by Betty Burton
He had heard a whisper that Freddy Hardy was being had up for using red petrol in his private car. What a fool. Everybody knew the police loved to get somebody for using business petrol for pleasure.
He helped his pencil discover the shape of the composition. And he’d got a stash as it was. The mayor going in for black market. How can you have any respect for a man who goes in for that sort of thing?
Mont had often seen vans being offloaded with stuff. Once he had seen a soldier unloading some cans from an army vehicle. You could smell the petrol right across the garden. It was not only illegal to hoard fuel, it was downright dangerous. The man was plain greedy. There were a lot of people who were like that these days, couldn’t rest unless they got more than their share.
Miss Eve had given up driving her little white car now. Driving a van for the school meals all week and a volunteer ambulance driver in her spare time. Mont missed her now that she was always out of the house before he got to The Cedars. Not Councillor Hardy’s idea of a job for his daughter who had been to school in Switzerland. He would have probably liked her to have gone about dressed in a natty little uniform like her Ma.
You had to hand it to that lady – she was a knock-out in that uniform. People reckoned she wore her hat cocked over one eye like that because she was sometimes mistaken for Lady Mountbatten. Not a chance of that, as Mont had said when he heard it. ‘Mistake Freddy Hardy’s wife for Lady Louis? Why, Mrs Hardy haven’t got hardly a line on her face.’
He touched cerulean, viridian and ultramarine and let his brush hover as lightly as the demoiselle itself.
People took the mickey behind her back. Lady Connie, they called her. The day might come when people would be glad of the Red Cross.
He had no tube of watercolour labelled ‘Iridescent’, yet somehow he achieved it.
It wasn’t that people were vicious, but they got a bit resentful when people like her always got themselves into the top position in everything. It was as though they thought it was their right. Money talks! You couldn’t argue with that.
There! It had taken him all afternoon, but he had got what he wanted. He had been thinking about it since the spring – a little painting for Miss Eve’s birthday – but the demoiselles weren’t about properly until now – and he had wanted to catch the water in just the right June afternoon light, with the yellow of the flags reflecting in the water, and the water-lilies opened to get the balance of their yellow stamens against the yellow irises. He imagined how it would look framed. A white mount – double, and a narrow white frame. No, plain pinewood! He imagined himself giving it to her. Nonchalantly. Oh, it’s not much really, but I thought you might like it. I did it specially for you. I called it ‘Demoiselle with Lilies and Irises’, it’s on the label on the back. Discreetly in the right-hand corner, Montague I.
He worked late that evening, making a perfect cut on the mounting cards, and sanding the edges of the beading, so that it was nine-thirty before he realized that the evening had almost gone.
He brushed sawdust from the folds of his shirtsleeves. Ah well, still time for a half.
* * *
The day had been hot, and the evening was hardly cooler than the day had been. A few men seated on a bench outside gave him the monosyllabic greeting of working men drinking and putting the world to rights.
‘Mont.’
‘Ev’n.’
‘Hot.’
‘Ah.’
‘Aw bugger!’
‘What’s that?’
‘Hark!’
‘Aw Christ! Not a-bloody-gain!’
The weary note of the air-raid siren close by. Half a dozen searchlights were suddenly unleashed across the sky and, even though no aircraft was visible, pom-pom guns outside the town opened up. From a distance, these deadly little guns sounded almost toy-like, but to be within a quarter of a mile of them was to have the vibration from the firing thrust deep into the ear-drums.
Mont jumped, but no more than the other drinkers.
‘Christ Almighty! Didn’t that put the wind up me!’
There was the sound of falling metal and tinkling glass.
‘Shrapnel!’
As a body the drinkers scrambled back into the porch of the pub. The Landlady polished the same glass round and round. Every face was turned upwards and towards the direction from which they knew the bombers would come. The guns stopped firing, and the sudden silence seemed deep after the barrage. In the brief silence, searchlights swept the sky back and forth, back and forth agitatedly, catching nothing in their beams.
