by Fern Britton
‘Even though I lost you your room, and this place is so much further from your work?’
‘Yes.’
‘I just want you to feel safe.’
‘I know.’
‘And do you?’
‘Safer than I have ever felt in my life.’
We spent that night putting out our few belongings and moving the bed (larger than we were used to) to a position where we could take full advantage of the garden view.
As the sun set, we lit one of the two gas lamps and lay in bed watching as the bats in the garden came out, catching insects on the wing.
I made love to her gently. Her body, so thin, but still warm and yielding. I never wanted to leave that room. Never.
But, early the next morning, I had to leave her. I had a ticket for the first train out of Paddington for Callyzion and my parents.
I climbed out of bed and washed and dressed while Clara still slept. She was lying peacefully in our muddled sheets, her long hair loose, strands curling on the pillow, and one hand flung above her head.
How could I go?
I took her a cup of tea and roused her. ‘Darling.’ I stroked her sleepy cheek. ‘Clara, would you come to Cornwall with me?’
‘Of course I will,’ she murmured with half-closed eyes.
I checked my watch. ‘Can you be up and ready to go in half an hour?’
‘What do you mean?’ She leant on one elbow and pushed her hair from her face.
‘We should just make it if we leave soon.’ I gave her the tea and kissed her nose. ‘Ma and Pa will be so surprised.’
‘No. I can’t come to Cornwall today.’ She smiled at me lazily. ‘You silly thing. I meant I’ll come when they know about me. You haven’t seen them for months. They will want you to themselves.’
‘Please?’ I pleaded.
‘No darling. You must see your family by yourself or they will hate me for taking you from them.’
I bent over her and kissed her. ‘I will talk of nothing but you while I am there.’
‘Good.’ She put her arms around my neck and pulled me back to her lips. Desire sprang in me as I freed her breasts from the sheet and her small fingers worked at the buttons of my shirt. ‘Just once more,’ she whispered. ‘And then you can go.’
Chapter Twelve
Clara, London
2 August–October 1916
Bertie went to Cornwall this morning. We have been lovers for only a week, but those days have been an eternity of bliss. My life at last has meaning and purpose. I have someone who has provided me with a roof over my head and a reason to be the person I always wanted to be. I can hold my head high and tell the world I am loved by a man, a brave man, a soldier. When this bloody war is over, we will marry and I shall be the wife of a plantation manager. I shall travel the high seas to the Orient and be his strength. His missing piece of the jigsaw. Together we will build a life and a family and I shall never know loneliness or hardship again. I just had to get through being alone, in our adorable little home, and to wait for the war to be over.
I met Elsie in a Covent Garden teashop later that day. She was agog with my banishment from the boarding house and wanted to know everything.
When I arrived, she was waiting and greeted me warmly.
‘Darling, Clara, are you OK?’
‘I am.’
We quickly ordered our tea and buttered teacakes and I told her my story. I don’t know why, but I found myself embroidering the truth, although there was no need.
‘The Old Dragon told me about finding you in a compromising situation.’ Elsie’s eyes were wide with questions. ‘Who was he?’
‘My fiancé.’ That was the first fib. Why did I say it? Wishful thinking?
‘You dark horse!’ Elsie grinned. ‘Why have you never told me about him?’
‘His parents. They are rather well-off. Gentry in Cornwall.’ Another slight colouring of their circumstances. ‘They may think I am a gold-digger. After all, I have nothing.’
Elsie was affronted on my behalf. ‘You? The sweetest, gentlest woman I know? And anyway, you come from wealthy landowner stock yourself. Probably of better blood than them.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to talk about my parents and their sad end,’ I said quietly, pouring us each a cup of tea. ‘The fire was terrible, but them losing all their money …’
She nodded sadly, then frowned. ‘I thought you said all the money went to your uncle and he gave you your education as your inheritance?’
