Call Nurse Jenny (31 page)

‘The way she talks,’ Susan went on, ‘you’d think I was on the streets. I like going dancing with Edie. And we know how to behave ourselves.’

In September, for a bit of extra money, she’d started a part-time job in the Whitechapel High Street near Aldgate East station in the stockroom of a wholesalers of men’s underwear and hosiery, Fishman & Sob. The owner’s son had been called up. Edie Barrows, who worked with her, also had a husband in the forces, and like herself needed to get out now and again and see a bit of life rather than be stuck at home – it was easier for her, having no children. There was no harm in it, the way Mrs Ward intimated.

‘Neither of us are going to go off the rails, both married. We just need a break now and again, that’s all,’ Susan repeated.

‘’Course yer do,’ Emma murmured. ‘Do yer want jam or a bit of yer cheese ration in this sandwich?’

‘Jam’ll do.’

She began mixing Mattie’s bottle with dried baby milk and a tiny drop of cod-liver oil. Her own milk had dried up earlier. Susan wasn’t sorry. Though making bottles was a chore, she wasn’t confined to the house or to rushing back home having to breastfeed at inconvenient hours.

She set the bottle in a saucepan of cold water to cool for when Mattie woke up. ‘I think I do all right with Mattie’s clothes. That exchange shop’s a real godsend.’

In the Mile End Road near the old Empire Music Hall, a small derelict shop had been set up with a system whereby mothers could barter clothing their toddlers had outgrown for larger clothes. It saved on clothing coupons and it was cheap. Mattie looked a treat in some of the baby clothes Susan had managed to find.

‘Trouble is, she inspects everything I buy for Mattie, as if I’m putting her into something lice-infested. The way she purses her lips if Mattie looks the least bit messy! You can’t keep babies clean all the time. She’s bound to sick up a bit of food on her clothes, and she always manages to come in when Mattie’s messy, never when she’s clean. I’m sure she times it.’

Emma laughed and glanced at the battered alarm clock on one of the kitchen shelves. Twelve thirty. The boys’d be home any minute, all three of them bursting into the house as ravenous as if they hadn’t eaten for a week.

‘Wait till she starts feeding ’erself, then yer’ll know what messy is.’

When the post fell lightly through the letter box, Lilian was neatly folding the finished baby dress, ready to take with her tomorrow morning. It looked pretty; the pink and white wool she’d picked up from the WI skeined and washed, almost new. Susan should be pleased, though Lilian could bet she wouldn’t show it if she could help, merely look askance at it as though she, Lilian, were interfering. How could she be interfering, the child’s own grandmother? More than them up in Birmingham ever bothered themselves – she allowed herself that little grammatical lapse in referring to Susan’s people who as far as she knew hardly ever came down to see their daughter, much less sent her presents of clothing. Out of sight out of mind. They probably wrote now and again and thought that good enough.

At the sound of the post, she left the dress on the round occasional table in the bay window and hurried into the hall to see what had arrived. Always in the back of her mind was that one day the post would contain a letter from the Red Cross or some other authority to say her son had been traced. At the same time there lingered that fear of being informed of his confirmed death, so that she never approached the envelopes lying in the wire cage attached below the letter box without pausing, to carry on more slowly in trepidation at what might be there.

This procedure she followed now. Pray God there was no bad news, bills excluded of course. But what was bad news and what was good if it concerned Matthew? Was missing good news? But surely better than that dread which invariably throbbed in her mind. Whatever it was, it had to be faced.

There were several letters, most of them bills and invoices concerning Leonard’s business, two private letters, both face down. What would they contain? One had an official look to it. It was that one which she swept up almost in a single movement, knowing even before she turned it over that it bore the small red cross on it.

Feverishly she ripped open the envelope. Her heart thumping heavily, she pulled out the single sheet of limp recycled note-paper and unfolded it swiftly, hardly daring to breathe, hardly daring to let her eyes scan what it had to say. It took only the first two lines to send a sensation of debility spreading through her limbs so that she had to clutch at the newel post to keep her from falling. The waiting was at an end. At last they knew.

