Shelter

by Sarah Franklin

  Seppe’s shoulders were square, but his neck was tense, like Bess when she was getting ready to sprint. He stretched his hands out in front of him as if protecting himself from an unspoken force. Skin spanned tautly over sinew and bone, hardened and sun-scorched. Amos had heard there were people who found the answers in palm-reading, but for him, the real measure of a man was on the other side of the hand. And this man, this man before them, had thought they didn’t want him around any more.

  Amos had to swallow twice before finally he found the words. ‘Joyce is right, lad. This is your home now. Yours and the babby’s. It’ll take some bumping along, but we’ll get there.’ He put his hand on Seppe’s shoulder, rested it there until he felt the trembling halt. There was stuff Seppe wasn’t telling them about that London, about that Connie, he was sure of it. But Amos didn’t need to hear it, not now. The boy would tell in his own time, or he wouldn’t if he didn’t have a mind to. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was back. They were home.

  Fifty-Two

  July

  CONNIE LEANED DOWN HARD on the joist until it tilted. ‘Come on, get the other end of the bugger!’ Sweat was dripping into her eyes and her fingers were fat sausages of heat. The crew had sworn at her when she’d told them to meet at daybreak, but she’d been right to insist. They’d got the frames sorted across the terrace before they were all burned to a bleeding crisp.

  Her sleeves had come loose again and were sticking to her arms. She shoved them back up, her skin all prickly. The lads were working shirtless, had been for a month now. It didn’t harm the working day, let’s put it like that. She had half a mind to join them and strip off too – that’d put the cat among the bloody pigeons.

  Misha had got behind the joist, swinging it up like it was his girl and they were jiving. He was all right, Misha. Spoke a bit of English, too, so he could help her get through to the others.

  Connie pulled the nails from her belt and hammered them in. That wasn’t going anywhere now.

  ‘All right, lads, that’s us for the day.’ They stared at her, five broad blank faces, and she sighed, flapped at Misha. ‘Tell ’em.’

  When were they going to start picking up English? It wasn’t that hard – look at Seppe and Gianni and that lot. Spoke it better than the Foresters half the time. Connie smiled to herself. Seppe had barely known what to call a tree in English when they’d first starting working out in the forest, had called the wedge the ‘widge’ for a week before he’d nailed it. But it had only taken a couple of weeks for him to know all the English names of the most complicated bits of kit, the stuff that sometimes baffled her still now, like the billhook. He’d got pretty good at other words too – her smile deepened into a grin, remembering the things he’d whisper to her if they got a moment alone in the trees, especially in the later days. Oh, he was pretty confident about expressing himself by the end.

  The grin faded, doused by guilt. If she’d given him half a chance, explained how she felt, he’d have had all the words he needed for it, she was sure. This lot could surely manage more than they did.

  She chucked the hammer into the barrow and one of the blokes carted it off to the lock-up. The tool belt was hers, meant more than any bit of jewellery.

  Connie raised her hand high in salute to the crew. ‘See you in the morning, same time.’ She could count on this lot. They didn’t seem to have anything else to do with their lives, so they’d be there all right when she rounded the corner tomorrow. She stopped now and looked back from that same corner, grinned to herself. Elfield Row was coming together, getting shape to it. You could see new roofs, new walls now where before it was rats and rubble. Filthy bleeding work it’d been when she’d first arrived. Every bugger was nose to the grindstone on the front or in the munitions factory. The sorry few who’d volunteered were crabby and overrun, and half the time they had to knock stuff all the way down before they could build it back up. Her first day on the job she’d stepped on a rotten joist, plunged to her knees into stinking scum and gashed her arm on a nail that was jutting out. She’d almost packed it in then and there, gone back to the forest after all and pretended she’d been away for Women’s Things or something else Frank wouldn’t question. She’d barely dared write for a bit then, in case she’d given in and gone back.

