A Family Recipe

by Veronica Henry

  ‘It hasn’t been on the news properly,’ Ivy told her. She had ventured out to talk to the neighbours. ‘In case the Germans hear and start getting all cocky. But the word is there’s hundreds dead and half of Bath flattened.’

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ said Jilly. ‘But you’re right. We must go and help.’ She stood up. ‘Let’s face it, the worst has already happened. And there’s people out there who need us.’

  It should have been a glorious spring day, a day to lift your heart and listen to the birds sing. But as Ivy and Jilly walked down the hill, their arms linked for comfort, the truth of what had happened the night before dragged their hearts down into their boots.

  There was no rhyme or reason to the devastation. A terrace of houses would stand true but for one house razed to the ground in their midst. The air was acrid with burning and thick with ochre brick dust mixed with soot. Everyone was subdued but determined. Determined to restore order. Yet underlying that determination was the fear the Germans would return the next night and wreak yet more havoc. There was no way of knowing whether they would or they wouldn’t. It was a game. A game of cat and mouse.

  There were people everywhere, but there was a kind of grace to the activity, a sense of purpose. There was a hierarchy of helpers, from firemen putting out blazes, their long ladders perched four storeys up, down to messenger boys who flew through the streets on their bicycles, puffed up with pride at the import of relaying vital information. People who had lost their homes had teams of neighbours helping them to retrieve what they could from the wreckage. Everyone they spoke to had a story to tell: of a narrow escape – or no escape. The bombs did not discriminate, it seemed. The homes of the rich took as many hits as the homes of the poor, from the gracious curves of the crescents to the Georgian slums piled up by the town centre.

  They walked on further into the centre of the town. Cats coiled themselves among the debris on an eternal hunt for mice and rats. Houses stood with their fronts peeled away: there were walls inside with the pictures still hanging on them; a mantelpiece with a clock still telling the right time. A piano stood on the pavement, saved from the wreckage but with nowhere to go. Ivy ran her fingers up and down the keys, plink-plonking an unidentifiable tune.

  ‘Don’t!’ said Jilly, feeling it was disrespectful.

  Ivy nodded to the ruined house it must have come from. ‘They won’t have any need for it now.’

  Jilly pulled her on.

  They went into a church hall that had been commandeered as a rest centre. Volunteers were pumping endless cups of tea from urns, sustaining the dazed and the injured while they waited for guidance. It felt surprisingly calm and ordered, with just the occasional crying child indicating something was amiss. It was as if no one wanted the Germans to know the chaos they had caused.

  ‘We’re here to help,’ Ivy told a woman with a clipboard who seemed to be in charge.

  ‘Are you any good at administration?’ She looked at them both.

  ‘Not me,’ said Ivy. ‘I’m a hairdresser. But I’m not afraid of blood.’

  ‘I am. I work for my father. He’s a doctor.’ Jilly stepped forward, then realised she should have said was. Was a doctor.

  ‘Excellent. We need people to help co-ordinate accommodation. We’ve got hundreds of people without a place to stay. We need you to take names and details; size of family; where they would like to be billeted. Not that there’s much choice.’ She looked at Ivy. ‘You can help in the kitchen. They’re sending soup over from Bristol, but it will need heating up again.’

  Jilly watched Ivy in admiration as she went about her task. She seemed undaunted by the situation. It was almost as if she was handing out teas at the village fete. Her chirpy, cheery attitude put a smile on people’s faces even amidst the loss. Ivy was truly kind, thought Jilly, even though she was as tough as boots and took some getting used to. She supposed working as a hairdresser taught you how to talk to people, and Ivy always said the stories her customers told her were beyond belief.

  ‘Honestly – it would make your hair curl! Sometimes I think I don’t need perming lotion.’

  Jilly busied herself with taking names and addresses, murmuring her commiserations when talking to people who had lost someone. The only advantage was she didn’t have a moment to think of her own loss. All that spurred her on was the thought that her parents would want her to be doing this. She wondered how many of these people were her father’s patients. She recognised a few of them, but didn’t tell them the sad news. She hadn’t yet spoken of it to anyone. And there were people who were worse off than she was. People who had lost their homes as well as loved ones. People who had lost children.

