by Karen White
“Well, it’s very decent of him to have Molly,” Mrs. Lewis continued. “Because after all, it’s a lot to ask of a man, to take on a child that is not his.”
“That’s enough now, Betty,” said Mother firmly. “Jack loves Molly like a daughter.”
I wanted to tell Betty Lewis to shut up. To point out her red lipstick was cheap looking and her eyes were too bulgy to be pretty. I hated her for saying what I was most afraid of. That Jack only put up with me because of Mother.
When the arguments at home began over whether I was going to America with Mother, Grandma had shocked everybody by saying the Yanks were oversexed.
“No need for vulgarities, Ma,” said Uncle Roger, coughing over his cup of tea. We were all scarlet with embarrassment, but Grandma was not going to be stopped. Major Jack Williamson would want a big family. Bigger, even, than the village vicar’s family of twelve—his valiant apostles no less—and everybody knew his wife had gone weak as a bolted lettuce with the strain and had troubles remembering her own name. Mother had better know what she was letting herself in for.
Uncle Roger stomped out the back door, slamming it behind him. Mother went upstairs. Grandma sat by the range and rustled her black skirts while I stood there unable to move, since it was me being discussed.
“She is staying here,” Grandma said, banging her walking stick on the table. “We’ve already lost Susan. We’re not losing Molly.”
—
Mrs. Lewis reached in her handbag and pulled out a bag of barley sugars. I knew she’d been saving them. She pushed them into my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My nerves are all shot to pieces.” Her voice was husky and full of tears. “It’s just . . . it’s just that I might never go back to London. I probably won’t see my mum and dad ever again. They’ll never be able to afford the crossing over here, will they. They won’t even get to see their grandchild.”
“You keep them,” I told her. I felt sorry for her. She was as homesick as I was. “I bet Jimmy will be mad keen to see you,” I added.
“Thanks,” she replied with a watery smile. “I don’t know about that. Surprised more like. The last time I saw Jimmy we danced all night. I used to love dancing. Now all I want to do is put my feet up. I’m gasping for a cup of tea. Irene, can we go and get a pot of tea and a bun somewhere? I can’t go on my own. I just can’t. I think I’d get lost in this crowd.”
Mother looked doubtful.
“I don’t want to miss Jack . . .”
“Molly could stay with the suitcases,” Mrs. Lewis said. She thrust a photograph of a man in uniform into my hand. I’d seen this picture of Jimmy a thousand times already. “You could watch out for Jimmy, couldn’t you, Molly? We’d be ever so quick.”
“I’m not sure,” said Mother. “This is an awfully big station . . .”
“I’ll be fine,” I told her. I was happy to think of some time without Mrs. Lewis’s shrill voice in my ear. Mother took one of the identity tags off our suitcase and tied it to a button on my coat.
“You have to stand right here and not move.”
“I will,” I promised. “And if I see Jack or Mr. Lewis, I’ll call out to them.”
I sat down on the suitcase watching them walk away. I took a small teddy bear from my satchel and hugged it. We hadn’t seen Jack for five months. He’d gone back to America in April, just before the end of the war. Would I even recognise him without his uniform? And if I saw him and didn’t call out, perhaps he’d look straight past me. He’d be searching for Mother, after all, not me. As Grandma said, I was an English farmer’s daughter, not a New York lawyer’s child.
Up till now I had still imagined something might happen on our journey, something unforeseen that would mean we could go back home. Now I wondered whether Jack might be caught in some dark accident on his way to the railway station; a flood or a motorcar crash or whatever kind of disasters befell people in big cities like New York. Surely, if he didn’t come to get us, Mother and I would have to go back to England.
I imagined myself returning to our village, walking over to Clarkie’s cottage. He and Susan would be sitting in the front garden on deck chairs with the sound of birdsong in the hedgerow. I’d be the returning traveller, describing the storms I’d seen in the Atlantic, the Statue of Liberty, the biggest train station in the world.
