by Lizzie Lane
‘I take your point,’ said Mr Sinclair. ‘The fact is that most of these demonstrations occur in the afternoon or on an evening. Surely you can help the war effort – and those out there risking their lives on the sea to bring us much-needed supplies, might I add. We’ll even provide you with extra petrol coupons, perhaps even a vehicle and a driver at some point – unless either of you can drive?’
Mary shook her head.
Ruby nodded. ‘I can. A bit.’ She had begged her dad to give her lessons in the van.
‘Perhaps you could share the work between you. We will also pay you, which in turn means that you could pay somebody to take your place serving in the shop, It’s your cooking skills we need. Might I remark that those skills are wasted behind a shop counter?’
Ruby sat silently, her thoughts reeling. Mr Sinclair’s suggestion was extremely appealing.
‘I don’t know that we can …’ Mary began.
‘I’ll do it. Gilda can help in the shop,’ Ruby said forthrightly. Mary was taken by surprise.
‘You accept?’ asked Mr Sinclair.
Ruby nodded enthusiastically. ‘Oh yes. Yes indeed. I would love to do it.’
Suddenly the door leading out into the garden opened. ‘Do what? Do what?’
Nobody could fail to recognise their father’s booming voice and nobody had heard him come in from the garden, his face pinched with cold and the smell of earth clinging to his clothes.
‘This is Mr Sinclair,’ exclaimed Mary, springing to her feet. She made a point of standing between the two men, just in case her father decided he knew best what was going on here.
‘Ministry of Food,’ said Mr Sinclair as he rose to his feet and offered his hand for shaking. ‘We’ve taken the liberty of requisitioning your daughters’ recipes for some of our information publications. I’m sorry. I presumed your daughters were over twenty-one and could make their own minds up. I apologise again. I should have asked your permission first.’
Mr Sinclair showed no sign of being intimidated. On the contrary, he spoke clearly and with an air of authority. Stan Sweet couldn’t help but be impressed.
If they could have read his mind on entering and hearing the tail end of their conversation, they would have known he feared Sinclair had come on a mission to hire single women for war work or, worse still, to join one of the women’s branches of the armed forces; a few in the village had already left. His relief must have shown on his face and also in the manner he grabbed Sinclair’s hand, shaking it enthusiastically as he told him how pleased he was that his daughters’ efforts had been officially recognised.
Recognising a protective parent, Sinclair praised them to the rafters. ‘Your daughters’ interpretation as to what is required on the home front are invaluable. The recipes in themselves are absolutely wonderful, and the fact that one of your daughters has agreed to give demonstrations and advice to women’s groups in the area is invaluable. You must be very proud of them.’
Stan Sweet looked unsure. ‘What do you mean demonstrations? Where and when will these demonstrations take place?’
‘Around the area.’
‘She won’t be leaving home, mark you. I’m confirming here and now that my girls are not yet twenty-one so can’t leave home without my say so,’ he said, stabbing the table with a dirt-encrusted fingernail.
‘No, of course not,’ said a smiling Mr Sinclair without a hint of being ruffled by their verbal exchange or by the size of Stan Sweet’s fists. ‘Afternoons and evenings, perhaps some weekends, and we will be paying her a salary for her services. You may of course use some of that salary to help towards hiring part-time help running your establishment – if it’s needed, that is.’
‘Gilda!’ Ruby exclaimed before her father had time to object or ask awkward and possibly trivial questions. ‘Gilda has a few mornings to spare and she’s desperate to help with the war effort, especially since she met Charlie.’
Stan Sweet knew when he was beaten.
Ruby accepted the job, though advised Sinclair that she would share it with her sister. ‘To keep our dad happy,’ she added.
That Sunday morning Stan Sweet stood over Sarah’s grave telling her all about it. The only sounds were the cawing of rooks and the soft footfall of people coming to church. The bells that usually summoned them to church had been silenced for the duration of the war.
