Wartime Brides and Wedding Cakes: A romantic and heart-warming family saga

by Amy Miller

  Audrey laughed and John doffed his cap, which fell to the floor. He bent over to pick it up and when he stood back up straight, she noticed his breathing was wheezy. She frowned while he stopped to catch his breath, but then he started coughing. He spluttered and coughed for a good minute, with Audrey patting his back, before he returned to normal, his face bright red and clammy.

  ‘That cough has been getting worse since this time last year,’ Audrey said, shaking her head. ‘You need to get it seen to. Are you even taking anything for it? I’ve got some blackberry syrup upstairs.’

  ‘Port wine and brandy is my medicine,’ he said, spluttering. ‘It’s nothin’ but a bit of flour in m’ throat.’

  ‘That may be, but it needs seeing to,’ she said. ‘It worries me. Pat told me you’re hiding it from me.’

  John shook his head, rolling his eyes at the mention of his sister, Charlie’s mother, Pat. A tireless volunteer for the WVS, when she wasn’t involved in the local ‘meat pie scheme’, cycling meat pies to the Land Girls working in the surrounding villages and fields, she was running knitting and clothes mending groups, or boiling up a sheep’s head to make a stew. She was a remarkable woman, but she did have her finger – and nose – in every pie.

  ‘Trust her to be makin’ a meal out of my ailments,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about, love. Speakin’ of worrying matters though, how’s that brother of yours? I saw him heading out for fire-watching duties not half-hour ago, but he barely grunted at me. I know it ain’t easy for him with his injuries, but it looks like he’s got the weight of the world bearin’ down on his young shoulders.’

  Uncle John shook his head and Audrey sighed, folding her arms across her chest. She thought of poor Elsie and the words she’d had with William earlier. She regretted being so short with him, but felt increasingly infuriated by his behaviour.

  ‘He’s not well,’ she said. ‘It’s like he’s gone into himself. All he can see is darkness. He’s gone and broken off his engagement to Elsie too.’

  ‘He never has!’ said John. ‘Get ’im to come down here tomorrow. The boy can ’elp me.’

  ‘But it’s his foot, he’s…’ Audrey started. ‘I don’t know if he’s able to…’

  ‘He’s got two working arms, ain’t ’e?’ John said. ‘He doesn’t need two feet to ’elp me out. I’ve known men more injured than ’im in the Great War get back on their feet without complainin’. In my mind, that boy needs less sympathy and more orders.’

  ‘I’ll speak to him,’ said Audrey, privately dreading the conversation.

  John returned to work, while Audrey lingered. It was these hours, late on, when the rest of the bakery slept but there was still so much to do, that she missed Charlie the most. They’d always done their talking, debating and deciding in the bakehouse while he worked on the bread. He seemed to think more clearly when he was busy working with his hands. She felt the same when she was mixing the ingredients for a cake or the counter goods – the methodical process helped her think straight.

  ‘What else is on your mind, my girl?’ said John. ‘I can tell there’s somethin’.’

  Audrey thought about telling him about her fears for Lily and how she was coping with motherhood, but decided against it. Going by his advice for how to deal with William, he wouldn’t have a lot of sympathy for Lily.

  ‘I’m all right, John,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘I’m still getting no end of orders for wedding cakes from young couples getting wed while their sweethearts are home on leave. How they’ll make their marriages work, I don’t know; they’ll spend more time apart than they will together.’

  ‘Absence makes the ’eart grow fonder,’ said John. ‘Or so I’ve ’eard.’

  ‘I’m having to make the dried fruit spread very thinly now,’ Audrey mused, thinking of the dwindling supplies in the storeroom. ‘Course, I can’t ice the celebration cakes anymore since icing is banned and I’m using the plaster of Paris cake covers, but folk still want a delicious cake inside, don’t they? I thought we had more raisins and a box of glacé cherries in the storeroom, but I can’t see them anywhere. I’ve lost track of a bag of sugar too, and I’m panicking since every spillage, wastage or lost item has to be recorded and reported to the Ministry. You haven’t moved anything in store, have you?’

  John shook his head and stopped what he was doing. ‘Nobody’s pilferin’, are they?’ he said. ‘None of the delivery boys got their ’ands in the stocks?’

