by Amy Miller
‘It’s the sleepless nights in the shelter and all the worry,’ she muttered to herself, running her eyes over an advertisement on a sheet of newspaper on the floor, where earth-covered spuds were piled up, ready for scrubbing and preparing and cooking for tomorrow’s dinner. The typeface was bright and bold, its message clear: Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution, will bring us victory.
Audrey gave a gentle laugh. There was no time for tiredness in wartime, was there? And she had no right to be tired, she told herself. Not when Charlie was away facing goodness knows what, and folk were having to live in shelters because their homes had been bombed out.
She began pegging out more washing. The strange thing was, despite being exhausted, when her head hit the pillow she couldn’t sleep. Instead, she lay there awake, worrying. Oh, there was so much to worry about – not least when the next air-raid siren would sound. Since the beginning of the year the siren in Bournemouth had sounded dozens of times. There had been heavy air raids all over Britain – and though Bournemouth hadn’t suffered a pounding like London, Coventry or Bristol, the Woolworths building in the Square had recently taken a hit, and swathes of Westbourne, Branksome Park and Moordown had been destroyed by parachute bombs. Churchill had been on the wireless, warning that Hitler may try to invade Britain ‘in the near future’ too and that civilians should prepare for gas, parachute and glider attacks. It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘No wonder we’re all tired!’ Audrey said to herself, shaking her head.
Then there were the wedding cake orders, of course. Audrey often made wedding cakes at short notice, because sweethearts had just days together before the groom had to return to active service, and often didn’t know, until the last minute, when those days might be. She never turned down a customer; Charlie always insisted they pull out all the stops for the customers.
Charlie. Of course, what she worried about most was whether Charlie was safe. She missed him dreadfully. Painfully. It was a difficult and complicated thing: love in wartime.
Looking sympathetically at Elsie, who was leaning with her back against the wall, her arms gently folded, listening to William’s harp, her eyes closed in relief that he’d started playing again, Audrey was heartened. Elsie would never give up on William, that was clear.
‘Go on up,’ said Audrey to Elsie. ‘You should be together. Of course, you should. It’ll do him more good to be with you than anything. I’m sorry to have delayed you.’
Watching Elsie rush inside to see William, hoping he would welcome her with open arms, Audrey’s crowded thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of little Mary running into the yard, leaving the wooden gate swinging and creaking on its hinges. Dressed in her blue school frock, one sock up and the other down, her fringe sticking up from running, she pushed aside the sheets hanging on the washing line, gasping for breath.
‘What is it, Mary, love?’ said Audrey. ‘You look like you’ve run twenty miles.’
Mary was a different girl from the silent creature who had arrived at the bakery a year ago, refusing to speak a word. She’d had so much to cope with for a girl of seven, what with witnessing the death of her little brother, Edward, when a bomb hit their house, and then, poor girl, her mother taking her own life at Christmas. Finding the words to explain that to Mary had been one of the hardest things Audrey had ever had to do. Mary’s high-pitched, horrified scream was etched on her memory for the rest of her life. But, despite her losses, away from the smoky chimney pots and the slum district she had previously lived in, the sea air, busy bakery life and simple kindnesses were doing the little girl good. Other women she knew hadn’t taken to their evacuees, but Audrey, unable to have a baby of her own, felt vehemently protective of Mary and had grown to love her as if she were her own flesh and blood.
‘It’s Lily,’ Mary said, in tears now. ‘She’s in trouble! She’s lost the baby!’
Lost the baby? Audrey’s stomach somersaulted and her jaw dropped.
‘What on earth do you mean, “lost the baby”?’ said Audrey, the clean washing slipping from her hands to the muddy ground. Mary gripped hold of Audrey’s hand and pulled her towards the gate.
‘Please,’ said Mary, tears spilling. ‘Help her!’
And just as suddenly as William’s sweet music had started, it stopped.
