Home Sweet Home

by Lizzie Lane

  ‘Mary, I know that. We heard something about a big raid on the BBC this morning.’

  Beatrice continued to cry. Ruby made no reference to her, her own feelings locked into those of her sister.

  ‘Dad heard the news about the raid on the dams, too. We presumed Michael took part.’ She paused. ‘Are all the planes back?’

  Mary held her breath for just a beat, enough for Ruby to comment again. ‘Mary. You don’t think they are, do you?’

  Mary closed her eyes. Should she tell the truth or leave it until she knew for sure? She sighed deeply.

  ‘I don’t really know. Not yet. I’m so afraid …’ She sucked in her lips and squeezed her eyes shut in an effort to keep her anguish – and the tears – at bay.

  A few more minutes on the telephone and she would be bawling her eyes out. But she didn’t get a chance. In the deepest depths of despair came the voice that changed everything.

  ‘Hey! Hey! What’s this baby screaming about?’

  Receiver still clasped in her hand, Mary gasped. ‘Michael!’

  Michael’s voice was followed by the sound of the front door slamming, announcing the unmistakeable arrival of her husband, breezing in like a hurricane. It always felt like that once he was home, both his presence and his physique seeming to fill the house.

  She shouted into the telephone. ‘He’s fine! He’s home!’

  It was hard not to slam down the telephone straightaway and rush into his arms. ‘Good news about Charlie,’ she blurted. ‘Love to everyone!’

  Not for one minute did she consider her sister’s reaction to her abrupt goodbye. Michael had been missing but now he was home! And Charlie was home too.

  Mary stood immobile, hardly able to believe her eyes, her hand held to her open mouth.

  Michael’s broad shoulders and height filled the doorway. An odd thought came to her. Past residents of the cottage, long dead, of course, must have been a lot smaller than today if the cottage doors and ceiling heights were anything to go by. Her husband was jiggling his daughter up and down while she avidly sucked on his finger.

  ‘I think this child’s hungry.’

  ‘You’re home,’ she said again, daring herself to believe it.

  ‘I’m home.’ There was something reserved about his smile, almost as though he were embarrassed to be there at all.

  ‘I didn’t see your plane go over. I mean, I saw it go out, but I didn’t see it come back.’

  A look of great sadness came to his face. He shook his head and the corners of his mouth turned down, all trace of a smile vanishing.

  ‘It went down but I wasn’t in it.’ He heaved a big sigh. ‘I’ve been grounded, at least for now. My fingers keep seizing up. A pilot needs two working hands to fly a plane. Flying with a gammy hand would put his own and his crew’s lives at risk.’

  ‘Grounded!’ She repeated the word he had used, rolling the syllables over her tongue, at the same time thinking it was the most wonderful word she had ever said. ‘I thought …’

  Michael smiled down at his daughter, who was still doing her utmost to suck milk from his thumb. When he looked back again at Mary, his face clouded.

  ‘The medical officer examined me. He said it could be some time before my hand returns to its normal flexibility, though there are no guarantees.’ He shrugged. ‘In the meantime, it’s been suggested I take a job teaching the theory of flying to would-be pilots. It means a new posting, but hell, I suppose it’s something.’

  ‘And your plane? What happened?’

  She already knew it had not returned, but she needed to know more.

  ‘It crashed into a hill at the end of one of the dams they were trying to destroy. I suppose you heard it on the news.’

  His gaze returned to his daughter, almost as though he was too ashamed to look his wife in the face. ‘A lot of good men are dead. I should have been one of them,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Why didn’t you let me know you weren’t flying? I was so worried.’

  ‘Nobody was allowed to leave the base. Everything about this raid was very hush-hush and top secret. Here. I think you’d better feed our daughter before she eats my thumb.’

  Mary took the child from him, unbuttoned her blouse and sat down in her chair. Beatrice’s rosebud mouth began sucking immediately she was put to her breast.

  Overcome with emotion, Mary looked tearfully up at her husband. ‘I’m so glad you’re home.’