“I reckon you’ve seen enough for a lifetime,” Clarkie might say, giving a low whistle of admiration. “Best you sit down and take your shoes off. Rest your feet, my girl. You won’t want to be going anywhere for a while.”
I put the teddy back in my bag and decided that when Jack came I would hide. I would hide and he’d leave, thinking we weren’t here. Then I’d tell Mother I hadn’t seen him. It was awful to imagine lying to her, but if Jack didn’t come to claim us, we would go back to the farm. Just me and Mother together, sharing our memories of Father.
—
When Father was alive we had two heavy horses that pulled the hay cart and he taught me to jump from the back of one to the other. The horses’ haunches were broad enough, he liked to say, for a family of three to picnic on. I loved him so much I couldn’t admit I didn’t want to do it. I was no good at acrobatics. I have always been a clumsy sort of kid. Grandma used to tease me saying I’d never be a ballerina. I scrambled on my knees from one slippery horse’s back to the other, clutching at the leather harnesses, hoping I wouldn’t fall.
“G’arn, Molly, my little tuppenny bit,” my father liked to yell, pushing his soft cap back on his head, his summer-tanned face creased with smiles.
Everybody loved my father and his games. Stepping from one horse to the other was one of his many tricks which made hay making memorable. He stood on their backs like a circus performer. Mother said the horses’ hooves were too big. She worried I might get hurt. My father said that would never happen.
“Molly is like me,” he liked to say. “Fearless.”
I wasn’t fearless, but I always pretended to be. I was six years old when Father died in the winter of 1940, and I had to carry on pretending to be fearless for Mother’s sake. After the funeral, she began going out for long walks, coming back in the dark, raindrops sparkling in her hair, lichen and moss on her clothes, a stony look in her eyes. Grandma and I watched her come through the kitchen, going upstairs to her room. It was as if she had forgotten me. Grandma said grief was wearing Mother out.
“But you’re my little apple dumpling,” Grandma told me, holding me on her lap, her hands wrapped round me. “Don’t you worry. I’ll look after you. They can put me in my grave and I’d still be here watching over you, my darling girl.”
I wanted to get off Grandma’s lap when she talked about graves, but she held me fast and it was comforting, in a way, to be pinned in her embrace. To feel her greedy love for me.
Uncle Roger and Aunt Marion were silent after Father’s death, as if it were a secret, but Grandma talked to everybody: the grocer’s delivery boy, the vicar’s wife who bought eggs from us and always expected a glass of sherry at the kitchen table, the coal man, the milk lorry driver, anybody who came to the farm. She said God knew no pity. Her big shoulders shook and she wept lavish tears. What a poor little mite I was with my mother fading away, and she at her great age doing what she could. “Irene is a wraith,” she exclaimed. “A ghost. My Roger’s working himself into the ground now he’s got to run the farm alone, and what’s the point when a bomb might fall on us at any moment? This blessed war will be the end of us.”
Grandma was wrong about Mother becoming a ghost. Mother was turning to stone. If I climbed into bed with her and watched her pretending to be asleep with her eyes open staring at the ceiling, she looked like she had been carved from marble. Like the tomb in the village church where we did brass rubbings with our schoolteacher. It was a memorial carved in stone, a noblewoman from the sixteenth century wearing long robes, her hands in a praying position, pointing
to heaven. That’s who Mother reminded me of. The stone woman in the church. I knew she spent hours sitting by Father’s grey granite headstone. Mother’s face had a greyish tint to it. I wanted to hug her so badly in those early months after his death, but I was afraid to touch her in case she turned me to stone, too.
My grandmother was neither stony nor shadowy. She had limbs like suet dumplings, softly fleshy. She sat by the stove all day because her legs gave her trouble. After the funeral it was Grandma who was in charge of grieving. The rest of us were dry-eyed, as if there were only so many gallons of salty tears to go around for Father, and Grandma had them all for herself.
Everybody knew my father, Robert, had been her favourite son. Susan had told me often enough when we lay in our room at night. After he died, my other cousins avoided me, but all that year Susan let me curl up against her at night and we’d talk about what she’d do when the war ended. Susan was sixteen in 1941 and had left school the year before. She was kind to me, perhaps because she had four brothers and would have preferred sisters. She adored my mother, who was an expert dressmaker and often jazzed up Susan’s clothes for her with ribbons and furbelows.