Chapter Two
Earlier that day Lily had taken Joy out in the pram, to try to soothe her. After months of being banned, sea bathing was now allowed on small areas of the beach where gaps had been made in the barbed-wire sea defences. With holidaymakers discouraged from travelling, to avoid creating traffic and wasting precious petrol, the beaches were bare. The sun warm on her skin, Lily pushed the pram along the promenade, past the signs warning people to ‘bathe at your own risk and do not take photographs’, hoping the motion would rock Joy to sleep. And, for a precious few moments, where nothing but the gentle lap of waves on the beach was audible, the child was quiet.
‘Why don’t you have a sleep?’ Lily had said, suppressing a yawn and peering into the pram as Joy chewed on a wooden clothes peg. ‘You must need a nap, I know I do.’
Though Lily had done everything the maternity nurse had instructed – nursing, bathing and clothing Joy the right way – the baby girl was ‘fussy’ and didn’t feed well. When she did feed, she cried and cried afterwards, her face boiling red and flushed. Her tiny fists would clench and she’d arch her back, drawing her knees up to her tummy as if in pain. She slept for, at the most, three-quarters of an hour at a time, and though everyone’s advice was to not be a martyr to Joy, Lily couldn’t leave her wailing in her crib because she’d wake up everyone else at the bakery and probably down the whole of Fisherman’s Road. Instead, the baby was strapped to her almost continuously.
She couldn’t admit it to anyone, since she’d taken the enormous decision to keep the child despite being an unwed, single mother – risking bringing shame and scandal to Audrey’s home and business – but having a baby was more exhausting than she could ever have imagined. The starry-eyed feeling she’d experienced on the day Joy was born had well and truly evaporated. Six months on, she longed for someone to take Joy off her hands, for just a few hours. She knew how selfish that sounded, especially when she knew that Audrey was desperate to have her own baby and couldn’t. But it was true. How she wished to read a book, write a letter or just be able to think clearly, but Joy had other ideas. As if reading Lily’s traitorous thoughts, Joy began to cry and her little fists flew up and down as if fighting off a swarm of bees, sending her wooden peg hurtling to the ground.
‘Poor little soul,’ Lily said, all out of energy. ‘Won’t you ever stop crying? Are you so unhappy?’
By the time they had walked for another quarter-hour and reached a shaded and empty spot on the beach, Joy had thankfully cried herself to sleep, and Lily took the opportunity to dip her toes in the sea while Joy slept in her pram. Ignoring the ugly sea defences all around, she stared at her pale feet on the slithery, cold pebbles in the shallows, lifting up the skirt of her cotton dress. She was struck by a memory of Jacques, the young French soldier who had stayed at the bakery for respite last year, and who was now missing, presumed dead. He had been evacuated to Bournemouth from Dunkirk, after waiting in the sea for hours to be rescued by boat, all the while under attack from the Germans. Lily’s blood ran cold; she couldn’t bear to think that she would never see him again. After leaving the bakery, he had written her an incredible love letter, but she had never had the opportunity to reply or to tell him the truth about her pregnancy. That fleeting moment, that possibility of love, was gone forever. She shook her head in dismay and, glancing back at the still-quiet Joy, lifted her skirt higher and went deeper still into the water.
Shivering now, her thoughts went to Joy’s biological father, Henry Bateman. He had been Lily’s boss in her previous job, and she had been so foolish to fall for him. Why had she never questioned whether he was engaged before becoming intimate with him? How could she ha
ve been so reckless and naive? Lily loved Joy, of course she did, but now that she was trying to be a mother, she could tell she was not a natural.
Privately, she felt envious of other girls her age who had war jobs. There were dozens of Land Girls working on the farms in the area who shared an enviable camaraderie. There was the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), where girls were working as coastal mine-spotters and repairing ships. Elsie was one of twenty-eight female ‘conductresses’ working on the Bournemouth buses, and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) girls were in the cockpit, flying aircraft on reconnaissance flights. Even the window washer on Fisherman’s Road was a girl, who came to work in her overalls, hair in a scarf and a ladder over her shoulder.
Lily sighed. Shouldn’t she be playing a vital part in the struggle like them, instead of fading into obscurity? She sometimes felt she’d woken up in someone else’s life.