  She gave a half-salute to Elfield Row, soppy cow that she was, and started home. She was good at the work, she’d give herself that. Once they’d got onto shaping and sawing, she’d recognised the rhythm, felt the weight of the wood catch on the teeth, and smiled for the first time in weeks. One afternoon she’d refitted three windows and the foreman had stopped her at the end of the shift.

  ‘Good little worker you, ain’t you?’ She’d thought of Frank, how he’d taken no shit from her, shown her how to love the work, and she’d dashed her shirt sleeve against her eyes when the foreman hadn’t been looking. And here she was now with her own crew, her own patch of houses to rebuild, proper nice little digs and a bit of spare cash in her pocket.

  To begin with, she’d blown the cash every week, beside herself at all the choice. She went to the pictures and saw the latest show, not whatever had trickled down to that bleeding backwater of a cinema in Coleford. She went dancing with Vi, thrilling at the novelty of a proper dance hall again.

  It’d been a stroke of luck, bumping into Vi that time early on when she’d been outside that dress shop trying to talk herself into spending Mary’s coupons on a couple of serviceable frocks. Vi had not only found her a bloke who did a roaring trade in black market coupons, but she had offered Connie digs too, proved to be a right diamond.

  There was another dance tonight. That was the thing with London, there seemed to be dances every night if you wanted them. They just weren’t all that much cop, not once the first thrill of being out had worn off. Her feet killed her by the end of the working day and all the blokes were not right in the head and hadn’t been able to fight. She’d heard of a couple of clubs that were mostly for GIs stationed over here; maybe she’d persuade Vi to give them a go one of these days. London was tougher than she’d thought but that Hollywood still looked worth a go, so sunny and shiny. Catching back up with the GIs would keep her on track, remind her why she’d come up here.

  Connie had reached the stairs to the Tube. It was going to be like a sauna down there, a stinking one, too. Not so bad now there hadn’t been so many raids, but the smell must be bled into the tiles, didn’t ever seem to change. Better to think about the dances. She put her hand lightly to the stair rail and sashayed, kicking out her feet at the ankles.

  ‘Mind where you’re going, willya?’ Had she kicked that bloke? No, there was no way she’d reached him from here – he just wanted her to be miserable too. That was the trouble, she was coming to realise, all this grey and bombing. It got into you, made you feel like your insides were rain and the cloud was pressing down on you. When you tried to keep yourself going, do something a bit daft maybe, there was always someone in the city ready to shut you down, not wanting to see the way out. Coventry hadn’t been like that; she’d belonged, knew everyone on Hillview Road and everyone on her factory line, too. She’d often felt herself hemmed in by the way everyone in the forest seemed to know each other – or be related – but it was only when she moved here that she copped on to how nice that could be sometimes, too.

  She didn’t have to wait long for the train, but there weren’t many carriages again. She swayed with the rhythm of the train, feet planted wide apart as if she was going to get down an oak, not breathe in some bloke’s armpit whilst he tried to cop a feel. Her overalls stuck to her in a way she didn’t even know they could and her hair was full of sawdust, except here it didn’t smell fresh, the way a tree did when you sawed into it. Must be baking in the forest too, weather like this – but at least they had the stream. Did Joe have a bonnet, to screen him from the sun? She couldn’t remember. Next time she sent Joyce some money for Joe she’d check, just in case. Seppe would know, too – but she hadn’t hea
rd a peep from Seppe. Couldn’t say she could blame him, but she hadn’t counted on how strange that felt. Seppe had snuck under her skin, the way a blister heals and leaves the area stronger. She hadn’t known he was making her stronger until she ripped away from him all at once. She’d always been able to be so honest with him and now she was back in a place where nobody knew the whole story and she noticed, really noticed, that that protective layer he’d provided was all gone now. It hadn’t even been this raw when – well, when the bomb hit.

