She gave Gloria two jars of jam, and six fresh eggs packed in a special cardboard box with separate soft spaces to keep each one safe. She gave Gloria money so that she wouldn’t have to pretend Dot was a babe in arms.
On the train ride home, the compartment no longer seemed like a compact traveling home. It was just a train with lumpy seats and smuts. Dot sat hunched in her corner, Gloria in another, each far from the other.
Eventually Dot asked, “Was he a brave man?”
“Reverend Hollidaye? I’ll say, I told you about him.”
“No, I mean him. The other one.”
“Who’s that?”
“Him. My father, was he like some kind of hero?”
“Your old man a hero? Don’t make me laugh! Your dad couldn’t have knocked the skin off a rice pudding.”
Dot tried not to look at Gloria’s face. Why would anyone want to go and see a man who was a coward?
Dot remembered one of the things she’d overheard Mrs. Hollidaye telling Gloria just before Loopy Lil crashed the tray. “You know, my dear, love’s a funny thing. If you want it, you’ll find it can grow in the most unexpected places.”
Dot hadn’t known what it meant. It made her think of green melons growing under glass lids. That was an unexpected place. Perhaps it could also mean loving a man who wasn’t there and didn’t deserve to be loved.
Dot thought about that place where they’d visited him long ago, with soldiers guarding the main gate, and long low buildings surrounded by grass clipped so flat, there was nowhere for a running man to hide. Then she thought about those other long low huts she’d seen in the fenced-off meadow beyond St. Michael and All Angels. Mrs. Hollidaye said that’s where the prisoners of war were housed. The buildings were the same kind as where her faceless father had been.
It was a tiny hope. But if he was a war prisoner, soon they’d be sending him back. That’s what Mrs. Hollidaye said was happening.
“Repatriation. It’s a slow old business, putting everybody in the country they started from. But in the end they should all be home with their mothers. Poor boys. That’s where they belong. Or with their sisters, or their sweet-hearts.”
If he was one of them, that’s why they were hurrying back to London, so Gloria could say good-bye before he was put on a ship and Dot wouldn’t ever have to see him again.
The train rumbled through the dark. Dot tried again.
“Is he one of them foreigners, then?”
“Foreigners? How d’you mean?”
“I saw some where we just been. In the big kitchen. They was working in the fields. But they gonna get took home soon.”
“Them’s prisoners of war.”
“I know. Germans. Is my old man one of them?”
“What kind of thing to say is that!” said Gloria. “All that good food you been getting, it’s gone to your head, I’d say. In fact I’m darn sure it has, the way you behaved. What made you want to crawl in with them mucky birds like that? I’ve never been so ashamed in my life. You don’t get that kind of behavior from me.”
“I just wanted to know about him,” said Dot, crying now because she had made Gloria angry. “Sorry, honest. Won’t never say it again.”
As the train drew into Victoria Station, Gloria softened. “There, there. Don’t take on so.”
She crossed over to sit beside Dot. She put her arm round her.
“Come now, pet, let’s kiss and make up and I’ll tell you about him. Biggin Hill, I met him, Empire Air Day. Oh, he was beautiful. In them days we could really go for a man in uniform. We was married real quick. Well, in them days you never knew what might happen next. Then you come along not so long after.”
She gave Dot a peck on the cheek.
“Oh, my, you’re warm as toast, aren’t you? You took a chill? Ooh, ducky, I do hope you haven’t gone and caught something nasty from them birds.”
12
Bad Germs
“So you’re back, then!” said Mrs. Parvis.
She didn’t seem too pleased even when Gloria gave her both pots of jam. “So you wasn’t gone away long, the pair of you, was you?”
Dot tugged at Gloria’s sleeve. She wanted to get in off the doorstep. She wanted to lie down.
“A nervy little thing, isn’t she? Fat lot of good the countryside done her. Couldn’t you have left her down there with that woman friend?”
Gloria began to edge along the hallway.
