by Susan Gandar
She’d used the excuse that a letter had been wrongly delivered to go round to the neighbouring house. She’d rung the bell and banged on the door, again and again, until after the third knock the door had opened.
She collapsed down onto her knees.
‘What the…’
Ellie knelt down beside her.
‘It’s the baby. It’s coming…’
‘It’s early…’
‘Two weeks…’
‘When did it start?’
‘This morning…’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘That it was my monthly and I had to lie down…’
Ellie helped Jess up.
‘I’ll do the same. Go on now, back to the house, up to your room before someone sees us.’
Maids-of-all-work, crouched down together on the front door steps, whispering, could only mean one thing – trouble.
‘Go on, I’ll be as quick as I can.’
She’d crawled up the stairs to her bedroom. Her legs were shaking, her teeth were chattering, and the dull ache in her lower back was no longer a dull ache but pain so great it felt as if every bone in her body was being slowly and systematically crushed.
It had started that morning just after breakfast. She was completely unprepared when, out in the garden, hoeing the soil, ready for sowing seeds, she had felt a pop deep down in her stomach. Seconds later, warm liquid had gushed down the inside of her legs, soaking through the coarse brown skirt of her working dress.
The Major went on pacing up and down, marking out where the carrots, cabbages and swede should be sowed, while she continued on with the hoeing. It was a warm, sunny morning, the beginning of spring, and the liquid had dried quickly – something that only she could feel, and no one else could see, just like the baby turning inside her belly.
Her mother’s waters had broken when they had been out together picking blackberries. Jess remembered her saying that there was nothing to be frightened about, that her brother or sister was now on his or her way. Nine hours later, the village midwife had called the two of them, her father and herself, into the cottage and there was her mother, propped up in bed, cradling a baby.
What she had tried to forget, but couldn’t forget now, up there in the attic, eleven hours into her own labour, was the sound of her mother screaming. It was like listening to an animal being ripped to pieces.
‘Jess, you’ve just got to get the baby round the bend. Push down, really hard, like you want to go to the toilet. Come on, now, push…’
Women died in childbirth, she knew that. She had seen it in their village. One day there was a mother, father, and two kids, and the next day, there was just a father and two kids. Mother and baby had died in childbirth. These things happened.
‘You’re nearly there, girl, just push…’
It came in another wave, washing through her and over her. She sank underneath it, helpless, unable to breathe, suffocating in it, while her body expanded wider and wider, splitting further and further apart. She was no longer needed. It didn’t matter what she thought, what she wanted, every muscle in her body was doing what it wanted to do, what it needed to do.
The pain became solid, more focussed.
‘Jess, I can see it, the baby, just one big push…’
She pushed. There, sticking out between her legs was the head. She pushed. Her lower body convulsed and widened. Shoulders appeared, then arms, and what had been inside her, was now outside her.
FORTY-SIX
JESS FOLLOWED ELLIE DOWN the narrow flight of stairs. Just less than nine months ago, she had crept down the same staircase and along the landing into Tom’s bedroom. When she pushed open the door there he was waiting for her. That was their last night together. And now here she was carrying their child, less than two hours old, wrapped in a blanket in her arms.
The door of the Major’s bedroom opened. Snores echoed up through the house. A floorboard creaked. Jess scrambled underneath the tapestry-covered table. Ellie darted through the door into the toilet. There was a shuffle of slippered feet on the landing carpet. And then silence. There was another shuffle. Jess peeped out. She could see her mistress; she was standing at the top of the staircase, directly in front of where Jess was hiding, looking down towards the hall below. She turned towards the bedroom. The door closed.
Almost immediately, the door opened and the Major’s wife stepped back out onto the landing. She started to walk towards the toilet. Jess closed her eyes. Please, no, don’t let her go in and find Ellie.
The footsteps stopped. There was a creak and a sigh and then the shuffling came back down the landing, past where Jess sat, crouched down on the floor, below the table. She tightened her arms around the bundle of blanket containing her baby. The footsteps stopped and then started up again, down the landing, towards the bedroom. The door closed. Silence.
Jess opened her eyes. She crawled out from underneath the table. The toilet door opened and Ellie stepped out. They stood there, white faced, staring at each other. Together they went down the stairs, step by step, to the half-landing, and then down the final flight of stairs into the hallway. They pulled back the first bolt, then the second.
‘When you go back up be careful…’
Ellie rolled her eyes.
‘Jessica Brown, it was you not being careful that got us into this mess. And it will be me, Eleanor Baxter, who will get us out of it. Go on, hop it. Better wear out shoes than sheets.’
The front door clicked shut.
Keeping to the shadows, every few seconds glancing up at the sky, Jess followed the same route she and the Major had walked, marched, almost a year ago, when he collected her from the station that first day in London. Past the bombed out school where eighteen children had died and more than a hundred injured, down Glebe Road, Hillier Road, Honeywell Road, Ebbs Road.
