A Wartime Wife

by Lizzie Lane

  She still did keep money in her knickers, but not guineas. The boiler was set on bricks so that the rim came to waist level. There was a gap at one side where she kept the bulk of her money, a cash sum she’d saved up over the past three years. Beneath the sink was a meat safe where she kept some of the stuff brought in to be pledged against money lent. Behind that was a gap in the wall for bigger items.

  ‘There’s five guineas. It’s worth that.’

  ‘I don’t think …’

  She cocked her head to one side and eyed him reproachfully. ‘Would you buy my daughter something cheap?’

  He shook his head and looked bashfully down at his feet.

  Mary Anne picked up the boiler stick and stabbed again at the washing. She had thought of suggesting that he take one of the wedding rings left with her, but none of them were at the end of their hock yet. Besides, it would be nice for her Daw to have something that was not second-hand.

  If a young woman wanted to marry, she couldn’t pick a better man than John. That was why she wanted to hide her expression. He mustn’t see the envy there. It’s wrong to feel like this at your age, she thought. But wouldn’t it be wonderful to do it all again, only with love and passion this time.

  ‘You don’t think Mr Randall will object to us gettin’ married?’

  Mary Anne stabbed more vigorously at the boiling washing. ‘Not if I’ve got anythin’ to do with it.’

  There was toast and dripping for breakfast. A big brown teapot stood on a stand in the middle of the table, steam curling from its spout. Lizzie was first down, her gloves and dark-green beret tucked beneath her arm, ready to cycle to her job in Ashton. The bicycle meant she didn’t have to live in at the Selwyn household, so every day, at around six thirty, she set off to cycle to her employment.

  ‘I don’t want anything to eat.’

  ‘You’ll have a cup of tea.’

  ‘Aw, Ma!’

  ‘You’re not leaving this house until you’ve had breakfast.’

  Mary Anne took hold of her daughter’s shoulder and pressed her into a chair. Lizzie resigned herself to the fact that she would have to at least drink a cup of tea before leaving for work.

  ‘You’ve a long day and Mrs Selwyn works you hard.’

  ‘Well, she’d better remember that when I ask her for time off this morning. I’ve promised to go to the recruiting office with Patrick Kelly. He’s got nobody else.’

  Mary Anne nodded approvingly. Patrick worked at Shellard’s Garage on Coronation Road. Mr Shellard had a reputation for drinking too much cider and left Patrick pretty much to his own devices. She felt sorry for Patrick. He’d been scruffy and neglected as a child. The holes in his socks had never seen a darning needle and his boots – if he happened to have any – would have uppers swiftly parting with the soles.

  ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘The least I can do—’ Lizzie suddenly caught the expression on her mother’s face. ‘Ma, don’t read anything into it. He’s just a friend. I’ve got no intention of having the likes of him as my sweetheart.’

  ‘Why not? He’s had a bad start in life but has a good heart.’

  Lizzie eyed her mother over the rim of her cup. ‘I want something better, Ma. I don’t want a bloke from round here who comes home smelling of tobacco or oil or sweat. I want one that smells sweet and can buy me nice things.’

  Mary Anne fixed her daughter with a knowing look. ‘And don’t think I don’t know what that means. Times have not changed that much. Mr Selwyn is not for you, Lizzie. He’ll dally and play with you, but when it comes to the crunch, he’ll marry a girl from a similar background, now mark my words.’

  Face flushed, Lizzie sprang to her feet. ‘He’s not like that! He’s really nice and he’s got a motor car—’

  ‘He’s not for you!’ The crockery rattled as she slammed her hands palms down on the table. ‘Lizzie! Don’t be a fool. I’m telling you. Fellas like that don’t marry girls like you. I’m telling you the truth!’

  Lizzie was defiant. ‘What would you know about it? What would you know? You’re old! All that’s behind you now, and besides it was different in your day.’

  The old memories, a similar scene, flooded over her – or so it seemed. Her physical state reminded her of another girl, another boy and another war.

  The room swam and Mary Anne clutched the back of a chair. A button popped off her blouse. Her hand fell inside to her breast as she gasped for breath. The room swimming, she slumped onto a chair.

