My Sweet Valentine

by Annie Groves

  ‘You can be sure that I’ll take the very best care of her, Mrs Robbins,’ Drew assured Olive.

  ‘I know that, Drew. I wouldn’t have suggested you go with Tilly if I didn’t think that, and if I didn’t feel completely able to trust you to do everything that is right.’

  Quietly they looked at one another, and Olive could see from the seriousness of Drew’s expression that he understood the promise she wanted from him and that he was willing to give it. He was everything any mother could want for her daughter, Olive knew.

  To see Tilly’s spirits restored so speedily and almost miraculously was wonderful, Olive had to admit later in the afternoon, as they all sat on the grass, Tilly’s voice rising and falling excitedly as she chattered happily about the holiday.

  ‘I’ll have a word with some of the guys on the paper,’ said Drew, ‘find out where they recommend.’

  ‘Well, if it was me I’d go to somewhere like Brighton where there’s a bit of life,’ Dulcie informed them.

  ‘No, I want to go somewhere quiet and peaceful, a pretty little village with houses with thatched roofs, and a dear river with fishing boats,’ Tilly said dreamily.

  ‘I’ve never been to the seaside,’ Agnes put in. ‘We were going to go once with the orphanage, but I had to stay behind because I got some spots and they thought I was coming down with something.’

  ‘I dare say the south coast itself will be out of bounds because of the war,’ Olive warned them, ‘but Devon is supposed to be very pretty.’

  ‘We could hire bicycles and explore the countryside,’ said Tilly enthusiastically. The truth was that really she didn’t care where they went as long as she and Drew were there together.

  Dulcie pulled a face. ‘That’s not my idea of having a good time. I’d want to go dancing and be taken out for a posh meal.’

  Seated at Drew’s side, Tilly reached for his hand. She felt so happy, elated and buoyed up with a heady mixture of relief in his safety and joy at the unexpected gift her mother had given her that fizzed up inside her. Suddenly, despite the war, her world had turned from the darkness of fear into a place in which she could look forward to a special time for her and Drew to share together.

  ‘We could go next month, in June,’ she told Drew.

  June, the wedding month. She and Drew might not be getting married, but that did not mean that she couldn’t make their precious shared time away together something very special, and just for the two of them. A couple didn’t have to be married for that. As that thought formed inside her head, Tilly deliberately avoided looking at her mother, knowing that what she had in mind right now as part of their special time together was not something of which her mother would approve at all.

  ‘I’m going to go in and make us some tea,’ Olive announced. ‘You girls can keep an eye on Alice. Don’t let her go too far, mind.’

  ‘I’ll come with you, Mum,’ Tilly said, her conscience urging her to make the offer as though to make up both for the gulf that had existed between them in recent weeks, and the secret thoughts she had just had about how she would most like to spend her precious time with Drew.

  The feeling of her daughter’s arm through her own as they walked back towards the house together, the May breeze catching at the hems of the skirts of their floral dresses, filled Olive with relief. With just a few words she had brought Tilly back from that dark, frightening place she had gone to, and where Olive had really begun to fear she might lose her, and now she was her old optimistic sunny self again. She had made a mistake in judging her daughter’s emotional makeup to be similar to her own, Olive acknowledged. Tilly loved fiercely and with everything in her, throwing herself into her emotions with unguarded intensity. Because of that she was vulnerable to her love in a way that Olive knew she herself was not. She might never have known the highs that love obviously brought Tilly, but she had never known the lows that were Tilly’s either. As a mother all she wanted for her daughter was her happiness, a good steady ongoing happiness that came from a world at peace and a reliable, loving, living husband. At least in Drew Tilly had found a young man who did truly love her, Olive comforted herself as they walked into the kitchen. Not that she intended to say anything of what she was thinking to Tilly.

  Instead she told her prosaically, ‘You get the tea tray organised, Tilly, and I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Tilly reached for the tray, which was propped up at the back of the smart kitchen cabinet of which Olive was so proud, and then stopped, going over to where Olive was standing by the kitchen sink.

