Shelter

by Sarah Franklin

  ‘Aye, all right then. But one bit of harm comes to that baby and you’re done, do you hear me? And you’ll not be on softer targets, mind. If you’re out there you’ll do what the rest are doing.’

  The rock shifted. Not very far, but enough to let her breathe again.

  ‘Frank, I could kiss you!’ Frank’s face was a picture. For the first time in weeks, she laughed. She’d had a plan, and that plan had had to change. But now she had another one, and people to pull it off with. Life was starting to make sense again.

  The Aylburton Marrow

  A great marrow weighing 73 lbs. has been grown by Mr A. Hayden of Aylburton. Mr Hayden, who is a keen gardener, is an expert on marrow growing and has devoted considerable time to it.

  Dean Forest Mercury, Friday, 29th September, 1944

  Autumn, 1944

  Twenty-Seven

  September

  THE FOREST IN AUTUMN was a shock after those months of desert monochrome and even the singing green of these last few months. Already in September it was a symphony of colour; high yellows and reds melding with ochre and amber, providing a richness and depth from sky to earth. ‘Too early,’ Amos had muttered, clearly viewing this sudden kaleidoscope of nature as more proof that the world was in chaos, but Seppe revelled in its unexpected harmony. Even the ground added bass notes of multi-faceted auburn as the winds turned with the leaves and whispered them down to foot level. Seppe hadn’t known a landscape could be so full of colour, that colour could be so soothing. Renzo’s tune, ‘Bella Ciao’, sprang to his throat every time he trod deep into the opus that the forest was creating all around him. Any flash of scarlet he’d seen in the desert had meant destruction, uncertainty; here it was a salve.

  But even the splendour of the woods couldn’t insulate Seppe from the baby’s distress. Joe’s plaintive cries ripped into Seppe like a saw’s teeth greeting metal. They’d been out here all morning and Joe must have been crying for half of it. How could Connie concentrate? But there she was, lining up the axe again – the six-pounder as usual. Ever since she’d been back out here with Joe these last few days, she had insisted on the bigger axe.

  There was only one way to grab her attention when she was like this. Seppe got between Connie and the oak and she dropped the axe, rested her weight on it like a gatepost.

  ‘What are you up to? We’re almost there. I was about to get the wedge in.’ She one-handed the axe handle and rummaged in her pockets, smiling as she appraised the oak.

  ‘Not the tree. Joe.’ Seppe had to shout to make himself heard. Connie glanced round, one hand still delving for the wedge.

  ‘I can’t make him stop. I’m sorry, Seppe, I’m at my wits’ end with him and nothing I do works, so I’m trying to come to terms with the noise.’

  ‘But he cries now for a long, long time. I think we must check him.’ The baby had been preparing for this even as they’d been getting the tree ready. His brow had folded, the angry fists clenched. Now the tree had several deep incisions in it and Joe’s face was the colour of fury, the birds scared away by his screams.

  ‘I’ve fed him. I thought it might be that, but it isn’t. I don’t know what he wants. I’ve tried, honest, but he cries all the time, no matter what I do.’ Connie drooped. She looked like she might cry, too.

  ‘Stop for a minute.’ Seppe balanced the axe onto jigsawed mulch and went over to Joe.

  ‘I pick him up?’

  ‘Help yourself.’

  The baby was all rigid misery. How best to hold him? Maybe if he stiffened one arm and rested Joe along it belly-first?

  That seemed to work. Now to check the rest. ‘Is he clean?’

  Another shrug. ‘He was when we left the cottage this morning.’

  ‘Do you have the thing – the – for changing him?’ Joe’s wailing had turned to despair. Seppe tucked the baby closer to him.

  ‘The what?’

  What a stupid word to forget. He mimed it.

  ‘The napkins? No. Didn’t remember to pack them this morning.’

  Seppe closed his eyes. Today, Connie had plundered Frank’s hut, made sure they had the fretsaw as well as the circular saw, that the axe she preferred was properly ground. But she’d wiped the baby’s face with the rough of her sleeve after she’d fed him, and now she was giving up as if Joe was a tricky clue in a crossword and she couldn’t find a pencil.

  ‘You remember the wedge but you forget for the baby?’

