drags on her cigarette then stuffing a mint in her mouth before going into the house, hiding her cigarettes beneath her bed and her matches at the bottom of her bag. This elaborate charade was for Dad’s benefit as Dad did not approve of women smoking. It was ‘common’. But now they had all survived five years of war. Now Caroline was nineteen, she worked nightshift in an aircraft factory operating a lathe and, somehow, whether you smoked or not didn’t seem to matter. Somehow a lot of things no longer seemed to matter.
She opened the little gate and let it bang shut behind her, walked up the path to the house and pushed open the front door. She could smell coffee, or some hideous wartime version of it, brewing in the kitchen, fat frying in the pan and carbolic soap where Mum had been washing down the walls in the hallway to remove some of the dust from the Nelson Avenue rocket. But mostly she could smell iron filings and hot metal and cigarettes and that didn’t come from the house, it came from her.
‘Poo, you stink!’ announced Deirdre, as she did every morning when Caroline walked into the kitchen.
‘Deirdre! Don’t be so rude,’ replied Mum, her stock response and Caroline ignored them both and went out the back to wash.
‘Mornin’, love,’ said Dad, not looking up from his paper.
‘Good shift, dear?’ called Mum over the sound of running water, the hiss of fat from the frying pan and the voice of the BBC newsreader who kept up a low but perfectly enunciated commentary in the background.
‘How many aeroplanes did you build last night?’ demanded Deirdre.
Through the doorway Caroline could see Mum in her floral apron, her grey hair in a net, one hand on the handle of the frying pan, one swirling the coffee dregs in the pot to make it go further, and Deirdre in her school uniform, grey socks pulled up high at her knees, kneeling on the kitchen chair, spreading margarine on her bread, the tip of her tongue poking out, all her concentration focused on making the meagre scrape reach each corner equally. And Dad, sitting with his usual silent frown, listening to the radio announcer, half reading the morning paper, half observing his family as though he was not sure how they—or perhaps he—had come to be here.
‘Croydon got it bad again last night,’ he announced. ‘Hear that, Clive?’
And, as Caroline emerged from her wash, Uncle Clive appeared in the doorway in his slippers and a faded silk burgundy dressing-gown, a matching silk scarf tucked inside the gown. He smiled broadly as though he were on holiday.
‘Just as well we don’t live in Croydon, then, in’t it, Matthew, old boy?’ he said brightly, looking at each face in turn so as not to miss the little laugh or the admiring look this comment obviously warranted. No one laughed or looked admiringly at him. Unperturbed he pulled up a chair, sat down and reached for Dad’s paper. Dad bristled visibly but Uncle Clive seemed not to notice and settled back in his chair to await his breakfast.
On the first of November last year, a V-2 had landed in Camberwell, killing and seriously injuring over forty people, causing widespread damage and destroying a number of buildings, including the Boar’s Head public house in the high street. Uncle Clive, who had been the landlord of the Boar’s Head at Camberwell, now lived with the Lakes in Oakton Way.
‘There was an egg, love,’ said Mum, turning to Caroline, ‘but I gave it to your dad.’ Mum stood at the sink and looked at Dad to confirm that there had indeed been an egg and that he had been the lucky recipient of it. But Dad was concentrating on the BBC news and offered neither confirmation nor denial.
‘Quite right, Berty, old gal. The workers ’ave gotta be fed!’ observed Uncle Clive. ‘Ain’t that right, girls?’ And he looked from Deirdre to Caroline. Deirdre wrinkled her nose as though to avoid an unpleasant smell. Caroline looked at his little military moustache and remembered with a slight shudder how it tickled when he kissed you.
Uncle Clive wasn’t really an uncle. He was one of those vague uncles-by-marriage of whom no one had even heard, or at least, Caroline and Deirdre and Dad had never heard, until he had inexplicably turned up on the doorstep on a frozen, foggy morning in the second week of November, wearing a grimy trenchcoat and carrying two paper bags of clothes he’d received at the emergency rest centre, waving his replacement ration book triumphantly. He had given a hearty, ‘Here I am then!’ as though they all knew who he was and had been eagerly awaiting his arrival.
Mum had known who he was: some relative-by-marriage of her dead sister.
So Uncle Clive had moved in and, though it was intended to be a Temporary Arrangement and Dad had made it very clear that giving up the parlour so Clive could have a temporary bedroom was not a long-term solution to anything, it was now the first week in February and Uncle Clive, as he sat at the kitchen table humming to himself and putting down his coffee cup in order to turn the page of the paper, looked in no hurry to depart.
‘Delightful drop, Bertha,’ he remarked in a pleased voice, nodding towards his cup then looking up and smiling approval.
Mum frowned darkly and attacked the frying pan with a scrubbing
brush.
‘Ahem,’ said Dad sternly, reaching over the table and reclaiming the morning paper, which Clive had momentarily put down on the table.
‘Why don’t you ever make the tea, Uncle Clive?’ said Deirdre, looking up from her plate.
‘Deirdre, don’t be rude,’ said Mum, not raising her head. She had spoken mildly enough but the scrubbing increased in ferocity to almost manic speed.
‘Ha!’ said Dad, shaking out the paper. ‘I expect Uncle Clive is far too occupied finding work and a place to live,’ but rather than appear abashed, Uncle Clive looked up in surprise and the light from the weak electric light bulb overhead bounced off his Brylcreemed hair.
‘Not me. I’m consolidatin’,’ he declared, and then he looked up at Caroline, who was standing in the kitchen doorway, and he winked at her.
Caroline pulled out a cigarette and ignored him.
The frying pan banged against the enamel of the kitchen sink with a loud and jarring clang.
‘For God’s sake!’ snapped Dad.
The scouring abruptly ceased and Mum stood perfectly still at the sink, her arms up to the elbows in soapy water, a sheen of moisture on her upper lip.
What was the matter with her?
‘Surrey and parts of Kent again came under heavy enemy fire last night,’ reported the man on the BBC news, ‘causing damage to a number of residential and commercial buildings, though casualties are reported to be light. Mr Churchill announced that heavy bombing raids by the RAF over Dresden continued to cause substantial—’
Dad scraped back his chair and turned off the radio, as he always did when he was leaving, as if no one else would be interested in listening to the news.
And perhaps he was right, thought Caroline, sitting down in the vacated chair and pouring herself a cup of grey-looking coffee. Deirdre was only interested in what was playing at the pictures and that morning’s hastily completed homework which she was invariably finishing off at the breakfast table. And Mum seemed unaware there was a War on at all—the absence of eggs, meat, clothes, sugar appeared to come as a complete surprise to her every time she attempted to purchase something. And Clive, who, of them all, had the most reason to be wary of the war, seemed the least interested in its progress. His daily perusal of the morning paper was purely concerned with rationing and coupons and what the shops in Bond Street had on sale. How he filled his day, one could only wonder—he certainly hadn’t found a job and the only time you saw him out and about was when he was coming out of one pub and going into another. Perhaps he was doing research—after all, he had been a publican for more than twenty years. But somehow you knew that what he was doing was having a drink and playing a game of darts.