by Anne Bennett
Molly wrote to her uncle, telling him he had not to blame himself for her decision to return to Birmingham, and explaining about Mark Baxter. She also wrote to Nellie and Jack, and a separate long letter to Cathy, opening up her heart to tell her about her feelings for Mark. Cathy replied by return confessing her love for one of the soldiers in Buncrana and as she wrote just as if she was in the same room, Molly realised how much she had missed her, missed them all and longed to see them all again.
In early December, Biddy Sullivan, in the throes of one of her famous tantrums, suffered a stroke and Tom wrote to tell Molly.
It is a bad one, the doctor said, and he confessed to me that he has been expecting something like this for years. At the moment she has virtually no movement below her neck and she cannot speak. He said it is impossible to say whether further movement will return or not, and advised us to keep her warm and comfortable and pray the situation does not go on indefinitely.
I certainly hope it doesn’t because most of the care of her falls to Gloria, although Gloria finds it easier to see to someone who was not yelling at her or slapping out. In fact, the old place is quite quiet now.
It is quite sad, I suppose, though she only has herself to blame and no one seems to feel sorry for Mammy. The general feeling is that she has got her just deserts and only the doctor and priest still visit. But still she clings to life, and though Gloria says Mammy is often in pain, she refuses to take the doctor’s medication.
We are all just waiting for her to die.
Molly could feel no pity for her grandmother. Like the neighbours, she thought Biddy had brought her illness upon herself with her ill temper, and was reaping her just deserts now for what she had put Molly through. When she told Mark just some of the ways she had suffered at her grandmother’s hands he quite understood.
Their courtship was well established now, and they saw each other as often as their shifts allowed. Sometimes Kevin went out with them, for Mark knew how close he and Molly were and, anyway, he liked the boy and got on well with him.
But whether Kevin was with them or not, their lovemaking had never gone past holding hands, and occasionally a chaste kiss on the cheek.
Biddy died in agony at the very end of January.
‘Will you go over for the funeral?’ Mark asked when Molly told him of the telegram that had arrived that morning.
‘I will not,’ Molly said adamantly.
‘Oh, but surely—’
‘No, Mark,’ Molly said. ‘The only reason I would go to the funeral is to dance on that foul woman’s grave and I would never shame the family by doing that. I am pleased that my uncle can now come and see me, but just at the moment I am looking forward to seeing the film Casablanca.’
Mark knew that was Molly’s way of saying that the subject was closed and he had no wish to fight with her.
Tom had hoped to come over for Molly’s twenty-first birthday, but he had been delayed and Mark told her not to fret about it, that he had a treat for her. It was a wonderful day from the start, for there were a wealth of cards on the mat when she got up, including ones from Nellie and Jack and Cathy. Tom had sent a card and she even had one from her Uncle Joe, whom she had never seen, signed, ‘With love from your Uncle Joe, Aunt Gloria and your cousin Ben’. There were also cards from Daisy and Martin, Helen, Lynne, Will and Betty and even Terry. When she reached the Naafi it was to find everyone had cards and presents for her, and she left later laden down with flowers. Kevin had given her a beautiful brooch, which she wore on her coat when she went to meet Mark that night to see the musical South Pacific.
Over a pre-theatre dinner at the Grand Hotel, one of the few buildings left standing in Colmore Row, Mark presented her with a watch with a golden strap. It was so beautiful she was rendered speechless for a while and she so wished she could have thrown her arms around Mark and shown her gratitude properly.
‘It’s beautiful, Mark, truly beautiful,’ she gasped eventually. ‘I never had anything half as fine. You are spoiling me.’
‘You deserve to be spoiled,’ Mark said and he reached across the table, took her hand and, looking deep in her eyes, said, ‘it is the only way I have to show you how much I love you.’