  He put his arms around her, cocooning the baby between them. Beatrice carried on sucking. ‘I’m glad to be home.’

  He didn’t need to say anything more to know that they were sharing the same thought, that there were a lot of other wives and girlfriends who would weep alone tonight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  By the time summer was in full bloom, Frances realised she was in love. Not only that but she was pregnant.

  It had been over a month since her last period, but already she was feeling nauseous. Each morning she locked the bathroom door so she could be sick in private.

  Gossip of who she was in love with was circulating the village, only to be expected seeing as she’d been seen on numerous occasions climbing into the passenger seat of Declan’s Jeep. The gossip had not yet reached her uncle’s ears, and Frances feared the moment when it did.

  Preoccupied with her war work and with making sure Charlie was well looked after following his return from hospital, Ruby hadn’t yet seemed to notice either the moony look in her cousin’s eyes or the fact that she was declining her favourite meals.

  To Frances’s mind, everything hinged on getting married – as quickly as possible. The time had come to face her uncle Stan.

  She stared out of her bedroom window, his response already in her mind. He’s too old for you.

  But Declan wasn’t too old. He wanted to marry her and she wanted to marry him. Just one niggling fear lingered in her mind. What if Declan wasn’t the father? What if the child had been conceived that last night in the lane with Ed Bergman?

  The prospect of Declan not being the father made her desperate. She didn’t want it to be Ed. Being unsure made the need to marry more urgent. She wanted getting wed done and dusted in double quick time. Never had she felt such urgency in her life, which in turn led to great concerns. What if Uncle Stan refused to give her permission to wed? What then?

  The answer came swiftly. There was one other person who was able to give her consent. She would tell nobody about the prospect that she was pregnant until every avenue of opportunity was open to her. The only other person who could sign for her to wed was her mother. The prospect chilled her, but she was determined to face the woman who had abandoned her.

  ‘I want to find my mother.’

  Stan paused in the process of cleaning his pipe when Frances asked the question, his features abnormally still, almost as though he’d stopped breathing.

  The prospect of facing her uncle had brooded with her for some while. It was early days but unless she suffered a miscarriage, she had to face the fact that she was pregnant and had to get married. Perhaps if Declan hadn’t come along, she would have married Ed. Then it occurred to her it might not be Declan’s baby. It might be Ed’s.

  Her problems loomed huge in front of her. The one thing she couldn’t ignore was that it was Declan she wanted. She sighed. Getting pregnant and falling in love had changed everything. Childhood was well and truly left behind; womanhood was most definitely here. Declan was the cause of that, the man she gave herself up to with such unconcerned desire. She was still friends with Ed, but had distanced herself. He’d been hurt at first but there were other girls in the village and he had other things on his mind. Rumours were rife that this year was the one when the allied armies would retake the continent of Europe from the grip of the Nazis. Soon he would be posted and likely they would never see each other again.

  ‘Soon you’ll be off chasing the French girls, as well,’ she’d said to him when he’d cornered her and asked her how she was. He hadn’t deni
ed that he would be.

  ‘But I wondered about us … you know … after that time …’

  ‘I’m fine. Let’s just be friends.’

  Ed had looked surprised but hadn’t pestered her to resume their relationship. That in itself was a sign that he had accepted their romance was over. Declan had been right.

  She drew her thoughts back to the task in hand. Never had this mattered to her so much.

  Reading her uncle’s thoughts was difficult at the best of times – more difficult now, with the closed expression on his face. Guessing at one of them, she said, ‘It’s not that I’m not grateful for all you’ve done. I just want to know why she ran away and left me after my dad died.’

  She rested her hand on her stomach. Not for any conscious reason except as some kind of confirmation that she would never, ever leave a child high and dry.

  Stan eyed the lovely young girl, wondering why he hadn’t noticed how much she’d grown, how swiftly the child had become a woman. Like her mother, but not like her mother, the same confident tilt to the chin, but more serene, nowhere near as flighty.