  ‘Ma!’

  Lizzie fell to her knees and stared up into her mother’s face. ‘Ma? Are you all right, Ma? Are you sick? What is it? What’s the matter?’

  Feeling the first effects of early morning sickness, Mary Anne heaved, bent almost double and brought her hand across her mouth. She mustn’t be sick. She mustn’t give herself away.

  ‘It’s all right.’ It wasn’t all right. Her chest was heaving. She swallowed the threatening sickness. ‘I’m just a bit tired. Our Stanley had me up during the night. His breathing wasn’t right …’

  Judging by Lizzie’s expression, it seemed the lie was believed. She looked relieved and more than a little contrite. She was all apologies.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you, Ma.’

  Mary Anne shook her head. ‘You didn’t upset me, Lizzie. I just want the best for you.’

  Lizzie reached for her cup of tea. ‘Here. Drink this.’

  Mary Anne did as she was told. ‘Just a bit faint.’

  Lizzie slid the sugar bowl towards her. ‘Here. Have some more sugar.’

  Mary Anne put her hand over the cup. ‘No. No sugar. I don’t like sugar in my tea.’ She noticed Lizzie’s frown. ‘I used to, but not any more. I suppose it’s something to do with age.’

  Lizzie blinked in a curious way, a little frown between her brows, a concerned tilt to one side of her mouth.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Mary Anne repeated.

  She felt her face alternate between the cold pallor of a faint and the heat of embarrassment. ‘I’ll see you off. The fresh air will do me good.’

  She followed Lizzie and her bicycle to the front door. The fresh air was like a wet veil on her face. ‘Keep your head, Lizzie, and give young Patrick my love.’

  Lizzie smiled over her shoulder before mounting her bike and cycling off.

  Mary Anne went back into the house. There were others needing to be fed before going off to work, but Lizzie would be her favourite – until the others came down. It had always been hard to favour one any more than another – although there were differences, there would always be differences.

  Daw was pale and agitated when she came down to breakfast, flitting between table, dresser and mantelpiece like a butterfly, unsure of the best place to settle. Harry came down just after her.

  ‘I’m only reporting in,’ she said, picking up a piece of toast and dripping, raising it to her mouth, then putting it down again. ‘I can’t eat.’ She rubbed her palms together as though they were cold or had something stuck to them. Suddenly, she was very still. The face she turned to her mother was stiff with fear. ‘I’m so afraid for him, Ma.’

  Mary Anne pursed her lips. She had promised John that she wouldn’t whisper a word about the ring. Smiling, she shook her head and pushed a wisp of hair behind her right ear. When she was young it was honey coloured and had glinted in the sun. Now it was a few shades lighter than the gold of her youth and streaked with pale, unmanageable strands.

  She addressed her daughter in a melancholy voice. ‘It’s all a big adventure to men. God knows, but it’s nothing but a struggle and a worry for the women left behind.’

  Sitting at the kitchen table behind them, Harry made no comment but concentrated on eating his breakfast and drinking his tea.

  Mary Anne’s feelings turned warm when she looked at her son. Like his father, the top of her head barely reached his shoulder, but there the likeness ended. Harry weighed everything up before forming an opinion. His father had b
randed him a coward, but he’d stuck to his beliefs and taken a stand. In his mother’s eyes, that made him a brave man indeed.

  She would dearly like to know who he had been out with until two o’clock this morning, but he still wasn’t saying.

  In time, she told herself, smiling, and hoped to meet her soon.

  Chapter Twelve

  Streetlights glimmered and the road glistened beneath the wheels of Lizzie’s bike. The morning mist was damp on her face, the air fresh as water. Houses, trees and people were without colour; varying shades of greyness in the early morning world.

  She passed the milkman’s cart at the end of Coronation Road and wondered whether she’d got the time wrong.

  Outside the back gate of the Selwyn house stood a lorry heavy with sacks of coal.

  Lizzie brought her bicycle to a halt, flustered because surely his arrival confirmed she was late.