* * *
A few streets away, Little-Lena, still half-asleep, automatically stepped into the knickers that her mother, still in her day clothes but with the hem of her perm fastened in Dinkie curlers, held out for her. ‘Come on, Lena, the siren went ages ago.’ Roy whimpered at being woken up. Grandma Gertie clattered about the kitchen, following the routine she and Mary Wiltshire had worked out for air-raids: filling kettles, sink, bowls and buckets with water; filling a basket with some food in case it was a long raid.
‘Quick now – whilst there’s a lull.’
Roy whinged, ‘I want Daddy. I’m frightened. I want Daddy.’
So did the trembling Mrs Wiltshire, but she said firmly but kindly, ‘Daddy can’t come. You know that. He’s gone to fight the Germans.’
She hustled her children down the garden and into the little below-ground shelter that held six people comfortably, ten at a pinch, a crushed dozen in a life and death situation.
Gertie Wiltshire followed, but before she went into the shelter, she unlatched the garden gate so Mrs Kennedy could get in. As she did so, the sky was lit with a white light.
‘Listen,’ she said to Georgia, holding her head to one side. ‘Can you hear them?’
‘No. Can you?’
‘Yes, they ain’t coming from the usual direction. Listen.’ It was not true sound, but a disturbance of air that seemed to move something within the ear-drum, a sensation that went lum-lum-lum until eventually it became fully audible, when the sensation was transformed into the sound of fully-laden night-bombers homing in on their target.
‘You coming down tonight, dearie?’
‘If it’s all right.’
‘You know it is. Ain’t it bright?’
‘Must be the new searchlight battery.’
‘Powerful.’ She called out, ‘Come and see, Mary.’
‘No, Mum,’ Mary Wiltshire called back from below ground. ‘You should come down.’
‘She gets nervy these days. It’s understandable, I expect you do yourself with your man gone. How long’s he been away?’
‘Into the second year now.’
‘And not much leave.’
‘No, just the odd twenty-four-hour pass.’
‘Dick’s been gone six months, seems ages.’
Long minutes of near-silence. Georgia said, ‘I think it’s rather like at the pictures when a something is creeping up on the girl, and you can hardly breathe, waiting for it to pounce and the girl to shriek.’
‘Blimey, look at that!’
One of the new wide beams caught and picked out an aircraft. High, but not as high as they came in daylight, was a long black bomber. A second beam arced its way with a flash to join the first. Then a third. Then another and another, until the many beams fused upon the bomber and accompanied it slowly across the sky. Then all Hell was let loose. As the great ack-ack guns that encircled Markham opened up, Georgia and Gertie Wiltshire dived into the shelter.
* * *
In Jubilee Lane, Dolly Partridge gritted her teeth at her obstinate husband. Sam, wearing a tin helmet, was standing by the blast wall of a shelter much like the one in which the Wiltshires and Georgia were seated.
‘Come down, Sam. I’ve asked you a dozen times, we can hear shrapnel falling from here.’
‘Don’t nag. I’m all right. I can see what’s what.’
Bonnie loved it when she was sleeping at Grandma’s house and they had to
take cover. It was cosy in the shelter. Tonight she had Auntie Paula as well. Bonnie cuddled up between them and sucked her thumb.
Dolly whispered to her, ‘You tell Grandpa to come in. He’ll take notice of you.’
‘Come down, Granpa, I want somebody to read Long John Silver.’
As everybody said, Bonnie could twist him around her little finger. He came, wagging his head. ‘Cheeping chicks and clucking hens.’
And crabby old capons. But Dolly did not say it aloud. Sharp. Too cutting – like Sam’s own comments. Too many thoughts like this came these days – it was as though a spark had landed on her dry-store of resentment and, every day since she had been working at the Town Restaurant, a bellows was put to it. He was always sniping at her, picking holes.
Paula, when she was with her parents, felt immature, her feelings rushing back and forth between them as she sided first with one and then with the other. It was why she had been glad to marry Robbo and live in their little house near
Southampton Docks – just far enough away from Markham.
