Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys

by Mary Gibson

  George looked at the silent white-faced women surrounding him in the kitchen, a puzzled look on his face.

  ‘Bastard, I know... don’t worry about him. My mate said he give ’im a right pasting.’

  May was the one to voice the unasked question on all their lips. ‘But, George, did he tell you if Jack was still alive?’

  ‘Didn’t I say? ’Course alive!’

  May stifled a cry and grabbed hold of Peggy.

  ‘Alive! Thank God!’

  ‘You could’ve told us that in the first place, George!’ Peggy said.

  Mrs Lloyd slumped forward, gripping the identity card even tighter. ‘Oh Jesus, me poor boy’s alive.’ And covering her face with her hand, she let fall tears of relief.

  ‘Well, alive then,’ George said, silencing Peggy with a glare. ‘I’ve put the feelers out, got people looking Kent way,’ he added, looking vaguely aware that his revelation was not getting him the praise he felt it deserved.

  George’s ‘contacts’ were many and there wasn’t an institution in the South-east without some sort of under-the-counter trading going on that he wasn’t involved in, even hospitals. If anyone could track down Jack, May was sure it would be George. He gave a self-satisfied smile as he was rewarded with a kiss from Peggy and a cup of tea from her mother, who was even cheered enough to use the family’s butter and sugar ration to set about making George some fairy cakes, which, an hour later, he generously shared with them.

  *

  On the third day, May kneeled beside her bed in the early morning light. Her Catholic upbringing, with its straitjacket of confessions and its burdens of guilt had so often felt like an inconvenience, but now May groped for her faith, calling on God and all his angels and every saint that she could remember, promising that if Jack would only return to them alive, she would go and do her bit. Whatever it was, she didn’t care. Even if it meant facing her own worst nightmare – leaving her home. She would do whatever was asked of her, if it would help end the insanity, where young men were blown up on their way home from a party and babies left wailing in their dead mother’s arms. But as she rose from her knees, peering through the sash window at a pale, frostbitten dawn, a feeling – half dread, half excitement – stirred in her, as she strained to see where that vow might lead her. Just at that moment she spotted George. He was bundled up against the cold in a camel coat and scarf, hustling along Southwark Park Road like a chugging steam train, breath pluming behind him. If he was coming at this hour he had news, and May’s heart expanded with the certainty that her prayers had been answered, that it would be good news. She flung on her dressing gown and ran downstairs to let George in.

  His lips were blue and ice cold on her cheek as he kissed her. He took off his hat and May looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Where’s Mum and Dad?’ he asked.

  ‘Still in bed. I’ll get them.’

  May crept into her parents’ room and saw her mother lying awake, a handkerchief screwed into a tight ball in her hand.

  May crossed the lino, cold to her bare feet, and leaned over to shake her father. He sat up with a start. ‘George’s here,’ she said softly. ‘I think he’s got news.’

  As she helped Mrs Lloyd into her dressing gown, she felt her mother’s whole body shaking. May knew it wasn’t from the cold and she put her arm round her, holding her tightly all the way down the stairs and into the kitchen.

  ‘Have you found him?’ Mr Lloyd asked.

  George nodded, still breathing heavily from his brisk walk. ‘Farnborough Hospital. Been unconscious…’

  ‘Oh!’ The cry forced itself from her mother’s lips and May felt her buckle. ‘Thank God, I knew he’d answer me prayers!’ And May echoed the thanks in her own heart. Her future seemed instantly clear; she would fulfil her secret promise. But the clarity lasted barely a minute. For George was flapping his hands at them, reaching for words in his laboured, infuriating way. He raised his breathy voice above her mother’s tears of joy.

  ‘Carrie, Carrie… He didn’t have a bit of identification on him, no wallet, nothing… hospital’s been trying to contact you,’ he managed to stutter out. His face twisted into something very like guilt before creasing into sobs. George’s voice sank to a husky whisper. ‘He never woke up – Jack’s dead.’

