‘No,’ he said ‘Leave it to me. I’ll see to it. I should’ve done it ages ago, but with the election an’ everything …’
‘Can’t have our Barbara fretting,’ she said, as she left him to go back to the ticket office.
And he agreed that they couldn’t.
That night, when he and Heather were in bed, he broached the subject he’d been putting off for far too long.
‘You never wrote to him about the Dear John, did you?’ he said.
Heather looked away from him. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said.
‘An’ now he’s not coming home.’
‘He’ll come home,’ she said, but there was no conviction in her voice. ‘I mean, they can’t send them all home, can they. Not all at the same time. I mean, not if he’s in Berlin.’
‘Write tomorrow,’ he instructed. ‘First thing. Or d’you want me to do it for you?’
That would be too shaming. ‘I can manage,’ she said. ‘There’s no need for that.’
‘Well see you do.’
She turned her head into the pillow, sighing. ‘You don’t know how difficult it is.’
He looked at her averted head. ‘The longer it goes on the more difficult it’ll get. Do it tomorrow. Promise me?’
She answered with a murmur that could have been a promise or an argument.
But she didn’t write because the next morning the newsagent’s little boy arrived while they were in the middle of their breakfast to say that Daddy thought there was something the matter with Mrs Tamworth. ‘She ain’t come for her paper,’ he explained when they questioned him. Could they come and see?
‘I’ll go,’ Barbara said at once. ‘I got a key.’
But Bob and Heather were so alarmed by the urgency in the child’s voice that they all went together.
Sis was still in bed in a room frowsy with fever. She was plainly very ill, her cheeks unnaturally red, her breath laboured and wheezing.
‘I’ll get up presently,’ she said, when they trooped into her bedroom, but even those few words reduced her to such a paroxysm of coughing that Bob went out at once to call the doctor.
‘Stay with her till he comes,’ he told Heather. ‘I’ll have to go straight on to work or I’ll be late. Let me know what he says.’
The doctor didn’t come until past eleven o’clock, by which time, Heather and Barbara had gone to work too and Mabel had come over to sit with their patient. There was no doubt about his diagnosis. ‘Your sister has bronchitis,’ he said to Mabel. ‘I’ll give you a prescription for some M and B tablets to bring down the fever and some linctus for her cough. A steam kettle would help when the cough is bad. She will need careful nursing, day and night. Can that be arranged? Good, good. Keep her in the warm. I’ll call in again tomorrow.’
‘That’s this damned election,’ Heather said trenchantly when she heard what he’d said. ‘Taken it right out of her. It’s not a job for a woman. I’ve always said so …’
‘We’ll have to take it in turns to sit up with her,’ Bob interrupted, before her complaint could get out of hand. ‘Rota, sort a’ thing.’
So they drew one up and took it in turns to stay in the flat and feed her pills and cough medicine and do what they could for her. And the letter that Heather should have written to her son was thankfully forgotten. On the second evening, Barbara cleaned the living room while her patient slept, on the fourth afternoon Heather and Mabel gave her a blanket bath, and were alarmed when it exhausted her. She got no worse but she didn’t seem to be getting better either. Her voice was so hoarse they could barely hear what she said to them, the cough racked her, her fever returned every night. At the end of the second week, the doctor prescribed another course of tablets. But on the sixteenth day she declared that she was well enough to sit up and struggled out of bed and into her now tidy living room to sit by the window and read the papers.
‘Any news of the election?’ she wanted to know.
‘What news can there be?’ Heather said. ‘They’ve all voted I suppose. It’s all gone quiet these last few weeks. We shall know in a day or two.’
‘I must get better,’ Sis said, as if being determined about it could make it so. ‘Wouldn’t do to miss the count.’
‘Nobody would blame you if you did,’ Heather told her. ‘I mean it’s not as if you’re going to win. It’s solid Tory.’
‘That ain’t the point,’ Sis said. ‘I can’t let the side down. I got to go.’
‘If you’re not up to it, the doctor won’t let you go,’ Heather warned.
