Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  “It’s not as if I’m going around with a whole platoon of soldiers, just the one. And anyway, I’m going to do fine in them exams. I got good marks.”

  “Yes, but those exams can make or break—it don’t matter how well you’ve done all year if you don’t get a good mark on the exam. And if you don’t, you might not get into your commercial course.”

  “I’ll get into the commercial course, Mom. And then I’ll get a nice job in an office on Water Street and bring home my pay. You got nothing to worry about.”

  “Are you sure you want to work in an office?”

  Audrey’s eyes slipped past her mother’s gaze, to the counter, the cash register, the coolers, the shelves of stock. She didn’t say It will be better than this, but the look on her face was as plain as if she had spoken the words aloud.

  AUDREY

  Monday to Friday, nine to five, she worked in Johnson’s insurance office. Two or three evenings a week, and every Saturday, she was behind the counter in the shop. She made good money at the office but nothing in the shop; she was working nearly as many hours for no pay as she was working for fifteen dollars a week. You couldn’t complain about it: that was the whole point of having a family business; everybody pitched in to do their part.

  But it didn’t stop her from resenting it. She especially hated working Saturdays, the worst day of the week for youngsters from the neighbourhood coming in, buying dozens of four-for-a-penny candies, trying to steal stuff off the shelves when she wasn’t looking. She brought down a stick of baloney over Snotty Cadwell’s knuckles when she caught him at it one time and told him he couldn’t come in the store for two weeks.

  A slew of them had just left the shop when a girl about Audrey’s own age came through the door and looked around as if she were unsure whether she was in the right place. She was a stranger, dressed in a white dress with green sprigs on it, dark hair in a permanent wave, clutching her handbag like a life preserver. Audrey wasn’t one bit surprised when she opened her mouth and a foreign accent—English or Irish or something like that—came out.

  “Pardon me, d’you have, er…,” she looked down at the list in her hand, “bologna? And bread? And, er, tinned peas?”

  “We got it all,” Audrey said. “Here, give me your list, I’ll get it for you.” As the girl handed over the folded piece of paper, Audrey said, “You must be Lester Parsons’s wife, are you?” Once she heard the accent, it wasn’t hard to place the girl: Audrey had heard months ago that Maxine Parsons’s cousin Lester, who had joined up with the Canadian military, had married a girl overseas. Then just last week she heard that Mrs. Noseworthy was renting out two rooms to a soldier who had come back from overseas with a war bride. There couldn’t be that many of them, not in this part of town.

  The girl blinked. “Yes…yes, I’m Doris Parsons. Do you know my Les?”

  “I knows his people,” Audrey said. “I went to school with his cousins. Maxine and Jim and Betty.”

  “I’ve met Maxine and Betty,” Doris said, looking at her groceries as Audrey put each item on the counter. She squinted at the labels. “Les told me St. John’s was a city, but it’s just like a village, the way everyone knows each other and all each other’s business.”

  “That’s just Rabbittown. The neighbourhood,” Audrey clarified.

  “Why is it called Rabbittown?”

  Audrey shrugged. “It’s not on no signs or nothing, that’s just what everyone calls it. Some people says they used to catch rabbits out here before it was all built up, and others will say it’s because the streets are all narrow, and close like a rabbit warren. But I’ve heard some folks say it’s because the place is full of poor people and we all breeds like rabbits.” She laughed, and the other girl joined with a hesitant giggle, as if she wasn’t sure she was allowed to laugh. “I don’t see no eggs on your list, but you’ll want a dozen, won’t you?”

  “Oh, aye, please. I knew I’d forget something.”

  “Anyway, everyone knows everyone in Rabbittown. I wouldn’t know if somebody on the South Side brought home a war bride, but if it’s here in the neighbourhood, then you can bet everyone knows about it.”

  “I suppose that’s what I am, isn’t it? A war bride. It sounds a bit funny when you say it.”

  “But that’s what you are.”