Mum’s life had been nothing but work, work, work: she would be fifty before long and what had she done… ? But then, it was worse for Dad, wasn’t it – he had no legs. There couldn’t really be anything worse than that… only, it wasn’t Mum’s fault yet he seemed to want to turn everything round to blame her… or Harry. When she was little, Paula sometimes sat with her legs under her, staring at her knees until the feeling went out of them, wondering what it must feel like to go to stand up and find that there was nothing there. Making herself believe it. Panicking, until in the end she would have to leap up to prove that it was only a game. The times she had frightened herself until she leapt up and somebody said, Oh Paula! watch what you’re doing!
Later, it had seemed that she could watch her legs grow almost daily. Long and slender. Until the war, she almost always wore silk stockings and high heels when she went out. Her legs were her pride and her guilt. She often used to think that it was as though her father’s legs had been a sacrifice so that her own could be perfect. When Robbo was courting her, he soon discovered what running his hands up and down the length of her legs could do to her. ‘Cyd Charisse has got nothing on you, Paula.’ Except that Paula was not much of a dancer. She wasn’t much of anything except a docker’s wife who couldn’t get pregnant.
And now where was Robbo? Robbo was in the tank corps. Not in a tank, thank God. Paula’s nightmares of burning men encased in an iron box would have been even more unbearable had Robbo been in the tank, a driver or something, instead of being one of the servicing team.
Paula slipped her arm round Bonnie and discovered her mother’s arm already there. Bonnie, wallowing in the midst of warm female flesh and safety, listened to her Granpa’s voice acting out the part of the pirate with a wooden leg, until she dropped off to sleep.
* * *
Bonnie was staying with her grandparents to give Charlie and Marie a bit of time to theirselves.
Charlie had four days before having to fly back to Canada, and at the Dinner Kitchens, Georgia had said that she would stand in and do the cash-till so that they could have as much time as possible together. Shortly before the air-raid warning sounded that June night, they were sitting where they had spent all day – in deck-chairs on the rectangle of grass that used to be Charlie’s lawn. Charlie’s threat to dig it up and plant it with winter greens had never been carried out. A bit of the lawn was reprieved, not velvet and weedless as in pre-war days, but still a pleasant bit of grass. ‘You won’t ever dig it up will you, Charlie?’
‘Won’t ever have the time.’
‘I wish you could get posted in this country.’
‘You get quicker promotion on this job.’ He was already a corporal and expecting sergeant’s stripes before long.
‘I hope it’s worth it.’
As darkness fell, Marie got up to collect things together. ‘You don’t want to do that, let’s stop out a bit longer.’
‘We can’t stop out here. They’ll be over tonight. They’ll keep on bombing Portsmouth and Southampton now.’
‘Southampton’s not Markham.’
‘Charlie – eight miles as the crow flies is nothing. Markham could get bombed any night by accident, or some nutty Jerry off-loading on us. It’s happened enough in other places.’
‘All right, but let’s not go in till we can see the whites of their eyes. It’s my last night, remember.’
‘You don’t have to remind me.’
‘Well then…’ He came and sat close to her and whispered in her ear.
‘Charlie Partridge!’ She darted glances at the walls on either side.
‘No need to shout.’
At once whispering, she said, ‘I’m not shouting. I don’t know what’s got into you. It makes me wonder what you’ve been getting up to in Canada.’
‘Don’t be daft. Come on, it will be nice. Nobody can see. It would be like when we were courting.’
‘But that was out in the country.’
‘And it was nice, wasn’t it?’
It was… very nice. Like Markhambrian couples down the ages they had their special places for courting and love-making on warm summer nights. Places which, when passed by in the normal run of daily life even years later, drew the eye. Expecting to see what? To see meadow grass compressed into a nest? To hear a bit of happy laughter? Or breathlessness? A stifled ecstatic groan? A promise?