  ‘I know what we need for felling, that’s why. It all makes sense; my brain knows without me telling it. But him – I don’t have the first notion.’ She poked at the ground with the axe head and a clump of brown sediment heaved loose. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for this, to be honest.’

  Her voice was fragile, the bark peeled away. He trod carefully.

  ‘Did you – your home – were there brothers, sisters, small children?’

  When she spoke it was barely a whisper. Seppe rocked Joe so that his whimpers didn’t drown her out. ‘Two littluns – Babs and Linda. But that was different.’ Her eyes beseeched him. ‘At the end of the day it was up to Mam to keep them fed and watered, not me. I played with them, but I didn’t have any of the work of it. I know that now.’

  She nodded at Joe, fidgeting in Seppe’s arms. ‘Don’t tell him, will you? It’s not his fault. It was easier to think of it before, when I didn’t know him. But I was going to sort it so that he had a decent chance in life. I knew it couldn’t be me who looked after him. I was scared, Seppe. So scared.’

  She looked at him, her eyes huge, so desperate that he had to look down. ‘You’re all being so kind and helping, and I know I have to give it a go, I do. But most days I still don’t know how I’m going to cope.’ She swallowed. ‘If you weren’t here, I don’t know what I’d do, to tell you the truth.’

  Connie would have given Joe away? Bile rose in the place of the words he didn’t trust himself to speak. The thought that she might have forsaken Joe lay chasm-like between them and he couldn’t bridge it to comfort her.

  He wanted to shout at her, demand to know how she could treat another human being like that, but then the words jammed. This was Connie. She was terrified, and more to the point she was telling him so; Connie, who didn’t confide in anybody, who lived inside that shell of defiance where she thought nobody could reach her.

  Seppe didn’t know what to do with such conflict. His hands were trembling – surely she would notice? Seppe laid the baby back down on the bedspread, and Joe started bellowing again. With an effort he refocused. The conversation with Connie would have to wait. A core of pride smouldered. She trusts you enough to be vulnerable.

  ‘Let’s see what’s up with you, shall we, little man?’

  The napkin was lurid, the stench billowing into Seppe’s face as he undid the pins. No wonder Joe had been yelling. Seppe cast around.

  ‘Get me some leaves.’ Connie picked up the clump of mulch she’d dislodged with the axe and he tutted, actually tutted at her, before he could help himself.

  ‘No – leaves. The ferns, under the oak.’ She offered him a fistful and he pulled them from her. They were cool to the touch, but at least there were no prickles. They’d have to do.

  ‘How can you do that and not mind the stink of it?’ Connie, a hand clamped over her nose and mouth, was surveying him in horror. He laughed, despite his lingering revulsion at her revelation.

  ‘When you live with hundreds of Italian prisoners you stop noticing bad smells.’ Joe was nearly clean now, his face uncreasing and the howls slowing into sobs. Seppe pointed.

  ‘My bread.’

  ‘How can you be hungry now, after that?’

  ‘Not for eating!’ He took out the food and shook the cloth clean of crumbs. Then he folded it and pelted it on to Joe. The cloth was soft enough and should keep the rest of him dry.

  ‘There!’ He admired his handiwork. He must look like Connie did when she’d made a good first cut into an oak. Joe was quieter already.

  ‘Th
at’s you all clean and tidy now, caro.’ He did up the last of the buttons on Joe’s overalls and handed him to Connie, but she recoiled, gave him another beseeching look.

  ‘I’ve got trees to get down. Can’t be standing around holding a baby all day.’ She looked down at Joe. ‘Nothing personal.’

  She was so formal with the baby, so careful. Maybe it was fear? Connie would reconcile herself to motherhood eventually. In the meantime, Seppe realised he needed to make sure he took as many shifts as he could, spent as much time with Connie and Joe as possible. He needed to make sure Connie had help, that the concept of disowning Joe never returned.

  Seppe placed Joe back on the bedspread, angled so that the sun was out of his eyes, and picked up the axe, heavy again.

  ‘Where is the best place for me to stand?’

