Rising Summer

by Mary Jane Staples

  Mail arrived sporadically. Aunt May kept writing. And Kit answered all my letters. She gave me news of her life as it was at the moment. By the spring of 1944, she was a lieutenant. She didn’t make a big thing of it, she made much more of a suggestion that she knew would buck me up no end. She suggested, in fact, that if I managed to get home on leave our marriage could take place. In my reply I told her that that suggestion was as good as a Christmas present. I thought about her often, not so much while we were in action, but during the mucky boring slogs.

  I thought about Aunt May too and kept wondering why she couldn’t or wouldn’t make up her mind about Bill. I was sure her feelings for him were special.

  Frisby said that Italy and Hitler and the Jerries were all making a mess of his nerves. He had Cecily on his mind and why not? Cecily was lovable. He suggested in a mad moment to the sergeant-major that if only General Montgomery would push all ack-ack units forward to within touching distance of the Jerries, we could go in and surrender. The sergeant-major did a Queen Victoria act, but in more ferocious terms.

  I got no reply from Jim or Missus to my letter. I fancied neither was much of a letter-writer. I wondered if Minnie was still going steady with her RAF bloke. I hoped she’d got her sparkle back.

  The Allies slogged on into spring and then into summer. I was prodded awake one morning. My head came out from under a blanket on the floor of a bomb-damaged house on the outskirts of a village. Major Moffat, his ruggedness a bit leaner, took the toe of his brown boot from out of my ribs.

  ‘Who’s this inert lump, Sergeant-Major?’ he asked.

  Sergeant-Major Baldwin said smartly, ‘Can’t tell, sir. Not under all that hair. Might be Lance-Bombardier Hardy.’

  ‘What a sight,’ said Major Moffat, ‘the bugger’s not even shaved. Why’s that?’

  ‘Answer up,’ said the sergeant-major.

  ‘It’s not reveille yet, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Has this NCO been present and correct ever since we embarked?’ asked the major.

  ‘God knows,’ said the sergeant-major, ‘but he’s here now.’

  ‘Yes, present and correct, sir,’ I said, coming to my feet.

  A German shell struck then, about two hundred yards away, pre-empting reveille. It got men out of their pits at lightning speed. The major didn’t turn a hair. I think he liked war. I think he thought everyone should.

  ‘Don’t stand about gawping, Bombardier Hardy, move yourself,’ he said and that was how he advised me of my further promotion. Another shell landed. It blew up an already damaged house and the house collapsed in a riotous welter of disintegrating bricks. Clouds of smoke and dusk spewed upwards. I moved myself and later I sewed on my second stripe. And Frisby was given his first stripe.

  Italy continued to be a hell of a grind, but Rome was eventually taken and the GIs swarmed all over the Eternal City, asking why the Colosseum hadn’t been repaired. Shortly afterwards the invasion of Normandy took place and in July the regiment was transferred to France.

  Just before that came about, I received a letter from Bill. He’d got my army address from Aunt May, having told her he’d like to drop me a line sometime. His letter was all about the fact that she was ill with some kind of stomach complaint that kept recurring and was obviously causing her pain. He had had to bully her into admitting it had been going on for some months, that the doctor had finally made her go to King’s College Hospital for an examination and that the hospital, after the examination, had made a date for her to have an operation. She was going in tomorrow wrote Bill and he was getting time off from work to take her himself. She didn’t want me to know but Bill said he thought I ought to know. In your place, he said, I’d want to. He said he’d let me know how the operation went, then gave me his regards and signed off.

  It left me worrying myself sick about what she was suffering from exactly.

  I spoke to Sergeant-Major Baldwin about being allowed compassionate leave. He grimaced.

  ‘Not now, Bombardier Hardy, not now,’ he said.

  ‘Have a word with Major Moffat, Sergeant-Major.’

  ‘Sorry, not a chance and he wouldn’t wear it, anyway, you know that. It’s only an operation and only your aunt.’

  ‘She’s as good as a mother to me.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the sergeant-major gruffly, ‘it’s no go.’

