"Well, now. Do sit down. I'll put the kettle on and we'll have a cup of tea."
I sat down and smiled up at her, confidence returning. "That would be lovely," I assured her.
A dragon? A Tartar? Really, Eddie! She was a fine, well-bred, northern lady, and she was being heart-warmingly kind. I loved her on sight, and continued to loveher until her death. She provided for me a warmth and affection that Mother, even at her best, had been unable to give me.
"You're so like Eddie," she would sometimes say. "I can't get over it. I wish I had had a daughter like you."
I think that in a vague way, she hoped that her burly elder son would take a fancy to me. Though we did become quite friendly, there was none of the natural attraction that there had been between Eddie and me. He did, however, eventually bring her a very sweet daughter-in-law.
She showed me Eddie's room and his books. She had the same ready sense of the ridiculous that Eddie had had, and she told me lots of funny stories about his various escapades.
When Eddie proposed to me, I accepted him on chance. But he knew what he was doing. I would have fitted into his life very well. Though he might swear like a docker and play tough, I knew now who had taught him the attitudes which had endeared him to me.
"Losing their father so young had a profound effect on both the boys," Mrs.Parry told me. "I knew it but I could not do much about it. Without a father, it is harder to learn how a man should behave, and they were quite wild, and I was very worried about both of them. I used to lay down the law like a High Court judge! But it's surprising. In the last few years, they both settled down quite well. And then, of course, the war came ..." She fell silent after such confidences, and I would hold her hand until she felt better. I did not know what else to do.
38
AS the Allies advanced in Europe and Asia, we became impatient, and asked each other, "Will it never end?" And when faced with a task we did not want to undertake, we would say, "I'll do it after the war," as if, by saying that, we would never actually have to do it.
Our family worried that, during this last lap of the conflict, we might lose either Alan or Brian. And we simply prayed that neither of them were sent to the East, because of the tales of Japanese atrocities.
The son of a friend of mine died of beating and starvation while doing forced labour for the Japanese, on the Burma Road. She was so stricken, when a scarred survivor came to tell her what had actually happened to her boy, that she was unable to speak or eat for several weeks, and lay in hospital being artificially fed like some poor suffragette.
Pictures of the death camps in Germany and Poland, taken as the Allies releasedthe survivors, raised the hatred of the Germans, in Britain, to new heights.
Despite the feehng of the general pubHc that the war would never end, Government and business were planning for that happy day. A civil servant called William Bever-idge had designed a plan to overhaul the entire health and welfare system of the country, and when, after the war, it was implemented, it changed the lives of almost every man, woman and child in the country. The Petroleum Board was preparing to dismember itself, and I was told, at the end of the Japanese war, that there would be a post for me with one of the companies.
I remember laughing, when I was told that the post was a pensionable one. After the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nobody expected to survive long enough to draw a pension. Long before that, another war would obliterate us.
Our tight little group in the Wages Department was restless. Some of the camaraderie began to wane, as faces new to many of us began to appear. Unfit men were being demobbed and returned to civilian life.On 8th May, Churchill announced that the war in Europe was over, and someone took a picture of the girls in our Department. We still looked young; yet in many ways we were old, just as our parents had been after World War I.
While the war still raged in the East against the Japanese, many people began to get married, to househunt without much hope—to look for peacetime employment.
I was twenty-five years old and, once again, my life was going to change. Like everybody else, I was tired to my very bones, and almost any effort seemed too much. I sat in the train, amid a very merrily drunk group of Air Force men who had been celebrating the victory, and wondered what to do with my life.
Though Mother had been very kind in helping me when Eddie was killed, like the leopard she still had her spots, and when I arrived home she was very cross at being left alone on a day of rejoicing. As I sat down to two shrivelled sausages and a small mound of potatoes, she asked fretfully, "And what are you going to do?"
"Do you mean this evening?"
"Yes.""I thought I'd finish the dress for Mary."
"Well, I hope she pays you for it. She'll be out of work soon—they won't want any munitions."
I looked up quickly. She was right. My dressmaking business could shrink, even vanish, once properly trained dressmakers returned to their peacetime occupation. The girls for whom I had made so many dresses would never again earn such high wages as they had enjoyed in the war.
My salary had increased slowly during my time with the Petroleum Board, but I had not realised until recently how really low it was. I had tried to save a little by contributing to war savings bonds through payroll deductions, and had long ago given Mother the money for a set of artificial teeth. I do not know what she spent it on, but she never had any false teeth, and, once she had discovered that I could save, she had been merciless—and often successful—in squeezing extra money out of me.
Mother poured herself another cup of tea out of the pot I had made. She wasnearly fifty, yet she looked like a very old woman. Her dyed, black hair contrasted strangely with a heavily lined face and toothless mouth. Her hands, like mine, were ruined by too much scrubbing of floors and rubbing of washing. She was running to fat, and her shoulders stooped. She did not seem to care much what happened to her, as long as she had cigarettes and cinema money.
As I listened to her monotonous, nagging voice, I thought, "My God, I must pull myself together. I must try for a real career. Otherwise, in a few years' time, I'll be just like her."
It was a salutary idea. And at that moment, in quiet despair, afraid of being hurt again, I gave up all hope of marriage as an escape route. I would work and save for a home of my own.
In Liverpool, 8th May—VE Day—had been celebrated with street parties and dances, and it became a custom to give a street party for returning servicemen.
Kitchen tables were put end to end along the centre of the road, followed by almost every chair in the neighbourhood. Children had a great time making fancydresses, while their mothers used precious rations to bake rock buns and scones. Hoarded tins of Spam and sardines were sacrificed to make sandwiches, and anything green was tossed into a salad. If anybody owned a piano, it was dragged on to the pavement, so that there could be music for singing and dancing. Otherwise, they made do with accordions or mouth organs. The local pubUcans were under great pressure to produce a barrel of beer. For years afterwards, one would come across brick walls with Welcome home Joey or George or Henry, splashed across it, in drippy, faded whitewash.
I never saw such a message painted for the Marys, Margarets, Dorothys and Ellens, who also served. It was still a popular idea that women did not need things. They could make do. They could manage without, even without welcomes. But these were the women who would give impetus to the feminist movement. At the time of demobilisation they did not realise it, but they were going to do a lot more marching.
The 15th August, 1945, was declared V J Day, the end of the war with Japan. Thesame six girls in our office had their photograph taken, this time with a returned soldier in the centre of the picture. How quaint we look, in our heavy utility shoes and our ill-fitting dresses. One of the six had been widowed and, like me, must begin again, one had a merchant seaman for a fiance, mercifully spared, one was engaged to a civilian, and two were still fancy free. I smiled for the photographer, but I remember t
hat I wanted to scream at the unfairness of life.
That night, I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote replies to every advertisement in the Liverpool Echo, for secretaries.
Firms that had closed for the duration or who had gone over to war work, now re-opened, like crocuses in the sun. I had several replies, and accepted a post as personal secretary to an electrical engineer, at double my previous salary. It was the first step in a long climb which led me, eventually, into the packaging industry, a fascinating world for a woman to be in.
When I left the warm companionship of my friends in the Petroleum Board, I was stepping out blindly into a rapidly changing world. I felt dreadfully alone.
THE END
Lime Street at Two Page 26