  Twenty-Eight

  CONNIE YAWNED AND GLARED at the clock on her bedside table. Six o’clock already? And on a Sunday, too. This time of day wasn’t even supposed to exist, in her book, unless it was a shift she was getting overtime for. She picked the clock up and turned it face down with more of a bang than was strictly necessary. Better to take it out on the clock than on Joe, after all. Wasn’t he supposed to be sleeping better than this now, though? Six weeks old; surely he’d had time to get his days and nights sorted by now. He’d been awake for what felt like every hour last night and she’d paced every inch of the room a hundred times over, all the while thinking there must be some trick she was missing that was making him unable to sleep. She’d checked for loose napkin pins, bicycled his legs the way Joyce had shown her to get rid of any wind, tried singing to him like Amos (but softly, since Amos wouldn’t welcome being woken up by her mangling his songs in the dead of night). What was she missing? It couldn’t possibly be this hard for everyone, could it? ‘I’ve half a mind to put you in Bess’s basket for the night, let her mind you like the sheep,’ she’d muttered to Joe around 2 a.m. He snuggled into the crook of her arm and gurgled, and she dropped her head so that her cheek rested against the soft matting of his hair, the smell of talc and baby enveloping her so that he was the only thing in the room. When he wasn’t scaring the living daylights out of her the baby could be not half bad. But the good moments were fleeting and the hard bits, especially in this endless stretch of grey night, they seemed to go on and on without hope. She’d sighed and shifted him onto the other shoulder to see if that helped him get some kip.

  It didn’t, but you’d have thought that when he did eventually drop off he’d have granted her more than four hours’ grace. Her eyes ached in their sockets the way her shoulders ached after a morning on the hardwoods, and she hadn’t even known it was possible for eyes to hurt like this.

  Joe gurgled again in his crib and she turned from the clock, her arms tensing at the thought of reaching in there and pulling him back out. ‘Stay there just a bit longer, babba.’ She turned away from him and grabbed her overalls from the back of the chair.

  When she got downstairs with Joe, Amos was already in the kitchen, wireless burbling away, something about a big push on the front. The front of what? Her world was shrunk right down these days, barely reached further than the felling site.

  Amos handed her a cup of tea, wordlessly spooned baby milk into a bottle and put it into an already bubbling pot of water on the pan. Amos did most things wordlessly, but at this time of morning she was grateful for it. He must be listening out for news of his son’s regiment. She should say something, but talking about big things wasn’t her style. Push them down, bury them. She and Amos had that in common.

  The wireless moved on from the news and Amos clicked it off. Connie shifted Joe in her arms. ‘Can you take him for a minute?’

  Amos collected the baby and wandered outside, Bess at his heels. Frank and Joyce had worried about how Bess would take to a baby in the house, it turned out – ‘She’s not a pet, you know, however our Amos do treat her,’ but Bess had apparently decided the infant was a lamb, and herded him endlessly. Connie spooned three precious sugars into her tea and wandered outside to the bench with it. A cup of tea and a cigarette and she’d manage the rest.

  ‘Bad night again, were it?’ Amos was talking to Joe rather than to her. ‘You’ll get there, don’t you be fretting about it.’ He walked back up the garden. ‘I’ll give you your bottle now, shall I? That’ll see you right.’

  Joe was at his best in the morning, perky after a night of sending her spare, and so happy to see the bottle there was no messing around with the feed. Giving up on the idea of feeding him herself had been the right thing in the end. Maybe it was easier if you could get your Mam or your mate to hold the baby’s head whilst you hoicked your tits into place, but she could hardly ask Amos, good as he’d been, and nor could she pop over to Joyce in the dead of night. It had been so painful, too, and she’d never figured out if that bleeding was normal or not. When her milk had dried right up, it had been a relief, to be honest.

  Amos sat down beside Connie on the bench, Joe already guzzling. She shifted her tea to the other hand so that she didn’t scald the baby and lifted her face to the sun.

  ‘Can’t believe it’s so warm still.’

  ‘Aye.’

  The edges of Connie’s exhaustion softened, smoothed away by the sun, Joe’s sucking sounds as he demolished the bottle, and the steadiness of Amos’s company. She wouldn’t go so far as to say that they were friends, but if she’d ever known her grandad she’d have done well if he’d been like Amos. The old man’s bone-deep love for Joe warmed her, though surely she shouldn’t have to watch him to learn how to care about her own child? Connie pushed the thought away and gazed at the apple tree. Those white flowers had turned into apples all right, tons of them.