  So I was left with nothing but worry.

  Two days later, when we were lining up on the quayside of an Italian port and about to embark, further mail was distributed to the regiment. There were three letters for me. I recognized the handwriting on two of them. Aunt May’s and Kit’s. The third I didn’t recognize, but the postmark was Sudbury, Suffolk. There was too much going on for me to read any of the letters in peace, so I waited until we were established aboard a troopship. I opened Aunt May’s first.

  ‘Dear Tim,

  I thought I’d better write and tell you the news. I wasn’t going to, I didn’t want you to worry, but I decided I’d better. First, it’s this silly tummy of mine, it’s been playing me up, so I’m going into King’s College Hospital tomorrow, they gave me an examination and X-ray last week.

  ‘I’ll be all right, I’m sure, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately. There’s things I ought to tell you now you’re a grown man and know a lot about life. I don’t know I’m doing the right thing, though, they say it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie, don’t they? But I don’t think I should keep secrets for ever, I think you ought to know just who you are, though I don’t want to hurt you.’

  I read on, mesmerized by the words that came to my eyes from several sheets of writing paper. At the end, I was far from hurt, I just felt a great wave of deep affection for her and my whole being was concentrated on a desperate wish for her to come out of that hospital alive and recovered, because I knew exactly why she had written this letter. She felt, or she’d been told, that at the most the operation was only going to give her a fifty-fifty chance. So she’d decided to tell me who she was and who I was.

  It was all there, the story. In 1917, when she was thirteen and her brother Leonard twenty-one, she was a bridesmaid at his wedding to a lovely young lady, Edith Palmer. He was home on leave from Flanders. Afterwards he went back to the trenches, but was invalided out early in 1918 because of the results of serious wounds. He recovered, he pushed himself like a Trojan and his wife Edith was a loving help to him. He managed to get a decent job. Aunt May, still at school, went to see them often, being very attached to her brother and liking her sister-in-law Edith very much.

  But early in 1920, just before she was sixteen, an awful thing happened. She developed an intense girlish crush on a young man, a lodger with neighbours next door to her home in New Cross. It was her first crush and a fateful one and she fell headlong into the trap set by emotions and the devil-may-care charm of the young man. The consequences were a dreadful shock to her family and appalling to herself. She nearly died when she realized she was going to have a baby.

  At a family conference, a solution was offered by her brother Leonard and his wife. Because of the original nature of Leonard’s wounds, it wasn’t possible for him to father children, so willingly they would take the unwanted baby immediately it was born, register it as their own and bring it up as their own. Its real father had disappeared. Aunt May, now sixteen, begged her parents to agree. They did more, they helped to arrange it all with Leonard and his wife. Three months before the baby was due, Aunt May and her sister-in-law went to stay in a rented flat in a house in Brighton, where Leonard visited them on Sundays. Mr and Mrs Hardy senior visited once a month, getting a friend to look after their shop on those occasions. A careful eye was kept on Aunt May and her condition, her mother giving her all kinds of helpful advice and Edith a great deal of companionship and affection. Aunt May endured her nine months in remarkably healthy fashion and when the critical time arrived, her mother was there, as well as Edith. Her mother took her to the hospital in a taxi at just about the right time. She was wearin
g a wedding ring. Her mother asked for her to be admitted to the maternity wing, giving her name as Edith Margaret Hardy, her daughter-in-law, eighteen years old. She was ready to field questions, but the hospital made no fuss. Aunt May was already in pain and she was admitted immediately. A nurse, writing down details given by Aunt May’s mother, including the patient’s address which was Lewisham, asked who her doctor was. Mrs Hardy senior said you’ll never believe this, but the poor girl never ever realized she was pregnant, she simply complained she was getting fat. The nurse smiled and said that wasn’t the first case of that kind.

