Dolly's War (21 page)

However, all the jobs got done and after our meal I prepared Susan for bed, while Chas went up to see my parents. We only had one bedroom, although it was a very large one, and I had purchased a single bed for Susan which I placed in the far corner of the room. She had slept with me for the greater part of the war during the air-raids and eyed this new bed with reluctance. ‘Is he going to sleep here then?' she asked. ‘Yes, darling,' I said. ‘For ever?' she queried in a horrified tone. I thought it expedient for the sake of a peaceful evening with my beloved, to tell a white lie. ‘No,' I replied reassuringly, ‘not for ever,' and I added quickly, ‘Daddy's going back to another country in two weeks' time.' Fortunately this satisfied her and she was soon fast asleep. I changed hastily and donned a glamorous-looking housecoat in green and gold brocade. This had come from Persia and had been a present from an American officer to his wife, but she had deserted him for someone else and in a state of emotion he had given it to me saying, ‘Here, Towser, perhaps it will do something for you when your husband returns, I admire women like you who have Carried on so cheerfully and loyally while their husbands have been away.' ‘It's an ill wind,' I had thought at the time, rather callously. The officer felt his wife had no reason to desert him, no raids or shortages in America to cause her to do such a thing.

I lit the fire, for not only would it be more welcoming and easier to relax with each other in its flickering light, but I thought Chas might feel the cold on an English summer evening after living in such warm climes. I placed two arm-chairs by the fire, and awaited his return from above. He removed his armchair from the fireside and sat in it by the window. ‘He's more shy than I thought he would be,' I reflected. He seemed to be staring at me in the firelight. I was just racking my brains for something nice to say to him when he arose suddenly from his chair. ‘At last.' I felt all warm and loving at his approach. But no, he switched on the light and said belligerently, ‘Now I'll see the books.' ‘Books,' I stammered, ‘I didn't know you liked reading.' ‘No, the bank books, the savings books,' he went on as I gazed stupidly at him. Book in the singular would have been bad enough at such a time, but books in the plural! I was furious, all my loving, welcoming mood evaporated. Everything had gone wrong, I was sure it wasn't my fault, and thus ensued, on our first meeting after the toil, stress and misery of the war, a fierce argument. Chas calmed down first and it transpired that ‘someone' in his mess, or the officers' mess (he must have been a hypnotic beast, I was sure) had warned the chaps that their wives had held the reins for so long they wouldn't relinquish them easily, and unless a man ‘put his foot' down on arrival home from a financial view, he might become a second-class citizen in his own home, and not the man of the house as he had been before the war further emancipated women.

However, the argument seemed to clear the air and remove the last traces of our shyness with each other, and after a drink both very tired (at doing nothing exciting) we retired to bed. As I took off my housecoat I thought, well, perhaps bed is the right place for making love. No sooner had Chas put his arm round me than a little voice came from the corner, ‘Can I come in your bed, Mummy?' Deciding quickly to myself, ‘Well there's another day tomorrow,' I was on the point of saying, ‘Of course you can, darling,' when Chas said, quite sharply I thought, ‘No, you cannot, just close your eyes and go to sleep.' Of course Susan began to cry and I said to Chas, ‘You shouldn't snap at her like that.' I went over to her, and for the sake of peace and quiet I whispered that if she closed her eyes and tried to sleep I would buy her something extra-special the next day. This seemed to be the right approach and we heard no more from her. I was glad Chas hadn't heard my bribery and corruption promise to her for he would have been very cross I am sure.

Back in bed, to make a fresh start, I tenderly took Chas's hand but with an unearthly groan he thrust my hand back at me. This inhuman noise heralded the start of ten days' illness for him. He was very poorly indeed, the doctor diagnosing either gastric flu, dysentery or a foreign bug. Mother made up a bed for him in her spare room in case of infection. He recovered, but the illness left him with severe palpitations so that he was unable to exert himself in any way! Finally he visited a military doctor and thankfully his heart returned to normal. I felt I was being punished in some way for my unpatriotic wishes at his first army medical. Now that the war was over surely his heart wasn't going to have its own back on me? However we had at least a couple of happy days before he returned to the Continent, and his leave was still not ‘wasted' one might say, for by the time he returned home demobbed I was already large with our second child.

We had visited the hairdressers towards the end of his leave. The salon was run by a married couple, who, I thought, knew me well. The ladies' salon was on the ground floor and the men's on the floor above. I was ready to leave before Chas and sat in the passage with the proprietress waiting for him. As he came down the stairs she said, ‘Here is your son, won't you be glad when he is home for good.' So I looked old enough to be his mother, and he had spent nearly two weeks as an invalid! I looked at Chas and he was actually ‘grinning' (quite a feat for him) and as we went down the road he burst into laughter. I shook off his arm and wished he had been wearing a revolver for I might have shot him on the spot. And to think a month previously I was sure I would be spending two weeks of rapturous bliss. At the very youngest I must look fifty!

There was no comfort from the family, either. Mother giggled and Amy inspected herself in the mirror, her look confirming, yes, Dolly looked even older than her older sisters. The hairdresser's remarks really cast me down so that when I went to the station to bid farewell to my youthful warrior, I looked and felt like crying and Chas departed beaming like the sun. This was his last departure, his next homecoming would be permanent. How different from his first departure, then I was smiling radiantly and he almost in tears. His leave had not made me impatient for the future and I had to learn all over again that some things cannot be planned. I addressed my next letter to him ‘Dear Son,' and his speedy reply was a passionate apology for his laughter at the hairdresser's remark. He had only been laughing because I had taken it seriously. The hairdresser was of course mad, his officer, whom I'd met at the station had been very smitten with me. ‘I had no idea you had such a striking-looking wife,' he had said to Chas, ‘and what a brilliant sense of humour.' I wished I could have remembered what I had remarked to the officer; I remember I thought him quite a dish. I cheered myself up by deciding that I was one of those people with a ‘fixed age' when I reached the age people assumed I was, those around me would grow more ancient while I stayed the same.

