But his thoughts fell into the same holes no matter what he saw or how pleased he was to see it.
The next day news came through that Admiral Doenitz had sent an envoy to Montgomery’s HQ on Luneburg Heath. And that night the announcement they’d all been waiting for was finally broadcast. The Germans had surrendered unconditionally. More than a million Germans in Holland, Denmark and north-west Germany were to lay down their arms at 08.00 hours the following morning. The war in Europe was over.
Dusty Miller put in for leave the very next day. But Steve was still locked in misery and indecision and he stayed where he was.
‘You’re barmy,’ Dusty told him. ‘Don’tcher want ter go home?’
‘Not yet,’ Steve had to admit. ‘I got things to sort out. And besides,’ managing to grin at his oppo, ‘someone’s got to keep the army running.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
At three o’clock on the following afternoon Whitehall was so full of people it was impossible to walk in any direction except the one the crowd was following. Many had been there since early morning, jostling and dancing and cheering, with paper flags in their hands and London dust on their shoes, and more were arriving by the minute to join the celebration. Barbara had come up on the tram as soon as she finished work, with Sis and Mabel and the girls. Now they were wedged in the mass, waiting for the Prime Minister to declare the war officially over. There were loudspeakers on all the lamp standards and Union flags draped from every window and the sense of happiness and relief that rose on every side was as palpable as incense.
‘What a day!’ Sis shouted above the racket. ‘What a day!’
‘Our Betty should’ve been here to see it,’ Mabel said, sadly. ‘Poor kid. I keep thinking about her. An’ all the other poor little devils. There’s been a lot a’ good people killed. I don’t think I ought to have come.’
Poor Betty, Barbara thought, remembering her with a sudden surge of anguish. And poor Norman. She could see his brawny arms and that rolling walk of his and the way he’d gone whistling off to sea. We got peace at last but they paid the price for it.
‘It’ll never happen again,’ Sis said, patting her sister’s arm. ‘We’ll make sure of it this time.’
There was a whirring noise from Big Ben as the great clock began to sound the hour, booming out across the crowded streets in the steady familiar way that had been such a comfort over the last six years. As it struck, the crowds gradually shooshed themselves quiet and at the last stroke, the loudspeakers spluttered and a voice spoke tinnily over their heads announcing the Prime Minister.
There was a cheer and shouts of ‘Good old Winnie!’, then a pause, and then there was that fruity, unmistakeable voice with the news they’d all been waiting to hear for such a long, long time. Although Japan remained to be subdued, he said, the war in Europe would end at midnight. It was a short speech and ended with a flourish, ‘Advance Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King.’ And at that there were tears as well as cheers.
Barbara was thinking about Steve. Now he’ll get leave and come home. Now I shall see him again. In a few days. A week maybe. It made her yearn to imagine it. Steve, Steve, after all this time.
The crowd was on the move again, inching down Whitehall, and looking up she saw that there were people coming out onto one of the balconies and that one of them was a short, stout man wearing a dark siren suit and a Homburg hat and waving a cigar. Churchill himself. At the sight of him such a roar went up that it made her ears ring, and when it died down, a band began to play ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ at which they all cheered again and began to sing, waving their paper flags in time to the music. And Churchill held up his cigar at them and nodded and smiled. After the song, the cheering went on for a very long time and it didn’t stop until the band played the first chords of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Then they all settled and stood very still to sing the words while Churchill conducted them, using his cigar as a baton.
‘I feel almost sorry for him, poor old beggar,’ Sis said, when the patriotic hymn was over and the balcony was empty again and the crowds were wandering off in their various directions. ‘He’ll take it hard when we vote him out a’ power.’
‘D’you reckon we will?’ Mabel wondered.
Sis had no doubt. ‘It’ll be a close run thing,’ she said, ‘but we’ll do it.’
Now that they’d heard the official announcement, Mabel said she thought she ought to be getting back. ‘I haven’t got the heart for it. Not really.’
