by Beezy Marsh
Bill did his best to cheer everyone up, practically standing to attention every time the announcer mentioned Lord Gort, the head of the British Expeditionary Force, who George reported to directly. ‘Impressive man, very impressive. He stands over six feet tall, you know? Man’s a bleeding giant. He’ll squash that Hitler like a little cockroach.’
Elsie rolled her eyes and said, ‘Yes, Dad, we know. You’ve only told us about fifty times already!’
But Annie indulged him. ‘Don’t be like that, Elsie. Lord Gort is such a great leader and to think George reports directly to him! It’s something we should all be very proud of.’
A few neighbours had popped around to see how they were getting on, knowing that George was involved in all the drama in France. No one could make it better, of course, but just knowing that people cared was enough to lift Mum’s spirits a bit.
Around tea time, there was another knock at the door and Elsie said, ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll get it.’
The shriek she let out brought the whole family running, even Annie, who almost got wedged sideways in the door as both she and Bill tried to squish through it at the same time.
There, dishevelled, filthy, thin as a rake, wearing ragged trousers and a woollen jumper three sizes too big with a maple leaf on the front of it, with a gaggle of schoolkids cheering in his wake, was George.
‘Hello, Mum,’ he said.
‘My boy!’
Mum was like a woman possessed, grabbing hold of George, kissing his face, hugging him, laughing and crying all at the same time, as half the street gathered outside the front door, celebrating his safe return from the beaches of France.
‘But how did you get here? Won’t you be in trouble with Lord Gort?’ said Bill, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. ‘You’re supposed to be with him, aren’t you?’
George shrugged his shoulders. ‘I jumped off the train at Acton station ’cos I knew you’d want to know I was safe. The rest of my regiment – what’s left of it – are on the way back to barracks. Expect I’ll get a couple of days in chokey for it but after what I’ve been through, that’s nothing. I’ll take the punishment. I just wanted to see you all.’
He leaned down and kissed Mum on the cheek. ‘I missed your cooking, just like I said.’
Her eyes filled with tears as they hugged for what seemed like an eternity.
Eventually, she stepped back and had a good look at him. ‘Oh, good Lord, what on earth have you been doing?’ cried Mum, as George started to scratch at his head and his armpits. To her, he was just a grubby little schoolboy again, rather than a soldier who had fought his way through enemy lines to get back to Blighty. ‘You’re crawling with lice. We’d better get you cleaned up. Elsie! Ivy! Get the copper filled up. Go on out the back, George, and get those filthy clothes off.’
He was manhandled down the hallway by all three of his sisters. As he squeezed past Annie, he quipped, ‘You look like you’ve got a whole loaf in the oven there, my girl, never mind a bun,’ which made everyone collapse in gales of laughter.
‘Feels like it too,’ said Annie, giving him a big hug and wiping her eyes. ‘It’s a proper little wriggler this baby, I expect it will be trouble. Just like you. Now, I’d better get some fresh things for you to put on.’
‘I expect the sergeant major will have me peeling spuds for a month but it’s worth it just to see you all,’ said George.
By the time the water had heated for George to have a bath in the tin tub and he had scrubbed himself clean, Mum had used up the entire week’s ration of bacon in a fry-up; even Bill couldn’t begrudge him that.
George wolfed it down, followed by two strong cups of tea, and then began to tell them of his miraculous escape from the hell that was Dunkirk.
‘It had all started so well. We had such a success of it in Belgium, with people welcoming us like heroes. We couldn’t believe it when Jerry broke through with tanks and the Belgian army just bloody well rolled over and surrendered, the useless sods,’ said George, catching his mother’s eye. ‘Pardon my French, Mum.
‘Everyone was ordered to retreat to the coast. Our boys were hiding in ditches and barns, taking out the enemy where they could, but, oh my God, the poor Belgian people . . .’ He put his head in his hands. ‘They were blown to bits on the road, the German swines showed no mercy. They were just trying to get away from the fighting.’
A shiver ran down Annie’s spine at the horror of it all.