  Amos followed her gaze. ‘Probably need to get those down now.’

  ‘What, the trees?’ Is this what happened? Was it like a factory line? You used up the apples and planted more trees? But a tree took years to grow, she knew that now. She looked more closely. Maybe there were sapling apple trees planted amongst the ripe ones.

  ‘No, you daftie.’ This was new too, Amos teasing her. She was still a bit thrown every time, but she thought she liked it. He’d seemed quieter than usual recently, even for Amos, so it was a relief to hear him saying anything.

  ‘The apples. The trees stay there; we prune ’em, give ’em a bit of a pollard if they need it, and off they go again. Those trees must be nigh on twenty years old.’

  Joe pulled off the teat of the bottle and started to squeal. Amos tilted the bottle, handed it to Connie. He hoisted Joe up onto his shoulder and immediately Joe gave out a burp loud enough to shame a navvie.

  Amos considered the trees again. ‘What’s today – Sunday? Tell you what, why don’t we do the trees today?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Get the apples down. Take a few of us, though. Why don’t you ask that Italian of yours – the one our Joe’s named for?’

  ‘He’s not “my Italian”!’

  The look Amos gave her said everything and nothing. She tried a different tack.

  ‘Anyway, I thought the POWs weren’t allowed into civilian houses.’

  Amos snorted. ‘Have you noticed that stopping that Seppe? When it comes to you and our Joe he don’t see the rules, though Frank do say he’s a decent one otherwise. We aren’t asking him into the house, any road; it’s the orchard we need him in.’

  ‘All right, all right. I’ll go and get him.’

  Amos handed Joe to Connie and clapped her on the shoulder. She fumbled with the baby, righted him again.

  ‘I’m off to see to them sheep. I’ll knock for Frank on my way back and then we’ll get cracking.’

  Joe bounced on Connie’s knee, making babbling sounds and trying to poke her in the eye. He wasn’t tired at all. How could that be, when everything in her body was begging for sleep? An urge to poke him, to do something just to make him suffer like she was suffering flashed into her and then straight back out. She shuddered. What kind of a mon
ster was she to even be able to have those thoughts?

  She needed to move. Things never worked out when she sat still. They’d go and get Seppe, that’s what they’d do.

  Her route up to the camp took her past that big gate to the compound that housed the American troops. Before the baby she’d often lingered, the accent still making her smile, the idea of all the men out here on an adventure giving her hope. She’d never met a miserable GI – must mean the country was worth something. To be fair, she’d never seen a GI anywhere but at a dance, where everyone was either hoping to get lucky or three sheets to the wind, and often both. But it seemed a pretty good way to live.

  She hadn’t got up here for a while though, and today, the GI gate hung open, no cheery guards at their gate. ‘Let’s go and see, shall we?’ Connie hoisted Joe up a bit and wandered in through the gates, looking around for challengers. An owl hooted – wasn’t it the wrong time of day for that? She shivered despite the sunshine.

  The camp was deserted – not a single Yank sitting around, and those big trucks of theirs had gone, too. Where on earth could they all be? What was it on the wireless this morning? God, she’d been at such sixes and sevens recently. Joyce had told her something a month or so ago that made sense of this, she was sure of it. But her brain was fogged and reaching for it was like looking for the bus stop in the murk. You knew it was there, but you’d be buggered if you could get to it. Things had been better since she’d been out working again. Work was a tonic. It was as if the only place she ever thought straight was in front of an oak with the six-pounder chafing her palms.

  A breeze shook the trees above them and Joe whimpered.

  ‘Sorry, baby. You’re right – time to move on.’ Something was up, though. An entire camp’s worth of American troops didn’t just disappear into thin air, surely.

  Connie made her way on up the hill that led to the POW camp. There’d been renewed fighting on the continent, she was sure she could remember that from before Joe arrived. That must have been where they all shot off to. An image of the remains of her home in Hillview Road flashed unbidden in front of her and she shivered again.