Bia's War

by Joanna Larum

  “All through those terrible days, Sam was at my side. He supported me both physically and emotionally, whenever I looked as though I was faltering he was there, urging me forever onwards until, eventually, with his and Annie’s help, I stopped wishing I had died along with my child and I turned my face towards the future once again.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Nana Lymer stopped speaking and Victoria realised that she had fallen asleep, even though she was still sitting upright, propped against her pillows. She tried to slide her down so that she could rest more comfortably but her body seemed almost wedged somewhere, so this was no easy manoeuvre. As Victoria was watching her, trying to think of some way to be able to move her without waking her up, Nana’s eyes opened sluggishly and she slid herself quite easily down into the bed.

  “I’ll finish the story tomorrow, Victoria,” she whispered, before she turned over and made herself comfortable under the covers.

  Victoria was more concerned than she had ever been before about the state of Nana’s health. She had never seen her so frail and tired and she briefly wondered if she was coming down with some sort of bug.

  “Please don’t let it be that she is exhausted from reliving her experiences during the First World War.” Victoria didn’t think that she could cope with being the reason for her grandmother being ill. She would never forgive herself if Nana died because Victoria wanted to hear the story of her life; that would be unbearable. She resolved to keep an extra special eye on her grandmother the next day and to stop her from finishing the story if she looked at all tired.

  Once again, Victoria’s mother made no complaint when Victoria said she intended spending the day with Nana Lymer again. She didn’t react in any way other than raising her eyes above her teacup as she drank her tea and glancing at her daughter. Victoria took this unspoken communication as leave to spend her day however she chose, so she quickly finished her toast and washed the pots which were waiting on the draining board, before making her exit from the kitchen. Her mother ignored her completely, but her father winked at her as she passed him on her way to the hall and staircase.

  Nana Lymer was awake and sitting up in bed when Victoria entered her bedroom, finishing her own breakfast.

  “I’ll just take your pots downstairs and wash them, and then I’ll be straight back up.” Victoria said.

  “Ok. Then I’ve got a story to finish telling you. We should get through the rest of it today and then it doesn’t matter if I peg it tomorrow.” The old lady smiled at Victoria, ignoring the frown that her words had produced on her granddaughter’s forehead. Within minutes, Victoria was back in Nana Lymer’s bedroom, making herself comfortable on the chair next to the bed.

  “Before you ask, I’m as healthy as anyone my age can expect to be, so there’s no need for you to worry about me.” Nana Lymer smiled at the expression on Victoria’s face. “If I wasn’t well enough I would let you know, so let’s just get on with the story, shall we?”

  “Ok, I give in.” Victoria said, raising her hands in submission.

  “Good. Once I had decided that I wasn’t going to try and join Simon by killing myself, I turned my face towards the future and that was when Mrs Dennison came to see me. She turned up in the shop one rainy Wednesday afternoon, shaking the raindrops from her shawl and asked Hannah if she could have a word with me. I was in the kitchen with the door open into the shop so I heard her voice as soon as she spoke. Hannah’s face appeared at the open doorway and she raised her eyebrows as she tilted her head towards Mrs Dennison. I carried on making the fresh batch of ginger beer that I had started but nodded my agreement at Hannah and she went and brought Mrs Dennison into the kitchen. I watched her enter the room with some trepidation. Was she going to accuse me of murdering her husband? Could she possibly have some idea of what had happened that night? I went cold through to my bones, but then shook myself mentally over my guilty conscience and civilly asked her what I could do for her. Her answer to my question knocked me for six.

  “I’ve come to ask for your help, Mrs Drinkwater.” she said, looking me straight in the eye as she spoke. She didn’t seem as meek and mild as she had been the last time I had seen her, when she was sporting the black eye the pig butcher had given her. She stood upright and looked me square in the eyes.

  “I know my husband was making life difficult for you, before he was killed in the raid and I’m right sorry that he was doing that. I heard about him carrying on in your backyard and making a fool of himself in front of all your neighbours. I’ll not lie to you, Mrs Drinkwater, he wasn’t a pleasant man, he was often more of a pig than the animals he butchered in our shop but he was my husband and now he’s dead, so I’m on my own. Our Albert was killed last year on the Somme, so I’ve got no-one to provide for me, but I do now own the shop. I was wondering if you could give me some advice on getting the business up and running again.”

  “She raised her hand to stop me before I had a chance to speak.”

  “‘I know I don’t deserve your help, seeing as how it was my husband who was threatening you in your own backyard, but you’re the only woman I know who’s running a business on your own and I wondered if you would help me do the same. My shop wouldn’t interfere with your profits, cos we would be selling different things, so it wouldn’t be detrimental to your business. Would you consider helping me? After all, my husband died trying to save your husband and son.’”