“So you got the message all right? About hubby, was it? Anything to oblige. Though you know being telegraph boy isn’t in my normal line of business. Still, I said to myself, so she has got a husband after all, because I was beginning to put two and two together and ask myself a few questions. We keep a respectable house here, as well you know. So he’s being demobbed at last, is he?”
“We got some eggs, too, Mrs. Parvis,” said Gloria. “Would you like a couple?”
“Ooh ta, ever so. Well, I hope you sort yourselves out nice and quick. Because I shan’t do with him lodging here long. That’s only a single room. At that rent it has to be.”
“Hold your horses, Mrs. Parvis. You won’t get him stopping here, not for all the tea in China. He’s fixing us up in a flat, with kitchenette, out Godalming way, a live-in maintenance job.”
Dot knew it was all dreams. She could tell with Gloria. There was the way her lips moved when she was lying.
“Glad to hear it. I was pushing it, letting the child in. So now I’ve got to be cruel to be kind. Because you know that you won’t get on that priority housing list if I’m soft on you.”
Dot preferred Mrs. Hollidaye’s way of talking, always trying to see the good side of things. Even when it was something bad, like the mice damage in the apple room, or the wasps’ nest in the orchard, or even your husband jumping off a plane and dying, she managed to see the good part of it. Mr. Brown was a bit like that too.
Dot said, “In the country, where we just been, there’s this lady where we stayed what hasn’t eaten a banana so long, she’s forgotten the taste, and what’s growing these melons in her garden. Under a lid.”
“In the country, in the country. I’m not sure I can stand that kind of talk,” snapped Mrs. Parvis. “If it was all so blooming wonderful, I dunno why your mum didn’t let you stay put.”
That night the air in the basement room became so thick it was like inhaling the black tar they put on the road. Dot knew it must be the enemy had dropped their gas canisters to suffocate women and children in a gas attack. She saw how the dark room had filled with transparent figures who marched along the walls singing and mocking, who wrapped themselves around her so that she was suffocated in their embrace, then turned to broken bricks and choking mortar dust that cascaded in torrents onto her, flattening her to the bed so that her limbs ached with pain and she couldn’t move.
Each breath was fire and splinters of ice. Her throat was filled with coils of barbed wire.
Toward morning she woke limp and exhausted, shivering with cold. As delirium receded, she knew it had all been dreams.
“My throat hurts,” she whispered.
But Gloria wasn’t there. Her black hat with the little veil had gone from the shelf, and her best peep-toe shoes. Dot realized she’d already left to visit the man who was a gutless jink.
Dot guessed by the papery men lurking inside the walls that she must be ill. But if so, how had it happened? Was it in some way her own fault? And how ill did you have to be before you died?
She put on her coat and got back into the bed.
During the day it came again, the shadows falling off the walls. And Gloria wouldn’t be back for hours. It was a long bus ride to reach those low huts standing behind the high fence.
Dot got up and went along to the kitchen for Mrs. Parvis’s high tea. Two wet floury potatoes were dished onto her plate, but she couldn’t eat them. Mrs. Parvis scraped them back into the pot.
“Waste not, want not,” she said with a frown of disapproval.
The table lurched
up at Dot.
“That child don’t look any too well, do she?” she heard Mrs. Parvis’s voice, far away at the end of the table. “Say, Dotty, you all right?”
Dot’s throat was so swollen, she couldn’t speak. She wanted to drink. As she held the cup of tea to her mouth, she felt herself tumble down into a deep well.
She began sliding from the chair toward the gaping hole in the floor. There was nothing she could do to save herself. She tried to remember what Mrs. Hollidaye had said about the many different ways of being brave. She clutched at the slithery sides but there was no grip.
Way up above in the light at the top of the well, Mrs. Parvis was speaking, but Dot knew it was nothing to do with her.
“Said I’d keep an eye on the kiddy for an hour or two. Now look what’s happened! It’s a disgrace.”
“It’s hardly her fault if the child falls ill,” said one of the lodgers.
“That’s as may be. But I can’t go having my place turned into a fever ward. All them germs. Where’ll that lead us? Before we know where we are we’ll all be down with it like flies. As if I don’t have enough on my plate already.”
