‘You really believe we’ll be at war?’
‘I hope not. Look, let’s see what we can see written on your blackboard, shall we?’ He pointed to where the faint line of surf showed in the blackness like a child’s scribble and pretended to read. ‘Phil’s full recovery. An even better year for Owen’s shop.’
‘And you, Peter? What would you like to see written?’
He squeezed her shoulder, bent his head down a little so his chin rested on her hair. ‘Oh, just more of the same will do for me.’ For the first time he touched her cheek with his lips, then guided them back to the car.
‘New Year is never a new beginning, is it?’ he mused. ‘Threads drag over from one year to the next. Problems never cease on the stroke of midnight.’
As he spoke the midnight chimes began to echo over Ada and Phil’s resentment and unhappiness, over Cecily’s inability to face the truth over her obsession with Danny, over Dorothy’s spiteful nature and Peter’s secret love for Cecily. Yet all these were insignificant as optimism faded while they waited for Chamberlain’s government to dash their hopes and war to begin its ugly, destructive path.
As they approached the docks they stopped as hooters and ships’ sirens filled the once-silent night. High-pitched whistles and deep blasts from the big ships all blending on the night air to perform the usual symphony. They stood for a long time, each with their dreams, then Peter drove her home, adding his car’s horn to the rest, smiling at her in the darkness.
Chapter Four
WILLIE HAD FINISHED the stable repairs, the charred wood had been replaced and a new floor added with steps leading up to what once had been the hay loft. The place had been emptied of the stalls where the horses were kept and the hay feeders were gone from the wall.
‘It makes me sad to think there are no more horses,’ Willie said as he stood with the sisters to explain what had been done. ‘Perhaps we should have waited. If this war is as bad as some predict, we might have to give up the van and go back to the horse and cart.’
‘It was lovely to ride on the trap, wasn’t it?’ Cecily said. ‘It made us feel special.’
‘Even our Van was pleased when Willie met her from school and she could ride home in style,’ Ada added.
Willie looked down the stone steps leading to the cellar. ‘You might like to think of making this into an air raid shelter,’ he suggested. ‘The government will be delivering shelters soon and you might be just as safe down there.’
Ada shuddered. ‘I can’t imagine having to leave our beds and go down there,’ she said. ‘Can’t we forget the war for a little while?’
The year had begun like every other with talk of the weather, comparing it to previous winters, knitting scarves and hats to keep warm, reminiscing about the previous summer and looking forward to the next, but whatever the subject of the conversation, there was always a reference to the approaching war.
The rumblings of war filled everyone’s mind. There were more insistent calls for volunteers for air raid precautions and fire watching and many other organizations intent on preparing for the troubles to come. The experience of the Spanish war encouraged councils to recommend building deep shelters, the Maginot Line quoted as proof of the strength of cement as protection.
Entrepreneurial businessmen advertised their services in strengthening underground rooms, making cellars and basements comfortable and safe. Other firms offered custom-built shelters complete with lights and sanitation.
The sisters left the decisions and the work to Willie. Their neighbours surprised them by saying they were selling their bakery shop. The premises was emptied and they moved somewhere away from the coast and its docks, hoping to avoid the worst of the bombing they were warned to expect. Several of their friends had done the same, two leaving by ship to go to America until Europe was clear of the German threat.
Cecily was still thinking about the shop next door. She and Ada had often considered buying a second shop but with the strained atmosphere between them she couldn’t imagine their discussions being fruitful. Without mentioning her intention, she went that day to talk to the solicitor who had dealt with their few problems and arranged to buy the shop.
She had no idea what she would sell but felt that, with Ada and Phil being so difficult, she had to have something of her own. Being on her own was more and more likely. Ada had once mentioned selling the shop and with a place of her own that wouldn’t be such a disaster. She and Van would be able to manage. The sale went through quickly and her bank balance looked sick but she was pleased to know she had a place, a second way of earning a living for herself and her daughter.
Ada’s only reaction to the news was a disapproving nod and a look of anger shared with Phil.
After the event, she told Waldo and Bertie. The only other person who knew was Willie. They depended on Willie for so many things. They paid him seven pounds a week now, double what most men earned, and considered it money well spent. Although he was only twenty-four, he was capable and mature and they trusted him completely.
Beside what he did in the business, he dealt with the care of the property, deciding when and how repairs should be carried out. He employed men, occasionally Danny Preston, to do the work, which he meticulously oversaw to make certain the work was correctly done. It was Willie who Cecily asked to do some tidying up work on the shop next door. She and Ada dreaded the thought of a war, not least because of the threat that Willie would have to leave them.
Phil was never enthusiastic about any job they coaxed him to do. Although Cecily had not gone back on her refusal to employ him, there were occasional tasks which, if he had shown the slightest interest in doing, would have at least kept him occupied. But he preferred to set out a game of patience on the table in the room behind the shop and wait for Ada to finish work and take him home.
He had retained his prison pallor and Ada was determined that in this coming summer she would persuade him to get out on the beaches, to swim, relax and build up his strength and health in exercise, fresh air and warm sunshine.