  “While she had been talking, there had been so many thoughts rushing through my mind, but I nearly lost all my hard-won self-control at her last statement. Her husband hadn’t died trying to save my husband and son, he’d murdered them both, but my husband had killed her son and then the most innocent of adults had ended the pig butcher’s life. So much hatred and evil had revolved around her husband, but she was innocent of it all. Like me, she had lost her only child and realised that she didn’t want to stay married to her husband, but, unlike me, she had left him when he had taken to physically abusing her. The black eye which was the last present her husband had given her had been the last in a long line of injuries he had inflicted on her, so didn’t she deserve a better chance at life? She was prepared to work for it, so who was I to hold her back? I had made my decision.

  “I’d be very happy to help you, Mrs Dennison.” I said. “I admire people who are prepared to work hard and it’s about time you had a better quality of life. Would you like to come back this evening when I’ve closed the shop and we can go through some of the practicalities of running a business?”

  Mrs Dennison did come back that evening and we covered such subjects as suppliers, staff, stock levels and stock control. I was reassured to discover that she had learnt quite a lot about butchery from watching the pig butcher as he worked and that she had a young man who was already qualified as a butcher ready to work for her. He was one of the few young men still at home and able to work for a living because he had been born with a gammy leg. For some reason it had never grown at the same pace as his other leg and so he rolled rather than walked, but it was enough for even the army not to want him as a soldier. He became a very valued member of her team and the fact that he needed a tall stool permanently placed behind the shop counter where he could rest his leg when necessary didn’t interfere with his ability to carry out his job. All her customers were prepared to wait a few minutes more than usual when he served them, especially as he was a particularly good butcher.”

  “I gave Mrs Dennison what help I could in re-starting her business, even to the extent of lending her some money at a very low rate of interest in order for her to re-stock the shop. Within a year of the night of the bombardment, she was running a profitable business and was able to pay me back the money I had lent her. She harboured no great ambitions, wanting to simply be able to live comfortably on what she earned and her life entered a new phase with the re-opening of the butcher’s shop. She met a local pig farmer not long after the war ended and she sold her profitable business, married him and went to live v
ery comfortably on his farm for the rest of her life. I was pleased I had helped in turning her life around and very glad that I hadn’t turned her away when she came to me for help. Of the four of us who had been affected most by the night of the bombardment she was as innocent as Annie and deserved her chance for a better life.”

  “My businesses flourished through that time as well. After the docks area had been cleared and rebuilt by the authorities, I bought one of the new warehouses which occupied a site almost, but not quite, on the ground plan of the old one. The docks themselves were working again very quickly after the night of the bombardment both because the country needed the contribution those docks made to keeping the country going with both food and armaments and because the dockworkers needed their jobs. The railway station hadn’t been affected by the shelling at all as though the Hun hadn’t realised that it was there and consequently hadn’t aimed their shells at it, so food and other commodities continued to be moved around the country by rail. I still had my contracts with the local farmers, so my supplies didn’t dry up, which had been a constant fear of mine throughout the previous two years.”

  “It was late 1917 when I had purchased another shop, but this time in Eston. It was smaller than the Queen Street shop, but had sufficient space to be able to carry a fairly wide range of stock and I was very lucky in that I managed to find a young man in his thirties ready and willing to work as a manager for me. He had lost an arm in the fighting at the Front and hadn’t thought he would be able to work and make a decent living for himself, his wife and two small daughters ever again, but I knew he was the one for that position as soon as he entered my kitchen when he came for his interview.”

  “He had suffered exactly the same injuries as had William but, in every other way he was the absolute antithesis of my late husband. He cared for his wife and children incredibly deeply and always put them before himself; he was a very hard worker although he was slightly limited because of his injuries; his outlook on life was always positive and he never, ever moaned or complained about his situation. I had employed him because of his disability not in spite of it and, in some strange way; I felt I was squaring the circle with a possibly vengeful Fate over William’s attitude and behaviour. I had also taken on a young boy to help David in the shop, a boy whose father had been killed at the Front and his salary kept his mother and younger brother and himself fed and housed, when an ungrateful country would have ignored them and left them to starve. I couldn’t have explained my motives to the rest of the world, but they made sense to me and that was what was important.”

  “Sammy understood all that I was doing and his support, together with that of Annie, kept me always facing in the right direction. He recognised the need in me to put right what had gone wrong in my life and somehow make reparation for the evil done by some of those around me. Sammy supported me through it all, even keeping the secret of who actually owned the shop in Eston, because I had deliberately had the name ‘Harrison’ put above the shop door, reckoning, and rightly, that few people would recognise my mother’s maiden name. David was quite happy to go along with my little whim and even encouraged the gossips to think that the shop possibly belonged to him, although he didn’t ever say that it was so.”

  “Sammy and I continued with our programme of buying houses and renting them out, although we now moved away from houses near to the docks because I had a horror of another visit from enemy warships, although they never did come back during that war. We eventually put all of our properties into the hands of a large property company based in Newcastle who, for a fee, found tenants, arranged repairs and collected the rents. It ate into our profits but I reckoned it was a good move because it meant that no-one in the town had any idea of how much we owned or how much money we had.”