‘But what about Lord Gort?’ said Bill, who was on the edge of his seat, absorbing every word of the despatches from the frontline so that it could all be repeated, at length, to his mates down the boozer later on. ‘Surely he had a plan?’
‘Yes,’ said George, ‘he did, but there was so much confusion with everything that was going on with the French generals and the Belgians and the higher-ups over here. Boulogne and Calais had fallen and the German Panzer tanks were smashing their way across the countryside from the north so we were caught in a pincer movement and the game was up. It’s all very well for people in London to make plans but when you are caught up in it, it’s chaos. We had no way out but those beaches in the end.
‘I got separated from my regiment but I had orders to burn my motorbike and despatch bag in case any of the papers fell into enemy hands if I was captured, so I did, and then I had to get to Dunkirk. I had to hide out in a pigsty for a day and there was a boy there, can’t have been more than twelve years old. I did the only thing I could think of and I gave him my army greatcoat and some rations. In the next village, I borrowed a bicycle from a Frenchman. I don’t think he minded, he couldn’t stand the smell of me.’
Bill gave a hollow laugh as he caught George giving him a little wink.
‘But when I got there, Dunkirk was on fire and there were thousands and thousands of men just hiding in the dunes or waiting on the beaches. I didn’t know it then, but we’d be there for days. We had no water, we were so thirsty, we were looking at the sea with nothing to drink, and then the bombing started.’ George’s hands started to shake.
‘Don’t upset yourself, George,’ said Mum, putting her arms around him. ‘It’s over now.’
‘Oh God, Mum, the cheers when there was a dogfight overhead and our boys took down the Krauts. I think you could have heard it in Dover,’ he laughed, pouring himself yet another cup of tea.
Then his voice fell to a whisper. ‘I saw men go mad. Fellas just stripped off and walked into the sea and swam out and they were like little blobs on the horizon and then I lost sight of them and I didn’t think about them any more. I just thought about getting home to you, so I knew I wasn’t going to go doolally.’
Elsie and Ivy were listening, open-mouthed.
‘So,’ said Bill, shifting in his chair. ‘How did you get back? Was it on one of those big navy ships? Annie said she saw some on the newsreel at the cinema the other day and they were jam-packed.’
‘I saw so many of them on fire,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t always a good thing to be on one of the big ships . . .’
‘But you made it out all right,’ said Bill, patting him on the knee, waiting for him to continue.
‘Yes,’ said George. ‘We boarded a boat off a jetty that some of the lads had built on top of burned-out trucks. They put these duckboards over the top of them so that when the tide came in, we could clamber out along them.
‘The first boat wasn’t very big, and it was so crowded it was a wonder we were even floating. It didn’t matter because we’d only been on it about half an hour when we got fired on by a Stuka and half of us ended up overboard. I suppose we were the lucky ones because some of the lads didn’t even make it over the side.’
His eyes filled with tears. ‘I spent hours in the Channel, just trying to keep my head above the water. I lost track of the time. It was getting dark then, which was a mercy because at least the Germans couldn’t see to strafe us with their machine guns. We were shouting to each other, to keep our spirits up, but some of the voices went quiet as th
e night went on; there were boys from all over the place, a few of us from London, and we tried to talk about where we grew up, people we knew, anything really, just to stay awake.
‘I kicked off my boots and just sort of floated for some of it. There was no point struggling and the sea was calm as a millpond. The next thing I knew, dawn was breaking and I saw the most beautiful sight. It was the Maid of Orleans, a blooming great steamship. We waved and shouted and she came alongside us and the squaddies lowered lifeboats over the side and we clambered in. As I climbed aboard the boat, I heard a voice saying, “All right, son, we’ve got you.” This big Canadian geezer, he must have been six foot four, whipped off his sweater and gave it to me.
‘He didn’t even hesitate, Mum. He took it off his own back and handed me a good shot of whisky too, the finest thing I ever tasted.’
The room was eerily silent as he finished his story.
George had survived but Annie had a feeling that for the rest of them, the war was just beginning.
4
Annie
Acton, June 1940
‘It’s so good to know he’s home safe, I knew he’d make it, but he probably didn’t tell you the worst of it, and just as well,’ said Harry, hugging Annie tightly as they lay in bed together back at the flat.