Tears she had kept unshed all this time started to flow and she didn’t try to prevent them as she sank down on the stairs and, all alone in the house, gave herself up to weeping, the letter crumpled in her hand. Slowly, though, she gathered her thoughts. She must let Leonard know. Her hand automatically reached for the telephone on the hall stand, she dialled the operator, gave her the number of Leonard’s shop and waited. It seemed to take forever before his receiver was lifted, but she felt too drained to think in the interval. Her brain seemed quite dead. She actually gave a small start as Leonard’s voice sounded close to her ear.

‘Hello? Ward’s Electrical Shop.’

‘Leonard! We’ve heard. We’ve heard from the International Red Cross – a letter – this morning. Leonard – they’ve found him. He’s a prisoner of war. That’s all they know. But, Leonard, he’s alive. Our Matthew’s alive.’

There was a second or two’s silence, then his voice came, trembling, just as hers had. ‘I’m coming home. I’m closing up and coming home.’

‘But your customers. You can’t …’ It sounded quite inane. News of Matthew traced and she was worrying about customers?

‘Sod the customers!’ He never swore in her hearing. She wouldn’t have it. But today she forgave him.

The rain had ceased. The flood within the railway cutting had subsided and with it part of the earth wall which must now be shored up. The guards, tempers uncertain at the best of times and now made more vile by the appalling conditions which they and prisoners alike were compelled to share, were calling for more speed. Anxious to return to their dry quarters and some warm food, they backed their demands with stick and stone aimed at any prisoner who flagged at his task.

The cutting rang to their demented yells, to the screech of steel being dragged from antiquated lorries, the clang of hammers on the metal spikes securing the rails in place while the sickly glow of carbide lamps gleamed on the glistening shoulders of those who toiled into the night.

To Matthew’s fevered mind the whole thing resembled scenes from Dante’s
Inferno
as on hands and knees he groped in the yellow mud for the bolts of the fishplate that would join together the two rails placed there.

His last meal of cold boiled rice diluted by monsoon rain had been eaten at mid-morning, eight hours ago. He would not eat again until their overseer, the shoko, called a halt to measure the day’s quota of work sometime just before midnight. His brain felt it was bursting from the most recent attack of malaria; he dared not dwell on how he would get through the remaining hours, but get through them he must.

Evading the prospect, he found himself turning his thoughts inward – a sort of mental escapism he’d long ago learned – a way of withdrawing into the depths of his own brain as into a dark little world secluded from all this misery outside. Slowly a wonderful phenomenon would occur, though it was only imagination. Inside his head there would appear a bright disc and within the disc he’d visualise Susan’s face, smiling, gentle as she reached out to him. The clamour around him would recede and he would seem to float on a tiny island of peace, remote from the violence and hunger that made up the world he now existed in. A figment of a feverish mind, perhaps. What did it matter? It sustained him, and with a fanaticism born of sheer desperation he clung to that wavering disc with an insane – because one could become insane in this place – but obdurate conviction that while he could conjure up that disc of light inside his head, he would survive.

He had never dreamed he would, that day of his being taken prisoner. Hands raised, his pockets being rifled, he’d protested at Susan’s photo being torn into pieces, had taken a step forward. One of his captors had sprung at him, bayonet whipping round. It was then he’d thought his life over, but the bayonet just scored his outstretched forearm.

The captives, bound together by their own belts in twos, had been pushed and prodded along jungle tracks with the noise of the river, which had meant safety, receding; they had finally been incarcerated in a small bamboo enclosure, full of Indian and British soldiers, which became filthier as the days passed with no latrines and a constant scramble for water. His arm had swollen to twice its normal size from the shallow bayonet wound bound by a piece of his own shirt.

Rangoon fell a week later. He had joined a lengthening column of POWs, taken back across the Sittang River, by then spanned by a hasty bridge flung up by the Japanese, past shattered metal and unburied bodies and into the city.