Molly’s stomach did a somersault. ‘I love you too, Mark,’ she said, speaking the words aloud for the first time. Mark’s spirits soared as she went on, ‘There aren’t enough words to tell you how much I truly love you. But I can’t … you know what I mean. I’m sorry that …’
Mark stopped Molly’s stumbling apology as he said, ‘Hush. Don’t be sorry about anything, and certainly not on your birthday. You love me and I love you, and that is all that matters.’ He kissed the tips of Molly’s fingers, sending a delicious thrill all through her body. ‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘Everything else will fall into place in time.’
TWENTY-NINE
Mark was on three weeks of night ops. Now that Molly had actually admitted her love for him, it was harder not to be filled with fear every night as she heard the planes taking off. How well now she understood Helen’s fears.
‘You will learn to live with it, my dear,’ Helen told her when she said this, ‘but it will never totally leave you.’
It wasn’t just the airmen at risk, of course, though sometimes the air tragedies had a more immediate effect and each airman lost would leave the other pilots a little subdued. Mark was particularly upset if the man missing was from his squadron. Molly knew he felt semi-responsible but there was nothing she could say to ease that for him.
She understood more now of the pilots’ need to live one day at a time, their need to let off steam and the way they often tried to squeeze every bit of life into their off-duty hours. Mark was the same as the rest, though sometimes his eyes were glazed and bloodshot with tiredness, and Molly did worry more about him at those times, for she remembered what Helen had said about tiredness being a killer.
Then, one dreadful night, when Mark’s stint was very nearly over Molly was roused from her sleep by a pounding on the door. She turned on the light and looked at the alarm clock to see that it was three o’clock in the morning. The pounding came again and with a sigh, she swung herself out of bed, wrapped her dressing gown around herself and pushed her feet into slippers as quickly as she could. As she descended the stairs, she heard Terry’s frantic voice.
‘Molly, open the door, for Christ’s sake.’
She slid the bolts top and bottom, and Terry almost fell in through the door. He was still in his flying gear and his eyes were wild as he cried, ‘Mark didn’t make it back.’
‘Didn’t make it back?’ Molly repeated in an appalled whisper, while the realisation of what those words meant were screaming in her head.
‘We hit heavier resistance than we were prepared for, and Mark wasn’t the only one, but Christ, I’m real sorry, Molly.’
‘Oh God!’ Molly cried. ‘How can I go on without him?’ She felt her legs crumple beneath her, and Terry caught her and led her to the settee. He was crying too and he shook his head helplessly as he sat down beside her.
‘I don’t think I want to go on without him, Terry,’ Molly said. ‘I love him so much.’
Terry had tasted the sorrow of losing good friends and comrades since he had joined the Royal Air Force in 1939 and he said, ‘Hush, Molly. You must go on because it is what Mark would want of you, expect of you. He was a grand man. There will never be another like him and we will all miss him.’
‘I have lost so many people in this life that I love, Terry,’ Molly said. ‘How much can one person take?’
Terry couldn’t answer, his heart was too full of sorrow, and when Molly began to cry he put his arms around her and she needed the comfort of those arms too much to push Terry away. Tears rained down his own face.
Despite the embrace, Molly felt bereft and alone, as she tried to accept that never, ever would she see Mark’s beloved face again, never feel his lips kissing her properly, his arms enfolding her, his hands exploring her body.
M
uch later, when her tears were spent and she was weak from crying, Terry left her on the settee with a rug to cover her.
‘I need to go back to the camp,’ he said. ‘Will you be all right?’
Molly knew she would never be all right, that she would never recover from this, but she nodded her head because she wanted to be alone. When Terry had gone, she was too churned up to rest and she paced the floor back and forth until the pain in her heart became so great she slumped to the floor, wrapped her arms around her chest and rocked backwards and forwards as she keened in anguish and despair. She knew she would never love another as she had Mark and she bitterly regretted allowing Collingsworth to sully that beautiful relationship, which had scarcely begun before it was snuffed out.
By the morning, Molly was feeling empty, completely drained inside and light-headed with the tears, but she needed to go to work, to keep active, to be too busy to think, or she would sit and cry all day. She had to get Kevin up for school as well, but before she did that, she would have to try to repair her face, for she didn’t want to tell Kevin yet.
