by Beezy Marsh
Esther’s eyes shone with tears as she spoke. Her family had fled persecution in Belarus before the Great War, saving money from their shoemaking business and fleeing to a new life in England, so she felt more keenly than most how terrible it must be to have to start again from scratch in a foreign land. Annie had always been struck by how kind Esther’s family were; they’d helped her out when she’d rowed with Bill and had nowhere else to turn. There would always be food on the table and a warm welcome for her.
Annie couldn’t imagine cramming refugees into her flat or her mum’s house, but Esther lived in a house on the smarter side of Acton, off Twyford Avenue, because her husband had found a job as a bank clerk and they’d gone up in the world. She never put on airs and graces like some people, though. She was still the same Esther who had washed shirts with Annie back in the laundry when they were little more than girls. She’d even promised to give Annie some of her kids’ old baby clothes, which would really help Annie out.
There was a footfall on the stairs and George ambled in, rubbing sleep out of his eyes with his hair all over the place.
Mum practically clucked like a mother hen as she handed him some toast, spread thickly with butter, and started to pour him a cup of tea. She handed him his army uniform trousers, which had been patched and pressed to perfection overnight, as if by a miracle.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ he said. He kissed Annie on the cheek and sat down at the table. ‘I’d better be off sharpish after this. I’ll be for the high jump if I stay much longer.’
‘Harry’s planning to pop in on his tea break, can’t you just wait a little longer?’ said Annie, reaching out to hold his hand. ‘He’ll be so disappointed if he misses you.’
George glanced at his sister, smiled and nodded in agreement.
Annie watched him as he ate his breakfast, trying to freeze time. She’d always looked out for him when they were growing up together but the battles that were to come in this war were his to fight. ‘You will come back to us safely, won’t you?’ she said.
He held her hands in his. ‘Of course I will,’ he replied gently. ‘You know, Annie, you mustn’t worry about me. You’ve got to think about the baby now. In fact, I’m going to write to the little one, from wherever I end up. I’ll send postcards to you, I promise. And when this war is over, we can all look through them together. How about that?’
Annie found herself fighting back tears. ‘That’s so kind, George.’
While they were chatting, Elsie was edging her way towards the door with her scrap metal contribution, but she was cut off at the pass by Mum, who made a last-ditch effort to snatch one pan back. The pair of them were still tussling when Harry appeared in the hallway and Mum relented and went back to the washing-up.
He joined them at the table but Annie watched with a growing sense of unease as Harry listened to George tell him more about his miraculous escape from Dunkirk. His jaw was rigid, and his eyes started to dart about the room. In the end, he got up and came back with a bottle of sherry from the larder and poured himself a glass.
He liked a pint did Harry, but sherry was for Christmas and celebrations, so it was strange to see him choosing a drink like that and at this time of day. Mum raised an eyebrow as he knocked it back and, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece, said, ‘Well, it’s almost time for the news.’
They switched on the wireless to listen to the BBC Home Service and the room fell silent. The announcer spoke solemnly about an important speech Prime Minister Winston Churchill had made to parliament, in the face of the German invasion of France and the fall of the Low Countries.
Churchill’s words carried across the airwaves into their little terraced home. They were all relying on him now, more than ever, to guide them through this war. ‘We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost will be.’
There was flicker of terror on Harry’s face, before he put his head in his hands for a moment. George stood up; it was time for him to go.
‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.’
The neighbours turned out to wave George off and Harry strolled along with him, to get back to work at the factory. Annie and her mum watched from the doorstep as the two men made their way down towards Acton High Street. George would need to catch the tram up to town and return to his regiment, which was stationed up North, near Leeds, where he’d be expected to explain his absence to his superiors.
Annie felt so exhausted and queasy from the emotion of saying goodbye, she went upstairs for a lie-down and the next thing she knew, it was tea time and Mum was at her side, gently shaking her awake.
She tried to sit up but had the most sudden and shocking pain, letting out a yelp. ‘Ooh,’ she said, as she curled into a ball and her stomach went rigid. ‘I think I might be better standing.’
As she swung her legs over the side of the bed, there was a sudden gush of liquid all over the bed and the floor.
‘Oh my God,’ cried Annie. ‘I didn’t mean to do that, I’ve ruined the bedspread. I’m sorry.’
‘Stop fussing,’ said Mum, rolling up her sleeves. ‘It’s just your waters breaking. I’ll get some towels. Now, just relax.’
‘But I’m supposed to go to the hospital!’ cried Annie, panic etched on her face. ‘I’m too old to have it at home. The doctor said so!’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said Mum. ‘You’re as fit as a fiddle.’
Annie eased herself out of her underwear and lay on her back as the contractions started to get closer together, gasping, ‘I need to get up to the hospital!’
‘No time for that,’ said Mum matter-of-factly. ‘This baby’s got other ideas . . .’
She was such a perfect, wriggling lump of humanity, with a pink, screwed-up face, and hair as black as coal.
She’d only taken a few hours to arrive and Annie knew, as she looked down at the baby in her arms, that their world would never be the same now that she was here.