  Cars, trucks and wagons arrived to drive people off to their temporary accommodation. Gradually the queues subsided and as dusk approached the city became quieter. There was a palpable tension.

  Would the bombers come back?

  Bath was as vulnerable as a newborn baby, with no anti-aircraft to defend her. But what could anyone do? They just had to sit tight.

  As dusk approached, Ivy and Jilly left the church hall to make their way home. Never had Lansdown Hill seemed so steep. It was always a tough climb; although Jilly had done it every day on her way home from school, it still made her calves scream. But today it seemed interminable. They barely spoke, just put their heads down and walked on. The impact of the night before and everything they had seen that day was sinking in.

  Jilly both longed for and dreaded going home. It was where she wanted to be: in the kitchen, chewing on a piece of bread and dripping and making up a hot-water bottle. But the empty chairs at the table, the absence of her father’s pipe smoke, without her mother turning up the wireless because she was deaf in one ear after her brother shoved a dried pea in it when she was small … how was she going to bear it? She looked sideways at Ivy, whose painted eyebrows were drawn in towards each other in a scowl of fury.

  ‘What is it?’ Jilly asked, though her question seemed superfluous.

  ‘Everything,’ Ivy replied. ‘It’s everything and I feel as if there’s nothing I can do. I wish I had a Spitfire. I’d fly it over the sea and drop a bomb on Hitler while he’s having his dinner.’ Her little fists were clenched as if she was holding the controls. Jilly wanted to laugh. Ivy would be a fierce and deadly fighter pilot, she was sure of that.

  And for a moment, yet again, she had a flickering image of a boy – no, a man – wrapped in sheepskin, auburn hair flying back in the wind, his face intent on his mission, his determination to defend his country …

  He was gone, she reminded herself. Harry Swann had never happened to her. He wasn’t going to swoop in like a hero and gather her up in his arms. He wouldn’t come to find her because he didn’t know her name or where she lived – they hadn’t talked about that kind of detail.

  Harry Swann had been a mirage. That was all.

  Jilly rushed out to feed the hens when they got home, before the light went. They were still there, roosting in their little wooden house, just half a dozen of them, but they’d laid a few eggs, despite the horrors of the night before. Hens didn’t understand war, it seemed. Jilly gave them some feed, shut them away safe from the fox, then brought the eggs in, putting them gently in the basket on the dresser, a little reminder that life went on. Then she went back out to feed Mungo.

  Mungo had been given to her father by a patient as a thank you for lancing a tricky boil. The farmer had assured him that when the time came he would do the necessary and they would never want for bacon or sausages or pork chops. But Mungo turned out to be something of an extravagance: pig feed was expensive and scarce (the ships that feed came in on were given over to munitions), and the current fashion for kitchen economy meant there were few leftover scraps to be boiled up for his consumption. Jilly suspected that it had suited the farmer to get rid of him in a gesture disguised as generosity. Since then Mungo had gone from a potential food source to a much-loved pet whose good nature melted everyone’s heart. He w
as good at listening, Mungo. Half an hour spent chatting to him in the sunshine, scratching his back with a stick, could restore anyone’s spirits.

  Mungo lay half in and half out of the brick piggery that had been built to celebrate his arrival. It was tucked away at the very end of the garden, so his piggy smell wouldn’t waft up and bother the neighbours. Being at the end of Lark Hill, the plot at Number 11 was the biggest and the longest, and her parents had done their best to turn it into a small market garden worthy of a country estate in an attempt to be almost self-sufficient. Jilly had watched her father dig up his beloved dahlias and rose bushes and throw them on the compost heap, to make room for rows of carrots and cabbages and potatoes.

  ‘Oh, Mungo,’ she said. He stared at her with wise eyes through ginger lashes and gave a gentle knowing grunt, and in that moment she knew he would never adorn her plate, no matter how tight things got. He was an expensive luxury, but somehow he embodied the spirit of her father, and because of that he had earned his reprieve.