And what of her heart? The one man she’d had genuine feelings for, Jacques, was gone, and Henry Bateman – who she never wanted to see again – had turned out to be a cheat and a liar, and was now married to another woman.
Squinting in the sunlight, she quickly unbuttoned her dress and dropped it on the beach, where Joy was still sleeping. In just her slip, she walked into the sea and dipped her shoulders in and out of the water, gasping at the cold. Glancing once more at the pram, with the gas-mask boxes slung over the handle, she waded even deeper until her whole body was submerged. Holding her breath and dipping her head under the water, she opened her eyes to see her hair streaming through the seawater, like copper-coloured seaweed. Releasing breath from her lungs and watching the bubbles rise to the surface, shot through with shafts of sunlight, she waited until she couldn’t stand it for a moment longer, then pushed her face up through the water, gasping in the air. Starting to swim now, she found it so refreshing and soothing, and the water so cold and clear, that her mind emptied of all thoughts. She swam and swam towards the horizon, feeling quite free, not thinking of anyone or anything but the sensation of the cold water against her pale skin.
* * *
Now, Audrey dashed out into the street to be confronted by a portly elderly gent in ill-fitting battledress and cap, from the Home Guard, an organisation of local volunteers guarding the coastal defences, carrying baby Joy in one arm, and pushing the pram with the other hand. Unclothed besides her pilchers, poor Joy was furiously kicking her little legs and screaming at the top of her lungs. Her darling face was beetroot red, topped with a tuft of copper curls.
‘Is this your baby?’ he said crossly. ‘The poor wee thing was abandoned in her pram on the beach, screaming so loud you could hear her in France!’
Audrey gasped and stretched out her arms to take Joy and opened her mouth to answer the man when Lily came running up behind them, soaking wet, her thin slip clinging to the outline of her body and her undergarments, her copper hair sticking like strands of seaweed to her forehead and neck. In one hand, she carried her shoes and her dress and she leaned over to catch her breath, hands on her knees.
The man, taken aback by Lily’s appearance, shielded his eyes with his hand, muttering under his breath and shaking his head. Audrey blushed on his behalf, astonished by Lily’s brazenness, instinctively wanting to cover her up and protect her from his judgemental glare. The older generation couldn’t help but judge, and didn’t she know it. Having Lily, an unwed young mother, in the bakery had caused quite a stir amongst some of the older customers.
‘You look half-drowned!’ said Audrey, handing Joy to Lily, then throwing a white sheet over her shoulders. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Thank heavens!’ Lily cried, shrugging off the sheet, standing straight, taking Joy and kissing her chubby cheeks. ‘I thought I’d lost you!’
The man cleared his throat and rocked on the balls of his feet, averting his gaze from Lily’s snow-white plumage. Audrey knew he was about to voice his disapproval of Lily and felt impatient with him, wishing he would go away.
‘I found this baby on the beach,’ he said. ‘I was calling out, hollering at the top of my voice, for the baby’s mother to come forward, but anyone I spoke to on the beach said they didn’t know who she belonged to. There was no identity card near the baby. I was about to take her to the police station and report her as an abandoned child, but this young girl here insisted the baby came from the bakery.’
‘I didn’t abandon her,’ said Lily, frowning and holding Joy close to her body. ‘I…’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time a baby has been abandoned,’ the man continued. ‘Did you hear about the child that was found in the porch of the Coolmain Nursing Home on Porchester Road? The poor little mite was left with his soother and his milk. I heard that the mother who left the baby was a young girl…’
‘Never mind what you’ve heard,’ interrupted Audrey. ‘Better to keep a still tongue in a wise head these days. This was obviously a misunderstanding, isn’t that right, Lily?’
Lily nodded, but her eyes had misted over and her bottom lip was trembling. Wet through, she looked a sorry state. Audrey whispered to Mary to run into the bakery and bag up a few leftover rock cakes for the man. When she returned moments later, she handed them over.