‘At least it’s not the armed forces for Ruby or leaving home on a permanent basis. Hopefully that means Mary working with me will be regarded as a reserved occupation. That Mr Sinclair suggested they share the job between them, but I have to admit that our Ruby is keener than our Mary. I suppose it has to be and I should be thankful. While I had two of them at home, one of them was likely to be regarded as reserved occupation and the other likely to be called on to do something else.’ He sighed. ‘It looks as though we’ve been lucky. Anyway, don’t worry about us overworking ourselves. Gilda Jacobson, who’s vaguely related to Mrs Hicks and is staying with her, is willing to help out in the shop. I’ve already told you about her. She’s from Austria but was born in Holland so has a Dutch passport, which is why she hasn’t been interned with all the other alien refugees – poor buggers. They travelled here to get away from Hitler’s prisons and concentration camps and ended up getting imprisoned here instead. Rough justice if you ask me. Anyway …’ He paused as he contemplated telling her the rest of it. He decided that he would, after all, he’d never been able to keep his deepest secrets from Sarah when she was alive. Even now she was dead he could still hear her in his mind, urging him to spit it out, as she used to say.
‘I know, I know,’ he said as though responding to something she was saying to him. ‘Our Charlie and her, this Gilda, are closer than they should be. It was love at first sight and before you remark, remember it was like that for us. One day and I knew, we both knew … and somehow …’ He sighed and tried again to collect his thoughts. ‘The thing is I can’t condemn them even though she is married with two kids. I’m not sure I know all the story as yet. She’s Jewish, you see; fled from the Nazis in Austria. Her husband didn’t get out and I’m not sure whether he’s alive or dead. All I can say is that she brightened up the minute she met our Charlie and well, there seems to be some kind of secret surrounding her husband. No, I don’t know what it is though I get the impression our Charlie does. No doubt we’ll hear all about it in time, but for now it’s a case of letting sleeping dogs lie. Oh, and before I forget something funny, before returning to base, Felix the dog chased Melvyn Chance from the front door of Stratham House to the gate. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion Mrs Hicks let the dog out on purpose. Nobody much liked Melvyn Chance when he was a black shirt. They dislike him more now that he’s a turncoat!’
He was about to turn away when a thought tugged him back. He hadn’t been going to tell her about his friendship with Bettina Hicks, but there, he’d never been good at keeping secrets from Sarah.
‘She’s the first female friend I’ve had since you passed over. It’s just a friendship. You do understand that, don’t you?’
A soft breeze stirred the top of the trees, yet the rooks did not fly away. It caressed his face like soft fingers. It felt like his late wife’s touch.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was Ralph who caught the rabbit and Deacon’s idea to light a fire down in the old quarry.
Everyone brought along what they could to the proposed feast except for those who were members of big families where mealtimes were a scramble for whatever they could get. Frances brought half a loaf of bread and some potted jam.
There were many old quarries, small rocky inserts into the land made by men with pickaxes centuries ago. Their digging had left rocky crags jutting out below the roots of trees and half hidden by vegetation.
The roots of the trees had barely enough soil to cling on to, their branches overhanging to form something of a roof over their heads.
Ralph had a lot of brothers and sisters and perhaps because of that was the best at s
naring rabbits, tickling trout and stealing spawning salmon from under the river gilly’s nose. It was the gilly who looked after the fish in the river, especially the salmon and trout.
Ralph was more at home in the forest than anywhere else. To a great extent he fended for himself leaving whatever was placed on the table at home to the rest of his family.
By the time Frances had got there with her bread and jam, the rabbit had been skinned, skewered on to a stick and was presently roasting over a smoky fire that nonetheless was cooking it nicely. The smell was fantastic as was the sound of sizzling as globules of fat fell into the fire.
Dusk was turning to darkness as stomachs began growling with hunger. Frances and her friends sat around the fire, their eyes fixed firmly on the rabbit as though willing it to cook through. Pink tongues licked hungry lips.