Dot felt herself gathered up from the kitchen floor, and Mr. Brown’s face came into view, kindly and familiar. She reached out for his hand. Benign Mr. Brown.
“Now, then,” said Mrs. Parvis sternly, and pushed Mr. Brown out of the way. “That’ll be all for now, Mr. Brown. Everything under control and we can manage on our own.”
When she was laid on the bed, Dot felt the room spin.
“Did you ever play cloud pictures?” Mrs. Hollidaye had asked when they went over the fields to fetch the creamy milk from the home farm.
“Don’t know,” said Dot, and wondered if it was anything like princesses.
Mrs. Hollidaye explained. “We have to lie down on our backs. Springy moss is best, here on this bank. We look up into the sky, we watch the shapes of the clouds changing till we recognize a picture. Do you see, my dear, up there now? A clown with a laughing face?”
Dot looked upward and saw the smiling clown.
“And now he’s changing into a little dog, d’you see, my dear?”
Dot saw the little dog, too, dancing. Then it was her turn.
“I can see fire,” she had said. “Flames.” She saw them swirling and licking across the sky, burning up everything. She pointed them out to Mrs. Hollidaye.
Dot tried to find beautiful pictures like Mrs. Hollidaye did, of meadow flowers and laughing children, cathedrals and fairy coaches.
A long time later, or perhaps only a few seconds, she thought she saw her father’s face white as paper, floating among the clouds, then it dissolved into the face of an elderly stranger bending over her. If only Gloria was here. He wrapped her in a scarlet blanket and carried her up the outside-area steps. It was already dark outside. The ambulance stood in the road.
“Gloria!” Dot croaked. She knew she shouldn’t cause trouble to people. Mrs. Parvis was always telling her so. She wanted to cry.
“That’s all right, sunshine,” said the ambulance man. “We’re taking care of you.”
Dot turned to see Mrs. Parvis, arms folded across her floral apron, rigid on her front steps.
They slammed the ambulance doors. The windows were like the windows of the children’s ward where Baby used to be, of white glass you couldn’t see through.
One of the lodgers was traveling with her. The woman saw Dot staring and smiled.
“There you are. Everything all right now?”
What on earth was she doing in the ambulance? Was she ill too?
At the hospital, in a cold, tiled room, they asked questions and wrote down answers.
“Mother’s name? Father’s name?”
Dot struggled to sit up. “Airman,” she croaked. “Dead now.”
“Shh, dear, don’t try to talk,” said the woman lodger, and the nurse made her lie down.
“Has she ever been admitted to this hospital before?”
“Yes,” said Dot, sitting up again. “Every day. To see Baby.”
But they didn’t mean it like that.
Name? Age? Date of birth? Address? Religion? How long ill? Any fever yesterday? Immunized against diphtheria? Opened her bowels today? Ever been in contact with any person carrying typhoid? Any family history of rheumatic fever?
After that Dot couldn’t be bothered. She let the woman lodger answer since that’s what they seemed to want.
After the questions, the woman lodger went away and they took off Dot’s clothes and touched and prodded at her neck, her ears, and her throat. But she knew she mustn’t make a fuss. Finally they wheeled her on a trolley down the drafty brown corridor, through the swing doors, into Ward 3-South, where a dim light showed the children lying down.
Dot was put into a bed with high sides. She wanted to explain that she wasn’t a baby and didn’t need a cot.
“Haven’t had no tea,” Dot croaked. “Didn’t get no dinner, neither.”
The nurse pulled up the metal sides and closed them with a clang so that Dot was like a caged prisoner. “It’s too late for that now,” said the nurse. “You’ll have to wait for morning. You’ll find that comes soon enough.”
A child in a bed nearby began to whimper, and Dot wondered if not crying when you wanted to counted as being brave.
Later that night one of Dot’s teeth came out. She thought at first that it was an apple pip in her mouth. She touched the jellied space in her mouth and found a drop of blood like a shiny ladybird resting on her finger.