And Sis, having seen what she’d come to see, decided to go home too. But Barbara and the two girls stayed on to join in the fun, for as Joyce declared, ‘We’ll never see nothink like it again, will we? An’ Betty wouldn’t’ve minded.’
It was an extraordinary evening and they spent most of it in Piccadilly Circus, carried along by the excited euphoria around them. They sang themselves silly, were hugged and kissed by perfect strangers, and danced and danced – the conga, the Lambeth Walk, the hokey-cokey – until their heads were spinning and their feet were sore. At the end of it all, they missed the last tram and had to walk all the way home, so they didn’t get to bed until past two in the morning. But they didn’t care. The war was over, Steve was coming home at last, life was going to get back to normal.
The next morning Barbara wrote him a long letter describing what an amazing occasion it had been and asking him when he thought he’d be getting leave. She was rather disappointed by his answer for although he agreed with her that it was wonderful for the war to be over at last and told her that the German troops were surrendering in thousands, he didn’t say anything about coming home.
‘I don’t expect he knows,’ Sis comforted. ‘They’ll have to take it in turns for leave, now won’t they, or there’ll be no one left to look after things. He’ll come home sooner or later. We’ll just have to be patient, that’s all.’
But after a year without him, patience was impossible. I’ll get everything ready for him, she decided, and I’ll write and tell him. I’ll buy a double bed for a start. We can’t sleep in that narrow one of his. Which she did.
‘Thass so big that fill the room,’ she wrote when it had been delivered. ‘And so comfortable. You wait till you try it. Oh I can’t wait till you ’re here to try it. You will get leave soon, won’t you. That’s such a long time since you went away.’
But his next letter was all about grey paint and a Victory parade that was going to take place in Berlin.
There is a rumour that we are to go to Berlin in a week or two. They’ve given us masses of paint. It is battleship grey and comes from the German naval stores at Lubeck, so they say. We are sprucing up the tanks and the TCV’s. Lots of rain recently.
And still not a word about coming home.
‘Keep yer chin up,’ Sis advised. ‘It’s bound to take time. I’ll bet he comes back for the election. He wouldn’t want to miss that.’
Three days later, on May 23rd, the General Election was called. Polling day was to be on July 5th, and because there were so many men who couldn’t possibly get home to vote because they were still on active service all over the world, the election was going to be taken to them. They would cast their votes at special polling stations wherever they were and there would then be a three week interval between the vote and the count while their papers were collected and returned to the relevant constituencies. It was the proper and admirable way to run this election but it didn’t help Barbara at all.
‘Never mind, duck,’ Sis said. ‘He’ll come home in the end. I shouldn’t think about it too much if I was you. We got a job to do.’
Which was true enough. For although they thought they’d prepared themselves for this election, now that it was upon them there was more work than they could cope with, even with an eight week campaign. Sis arranged to take the early morning shift so that she and Pauline could go out canvassing every evening. And Barbara joined them whenever her own work pattern would allow, giving herself up t
o campaigning so that she didn’t have time to brood about Steve. It was a revealing experience.
From the very first evening she was surprised by how much sympathy there was in these affluent houses for the plight of the unemployed and the needs of the sick. For denizens of a safe Tory seat, the people she met were impressively radical. At first it took quite a bit of courage to knock on such important doors and the first two householders she met were fierce ladies who sent her packing, one saying, ‘No thank you. Not today,’ the other, ‘We never reveal our voting intentions. Secret ballot you know.’ But the third door was opened by a gentleman who welcomed her and stood on the doorstep talking for nearly a quarter of an hour.
‘Sir William Beveridge is quite right,’ he said. ‘We must tackle these problems. We cannot go on as, we were.’ And when she asked, almost tentatively, whether the Labour candidate could count on his vote, he said he thought the time had come for change and yes, they could indeed.
