by Irene Carr
Later he was to tell her, ‘We came down in Czechoslovakia. I was picked up and hidden by a Resistance group but they had no escape network, no way I could get word out that I was OK. The Yanks liberated us the day before yesterday and flew us home.’
Sarah only knew that, incredibly, he was alive and come back to her. She took no note of the ill-fitting uniform lent to him by a brother officer but she saw there was a lean hardness about him now. He had been living in the open and on the run for the past three years and it showed. He was weathered by sun, wind and cold so that his teeth showed white against the tan. He came around the desk and she fell into his open arms.
At the end of that week Helen stood on the station platform in a raincoat sodden from drizzling rain as low-clouded, early dusk turned into dark night. A bomb had blown the roof from the station in 1940 and it had not been replaced, so the rain came in. The trains were running late and one by one they pulled in, discharged their passengers and clanked on. The temporary shelters built on the platforms kept off the worst of the rain but the wind drove it in, slanting, and Helen could feel her feet squelching cold in her shoes as darkness and her spirits fell.
Another train ground past her, slowing, and stopped with a hiss of steam and a clatter of couplings. She peered into the crowd that poured from its doors and swept around the slight figure of the solemn-faced girl. Then suddenly Matt towered above her. He was Lieutenant Ballantyne now, commissioned in the field, and his decorations made a block of colour on the left breast of his khaki tunic. The breath was crushed out of Helen and the khaki serge was rough against her skin. She protested and laughed and cried and held on to him.
28
September 1945
‘Tea?’ Jack put his head around the door to peer into the kitchen of the Ballantyne house, brows raised as he asked the question of the women in there.
‘Just coming.’ Chrissie, wearing a flowered apron over a pre-war silk dress, looked up from spreading the carefully hoarded butter thinly on the bread. Then voicing the thought she had cherished all afternoon, ‘Do you realise this is the first time for more than six years that we’ve all been together?’
Jack nodded slowly. ‘I thought about it this morning. It’s been a long time.’ Chrissie thought he looked older, that the war had aged him, and she knew it had put more than six years on her.
That Sunday was a clear, hot, Indian summer day, with no bitter north-east wind coming in off the sea. A few minutes later Chrissie came out of the kitchen door into the back garden, the apron discarded, her eyes slanted against the sunlight. She carried a tray loaded with plates, cups and saucers and put it down on the table set out for the purpose. Her favourite chair was there with the others grouped around the table and she sank into its creaking comfort of cushioned wickerwork.
The men were talking of ships, inevitably, and playing cricket. Robert, Matt’s six-year-old, was at the crease, and Billy Hackett, Peter’s grinning half-brother, kept wicket. There were no uniforms now, except that all were in their shirtsleeves and grey worsted trousers, though Tom was still in the RAF, Matt in the Army and Peter a ship’s officer. Tom was eager to join his father in the yard and Matt had been accepted for medical school as soon as he was demobilised.
Now the girls in their cotton dresses came out of the kitchen carrying the cakes and bread and butter, pots of tea, milk and sugar, all scraped together from their rations. Sophie, married for three months now and expecting her first child, was looking for Peter as she chatted with Helen, a qualified doctor and due to return to her duties at the hospital in an hour or so. Sarah followed them, slowly because of her daughter, Jean, dawdling by her side. Ursula Whittle, now a head teacher, came with her.
Chrissie called, ‘Tea!’ and the cricketers wandered over, still talking, to gather around her and the table, sink into chairs. Little Robert bumped himself down cross-legged at her feet while Billy sat on the grass by her side and leaned against her legs and Jean clambered up into her lap. Jack watched her from across the table, content.
Chrissie looked around at them, all of them her children or her grandchildren, though she had only borne two. All the others – Tom, whom she and Jack had adopted, Peter, Sarah, Helen, Ursula and Billy – were as much her children as Sophie or Matt. She recalled how she had sworn over twenty years ago that she would hold this family of hers together for the sake of the children. There had turned out to be more children than she had bargained for but she had done it, and now she swore anew that she would go on doing it. She smiled at Jack and into the sunlight.