Sis snorted at that. ‘He won’t be here to stop me,’ she said. ‘If I say I’ll do a thing, I do it.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
By the time Sis and Barbara arrived at the Town Hall on that historic Thursday morning – Sis determined, Barbara in serious attendance – the count was well under way. Three long lines of trestle tables had been set up in the body of the hall to accommodate the sorters and tellers, who were working steadily in their usual purposeful way, and the Mayor was ready on the platform, bulky in his robes of office and looking cheerfully important. As the safe Tory seat, their constituency had been given pole position just below the stage, with the safe Labour seat at the back of the hall and the marginal votes being counted in the middle. There was less excitement in the place than Barbara expected and what little there was was subdued and controlled, more like the throb of a machine than the mob roar of a revolution. Barbara watched as the piles of counted voting slips grew taller and more and more people ambled in through the double doors. If thass really going to be a revolution like Sis say, she thought, thass a far cry from the French one.
Most of the other candidates had arrived by this time too and were standing about trying to appear nonchalant, with their followers and supporters all around them. Barbara was intrigued to see that Sis was the only woman candidate and that the Tories were obvious from their classy suits and the boom and bay of their upper-class voices. She’d never seen Tories en masse before and the sight and sound of them was a revelation.
‘They’re so full of theirselves,’ she said to Sis. ‘You’d think the whole world belong to them, the way they go on.’
‘It does,’ Sis grinned at her. ‘For the moment.’
‘Steve should be here to see this,’ Barbara said. Oh how much she missed him. ‘He’d love it. You here as a candidate and everybody waiting to see what’s gonna happen, an’ the count goin’ on.’
But Sis was smiling into the crowd. ‘Here’s Mr Craxton,’ she said, and plunged towards her old colleague, holding out both hands in greeting. ‘Nice to see you, Mr C. How’re you keeping?’
‘Never mind me,’ Mr Craxton said, ‘How are you! That’s more to the point. I hear you been in the wars.’
‘Fit as a flea,’ Sis told him, coughing to prove it. ‘So what’s the news?’
‘Nothing yet,’ Mr Craxton said. ‘We got fidgety waiting, so I thought we’d come and watch the count. Pauline’s here somewhere. Have you seen her?’
She was just behind him, looking dashing and rather hot in a blue tweed suit and more nervous than Barbara had ever seen her.
‘It can’t be long now before we get a few results,’ she said to Sis. ‘I’d say we’ve given them a good run for their money, wouldn’t you? We’ve left Brian to man the wireless. Strict instructions to come down and tell us if anything exciting happens. I don’t know about you, Cecily, but this waiting is wearing me out.’
‘Not long now,’ Sis reassured her.
‘If only we knew which way it was going to go,’ Pauline complained. ‘The papers are so discouraging. They don’t think we’ve got a chance.’
‘The Mirror does,’ Mr Craxton pointed out.
‘Ah yes, the Mirror. Granted. But they’ve been on our side all along. You can’t count the Mirror. Oh dear! If we could just hear one or two marginals we might have more idea. I do wish they’d hurry up.’
‘There’s a marginal in this hall,’ Sis said. ‘Take a look
at that.’ But there was no way of knowing what was happening on the central table. The piles of voting papers were changing by the second. ‘Be a turn-up for the books if there was two Labour seats in this borough.’
‘We shall just have to hold on to our hats,’ Mr Craxton told them in his dry way, ‘and have a bit of patience.’
But it was very difficult. Especially when Christine arrived, breathless and dishevelled, to bring her own anxieties into the group. Her snub nose was beaded with sweat, her bun half out of its pins and trailing loose strands of hair. ‘Has anyone heard anything? Oh they are taking a long time. We must have a new government this time, mustn’t we.’
There was movement on the platform. The Mayor was tapping his microphone – ‘Testing, testing. One, two, three.’ Had they got their first result? Yes. At last. The candidates were gathering round him, rosettes to the fore. There was a throb of impatience, a shifting of feet, a buzz of excited voices.
It was the safe Labour seat, won as they expected but with a majority that brought a gasp from everyone in the hall. It had risen from six thousand to nearly eighteen.
‘Now that is a victory,’ Pauline said clapping rapturously.