  “I know…it’s just that it sounds romantic, and I suppose I thought it was, but now it’s just— living in a tiny flat, not even a flat really, just rooms to let. And buying food at the corner shop—all the things I’d be doing if we’d stayed back home. Only, doing them here, where everything’s so different.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Glasgow. In Scotland. Well, near Glasgow—it’s a place called Kirkintilloch, actually, but you’d not have heard of it.”

  “Oh, so that’s a Scottish accent is it? I wouldn’t know; we don’t get many Scotch people around here. I don’t know if I’ve ever met one before. So, what branch of the forces was Les in?”

  “Navy. Canadian navy,” Doris said, taking her money out of her purse as Audrey rang in the purchases. “Although…this isn’t Canada, is it?”

  “No, it’s Newfoundland. Another country altogether,” said Audrey. “Although there’s talks about us joining up with Canada, from what I hear, but who knows if anything will come of it.”

  Doris was in the shop almost every day after that and Audrey enjoyed chatting with the Scotch girl, trying to imagine how St. John’s might look to someone coming from so far away. “The weather’s not much different,” Doris said. “We get the rain and the fog up in Glasgow too. I didn’t think if we were living in a big town we’d be doing without running water, though.”

  “That’s just the street you live on. Some places are hooked up and some aren’t, though they say everyone should be soon. We got water but the people around the corner from us got to get it from the pump. And there’s plenty of well-off people in St. John’s—you just didn’t happen to marry into one of them families.”

  “Les told me his family was comfortable. When we were keeping company he showed me a snap of himself standing on the lawn in front of a big white house and said that was where his people lived. But later on he told me that was the Bungalow in Bowring Park and that they really lived in a much smaller house, but he still said it was nice. We go to his parents’ house for Sunday dinner every week. It isna what I’d call nice. And I don’t think his ma likes me.”

  “What about your people, did they mind you marrying a fellow from over here and ending up on the other side of the ocean?”

  “Mum loves Les,” Doris said after a brief hesitation. “And I think Da always liked him too—if he’d settled down in Scotland and stayed wi’ us. They didnae want him taking me so far away. They weren’t best pleased wi’ that at all.”

  Audrey put the last of Doris’s purchases, a tin of loose tea, into her paper sack, and pushed the bag across the counter to her. “It’s the same way here,” she said. “Girls go around with American and Canadian soldiers and sailors and the parents are always warning us not to, but I think the main reason is they don’t want us moving far away.”

  “So what about you, are you going to move away with an American?”

  Audrey shrugged. “I was going around with a fellow, but he got posted overseas just before the end of the war, and his unit’s still over there in Germany. He writes to me.” Harry wasn’t much of a letter writer, it turned out. Everything she liked about him turned on his presence. He was the best-looking of all the soldiers she’d met at dances, and he was a wonderful dancer too. But beautiful dark eyes and light feet didn’t mean a lot when all you had was letters.

  “Well, if he comes back, you want to think twice about marrying him and running off to America. I love my Les and all, but the truth is I cry myself to sleep every night, I’m that homesick.”

  “It’ll get better, I’m sure,” Audrey
said, putting on her best smile for the sad Scottish girl as she went out the door. It was too bad, she thought, that British girls who married Newfoundlanders felt that way, but really, could you blame them? They were coming to St. John’s, Newfoundland, after all—and they were the lucky ones, the rest were going to some terrible old outport like Candle Cove, where Audrey’s grandparents lived, a place where it might as well be 1846 instead of 1946.

  But the Newfoundland girls who married Americans—well, that was a whole different story. They were going to a country where people had more of everything—more shops, better clothes, everybody had those big gleaming cars driving on lovely blacktop roads, there were skyscrapers and the latest fashions and cute American accents. If I could get to the States, Audrey thought, there’d be no crying into my pillow at night. Homesick? Not likely!

  It was a funny coincidence, she thought later, that she and Doris had that conversation about war brides on the same day she got Harry’s letter. While he wasn’t a good letter writer at all, this one leapt to life off the page if only because she could hear him saying the words, hear the tremble of emotion he would fight hard to keep back.