  4

  A Black Christmas

  December 1940

  The news of Jack’s death was like the overnight frost which crusted rooftops and crackled over the ruined trees lining Bermondsey’s streets. May had gone to sleep with hope warming her heart, but that morning it had turned to ice. Theirs had become a house of tears. They all huddled together in the little kitchen, each with their own grief and regrets – her mother, father and Peggy, hugging each other, forming a sort of phalanx, shielding themselves from the unbearable fact of Jack’s death. The tears seemed to meld them into one agonized creature as they sat round the kitchen table. May sat with one arm round her distraught mother, and the other round her sister. Her father’s hand closed over her own, as he sat rigid, focusing only on reining in his tears. It was then that she felt something else emerging from the numb grief, something quite alien. Anger, a cold rage, that her beautiful brother should have been robbed of his life so senselessly. She knew he was only one of thousands, millions probably before this evil war had run its course. But perhaps that was the nature of loss; it was only ever real when it was yours.

  It was May who answered the door to Joycie when she arrived next day.

  ‘They’ve given me compassionate leave.’

  Her wraithlike face was another hammer blow to May’s heart. She stood on the doorstep, hesitating, before May wrapped her arms round her and drew Joycie in. May led her to the kitchen and the young woman almost collapsed into the grief-stricken circle. She had the same questions they all had. Why hadn’t he come straight home, how could someone have robbed him while he lay injured, and if they’d found him sooner would he have lived? But May knew that she hadn’t really come for answers; she had come to be near Jack. His family was all that was left of him and it struck May then as intensely sad that this was the closest she would ever be to her intended sister-in-law.

  As the days passed and their early tears had been shed, they each retreated to whatever privacy they could find. But when every room contained someone mirroring her grief, May took to wandering the park, circling and circling the big guns. They became her anchor in a sea of mourning. She fixed on them, drawing strength from those symbols of her own futile vow, that she would ‘do her bit’ if Jack was found alive. Her vow hadn’t worked. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to keep it. There was a moment when it struck her that Jack might have died, not because of a German bomb, but simply because he was young and reckless. He had chosen to walk home through the raid, daring the bombs to curtail his youth. But no, that thought was too hard to bear. A German bomb was the only reason he was dead, and she was determined to make his death mean something. So she took another vow and this time she swore to be the one behind the gun. This war had become hers.

  *

  Everyone said that her flat was like a little palace, and compared to the houses she’d grown up in, it was, Peggy thought as she wiped steam from the bathroom mirror. Running hot water and a bathroom! It was an unimagined luxury in the years she’d been growing up. They’d lived in two rooms in Cherry Garden Street, she and her brother sharing their parents’ bedroom until May came along and the family grew too big. Then they’d moved to Southwark Park Road, where a bath was a grey tin affair brought in from the backyard and filled by the bucketful from the copper.

  She stared at her reflection, slapping at her cheeks to bring some colour to their sallowness. She hardly recognized herself these days. Opening the bathroom cabinet, she took out a pot of moisturizer, one of a lorry load appropriated from Atkinson’s cosmetics factory by an associate of George. The rest had been sold on the black market, except for a boxful under the bed, destined as Christmas presents for the women in he
r family whose skin would from now on be permanently peach-like. At least they would have reason to bless George Flint, even if she didn’t. She brushed her abundant fair hair till it shone and then rolled it into the confining net that George preferred.

  Everyone loved George. Wide’oh, the cheery local wide boy, with a ready wit and permanent wad of money. Generous to his family and loyal to his friends, it had been easy to convince herself that he was not vicious, not like some of the other villains. And when he’d singled her out four years ago, she’d been young and inexperienced enough to be flattered. She’d married him because he made her feel special. She’d never shone at school, like her clever younger sister May, but people said she was pretty and her slim, tall figure had turned heads as soon as she’d started work.

