Wartime Brides

by Lizzie Lane

  ‘You have very skilled hands,’ Charlotte said as she picked the boat up. ‘I advise a lot of war veterans on how best to manage on their pension or what to do about setting up in business or in some sort of hobby. Do let me know if you need any extra assistance. I’m sure I can find the funding for you to take your skill further. I can probably find the customers too, though from what I see here,’ she said, nodding at a can of navy issue paint with an amused smile on her face, ‘you appear to be doing quite well without any help.’

  Her face shone with enthusiasm. She’s like a lighthouse, thought Edna. The point to rush to when you were tossed in a storm. If only I had her courage. She wondered whether to tell her about the parcel and about Sherman. Perhaps her determined confidence might rub off and she’d bravely claim her child. But then, what would she tell Colin? And could she cope with hurting him?

  Charlotte bent to pick up the boat. It was then that her coat fell open and the scarf around her neck came adrift.

  ‘Mind you don’t lose it,’ said Colin.

  Charlotte put the boat down and retied the scarf hastily. It was the first time Edna had ever seen her look embarrassed and she wondered why.

  ‘I must be going,’ she said hurriedly and immediately turned to leave.

  ‘Ten shillings and sixpence!’ Colin shouted over his shoulder from the confines of his wheelchair.

  Charlotte stopped in her tracks, her face flushed even more. ‘Oh my goodness! I’m so sorry.’

  She put the wooden ship back down on the dining table and unclipped the silver clasp on her tan leather bag.

  Once the money was jingling in Colin’s palm, Edna saw her to the door.

  It was raining outside.

  ‘Silly me! I haven’t brought an umbrella,’ said Charlotte.

  Both women stared for a moment at the drizzle falling from an iron-grey sky. It was hardly rain, more of a mist that left droplets shimmering on dead stalks and the crisp remnants of autumn leaves.

  Once she’d regained her usual confidence, Charlotte asked her when she was getting married.

  Edna blushed. ‘As soon as we’ve saved enough what with a dress and a going-away suit.’

  ‘My dear! I can offer you a most wonderful opportunity. The Red Cross is holding a Christmas bazaar and jumble sale at the Shaftesbury Crusade mission hall. It’s just off Old Market so there are buses. I can assure you the most wonderful clothes will be available. I have begged everyone I know to dig deep into their wardrobes and donate for a good cause. Now,’ she said, a pink glow warming her cheeks, ‘I won’t take no for an answer. And,’ she added, leaning closer as if imparting the most wicked of secrets, ‘I will ensure that something is put aside for you. Will you come?’

  Edna thought about what her mother would say.

  Charlotte continued, her face gleaming with almost missionary zeal. ‘There are good wool suits, some from the best fashion houses in London. Hats, shoes, handbags and dresses from Liberty.’

  Edna had never heard of Liberty but didn’t let on.

  Fully expecting Colin to be pleased at her news Edna went back into the room. Her jubilant expression froze on her face. Her fiancé sat very still in his chair, looking down at his hands. He wasn’t whistling or singing like he usually did when he was working or about to start doing so.

  She told Colin all about it. ‘I won’t go if you don’t want me to,’ she said, automatically surrendering even before challenged, a matter of habit after living with her mother and father.

  ‘Up in Clifton, is it?’

  Relieved that he seemed unconcerned, Edna nodded vigorously even though it was being held in Old Market, not Clifton at all.

  ‘You go, girl.’ He pointed his finger at her, a mischievous quirkiness playing around his lips. ‘That’s where all the Conservatives is and, if my old mum is telling the truth, Conservative jumbles got better quality chuck outs than Labour ’uns!’

  Eyes shining, Edna clasped her hands together. This was her old Colin, the old common sense side by side with his chirpy sense of humour. Overcome with relief, she dived to his side and threw her arms around his neck. ‘You’re a right card, Colin Smith! And there was me thinking you were going to say I wasn’t to go.’

  ‘If Mrs Hennessey-White says you can find some frilly bits and pieces to wear on our honeymoon, it’s to my advantage, ain’t it?’