  She shook her head, confused, trying to imagine anyone at the bakery taking ingredients. Nobody would do that. Perhaps she had misplaced them; her mind was overflowing these days.

  ‘Maybe you put ’em somewhere else,’ John said. ‘Remember, we got that leaflet about what to do in an invasion a few weeks back? “Hide the sugar” was on that list. Maybe you took heed and hid it! There’ll be an explanation. Only someone downright desperate or stupid would steal from the ’and that feeds ’em.’

  Chapter Five

  Maggie perched on a wooden stool in front of her dressing table, one of the few pieces of furniture that had escaped being chopped up and burned for fuel during the freezing winter months. Taking the turquoise and gold hairbrush and handheld mirror from the silk-lined vanity set her sweetheart, Pilot Officer George Meadows, had gifted her, she brushed through her cloud of strawberry blonde hair one hundred times and applied a bright slash of lipstick to her lips. Sitting on the floor were her two younger sisters, Nancy and Isabel. Nancy was darning the heel of her stockings, while Isabel was cutting the toes off her shoes to make them into sandals.

  ‘When I get married to George,’ said Maggie dreamily, ‘I’m going to wear my hair like Veronica Lake, to the wedding. You know, her “one-eyed do”. Like this.’

  Isabel put down her shoe and smiled in admiration at her older sister. ‘Oh, you’ll look so pretty, Maggie,’ she said. ‘If only I had half your good looks, maybe I could find a husband and wouldn’t be condemned to spend my life working in that rotten laundry.’

  Maggie left one side of her shiny hair tumbling over her left eye and pouted her lips, resting her hands on her crossed knees. Though her sisters might be called plain-faced, she knew very well how pretty she was, and wanted to stay lovely for George. But it wasn’t just her sparkly eyes and white teeth that had won him over. No, she believed he had fallen in love with her determination not to give in to the misery of wartime. Some women – and her grandmother, Gwendolen, who she lived with was a shining example – wore the grave hardship of wartime on their faces like a slap and had a fit every time there was an air-raid siren. But Maggie made sure to stay fresh-faced and bright whatever she came up against.

  Looking more closely at Isabel, she frowned. There was a bruise on her sister’s cheek that hadn’t been there last time she looked.

  ‘Is that boss of yours giving you a hard time?’ said Maggie. ‘Where did you get that bruise?’

  Isabel’s hand shot to her cheek and she blushed, pulling her brown hair over her face and staring down at the shoes she was working on.

  ‘He’s got a temper on him all right, but it was my fault for being clumsy,’ said Isabel quietly. ‘He pushed me because I wasn’t working fast enough – jabbed me between my shoulder blades – and I tripped and hit my face on the corner of a shelf, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s all?’ said Maggie, pinning back her hair. ‘How dare he! If he lays a finger on you again, Isabel, you come and tell me. I’ll not have anyone hurt you.’

  Maggie and Nancy shared a concerned glance. Whereas Nancy could look after herself, Isabel was vulnerable and always had been. The youngest sister, she’d had her pigtails pulled at school and stones thrown at her by the neighbourhood boys, just for being shy and awkward. In truth, she was a gentle and loving soul, and whenever she was on the sharp end of their grandmother’s tongue, Maggie tried to protect her. Maggie knew Isabel hated her job at the laundry, but she also knew the family desperately needed all the girls’ wages. Keeping your job �
�� even one with a cruel boss – was paramount.

  ‘And what will you wear for a dress, Maggie?’ said Nancy, deliberately changing the subject. ‘Your bakery overall? You can borrow my dungarees from my night shifts in the aircraft factory, if you like.’

  ‘A beautiful wedding dress of course, made with the finest silk and handmade lace!’ said Maggie, winking at Isabel. ‘No, but it will be lovely, if I can get enough coupons to buy some decent fabric, that is. Rationing has made it difficult, but I have my ways…’

  Clothes had been rationed on 1 June 1941, as supplies of wool and cotton had fallen, with an announcement on the wireless from the President of the Board of Trade, Oliver Lyttelton. You were allowed sixty-six clothing coupons per year and you could spend them how you wanted, but with a mackintosh taking nine coupons and a woollen dress eleven coupons, women were panicking about their wardrobes. It was a good job, thought Maggie, that she had a plan in place.