Deacon had also added a wood pigeon to the twig that was acting as a skewer.
‘Enough now for everyone,’ Deacon exclaimed, his dark-blond hair cut in a pudding-basin style that most of the kids around the forest – the boys at least – seemed to favour.
Up until the point he’d killed the pigeon, there had been suggestions that girls – that is Deacon’s sister, Gertie, and Frances’s new best friend, Merlyn – should not be included because they weren’t members of Deacon’s gang.
Frances was regarded as an honorary gang member because she could climb trees better than any boy – and she’d brought the jar of jam and half a loaf of bread.
Every bit of food they’d brought with them was consumed during the vigil of waiting for the meat to cook with the exception of the four spuds Evan Evans had brought with him. These were first stabbed with each boy’s pocket knife before being buried in the ashes at the perimeter of the fire.
There was a period of patting full bellies and licking of lips before attention went back to the spit-roasted meat.
‘How ’bout we play hide and seek while we be waiting,’ suggested Ralph.
Deacon’s sister sucked in her breath. ‘It’s gettin’ dark.’
‘Scaredy cat. Chicken!’ He accompanied his accusation with flapping arms and strutting around like a farmyard cockerel.
‘There might be ghosts out there or monsters,’ said Gertie in a quivering voice. Round eyed, her gaze flickered towards the blackness beyond the bright ring of firelight.
In response, Evan made howling noises and lifted his arms in an apelike fashion so that his hands drooped at the sides of his ears. He had big ears, like that Dumbo the elephant, thought Frances.
‘Stop it,’ shouted Gertie.
‘Aw, come on. I like playing hide and seek with girls,’ whined Ralph which he followed with a toothless grin.
‘No kissing,’ said Frances, pointing her finger in warning.
Ralph grinned, which yet again exposed the fact that his two front teeth were missing. Apparently his father had come home drunk one night and hit them out.
Frances had experienced one of his kisses before Christmas. He’d come at her with a bunch of mistletoe and pinned her against the back wall of the girls’ toilets at school. Her bottom lip had been sucked into the gap in his teeth and she’d had trouble extricating herself, for one horrendous moment thinking she’d be stuck to him forever. She hadn’t been keen on the prospect. And as first kisses went, it hadn’t whetted her appetite for another.
‘Come on, then,’ said Merlyn who if rumour was correct had a schoolgirl crush on Deacon. ‘But I don’t want to be “it”. I want to hide.’
Nobody could agree, though Frances would have liked to. However, she didn’t want to appear too keen. Accordingly Deacon broke a handful of twigs into different lengths and handed them round.
‘Shortest is “it”,’ he proclaimed with an air of authority.
Deacon, it had to be said, had leadership skills.
Frances clasped her stick tightly hoping it was the shortest. If she had to hide it would be in the opposite direction to Ralph Tate. If she was ‘it’, the one who counted to fifty while everyone else hid, she wouldn’t get kissed, at least not by Ralph.
Each of them in turn took a stick clenching it tightly until there were none left. The reckoning had come.
Deacon gave the order, ‘Go!’
Everyone showed their sticks.
Frances’s heart leapt with joy when she saw hers was the shortest. ‘I’m “it”!’
She couldn’t have been more pleased as she headed for a thick tree trunk, resting her forehead against her folded arm and closing her eyes.
‘One, two …’
‘Count to thirty,’ she heard Evan say.
‘No. Fifty,’ said Deacon.
Deacon was the gang leader so Frances began counting to fifty.
She smiled at the sound of her friends scurrying away, crashing through the undergrowth, looking for any small crevice in the rock face where ivy and tangled lengths of sloe intermingled to soften the harsh outlines left by the long-ago quarrying.
She knew how some kids dithered over the best place to hide so wasn’t surprised to hear what she thought were returning footsteps, somebody undecided of where to go.
‘You’d better hurry up,’ she shouted. ‘I’m on thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five …’
Whoever it was seemed to pause and take notice before yet again there came to her the sound of someone or something disturbing the fallen leaves.