  ‘Mr Evans! I must have misread the time.’ She pushed her bicycle through the wooden gate, left it leaning against the hedge and rushed up the garden path to open the door to the coal shed.

  ‘You ain’t done no such thing,’ he replied, his back hunched beneath the first hundredweight of coal. ‘It’s me that’s early. I’m off with me eldest boy to the recruiting office. I’ve got ar Archie, me other boy, helping me now.’

  He said it proudly and nodded to where a lanky boy in dusty cords, no more than fourteen by the looks of him, was bent almost double beneath the weight of a sack. A rumble like thunder preceded the black cloud, piercing the morning air as the first sack was tumbled into the shed.

  ‘I’m going there too,’ said Lizzie, stepping back onto the lawn so she wouldn’t breathe in the thick cloud of dust.

  ‘They don’t take girls, I think; they certainly didn’t in the last war,’ said Mr Evans, his grin marked by the cigarette at the corner of his mouth, his eyes like dabs of whitewash in a sooty black face.

  She managed to smile. ‘They don’t have women soldiers in this one either, Mr Evans. But don’t worry. I won’t be wearing a tin hat and khaki trousers just yet. I’ve promised a friend I’d go with him.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  No comment was made about the friend being her sweetheart. She was glad of that. Admitting Patrick was only a friend seemed somehow disloyal. Patrick needed someone to support him, and there was no one else. Now all she had to do was convince Mrs Selwyn that it was an act of patriotism for her to take mid-morning leave.

  ‘Be seein’ you later then,’ called Mr Evans once he’d finished his drop.

  The kettle was singing, the porridge was thick and creamy and the smell of fish caused her empty stomach to rumble. The porridge was for herself and Mrs Selwyn. The piece of smoked haddock was for Peter.

  She poked the fish down so it would cook better. As she watched it shift slightly, she wondered at how her mother had guessed about her and Peter. Although the advice was well intended, she had no intention of taking it. She couldn’t. Her heart bounced every time Peter was near, but how could she explain her feelings to her mother? Unlike Daw, she did not believe that mothers and fathers were beyond such things and put on earth purely to cater to the whims and wishes of their children, but trying to explain was never going to be easy. She was so set against Peter, continually implying that he would only take advantage of her because she was of a different class.

  The image of her mother looking so pale popped into her mind. She felt guilty for being so disagreeable, but her comments about Peter had caused her to question both his motives and her own. It came to her then that it was not the first time she’d seen her looking pale, though she’d never actually fainted before. Was it just tiredness because of young Stanley? He’d been ill, but that was a while ago now and she hadn’t heard him disturb during the night.

  Her thoughts were interrupted when Mrs Selwyn came into the kitchen at seven o’clock as she did every day, including weekends. She was always down for breakfast at least an hour before her son and always made the same pronouncement.

  ‘I’m ready for breakfast, Lizzie, and my son will be down in precisely one hour.’

  ‘Keeps a clock in ’er bloomers,’ remarked Ivy Smith, who came in to help now and again and covered on Lizzie’s day off. But this morning was different. She came down early, taking Lizzie by surprise.

  ‘Good morning, Lizzie. Peter and I are ready for breakfast. Today we intend dining together.’

  Lizzie ceased stirring the porridge with a large wooden spoon, but contained her surprise. Peter rarely rose before eight. She’d heard from the staff at the haberdasher’s, the family business, which he’d inherited on his father’s demise, that they never expected to see him until nine thirty.

  It struck her that Mrs Selwyn didn’t look quite herself. Her clothes were no different than usual: a dark-grey dress, the high collar fastened at the throat with a blue and white cameo brooch, her hair crimped into tight curls that dangled like seashells over her forehead. There was something furtive about her. The set of her jaw was at variance with her eyes. Her lids were lowered and she kept her face turned away, as though she did not want Lizzie to see them and perhaps read her thoughts. Overall, Lizzie got the impression of distraction.

  ‘Mrs Selwyn, I wish to go to the recruiting office this morning …’

  Her employer stiffened, as wooden as the door she held half-open.

  ‘War! There will be no talk of war in this house!’