  ‘You could make a dress out of parachute silk,’ said Isabel, looking relieved that the conversation had moved on from her bruise. ‘Some girls are doing that, y’know. Last time a parachute came down in Bournemouth the silk was stripped off it in seconds. I could get you some, probably, though it might be bloodstained.’

  Maggie pulled a face. Isabel was talking about enemy pilots crash-landing, but German landmines were also dropped on silk parachutes, so when locals got wind of one landing, they’d be at the site in minutes, just for the fabric, undeterred by danger.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said in disgust. ‘No, I’m going to have a gorgeous gown made from the best fabric I can buy. I’ll not have gravy browning down my legs either, but real silk stockings, and my shoes will be—’ She paused and put her finger to her lips, while dreaming of her shoes.

  ‘Wooden clogs?’ giggled Isabel. ‘Like you wear to work?’

  Maggie stared at her in mock disapproval.

  ‘Has he even asked you to marry him yet?’ said Nancy, frowning. ‘Does he even exist? You’ve never brought him home.’

  ‘How can I bring him home?’ Maggie said wearily, putting the brush and mirror back into the leather vanity case, closing it and pushing it under her bed, the only place it would be safe from her grandmother’s beady eyes.

  She looked around the room that she shared with her sisters: the floral wallpaper peeled, and damp crept across the walls like ivy, the creaky beds complained every time anyone climbed onto the thin mattresses, empty candleholders were lined up on the windowsill, waiting to be refreshed. The two-up, two-down cottage that the girls lived in with their grandmother since their parents had passed away was a poor excuse for a home.

  Their grandmother, Gwendolen, squandered money on homemade alcoholic concoctions such as dandelion wine, nettle beer or ethyl alcohol mixed with hawthorn berry juice, illegally sold by a shady neighbour, and each day they only just managed to put food on the table. Maggie’s job at the bakery helped; Isabel earned a pittance in the laundry and Nancy worked at the aircraft factory. But Maggie was fed up with scraping through. She wanted a better life and believed that George Meadows was the key to that. Since they’d met, she had worked hard to give the impression that she was from a good, well-educated family, who had a nice house in a decent area of Bournemouth. She couldn’t tell him the truth – that her grandmother loved the drink and they were completely poverty-stricken.

  ‘He hasn’t asked you yet, has he?’ said Nancy and quickly held up her hand to catch the powder puff Maggie was hurling at her. ‘You’re not going to do much damage with that!’

  Regaining her composure, Maggie smiled briefly.

  ‘No, he hasn’t asked yet,’ she replied, ‘but I can sense it’s only a matter of time. Look, I better get to the bakery. See you tonight, girls. Isabel, if that man touches you again, come and tell me. I’m not afraid to tell him what I think of him. When I’m married, Isabel love, you can go into that laundry and tell him he can stuff his job!’

  Isabel beamed at Maggie, and Maggie silently vowed she would improve her sisters’ lives, no matter what. She blew them a kiss and headed down the narrow staircase, pausing at the door of the room where their grandmother slept in an ancient rocking chair, her woollen stockings rolled at the ankles, revealing sharp and knobbly, vein-ridden knees. Maggie shivered; sometimes her grandmother resembled a corpse.

  ‘Goodbye, you old bag,’ she whispered. ‘It won’t be long until I say goodbye for good.’

  A shadow of guilt passed over her as she left the house and stepped into the street. She thought of the clandestine meetings she’d had with the neighbourhood’s women in alleyways to ‘trade’, some with their loot hidden in prams alongside their babies, but she shrugged off the guilt as quickly as it had arrived. You didn’t get anything by waiting, not in wartime. She would pay back everything she’d ‘borrowed’ one day, but for the time being, she had one goal: George Meadows, her ticket to a better life.

  Walking quickly down the street, she took off her cardigan and carried it folded neatly on her arm. It was a hot day – women would be hatless and stocking-less – but not Maggie, whose standards would remain high, no matter what other women did.