Kevin knew something was up with Molly because she was sort of distant and she had been crying. Loads, as well, it looked like. Yet when he asked her what she’d been crying about, she said she hadn’t been crying, that she had a cold, like he was some little kid who would believe that stuff. He knew, despite her promise, she was shutting him out again. Molly knew it too, but she felt she wasn’t strong enough to answer his questions and deal with his grief when she hadn’t come to terms with her own.
The women at the Naafi knew something was up with Molly. You only had to look at her ashen face and bloodshot puffy eyes to see that she was far from well.
‘D’you think she is sickening for something?’ May asked.
‘Looks more like sickness of the soul, if you ask me,’ Doris said. ‘Poor kid looks as if she has been crying for bleeding hours.’
‘She does and all,’ Edna said. ‘Hope nothing’s gone wrong with her and that young airman.’
‘Well, they haven’t had time to have a row or owt,’ May put in. ‘Didn’t he say a few days ago he was on night ops?’
‘Yeah, he did,’ Edna said, ‘and Molly was all right yesterday, weren’t her?’
‘Yeah.’
There was a pause and the women looked fearfully.
‘What if summat’s happened to him, like?’ Doris said.
‘Can’t be that,’ Edna said. ‘She wouldn’t know yet.’
‘Well, summat’s drastically wrong,’ May said. ‘When I was in the kitchen just now she was moving around like a zombie, and often didn’t register that I was speaking like. She was sniffing too and said she had a cold, but I reckon she was still having a little weep. I asked her if she was OK and if she wanted to go home and she said she was fine and she would rather stay.’
‘She best keep in the back today, anyroad,’ Edna said. ‘Whatever ails her she don’t want people gawping at her.’
Molly was glad to be working in the kitchen beside the taciturn chef, who didn’t expect or even approve of excessive chatter. That suited her mood that day. She could not laugh, joke or chat with anyone when she was dead inside, when her world had turned upside down.
She knew eventually the news would filter through the camp of the pilots lost, but maybe by then she would be better able to cope without fearing she might sink to the floor and howl like an animal. And so by half-past eleven, when she went back out into the Naafi to help lay up the tables for lunch, the ladies on the counter knew about the four pilots lost the previous evening and knew too that one of them was Mark Baxter. They shed a few tears for the pilots and their families, but much of their sympathy was for Molly.
‘She must have got to know somehow,’ May said.
‘Someone maybe called and told her,’ Edna decided. ‘Poor bloody cow – as if she hadn’t got enough to put up with already.’
They watched Molly working slowly laying up the tables and Edna thought she had seldom seen anyone who looked so ill and yet was still on their feet.
When the door suddenly opened, it didn’t register with Molly, although the three woman behind the counter were struck dumb and gazed in stupefaction at the airman framed in the door, swaying with weariness.
And then he spoke: ‘Molly.’
It was the voice that Molly thought she would never, ever hear again and she raised her head slowly to see her beloved Mark in the doorway. For a moment, she thought her heart had stopped beating and then it was as if there were just the two of them in the room. Everyone else ceased to matter to either of them, and Molly threw the cutlery to the floor and was across the room in seconds. She barely took in Mark’s face, grey with fatigue, or his red-rimmed eyes as she threw herself into his arms.
The tiredness left Mark as if it had never been as he held Molly tightly in his arms.
‘Mark, oh darling, Terry told me … Oh, I thought you were dead.’
‘I knew that was what you would think,’ Mark said. ‘That’s why I had to get back. The Spit was shot to pieces and losing height, and I knew it would never make it to the airfield, but I had to find somewhere safe to land where hopefully there weren’t that many people. Eventually I came down in Cannock Chase.’
‘You walked from Cannock Chase?’ Molly asked, because it was miles away. ‘I can’t believe this. It is wonderful! Magical!’
‘So is this,’ Mark said. ‘You do realise I am holding you in my arms?’
Molly laughed. ‘Of course I realise, and I am enjoying every minute of it. Shall we try something else now?’
‘What had you in mind?’
‘Would you kiss me?’