‘Please, take these for your trouble,’ Audrey said. ‘I’ll look after it from here. I’m sure you have more important things to attend to. I’ve heard about the weapons training the Home Guard has been undertaking lately, and we have a great deal to thank you for.’
The man’s chest puffed out. The compliment and the smell of the sugary rock cakes had cast a spell on him. All of a sudden he regained his composure and relaxed. Audrey allowed herself a small, internal smile. She was happy enough to give this man his due – the Home Guard had suffered a lot of taunts, dubbed the ‘Broomstick Army’ as there were not enough weapons for all the volunteers and men were literally training with broomsticks in place of weapons, but there was no doubt that they were a solid part of the coastal defence and would help delay – heaven forbid – an enemy invasion.
‘Yes, well, of course I do, but…’ he began, his eyes resting on the cucumbers growing in a small greenhouse in the bakery courtyard. ‘They’re four shillings and sixpence a pop now, you know, cucumbers. The price of food has rocketed, don’t you think, ma’am?’
Audrey quickly plucked one from the plant and gave it to him. She resisted the mischievous temptation to tell him that perhaps he could use the cucumber instead of a broomstick in weapons training.
‘I see you have hens,’ he said. ‘Are they good layers? Eggs are such a luxury these days, aren’t they, what with rationing and all?’
‘The hens have been on strike this week, I’m afraid, but thank you again,’ said Audrey, gently taking hold of his arm and steering him out of the bakery gate and closing it behind him, widening her eyes in mock disbelief.
‘Right then,’ she said, facing Lily, who, shame-faced, was shivering in the early evening air. ‘Let’s get dinner on before I look at tomorrow’s orders. You look like you need a hot meal. Why don’t you get dry and then help me?’
Silently cursing Lily for being so daft, Audrey got to work in the kitchen, the warm cosy space where she spent much of her time when she wasn’t in the shop or the bakehouse. With a view of the Overcliff and sea through the window, it was the room where she experimented with new ration-friendly recipes, cooked up meals to feed her family and friends – and where she liked to sit, on a rare break, for a cup of rationed tea or to write to Charlie.
‘What was Lily thinking?’ she said to herself, shaking her head as she imagined Joy alone on the beach. Lily was such an unpredictable young woman. She liked to take risks, was impulsive and if she hadn’t got herself in a fix by getting pregnant with an unavailable man, Audrey had no doubt she’d be one of those girls to have a thrilling war job. She wasn’t the domestic type, and though Audrey would never say it out loud, Lily was not particularly maternal. But as things were, she must concentrate on being a good mother to Joy. With no fath
er on the scene, it wouldn’t be an easy journey, there was no doubt about it.
‘She’s going to need your help, not your judgement,’ Audrey muttered to herself, as she soaked a large slice of stale bread in milk, then mixed together the precious minced meat cuts, onion, grated potato and oatmeal, before mashing in the softened bread, for the meat roll. Once it was cooking – the tantalising smell of meat making Audrey wish the meat ration was bigger than the meagre 1s 2d it had been since January – she made a hot drink. From the hooks nailed in a row above the sink, she selected the teacup she always gave to Lily; decorated with blood-red flowers and trimmed with gold, it seemed to suit her stepsister’s air of drama.
‘Something smells good,’ said Lily, carrying Joy on her hip.
Audrey smiled and pulled out a chair at the kitchen table for Lily, placing down a steaming cup of weak tea in front of her. Mary came into the kitchen too and sat down at the table, quickly becoming engrossed in a jigsaw puzzle on a wooden tray that she’d half done the previous day.
‘What happened today, Lily love?’ asked Audrey, trying to keep the anxiety and annoyance out of her voice as she fetched down a board and deftly chopped up a cabbage.
‘I hadn’t intended on leaving her like that,’ said Lily slowly, tears welling up in her eyes. ‘She had been screaming so hard and then suddenly she fell to sleep and I just wanted a few minutes… a few minutes to do something else. I went for a swim, but once I was in the sea, I couldn’t stop swimming. I almost reached the pier.’