‘What shall we call her?’ said Annie, gazing up at Harry, who looked fit to burst with pride. Bill had been despatched to get him from the factory, with the news that the baby was on the way.
Harry thought for a moment and then said, ‘How about Anita? It means little Annie, and she does look just like you . . .’
As Annie lay back, exhausted, the baby wriggled again in her arms and started to cry. Annie stroked the baby’s face for a moment and felt a deep pull of love inside her, when tiny fingers clasped hers.
Harry came to Annie’s side and picked up the baby, soothing her. ‘There, there, little Annie. Everything’s going to be all right.’
She stopped crying and looked right at him.
‘My daughter, my little girl, Daddy’s here,’ he said.
5
Annie
Acton, September 1940
‘They were more like a bunch of street urchins than my own children,’ said Esther, as she helped Annie push the baby around Springfield Gardens one beautiful, sunny afternoon. ‘As soon as I laid eyes on them, I knew I had to bring them home.’
Esther’s three kids were playing chase, whooping with delight, their gas masks in cardboard boxes strung across their bodies. Leonard, her eldest, still didn’t have a picking of fat on him and his younger sisters Florrie and Clemmie had a terrible, exhausted look about them, with dark circles under their eyes.
‘I wish I’d had Bessie with me when I went to get them back and found out what had been going on,’ said Esther. ‘She would have given that beastly farmer’s wife what for. I should never have let them be evacuated in the first place.’
‘Don’t torment yourself,’ said Annie. ‘Everyone thought that sending them out of London was the right thing to do.’
Poor Esther. She’d trusted that the f
arm in North Wales where the children had been evacuated would be a kind place, where they could run about in the fresh air and enjoy the country life. Instead they were used as cheap labour, forced to milk the cows and feed the pigs and muck out the stables before breakfast, and after school they had more chores before the farmer’s wife would even think about feeding them. Clemmie, the youngest, found it the hardest because she got terribly homesick and when she lost her coat, she was left without one all winter and got sick with the flu.
It was only when Leonard managed to smuggle a letter to the parish priest to send to his mum that Esther realized something was wrong. They’d been struggling as evacuees for more than nine months by the time she brought them home to London. Now they were back where they belonged and Esther had a full house, what with the kids and the Belgian refugees she’d taken in, but everyone seemed to get along just fine.
‘I don’t think I will ever forgive myself,’ Esther said, as Clemmie ran to her for a hug. ‘Just don’t you let little Anita get sent away, will you?’
‘Of course not,’ said Annie. ‘She’s staying right here with me, where she’s safe.’
They wandered past rows and rows of vegetables which had been planted thanks to the Dig for Victory campaign. The lawns at Springfield Gardens had always been so well tended, but now they’d been turned over into mounds of earth and they looked like a market garden, with Acton’s Gardening Society volunteers hard at it, tending their crops. The veg was sold ‘off the rations’ in the market place just off the High Street. The fact that you weren’t limited by coupons meant there was always something to chuck in the pot to make a stew go that bit further.
People had been pulling together since Dunkirk, preparing for the worst. There were pillboxes popping up all over the place around Acton, disguised as police telephone kiosks and even an ice cream stall. Kids played around them, but Annie knew that if it came to it and Germany invaded, they’d be used as vantage points for the Home Guard to fire weapons at the enemy. Every street had volunteer firewatchers and there were signs painted in white in front of the houses: ‘P’ meant there was a stirrup pump kept there and ‘L’ meant ladder. Kids liked to join in too, so they’d chalk ‘B’ for ‘bucket’ on the pavement outside their front doors.
Things at Grove Road were quite cheerful because Ivy and Charlie were tying the knot soon and there was all the excitement that that brought with it. Annie was helping Ivy to make her dress, because she was a dab hand with a needle and thread, but her sister had lost so much weight recently, Annie was sure she’d have to take it in again. Ivy had always been slimmer than Elsie, with a heart-shaped face, but now she had a gaunt look and her clothes had started to hang off her. Of course, all brides lost a bit of weight before their big day, with the nerves of it all, but Annie couldn’t help worrying about her. In her heart of hearts, she feared something was wrong but Ivy just brushed her concerns to one side whenever Annie tried to ask her if she needed to talk.
‘Is Elsie going to be a bridesmaid?’ asked Esther. ‘I expect she’ll be wanting to walk up the aisle next, won’t she?’
But Annie’s reply was drowned out by the deafening wail of the air-raid siren. Esther and Annie looked at each other in horror. Time stood still. They heard the drone of aircraft approaching from above and then the boom of the anti-aircraft guns less than a mile away at Gunnersbury Park. Then there was another sound, more terrifying: the sickening thud of bombs exploding.
There was little time to think. Esther’s children ran, screaming, towards them, in a welter of flailing arms and legs. Annie grabbed Anita from the pram, tucking her under one arm. She seized Clemmie’s hand and started to run towards the public air-raid shelter at the far end of the park. It was buried deep underground and had grass over the top, so that all you could see were a couple of little periscopes sticking out, to give people inside fresh air.
