‘I like working here, growing things is fun, but I can’t let Mr and Mrs Castle down. It’s getting hard for them to find people to run the stalls and rides and things on the sands, with men and women called up or sent to work in factories.’
‘I understand, Myrtle, but if you change your mind, let me know, right?’
Myrtle cycled back to the house in Stanley Street, where Audrey and her husband Wilf were standing on the doorstep anxiously looking up the street waiting for her to appear.
‘Sorry, Auntie Audrey,’ she called as she slid off her bike and pushed it into the hallway. ‘Mr Gregory needed my advice about something,’ she said jokingly. ‘Wants me to work for him full-time, but I told him I’m needed on the sands until the end of summer.’ She chattered happily as she went through to the kitchen to wash before sitting at the table, explaining about Sally Gough’s field and her suggestion that Mr Gregory took it over.
Wilf laughingly said, ‘Hush, lovely girl and start again, I can’t make out what you’re on about! You start talking the minute you’re through the door. I’ve never known such a whirlwind!’ He shared a smile with Audrey before adding, ‘I wish I had your energy — and joy.’
‘Go on with you, Uncle Wilf. Happy as a pair of larks you and Auntie Audrey.’ She explained in more detail what Sally Gough had suggested, then asked, ‘Well? What d’you think of Mr Gregory’s extension then?’
‘Marvellous, so long as he doesn’t keep you there too often. As you say, we need you on the beach.’
‘And that’s what I told him, Auntie Audrey, when he asked if I’d work for him full-time. “The Castles are wonderful people, but they can’t manage without me,” I said.’ Audrey and Wilf were laughing as the lively girl found her place at the table.
Myrtle’s solemn-faced sister, was sitting at the corner of the table where the teapot, milk and cups stood. She poured the teas and handed her sister a cup. ‘What a cheek,’ she said. ‘Working for him full-time would mean every hour God sends. As if you aren’t doing enough already, the hours you put in and all for the few shillings the mean old devil pays you.’
‘He’s not a mean old devil. I was pleased, our Maude. In fact, I wouldn’t mind the job, growing things is real satisfying. But it isn’t as good as the beach in summer. That’s magic,’ she said to reassure Audrey that she was not about to let them down. ‘St David’s Well Bay in summer, yes, that’s where I want to be, and coming home starving hungry for one of Auntie Audrey’s dinners, eh, Uncle Wilf?’
Audrey began to serve helpings of steamed suet pudding with a small amount of meat at the bottom. Potatoes and some late leeks filled the plates and the lack of meat was disguised with helpings of Bisto gravy. As usual, the enthusiastic Myrtle was the first to empty her plate.
Later that evening, Audrey took the tablecloths from the café which she had freshly laundered, to Marged a few doors down the road and found Marged washing out some small meat-paste jars ready to fill with flowers for the café tables. Huw was chewing a pencil and making a list of jobs, then seeing Audrey, made the excuse that he needed to see his brother Bleddyn.
‘Off for a pint they’ll be,’ Marged muttered.
‘There’s lucky we are to have Myrtle and Maude,’ Audrey said, explaining about Mr Gregory’s attempt to coax her away from the beach. ‘Specially young Myrtle. She’s so lively she’d revive a corpse!’
* * *
Work began almost at once on the field. A team of young boys was sent from the agricultural college, and with Bernard working with them for all the hours of daylight, the field was cleaned and dug during the last weeks of April and early May, and within a few weeks was ready for planting. Myrtle came regularly to help and was pleased to see she had been right about the potatoes.
‘There’s no magic involved, there’s nothing in the potatoes to kill off the weeds and grass,‘ she told one of the students. ‘It’s the digging, and the earthing up and hoeing between the rows, then digging again to harvest the crop, all the time clearing weeds. All that digging and hoeing and weed-clearing helps to clean the ground.’
She knew that lifting the potatoes towards the end of summer was back-breaking work and admitted to Mr Gregory that she wouldn’t be sorry to miss it. ‘The beach is opening up and already the town is filling up as day trippers are coming to St David’s Well to enjoy a day out.’ she told him. ‘So I won’t be able to help much after this week.’
