by Mary Arden
BRAVE FACES
MARY ARDEN
Copyright © 2015 Mary Arden
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Matador®
9 Priory Business Park
Kibworth Beauchamp
Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK
Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299
Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
ISBN 978 1784629 809
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Brave Faces is dedicated to my mother and father who were always there for me when I needed them.
CHAPTER 1
1939
‘Are you going to join up when war is declared, Daddy?’ I asked my father, after we had boarded the early ferry back to England.
‘They wouldn’t have me this time, Mary, not with only one lung, don’t forget I was gassed in the last war and I’m grateful to be alive,’ he replied, ‘but I’ll have plenty of work to do at the War Office I expect.’
Our family holiday in Normandy had been cut short when my father received a phone call to warn him that war with Germany was imminent and that we should get home, as quickly as possible.
As I looked back at the French coast, it felt strange to think that I had only been playing and laughing with my brothers on the beach the day before. I wondered if we would ever be able to return.
‘Will they let me do something to help?’ I asked eagerly. ‘I can’t just sit at home and do nothing.’
‘I’ve never seen you do nothing!’ my brother William giggled, sitting next to me. ‘Perhaps you could dig up the garden and plant potatoes?’
Although William was only eleven, four years younger than me, he played a first-class game of tennis and very often beat me. He had even managed to beat my elder brother Peter once, which didn’t go down well with him at all, as he liked to win at everything – even Monopoly. Peter was eighteen and due to go to Cambridge soon.
When we were back in England and on the road home to Woking, my father pointed to a roadside café with several lorries parked outside it. ‘That’s a good sign,’ he said ‘it means the food is good. Let’s stop here and have some breakfast.’
‘Well it’s not exactly the Ritz is it?’ my mother said, as we pulled in. ‘Let’s just hope it’s clean.’
‘Now children,’ my father warned, ‘keep your voices down when we go in, as some of the lorry drivers might object to people who drive a Daimler using their café.’
‘Why?’ William asked, ‘What’s wrong with our car?’
‘It’s not the car, but us,’ Peter explained to him ‘it would be like barging into the servants’ dining room while they are eating. They would be just as put out as we would be, if they suddenly came in and sat down in our dining room while we were eating.’
‘Oh,’ William said glibly, ‘I see.’
‘Oh My Goodness!’ my mother cried suddenly as she was about to get out of the car.
‘What’s wrong darling, have you got cramp?’ my father asked her.
‘No I’ve just realised that there will be no food in the larder and no one to cook for us when we get home!’ my mother exclaimed. ‘They won’t be expecting us home until next week.’
‘We’d better go to Sainsbury’s on the way home then,’ suggested my practical little brother.
Sainsbury’s had just opened their first shop in Woking, which William loved as it all seemed so different and such fun, everything was sold in such huge quantities and there was a variety of food in colourful tins. My mother would sometimes take him with her if she was shopping there as a treat, although she told me that she still always preferred her own little grocer’s shop that she’d been using for years.
‘Let’s make a list of the things we need to keep us going for the next twenty-four hours while we have breakfast,’ my mother said as we followed her into the cafe.
My father found us a table near the window, and then he and Peter went to place our order with the woman behind the counter. There was a tough-looking man standing next to her who must have noticed our car in the car park piled high with luggage as I heard him say to my father in a rather sarcastic tone. ‘You running ‘ome quick from France then, Guv? ’Fraid them Huns were behind you and want to steal your fancy car?’
‘We’ve come home early from our holiday to see what we can do to help.’ my father told him firmly ‘I served in the last war, so I want to do my bit in this one too.’
A broad grin crossed the tough man’s face and his tone then changed completely, ‘Well done, Guv, we’ll all do the same.’
Breakfast was served on chipped plates, but it was hot and delicious. There were doorsteps of hot buttered toast and the tea was poured from a metal teapot, which to our surprise tasted better than tea poured from the china teapots we were used to at home. My mother ordered a coffee, which she quickly regretted as she’d been spoiled while we were in France with much better quality. My father told her that she would have to get used to drinking far worse coffee once we were at war.
‘I’d better send telegrams to the servants to tell them to return at once,’ my mother said looking at my father.
‘That isn’t fair, Mummy,’ I said, ‘think of how hard they work all year round. This is the only holiday they get. Perhaps we could ask Pansy to come and help out instead?’
Pansy lived locally and worked for us on an hourly basis when we had visitors, or at other times when extra help was needed around the house. She would always arrive on her bicycle and I knew that she would be only too happy to have a few extra hours work, as her family were very poor.
‘Good thinking,’ my father said smiling at me.
My mother said that she was worried that if the threat of war escalated some of the staff wouldn’t be able to return. Nancy, our cook, was only in Portsmouth so she should be able to catch a train; and Alice, the housemaid, lived in Devon so she would be able to do the same; but Agnes, our parlour maid whom we all called ‘Aggie’, was staying with her family in Ireland, so she might not be able to get back to England and without her the house wouldn’t be run properly.