  We got a big shock today, a real shocker for all of us. One of my buddies, George Crowley from Ohio, he got killed today. Now a few months ago before the war ended we wudnt have thought nothing of saying one of my buddies got killed, sad but true we all got used to it in that time and there was no shock sometime you didnt even realize till after. But now we are at peace and were just here helping Germany get stabilized or whatever you wanna call it, you dont expect anyone to die and thats why we’re all in shock over poor Crowley. The jeep he was driving rolled over and it shudnt of happen but it did. Yesterday we were all havin a good time laughing and carrying on with Crowley just like the other fellas and now he is dead.

  Made me stop to think and realize that I figured when the fighting ended everyone was safe and I had come thru ok but now it just kinda brings home to me that bad things can happen anywhere, anytime, to soldiers in peacetime or even to pretty girls waiting back home. If anything happend to me or you and we never had our chance to be together it would feel so wrong to me. So I guess in this very roundabout way I started out this letter telling you about poor Crowley and now I’m asking Audrey, will you marry me when I get discharged? I could come back to Newfoundland so we could be married at your home if that’s what you want and then we could go back to my home and you could meet my folks. What do you say?

  Audrey read his letter in the front room with the radio tuned to VOUS, as it always was when Audrey was in control of the dial. The American station broadcast from down on the base and they played a lot more music than VONF, always the best and latest hits. Frank Sinatra was singing “Five Minutes More.” The words about staying together just five minutes longer made her think of saying goodbye to Harry, that last night before he shipped out. She had wanted that so much, then, just to stay wrapped in Harry’s arms forever. It was more than a year since he’d gone away and that desire, just like the memory of him, had retreated a little bit each day.

  Now he wanted to come back and marry her, to take her back home to the States with him. Why? Because a buddy of his had died in some freak accident. Harry was right: life was short and anything could happen.

  She had been out with other fellows since he left; they had made no promises. In fact she was going out this very evening, to a dance down on the base. She would dance with half a dozen other young American soldiers, hoping to find—what? Audrey wasn’t even sure anymore. She folded Harry’s letter away, stuck it with the others in the dresser drawer with her underwear and stockings. Audrey, Marilyn, and June each had a drawer; Audrey and Marilyn shared the big bed and June slept on the cot. The one thing you could say for getting married was that it was a sure way to get out of your parents’ house, out of sharing a room with your sisters.

  The upstairs of the house was quiet. Mom took over the shop at five when Audrey’s Saturday afternoon shift was finished; Dad and Alf were still out finishing a job. Marilyn was off at some friend’s house, and the youngsters, Frankie and June, were playing outside. In half an hour they’d all be back here wanting supper: Audrey, if she was home, would be expected to fry up a pan of chips to go with the leftover baked beans from dinnertime. Then she and Marilyn would fight over the bathroom mirror as they both got ready to go out, and Alf would push them out of the way so he could shave before his date with his fiancée. Alf and Treese had finally made it official: no date set yet, but land bought and a house started. Treese was proudly flashing around the world’s tiniest, cheapest diamond ring and the two of them were doing their best to ignore all the ructions a mixed marriage had stirred up among the older folks in both families.

  Audrey put her good stockings and the blue-dotted Swiss dress she bought with her last paycheque into a bag with her best shoes. “I’m going to get supper over to Val’s and change over there,” she told her mother as she passed through the shop.

  “Where are you going tonight? Another dance?” Ellen, good Methodist girl from around the bay, still couldn’t keep that little edge of disapproval out of her voice whenever she said the word dance. Much like when she had to introduce Alf’s girlfriend as Treese Ryan, admitting that her son was going out with a Catholic.

  “Yes, Mom, down on the base.”

  “Keep an eye out for Marilyn, she’s supposed to be going up to the roller rink with that one Sharon, but I wouldn’t put it past her to try to sneak out to a dance. She’s no better than you were at her age.”

  “If Marilyn shows up at Fort Pepperell I’ll have her sent home in an armoured car. I promise.”