  She crossed the narrow passage into their bedroom. It had an empty feel, despite being crammed with heavy oak furniture: a curved dressing table, with a silver-backed hairbrush set; a double bed with sweeping carved headboard; two wardrobes with brass keys, all chosen by George, who said they’d fallen off the back of a lorry en route to Heal’s in Tottenham Court Road. But whenever the sun broke through the net curtains, striping the patterned carpet with bars of light, she felt heavy with sadness. Perhaps the truth of her bedroom was too plainly visible in the light of the sun. At dusk or when dimly lit by the two bedside lamps, she could fool herself that all married women felt the way she did. Empty. Perhaps that was why she was one of the few who never complained about the blackout.

  She drew in a long breath, sat down at the dressing table, and opened her old make-up box. A block of crumbling rouge, a half-used tub of face powder, a stub of red lipstick, all frozen in time. For at a certain point, she couldn’t remember when, George had made it clear he preferred her without make-up.

  He had a way of letting her know what he wanted, without saying a word. His cheery expression vanished and his silence became almost palpable. Whatever her own preferences, she often found herself suggesting the very thing she knew he wanted. There was no doubt in her mind that he loved her; it was just that she wished he’d show it in other ways, the ways that had filled her romantic girlish dreams.

  Romance she could dream about, but sex she was entirely ignorant of. She’d even resorted to asking an older friend in a roundabout way, what she could expect when she married. The woman had looked at her pityingly.

  ‘You mean how’s yer father? Well, it’s like tomato soup, Peg,’ the woman had said. ‘It’s nice for a change, but you wouldn’t want it every day, would you?’

  From which cryptic piece of advice Peggy had assumed she would be constantly fending off George’s advances. But she quickly learned that wouldn’t be the case. For them, sex was an infrequent, cold coupling, which left George fighting for his breath and herself feeling nothing but a yearning sense of failure.

  His generosity meant that she had a beautiful home, with the latest cooker and kitchenette, but she would have traded all the appliances in the place for an ounce of passion. But she shouldn’t blame George; after all, he wasn’t a well man.

  She went to her wardrobe, full of the good-quality clothes he’d paid for. No visits to the Old Clo’ market for Peggy Flint. She pulled the grey, soft angora twinset off the hanger and tossed a heathery tweed skirt on to the bed. She wasn’t ungrateful, really she wasn’t. It was just that she’d chosen none of these clothes for herself. But what she had chosen was Wide’oh, and as her mother had once reminded her, ‘There’s women would give their right arm for a bloke like that – you should think yourself lucky.’ George had always been a favourite of Mum’s.

  Her mother was right. At least she didn’t have to cover up black eyes like some of the women round here, and in the early days she supposed she’d found his ways sweet. He would come home very late at night, often waking her up to show her his latest trophy. Once it was a vacuum cleaner.

  ‘Bet there’s not another one like it on the Purbrook!’ he’d said proudly. ‘It’s brand new – just have to rub the label off, in case.’ And when she’d been unenthusiastic he’d gone quiet, turning his back on her, and she had kissed him, making a joke, saying she would invite the neighbours in tomorrow to witness its maiden voyage.

  She picked up the lipstick stub and lightly brushed it across her lips, dabbing it, till it had almost disappeared. She heard the front door bang shut and with a guilty jump, dropped the lipstick. She heard his wheezy breath coming from the front room.

  ‘Princess? Come and have a butcher’s at this!’

  She slipped on her dressing gown and went into the living room to see what he’d brought home this time. It was a clock, made of cream Bakelite, with a bronze figure of a naked woman on the pedestal. Peggy thought it was hideous.

  ‘We’ve already got a clock,’ she said. It was one of the few things in the home she’d chosen herself.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ he said eagerly. ‘It’s an original, not another one like it – come from Bond Street. Brand new!’

  ‘Yes… but I like the clock we’ve got.’

  ‘You can give the old one to your mother,’ George said.

  And suddenly she felt tired. There seemed no point in making a fuss about the clock. She turned and went back into the bedroom.

  ‘Hurry up and get ready, George,’ she called back from the bedroom. ‘You know what Mum’s like about the Christmas dinner being on time.’