  The baby arrived several hours later, the hospital recorded the birth, and the certificate was subsequently issued by the registrar in Brighton to Leonard and Edith Hardy. The baby was a boy and was registered as Timothy Edward. They all returned to London a week after the birth. Edith and Leonard happily took the infant to their home in Lewisham, for Edith had told friends and neighbours months ago that she was expecting. Aunt May stayed a week with them, saw the delight her brother and sister-in-law had in the baby, and then went home to her parents in New Cross, relinquishing all claim on the child. After all, it was still in the family.

  She and her parents visited and she watched it grow into a healthy three-year-old boy. He was with her parents one Saturday afternoon when Leonard and Edith were braving the Christmas crowds in London’s West End, buying presents. The train carrying them to New Cross, where they were to pick up the boy, hurtled into collision with another and they were among the tragic casualties.

  ‘The rest you know, Tim, except for the fact that I always stuck to being eighteen at the time of your birth. I felt, she said, that if you ever did find out you were my son, I just didn’t want you to know I was a silly silly schoolgirl at the time and to think of me as young and tarty. I wanted you to think more of me than that, so I invented that soldier and a romance with him to make you think he was your father if you did find out I was your mother. Have I hurt you by telling you all this? I hope not because of all you’ve meant to me during our years together. Take care. All my love, Aunt May.’

  But she wasn’t my Aunt May. She was Mum. I’d have been tickled pink if I hadn’t had the operation on my mind. The date on the letter meant it had taken place three weeks ago. I wouldn’t know whether she had come safely out of it or not until we got to France and then any letter from her or Bill would be delayed because of our move from Italy. I was sick at the thought of carrying my worry about with me for an indefinite time, sick to my eyebrows.

  I should have found Kit’s letter a consolation, because it was so warm and affectionate. Absence can loosen ties and change feelings, but there was no change in Kit’s. The Allies were going to win the war, she said, there was no way they couldn’t and it will all be over by Christmas. She was making the best kind of plans for the wedding and for our future. She was due for some well-earned leave, she’d had none for months prior to D-Day and for weeks since. She was going to write to my Aunt May and arrange to call and meet her. Keep the mail coming, she said, I worry if there’s too much of a gap.

  That was a bit heart-breaking, her intention to call on Aunt May – my newly-confessed mother – at this moment in our lives. She might, in any case, receive no answer to her letter. She might never receive one. The realization made it difficult to feel consolation in all that Kit wrote.

  I opened the third letter. The troopship, crammed with men and their equipment, was under way. Minnie had written, young Minnie, the girl who had gone off me because I hadn’t been any real help to her when she’d wanted to be my girl. She wrote hoping I was well, that her mum and dad wanted to thank me for my letter and had meant to write back, but they weren’t much good at writing letters. She said they were still going strong, that some nosy person from the Ministry of Food had been round to see her dad about him registering as an egg producer, would you believe. Her dad had talked to him until the nosy parker didn’t know if he was coming or going, but he still left her dad a form to fill in. Then Mr Ford had come home on leave and Mrs Ford was going about looking very pleased with life, especially as Mr Ford had put his foot down with young Wally Ricketts and given him a thick ear. Minnie gave me other bits of news about the village, just in case I was interested, she said, although she didn’t suppose I was. Still, her mum and dad wanted to be remembered to me. She signed herself, ‘Yours truly, M. Beavers.’

  M. Beavers? She really had gone off me. I felt a twinge, but it was hardly important now. Aunt May. No wonder her one mistake had taught her to rate behaviour.

  We were on the move south of Falaise and in the heat of August. We halted to await further orders. The Germans were in retreat, the skies relatively clear, the fading Luftwaffe looking for new landing grounds. I’d had a letter from Kit. She hadn’t had her expected leave, she’d been transferred to American Headquarters in London and was working round the clock. But she’d written to my Aunt May she said and was waiting for a reply.

  I was waiting myself for a letter from home. None had come.

  A supply truck from Brigade arrived in the middle of the afternoon, when we were brewing up by the roadside in Eighth Army fashion. Among other things, the truck brought delayed mail. In that mail was a letter from Bill, weeks old.