‘Come when you can, you’re welcome any time. A shaft of sunshine you are, young Myrtle,’ Mr Gregory said and he nodded to Beth for her to add her agreement.
The cafés along the promenade and the gift shops had now shed their winter boardings, windows were cleaned and steps scrubbed. Windows were decked in whatever the owners could find to tempt customers into their shops and the smell of chips frying filled the air.
Audrey, who with Wilf had been delivering freshly baked scones to the Castle’s café high above the beach, looked out at the golden sands of the bay and smiled. The beach was like a hibernating animal, waking and stretching its limbs.
‘But it won’t truly come alive again until Eynon and Alice are reunited, and Johnny comes home to his Hannah,’ she said sadly. ‘No matter how hard we try, behind the smiling faces there’s the fear that threatens us all. A telegram, a letter from a friend, the feeling that the next moment will bring the news we all dread.’
‘Try to be confident of their return, love,’ Wilf said. ‘I feel that we keep them safe with our thoughts and unhappy dread isn’t what we want to go winging across the miles, now is it?’
‘Perhaps this will be the last summer without them. Perhaps this year it will finally end.’
‘Everything has to end sometime, lovely girl.’
Audrey glanced at him and saw that melancholy had settled on his handsome features and she regretted spoiling the mood.
‘Don’t listen to me, Wilf, dear. You’re right. They’ll be home again soon, and what a party we’ll have then, eh?’
* * *
Maude worked in a factory but she was often absent from work because of illness. She had suffered more than Myrtle from the time they had been homeless and each winter brought on chest infections and almost continuous colds and coughs. Audrey had taken her to the doctor on numerous occasions, but he assured them both that it was nothing serious, and certainly not the tuberculosis they both secretly feared. So when she felt unwell, she would take to her bed and be fussed over by Audrey and Myrtle; Myrtle reading to her and spending as much time as she was able, although it was never enough to stop Maude from complaining about her neglect.
On the way home from her day at the beach café, Myrtle would go straight to Maude and ask about her day, which, she already knew, would never be as happy as her own.
‘It’s a shame you have to work in that factory, our Maude. If only the doctor would say you had to work outside then you could help on the beach and you’d throw off these colds as soon as you got them.’
‘Auntie Audrey has tried,’ Maude reminded her. ‘Every time we see the doctor she asks, but he refuses, insisting I’m not sick enough to be excused from war work.’
‘Thank goodness I’m only fifteen. Nearly sixteen, mind,’ she added proudly, although with some exaggeration. ‘The war’s bound to be over before I’m old enough to be called up.’
‘If only I’d passed the medical when I tried to join the Wrens,’ Maude sighed. ‘Not even the Land Army wanted me.’
‘Glad I am that you didn’t. I’d miss you, Maude.’
‘Yes, we must always stay together, mustn’t we? Nothing must separate us, you promise?’
Willingly, as in the past, Myrtle promised.
Overhearing them, Audrey frowned. It was a wicked thing to make a fifteen year old promise. Myrtle wasn’t able to think ahead to a time she might want to do something her sister begged her not to do, when Maude could remind her of a promise so solemnly and unthinkingly given. A spurt of anger flooded Audrey’s mind. Once, she had been
forced to take a path she hadn’t wanted, and it was something she would always regret. While she had been in a vulnerable state, she had been persuaded that she had no right to her dreams, no right to be happy. She had given up on a great many dreams because of a similar promise, a decision forced upon her when she was too young and vulnerable to realize that such a promise could, and perhaps should, be broken.
Resentment, so long hidden in Audrey’s mind beneath layers of guilt and obedience and a sense of duty, was coming to the surface more frequently, and seeing the willingness of Myrtle to accept her sister’s subtle domination, hardened her heart more strongly.