  The shop door closed behind Audrey and she stepped out into a warm, golden summer afternoon. Rankin Street was busy with youngsters; she heard her brother Frankie’s voice but couldn’t see him as a small crowd ran past playing “Hoist your sails and run.” On the corner of Liverpool Avenue, her sister June and three other little girls—two Taylors and the littlest Hiscock girl—were playing hopscotch. Audrey turned there, heading down towards Val’s place. Mr. Hynes had built a new house out on Suez Street, a couple of years ago, in a space that had been all open fields when Audrey and Valerie were little. The new house stood alone, not attached to its neighbour, and Val had a bedroom to herself.

  A door opened in one of the houses as Audrey passed, and a woman called: “Charlie! Libby! Diane! Five minutes till suppertime! You get yourselves back in here now!”

  All down the road, the cry was repeated, women coming out onto the galleries to call in the children. Two boys, kicking a ball across the street, looked up, and one scooped up the ball to run for home.

  Five minutes more. The song echoed in Audrey’s head. If she wrote back with a Yes, she would have not just five minutes more but a whole lifetime with Harry. She could imagine dancing with him to that song. When they danced together, when they were holding hands or in each other’s arms, then she was in love. And if she married him, he would take her away. Away from the streets, from the shop, from this small, narrow life where everyone knew everyone.

  In Valerie’s kitchen she found Valerie and her parents and also Lorraine Allen, all sitting at the table having a cup of tea. “Staying for supper, Audrey?” Mrs. Hynes asked. “It’s only a drop of pea soup.”

  “That’s grand, thanks. I thought I’d come over here to get changed before we go out.” Now that the girls were older, out of school and earning their own pocket money, Valerie’s parents, like Audrey’s, had accepted dances down on the base as something their daughters were going to do whether the old folks liked it or not. They made little fuss as long as the girls kept to a midnight curfew. Lorraine, who had urged Audrey and Valerie to sneak out to dances with American boys when they were sixteen, was now, at eighteen, engaged to Ted Penney from Mayor Avenue. As a result, Lorraine was going to spend her Saturday night playing cards with Ted’s brother and his wife instead of dancing wit
h soldiers down at Fort Pepperell. She didn’t seem any too thrilled about it, either, though like Treese she was fond of showing off her dinky little ring.

  All evening, Audrey thought she would tell Valerie about Harry’s letter, his proposal. There was plenty of time; they walked all the way down to the base in the soft evening air. Children were out playing again, young folks heading up to the roller rink, older folks sat out on their galleries enjoying the rare warmth. Everyone called hello. Up on Merrymeeting Road they ran across old Moses Hiscock, who provided a bit of a change from the friendly greetings of most of their neighbours. “Are ye girls goin’ off dancing? That’s Satan’s playground, them dances! You puts your soul in mortal peril! Read the Scriptures, for they was out laughing and dancing and giving in marriage till the Day of the Lord came upon them like a thief in the night! A thief in the night! Stay home and read the Book of Revelation!”

  “He’s three sheets to the wind already, and what is it, only seven o’clock?” Valerie said.

  “Ruby said Uncle Mose has been going to revival meetings—is it the Salvation Army? No, it’s the Seven Day Adventists, that’s why he’s all up on the book of Revelation. Mind you, they don’t drink either, but I don’t think he got up to that part yet. Oh look, there’s Donna Crocker with Mickey Nolan—are they going out together?”

  “First I’ve heard of it.”

  The evening slipped away—the walk, the dance, turning around the dance floor in the arms of one crew-cut American boy after another, walking back home through the velvet-dark night with a crowd of girls and soldiers. The songs they danced to lingered in Audrey’s mind longer than any of the boys she danced with; she was humming “The Old Lamplighter” and wondering if there was ever a time when real lamplighters lit the streetlights in St. John’s. She only pretended to listen to the boy next to her—what was his name? Freddy? Eddie? He had to be twenty, at least, but he seemed younger than Audrey. The lamplighter song somehow twisted into “Five Minutes More” in her head, and there she was in front of Holloway’s Grocery and Confectionary, taking her key from her purse and saying good night to everyone.