Susan wanted to fall in love and marry a bank clerk or a man who sold insurance, someone who wore a suit and had a job in an office. While she worked in our fields, hoeing and pulling weeds, she dreamed of fox furs, pink satin, and cocktail parties. She smoked Grey’s Cigarettes that she bought in town because she said smoking gave a woman a certain elegance, opening the window in our room, leaning out, wafting the smoke away.
In the autumn of that year, German planes flew over the coast, heading inland. We heard them every night for a week, and in the next village, boys picked up pieces of shrapnel. Aunt Marion gave a ruling. The whole family, including Uncle Roger who worked until after nightfall, had to be indoors by six o’clock in the evening. Only Mother ignored my aunt’s curfew, going out in Father’s old coat and her red Tam o’ Shanter hat. Grandma begged her not to. She said Mother made herself an easy target for the Germans. I tried hard not to think of her so clearly visible, standing for hours by the village lake, looking across its deep waters.
Susan watched the sky for planes from our room, leaning out of the window with a cigarette, her hand cupped over it to hide its glowing tip. The sun was setting, pouring gold light across her brown curls. I sat on the bed doing a jigsaw puzzle. A hunting scene of men in red coats on horses galloping with hounds across a wooded landscape.
“Grandma called him a gift,” Susan said. “Your father, I mean. She was fifty when he was born.” She blew a smoke ring. “Dreadful to think of a woman of that age, you know, doing it. Grandpa was ten years older than her. He died when your father was twelve. That was the year I was born. Everybody called your dad a miracle child. The last fruit from an old tree. Who knows what my poor old pa thought when your golden-haired father came along.”
Grandma had told me Uncle Roger had always been in awe of his younger brother. That he had always doted on him. My uncle was as reserved as my father had been outgoing. As strict with his family as Father had been happy-go-lucky. I’d heard our farmworkers saying Uncle Roger blamed Clarkie for Father’s accident.
“Poor Clarkie,” said Susan, her cheeks darkening. “Your father’s death wasn’t his fault.”
I carried on with the jigsaw. I liked to talk about Father, but I never mentioned how he’d died. I had begun to suffer from nightmares, and thinking about it made them worse.
“Sorry, Molly,” said Susan, closing the window. She sat beside me, putting a piece of jigsaw in place. “Why don’t we sneak out and go see Clarkie? We can go after tea.”
“How is Irene?” asked Clarkie when we knocked on his door. He squinted across the dusk-dimmed fields and woodland in the direction of the farm, as if he hoped he might be able to see her. I told him I thought Mother was turning to stone. He said it wasn’t that at all. Her heart was broken and that was worse than shattering every single bone in your body because there was no plaster cast or sling you could put on a damaged heart.
We had glasses of milk in his kitchen and Clarkie talked to Susan about the German planes. Clarkie was twenty-six back then, a year younger than my father would have been. He had been born with a funny leg and had a limp which stopped him doing military service. He said his leg put women off and that was why he was still a bachelor. I couldn’t see why it would put anybody off. He was marvellous. A great one for jokes and acting the silly goat. He liked to ride his bicycle downhill with his arms folded. Only when he was thoughtful did his mouth in repose fall to slackness, giving him a disappointed look.
“What Clarkie needs is a wife,” I once heard Mother say to Susan. “He needs somebody to care for. He’s a romantic soul and that’s half the trouble.”
I thought how nice it would be to live with him. I thought my mother should marry Clarkie.
“You have to look after her,” Clarkie told me, walking us home in the dark that night. “She needs you to be strong for her. You’ve got to look after Irene.”
I remember I put a hand to my seven-year-old chest and felt the beating of my heart. It had a hurried, frail rhythm. Nobody had ever asked if it had been broken by Father’s death. They just told me to look after Mother.