The cellars were inspected by Willie and a man from the council who visited such places to assist in decisions about air raid shelters. They decided it would need strengthening but, when finished, would be large enough to hold six people comfortably. The couple who ran a nearby cafe were invited by Ada to consider it theirs too. Willie suggested that if war became a reality they would need a key but the thought of a key being in someone else’s hands made Cecily doubt the decision to offer them a place. Living alone in the rambling old building was bad enough without the fear of someone else being able to come into the yard without her knowing.
Jack Simmons helped with the work of strengthening the cellar. He no longer sold cheap fruit and vegetables in the rundown shop nearby. The business had failed and now with his wife, Sally, the three children and another on the way, he coped by managing an assortment of jobs, including selling ice cream from a pedal cycle cart in the summer and in winter by taking any job that offered. Twenty-four shillings dole was not enough to pay rent and feed and clothe them all. Cecily and Ada helped when they could, finding him occasional work and recommending him to others looking for a reliable workman.
The cellar was finished and duly examined by the sisters and Phil – who pronounced firmly that he would never use it. ‘Been locked up for too long,’ he said, peering into its dark and cold interior. ‘You won’t get me down there, not if Hitler himself landed on the beach!’
Willie went home one day in March to find the living room empty. He thought Annette must have gone shopping and worried in a slightly irritated way: she was near her time and shouldn’t go far from home. He stood on the doorstep and looked out, anxious for a sight of her. Then a voice called and he saw Gladys Davies running towards him, skipping in her excitement as she ran across the grassy lane.
‘It’s the baby!’ she shouted. ‘Come quick it did. Your mother-in-law is with her. Lucky she was here, mind. The doctor’s been and everything is f
ine.’
She knew after the first few words that Willie wasn’t listening. He ran up the stairs, leaving her at the door, still talking.
‘Annette, love? Are you all right? Why didn’t you send for me?’
Annette lifted the tightly wrapped bundle proudly and smiled at him. ‘Willie, everything is perfect, we have a little girl and her name, as you wanted, is Claire.’ She kissed the small, wrinkled face. ‘Claire, meet your dadda.’
On 1 April 1939, Van celebrated her fifteenth birthday in two ways, by going skating in the evening with Edwin, which cost them a shilling including the hire of skates, and by leaving her position as third sales in the department store’s fashion floor. She had been there six months.
Dorothy was disappointed: Van had been a successful sales lady, being forthright in her criticism of the choices of many wealthy customers and persuading them to be guided by her. This had led to a group of clients who would only be served by her.
Dorothy gloried in her niece’s success, referring to her as ‘my protégée’. She had explained at length the problems the poor dear girl had to face at home with criminals and a mother who was ‘very keen on men and not providing a suitable environment for an innocent and clever girl like Myfanwy’, whispered behind an elegant hand. She convinced everyone that she had influenced the child for the better and was afraid of her falling back into the bad example of the sisters.
‘What will you do, lovey?’ Cecily asked when she was told. ‘Will you go to commercial college for shorthand and typing? That would be a useful skill to have.’
‘I’m coming to work here, in the shop.’
Taken aback, Cecily blustered, ‘Well, I’d rather you began building a career for yourself, not bury yourself here in the little shop with Auntie Ada and me.’ She looked at Ada to see if there were signs of protest at the suggestion of a job for Van when no place had been found for Phil.
‘Auntie Dorothy tried to persuade me to stay on in the fashion business,’ Van told her. ‘She said I was brilliant and, besides, she didn’t want me to come home and work with you. She seems to think this shop will belong to her Owen one day and I should find myself a place where I can keep myself in the manner to which I’m accustomed. Whatever that means!’
‘Dorothy is twpsin,’ Ada snorted. ‘It’s our shop, mine and your mother’s, and we’ve no intention of leaving it to anyone but you. In fact I’d rather leave it to Horse!’ She glanced at Phil, who was concentrating on putting a black three on a red four and seemed oblivious to them all. ‘I doubt if Phil and I will have a child, but if we do, then half the business will still be yours and there’s a good enough living for two, isn’t there, Cecily?’
‘Not if Owen runs it! He doesn’t even know the cuts of bacon yet – he has to ask every time. And after all this time working with Waldo.’
To Cecily’s relief, Ada agreed that Van should start working with them but it was an uneasy few weeks as Van learnt the ways of the sisters. They had worked together efficiently for so long, there was no space for another to intervene. Van would go to do something and find it already done, and would complain when one of them corrected her and told her to do something their way. She was far more difficult with Cecily, who found it more and more exhausting to work beside her and try to ignore the constant carping.
For her part, Van was enjoying herself. The opportunity to criticize her mother – and in front of others – was a joy. She used her half day to go into Cardiff and report her progress to Gran, a secret which gave her an added pleasure. She worked beside the sisters day after day and they had no idea she was in regular touch with their mother. The visits were even better now. Kitty’s stepson, Paul Gregory, was home.
On the first day at the shop she had slouched aimlessly around, unwilling to be more help than she needed to be. Her growing resentment, fuelled by Dorothy, was clear, and the sisters wearied themselves coping with it and trying to ignore the disappointment and stifle their anger at her behaviour.