And Sis said, ‘What did I tell you?’
Mr Craxton was cautious. ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer,’ he warned, as the new Labour MP stepped up to the microphone to make his acceptance speech.
It was a very long one, thanking the returning officer, the mayor, the tellers, the police, his supporters. ‘An’ Uncle Tom Cobley an’ all!’ Sis mocked happily.’ But at the end of it he was handed a paper and after a pause he told his audience that one or two other London results had come in and proceeded to read them. There was a Labour gain in Dulwich, both the Lewisham seats had been won by Labour and at Peckham, which was one of their closest marginal seats, the Labour majority had risen from ‘one hundred last time’ to seven thousand. ‘I think you’ll agree,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing marginal about that.’ The applause was deafening.
‘What price swallows now?’ Sis said to Mr Craxton. The excitement was making her cough but she was massively happy.
The young man called Brian was pushing through the crowd towards them. ‘They’ve been coming in fast for the last twenty minutes,’ he reported. ‘I brought you the latest. Look!’
They crowded round him to read the results.
‘I’ve marked the Norfolk ones for you, Barbara,’ Brian said. ‘They’re really good. We’ve taken King’s Lynn, Norfolk North and Norfolk South. That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?’
‘If Lynn’s voted Labour we shall win,’ Barbara told them, green eyes wide with surprise.
‘I’m beginning to think that too,’ Pauline said. ‘I mean, it could be possible, the way things are going. I mean …’
‘Hold on!’ Brian said. ‘They’re going to announce the marginal.’
Another group of rosettes around the microphone, more papers fluttering from hand to hand, another set of candidates wearing decorous expressions, the hall bristling with anticipation. Has this one swung too? Oh come on! Come on!
It was another Labour victory and a good one.
Even Mr Craxton was excited. ‘If this goes on,’ he said, ‘I think we shall see a Labour government.’
Results were coming in fast. Every new arrival brought news of another victory. Deptford’s Labour majority had doubled to fourteen thousand. Labour had one hundred and seventy-two seats, one hundred and eighty, two hundred and counting. The marginals were falling like flies.
But the vote in Bellington South was still being counted.
‘You don’t have to wait,’ Sis said to her supporters. They were all so thrilled by what had happened up to that moment that she was afraid her result would be a disappointment to them.
‘Of course we do,’ Pauline said. ‘I want to see how big your share of the vote turns out to be. I said we’d give them a run for their money, didn’t I? Well then. We’re all going to stay.’
So they stayed as more and more results came in and the excitement in the hall grew until they felt as though they were in the middle of an electric storm.
Eventually a teller came over to ask if Mrs Cecily Tamworth would join him at the tables.
‘This is it,’ Sis said, grinning at her friends.
So they wished her luck and watched as she and the Tory stood beside the teller, listening to what he had to say. Telling them the result, Barbara thought, and in a minute they’ll go up onto the platform and we shall hear it too. But they didn’t. Instead, the conversation went on and the Tory was beginning to get agitated. And Sis looked flabbergasted, her plump face so pale that Barbara was quite worried about her. What is he saying? Are they arguing? Surely not. Has something gone wrong? The suspense was holding her ribcage in a vice.
They were still talking when Heather and Mabel came puffing through the crowd with Joyce and Hazel trailing after them.
‘How is she?’ Heather asked, plunging straight into the concern that had kept her anxious all through her journey. ‘I heard her coughing as we came in. I said to Mabel – didn’t I Mabel? – that’s Sis an’ I don’t like the sound of her at all. She shouldn’t be here.’
The cough was approaching at that moment, hoarse and rasping, but Sis was beaming despite it, the colour back in her cheeks. ‘He’s asked for a re-count,’ she said, her voice high with disbelief. ‘Apparently Bellington South is a marginal now. What’cher think a’ that?’
They were stunned. ‘Good God!’ Pauline said.
‘D’you mean you might win?’ Joyce asked her, eyes wide.
‘You never know,’ Sis told her. ‘Keep your fingers crossed.’