‘What a disaster that would be!’ my mother exclaimed.
‘Perhaps Kay might like to earn a little extra money, Mummy?’ I suggested, ‘She’s good at doing everything in the house and she is always willing to help.’
Kay was my ex-governess, and I loved her like an elder sister. Kay and her husband, Jack, lived only fifteen minutes from us, so we were able to keep in regular touch with one another. As we were driving the final leg home I asked my father if he would tell us about some of his experiences in the last war, a subject he seldom talked about.
‘When war is declared I will tell you about it, but I’d rather not right now as it brings back some rather unhappy memories my dear. Let’s play ‘I spy with my little eye’ instead,’ he suggested.
This passed the time for about half an hour until William said in a loud voice that he was bored and hungry and asked if we had remembered to put chocolate biscuits on the shopping list, which made us all laugh, as if
eating chocolate biscuits was an international sport William would certainly win the gold medal.
As usual we ended up buying far more than was needed, so when we got back in the car, Peter and I had bags of shopping on our knees, while William clutched a leg of lamb to his chest.
When we finally arrived home it took almost an hour to open up the house, remove the dustsheets and carry in all the cases, golf clubs and tennis rackets, plus all the food we’d just bought. The only things we didn’t take into the house were the heavy trunks and our rather fishy-smelling bathing costumes.
Lunch was the next priority. Peter was put in charge of the sausages. My father opened two tins of baked beans, while William was sent out to the garden to see if there were any ripe plums and vegetables worth harvesting. I offered to lay the dining room table but couldn’t find the silver. I opened all the sideboard drawers and even looked in Agnes’s pantry but couldn’t find it anywhere and started to get worried, so I asked my mother where it was.
‘Oh goodness, it’s in the bank!’ she said, ‘I’d quite forgotten. We’ll have to use the kitchen things.’
‘So why don’t we eat in the kitchen then Mummy?’ I suggested. ‘It seems silly to carry it all through from one room to another. It’ll be like a picnic.’
After lunch, my father tried in vain to get the boiler to light, but smoke belched out of it instead of going up the chimney.
‘I could go next door and ask Mrs Derwent if it’s all right with her if we borrow Brown for half an hour. I’m sure he would be only too willing.’ Brown was the Derwent’s handyman and always seemed happy to help anyone in need.
‘Good idea,’ my father said coughing and opening a window to let the smoke out.
We were great friends with the Derwents, and their children were in our house as much as in their own. I ran along the terrace, down the steps to the lawn and then down again to the tennis court that adjoined the Derwent’s orchard, pushing myself through the hole in the hedge, as I had done many times before. When we’d first come to live at Woking, the gap in the hedge had been tiny, but over the years, as all us children had grown up, the gap had become big enough to walk through. Bullen, our gardener, had often promised to put a gate there but he had never had enough time to do it.
As I ran towards the house, I wondered whether Edward and Robert, the Derwent boys, would be at home and then thought that if they were perhaps their cousin Andrew or Edward’s best friend Henry might be there too. When I got there I saw Brown, the handyman, standing on top of a ladder picking damsons.
‘Hello Miss Mary,’ he said smiling down at me.
‘Hello Brown,’ I replied still a little out of breath, ‘Do you understand boilers? If so, do you think you could come and help my father? He says to tell you that he gets the kindling lit, puts on the coal but then it goes out.’
‘It ‘be those there dampers,’ Brown said as he descended the ladder, ‘You go tell Mrs Derwent you be ‘ome, Miss Mary, and I’ll go clean up me ‘ands and call you when I’m ready.’
Mrs Derwent, or ‘Aunt Nora’ as I called her even though she wasn’t a relative, was in the kitchen with the family’s nanny, an old lady who had long since retired but still lived with them and was more like an old friend than staff now.
Aunt Nora gave me a hug and asked after my parents, and then told me that Edward and Robert were away at some sort of camp and would not be home for several more days. I then explained why we had come home early and the reason for my visit.
‘May we borrow Brown for half an hour to get our boiler going?’
‘Keep Brown for as long as you need him. Boilers can be the very devil; you have to know how to work the dampers and Brown seems to be the only one that does!’ Aunt Nora said laughing just as Brown knocked on the kitchen door to tell me that he was ready. I suggested that we go to our house through the hole in the hedge to save time.
‘After you, Miss Mary,’ Brown grinned as he forced his big body through the hole in the hedge, ‘this ‘edge could do with a clipping it could, make it look more tidy-like.’
I guided Brown up the steps, past our seesaw, to the back door of the kitchen where the recalcitrant boiler was. My father was thankful to see him and apologised for having no idea how to light his own boiler. After taking a close inspection, Brown confirmed it was just the dampers.
‘You have to pull ‘em up and then pull ‘em down,’ he advised my father, demonstrating at the same time, ‘to help the air go up the chimney.’