—
By the time Mrs. Lewis and Mother returned from their quest to find a decent cup of tea in the station, neither Jack nor Jimmy had come to find us and I had sat in a daydream hardly noticing the noise of the travellers around me.
“There’s all sorts of shops,” said Mrs. Lewis. She was puffing with the exertion of walking. “You wouldn’t believe the café, Molly. Fresh fruit in big baskets. A cheese shop, too. They even had a bit of Stilton on sale. And there’s an oyster bar, though I can’t be doing with shellfish in my condition. Couldn’t get a proper cup of tea but the waiter was awfully nice, wasn’t he, Irene?”
“He was,” agreed Mother. “Any sign of Jack?” I shook my head, and she handed me a brown paper bag. “I’ve bought you pretzels, Molly. So you can tell Jack you’ve tried them.”
I thanked her and turned my face away. How could I accept her kindnesses when I was plotting to hide from Jack?
“We thought you two could sit in the waiting room,” said Mother, picking up our suitcase. “That way Betty can rest her feet. I’ll stay here.”
“No,” I said hurriedly. “I can stay here. You go and sit down. I’ll look out for Jack.”
Mother smiled and said I was a very good girl. Jack would be proud of me.
I wanted to tell her I loved her and didn’t mean to do her any harm. So that later, when I explained how Jack hadn’t come after all, she would not think badly of me.
Mother leaned towards me and kissed my cheek. “Poor Betty is not feeling too well. I think she’d be better off sitting down.”
I didn’t tell Mother I loved her. The lies I planned stopped me, turning me silent and unable to watch her walking away.
—
Three years after Father died, when our tiny village was buzzing with the arrival of three thousand American airmen on the newly built airfield that bordered our farm, Mother stopped turning to stone. In the middle of summer in 1943 I heard her laughing again. Her eyes shone as if they had sunlight caught in them. I believed I had finally mended her broken heart. She began wearing lipstick and had her hair done in a permanent wave. She took up dressmaking once more, unpicking some of Susan’s old dresses and making me skirts and pinafores.
Earlier in the year we’d heard the first American trucks arriving. Susan was eighteen and working part-time in the local pub. That was a compromise between her and her parents, who had refused to let her get a job in the ammunitions factory in town. Susan desperately wanted to do her bit for the war effort, but Uncle Roger said working on the farm was doing her bit.
We watched lorries trundle past for days. Each one of the corrugated iron buildings that had
been erected was marked U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES in huge lettering. Big brown tents were put up, a whole rippling sea of them. At school, a boy brought in something amazing. He showed it to the whole class. A juicy-looking orange. He had been given it by an American airman, he announced.
When I told Susan, she said we should go and ask if we could have some fruit. On the airfield there were sweet cooking smells and the odour of petrol. Swing and Big Band music played through loudspeakers. In her best cotton dress, the blue one with tiny white daisies, Susan danced me along the concrete paths between the temporary buildings. She said the Americans were going to kick Hitler’s backside, and we stuck our hands in the air, holding up two fingers like Churchill had just done, making his “V for victory” sign.
The airfield was vast. A whole bustling American town built on our farm’s fields. There was a tent with a sign hanging off it saying Sleep Lagoon where pilots could rest before air missions. They had a fire department, a corrugated iron parachute store, a dentist surgery, a base infirmary, even a metal-roofed cinema where we village children would be invited to watch Walt Disney films over the years. We watched some GIs putting up a sign. A painted wooden board. It said Welcome to Tin Town.
“You ladies thinking of becoming pilots?” asked an airman. Susan and I were looking up at a huge B17 bomber plane. The man smiled. His face was all brightness in the last glow of afternoon sun. He was very tall. His uniform buttons were polished. His eyes were deep blue and full of kindness.
“We’re just having a look round,” said Susan politely.
“That’s okay. Are you from the village?”
“We live at Swan farm,” said Susan, pointing. “Over there. This is my father’s land.”
“Oh, is it?” He took off his hat, turning it over and over in his hands. “Well,” he said. “I hope he doesn’t mind too much us being here?”