‘Put the other two down as Tory,’ Sis advised, when they met up at the end of the cul-de-sac. ‘When in doubt count them against us. It’s better to underestimate.’
Even allowing for underestimation, the number of voters who said they were ready for change seemed encouragingly high. And when Sis held her second public meeting, the hall was packed and the questions were fast and passionate.
‘We ought to have a card with our address on it and hand them out to fellers like that,’ Sis said to Pauline after one particularly heartfelt offering. ‘He’d join us if we asked him.’
‘I’ll ask him now,’ Barbara decided. And when the next questioner was on her feet and taking attention away from the platform party, she got up quietly and walked through the hall to do just that, returning to her aunt after ten minutes, with a new member and another canvasser, feeling very pleased with herself.
By the end of the first fortnight they’d acquired over thirty new members and Sis was cock-a-hoop at their success. By the end of the second, they’d settled into such a steady routine that they were canvassing twice as many houses in an evening as they’d done at the beginning. The newspapers kept them provided with ammunition and they were steadily honing their arguments. In the sixth week they all went to a big meeting in New Cross and saw how an established candidate could hold an audience. In the seventh, Sis spoke to a packed meeting of her own and used some of his tricks to excellent effect.
‘I’m learning,’ she said to Barbara as the bus took them home afterwards. Her voice was husky after all the effort she’d been making but she was beaming with satisfaction. ‘We ain’t half done well this evening. D’you see that bloke with the Homburg? He was from the Mirror. Doin’ a piece on first-time candidates, so he said.’
It was a lively article and she was the last and most colourful candidate to be featured in it. ‘Mrs Cecily Tamworth, railway worker by day, ebullient candidate by night.’
Barbara was so impressed by it that she cut it out and sent it to Steve. Maybe that would provoke a bit of interest in what they were doing. And, to her great delight, it did. He wrote back almost at once, to send his congratulations to his ‘political aunt’. ‘Tell her I’ve shown your cutting to all my mates,’ he wrote, ‘and we ’re all rooting for her.’
But his next letter was all about the army again and now it was just a little too obvious that he was avoiding Barbara’s question about leave. She sat in her lonely bedroom on their new comfortable double bed and wondered bleakly whether they would ever share it. If he hasn’t said anything by polling day, she decided, I shall tell Aunt Sis and see what she thinks about it.
In the meantime there was too much work to do to sit about and mope. Pauline and Sis were busy setting up local committee rooms to keep an eye on the turn-out on polling day and to knock up promised voters. There were voting lists to prepare, teams of workers to organise, supplies of tea and biscuits to be laid in. They were all up until past midnight on the eve of the poll and by the time the polling stations were finally closed the next day, Pauline declared that she was too tired to keep her eyes open.
‘I suppose you’re going straight home,’ Sis said to Barbara as they got off the bus at New Cross.
‘Not if you can stand my company a bit longer,’ Barbara said.
‘Let’s have a nightcap,’ Sis decided. ‘We’ve earned it today.’
So they had a nightcap – whisky and a cigar for Sis, tea and a cigarette for Barbara – and they sat one on each side of the empty fireplace with their feet on stools, the way they’d done all those months ago. And for several seconds they smoked and drank and said nothing. Then Barbara plucked up the courage she needed.
‘Aunt Sis.’
‘Um.’
‘I got something I’d like to ask you.’
Sis was relaxed and easy. ‘Fire away.’
‘Thass about Steve.’
‘You’ve heard from him,’ Sis said happily. ‘He’s coming home. Is that it?’
‘I wish he was,’ Barbara said, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Thass just the point. He hain’t. The thing is, I’m beginning to think there’s something the matter.’
Sis looked at her quizzically. ‘What sort a’ something?’
‘Thass been nine weeks since the war was over,’ Barbara said. ‘I’m beginning to think he hain’t coming home.’
Sis was fully alerted now. This was serious. ‘Why’s that then?’