I put my tea cup down to give me time to think. ‘Oh yes. Quite so. He was very generous, but my poor parents, what I meant to say was that they lost everything, if you see what I mean.’ I looked her square in the eye and saw that she believed me. I used to ask myself why I did this – but after a while the lies got easier and I wanted to believe them. I remembered my mother always saying, as she pocketed any coin she found, or pilfered, ‘Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.’ I saw myself once more as the dirty, straggle-haired, shoeless girl I had been, and still was, deep down. A girl not worthy of decent work, a place to live, a man to love her. I clenched my hands under the table as unwanted tears stung my eyes. If Bertie knew my lies, he would run a mile. I was not worthy of him.
‘Clara. Clara!’ Elsie was shaking my arm. ‘Darling. I have upset you. I am so sorry.’
She spoke the same words Bertie had the night before when he said the apple tree in our garden would remind me of my ‘home’. I should have told him then and there the truth about who I really was. What a fraud I am. ‘Be sure your sins will find you out,’ my mother had warned. I screwed my eyes against the tears that threatened to spill.
Elsie was passing me a handkerchief. ‘Here, darling. Take this. I have smelling salts in my bag if you need.’
I composed myself. ‘I must apologise. I am fine.’
‘You poor darling,’ she cooed. ‘I am sure love will carry you through all his family nonsense. What is his name?’
‘Herbert. Second Lieutenant Herbert Bolitho.’ He wasn’t second lieutenant yet. I was lying again, so I corrected myself. ‘Well, he soon will be, after officer training.’
‘An officer! How romantic. Tall, dark and handsome?’
I nodded, wiped my eyes and drank some tea.
‘How marvellous!’ She clapped her hands. ‘How did you meet?’
I wanted her to think the best of me and I wanted to make myself the princess in the fairy tale. So, I told her the story, changing the timeline a little. Made it seem that we had known each other for ages, trying to keep our romance a secret until the war came to an end, whenever that may be. Elsie sighed wistfully. ‘Oh, it all sounds so wonderful and I am so happy for you both. When can I meet him?’
‘Not for a while. After Cornwall he has to go straight away to officer training. From there it is expected he will have to go immediately to France. He is very much missed by his men.’
‘And you,’ Elsie smiled, taking my hand across the tablecloth.
‘Yes. And me.’
‘Oh, but where are you living?’
I smiled, ‘He has many good friends, one of them owns a bank.’ I was trying not to sound as though I were bragging.
‘A bank?’ Elsie was agog.
I nodded my head, smiling broadly. ‘Isn’t that lucky? And he has properties and was able to rent us a dear little place, with a garden!’
Elsie fairly swooned. ‘A little place with a garden – oh but how heavenly.’
‘It is. And I have a real fire I can light on cold nights.’
‘How romantic. Where is it? Can I come to visit?’
‘It’s in Ealing, near the common,’ I finished proudly, then added with regret, ‘I shall have to ask Bertie if it’s OK. I think his friend may not allow it.’
Elsie might have had her cunning wiles with men, but she fell easily for my explanation.
‘Oh, I quite understand. Being a banker and all. He doesn’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry knowing his business, does he?’
I caught the waitress’s eye. ‘This tea is my treat.’ I took my purse from my bag. ‘But only if you promise not to breathe a word to anyone about Bertie, or Ealing.’
‘Mum’s the word,’ she said in earnest.
I had a letter from Bertie a few days later. He had had a mixed time with his parents. His mother wasn’t well and Amy, who had heard only in the last week that her sweetheart, Peter, was missing presumed killed in action, had joined the Land Army, working on a farm nearby, and her long hours meant she couldn’t do all her mother wanted of her. I felt enormous sympathy for her, especially when Bertie wrote that Amy had also discovered Peter had been writing to another girl in the village. There had been a huge upset, probably what had led to his mother taking to her bed, and Amy had decided to work her grief out on the land.
To add to this cauldron of domestic tension, Ernest, Bertie’s younger brother, had arrived in Aden, and was facing all sorts of horrors defending the harbour. Bertie had tried to bring them some cheer by telling them about me, but there had never been the right time to start the conversation.