  ‘Dear Tim,

  I’m glad to write to you, old son. What a turn-up for the book as we used to say in my outfit and your Aunt May’s just beginning to see the funny side of it herself. It’s a strain on her stitches. She’s had her appendix out. That was the cause of it all, her appendix, nagging, niggling and giving her gip, but I don’t know how the devil the doctor and the hospital didn’t cotton on to it. What a lot of blind old Aunt Sallies, they need things being chucked at them.

  When I received your reply, just before your aunt went into hospital, I guessed you were thinking the same as me about what was wrong with her. I asked some questions after the operation and it seems it wasn’t until the surgeon opened her up that they found the trouble. Her appendix was a mess, to put it bluntly. What luck they took her in when they did, another week would really have been serious. It was a close-run thing, Tim, believe me. But she’s sitting up now, well, near enough she is and by tomorrow I think she’ll be as lively as a cricket. But they won’t discharge her until they’ve taken the stitches out, which will be in a few days.

  I let her know I’d written to you, spilling the beans about her operation and she said she’d written to tell you herself, after all. Then she said she shouldn’t have told you anything and looked upset. I said not to worry, that it was right for you to know, that you wouldn’t have liked it if you’d been kept in the dark. But she had a quiet five minutes about it and then visiting time was up.

  Well, Tim, I know the news will cheer you up, it’s cheered me up a hell of a lot. Good on you, old son, keep after the Jerries, you’ve got them on the run now.

  Sincerely, Bill.’

  I felt Aunt May – she still came to my mind as Aunt May – hadn’t meant she shouldn’t have told me about hospitalization. She meant, I was sure, that she shouldn’t have told me her life story. But with the operation to face and suspecting the worst, she’d gone over the top for once in her adult life. She’d be fretting now because she’d told me I was the son of an unwed mother, a schoolgirl at the time. God, Minnie as a schoolgirl had frightened me.

  One thing I could tell this mother of mine, one thing that was quite true, that I wasn’t in the least upset about how conventional society would see me. She was alive, she’d only had her appendix out and I had an extraordinary giddy feeling at knowing she was my mother. Who wouldn’t?

  ‘Bombardier Hardy!’ Captain Marsh was shouting at me. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘No idea, sir. What am I doing?’ I was dancing on top of a Bren carrier.

  Major Moffat broke through ranks of grinning, dusty men and looked up at me. ‘Gone off your clever head at last, have you, Bombardier Hardy?’

  ‘Only for the moment, sir. News from home. A ver
y close relative of mine had a baby.’

  ‘Get down, you clot,’ he said. I climbed down. ‘You pancake,’ he said, ‘I’ll chop your legs off next time you behave like that.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Still, it was good news.’

  Life was worth living again. The war wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot, but Kit was right, there was no way we could lose it now.

  In France, Frisby felt much nearer to Cecily than in Italy and Cecily was still faithful. Moreover, she felt she belonged really to our tight little island. Remembering her paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Martin and that she had been born in Somerset, she had been to Midsomer Norton, the birthplace, and actually discovered the graves of her grandmother’s parents, and her aunt and uncle. She was tickled to death and she told Frisby in one of her many letters that she felt this gave her a rightful stake in the buttercups and daisies of England.

  ‘How about that?’ asked Frisby, having related the news.

  ‘You realize what it means, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t get funny,’ said Frisby.

  ‘It means Cecily’s a romantic, a genuine woman and you’re a lucky old sweatbag.’

  *

  A letter from Aunt May herself, at last, which I received at the beginning of September. I’d written to her after receiving the glad tidings from Bill and I’d told her at length that the only thing that mattered to me was the happy fact of knowing she was me mum. That’s it, I said, nothing else is important, nothing is a worry to me. But I suggested we should keep it to ourselves. After all these years, what was the point of turning her background upside-down? You know and I know, I said, nobody else has to know. It’s our secret and it’s one secret that’s in the happy file. I asked was it that and the suspected nature of her illness that kept her from giving Bill his answer? If so, do some more thinking.