She felt with her tongue. Other teeth moved freely in a way that they had never moved before. She was breaking into pieces. Maybe more teeth would come out. Maybe her arms, then her legs, her hair, her arms, her fingers, her thumbs, till there would be nothing left of her for Gloria to find.
She called out to the night nurse, who scurried over when she saw the red smear on the stiff white pillowcase. But as soon as she saw the tooth, she lost interest.
“Is that all it was?” she said. “Thought you were bleeding to death? Thought the sky was falling in on your head? Shh now, and go back to sleep. Or d’you want the whole ward to wake up just for one milk tooth?”
13
Ward 3-South
When Baby had been here, Dot remembered how she had yearned to be with him, among those quiet children so calm in their tidy beds. But the ward was no longer shining with peaceful light. What had appeared then to be contentment turned out now to be cold loneliness. And once in, there was no way through the blank windows.
It came and went in swirling waves that rushed down from the ceiling and swallowed her up. She forgot who she was, how long she had been here.
They told her she was lucky, but Dot couldn’t understand how.
Four times a day the nurse came toward her across the wide spaces of lino with the shiny basin containing the rattling metal syringe. Four times a day, the nurse pulled back the white cover, turned Dot on her side, pulled up the gown, and thrust the needle in with the savage pain of a bayonet.
The first time, Dot cried out at this new kind of hurt. Later she knew not to make any sound; otherwise the nurse said, “Don’t you want to get better?” Then she told Dot, “You’re a lucky little scallywag! Ten years ago and you’d have died!”
Sometimes she saw nurses whispering about her and wanted to hide.
When Gloria came, pattering across the ward in all her best, Dot couldn’t bear to see her pretty face and turned away on the pillow with shut eyes.
Why did you let them bring me here? What have I done? she wanted to say. When can I get out?
Each bed had a locker beside it. On top of some were displayed heavy glass bottles of fizzy pop, or colored postcards, or jigsaws, or rag dolls with floppy arms. Dot didn’t mind about the toys and she knew she couldn’t ask for ginger pop because that cost money, but she would have liked to have had her victory token back. Gloria had told her she’d got to keep it forever. It had been in her coat pocket when t
hey took her clothes away. Now it was gone forever.
Dot managed to attract the attention of the girl lying in the next bed.
“Want to play a game? Film stars?”
The sick girl nodded.
“You start, then,” said Dot.
But the girl didn’t know how to play, and Dot hadn’t enough voice to explain. By the time she had, they’d moved the girl away to another ward. Dot didn’t see her again.
Gloria came every day, just as she had for Baby.
“Mustn’t stay long,” she said, giving Dot’s hand a little squeeze. “I’ve started this little job, see, pet. Ooh, your hand, it ain’t half skinny. I’ll have to call you spindle-shanks if you let yourself get any thinner!”
She was usherette at the Essoldo cinema, showing people to their seats. “Matinees only. I get to see all the films. Well, it helps pass the time. I’m saving a bit up for when your old man gets home. To Have and Have Not, that’s showing now. Ooh, it’s a lovely one!”
Gloria’s lipstick was brighter than ever, and she had a fitted red two-piece with ESSOLDO embroidered in cream on the top pocket.
“Being a good girl, aren’t you, ducky? Saying please and thank you? Don’t want to hear no tales told about you from them nice nurses. You eat up your dinners, too.”
Where her tooth had fallen out a sturdy new one was forcing its way up, with frilled edges and ridged from top to bottom. Dot asked Gloria for the powder compact she kept in her bag. When she looked in the little round mirror, she saw that she wasn’t falling to pieces. She was turning into a different person with a different face.
After Gloria had gone, lying in her cot with nothing to do, nothing to look at, Dot told herself about the hens laying in the country. She went into the henhouse and looked at their eggs. She thought she saw the Germans still working in the fields, and now they were picking up potatoes from the muddy ground. But perhaps she’d never really been there at all. Perhaps she’d just imagined it, like she’d imagined the pallid papery men buried in the walls.
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