‘You seen his letters,’ Barbara said. ‘I mean they hain’t axactly love letters, now are they?’
No, Sis admitted, that was true, but it mightn’t mean anything. ‘My Percy never wrote me a love letter in his life. Some men are like that.’
‘Not Steve.’
‘He does write to you?’
‘Oh yes. He writes.’
‘Then what’s the matter?’
Barbara thought for a few seconds, her face perplexed. ‘Thass hard to put a finger on,’ she admitted. ‘He tells me all sorts of things but they’re all about the army an’ the tanks an’ parades. He never say things like, I can’t wait to get home, or I can’t wait for us to be together again. Not like I do. I mean, look at this one.’ And she took his latest letter from her bag and handed it to her aunt. ‘He could be writing to anybody.’
We drove down the autobahn. It was a long drive to Berlin. We went through the Russian occupied area past Magdeberg. It was pouring with rain for most of the journey. We passed a park full of burned out buses, and drove into the Charlotten-burg district. We stopped at the Olympic Stadium. Berlin is in a terrible state. I should say over half the buildings have been totally destroyed. There is no electricity and no water and when the sun shines the stink is awful. We keep being warned about the danger of polluted water, and there are plagues of mosquitoes and rats everywhere you look. It is not a good place to be.
‘Yet he don’t say, I’ll be home the minute I can,’ Barbara said, ‘which I know I would if I was there.’
‘No,’ Sis agreed, considering the letter. ‘He don’t.’
‘I don’t think he’s going to come home,’ Barbara said sadly. ‘I don’t know why, but I think he’s decided not to. Something must have happened. Don’t you think so?’
Sis gave her an honest answer. ‘It could’ve done,’ she said.
Barbara wanted to cry but she surprised herself by staying calm. ‘You did this once before,’ she said. ‘Told me the truth, I mean. When he was recalled. D’you remember? When we came back from honeymoon. You knew he was going to be sent to France an’ they wouldn’t let him home and you said maybe I ought to find myself a job just in case.’
Sis remembered. ‘I was sure of it that time,’ she said. ‘I ain’t so certain now. There’s a lot a’ pride in our Steve. I mean, all sorts a’ things could have happened. He could’ve asked for leave an’ been refused. Could be in some sort of trouble an’ they won’t let him home yet awhile. Could be all sorts a’ reasons.’
In the quiet of the flat, after the effort and emotion of the day, it was possible for Bar
bara to ask the question that had been troubling her since the election was called. ‘You don’t think he’s found someone else, do you?’
‘No,’ Sis said, decidedly. ‘I don’t. He’d’ve told you straight out if he had. You mustn’t think that.’
‘The thing is, there’s a sort of atmosphere at home when I try to talk about it. Mrs Wilkins won’t let me say anything about him not coming home. She sort of shuts me up every time I mention it. She says, “He’ll be home. You got to be patient,” as if I’m making fuss over nothin’. I hain’t, am I Aunt Sis? You’d tell me if I was.’
Her face was so woebegone, that Sis put down her cigar and leant across to pat her hand.
‘Tell you what,’ she said, ‘we’ll get this election over an’ out the way and then if he’s still writing like this an’ he still ain’t come home, I’ll write to him mesself and ask him what’s the matter. Straight out. How would that be?’
It would be very kind, Barbara said. But her heart was shrinking at the thought that such a letter might have to be written, and she knew she was afraid of the answer he might give if it were.
‘We’d better get to bed,’ Sis said, ‘or we’ll be fit for nothing in the morning.’ And as she kissed her niece goodbye she made up her mind to say something about this to Bob. If anyone ought to know what was going on, he was the one, and she could catch him at the station in one of his breaks.
It didn’t seem to surprise him. ‘I been wondering about it mesself,’ he said. ‘I mean, he ought to have come home by now. Most of the others have had leave. Kenny’s son’s been home twice.’
‘So you reckon I should write?’ Sis asked.
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