  He grinned and lifted his eyebrows in a scandalously suggestive way that made Edna blush but also smile primly.

  ‘Poor woman,’ Colin went on. ‘Can’t help feeling sorry for her, can you?’

  Edna almost burst out laughing. ‘Sorry for her? With a house in Clifton, her children at a posh school, and a cook and a cleaner to do her housework! Lucky, I’d call it!’

  Colin shook his head and his earlier frown came back. ‘I wouldn’t treat you like that.’

  Edna frowned. ‘Like what?’

  He looked wistfully towards the window. The buds and flowers of a cream net curtain hung between the mellow cosiness of the room and the rank of bay villas on the other side of the street. Edna was not at all prepared for what he said next.

  ‘She’s got red marks around her neck. I think she’s got problems.’

  It was Mrs Grey’s day off so Charlotte made breakfast. She could have got Nellie in, an amiable woman who came in to do the cleaning on occasion. But she didn’t want anyone else entering her world. It wasn’t the same as it had been and, in a strange way, she needed to keep it to herself until things were sorted out.

  She needed to keep herself physically busy while she brooded on David and the frightening violence he’d shown towards her. Her hands shook slightly as she took the food into the dining room.

  Light, whitened by an overnight frost and further frosted by sheer white nets, poured into the room from the floor to ceiling Georgian windows. Despite the warm reds of Turkish carpets and the gleam of richly polished wood, the room felt cold.

  As though they’re all made of ice, Charlotte thought, eyeing in turn her husband, her daughter and her son.

  Cutlery moved from plate to mouth, cups were raised from saucers and replaced. The sounds tinkled like hollow silver bells.

  If only David would take an interest in them like he used to. If only Geoffrey chattered like he used to, and if only Janet lolled over her father’s arm as he read his paper, unafraid of rebuke, revelling in the fact that she was his little angel. But nothing was like it used to be.

  But it will be! It has to be!

  Perhaps her husband needed help of some kind. But what and who would give it? No. He’d be all right. He’d surely be all right.

  ‘More toast?’ Even to her own ears the sound of her voice seemed an intrusion. It hurt to hear the mumbled ‘No thank you, mummy’ from her children, less hurtful to hear it from David who was reading The Times, a familiar action that had survived the war unscathed.

  Charlotte poured him more coffee and buttered him more toast. It was subservient in a way, but small favours were what women had to do if they were to get what they wanted from their menfolk.

  She turned to the children.

  ‘We might as well get on to school then, children.’ She glanced nervously at David, afraid he might notice it was a little too early. ‘Goodbye dear,’ she said kissing him on the head. ‘I’ll clear the dishes away when I get back.’

  Heart thumping, she started to follow the children to the door where she intended to remark that they should kiss David goodbye. After all, he was their father.

  She gasped as David grabbed her arm. ‘Just a minute.’

  ‘The children …’ she began, flustered because she was half-afraid he might guess where she was going after dropping them off. Working outside the home, whether voluntary or otherwise, was still a bone of contention between them. So far she had always been there in the mornings, at weekends and when he got home. He was assuming she had obeyed him. She had not.

  Geoffrey and Janet were already at the door. Geoffrey looked nervous, his c
hin resting on his tie while he eyed his father from beneath a heavy brow. Janet looked openly defiant, her eyes wide and her pupils large and staring; as if she’s trying to understand him – and remember how it used to be.

  ‘Get your school things and wait for your mother by the front door,’ said David without relinquishing the grip on her arm.

  ‘David, they’ll be late.’ She made the effort to smile. Inside she was all nerves.

  ‘Well, they won’t be for much longer. I’ve decided that it was a bad move to have them educated at a day school. It’s a hard world out there and they have to be prepared to face it. I think the time has come for them to board.’

  ‘Boarding school?’

  Charlotte’s worst fear! Her children snatched from her loving, responsible bosom and thrust into a cloistered atmosphere where self-reliance was paraded as a virtue simply because it was the only option available to the lonely souls left there.