It was Molly’s first proper kiss, apart from Collingsworth’s bruising attempts when she thought she might choke, but the sweetness and gentleness of Mark’s kiss drove that memory from her mind. It nearly took her breath away and she kissed him back with intensity. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ Molly told Mark when they broke apart at last.
‘And I you, my darling girl,’ Mark said. ‘And this is neither the time nor the place, but I need to know, Molly, my beloved, will you marry me?’
‘Oh yes, Mark, and the sooner the better,’ Molly said.
There was a collective sigh from the women and then a spontaneous round of applause from all those in the Naafi, and it broke the spell. Molly and Mark came back to the real world once more, and smiled at each other, a little embarrassed.
Suddenly there was a guard at the door and he said to Molly, ‘Chap at the gate, name of Tom Sullivan. Says he’s your uncle.’
‘Uncle Tom!’ Molly cried. ‘Yes, yes he is.’ She caught up Mark’s hand and kissed it before saying, ‘Come and meet my Uncle Tom,’ and the two ran hand in hand through the airfield.
Later, with Mark rested and Molly having finished her shift, they sat and discussed the wedding plans with Tom and Kevin in the sitting room of the house. Kevin was quite pleased that Molly hadn’t told him about Mark not making it back to base before he went to school that morning. He knew he would have been upset all day because he really liked Mark and would hate anything to happen to him. He was, however, very interested in the crash landing that Mark had to make and he would have quizzed him mercilessly about it if Molly hadn’t put a stop to it.
‘When were you thinking of having the wedding?’ Tom asked.
‘As soon as possible,’ Molly said. ‘You will give me away, won’t you?’
Tom grinned and said, ‘You try and stop me.’
‘We will have to save first,’ Mark said. ‘I have a bit put by, but not nearly enough.’
‘I’m sure Joe and his wife would like to come over for it too, and their son, Ben, who is your cousin, Kevin, and only a little younger than you,’ Tom said.
‘And I would like Jack and Nellie McEvoy, and Cathy, of course, to come too,’ Molly said.
‘It will take some organising, I’d say,’ Tom said, ‘but as for paying for it, don’t worry about that. Paul Si
mmons said he would like to do that for you.’
‘It’s very kind of him,’ Mark said quite stiffly, ‘but—’
‘I know how you feel, but he would like to do this for Ted, Molly’s father’s sake,’ Tom said.
‘Hang on,’ Molly put in. ‘How does Paul Simmons even know?’
‘I told him.’
‘When?’
‘This afternoon before I came here.’
‘But, Uncle Tom, you don’t even know the man.’
‘I went to apologise to him. I promised myself I would the first chance I got,’ Tom said. ‘He sent me a letter when the court case was going through when he accused me, quite rightly, in my opinion, of not looking after you properly, so I went to the address on the top of the letter.’
‘I told him it wasn’t your fault.’
‘I know, he said,’ Tom went on. ‘I found him a true gentleman and he only has your interests at heart.’
‘I know.’
‘And,’ Tom said to Mark, ‘you have married a woman of means, for Paul Simmons put some money by in a trust fund that matures when Molly, and Kevin too, of course, are twenty-one.’
Molly had totally forgotten that, and Kevin had never known of it at all.
‘Does that worry you, Mark?’ Molly said. ‘I would rather give the money away than have you upset about it.’
‘That would be very small-minded of me,’ Mark said. ‘The war won’t last for ever, and when it ends, Terry’s family will come back here. If this money is enough to put a deposit down on a little place of our own, won’t it be better than us starting out in a couple of rooms?’
‘I suppose,’ Molly said. ‘Though I wouldn’t mind anywhere as long as I am with you.’
‘Well said, Molly,’ Tom said. ‘They are wise words indeed for home is surely where the heart is, and it will be a happy home when those two hearts are entwined together as yours so obviously are.’
Molly was touched by the words and a little later, when he had gone back to the lodging house he was staying at, for he didn’t think it seemly to stay with Molly, she said to Mark, ‘Isn’t Uncle Tom an old romantic?’