She’d had a quick look around one morning while she was out with the baby, just out of curiosity, really, pushing open the metal door, peering inside and wrinkling her nose at the dank smell. But now, this grim underground concrete bunker was their best hope of survival and she’d never been more grateful for it.
Esther was hot on her heels, with Leonard and Florrie at her side. Gardeners chucked their spades to the ground and threw off their gumboots to sprint across the park to safety, as the sky above filled with enemy planes, sounding, for all the world, like a horrid black cloud of droning insects.
Annie’s heart was pounding as she hurried Clemmie down the narrow concrete steps which led into the shelter in front of them. The metal door was propped open and half a dozen people were already sitting in there, blanching with fear under the electric lights. There were slatted wooden benches at either side of the shelter and some metal bunk beds at the far end. Once the last of the gardeners had made it to safety, the door clanged shut and the fetid atmosphere closed in on them.
‘Do you think there will be anything left of Acton when we get out of here?’ said Esther, her eyes widening as the thudding of bombs grew nearer.
‘Of course there will,’ came a man’s voice from the bench opposite. ‘And if there ain’t, we’ll rebuild it.’
Annie could only hope that her family had got to safety in the Anderson shelter in the back garden. And, please God, let Harry have made it into the factory shelter down at C.A.V. She clasped her hands together around the baby, willing them all, through divine intervention, to get through this and trying to ignore a dark swell of terror inside her about what may become of them if they took a direct hit.
The baby started to grizzle. She was hungry.
Annie knew she was going to have to feed her but the whole idea of doing it in front of strangers seemed to have robbed her of the use of her fingers. Esther leaned across and whispered, ‘It’s all right, Annie, no one will care. Just get on with it. Here, let me help while you get yourself sorted. I’ll hold her for you for a minute.’
Annie turned scarlet with humiliation and fumbled to undo the buttons on the front of her blouse. It was such a private thing, a precious moment between her and her child, and now she was having to do it in front of people she’d never met before. A woman at the other end of the shelter untied her headscarf and brought it to Annie, gently laying it over her shoulder to protect her modesty. She was about the same age as her own mother. ‘There you go, love, you carry on, it’s only natural,’ she said, giving Annie’s arm a little squeeze.
Men looked at the floor or started twiddling their thumbs. One lit up a smoke, his match flaring.
The reality of being in the middle of an air raid seemed to sink in after a while, and Clemmie began to sob quietly, until an old woman started humming ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Before long, all three of Esther’s children were singing along. One of the gardeners produced a hunk of bread from his jacket pocket and shared it with them. Annie gazed down at Anita, who was now sleeping soundly through the most horrifying racket outside: the booming of the ack-ack guns punctuated by the thudding of a stick of bombs raining down from the sky.
More than an hour went by before the all-clear sounded, and when they emerged, blinking, into the remains of the day, there was an eerie quietness and the acrid smell of burning filled the air. Birds were still twittering in the trees, but the park was strewn with abandoned wellies, gardening equipment and Annie’s overturned pram, as if a whirlwind had whipped through their world and then, just as suddenly, departed.
‘Well,’ said one gardener, shrugging his shoulders, ‘it don’t look that bad! I’d better get back to me spuds.’
They all took great lungfuls of air, shook hands with each other and said their goodbyes, as they were now certainly more than just strangers. They had survived this together.
The horizon seemed to be on fire, glowing red, with palls of black smoke rising in the distance. Annie and Esther hugged each other tightly. Who would have thought that the war would come to London?
With Anita still fast asleep, Annie hurried with h
er pram to her mum’s house in Grove Road, her heart thumping ten to the dozen. Churchfield Road hadn’t been hit but some shopkeepers were dragging more sandbags up in front of their windows, in case of any further attacks.
People were standing on their doorsteps talking animatedly and children started coming out of the houses in dribs and drabs, to play in the streets, just as they always did on fine evenings. One little boy kicked over a dustbin which clattered as Annie went past, almost making her jump out of her skin.
Mum was standing on the front step looking out for her as she came rushing down the road with the pram, at full pelt. They almost collided with each other and then Mum threw herself into Annie’s arms, hugging and kissing her.
‘Oh, thank the good Lord above, you’re safe!’ cried Mum. ‘Come inside, love, I’ll put the kettle on.’
Just then, Elsie came lumbering down the stairs with a huge bundle of bedding, which she dropped as soon as she laid eyes on Annie and the baby. ‘Oh, Annie,’ she cried, rushing down the last few steps and ignoring Mum’s tutting at the mess she’d just made. ‘I thought we were all goners! Where were you?’
‘I was caught in the park with Esther,’ said Annie, lifting the baby out of the pram. ‘We made it into the underground shelter. It wasn’t that bad. Folks were quite nice, actually.’ The last thing she wanted was to have to spend every air raid in there with Anita, but she was determined to put a brave face on it.
‘Love,’ said Mum, brushing some hair back from Annie’s forehead, ‘why don’t you and little Annie come and stay down here in the evenings? It would be much better. We can all be together in the Anderson.’
Bill’s head appeared around the scullery door. ‘But there’s barely enough room in there as it is! We’ll be squished like sardines!’