I had to wait another four weeks before I saw him again, as he had travelled straight from Cornwall to Lichfield for officer training. In those four weeks I made our home in Ealing a sanctuary for him to return to. Each weekend our local church, St Stephen’s, held a second-hand sale to raise money for the war effort, and I began to haunt it, gleefully picking up two saucepans, a frying pan, some pretty unmatched plates, a teapot, a pair of bright curtains and lots of balls of wool. I would carry each find home and set about brightening up our room. My greatest find was a bag of scrap material which I fashioned into a patchwork quilt for our lovers’ bed.
Elsie kept asking to visit but I did not want her to see our home. It was ours, Bertie’s and mine. Private. Not to be shared by another’s thoughts or judgements. I told her that our landlord had refused my request.
I felt a little guilty but not enough. Elsie was a wonderful friend, but a friend who didn’t belong in our home. It was bad enough that she knew about Bertie, but she had kept her word and told nobody about him.
I loved my work and had had a small pay rise with another promotion to chief sub’s secretary, and I loved going home to our special place. Putting the key in the lock of our own door was heaven. I would make myself a tomato sandwich and take that, with a cup of tea, out into the garden, where I would sit in the August evening sun, knitting socks for Bertie and dreaming of him being home soon.
His letters were full of his training and full of longing for me. I held each one to my heart before and after I opened it. I would sleep with them under my pillow. My letters back, I filled with news of the office, my brilliant purchases and my yearning for him.
We both counted down the days to his return. Four weeks. Three weeks. Two weeks. Seven days. Twenty-four hours.
I felt I would die with the excitement and then, at last, he was standing before me. Wearing the kilt of his regiment, tanned and handsome. I could hardly breathe with the nervous excitement that rushed through me.
‘Hello,’ he said and kissed me. I led him into our room and made him a cup of tea. I needed that moment to feel real, to cut him a slice of cake, to pour him some tea. To walk around our little garden hand in hand, to show him the peas I was growing. Finally, I showed him our new patchwork quilt and he was home.
In that seventy-two hours we were never apart. No further than an arm stretch away. He took me to a concert at the Wigmore Hall and later we walked on Ealing Common. He gave me my silver cigarette case and I gave him three more pairs of warm socks, blue this time, that I had knitted. We were building our life together. Our dream. Our married life to come. A life after this bloody war. And we would go to Penang where I would never be found out as the liar I was. Or the poor, destitute girl I used to be.
The weekend flew by but I would recall every second over the years to come. In four more weeks he would be trained and I would be allowed to travel to Lichfield where there was a nice pub in which we could stay. ‘I will book it for Mr and Mrs Bolitho,’ he said as he held me for the last goodbye on the platform. ‘Because, in my heart, you are Clara Bolitho.’
Just four more weeks to get up, work, water my peas and knit, and we would be together again. He had managed to wangle a family ticket for me to see him pass out as ‘Second Lieutenant on Probation’. ‘I have told them my sister is coming,’ he said. ‘My sister, of whom I am inordinately fond.’
Neither of us spoke of France or the war.
On that morning he left, he made me a boiled egg with toast soldiers. He brought them to me in bed with a cup of tea. I felt queasy as soon as I had finished it all and had to run to the kitchen sink to be sick. He held my hair from my face and rubbed my back. We agreed it must have been a bad egg. The sickness went on for the next three weeks. Always in the morning and sometimes at night. I mentioned it to no one. It was just a bug.
Four weeks later and the bug had cleared up. I was relieved as I hadn’t wanted to travel all the way to Lichfield with the embarrassment of having to use the train’s public lavatory. He was waiting for me as I stepped off the train and I wept with the joy of feeling his arms around me. I wept as I watched him receive the honour of becoming The London Regiment Cadet Herbert Bolitho, Second Lieutenant on Probation. I wept when we made love and I wept as I folded his clothes and placed them on the end of the bed at the end of each of those three days. Then I wept as he put me on the train back to London. France was getting closer. By now we knew that fewer men came home and the ones who did were not the same men who had gone away. He had been told they could be sent any day now.