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ she told her, reaching for her and hugging her tightly. ‘This morning I thought that Drew was really gone and that I’d lost him, and now … I don’t think I’ve ever felt so happy.’

  The feeling of her daughter’s young strong arms around her filled Olive’s heart with emotion.

  She hugged her in return then told her, ‘You go back to Drew, Tilly, but remember, when you and he do go away—’

  ‘I know, Mum. You don’t have to tell me,’ Tilly stopped her.

  As she headed back to Drew she recognised that she hadn’t crossed her fingers behind her back when she’d let her mother think she was giving her an assurance of ‘good behaviour’, but then crossing your fingers was a childhood thing and she wasn’t a child any more. She was a woman on the verge of claiming that womanhood, and so very eager to do so, to give and share the reality of love with the man she loved.

  June couldn’t come soon enough.

  Olive was just pouring the boiling water onto the tea leaves when Sally walked into the kitchen.

  ‘You could have had a couple more hours in bed,’ Olive told her. ‘If we have another night like last night you’ll be kept busy at the hospital.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. We had so many patients in last night that we just couldn’t do anything for. Too many. You just lose count in the end, but to their families every one of them is someone loved who has been lost. You feel so guilty because you can’t be more sympathetic, but there just isn’t time.’

  ‘I’m sure that people would much rather you were in the operating theatre helping people, Sally, than offering them cups of tea and sympathy. You’re a trained nurse. Anyone can make a cup of tea.’

  ‘That’s exactly what my mum would have said,’ Sally admitted, bending to pick up the tea tray. Olive had a way of saying things that were unexpectedly sympathetic and understanding. She couldn’t have had a better landlady, Sally thought, and in her more fanciful moments she liked to think that her mother was looking down on her and thought the same thing.

  Out in the garden Agnes was brushing her uniform hat free of the dust it had collected during the week’s bombings, whilst Dulcie filed her nails. Tilly was showing Drew how to make a daisy chain, ostensibly for Alice, but since it gave her an opportunity to sit close to Drew and hold his hands whilst she showed him what to do, Olive suspected that the chain would be a long time in the making.

  Alice herself, busy playing on the lawn spotted them, toddled towards them, stopped and then sat down and looked straight at Sally, holding out her arms to her.

  For a moment there was silence. Olive held her breath. For Sally’s sake as much as Alice’s she really hoped that the two half-sisters could form a bond, and that Sally would find it in her heart to love her little sister, who needed her so much.

  Sally, though, after the smallest hesitation, turned from the baby and walked away.

  As she put down the tray Sally could feel her heart thumping so heavily that it was making her feel light-headed. She felt sick and shaky, angry inside, and yet guilty, in the same kind of way she had done as a child when she’d done something she’d known was ‘wrong’.

  When Sally turned from Alice, leaving the little girl to wail in rejected misery, the sound of her despair tore at Agnes’s heart. Normally the last person to cause a confrontation of any kind, little Alice’s plight touched such a raw place in Agnes that before she knew what she was doing she was on her f
eet and following Sally to the furthest end of the garden, telling her fiercely, ‘I think it’s a terrible cruel thing wot you’re planning to do with little Alice, giving her away like she was just …’ her gaze fell on the vegetable patch, ‘… just like she wasn’t a baby and your own flesh and blood at all but a … a bag of veggies. I never thought you were the sort to do something like that, Sally.’

  To be verbally attacked by Agnes, of all people, really caught Sally off guard, but she suspected that she should have expected it. After all, Agnes herself had been abandoned as a baby.

  ‘I’m not planning to leave Alice on the steps of an orphanage, Agnes,’ she informed her as calmly as she could. ‘Far from it. She will be properly adopted and placed with a family who will love and care for her.’

  ‘She has a family. She has you and her uncle.’