  Lizzie frowned. How could she not talk of it? Everyone was talking of it. She determined to press on regardless.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Selwyn, but I have to. I came in early this morning because I’ve promised to go to the recruiting office. One of my friends … and my brother—’ she knew Harry wasn’t going, but it sounded better if he was included ‘—are going to the recruiting office. I’ve promised to go with him … them … to give them courage, if you know what I mean.’

  She found herself curtseying as she said it and felt a fool. She didn’t usually curtsey to Mrs Selwyn, who was merely the widower of one shopkeeper and mother of another.

  ‘After all,’ she added, watching as Mrs Selwyn simmered like the kettle boiling behind her, ‘saying goodbye to those about to march off to war is much more important than black-leading the grate or pushing the laundry through the mangle. All young men over twenty who don’t enlist will be called up anyway, so I hear. My father says that no one will be exempt unless they’re cripples, lunatics or conscientious objectors, though he reckons some will hide and some go abroad to Canada and places like that.’

  Mrs Selwyn’s odd expression, the stiff face muscles and the hooded eyes, suddenly altered. In time Lizzie would remember that expression and realise its significance, but she was too preoccupied with thinking about her last meeting with Peter to take much notice.

  It had rained so the grass had been too wet to lie down. They’d climbed into the back of the car, the leather cold against her naked thighs.

  ‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ she’d murmured against his neck.

  ‘Of course we should.’

  His words had been delivered in a hot breath against her cheek. His hands had been stroking between her legs, the tip of his penis nudging towards its destination.

  ‘Do you love me?’ she asked, desperate to hear again the words that would go some way to justifying her letting him have his way.

  ‘Yes, yes, whatever you want, my darling, whatever you want.’

  The loose flesh of Mrs Selwyn’s throat seemed to tremble against the stiff collar, the words she spoke rumbling like the coal had done. ‘Yes. Well, of course, Peter has plans about what to do. I mean, everyone does, don’t they, but of course he’ll only go in as an officer. A young man experienced in running a business and organising staff is bound to end up as an officer.’

  Lizzie wasn’t sure whether overseeing a dozen female shop assistants, two old storemen and a young apprentice counted as good officer experience, but it wasn’t her place to say anything.

>   Determined to accompany her sister and the two young men, she found herself searching for reasons to justify her taking the morning off. ‘The milkman … and the coalman … they’re going too … their sons, you see …’

  Mrs Selwyn’s face paled. ‘Well. Yes. I suppose they would. One couldn’t expect anything else. Mr Evans is huge. A brute of a man. His sons take after him and will no doubt have their uses.’

  Lizzie frowned and wrinkled her nose at the smell of burning.

  ‘The porridge!’

  By the time Lizzie had swept the pot from the hob to the draining board, Mrs Selwyn had gone. Usually she would have got a ticking-off for inattention, but today Mrs Selwyn was preoccupied and it didn’t do to ask questions.

  Her employer had trained as a schoolteacher, so she said, though the fact that she read trashy romance was a little out of character. Lizzie had peered into one or two of the more lurid paperbacks where the heroes pledged undying love and the action stopped at the bedroom door.

  Wiping the dampness from her forehead with the back of her hand, she gritted her teeth. Regardless of what Mrs Selwyn might say, she was going to the recruitment office. Perhaps she could send Peter a message to meet him afterwards. Surely Mrs Selwyn could accept such an excuse?

  ‘Yes,’ she muttered to herself, as she dug the last of the porridge out with a wooden spoon. She’d have it out with her after breakfast, even though it might mean she’d have no job at the end of it. What did it matter, she told herself as she ladled the porridge into a serving dish. You have your bicycle. You can get a job anywhere because you can get to it better than most people. But there wouldn’t be a Peter, she thought, and Peter was what kept her here. She could earn much more at the tobacco factory, much more at the munitions factories that were taking over the production lines in engineering firms and garages.

  No. There would be no Peter. The thought of not seeing Peter, not being near him, not being …? Available? The meaning made her pause in the preparation of breakfast. Available! She frowned. The job was convenient – for both of them.