Keep the Home Fires Burning

by Anne Bennett

  ‘Not for Sarah’s injuries,’ Marion said. ‘I was resentful at first when he told me that he wanted to enlist. I thought he wasn’t thinking enough about us, but in his mind that’s exactly who he was thinking of. I had to see it his way in the end, as that was what he was going to do regardless.’

  ‘Well, you can’t carry resentment around for ever.’

  ‘No,’ Marion agreed. ‘Anyroad, I wasn’t the only wife and mother left like that.’

  ‘We’ll be late for work if we don’t go soon,’ Violet warned.

  Peggy glanced up at the clock. ‘Crikey, you’re right. We’ll have to get a spurt on.’

  ‘And I must get the twins up or they’ll be late for school,’ Marion said, but when they had gone, instead of rousing Magda and Missie, Marion sat at the table and poured herself another cup of tea. She dreaded writing to Bill for there was no kind way to tell a father that his daughter was possibly going to be scarred for life.

  She got herself together in the end. The twins were still tearful when Marion roused them, and didn’t want to go to school. ‘You’ll do no good staying at home,’ Marion said firmly. ‘If Sarah is awake today I will ask when she will be allowed other visitors, and that’s all I can do for you at the moment.’

  Sarah’s private room was very bare with just a bed with a chair beside it, and a small wash basin. Even the walls were a nondescript beige.

  ‘Has she not regained consciousness yet?’ she asked Dr Lancaster.

  The doctor shook her head. ‘We are at any rate keeping her sedated for now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, if she’s kept still and quiet her broken ribs will heal themselves,’ the doctor explained. ‘And even her liver might do the same, which might save her the trauma of more operations. I will have to operate on the pelvis and then, of course, there will be skin grafts, and all that will be shock enough for anyone.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘There is something else.’

  Marion turned her head towards the doctor but didn’t speak and she went on, ‘Sarah received quite a crack on the head and then she was unconscious for some time so there is a risk of brain damage.’

  Marion felt herself recoil from the doctor.

  ‘It’s not a foregone conclusion, Mrs Whittaker. I’m just preparing you for that possibility.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Doctor,’ Marion said.

  She left the hospital in a daze and once outside the tears came. Polly found her there later, awash with sadness. Marion clung to her sister and they both wept when Marion told Polly why she was so upset.

  ‘I can’t tell the twins any of this,’ she said. ‘And I can’t write to Bill yet either. The doctor said it wasn’t a foregone conclusion and so I must wait and see. Her disfigurement is enough for him to cope with now.’

  As one day followed another the twins couldn’t understand why Marion hadn’t written to their father to tell him about Sarah, and had also forbidden them to write and tell him.

  ‘But why won’t you write?’ Magda asked for the umpteenth time.

  ‘I will,’ Marion said, ‘but Dad will be very upset when he hears about Sarah. Richard will be too, of course, but Dad will be especially sad and I wanted to have something good to tell him as well.’

  ‘What sort of good?’

  ‘Well, Sarah hasn’t really come round yet,’ Marion said. ‘At the moment the hospital are keeping her heavily sedated and I really want her to come round fully before I write to tell your father.’

  The twins accepted this. Marion visited every day, but it was four days later before she entered Sarah’s room to find the sides of the bed down and Sarah lying there with her eyes open. They opened wider and a little light shone behind when they caught sight of Marion, though Marion saw with pity that they were glazed with pain.

  ‘Hello, Sarah,’ she said gently.

  Sarah didn’t answer that, but what she did say was, ‘I hurt.’

  ‘I know,’ said Marion. ‘Maybe the nurses can give you something for the pain later, because you’re in hospital now. Can you remember what happened?’

  ‘No …’

  But as her mother started telling her, it was as if everything slotted back in her mind. She remembered sitting talking with her uncle, and trying to read a letter from Sam and a terrific explosion.

  ‘The factory was an awful mess,’ Marion said, but she didn’t mention the girls who had died because she and Polly had already decided that Sarah didn’t need to knew that. She had enough to cope with.