Places like the banks of Princes Meadows where they used to picnic as children, and the bandstand in the Park and the cricket pavilion, and… oh, there had been a fair few places where Marie had taken her chances. And with Charlie – respectable, respectful, careful Charlie – Marie could be sure that they were safe.
She softened. ‘Yes, Charlie, it did use to be nice, didn’t it?’
Relaxed, Marie sat back on her heels whilst he felt the movement of crêpe de Chine against her back. ‘You’ve lost a bit of weight.’
What do you expect? I do two jobs as well as learning first-aid and going to emergency cookery classes. But not aloud, they had already spent too much time this leave with Charlie going on about her job, and about taking care of Bonnie properly, and trying to persuade her that she should either grow more on the allotment, or have another baby. Anything, she had thought, to keep me at home being Charlie Partridge’s little wife.
‘Don’t lose any more. I don’t like skinny women.’
It was as dark now as it would get on a normal midsummer night. He’s right, there’s only our own house that overlooks the lawn, and Bonnie’s away. He’s going away tomorrow. It would be nice if his last night was nice.
Releasing herself from the kneeling position, she let Charlie’s weight rest on her. The remembered feel from when they were courting, of stiff bents of grass prickling her body, that same smell of crushed grass, the feeling of space and being free and an excitement that never came in a bedroom.
‘Charlie? Do you remember that time in the Dewpond Meadow? I said to you, Just think, Charlie, there could have been a girl and her young man lying here a hundred years ago and you said, Perhaps a thousand years.’ Marie remembered it as the most romantic night of her life.
Until now. Charlie had been married to her for seven years, yet he still wanted to make love like this. It was romantic.
‘No! Charlie, no!’ An urgent, fierce whisper. She bent her knees in resistance, but he was heavy.
‘Oh go on, Marie, why not?’
‘You know why not. We had this all out. I will not have another baby.’
‘Who’s to say you would? Be a sport, just this once. I could be anywhere tomorrow.’
‘You rotten devil! You damned rotten devil, that’s blackmail. I know what it is, it’s because you don’t trust me.’ She breathed heavily with effort and anger. ‘I thought that when you were on to Sam about all the soldiers in the town. If I was going to be unfaithful to you, do you think getting me pregnant would stop me going with somebody else?’
�
��I never thought that.’
‘Good as.’
He did not move the weight of his body, except to try to kiss her. ‘Oh Marie, I didn’t ever mean that. But Markham’s swarming with soldiers, and you’re a very pretty woman, and you can’t trust men when they’re…’
He was still aroused and holding her down.
‘Oh yes… when they’re away from home… wasn’t that what you were going to say? You’re one of the airmen swarming all over Canada; is this what happens out there?’
‘Marie, don’t be silly.’ His voice was pleading. He pressed his face close to her ear.
She turned away from him.
‘I love you. I’d be careful. It’s just… you remember how good it used to be when you were expecting?’
She remembered. Which was why she struggled to get into a position where it wouldn’t happen now.
‘If you don’t get off me this minute, I’ll shout out so that the neighbours will know what’s going on. I will, and I’ll tell the whole family what happened.’
He hesitated. The siren wound up its warning note and the guns on the Oaklands Estate fired, pom-pom, pom-pom. Within minutes, the family from across the road, who had no air-raid shelter, were bundling down with Marie and Charlie, where they all began their long vigil.
Charlie to think about whether to be abject in his apologies, or to give her a tight-lipped farewell and show her he was still master in his own house.
Marie to decide to get on the bus tomorrow and do what she had been going to do for ages: go to Southampton and brazen it out with the prostitutes and low-class women she was sure would be at the Stopes Clinic. She would blush with shame and embarrassment, but never mind – it would be worth it. She would never trust Charlie again.
* * *
In another cellar – or basement, as it would prefer to be known at The Cedars – Connie Hardy blew upon the drying varnish on her nails, tacky stuff made up by the chemist and sold expensively under the counter. It took ages to dry.