‘Fifty,’ she shouted at last. ‘Coming, ready or not.’
She left the tree and dashed back down the slope towards the fire.
On seeing the fire she gasped, her feet coming to an immediate halt.
The fire was still burning. The cooked rabbit and the pigeon were gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
By April 1940, the enemy had taken both Norway and Denmark and rationing was beginning to bite. There was also bad news from the North Atlantic: convoys containing vital food supplies were under continuous attack by enemy submarines.
In late May, Ruby reported to the Ministry of Food in London to be briefed on her duties and how to go about them. The train journey had been long, the carriages packed with people, most of them wearing a uniform.
Despite the war, London was still colourful in a busy, booming kind of way. Sandbags were piled around important buildings so they looked like the entrance to Egyptian pyramids or temples. The proliferation of gas masks, military uniforms and shop windows covered in tape, to prevent injury from flying glass should a bomb fall close by, gave every indication that the war had turned a corner into a very serious phase.
‘We think you can do this,’ said Mr Sinclair from the other side of his wooden desk in Whitehall. ‘The prime minister is very keen that everyone should be properly nourished and not a scrap of food wasted,’ he said to her.
‘Has he seen how little we’re supposed to survive on?’ Ruby asked.
His smile was somewhat sheepish. ‘Um. Yes. He has now. When he first took a look at it he remarked that it looked very substantial for one day’s rations. It was pointed out to him that it was for one week not one day.’
‘And what did he say to that,’ Ruby asked.
Mr Sinclair recognised that Ruby was not the sort to be intimidated by anyone, including the prime minister, Winston Churchill. ‘He said, my people, my poor people.’
Ruby and Mary immediately understood why they’d been selected. It was all very well for middle-class women to devise recipes based on their own standard of living previous to the war. It was quite something else for those on low incomes whose main meals had never stretched to prime cuts of meat such as chops, steak and succulent lamb cutlets.
Ruby had seen the British canteen price lists with such items on as liver and bacon for sixpence. What the upper classes didn’t grasp was that a lot of housewives only spent about one shilling and sixpence on a meal to stretch among six people. Whole families were living on offal, mince, pigs’ tails and such like before war was declared; the rationing would now bite into those humble items too.
Ruby also pointed out to him that not everybody was proficient at reading and writing so wouldn’t be able to read the leaflets and newspaper items the Ministry was so keen on.
‘Then we’ll have to get you on the wireless,’ he announced with great aplomb.
Ruby gasped. ‘Wireless? Me?’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not … I mean, I don’t speak posh. Perhaps Mary could …’
She stopped. Sinclair had agreed that they could divide their duties at home and their duties to the country at large. Mary had always been better dealing with upper-class people, even to imitating their plummy accents.
Sinclair asked her whether she’d drawn up any precise plan.
She said that she had. ‘I think it would be a good start to give our first demonstration at the bakery. We could advertise in the shop window and there’s plenty of room for demonstrations inside. Plenty of room for leaflets too.’
He smiled and congratulated her on her resourcefulness and forward planning – whatever that was supposed to mean.
‘A good start. Going out and about and wireless broadcasts after that. Oh, and I think we can provide you with a vehicle and a driver. We’ll be in touch with the details.’
Mary read the letter she’d received from Michael for the third time.
Darling Mary,
Just a line to let you know that I am still alive, still flying and still wanting to marry you. This war is no longer phoney. It’s for real. I am no longer dropping leaflets. I am dropping bombs – can’t tell you where of course but no doubt you’re keeping track of the news.
Still the same base so if you want to write, you know the address. We have a padre on the base and lovely church down the road a shade, so with all that to hand it stands to reason I am going to ask you that question again. ‘Will you marry me?’
Love Michael.
PS I am a persistent kind of chap who won’t take no for an answer, in other words, I’ll keep asking until I get the answer I want.