  Those first few nights here, in the manky B&B before she’d moved in with Vi, she’d jolted awake and banged her head on the mouldy wall, choking on the panic of her dream. Seppe and Joe were in danger – trees were falling like mortar shells, just tilting down willy-nilly without her there to organise it all – and however hard Seppe ran, he and Joe were going to be squashed by one. She knew it, just knew it, screeched upright in bed, Joe’s desperation in her throat. She hadn’t been able to do a thing without bumping into a memory of her son. Every spoonful of porridge she expected to be interrupted by him grabbing the spoon, or the bowl, or demanding a mouthful himself. The first two weeks of being up here she stopped every time she left the house, patted herself down to figure out what it is she’d left behind before realising it was the babba she was missing, had barely gone anywhere without him for months. She could eat porridge and leave the house now without him appearing in her head, but he was never far away. And where Joe was, so was Seppe.

  Still, she’d made her bed and now she had to lie in it, even if it turned out being in London wasn’t all that after all. Since the war had ended all that hope seemed to have gone. They were just as mired in gloom and grimness as before, and now there was nothing to blame it on.

  The train slowed into her station and she got off, preparing to swap this indoor, swampy heat for the dry blast of sun outdoors. She couldn’t be doing with the dance tonight, she just couldn’t. Vi would mither on, but she’d find someone else to go with – one of those girls from that office of hers, where they’d spent all day in crisp shirts not having to deal with the sweat dripping down their backs or the nails getting so hot they’d burn your skin the minute you tried to get one in place. But try as she might, Connie couldn’t imagine ever being the person working in the office, either. This was her world, outdoors. And London, after all, was only her stepping stone to America. If she missed the odd dance, the world didn’t stop turning.

  September 1945

  Fifty-Three

  THE HOUSE WAS QUIET when she got in from the building site. Vi was still at the office. That was the good thing about this grimy city sunshine: days started at dawn, and early starts meant early finishes. Connie had the house to herself for an hour at least.

  The door was stuck again with the heat so she gave it a good shove, glass rattling in the pane as she did so. It was stuffy for September. Even though she loved being on a terrace again for the most part, it wasn’t half hot. Not like Amos’s cottage; those walls were a mile thick and all the trees had scared away the sun anyway. Here she could barely breathe sometimes, in the mugginess, even though it was supposed to be the tail end of September.

  When she’d first moved in, Connie had opened all the windows to get some air in and Vi had arrived home and screeched:

  ‘Are you trying to get us robbed in our beds? The looters’ll bite your arm off for easy pickings like that.’

  They hadn’t known each other long at that point. Connie tutted at Vi’s paranoia, but the windows stayed shut.

  Connie had felt faint all day today and her head was pounding. Maybe it was this heat. A bath would sort her out, and she’d still have time to get the job done. She went straight to the bathroom, set the taps going and stripped off, dropping everything on the floor. Next door’s wireless was blaring through the wall again; outside the window, the trains were rattling past and the neighbour’s kids were playing a hollering game of British Bulldog in the street. Some of them were right little tots; another few months and Joe might be big enough for that sort of thing now. But you missed his first birthday. You’ve got no right to imagine him playing games. She swallowed.

  ‘Yoo hoo! Connie! Are you back?’

  She started, shocked, and bashed her knee against the side of the tub. For a second that sounded just like Joyce. Her face split with a beam and she scrabbled to hoist herself out of the bath.

  ‘Con? Where’re you hiding?’

  Oh, Vi. Connie sagged. Stupid of her, really, to imagine it could possibly have been Joyce, who rarely went further than Cinderford. This was a bit early for Vi to be home, though.

  ‘In the bath.’ She hopped in quickly and lay back. The water was more than a bit nippy and she shivered as the door banged open and Vi burst in.

  ‘A bath in the middle of the week? Look at you, Lady Muck!’ Vi perched on the lavatory seat and poked at the water with shiny red toenails. ‘Lady Mucky, more like – look at that scum.’ She removed her foot sharpish. Good.

  ‘Some of us do actual honest work for a living, not pushing bits of paper around and flirting with delivery boys.’

  ‘More fool you, then!’ Vi grinned and picked up Connie’s tool belt. Vi thought the belt was hilarious, couldn’t for the life of her understand why Connie had saved up so long for it.

  ‘What’s in the belt of delights today?’