‘Men see things in war that they can’t forget and don’t want to talk about.’ He rolled over to face the wall, just as he always did when he was going to go to sleep.
Annie lay there in a dark, wondering for a moment about what Harry meant, before turning to him.
‘Is that why you won’t talk about your scar?’ she whispered.
It was about the size of a florin; a raised, red reminder of the Great War, on his right side, and it had shocked her the first time they had got into bed together on their wedding night. He had a much bigger scar on his back, about the size of a fist, where the bullet had passed clean through him, narrowly missing his vital organs. He’d confessed that much, but he never wanted to talk about how he got it, only once telling her, ‘I’m lucky to be alive and that’s enough for me, Annie.’
Annie had never forced the issue; her Uncle Arthur had fought in the trenches and returned a changed man, like many around Acton. He bore no scars from fighting but the war had left its mark on him in other ways, with his incessant rubbing of his hands and his need to be alone most of the time. He used to scare the living daylights out of Annie when she was a girl because of his strange habits and silent ways but the family looked after him. He lived with one of her aunts for a long time and she took care of him. Then, shortly before the war, he married a widow from the laundries who was as quiet as a mouse, so Mum said they were both right for each other.
But Harry was different. He was the lifeblood of the union at work, always ready to offer sensible advice to anyone with a problem. He was so looking forward to the baby coming and fussed over Annie almost as much as Mum did. But he can’t have been much more than a boy when he went away to fight, Annie had worked that much out. She took a deep breath and falteringly began, ‘Do you want to talk about it, Harry? About what happened to you in the war?’
She always felt she was prying when she tried to talk to Harry about his feelings. It wasn’t like her side of the family, with Elsie and Ivy bickering, Bill grumbling and Mum making everyone cups of tea in the cramped scullery at Grove Road. He fitted in there but when anyone asked how his folks back in Newcastle were getting on, he’d fall silent.
He was such a private person, really, and he never spoke much about his mum because it upset him to talk about her; she wasn’t in the best of health and his sister, Kitty, looked after her, he’d said that much. Kitty had the poshest job Annie had ever heard of for a woman – she worked for a shipping journal in Newcastle, tapping away at a typewriter and checking all the facts and figures, helping to edit it. Harry always talked about Kitty with such pride and Annie longed to meet her, but it seemed such a long way away, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Annie had even asked him if they could go and visit, but he’d just flicked open his evening newspaper and said, ‘Oh, Annie, pet, it’s too far to go, especially now there’s a war on.’ He wrote letters, lots of them, and he got letters back too. Annie supposed they must be from Kitty and his mother, but she’d never read them. He’d read her bits of news about what was happening at the shipyards but she didn’t like to ask too much more because, well, he seemed to like a bit of privacy. He kept the letters locked away in an old tea chest and he carried the key around in his jacket pocket.
Annie reached out and stroked his back, feeling the softness of his flannel pyjamas at her fingertips, silently thanking God that his life hadn’t been claimed by a German bullet in the trenches of the First World War.
Her question hung in the air. Harry lay motionless and Annie supposed, from the sound of his deep breathing, that he was already asleep.
The next morning, Annie was on her way down to her mum’s when she caught sight of Vera walking along wearing an ARP tin hat at a jaunty angle and whistling ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’, relishing every moment of the attention she was getting from people queuing with their coupons along Churchfield Road for the butcher’s and the grocer’s.
‘Hello, hello,’ said Vera, sidling up to her friend with a wicked grin on her face. ‘Put that light out, then!’
‘Vera!’ said Annie, pointing to the hat. ‘You’ll get into trouble wearing that, it’s for official use only, you know.’
‘I am official,’ she chimed, puffing her chest out. ‘I’ve only gone and joined the air-raid wardens, haven’t I!’
Annie tried to ignore the filthy looks and tutting noises of the two old ladies outside the butcher’s as Vera said, ‘They were only too pleased to have me, an’ all. They need all the help they can get, with things being the way they are after Dunkirk. I felt it was me patriotic duty to volunteer.’