Audrey Thomas and her sister Marged were not equals, because their mother had deemed it so. One had been more dominant since they’d been children. Although Audrey was the elder, she had deferred to her sister for the whole of her life. Now, at the age of fifty-two, with a worrying suspicion that her darling Wilf might be ill, Audrey was aware of a growing dislike towards her sister. For too long she had allowed Marged — and before her their mother, Molly Piper — to tell her what to do. Looking around her at people the same age as herself, who were sharing the fun of children and grandchildren and being an important member of a growing and loving family, she was aware of just how much she and Wilf had missed, how cruelly her sister had robbed them by emphasizing the extent of their shame and making her keep to her unwise promises.
She didn’t want Myrtle to suffer in the same way, but didn’t know how to warn her without causing a rift between herself and the sisters. Perhaps even that was wrong; to worry so much about offending someone so that you were unable to be honest.
The Castle family’s business was a complex one including cafés, a shop, plus the stalls and rides every summer. Audrey rarely became involved at the beach; it had been her role to keep house for her mother and deal with the housekeeping side of the business, and, until Granny Molly Piper’s death, she had accepted that.
When she and Wilf Thomas had married, so late in their lives, she had expected things to change and when they did not — she had been expected to continue to deal with the domestic side of things, besides look after Maude and Myrtle — her bitterness had slowly grown. She said little to Wilf who was more philosophical, thankful that they had at last married and grateful for every day they spent together.
Sitting in the quiet kitchen, waiting for Wilf to return from his afternoon stroll, she began to wonder if they would ever find a way of breaking away from the responsibilities that had crowded everything else out of her world, and make a different life for themselves. She was unaware that Wilf, sitting in the weak sunshine of the early May afternoon in 1943, was mulling over similar thoughts.
* * *
In spite of the sun, there was a weariness on many faces of the people wandering around St David’s Well. Beth Gregory, who owned the café in a corner of the town’s market, felt saddened as she looked around at the neat, clean, but poorly-dressed shoppers. They would flop down on one of her chairs and order a cup of tea that was pale and for which she felt like apologizing, if it weren’t for the fact that there was nothing she could do about it. Rationing affected cafés as well as the housewife.
She saw her mother approaching and called her over. Marged thankfully put down the heavy basket containing some newspaper-wrapped packages and a bunch of bluebells picked from the woods near the town, and Beth handed her a cup of tea. ‘Sorry it’s so weak, Mam, but it’s the end of the week and I have to make it last until Saturday evening,’ she apologized.
‘Wet and warm’ll do for me, love. I’ve brought you a lot of knitting wool. Mrs Denver gave it to me. It will do for making some toys and small garments for you to sell in your shop.’
Whenever she found a spare moment, Beth helped to keep the shop well stocked with handmade items. Working what hours they could, she and Eirlys and Hannah kept the shop open, sitting sewing or knitting between attending to customers.
‘Mrs Denver thought our Lilly would like it to knit for little Phyllis,’ Marged went on with a tut of disapproval. ‘but there’s more chance of a man walking on the moon than our Lilly doing something useful!’
Beth’s sister, Lilly, had escaped from family commitments by marrying an older man and she lived comfortably in his house with her daughter, Phyllis, who was just about to celebrate her third birthday. Lilly’s husband, Sam, was wealthy enough to have paid help in the house and many of the tasks that Lilly might reasonably expect to do were performed by Sam himself. Although everyone in the Castle family helped with the various businesses, particularly during the summer season, Lilly had never been willing. Marriage to Sam Edwards had given her a life free from worries and she loved it. As long as she managed to avoid having another child, she foresaw years of idle contentment.
Thinking of this, Marged looked at her daughter Beth and smiled. ‘Lucky I am to have you, Beth, love.’
‘I feel guilty working here when I should be helping you and Dad on the sands. And there’s the time I spend helping my father-in-law as well as taking time to help Eirlys and Hannah in the shop. Do you mind very much, Mam?’
‘It is difficult,’ Marged admitted. ‘Temporary strangers aren’t as committed to giving the customers a happy time. For us Castles it’s more than a job, isn’t it? But don’t feel guilty about managing a business of your own, we’re proud of you. Weekends and summer evenings when you could be doing other things, you come when you can and serve in the café or help out on the stalls. Grateful we are, your dad and me.’