  That evening, the two girls made their way up to bed early, exhausted and grubby.

  The city was on high alert after last night’s raids, but there was no point in sitting and waiting for the next one. They’d hear the warning soon enough, and in the meantime it was important to try and get some sleep. They didn’t get undressed, in case they had to get up. It was almost inevitable that they would. The Germans would have got the layout of the city from their mission the night before and have a better idea of what targets to hit. The railway, perhaps. Or the Abbey, one of the grander crescents or the Circus. No one could be sure if they would go for the useful bits or the pretty bits. Jilly imagined a room full of Nazi officers poring over a map. She shuddered as she pictured a nicotine-stained finger prodding at potential targets. They were ruthless but, of course, so had Britain been. War was dirty. War was about doing the unexpected and taking people by surprise; a battle of wits and nerves.

  Bath was prepared tonight. Hundreds of people had left the city already, begging a bed with friends or family in the countryside or even further afield, not willing to take the risk. Everyone else stood their ground.

  ‘We can’t all be cowards,’ said Ivy. ‘That’s what they want, everyone running around like headless chickens. I’m not afraid. Balls to Hitler, I say. He’s not going to win. He thinks he will, but he won’t. I’ll tell him if he wants.’

  Despite her mood, Jilly couldn’t help laughing at the thought of the Führer confronted by Ivy. She knew who she’d put money on.

  ‘I might as well sleep with you,’ said Ivy as they brushed their teeth and combed the dust out of their hair in the bathroom. ‘I don’t like to think of you on your own. But I’ll have no snivelling and no snoring.’

  Jilly didn’t like to protest that she would rather be on her own. She had a feeling that Ivy would probably wriggle in her sleep, with all that restless energy. But she knew she was being kind, and it didn’t have to be for ever, so she didn’t shun her offer.

  And when she started drifting off to sleep and the tears started to come, she was grateful for the warm little hand that patted her, and Ivy’s comforting whispers.

  10

  Laura had lain awake until five after Kanga sent her to bed, replaying yesterday’s horrible events, then had fallen into a deep sleep until she woke with a burning in her stomach – a nauseating slurry of panic and sadness and bewilderment and, oddly, shame. Why did she feel shame when she’d done nothing wrong?

  The bed was cold and empty. She remembered a song from her youth, ‘The Bed’s Too Big Without You’. She lay there with the lyrics going round and round in her head, realising that she had never slept in this bed without Dom, never woken up without his solid warmth beside her. The only time they’d slept apart since they’d got married was when Laura slept at the hospital.

  She wondered where Dom had slept last night, then thought she didn’t want to know. Was he snuggled up gleefully with his brief? Telling her it was all going to work out in the end, that Laura would survive …

  Her phone pinged. It made her heart jump. Was it Dom? Willow? She grabbed it.

  Sadie: So how did it go yesterday with Willow? All settled in?

  She texted back.

  Laura: It was fine. Until I found out Dom’s been screwing his solicitor.

  Sadie: WTF? Actually really?

  Laura: Yep.

  Sadie: OMG. I’ll be with you in ten.

  Laura knew she could share her revelation with Sadie and it would stay with her. They had been best friends since they had sat together in the back of the Maths class at school. Sadie would bring in fashion magazines and they’d leaf through Vogue and Harpers and Queen, sighing over the couture dresses and ignoring their quadratic equations. Laura had always been convinced Sadie would jet off to Paris or London as soon as her exams were done with, but to her surprise she had stayed in Bath, starting out selling velvet scarves and diamanté earrings on a market stall. Despite their different lifestyles, they were firm friends and shared all their secrets. Laura had spent many an evening mopping up Sadie’s tears after a relationship disaster.

  It would be strange for the boot to be on the other foot.

  Quarter of an hour later, Laura opened the front door, still in her pyjamas, her hair tangled, her feet bare. Sadie swept in with the fresh autumn air, wearing calf-length pinstriped trousers over high boots and a red polo-neck sweater, her white-blonde bob artfully messy. She threw her arms round Laura’s neck, her silver bangles clanking.