  Even before they’d married, he’d told his brother what he’d thought about Mildred, not that he’d taken any notice. His brother had been badly wounded during the Battle of Ypres back in 1914. Although it was the internal injuries that finally killed him, it was the physical scars he bore that affected his judgement.

  ‘Look at me,’ he’d said, coughing so harshly it was as if he was in danger of coughing his lungs up, before turning his head so that the scalded skin on the damaged side of his face was presented to his brother. ‘There’s not going to be too many women willing to put up with a bloke that looks like this.’

  Stan had admitted that Mildred appeared to be sweet enough, but would her kindness last? It looked as though she didn’t have a penny or a relative in the world. It was hard to do it, but he had pointed out that she might just be marrying him for security.

  ‘And who could blame her?’ Sefton had responded. His smile had lifted the undamaged side of his face, giving him a sardonic look. ‘I’ll be giving her what she wants, and she’ll make me believe that she loves me. It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t. We’re both giving each other something we both need.’

  At last Stan looked up at his young niece and said, ‘Your mother was not my most favourite person.’ He lowered his eyes to the task of cleaning out his pipe, as though doing that was more important. ‘We didn’t always get on. She wasn’t like your father. She wasn’t like you, either. I would advise that you leave her well alone.’

  Frances felt her face growing hot. This was not what she wanted to hear. ‘Whatever she is, she’s still my mother,’ she said, her tone of voice controlled but strident.

  His eyebrows beetled above his nose and he looked at her with eyes that had sunk deeper in his head in recent years. There was kindness in them but also a look that hinted at deep thoughts laced with vivid memories.

  As he straightened, he nodded affably, his brows going back to normal. ‘I suppose you’re right, but I really don’t understand why you want to meet her. Why now? She left you …’

  Frances broke across his statement with one of her own. ‘I want to know why she abandoned me. I want to know why she didn’t love me enough to stay!’

  Stan was now in the process of refilling his pipe. Frances’s outburst caused him to stop midway. ‘I’m sorry. It’s wrong for me just to look at her from my point of view. I wasn’t thinking of you.’

  Frances swallowed the web of nervousness that seemed to have been spun across her throat. ‘Do you know where she is?’

  Stan regarded her steadily. She couldn’t know that Mildred had first been brought to the village by Gertrude Powell. For some reason he didn’t know, Gertrude had taken the young and destitute Mildred under her wing. To Stan’s eyes, Mildred, with her blousy figure and familiar way she looked at men – as though she could eat them whole – had not seemed the sort to fit into Gertrude’s ideal of Christian womanhood. As it turned out, he’d been correct. Eventually, Gertrude Powell had concluded she had a cuckoo in the nest whose inclination was men rather than Bible studies. And Sefton had been the man Mildred set her cap at.

  She’d got pregnant by his brother, got married and might have perhaps lived happily ever after if Sefton hadn’t died when Frances was seven years old.

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but I had an address for her years back,’ he said to her, reluctance hanging heavy in his voice.

  Feeling a sense of destiny being fulfilled, he ambled over to the old roll-top desk where he kept family wills, property and insurance documents. The papers were in no particular order, in fact far from it; he could never bear to throw anything out, and anyway, paper was precious.

  Beneath the rolled-up bundles, he brought out a small diary from a long time ago in which he’d jotted down useful addresses and the names of people he’d long since lost contact with. From the back of the diary he took out a small piece of paper.

  There was a sad and apprehensive look in his eyes when he handed it to the lovely young girl whom he had brought up as his own.

  ‘This is your mother’s last known address. I would suggest you write first. Despite all your best intentions, Frances, I think turning up unannounced on her doorstep is not going to be favourably received. Write and tell her you’re coming, make sure you know she’s still there and plan a definite date and time, but be prepared: she might not want this.’

  Frances felt herself filling up with a mixture of joy and gratitude. Her eyes brimmed with tears of happiness she could barely hold back. ‘Uncle Stan! Thank you. Thank you so much!’