I clung to him and he to me, then he whispered, ‘Clara, will you wait for me?’
The stationmaster was walking the platform, slamming doors as he went. He was getting closer to us as I hurriedly replied, ‘Yes. Yes, I will wait for you, however long.’
The stationmaster was one door away from us. ‘All aboard,’ he shouted.
Bertie held my hand as I stepped onto the train and lifted my small bag up for me.
‘Shut the door, sir, please.’ The stationmaster had his whistle ready. ‘He’ll be back, miss, don’t you worry.’
He blew his shrill whistle, waved his flag and the train began to move. I hung out of the window and waved for as long as I could see my beloved, then wept all the way home.
I heard from him two weeks later. He was in France and his new officer’s pay meant that he could send half back to me to cover the rent and save as much as I possibly could, for when he came home.
He couldn’t tell me exactly where he was but it sounded grim. His battalion were all exhausted and in need of rest after weeks of brutal fighting. He described his position as being close to a wood, within which enemy snipers hid.
Bertie’s battalion had the dangerous job of digging a seven-foot-deep cable trench across a huge field in plain sight of the enemy. That week they had lost three men, picked off by the snipers like ducks in a shooting gallery.
Bertie had wired back to the command post some three miles away, to explain the danger and the profligate waste of three human lives, but the orders came back the same. ‘Keep digging.’
There was no protection from the constant rain, and they were again working in liquid mud. The trenches, sited at the bottom of a valley, were shallow and needed the communications cables. Every man worked with the enemy shelling them or shooting them, incessantly. Apart from one night, when they had discovered shelter in a bombed-out farmhouse. None of them had slept under shelter since he had arrived. Bertie wrote to me that night before he slept. ‘I cannot know the limits of human endurance. Many times I have thought we had nothing left to give and every time I am confounded.’
As I sat in the comfort of our Ealing home, the fire crackling in the grate, my heart broke for him. He finished his letter with this: ‘There are no men tougher than these. We each trust each other with our lives. We share everything to make certain no one has less
than the other. My socks are a source of much envy and, my darling, I must tell you that three English men are feeling the warmth of them tonight. This war must be over soon. It is not for want of bravery that it has not ended before. Thank God I have you. You are with me, always. Bertie xxxx’.
How do you reply to such a letter?
I began, and abandoned, many replies. What I wanted to shout, to scream, was ‘Come home.’ But I couldn’t ask for that, could I?
Could I tell him all the dreary tittle-tattle of office life and what I had for lunch, when he was living between life and death without a roof over his head? Could I complain that our garden was one big puddle when I was sitting cosily, eating warm soup in the comfort of our little room?
The other thing I couldn’t tell him was that I had missed two of my monthlies and that maybe the boiled egg hadn’t been bad after all.
I had to believe that he would be home by Christmas.
I fantasised about Christmas Eve. We would be sitting on the floor by our fire. Me wrapping presents. He toasting muffins. We’d have a small tree – I had never had one – twinkling with glass baubles, under which we would place our presents to each other, and as midnight came I would tell him the joyful news that we had a child coming. We would marry on New Year’s Day and, after we had exchanged our vows, an old man would enter the church, banging the ancient wooden door at the back of the church open and bringing with him chill air and snowflakes. The guests would turn their heads as his heavy booted steps came down the aisle towards us, waving his hat and shouting, ‘The war is over. It’s over!’
There would be celebrations, not just for us the happy couple, but for the whole world.
Then, we’d get the train to Callyzion and I would meet my new family who would cosset and fuss over me as the pregnancy neared its end.
And we would have a boy, a son, and we would call him Little Bertie.
All good stories would end like that, but neither Herbert nor me nor anyone with a loved one fighting this terrible war could know what ending we would have.
I pulled another piece of paper towards me and lifted my pen.