‘I know what I do isn’t enough. With our Ronnie round the corner on the vegetable stall and our Eynon serving out in the desert, I try to do what I can, but wish I could do more.’
‘It’s strange, isn’t it, that those two girls Maude and Myrtle who are no relation at all, are more use to us than your sister Lilly has ever been?’
Beth didn’t want to get into a discussion about her lazy sister and she was glad when the conversation was interrupted by a group of customers needing to be served.
When they had been supplied with sandwiches and a pot of tea, Marged went on as though the interruption hadn’t happened. ‘Wonderful girls they are. Did you know Myrtle was offered a full-time job helping your father-in-law? Since Bernard has taken over Sally Gough’s field he’s desperate for extra help and I know she was tempted, but she has enough family loyalty to stay with us on the beach. Lovely girls they are.’ As an alarming thought struck her she asked, ‘You aren’t going to help on the smallholding more now, are you? Instead of helping us on the sands?’
‘No, Mam. Helping in the fields isn’t for me!’ she said, with an eloquent shudder. ‘I help in the house, and with the paperwork, that’s all. I’ll be with you and Dad whenever I’m free. Bernard understands that.’
‘Good on ’im,’ Marged said with an approving nod.
Beth smiled but inside she was worrying how she would manage. When her husband Peter came home he had priority over everything, but when he was away, there was the café, the gift shop, helping her father-in-law and trying to give a few hours to the activities on the beach. She felt sometimes that she ought to give up the café, but it earned a reasonable profit and when the war was over, and Peter started to develop the employment agency business he was already planning, she wanted to present him with a sum of money to start him off, as well as continue to support them both until the agency took off.
During a previous engagement, to Freddy Clements, she had learned the hard way of the importance of money. Freddy had cheerfully spent everything she had saved. His affair with Shirley Downs, who was now Bleddyn’s step-daughter, had ended their engagement and although it had been a shock, she was now grateful and bore Shirley no ill will. She wondered how he was. He still wrote to her occasionally and understanding how important letters were to men serving overseas, she wrote back to him. Peter had no objection and, apart from Shirley Downs and the occasional duty letters from his mother, she guessed he had very few.
With a last comm
ent about the laziness of Lilly, Marged left, automatically taking her dishes into the area of the stall where dishes were washed. Beth wondered whether to call and see her sister. Perhaps she would pop in on the way to the beach one evening and suggest that their mother would appreciate a visit. Her little niece Phyllis rarely saw her grandparents and Beth knew how Lilly’s indifference hurt them.
* * *
Myrtle continued to deliver groceries twice a week during the early evening, then she would dash back over the beach to help clear up at the end of the day. The stalls were quickly boarded up and the swingboats and helter-skelter locked to prevent them being used after hours. It was the café that presented the most work. There, overseen by Marged’s critical eyes, any remaining food was either taken home for supper or placed in the special bins provided for pig food. Nothing was left to be sold the following day and Marged had the cooking to a fine art so there was usually very little wasted. Sometimes they would take home a few cakes to have at supper time with their regular cup of cocoa before bed.
At the end of each day, the counters and tables and chairs were washed, the tables reset with clean tablecloths and cruets, plus the glass meat-paste pots placed ready for a few flowers when they were available, leaves and grasses when they were not. The tea urn was washed out and dried, and the cheerful gingham tablecloths that had been used were packed to take home for Audrey to wash and iron.
Marged always stood at the door for a moment before leaving and looked around to satisfy herself that everything was immaculate and ready for a fresh start the following morning. They usually crowded into the van for Huw to drive them home, but today he was out of town buying supplies and they had to walk.
Marged and Beth and Myrtle shared the things to be taken home and they set off. Marged looked tired, and Beth was content to take her slow pace, only Myrtle was showing no sign of the long day; she skipped like a small child, impatient with their slow crawl.
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