The poison from his festering wound had spread and he remembered little of the trek across the Irrawaddy Plain beneath a burning sun, but it was then that the strange disc-like brilliance with Susan’s image inside it began to fill his head. Bob, who had been with him, and still was, had said that he was holding whole conversations with her. But he’d been convinced then as now of the telepathic origins of that bright light. Susan’s thoughts were encouraging him, spanning the thousands of miles between them.

It had been Bob Howlett who’d practically carried him into the Rangoon jail from that seventy-mile trek, who had badgered him into putting one foot before the other, holding him up, telling him not to give up, that he had Susan and a baby to get home to; Bob who had fed him with tiny morsels of watery rice and bits of fruit as he lay desperately ill.

Now it was Bob who lay desperately ill with dysentery, so pernicious that Matthew feared he would lose him. So many friends had been parted, they had been fortunate staying together this long. If Bob died, there’d be no panacea of shared comradeship, nights spent in their rotting tent talking quietly of their hopes of what they were going to do when they got back home, their wives, their memories of happier days. If Bob died, he’d be totally alone.

With the wall shored up and this particular group of railway workers at last clear of the cutting, a whistle blasted; work ceased abruptly while the shoko went forward to inspect the quota completed. Silence fell, broken only by the dripping of rainwater from sodden vegetation, the drowned earth sucking and bubbling, the laborious breathing of the men, a cough or two, the idle clink of a metal tool and the sigh of the sick, their mates waiting to help them back to the huddle of tents they called home.

With the shoko signalling permission, each man lined up for his mess-tin of cold rice doled out from an old oil drum positioned under a strip of leaking tarpaulin, afterwards to slither their way along a morass of a path to their tents and sleep. But first there was water from the river to be boiled, to cook the edible lizard he’d caught and killed that morning. Anything caught was supposed to go into the common pot, but he meant to cook it himself and feed the broth to Bob, who would have done the same for him.

Armed with a bent and battered petrol can, he made his way from the tent designed to hold three Japanese schoolboys comfortably but now used by eight men, and headed a quarter of a mile down the slippery path to the stagnant backwater of the river. It had to be the backwater. The torrent of the main river could wash away a man, especially one in a weakened condition. Men were already there scooping up the cloudy liquid, a perfect breeding ground for disease. The last to arrive, Matthew sank down on a decaying log to wait for the pool to clear, his head buzzing from his malaria. He watched each man depart with a full container, slipping, sliding, shambling back up the greasy track, all the spring of youth gone out of their step. Sitting here, he too felt like an old man, trying to summon the will just to raise himself up and fill up his can with the cloudy water.

Holding the petrol can below the surface to fill, he stared across the river into the darkness of the jungle. The roar of the river was deafening. A slow, lethargic thought came. What was the point of it all, squatting here, a half-naked, emaciated travesty of a man, shaken by fever, tongue raw from pellagra that made every mouthful of what food he got an agony? Would he drag on for a few more months in this hopeless corner of the world, or somewhere like it further along this growing railway, lost, forgotten, to succumb and be buried under a bamboo cross, one among all the countless other bamboo crosses that lined the route?

‘God! Why in Christ’s name did you do this to me? Why in Christ’s name won’t you help us?’

The roar of the river bore away the insane cry. The buzzing night-jungle swallowed it whole. There was no one to hear, just some unseen monkeys disturbed by the strange man-cry, replying with a distant demented howling while the incessant chirruping of myriads of insects in this primeval tangle of sodden vegetation continued uninterrupted.

There was a reply – voiceless in his own head, the memory of a smile, Susan hovering in his head across thousands of miles of sea and desert and mountain and jungle, waiting for him. He couldn’t let her down. He couldn’t let Bob down, sitting here nursing his own misery while Bob hovered at the edge of death. Rationality returned. The can was full and he had jobs to do.

It was heaven to close the door, to curl up in one of the old armchairs in the partitioned-off part of her room upstairs, to be alone.

Emma was a wonderful and supportive friend, but her chatter could get a bit much sometimes. With Mattie being looked after downstairs by a willing Emma, who adored girls, she could relax with the latest paperback romance, identifying with the beautiful heroine in the embrace of the dark handsome hero, who in her imagination was Matthew, until it was Mattie’s bedtime.