  ‘Callum is in the Royal Navy, and I am a nurse. There is a war on, and both of us have duties to fulfil for which we have been trained. Alice will be much better off with a family.’

  ‘No she won’t. She’ll spend the rest of her life wondering who her real family are, and why they gave her up. She’ll worry that she wasn’t good enough for them, and that they didn’t love her enough. She’ll grow up feeling that … that part of her is missing.’

  Never in the whole time she had known Agnes had Sally heard such an impassioned speech from her. Agnes was normally so timid and quiet. Because she felt that, as an abandoned child, she didn’t have the right to speak out or have an opinion? Was that what being rejected by one’s family did to a child?

  ‘I’m doing this for Alice’s own benefit. Like I just said, I’m not going to abandon her, Agnes.’

  ‘No you aren’t. Doing it for Alice’s sake, I mean. You’re doing it for you’re own because it hurts you too much to have her here because of what she means. You’re punishing her for what you think her parents did, and that’s wrong. I’d adopt her myself if I could, so I would.’

  Without another word she turned round and ran back up the garden picking up her hat and then disappearing in the direction of the house.

  ‘I’m sorry about the child being here, and about upsetting Agnes,’ Sally apologised to Olive later when they were drinking their tea. ‘It’s not right that you should have to help out with her like this. She’s nothing to you, after all. Callum should never have brought her here. She’d have been far better off in an orphanage in Liverpool.’

  ‘I understand how you feel, Sally,’ Olive told her gently, ‘but I wouldn’t be being fair to you if I didn’t advise you not to rush into anything that you might one day regret, and as for Agnes, well, I think we both understand why she’s so upset.’

  ‘Yes. It’s because of her being abandoned as a baby herself. It’s all very well Agnes getting herself in an emotional state, but she doesn’t appreciate the realities of the situation. Even if I wanted to keep Alice, which I don’t, how could I? I’ve got George to think of. He doesn’t even know she exists. How could I ask him to take her on? Besides, I’m not her only relative. She’s got Callum. She’s known him since she was born. She can’t stay here, Olive. I’ll have to do something.’

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘And we’ve booked to stay at this pub in a village on the River Otter, and—’

  ‘Two rooms or one?’ Clara demanded, interrupting Tilly in mid-sentence.

  ‘Two,’ Tilly responded. ‘Mum wouldn’t have let me go otherwise. She found out about the village for us from Mrs Windle, the vicar’s wife. She knew about it from some friends of her family, and it was actually Mrs Windle who wrote to the pub on our behalf. They’re a bit fussy about who they let stay, on account of not wanting to let rooms to RAF types who might be up to no good with their girlfriends.’

  ‘Your mum told you that?’

  ‘Not in so many words, but it was obvious what Mum was getting at when she gave me this lecture about not letting Mrs Windle down.’

  ‘So when do you go then?’ Clara asked, as they got ready for their day’s work, removing the covers from their typewriters and folding them neatly away before sitting down at their machines.

  ‘Just over two weeks. I can’t wait.’

  Clara nodded. Outside, the main streets of London might have been cleared of the worst of the debris from the dreadful blitz of 10 May, one might no longer have to literally crunch through ankle-deep broken glass on the pavements, the raw gaping awfulness of buildings ripped apart to show their most private interiors might have been softened by the herculean effort put in by people to restore the city to some semblance of normality, but London would never be the same. Too many buildings had been lost – too many buildings and too many lives. Rather than instil fear into people, though, the savagery of the May blitz had had the opposite effect, giving people a determination to see things through that was evident everywhere you went. Tilly now felt as though she was part of that courageous band. Knowing that she was going to have that precious personal time with Drew and that her mother finally accepted that she was old enough to do that had made such a difference to her, pulling her back from the edge of that awful fear that had dragged her down.

  Her spirits had rebounded, her natural optimism reasserting itself. She and Drew had now survived three equally awful incidents: the bombing of St Paul’s, the incendiary attack on Article Row, and finally the bombing of the city that had seen Fleet Street and the surrounding district on fire from end to end. Surely now they were safe now?