‘That’s . . . lovely,’ said Annie, struggling to imagine Vera reporting for night duty at the air-raid wardens’ HQ without taking a detour to the pub first. ‘I wanted to tell you our big news. George got home safely from Dunkirk. I need to get down to Mum’s to see him again before he goes back to barracks.’
‘Oh, Annie,’ said Vera, flinging her arms around her friend. ‘I just knew it was going to be all right, didn’t I? Your mum must be over the moon about it. Send him my best, won’t ya? I should be getting on, I’ve got important air-raid warden business to attend to.’
Annie smiled to herself as she watched Vera strutting off down the road in her heels but just as Vera was passing a pile of sandbags by the old cemetery, Annie spotted someone else falling into step with her friend. It was Herbie, the local second-hand car dealer, who’d been keeping himself very busy of late, if rumours were to be believed.
Things had always had a strange habit of dropping off the back of lorries and into Herbie’s hands but since the war had broken out there had been a constant stream of goods going into and out of his yard down in South Acton – at least, that’s what Bessie had told her.
And the moment Hitler invaded Poland, he’d raised the wall of his front garden by a couple of feet; folks said he’d put a big metal tank in there, behind the hedge, and filled it with petrol. Anyone who needed extra coupons seemed to be able to find them thanks to Herbie and cigarettes were always in plentiful supply when he popped into the pub.
There was something greasy-looking about him, despite his neatly tailored pinstriped suit; the turn-ups on his trousers were just a bit too wide and his shoes so highly polished that they almost gleamed. Herbie wore his black hair slicked back and he had a thin, pencil moustache which twitched whenever he spoke. He carried a little notebook in his breast pocket and he was forever taking it out and noting down what people owed him. He had a silly saying he’d trot out whenever he did that: ‘It’s all a game, business, ain’t it? And it’s my game.’
‘He’s a parky little so-and-so, that Herbie,’ Bill would grumble to anyone who’d listen, after he’d put yet
another packet of fags on tick. ‘Sell his own grandmother if he thought he could get a bob for her.’
Thankfully Herbie hadn’t spotted Annie because she didn’t want to be seen talking to the likes of him. But he had seen Vera all right and he popped his arm around her in the chummiest manner as they rounded the corner.
Elsie was on her hands and knees in front of the scullery cupboard, yanking pots and pans onto the red-tiled floor, making the most dreadful din.
‘For Gawd’s sake!’ cried Mum, covering her ears as she ushered Annie in to sit down and take the weight off her feet. ‘George is trying to sleep upstairs! He’ll think the Germans have landed. What on earth are you doing, girl?’
Elsie turned around, sweeping a lock of her chestnut hair from her face, which was red with exertion from pulling out every kitchen pot they owned, it seemed. ‘War effort!’ she panted. ‘It’s a scrap metal drive. They want every home to donate some saucepans so that they can melt them down and make aeroplanes. I think it’s a brilliant idea! Joan’s going to get her mum to put loads of their things in.’
‘Oh, is she now?’ Mum retorted, grabbing her favourite cast-iron stockpot before Elsie could get her hands on it. She cradled it in her arms. ‘Well, no one is touching my pans without my say-so, war or no war!’
‘Oh, Mum,’ cried Elsie, putting a few aluminium saucepans in a little heap, ‘we’ve got to give something. I just saw Esther with the Women’s Voluntary Service down on the High Street and they’ve got a lorry-load going off to that Beaverbrook fella, the Minister for Aeroplanes. I promised her we’d donate.’
Annie smiled to herself. She was desperate to see her friend Esther but they hadn’t spoken since last week; Esther had been so busy organizing the Women’s Voluntary Service war efforts there just hadn’t been time for much else. She had turned into a whirling dervish since her three kids had been evacuated to Wales and her husband, Paul, had joined the RAF. ‘It’s like being in an empty nest, Annie,’ she had told her friend the last time they’d bumped into each other at the shops. ‘I’ve got to keep myself busy, so I’m taking in a couple of Belgian refugees as well as volunteering. The poor souls have nowhere else to go.’