  ‘The best education for life, my dear. I went through it. And so did you. Can you honestly say it did you any harm?’

  As she looked down at his hawk-like features, the dark, deep set eyes, the black hair that slicked flatly back from his high forehead, memories of schooldays flooded back.

  Cold mornings rushing to wash in even colder water, the smell of chalk mixed with that of sweaty hockey boots and stale cooking, and the dark varnish plastered on Victorian rafters that made you feel you were trapped in some subterranean prison. A rabble of girls who might or might not get on together, who might be homesick, lovesick, or just sick of trying to prove they had some worth. Adopting an air of confidence, of making an effort to appear above it all, had drawn others to her. In helping them she had also helped herself. Yes, it had made her stronger, but it was an experience she had no wish to repeat.

  David was still talking. ‘And if they are at boarding school, you won’t need the car, my dear. You can be a full-time house wife and spend all your time looking after me.’

  ‘The car?’

  She thought of all the things she depended on the car for: the orphanage, the Red Cross fund-raising sales, going off to give advice at the Resettlement Centre. And soon, she’d be going out to the POW camp to help those imprisoned readjust to a new world, wherever theirs might be.

  ‘But how will I go shopping?’ she blurted.

  ‘You can telephone. That’s what it’s there for. You can have it delivered.’

  ‘But what about clothes shopping, things for the house …’ She was almost screaming, an entirely different Charlotte from the one everyone was used to. Any excuse! Anything to stop him doing this.

  ‘You can do it at the weekend. I’ll take you and the children whenever any of you need anything.’

  ‘That means depending on you every time I go out of this house,’ said Charlotte.

  The newspaper slapped down loudly on the table. His fingers dug into her arm. ‘I am the master in this house, Charlotte. Please understand that, my dear. My word is law!’

  She hardly saw the road ahead as she drove the children to their individual schools. Stark trees grew at regular intervals on either side of the road. They seemed to shiver as if they were trying to run away. It might have been the wind. It might just as easily have been her shivering.

  Both schools were good. Both took boarders as well as day pupils, she thought, with a sudden flash of hope. But she knew deep down that David wouldn’t countenance that. In some odd way since coming back from the war, he wanted to make them all suffer. Either that or he wanted to control their lives, utterly and completely.

  The children were as subdued and silent as she was. Geoffrey’s school was first. He looked glum as he climbed out of the back seat.

  ‘Be a good boy,’ Charlotte said, making an effort to sound as genuinely cheerful as she always did.

  ‘Yes, mother.’

  Although she offered her cheek for the usual kiss, he ignored it and, like Shakespeare’s schoolboy, crawled like a snail towards the school gates.

  ‘Will we really have to go away to boarding school?’ asked Janet once they’d arrived at her school.

  Charlotte managed a smile before turning round. ‘Nothing’s settled, darling. You may not have to go at all.’

  Janet scowled as she tugged her satchel out after her. ‘I wish he’d never come back from the war. I wish he’d died!’

  ‘Janet!’

  The door slammed behind Janet, who did not look round. Charlotte sighed and gripped the steering wheel. It was hard to accept what was happening to her family. One thing she did know was that it had started on the day David had come home from the war. He was redefining his role in their world, redefining their role in his.

  So far he had accepted that the work she was doing for the Red Cross and the Marriage Advisory Centres was still important, what with all the displaced persons and disordered family lives. But soon he would put a stop to it. She would be forced to relinquish this separate life she had so enjoyed while he’d been away. She understood what Janet was feeling because she felt a little of it herself.

  But it was no use dwelling on it. Today she was off to the POW camp out at Pucklechurch, a village on the edge of the city. The Red Cross was doing its best to repatriate German prisoners. There were papers to be filled in and collated, relatives to trace and permissions to gather. Europe was in turmoil, its cities flattened and millions dead. A shifting population drifted across each country searching for those they had once known.