Oh these brown eyes, Barbara thought, caught by their intensity. They’re so like Steve’s. And she looked round at them, Sis and Mabel and the two girls all looking at one another with his eyes, reminding her. Then she gave herself a shake and tried to be sensible. It was silly to be thinking of him, especially now, in the middle of all this. But she couldn’t help it. You don’t stop loving someone because they don’t come home. And oh, she did love him. So much. He ought to be here, if Sis is going to win. If she’s going to win.
‘How long will that be before you know?’ she asked.
‘Too long!’ Sis told her.
And she was right. It seemed an age before the second count was completed. The two girls fidgeted, Sis coughed, Heather grumbled, Christine lost all the pins from her hair, Mr Craxton told stories of previous elections, which his wife corrected, Pauline prowled and bit her lips. But at last the two candidates were called over again and this time there was no discussion, just a few words and they were on their way to the platform, the Tory bland-faced with his wife in attendance, Sis, pale and coughing, signalling to Barbara that she should come and join her.
It felt exposed up there on the platform, with the Mayor fussing and the microphone waiting for the final speech. The hall was so crowded that Barbara couldn’t see to the other side of it and the heat of such a great mass of people rose towards her as though she were breathing fire. She looked down at the rows of expectant faces, hundreds of them, pale as flowers, bobbing and turning. The tension was so extreme it was like waiting for thunder to break.
The Mayor waited for calm and took a long time to get it. ‘The total number of votes cast in the Bellington South constituency is as follows …’ It had been a very close vote indeed but the result, by a mere one hundred and thirteen votes, was, as he hereby declared, that ‘the said Mrs Cecily Elizabeth Tamworth has been duly elected to serve as Member of Parliament for the said constituency.’
The thunder broke in a cheer that made Barbara’s ears ring. Joyce and Hazel were jumping up and down, Heather clapping, Mabel blowing kisses. It was an impossible, unbelievable victory. And Sis stepped forward, smoothing down her old cotton jacket, clearing her throat, ready to make her acceptance speech.
She began it stylishly, thanking the returning officer and his team, the people who�
�d worked for her and the people who’d shown their desire for a Labour government by voting for her, but then she paused, seemed to be catching her breath, coughed once, tried to continue and was caught up in such a paroxysm that she had to retire to the back of the stage, spluttering and choking, to be given a glass of water.
Her audience waited anxiously, murmuring and watching. ‘Bar!’ she said, handkerchief to her mouth, struggling to speak. ‘You’ll – ’ave – to do it – for me. I can’t …’
Nor can I, Barbara thought, I hain’t never spoke in public in my life. She felt such panic she wanted to run away. But she couldn’t do that. Not now, with all this going on. The Mayor was nodding and saying it would be all right, and Sis’s eyes were pleading, and the audience were shuffling their feet.
‘All right,’ she said to Sis. ‘Thass all right. I’ll do it for you.’ And she walked up to the microphone. Her heart was beating so heavily it was like a lead weight in her chest and her throat was so taut she was afraid she would start coughing too. She put her hand on the microphone, as much to steady herself as to signal that she was about to speak, moistened her lips and began.
‘My aunt, Mrs Tamworth, has asked me to finish her speech for her,’ she said, rather quaveringly. ‘She hain’t been too well these last weeks. She’s recoverin’, as you see,’ – Sis was waving and smiling – ‘but not quick enough for a long speech. What she want to say to you is this – or somethin’ like this.’ Then she paused because she wasn’t sure what she ought to say next. Her mind was too full of memories, of Betty laughing in that sheepskin coat, of Norman striding through the North End in his blue gansey, of Steve saying goodbye to her on the platform at New Cross. So many memories and all to do with war. All to do with war. And then her thoughts came together and made sense to her and she knew what she had to say.
‘We come a long way in this war,’ she began, aware of her own voice echoing back to her through the loudspeakers, but stronger now and more assured. ‘We learned a lot, how to cope with death and injury, how to look after one another, how to share. We put up with rations an’ shortages, an’ bombs an’ buzzbombs an’ rockets, an’ we never give in. We dug our casualties out the rubble. We looked after our wounded. We buried our dead. We never give in.’
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