Back in the village, when Jess and her mother had helped her father and the other men bring in the harvest, a full moon in a cloudless sky had been something to be welcomed, even celebrated; it would give them enough light to work on into the night. But in the city, in time of war, a full moon, like the one shining above, was something to dread.
Anti-aircraft fire started just as she was approaching the station. They were easy targets. All the enemy planes had to do was follow the tracks, shining in the moonlight, up the coast to London. If this one took a direct hit none of the people here, an old lady trying to comfort a whimpering dog, the little girl humming to a yellow bird in a cage, a mother watching over a sleeping child, would have a chance. What had made them all come to the station? They would have been safer staying at home.
Her ticket was checked. She’d been careful with the money. But, day by day, month by month, with every letter she’d written, and with every stamp she’d bought, it had disappeared. Buying her return ticket had all but emptied her purse. All that was left of the five pounds Tom had given her were two pennies and one sixpence.
The last train out from London to Lewes was leaving in two minutes. She had to catch it. Going back to the house with the baby wasn’t an option. A child screamed, a man kicked, a woman cursed as Jess walked through, round and over the sleeping bodies, bunched up in blankets, carpeting the tunnel floor. Flights of steps led up from the tunnel onto the platforms; eight and nine, ten and eleven, twelve and thirteen.
She saw it, the hospital train, just before she reached the top of the steps. The doors were open and the wounded, and the dead and the dying, were being unloaded. Men in military uniform and nurses, white caps on their heads, red and grey capes covering their shoulders, walked up and down, whispering instructions. One stretcher was directed here, another there, another was loaded onto a truck parked at the side of the platform. There must have been hundreds of them.
A young woman, wearing a blouse, skirt and coat rather than a nurse’s uniform, was walking down the platform towards where Jess was standing. Head down, looking from side to side, she checked each stretcher, before moving on, do
wn the row, to the next, and the next, searching the battered and bloody remains for the one face she wanted to see.
There was a cry. The woman walked on. The cry was repeated. The woman stopped and turned. Jess had never seen Arthur Crow, the doctor’s son, when he came back home from France. She’d only heard about him. How the children when they saw him, walking down the street, had screamed and run away. Now she understood why.
A young man was struggling to sit up. Or what was left of a young man. Where there should have been an arm and a hand with five fingers there was splintered bone. Where there should have been a leg and a foot with five toes there was a stump. On the right side of his head, instead of an ear and eye, there was a gaping hole.
The woman took a step back. She twisted from side to side, once, twice. She opened her mouth. Jess waited for the scream, for the young woman to pick up her skirts and run away. But instead the woman closed her mouth. She took one step forward, a second and then she ran towards the young man lying there on the ground. She knelt down beside him and took his hands in her hands.
Doors slammed shut. A whistle blew. The train pulled out of the station. Jess sat, looking out of the window, as it rattled southwards through the suburbs of Balham and Croydon. Two planes, one small, one twice its size, were caught silhouetted against the moon. The larger went into a steep dive, spinning round and round, down and down, towards the ground, fire flickering along the length of its fuselage.
FORTY-SEVEN
THE GRAVESTONES LINING THE path, leading up to the church, were so old and covered in moss that it was impossible to tell who they were remembering. But at least they were being remembered. Her brother had been buried in an unmarked grave. And the vicar had told her, in the letter Jess had received after her mother’s death, that she too had been buried in the same churchyard, also in an unmarked grave. The poor got a hole in the ground but nothing else. Her mother had been lucky, given she had taken her own life, to get even that.
She tried the door, it was locked, but the night was dry and the porch would be a safe enough place to leave a baby until one of the wardens came up from the village to open the church. She sank down on to the stone floor and unbuttoned her dress. All she wanted to do was close her eyes and go to sleep but she couldn’t. She had to finish feeding the baby then walk back up the river to Lewes to catch the first train into London.
She laid her daughter, wrapped in the blanket, down on the stone floor of the porch. She stood, buttoned up her dress, buttoned up her coat and then walked out into the churchyard – and kept on walking. If she hesitated for one single second, she wouldn’t be able to do what she had to do. She hesitated. She took one step, then another and stopped. It was impossible.
She walked back up the path, past the rows of gravestones, to the porch. She picked up the bundle of blanket. She couldn’t leave her daughter here. With food and coal so expensive and in such short supply, no one with a family of their own would want to take in an abandoned child. She would be sent off, to die, in the nearest orphanage.
Out of the churchyard, back through the village and down the lane towards the river; if her mother could do it, then she could too. She climbed up the steps. On her left, the river tumbled down a weir. To her right it flowed, slow and smooth, towards the sea. All she had to do was jump. The end would be fast – and painless.
Her own mother had starved herself so that Jess and her baby brother could have food. When she sent Jess off to London, she had believed that she would be saving her, making her safe, so that one day, like her mother before her, Jess would fall in love, get married and start her own family.
Jess could see her climbing up the steps onto the bridge, dressed in her black dress, her head covered in a shawl, the wind and the rain gusting around her. She closed her eyes and raised her arms. The wind whipped the shawl away from her body but her mother didn’t move. She stood there, whispering a prayer, as the rain streamed down her face and over her shoulders. And then she dropped like a stone, her arms still outstretched, over the wooden railing, down into the river below.