  Sarah touched her bandaged face tentatively.

  ‘Your face and head got a bit knocked about,’ Marion said, and she willed her voice not to tremble.

  ‘It’s stiff.’

  ‘I expect they had to bandage it up tightly to protect it. Everyone has been asking about you. The twins, of course, and Peggy and Violet, and Polly and her lot, but also neighbours. I have had people stop me in the street or even call at the door to ask after you, and Deidre Whitehead from next door has been ever so good seeing to the twins and all.’

  Sarah’s eye were closing for all she tried to keep them open, but as Marion got to her feet she said drowsily, ‘Don’t go yet.’

  ‘I must,’ Marion said. ‘I mustn’t tire you out and I’ll be back tomorrow.’

  Once outside Sarah’s room, though, she set off to see the doctor and told her that she’d had a conversation of sorts with her daughter.

  ‘Yes,’ Dr Lancaster said. ‘Sarah opened her eyes for the first time earlier today after we stopped the sedation and the first indications are good. We will be running more extensive tests over the next few days and so then we will know for certain if there is any damage to the brain.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was early May when Marion eventually wrote to Bill and Richard. By then the news about Sarah was at least hopeful. There was no sign of brain damage, her ribs had started to heal and so had the cut on her head. The area around her liver was far less inflamed and tender. The letters took a week to reach Bill and Richard on the South Coast. Bill had been there a fortnight and he had often wished he could have described it to Marion, for he’d never seen so many men, or so many nationalities, gathered together one place. Each day more and more troops were being offloaded from trains and marched down from the station to set up camp.

  There were more military equipment and vehicles than he had ever seen in his life, too. Bren gun carriers, lorries, trucks and Jeeps filled fields, and camouflaged tanks lined many of the roads. Most coastal paths were sealed off altogether, while boats, barges and landing craft of one kind and another were holed up in harbours all along the coastline.

  He had not met up with Richard since he’d enlisted, but once he realised just how many soldiers were being sent to the South Coast he’d had a good idea that Richard would involved too, and he’d tracked him down in no time. They’d been delighted to see each other.

  That day, as Bill was once again on his way to see Richard, he passed the messenger delivering the post, who gave him a letter from Marion, which he stuck in his pocket to read later.

  When he got to Richard’s tent it was to find him sitting on his bunk reading the letter he had just received from his mother. He looked up as his father entered.

  ‘Terrible news about Sarah, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Haven’t you had word from Mom? I had a letter this morning.’

  ‘So did I,’ Bill said, withdrawing it from his pocket. ‘I didn’t take time to read it.’

  ‘I think you’d better read it now,’ Richard said, and with a sinking heart Bill tore the letter open. He read of the explosion that had killed nineteen workers and injured many more, including his beautiful daughter Sarah. He read of her many injuries and burns, and that she would in all likelihood be scarred for life.

  Tears trickled down his cheeks as he crushed the letter in his hands and his eyes met his son’s sorrowful ones as he said huskily, ‘This is all my fault and
I will never forgive myself until my dying day.’

  ‘How do you work that out?’ Richard said.

  ‘If I hadn’t joined up then Sarah needn’t have gone into munitions in the first place,’ Bill said. ‘Actually, I wouldn’t have allowed her to work in a place like that.’

  Richards gave a short laugh. ‘You’re talking about Sarah, the child you left behind. Sarah will be nineteen in the autumn and has a mind of her own.’

  ‘She would defy me? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I’m saying that she would have to do what she saw as right,’ Richard said firmly. ‘Just as you did. Even if you hadn’t joined up, you would probably have been out in the teeth of the raids like I was, doing what you could to help. Would you have tried to stop me, though you knew the work we did was essential?’

  ‘Well, no, I suppose not,’ Bill admitted. ‘But, Sarah—‘

  ‘Dad, Sarah chose to go into the munitions,’ Richard said. ‘No one forced her. She knew the work she did was dangerous, but in a war some risks have to be taken. And whether you like it or not, Dad, someone has to make the munitions for us. That being said, I am sick to the soul for what has happened to her.’