  Throwing her arms around his neck, she buried her head in his shoulder, closed her eyes and breathed in the pungent smells of the garden and tobacco. No matter where she went in the world or what life threw at her, she would always relish that smell as that of security and love. Her uncle had always been there for her and somehow she couldn’t help feeling just a little guilty that she was insisting on finding the mother who’d deserted her, the woman he so clearly disliked. The woman who, from the fragments of things told to her, might be willing to sign a consent form for her to marry the man she loved, the man who she could possibly dupe into believing that the child she was carrying was his.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Breakfast was over and Stan Sweet had gone across the village to tend to the garden at Stratham House on the day when Ruby finally tackled Frances about Declan O’Malley.

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know about you and him,’ she said to her. ‘The whole village knows.’

  Frances shrugged. ‘If they’re not talking about me, they’d be talking about somebody else. The village likes gossip.’

  ‘You’re being flippant.’

  ‘Really? I thought I was being honest.’

  Ruby wagged her finger and raised her voice. ‘Now don’t speak to me like that, young lady!’

  Frances sighed and placed her hands on her hips while holding back her anger. ‘Are you jealous?’

  Ruby looked at her in amazement. ‘Jealous? Why would I be jealous?’

  Frances folded her arms and held her chin high and defiant. ‘Because you wanted him for yourself.’

  Ruby’s jaw dropped. At first, it seemed she’d been about to voice a strong denial. Her open mouth finally closed and she chose her words more carefully. ‘We were friends. We had a good time for a while. But that was all it was. We never got that serious. We didn’t suit each other and we knew it. So you’re wrong. I am not jealous. The plain fact is, Frances, I think he’s too old for you.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ Everything about Frances was defiant: her eyes blazed, her jaw was firm, her chin jutted forward.

  ‘Look,’ said Ruby, sighing as she pulled out a kitchen chair and sunk into it. She didn’t consider herself the type to play big sister or be a mother figure; Mary was so much better at that. But Mary wasn’t here. She was. ‘He’s much more mature than you. Yes, he’s
very masculine, handsome and all that, but you have to realise that he’ll be off before very long and you’ll never see him again. You’re just a play thing to him—’

  ‘No! You’re wrong! He loves me and …’ Frances took a deep breath. ‘And I love him. We’re going to get married—’

  ‘He’s asked you?’ Ruby looked at her in disbelief. This was totally unexpected. Seduction had been her best guess, though on reflection she had to admit that Declan had always struck her as an honourable man.

  Frances took a deep breath. ‘Yes. He has. We’re going to get married and have a house and children and everything, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  ‘Yes, there is. You’re a minor. You have to have the consent of a parent or guardian before the age of twenty-one. Under the circumstances, I’m not sure my father will sign for you.’

  ‘I know. Why do you suppose I’m so eager to find my mother?’ Frances saw the look of comprehension on her cousin Ruby’s face.

  ‘So that’s it. You want to find your mother and get her to sign for you!’

  ‘That’s my plan.’

  ‘But Declan is—’

  ‘Promise you won’t tell Uncle Stan about Declan. I don’t want him to know. Not yet. Not until I have my mother’s signed consent.’

  She wasn’t certain Ruby would agree to keep her secret. Like her uncle, her cousin still regarded her as little more than a child.

  She had thought this through so carefully and was adamant it would happen. Being the kind of woman she was, her mother would understand, she was sure of it.

  It was clear from Ruby’s hesitant response that her loyalties were divided. On the one hand, she loved her father and was unwilling to do anything to hurt him. On the other, the look on her cousin’s face touched a chord within herself. If she were so in love with a man, what wouldn’t she do to get him?

  She thought of John Smith, a prisoner of war. What wouldn’t she do to get him home?

  Ruby looked down at her folded hands, her clean, neatly cut fingernails. She shook her head. ‘I won’t say a word about you and Declan. It won’t come from me if he does find out.’