Half an hour later, the boiler was red hot and began to heat the water. Brown offered to fill the hods with coke and coal and asked if there was anything else he could do for us. My father asked him for a hand to get the roof rack off the car.
‘Shall I switch on the immersion heater in the nursery bathroom?’ Brown asked.
We all looked at him in amazement, as everyone had completely forgotten that we had such a thing. It was good that we did, as it meant that at least three baths could be run one after the other. As Brown left, my father gave him a pound, which he took reluctantly, saying he’d put it towards a new bicycle.
By the time we’d all unpacked, put everything away, sorted the laundry and carried the dirty shoes down to the gardener’s shed, it was nearly teatime.
‘Mary dear, make me a cup of tea will you darling?’ my mother asked me, ‘and then be a good girl and go over to Kay’s house and ask her if she’d be willing to come each morning to help cook the lunch and prepare something light for supper. Tell her I’ll need her for a week until the servants come back and that I’ll pay her two pounds a day. Then come straight back again as I’ll need you to help me cook the dinner.’
I cycled over to Kay’s house and passed on my mother’s request. She leapt at the chance to earn some extra money, as she wanted to buy a new carpet for their sitting room. I promised I’d help her as much as I could and be her kitchen maid, ‘I’d better hurry back now to help Mummy cook the joint, as she’s never cooked one before!’
‘Good luck,’ Kay said laughing, ‘and if you need any advice just give me a ring.’
When I got home, my mother was already in the kitchen and I was amused to see her with an apron on, as I had never seen her wear one before. I found a roasting tin and the lard we’d bought from Sainsbury’s, and then William climbed onto a chair, pulled down Mrs Beeton’s cookery book, and found the chapter on how long to cook lamb. Meanwhile Peter was sent to see if there were any potatoes ready to be dug up.
‘What do we do if there aren’t any?’ William asked worriedly.
Having carefully weighed the joint, William said it needed to cook for two hours and that if we planned to eat at the usual time of seven-thirty, then the joint needed to go in the oven within the next hour. My mother sprinkled salt on the joint and then attempted to light the oven. When a big flame popped up at the back she gave a sigh of relief. As the oven needed to heat up before the joint went in, my mother told us that she would go and listen to the news for half an hour with a gin and Dubonnet and a cigarette.
William and I decided to pick some peas and runner beans in the garden and found Peter out there digging up enough potatoes for what looked like at least a week. When we all went back inside we found our mother asleep on the sofa with her feet up and her shoes on the floor. The sound of us laughing woke her up with a start.
‘I had no idea where I was for a moment!’ she said, now laughing too ‘I wasn’t sure whether I was still in France or safely back here at home. Now, William what do you think we should we do with the potatoes? Should they go in with the joint or in a separate tin?’
‘Put the joint in first, Mummy,’ he instructed, ‘then the roast potatoes take about an hour in their own tin… but you have to cook them in really hot fat.’
While our dinner was cooking, I asked if I could ring my cousin, Jane, who lived in London. When I got through to her, I asked, ‘Does your father think there’s going to be a war too?’
‘Fraid so,’ Jane replied
, ‘that’s why we’ve come back early.’
‘I did miss you in Normandy, Jane. What was it like in Wales; did it rain all the time?’
‘No we were lucky and there were riding stables attached to the hotel so I was able to ride every day and Bridget found a couple of boys who took her out in a boat on a nearby lake and they danced together every evening in the hotel ballroom.’
‘Sounds like fun! What did you do in the evening?’ I asked.
Jane giggled and told me that as there was nothing else to do once she’d read a story to her little brother Tim, she had gone to the ballroom too and that there was a gorgeous looking man who was a dance instructor so she’d learned how to dance the tango and the rumba. ‘I’ll teach you how to do both when you come to stay,’ she promised.
‘I can’t come for at least a week as I need to help Mummy with the cooking.’
‘Your mother cooking!’ Jane giggled. ‘Now that’s a sight I’d pay to see!’
After I had put the receiver down I looked up and saw Peter walking towards me looking very worried.
‘There’s something wrong with the oven,’ he told me. ‘Come and have a look. The joint hasn’t even started to cook. Poor Mummy is near to tears.’
I peered into the oven and guessed that it must be something to do with the gas pressure because the flame at the back was now very low. ‘Mummy, did you turn the gas tap on full?’
‘Of course I did!’ she answered crossly.
‘Is there a tap on the wall?’ William suggested ‘somewhere you can turn up the gas pressure. Shall I go and fetch Dad?’
‘Your father wouldn’t be much help, think how hopeless he was with the boiler!’ my mother snapped.
‘Why don’t I call Kay?’ I said quickly. ‘She’ll know all about the gas pressure and that sort of thing.’
When I rang Kay and explained the situation to her she told me to go and check the regulator knob and see what setting it was on, so I returned to the kitchen and went over to the stove. The regulator knob was on zero. No wonder our dinner wasn’t cooking! I immediately turned the knob to number six and then went back to tell Kay what had happened. She roared with laughter.