  Arriving at the bakery at 8 a.m., the front step sparkling clean, the gold ‘Bakery’ lettering on the window polished, and a row of honey-coloured loaves already on display and the scent of fresh bread in the air, she slowed down when she heard raised voices from inside. It was Audrey and a man having some kind of heated discussion. Maggie frowned. Heart thudding, feeling suddenly paranoid, she gingerly opened the door, releasing the jingly bell, and went inside.

  Chapter Six

  Lily was upstairs in her bedroom, fastening the safety pin on Joy’s nappy – who was blissfully quiet and distracted by Bertie, Lily’s budgie, fluttering around the room – when she heard the muffled sound of Audrey’s raised voice from the bakery shop below. There was a male voice too, but it was quieter and she couldn’t work out to whom it belonged.

  ‘Whoever can that be?’ she said, frowning. Audrey was rarely het up and never did she raise her voice to a customer. Indeed, she gave every customer her personal attention, ensuring they were completely satisfied.

  For a split second, Lily imagined that the old Home Guard man from the beach had come back with a police officer in tow, to arrest her for being a bad mother and ‘abandoning’ Joy. A wave of guilt washed over her as she was struck again by her careless behaviour on the beach. Her porcelain white cheeks turned pink at the memory: how could she do such a thing? What if the ARP warden had sounded the gas rattle when she’d been in the sea? Baby Joy would have been left exposed on the beach, with no one to fix on her gas mask – an awful great thing that looked like a diving helmet. The hairs on the back of Lily’s neck bristled at the thought.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered to Joy, who was furiously pedalling her little legs in the air. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’

  There was a side to her own character that Lily couldn’t quite fathom; the same recklessness that had got her in this situation the previous year with Henry Bateman, who, unbeknownst to Lily, was engaged to be married. Any girl with a sensible head on her shoulders would have refused to become intimate with Henry without the security of a ring on her finger, or at least an assurance that he was single. But seventeen-year-old Lily hadn’t been cynical enough to question or doubt him, and besides, she wasn’t interested in marriage. As far as she could tell, it meant a life of domesticity and Lily had never wanted that. She had also wanted independence and freedom from her father, Victor’s, watchful eye. Well, that particular wish had come true in spades: her father had refused to meet baby Joy and accept Lily’s indiscretion, no matter what. Though she had written to him in London several times since the child’s birth, he hadn’t even replied. Thank goodness for Audrey, who had welcomed her into the bakery family and given her a home.

  ‘Your silly grandfather is an old curmudgeon,’ she said to Joy, her playful words belying the sadness she felt. In truth, sh
e missed Victor dreadfully, and despite thinking she would manage motherhood without his support, privately knew that she was struggling. Keeping Joy was her choice, she thought, kissing her baby’s soft cheek. When Joy was born, Lily realised she could never have given her up for adoption. She loved her deeply and wanted to protect her and be a good mother and, with Audrey’s help, it had seemed altogether possible. The problem was – and Lily wouldn’t admit this to anyone – fear that she was a complete and utter disappointment to her own baby gnawed at her confidence. All the crying Joy did, the fitful nights and the refusal to sleep, felt to Lily as if she was saying: ‘You’re hopeless, you’re getting it all wrong, you never wanted me in the first place.’

  Lily’s eyes pricked with tears and she sighed, shaking her head. I’m losing my mind, she thought.

  Lifting Joy and placing her on her hip, where she seemed to fit like a jigsaw piece, Lily opened the bedroom door to listen to the raised voices coming from the shop. Heading down the stairs, she hoped it wasn’t another customer with bad news about one of their relations on the front line. Some of the outpourings of grief she’d seen in the shop took her breath away. Audrey, however, seemed to take it all in her stride and have limitless love and compassion for all her customers, neighbours and friends. The shop overflowed with warmth in more ways than one.

  ‘Gracious me,’ she said, stopping dead when she reached the bottom step of the stairs and the voices became discernible. The blood drained from her face and her heart thudded in her chest when she recognised the male voice. She could hardly believe her ears. After swearing he never wanted anything more to do with Lily or to see her again and making her promise she would never contact him, it was Henry Bateman.

  ‘I want to see her, Mrs Barton,’ he was saying, his voice firm. ‘I do have a right to see her and you can’t stop me from doing so.’