  ‘Where is he?’ she hissed in a stage whisper. ‘Is he here?’

  ‘No way.’ Laura shut the door and padded back into the kitchen.

  ‘You’ve kicked him out?’

  ‘Well, not kicked him out, because he wasn’t here when I found out. I just left him at the service station and he didn’t come back.’

  ‘Oh my God. Where did he stay last night?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue.’ Laura flicked on the kettle. She was trying hard not to sound as if she cared too much.

  ‘How did you find out?’

  Laura mimed her thumbs texting with a wry face.

  ‘A text? What a cliché.’

  ‘Actually, it wasn’t just that. A girl at the service station overheard him talking to her, then told me. Repeated their entire conversation.’

  Sadie winced. ‘That’s terrible! But I can’t believe it. Dom? He just doesn’t seem like the type.’

  ‘I know.’ Laura sat down at the table. ‘I feel such an idiot.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to talk to him about it?’

  ‘I can’t face it.’

  ‘But you have to.’

  ‘I don’t. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to sit there and listen to his reasons and his justifications and his excuses. What can he say that will make me feel better about it? Your arse was getting a bit big so I fancied a skinnier version? You’re getting a bit boring and I wanted some stimulating conversation? There’s nothing he can say that will make me go Oh, OK, I get it. No problem. Come home and let’s try again.’ She looked at the dresser. ‘Bugger. There’s no mugs.’

  ‘Where are they all?’ Sadie looked askance at the empty hooks – there were usually at least six mugs hanging there.

  Laura looked shamefaced.

  ‘In hundreds of tiny pieces in the bin. I smashed them all last night.’

  ‘What? Laura! What did you do that for?’

  Sadie was shocked. Laura was always so placid.

  Laura got up and burrowed about in one of the dresser cupboards for some spares.

  ‘Because I was furious. Because I didn’t know what else to do. Because I wanted to slice his balls off. And feed them to whatever-her-name-is.’ Sadie winced as Laura banged two cups down on the work surface. ‘Sorry. I’m ranting. But I think I’m allowed to rant.’

  ‘Of course you are. I’ve just never seen you like this before.’ It was true. Laura was always first to see both sides of the story. She was always ca
lm and measured and quick to pour oil on troubled waters. ‘So who is she?’

  ‘Antonia Briggs. Have you heard of her?’ Sadie knew everyone who was anyone in Bath, but she shook her head. ‘She works at Kettle and Sons. She does Dom’s conveyancing. He’s known her for a while, I think.’

  Sadie wrinkled her nose. ‘A solicitor? She must be as dull as ditchwater.’

  ‘Presumably not as dull as me.’ Laura looked at Sadie, her eyebrows raised as she spooned fresh coffee into the pot.

  ‘No one thinks you’re dull, Laura.’

  ‘Then why? What’s the attraction?’

  ‘I don’t know. How long’s it been going on?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea.’

  ‘Loz, you’ve got to talk to him. Get to the bottom of it. Maybe there’s been a misunderstanding?’

  ‘What – you mean he accidentally shagged her?’

  ‘Are you sure he actually has been? Maybe they’re just …?’ Sadie sighed, knowing she was being unrealistic.

  ‘Just what? Sade, it was written all over his face. He looked properly guilty.’ Laura poured water onto the coffee. ‘It’s so unfair. I’m supposed to be moving into the next phase of my life. I’ve got loads of great ideas for things I want to do. Things for me. And us. But I can’t think about any of it.’

  ‘I know, darling. But this is just a blip. Loads of people have blips.’

  ‘A blip? I’ve put Dom and everyone else in my life first for over twenty years and he does this to me? That’s not a blip. Antonia bloody Briggs is not a blip.’

  Laura forced the plunger of the cafetière down. Hot coffee spilled over the edge, scalding her hand. She grabbed a tea towel and wiped off the boiling liquid and felt hot tears threaten to spill over too. She was not going to cry. She was not going to turn into the archetypal wronged wife: a blubbering mess. She was not going to be a cliché, like her husband.