  “Sammy continued to work in the iron works as the labour shortage was so acute by that time, but he refused to do any overtime unless it was absolutely necessary. He bought some waste land next to the railway lines and set out an allotment, even going so far as to build a one bedroomed cottage on the same land. It was good use of what used to be good farm land before the railway came and the authorities looked more kindly on developments in those days than they do now. When it was all finished, Sammy went looking for the tramp we had met the night that Simon died and installed him in the cottage, with instructions to grow vegetables for me to sell in the shops. Old Walter took to allotment gardening with a will, proving to be remarkably adept at adapting gardening tools for his own use and set out the most wonderful kitchen garden, even growing a few flowers to brighten our days. He was eternally grateful to Sam for giving him a chance in life when the rest of the world had abandoned him, but Sam refused to take any credit for what he had done; only commenting that there was a lot of good in so many people who only needed a chance in life.”

  “Sam was my rock all through those dreadful days after Simon’s death. As he had promised that night he was always available for help and advice and supported me as I tried to get my life back together. I couldn’t have got through that time without him. I admired him for his unswerving devotion to family and friends, for his deep sense of right and wrong, for his intelligence and good humour and, above all, for his determination to gather every last speck of enjoyment out of life, both for himself and for others. I wouldn’t have got through 1917 if I hadn’t had Sammy at my side, but he helped me through it all and I came to rely heavily on his advice and help and unfailing good humour.”

  “It was that good humour of Sammy’s that supported me through the Inquest into the night of the bombardment. I was still very unsure about answering questions about that night and I was terrified I would let something slip and that the truth of the night’s events would come out, but the Inquest was very delicately handled and I wasn’t asked any difficult questions. I was only asked to confirm that I had owned the warehouse and that my husband and son had taken shelter there from the storm. The Inquest ruled that William, Peter and Simon had been killed by the German bombardment and that Dennison, the pig butcher, had been killed alongside them as he had tried to save them from the shelling and the subsequent inferno. It seemed so unfair to me that Dennison could be hailed as a hero, albeit a failed hero, when he had in reality been a double murderer and the reason for Peter’s death. I wanted to set the Coroner straight, but I couldn’t do that without blackening Peter’s name and upsetting Annie, so I had to grit my teeth and accept the pig butcher’s new status in the town. It was only the strength that Sam gave me which made it possible for me to rise above it and smile agreement when I wanted to scream out the truth.”

  “As that year rolled by, it got easier to cope with day-to-day living, although I continued to miss Simon with every beat of my heart. I was heartily glad to get through 1917, even though the end of the year brought snow once again to our town, reminding me of that dreadful night. The war was still going on and it was another Christmas that saw our boys on the wrong side of the English Channel, with little hope of them returning home. The casualty lists lengthened and more families lost husbands and brothers and sons and I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who couldn’t understand the futility of it all. Life was hard for everyone and shortages became the norm for everything; food, raw materials, clothing, transport and, above all, hope. That was when Sam got two telegrams, letting him know that both his boys, George and Bill, were lost, ‘missing in action’, presumed killed, at some unpronounceable place in Flanders, and all his joy in life evaporated out of him and it became my turn to care for him.”

  “That was when I insisted that he left his poky, little house and brought the other two of his daughters to live with Hannah, Annie and I in Queen Street. We had the attic bedrooms as well as the three on the first floor so there was plenty of room for us all and I could make sure that he remembered to eat every day. I knew that he didn’t sleep very much, as I hadn’t when Simon was killed and I followed him downstairs one night when I heard him moving around in the kitchen. The fire ha
d gone out because we didn’t have coal to waste and Sammy was sitting next to the dead embers, sobbing his heart out as quietly as he could. I crossed the room and wrapped my arms about his neck and cried with him as he sobbed out his sorrow at the loss of his two boys. I don’t know whether I was crying for his sons or for the loss of my own, but I know that when we had both sobbed ourselves dry, the huge rock which I had been carrying about in my chest all year had reduced in size.”

  Nana Lymer wriggled a little to make herself more comfortable and then asked Victoria if she could make her a cup of tea. Victoria managed to get into the kitchen, brew the tea and collect some biscuits and then make her escape back upstairs without either her mother or father entering the kitchen. She could hear the usual level of noise from the shop and guessed it was busy enough to keep her mother occupied and not so busy that she was screaming for help.

  As she re-entered her grandmother’s bedroom, Victoria heard the unmistakeable sound of the letterbox in the side door being opened and a heavy document being pushed through it. It was an unusual occurrence because the postman generally carried their post into the shop and gave it to whoever had a hand free to receive it. Victoria placed the tea carefully onto Nana’s bedside table and then ran lightly down the stairs to remove the large brown envelope which was sticking out of the letterbox. It was addressed to Mrs A Lymer so she carried it back upstairs and handed it over to Nana, noticing how tiny Nana looked in comparison to the large envelope, rather like a toddler trying to manage a pint mug.

  Nana opened the envelope with difficulty and withdrew the many closely written sheets from inside it. Attached to the top, handwritten sheet was a letter which had obviously been typed and signed with Anthony Vine’s rather elaborate signature.