  ‘I’d have liked to have stayed on the coast but, like Drew says, with the war on there’s bound to be all sorts of restrictions about going near the beaches and that kind of thing, and this village where we’re staying is on the river. Drew says he’s going to teach me to fish.’

  A happy smile curved Tilly’s mouth. ‘When he was growing up he and his family used to go to this lake every summer. He says it’s something that Americans do.’

  Once again Clara nodded. She was more interested in her own life than Tilly’s, and wanted to talk about the effect the new law bringing in clothing coupons was likely to have on her ability to buy a wedding dress.

  ‘I just wanted to say thank you, Sister, seeing as you were the one that was there when our Carole was operated on, after her being hurt in the bombing. Right as rain, she is now, thanks to everyone here, and her broken leg’s mending a treat. Broke my heart, it would, if we’d lost her, aye and my hubby’s as well. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it? When we found out that our Betty had got herself into trouble with a seaman she’d been seeing, her dad was all for throwing her out he was that mad with her, showing us up and bringing shame on the family, and then when our Betty didn’t survive the birth, well, my hubby said how it would be best if we were to give the baby up for adoption, her being illegitimate and everything. But flesh and blood is flesh and blood when all said and done, and it wasn’t the poor little mite’s fault that she’d been born the way that she had. You can’t turn your back on your own. It weren’t her fault what her mum did, bringing all that trouble on us and letting us down like she did.’

  The woman shook her head and then told Sally, ‘That was at the beginning of the war, and now you should see my Derek with her. Thinks the sun shines out of her, he does, and reckons she’s the spitting image of his sister wot died of scarlet fever when she was a kiddy.’

  Sally smiled politely and nodded. It wasn’t unusual for the relatives of patients and patients themselves to come into the hospital to thank those who had helped them. Normally their thanks gave Sally a real lift, but listening to this woman, it wasn’t a lift to her spirits she felt so much as a cold lump of unwanted guilt, which lay heavily in the pit of her stomach.

  She knew the others at number 13 thought she was being cold-hearted and mean in ignoring Alice and refusing to have anything to do with her, but she couldn’t help it. Every time she looked at the little girl she saw her father and her false friend, and every time she saw them she thought of her mother and what she had endured, the dreadful physical
pain, the awfulness of her body wasting away as the cancer ate into her. Then, at a time when her father’s thoughts should have been only for her mother, he had secretly been thinking of Morag.

  Thinking of her, wanting her … betraying her mother with her. Sally could visualise her mother now, see her sweet loving smile, feel the gentle loving touch of her hand on her own head brushing her hair out of her eyes as she had done when she had been a child, loving her and protecting her. Now it was her turn to love and protect her mother, to be loyal to her.

  Sally closed her eyes briefly and then opened them again when, as clearly as though she had been there with her, she could hear her mother’s voice saying quietly, ‘Sally, she’s just a baby.’

  ‘Morag’s baby,’ said Sally fiercely.

  ‘Talking to yourself?’ a fellow sister grinned as she passed Sally in the corridor. ‘Bad sign that, you know.’

  Sally smiled back dutifully, but in reality she didn’t feel like smiling. She wasn’t sleeping and she was missing George, whom she hadn’t been able to see since before the last air raid because of the shifts they were working. She really missed him, even though they wrote to one another every day. She wished desperately that she had been open with him right from the start about the situation with her father.

  She had a day off in three days’ time. She would go and see the vicar and ask him if he knew of a good orphanage that would take Alice. Olive might say that she was happy to have Alice living at number 13, and, even more generously, that she was prepared to look after her, but it wasn’t right that she should have to do that. Alice wasn’t Olive’s responsibility, after all.

  ‘Thanks for coming with me to take Mr Whittaker his tea,’ said Agnes to Ted as they walked back from number 50 arm in arm in the late evening sunshine.