  The guard who scrutinised Charlotte’s pass card was American. ‘Carry on, ma’am. Adjutant’s office is on the left-hand side.’ He saluted her smartly as she pulled away and drove past the raised barrier.

  The office was housed in a brick Nissen hut with a curving green tin roof that vaguely reminded her of the protective tunnels they used down in Cheddar to protect growing strawberries. Much smaller of course, but the same shape.

  She and the family had spent a week’s holiday in Cheddar before the war. She smiled when she thought of it: such a happy time for all of them.

  ‘Delighted to meet you,’ said the adjutant, an English officer who politely removed his cap and dusted off the chair he pulled out from beneath the desk. ‘Hope this will do for you. Best we can offer, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Tea?’ he asked raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Love one. Milk and one sugar.’

  ‘Well, I’ll go off and get you your cuppa while you see your first appointment, if that’s all right with you.’

  She smiled, said her thanks, set her brown leather briefcase down on the desk and took out the papers she needed. There were six prisoners of war to see.

  ‘Morning, ma’am,’ said the American corporal who escorted the first prisoner in. She was surprised at his being black, the only black man she’d seen in the whole camp. Throughout the war the American army had been noticeably segregated, the ‘Jim Crows’ being mostly used for supply, transport, and entirely black infantry battalions.

  The prisoner, a thin man with a five o’clock shadow and heavy eyebrows, looked her up and down. She avoided his eyes and, for the umpteenth time that day, wondered if the navy blue suit with the peplum waist had been the right choice. After all, it wasn’t as though these men had been cut off from women altogether. It had been explained to her before being assigned that these men were used to mixing in the community, helping on local farms and repairing local roads. Since VE Day they’d even been allowed to go to the pub.

  ‘Do you have to stay, corporal?’ she asked with a smile.

  ‘That, ma’am, depends on your German.’

  What a fool! She stopped herself from blushing but could have bitten off her tongue. Why had she presumed him to be merely a prison guard?

  ‘I’m sorry. Most interpreters have been officers.’

  ‘I almost used to be.’

  She wondered at his reply and sensed the bitterness in his voice. None of your business, Charlotte, she told herself. You’re here to do a job
. She turned to the prisoner.

  ‘Then let’s continue, shall we? Now,’ she said, smiling across at the prisoner. ‘Your name, please?’

  As promised, the tea came in at the same time as the next prisoner. The adjutant brought in both.

  ‘You’ve met Corporal Grant, I see,’ he said as he set the cup and saucer down. ‘Everything all right, is it?’

  She sensed what he was really asking her was did she mind working with a black man.

  She smiled broadly. ‘The corporal has been of immense assistance. Thank you.’

  ‘Then I’ll leave you to it.’ He nodded at them both, tilted his cap then exited. The corporal glared after him before instructing the prisoner to sit down. For the first time she noticed that the flesh around one of the corporal’s eyes was slightly darker than the other. There was also a graze on his right cheek. Had he been in a fight?

  After the second prisoner had exited there was a gap before the third prisoner made his entrance.

  ‘Tea, Corporal Grant?’ She found a tin mug in the drawer of the desk. He nodded.

  ‘Do you take sugar?’ she asked.

  ‘Everything, ma’am.’

  She glanced up at him. ‘Mrs Hennessey-White will do. I’m only a Red Cross worker, not a queen.’

  He laughed and she managed to smile more broadly than she had all day. David was someone she’d left at home that morning and would return to later this evening. In the period in between she felt lighter, more alive and in charge of her own life.

  ‘How do you feel about helping our ex-enemies get home?’ she asked.

  Corporal Aaron Grant swallowed his tea and shrugged. ‘I don’t feel aggrieved with them if that’s what you mean. A few are real Nazi types but most are just ordinary men, dragged from their ordinary lives and told to go out, kill and get killed. All most of them want to do is get back to their homes, their factories and their farms.’

  ‘So you don’t hate them.’

  ‘No.’

  Charlotte sat back in her chair and folded her arms. ‘They were pretty brutal towards the Jews.’