  ‘And so am I,’ Bill said. ‘But at least she’s alive.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve got to hold on to that,’ Richard said. ‘Especially after Tony. God, but I missed him after he died. I thought I would just miss his nuisance but I didn’t. I missed everything about him. He was a great kid.’

  ‘He was,’ Bill agreed sorrowfully. ‘And Sarah is another one, though, as you reminded me, she’s a kid no longer. Now she’s a young lady, who might find a scarred face a great deal to cope with.’

  Richard was silent because he knew his father was right and he remembered how pretty Sarah had been.

  ‘I’ll write her a letter when I get back and try and think of some way to cheer her up,’ Bill said.

  ‘Dunno what you’re going to say then,’ Richard said, going to the entrance of the tent and looking out at the sea of tents. ‘You can tell her nothing about all this. People say we’re for overseas.’

  Bill nodded. ‘More than likely.’

  ‘Fellows I was with say that you usually get embarkation leave beforehand.’

  ‘I think they were trying to keep it all hush hush,’ Bill said. ‘Couldn’t risk anything getting out if every man were to have leave. Anyroad, how could they give embarkation leave to this lot?’ Have you ever seen so many men in one place before?’

  ‘No, nowhere near,’ he said. ‘People say whole villages have been commandeered and the villagers have had to live elsewhere. Do you think that’s true?’

  Bill gazed around and imagined how the lives of the people who lived there must have been before the army moved in. The ploughed fields that might have been full of new crops had been reduced to a muddy slurry and the lush green meadows that probably once housed placid cows were churned up by so many military vehicles and equipment, packed in wherever they could find space. Once, fishermen would be out on the sea, sparkling before him in the sunshine, but the war had put paid to that.

  They had marched through sleepy villages with cobbled streets, old and interesting churches and quaint houses, many with roofs of thatch and ringed around the village green. Places where one generation would follow another and life wouldn’t have changed that much in a hundred years or more. He owned that their lives might have been changed somewhat in the carnage of the Great War, they had quite possibly lost sons, brothers and fathers but that war had been finished over twenty five years before and he imagined in this simple community, life would have eventually settled back into an even keel again. Until now that was.

  What disruptions it would be to the villager’s lives to leave their homes and their livelihood. It would break up their communities and Bill felt suddenly saddened by the thought that life for them would never be the same again.

  He sighed before turning to his son. ‘I suppose it’s true, because I heard the same thing.’

  ‘Yeah, but, Dad, you talk about it all being hush hush and that, but we’ll never get all these men and all the equipment over the Channel and into France without being spotted,’ Richard said. ‘Isn’t it madness to even think of it?’

  ‘All war is madness,’ Bill said, ‘and it was you spoke about the risks people have to take in wartime. I suppose leaders have to take those sorts of risks as well. One thing I’m sure of, though, the Germans will be holding reception committees for us on the beaches. How we respond to that will determine the outcome of the war, I reckon, because there’ll be no second chances.’

  ‘It’s make or break then?’

  ‘Yes, son, I think it is,’ Bill said. He clapped Richard on the back. ‘And now I’m away to write my letters because God knows when I’ll have the time again.

  ‘Yeah, you have to grab any time you can in the army,’ Richard said. ‘I’ve learned that much.’

  ‘Then you’ve learned a valuable lesson,’ Bill said. Then he asked, ‘Have you ever regretted joining up?’

  ‘No,’ Richard said. ‘I know that I’m in the right place. This is a job worth doing.’

  ‘A job worth doing,’ Bill said to himself as he returned to his tent. His daughter, who had thought the same thing, now lay injured and quite possibly scarred for life in hospital. God Almighty! He thought that was a high price to pay.

  By the end of May, Pat was out of hospital, with crutches, bound ribs and orders to rest. Sarah was recovering well from the operations on her pelvis.

  Marion had received letters from Bill and Richard addressed to Sarah. She popped them in her bag to take in that day.