  This Christmas, more than any other, it would be up to them to make sure Mum was happy, though how that would be possible, God only knew. She was being so brave, insisting they went on with Christmas. Christmas! Who cared with her brother in the frozen ground?

  It was snowing as they walked from the Purbrook Estate to Southwark Park Road. The trees in the park were heavy with a deep icing that slid in pats on to the rimed grass. The ack-ack guns, now covered in tarpaulin, were like snow-humped beasts, and Peggy shivered at the sight of them. Even last night, the German bombers had not let up. Christmas Eve – and instead of church bells, those big guns had pealed their deadly carols.

  When they reached her parents’ front door, George had to stop to catch his breath, which plumed in the cold. As her father showed them in, George forced a smile and wheezed ‘Here comes Father Christmas!’, pulling out a bottle of sherry and another of whiskey from his inside pockets.

  ‘Where d’you get the good stuff like this!’ Her father inspected the bottles and George winked. ‘Come from the Brick!’ The Bricklayer’s Arms was a vast railway goods depot just off the Old Kent Road.

  ‘They say there’s no way into them sealed carriages,’ her father said, uncorking the sherry.

  ‘Well, there ain’t, but who says you got to always use the bloody doors!’

  And George imitated the crawling motion required to get under a goods van prior to bashing a hole in its floor.

  Her father poured the sherry without comment and Peggy placed the Christmas cake she’d made on to the sideboard. George had found a source of sugar at the docks.

  ‘It must be the only iced cake in Bermondsey,’ said her mother.

  ‘Well, it needs to be, Dad told me you’ve invited half the street!’

  ‘Only Flo and some of her family that got bombed out. If it wasn’t for George, we’d be giving them bread and drippin’ for Christmas dinner. Them chickens you got us have turned out lovely, George,’ she said, planting a kiss on his cheek.

  As George basked in her mother’s favouritism, Peggy sought out her sister.

  ‘You’ve made a lovely job of the tree!’ Peggy said, glancing nervously at May. Since their brother’s death it was as if she and her sister had developed a secret sign language of looks and expressions, each one designed to reveal just how well or badly their mother was doing that day.

  ‘Are you taking the mick?’ May replied, while her look and a small shake of the head, told Peggy that in spite of her make-up and cheerful expression, their mother might not last the day without breaking. The tree wasn’t a proper Christmas tree
– they simply weren’t to be had. But they had found a large fallen branch in Southwark Park, covered it in tinsel and hung it with old glass baubles.

  As always, they sat down at one o’clock sharp. But once her mother took off her apron and sat down, her work done, she took on a vague, haunted look as if she were barely present. Peggy looked at all the pink, smiling faces: grateful Flo and her homeless relatives; May trying to interest her mother in some chicken and passing potatoes to her father; her old Granny Byron, wizard-like in a gold cone-shaped party hat; her father pouring out the sherry and lastly George. Candle ends had been lit and light danced off the red and green baubles, while homemade paper chains festooned the ceiling. Yet, in all this colour, she was conscious only of her grey twinset; in all the warmth, surrounded by family and friends, with more Christmas fare than could be expected these days, Peggy felt only scarcity. With her husband the source of all abundance in this little community, how could her heart feel so severely rationed? Perhaps they were all feeling the same way. But she knew that she wished herself elsewhere. Serving dinner to refugees from a mobile canteen; making aeroplanes in Birmingham; sorting clothes in a WVS depot; anywhere but here, the wife of the cornucopia, George Flint. When the toast was raised, her father bravely said the words. ‘It can’t be a Merry Christmas,’ and he gulped, ‘but our Jack loved a party, and so here’s to our beautiful boy, who brightened our lives.’ And they all raised their glasses. ‘To Jack!’ and ‘To absent friends.’ Peggy was left wondering how she too might become one of the absent ones.

  That Christmas night, after they got home, she pulled the blackout curtains and in the darkness of their bedroom she broached the subject that had been on her mind all through dinner and the wireless broadcast of the King’s speech and the party games during the evening.

  ‘George,’ she said, slipping into bed beside him. ‘I think I should go back to work.’