And now she could see her father. He was one in a line of hundreds of soldiers, gas masks on, bayonets at the ready, walking up a hill. The man to her father’s right staggered and fell. Blood fountained out of his skull. Directly ahead, at the top of the hill, stretching to the left and to the right, unbroken, was a solid wall of barbed wire. The dead and the dying, trapped and unable to escape, hung from it. And still her father walked on, straight, never hesitating, towards the wire. Bullets ripped through his chest, one step, two steps, on he continued. More machine-gun fire. One last step and then he collapsed, down, onto the ground.
He had not given up, even when he was walking to his own death. He did not turn and run away. He’d stayed, marching on, side by side, with his colleagues. For her father it had been the right thing, the only thing, to do.
And, standing alone together, up there on the Downs, he’d asked her to make him a promise – that however bad things were she would never give up. If she threw herself off the bridge, her daughter in her arms, she would be breaking that promise. Her father hadn’t had a choice.
She did. There was still a chance, however small, that Tom was still alive and that, one day, he would come home. Killing herself, killing her baby, destroying his and his daughter’s chance of happiness, would be mocking the sacrifices both her mother and father had made. She had to protect the future.
Jess walked back along the bridge, down the steps, across the meadow and up the lane to the church. A light was flickering in the ground floor of a house. In London a light burning out into the darkness, even just a candle breaking the blackout, would have immediately attracted the attention of the police. But out here, in the country, far away from the raids, nobody would bother or care. But, even so, it was strange. Someone had either got up very early or had never gone to sleep.
A woman dressed in a grey dress, a black mourning band on her right arm, was sitting at a table in the bay window. She was staring at a single candle, her right hand turning, and turning again, the gold wedding band on the fourth finger of her left hand. She was whispering what could only be a prayer. The woman hesitated. She looked out of the window. Jess shrank back behind a tree. The woman returned to her prayers.
Jess opened the gate and walked up the path to the front door. She placed her daughter down on the step. She unfastened the locket from around her own neck. She knelt down and slipped the locket round her daughter’s.
It was almost exactly a year ago that Jess and her mother had buried her baby brother in the village churchyard. Her mother had thrown a bunch of primroses onto the tiny, white coffin lying there in its waterlogged grave. And now Jess was a mother and she, too, was saying goodbye to her child. She picked a single primrose from a bunch growing by the front door and slipped the flower underneath the blanket next to her daughter’s heart.
‘Goodbye, my love. Live well.’
Jess knocked on the front door. The woman paused but then went back to her prayers. Jess knocked again. The prayers stopped. The woman stood up. Jess ducked down behind a bush.
The door opened. The woman stood there, her shawl pulled tight around her shoulders, searching the darkness for the person who had knocked so loud and so long in the middle of the night. For a moment their eyes caught. There was whimper. The women looked down. The bundle of blanket sitting at her feet wriggled and squirmed.
‘We’d always wanted children…’
The woman picked up the baby. She cradled it in her arms.
‘Having a little boy, a little girl, a child of our own, would have been something to remember my husband by…’
There was no point in hiding. The woman knew she was there. Jess stepped out from behind the bush.
‘You will look after her for me?’
The woman smiled.
‘You’re the girl from the market…’
The woman had seen Jess stealing her bread. She could have called out. The
crowd would have heard and Jess would have been caught and handed over to the police. And tried as a thief.
‘And you were in the churchyard, with your mother. You were there when I was visiting my husband’s grave…’
The woman had recognised her, Jess had been certain of it, but she’d said nothing.
‘We were burying my brother.’
The woman nodded.
‘Your mother, is she–’
‘She’s dead.’
The woman nodded.
‘I remember. There was talk of it in the village. And what about you… I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name…’
A blackbird was singing its first song of the day.
‘My name’s Jess.’
She was running out of time.
‘I’m a maid in London. I’ve got to get back…’
She ran out of the gate onto the track. The woman called after her.
‘Does your daughter have a name?’
She’d worked so hard and so long to keep the baby a secret that she’d never thought about a name. It had seemed too much of a luxury.
‘She’s called…’
The scent, the tiny blue flowers, the needle-like leaves, the bush she’d been hiding behind was identical to one growing in her mother’s garden. Her parents had planted it there, as a good omen for their marriage, on their wedding day.
‘Her name’s Rosemary. And you?’
‘Martha. Martha Pearce.’
Jess ran down the track across the moonlit meadow. She ran over the bridge and then turned left to follow the riverside path back to the station and the first train into London.
FORTY-EIGHT
SAM OPENED HER EYES. The windowless, low-ceilinged intensive care unit, on the top floor of the hospital, had been replaced by a high-ceilinged, glass-walled, shiny-floored building which stretched on, up and down, in front and behind, to the left and right of her. The lights were on, the escalators whirring, the shops and restaurants bustling; she was in an air terminal and it was busy.