  However she had only just entered the hospital building when she met Dr Lancaster, who told her that as the swelling had gone down on Sarah’s face, and the lacerations had healed better than they thought they would at this stage, they would be starting the skin grafts on her face the following week.

  ‘Where will you take the skin from?’ Marion asked.

  ‘From the back of the ear, for the facial burns.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘I popped in to tell her today. When I went into the room ten red roses had just been delivered for her. She has an admirer, I believe?’

  Marion smiled. ‘A young man called Sam has been writing to her for nearly three years. He’s really the only one who would send her flowers. He’s a soldier, like most young men these days, and we know him a little because he’s the brother of one of my lodgers. Sarah swears he just thinks of her as a friend, but I’m not absolutely sure.’

  ‘I wish I had friends who would send me ten red roses,’ the doctor said with a smile.

  ‘Yes,’ Marion said. ‘His sister Peggy says he’s driving her wild with questions about Sarah that she can’t really answer, never having seen her.’

  ‘And that situation can’t be remedied yet,’ Dr Lancaster said. ‘Especially as we are starting the skin grafting. The risk of bringing infection in is a real one, and that’s why Sarah will be allowed only a few visitors.’

  ‘But surely you’re not banning me too?’

  ‘Oh, no, not at all,’ the doctor said. ‘Sarah would really go into the doldrums if she were to see nobody. You will probably be instrumental in her recovery. I think we can safely say you and one other.’

  Marion thought for a moment and said, ‘Oh, well, then, I suppose it must be my sister, Polly, for the others are at work all day.’

  Dr Lancaster nodded. ‘I’m sure the two of you will do your best to cheer Sarah up.’

  ‘Yes.’ Marion pulled two envelopes out of her bag. ‘I have something else to please Sarah today: both her father and brother have written to her. I’d better go in now and give them to her, or she’ll think I’m not coming at all today.’

  Sam had been totally shocked when he heard of Sarah’s accident, and it was brought home to him exactly how much he thought of her. If he couldn’t have Sarah in his life, he realised, then i
t wouldn’t really be worth living. He had been so distressed that he’d gone to his commanding officer and asked for a few days’ compassionate leave so that he could go and see her, but he’d been told all leave had been cancelled.

  So the letter he wrote to Sarah to explain this was the most ardent that he’d ever sent her. He said that she was very dear and special to him, and she’d blushed when she had read it.

  ‘What lovely roses!’ Marion exclaimed when she went in the room.

  ‘Aren’t they?’ Sarah said. ‘I had a letter from Sam this morning as well. It was a lovely letter.’

  She felt the heat flood her face as she remembered Sam’s words, and she was glad of the concealing bandages that hid her crimson cheeks.

  ‘The roses came afterwards,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t he lovely to think of sending them?’

  Marion saw the dreamy looks in Sarah’s expressive eyes, and heard her soft voice, and she knew that whether Sarah was aware of it or not, she was in love with Sam Wagstaffe.

  ‘The nurses were impressed as well,’ Sarah said. ‘They said they’ll have to take them out at night because they use up the oxygen or something. But I don’t mind about that. I can hardly enjoy flowers at night, can I?’

  ‘No,’ Marion agreed, ‘and meanwhile the smell in the room is gorgeous. She bent to sniff the petals. ‘How are you feeling?’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘Not bad. But they’re starting skin grafts soon, the doctor told me today.’

  ‘I know,’ Marion said and as Sarah’s eyes looked suddenly apprehensive she went on gently, ‘they can do wonderful things today with all the techniques they’ve learned. The doctor told me herself.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sarah said with a sigh. ‘But I bet that she never said that they can work miracles.’

  The twins were very upset when they heard that they were still not allowed to visit Sarah. ‘I don’t see how we would bring that much infection in,’ Magda said mulishly.

  ‘It really doesn’t matter what you think, Magda,’ Marion said. ‘It isn’t my decision, but the Hospital’s, and we have to believe that they know best. Sarah isn’t happy about it either because she’s missing you just as much, and she will probably be sick of the sight of me and Polly before long.’