Van had once learned to dress the shop window and they decided that might be a good place for her to start, but she took all day on the simple task, ignoring their request to display more prominently the items with which they were overstocked and needed shifting. The final result was a mess. Cecily agreed that it was deliberately done, but slowly Van began to change. People commented on her dismal displays and this brought out a pride in her work and her interest grew.
She filled shallow boxes with straw and arranged apples and pears and oranges in polished rows which she decorated with a few leaves. She enjoyed the work and added some tins of fruit, which they wanted to sell quickly to make room for other things, some ribbons and even a few fluffy chicks on the baskets of farm eggs. She was soon entering into the work with greater enthusiasm, getting to know the customers and giving the sisters a little more free time.
In May the beaches were throwing off the mantle of winter and preparing for the influx of visitors in the next few months, but amid the gaiety and cheerfulness of newly painted signs urging people to eat, drink and spend their hard-earned holiday money in a hundred different ways, the undercurrent of trouble looming on the Continent was ever-present.
It was during that month, amid preparations for the first of the summer entertainments, that the first delivery of gas masks arrived and with them the realization that war was frighteningly real. The town was one of those being given a supply of household shelters, and auxiliary fire pumps were presented to assist in the town’s defences.
It was also in May that, after encouragement, women busied themselves building supplies of clean white cloth to use as bandages as well as preparing for the evacuation of children from the danger spots when war was declared. No longer ‘if’, but ‘when’.
At the end of the month, a sea and air battle took place to enable the forces to demonstrate how and what the town could do to protect itself. There was a practice blackout and shops advertised aprons and blankets made of asbestos, which could be used to put out fires in the event of a fire-bomb attack.
It was frightening yet the organization of summer on the beaches went ahead as if the rumours were nothing more than the government’s pretence to the German threat that they were ready and strongly able to combat any foolish attempt to begin battle.
Van played tennis with Edwin during the long evenings and skated and danced and picnicked on her days off. She was showing a quickness and an intelligent ability to deal with the running of the shop with its complex seasonal changes. Ada and Cecily were proud of the way she fitted into their ways. She had, after initial problems, become very reliable.
Ada and Phil continued to live with Phil’s mother who, although looking frail, was still keeping the whitewashed cottage as neat and orderly as always, and producing a meal for them every evening. Ada tried in vain to be allowed to help, but apart from bringing home the shopping and paying all the bills, Mrs Spencer managed contentedly alone. She had never learned to read and took great delight in deceiving others and convincing them she could. She would listen while the news items were read to her, marking mentally the section of the pages where these were to be found.
With the absence of Ada while Phil was in prison, it had been Gladys Davies who read the main news items to her and she continued to do so. Gladys was impressed by the woman’s memory as she pretended to read the paper, reciting without error all that she had been told.
‘Fancy delivering post to foreign parts by aeroplane,’ she greeted Phil and Ada with one evening. She was referring to the newly augmented transatlantic Air Mail service. ‘A bit different from when that Amy Johnson flew to Australia in twenty days or so. Or when that man Corrigan went to fly to America, turned the wrong way and ended up in Ireland! There’s a thing! Fancy if you posted a letter to Ireland and it ended up in America!’
She would prattle on as she brought dishes to the table, seemingly unaware of how little Phil contributed, although he occasionally laughed at her reminders of things long ago. She would
take her son into his workshop while Ada did the dishes and talk to him of the customers he’d once served, hoping one day to see him rise out of his lethargy and start up the machines. But he would stare vacantly around him as if he were in a strange place with nothing even vaguely connected with his past or his future. Then he would walk back to the living room, crouch near the fire and play patience, while Ada talked about the happenings of the day.
He gave up playing patience in June and began counting things. Tassels on the chenille table cover, flowers on the wallpaper, bars on the grate, roses on the cloth covering the kitchen table. He would become agitated when his tired eyes refused to separate them and make him lose count. He would begin again and again, anxiously holding threads in his hands, or covering the roses with dishes as he counted, or touching the bars of the fire with the long brass poker.
The doctor called regularly and wanted to take Phil into hospital but Ada wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Can you imagine what it would do to his mother if he went away again?’ she argued. ‘Besides, I want to look after him. Cecily helps and Gladys is wonderfully kind. I can manage.’
When she told Cecily, her sister said, ‘With Van here to help me, you can spend as much time with Phil as you need until he’s well again.’ She was startled by the vehemence with which Ada replied.
‘No need! I’ll continue helping you,’ she said. ‘Van gives us extra freedom but you and I, Cecily, are partners. I am not your assistant!’
‘Oh, not this again,’ Cecily said with a groan. ‘When have you and I not been partners?’
‘You’ve always treated me like a useless dogsbody!’
‘Am I such a bossy woman that my own sister has to remind me of my place?’ she asked Peter one Wednesday near the end of August. ‘I don’t mean to treat her like an assistant, it just comes out that way sometimes, and I don’t really think of our partnership that way. We each contribute what we do best.’
Paint on the Smiles Page 8