  ‘Hammers – you can see that. We’re fixing joists this week; row of houses not far from here, as it happens. If you line up all the nails then knock ’em in quick enough, it sounds like a woodpecker – rat-a-tat-a-tat.’ Connie had got all teary the first time she’d recognised the noise, but there was no way she was telling Vi that.

  ‘A woodpecker? More like ack-ack fire, lovie. We didn’t all spend our war hidden away in the back of beyond, you know.’ Vi dropped the tool belt and it rustled the bag hidden beneath Connie’s overalls. Connie tensed, but Vi was already nosing around. She pulled out the bag.

  ‘Ooh, so you did go to Woolies after all! That’s more like it. Get any good slap?’

  Connie half rose from the bath, but Vi held the letter away from her, tilting it towards the light to see through the envelope.

  ‘Stationery? Pens and paper? What are you up to? Got a sweetheart I don’t know about, have you, Connie Granger?’

  ‘There’s plenty you don’t know about.’ Connie pushed under the water, where she couldn’t hear Vi’s comeback. The mental checklist in her head added on another item. People in the Forest had the sense not to ask constant questions.

  She splashed out of the bath, accidentally-on-purpose getting water onto Vi’s fancy skirt, and marched past her in a towel.

  Wait, she needed that stationery. ‘I’ll have that back, ta.’ Her hand shook and the paper rustled. Vi opened her mouth and Connie legged it to her room and shut the door as firmly as she could without actually slamming it in Vi’s face. She bent down under her bed and her towel fell off. She’d dry quick enough in this heat.

  The sock was where she’d stuffed it, between the mattress and the springs, a rustling pile of envelopes and a crafty bottle of mother’s ruin alongside it. The sock was as lumpy and bumpy as a Christmas stocking, and her heart swelled a little bit. I did that. She reached inside it and pulled out a couple of crumpled notes and the latest envelope. Babies weren’t cheap, though Joyce never asked for any cash and certainly never made mention of Amos passing any comment. But in that last picture she’d sent of them all out picnicking, Connie had seen that Joe had on a little cap and blazer, not the sort of thing Joyce could have knitted. Must’ve cost a bob or two, even with coupons.

  Well, maybe she’d find out for herself soon enough. Connie swallowed hard. No number of nails going into rafters month after month had tapped out the message of what she should do. After those first few weeks of what she’d thought was freedom, the doubts about London life had built up and up like sediment. But she’d stuck it out; the beginning of anything always felt a bit odd and that wasn’t a reason to give up. She
was a city girl, she just had to get used to it again.

  Then one morning, a month ago, she’d arrived at the rebuild site just after dawn and found herself listening out for Seppe’s humming. Into the disappointment that filled the silence, the answer had arrived, as shining and decisive as any blade she’d ever handled. The only way she’d know what the future looked like would be to go back and find out for herself.

  Connie pulled an envelope from the packet and took a quick swig of gin. Her palms were sweating. Must be the heat.

  Fifty-Four

  AMOS HAD BANGED ON the hut door this morning before the blackbird had even started chirping. He often deposited Joe with Seppe first thing whilst he went and checked on the sheep, and even though it was the end of September and the nights were starting to very gradually draw in, Joe was still waking with the light. Seppe didn’t mind; it gave him more precious hours with Joe before handing him over to Joyce for the morning. Most nights he scrambled back from felling in time to help bathe Joe, tell him a story and feel his warmth before tucking him in upstairs at Amos’s. It worked out well for all of them.

  ‘Bright one today. Cobnuts are ready, hazelnuts too. When I’m back from the sheep we’ll get going.’ Joe pushed past Seppe into the hut, chattering nonsense in his sing-song voice, and Amos nodded after him. ‘Had his porridge, he has. Don’t let him fool you.’ Amos was lighter now, younger since they’d had the letter from the War Office. Billy had followed it up with one of his own, full of excitement at being back before Christmas. Billy, who had called this forest home before Seppe had even known it existed. And now he’d be back. Seppe would meet him. A brother in arms.