Some time after Chas's final return he was offered a position with a shipping company. He possessed the necessary qualifications, there were excellent prospects with this company, and never having been one hundred per cent keen on canvassing or salesmanship, he took the position with the S.S. Co. And we installed a telephone – the first members of the family to arrive at such affluence! We longed for it to ring after the engineer left. But silent stayed the bell. Until we were asleep that night. Chas answered it and returned to me white-faced. A ‘dreadful' voice had said, ‘Your life is in danger.' ‘I must phone the police,' said Chas agitatedly. ‘Whatever can they do?' I asked, and persuaded him to come back to bed. I started to laugh when I thought of his terrified expression and he was a bit sulky about my laughter. Suddenly, just as I was dozing off he sat up in bed and said in a delighted tone, ‘The man didn't say “Your life is in danger”.' ‘Oh, good,' I said, happy for him. ‘No,' he went on. ‘I realise now what he did say.' ‘What was that then?' I said, now quite interested, ‘Your Wife is in danger,' he said triumphantly. Now he went to sleep with a smile and I lay awake quite worried.

Chas liked his job, Susan liked her school, our neighbours were friendly and life was pleasant while I was waiting for my next baby to be born. After the miserable intervening years we seemed to have enough to smile at. We had two girl neighbours whom I liked very much. They were real characters. Ivy and Nell. They had been lifelong friends, had married two brothers, both quiet and gentle fellows, and now they shared a large house half a dozen doors away from us. Nell had a voice mightier than an ‘Ada Larkins' and whatever part of the district her young son Peter was playing in, her ‘
PETER
' always reached him. Their day's work finished, the girls would station themselves on the wall of the front garden, the railings of all gardens in the road having been removed ‘for the war effort'. Here they would sit and pass the time of day with a joke to the homecoming men, most of whom were a little bit shy at the evening's public greeting, but Chas always had a smile and a ready word for them and when I was preparing his meal at evening-time I always knew of his approach before he reached our house because of Nell's sergeant-major's, ‘Evening, Charlie – had a good day, boy?' They were cockney girls of the old school, with no shyness or fear of anyone.

They gave me hours of amusement and I was ‘Dolly' to them before I'd been in that area more than a few hours.

Nell's son was in the same class at school as Susan and at the end of the first year after the war the children brought home their school reports. I always met Susan from school and Nell's son walked home with us. The reports had been rolled out on a green jelly pad and the words ‘Nature Study' had come out faintly ‘Nature'. As I asked Nell, when we were comparing the reports, ‘And what has he got for Nature Study?' before I could say the word ‘study' Nell looked at her son's report and said, for all the world to hear, ‘Nature? Well, I'll tell you, Dolly, if he's anything like his father, it's bleeding 'ot.' It took me a long while to explain to her what Nature Study really was. ‘Well,' said Nell, obstinately, ‘he don't bleeding well need it, not if he takes after his father!' His father was so quiet and gentle I could hardly believe Nell's description of her husband.

Chas never appeared interested in ‘bank' books again and we decided to spend the war-time savings on modernising our house. We were fortunate in obtaining the services of a ‘master-builder', the strangest master-builder I have ever seen. He was small and slight, yet possessed the strength of a Goliath. He was a cultured man with a lovely voice and an Edwardian manner of speech, and with an old-fashioned courtesy. He was the first builder I had met who did not make me feel as though my house was falling down. Whenever I had asked for an estimate for decorating etc., the builder or decorator had always looked round tragically, tutted, making me feel I was asking for a miracle, and finally, while the estimater was ‘hesitating' on the price to be asked, I would jump in with profuse apologies for daring to invite a real ‘craftsman' into what they always made me feel was a ‘dump'. But this new man I had engaged was like one of the Three Musketeers in his gallant treatment of me. His first job was to put a picture-window down one side of the kitchen wall and he would bang away at the brickwork singing in a lovely voice or reciting poetry. He would say, ‘If Madam would be so kind as to journey to the front gate we might ascertain as to whether the building inspector approacheth.' Like a madam I would gaze up and down the road, and on my return would describe a man who might be walking near the house, and my little craftsman would put his hands together and gaze up at the sky in supplication and say, ‘All is still well for that is not he.' What action would have been taken if‘he' did ‘approacheth' I never knew.

My mother liked my little craftsman, perhaps because he was like a little faun in his leaping and springing movements, perhaps because she liked his singing or poetry. Doubtless he brought out the maternal in her and he brightened visibly each time he saw her. She would make hot scones for his morning tea feeling he needed feeding up. My father, on the other hand, was a little frustrated by my Musketeer, possibly because he couldn't fault his work. My father, a craftsman of the ‘old school', would say ‘craftsman' with such an expression of disgust when workmen were employed by any of the family, but D'Artagnan was perfect so Father avoided him whilst he was working on my house. But as soon as the little courtier had left for home in the evening my father would scoot downstairs and inspect very carefully every inch of the work, and return silently to his books. Finally my father accepted the newcomer as a member of the craftsman fraternity and in a subtle manner eased his frustration through ploys against Chas.

Chas had decided to cultivate the back garden. It was a mass of trees, lilac, firs, etc., and at the bottom of the garden there were a William pear-tree and a cherry-tree. He removed all the trees with the exception of the fruiting ones and soon had rows of vegetables planted. Chas thought he detected a slight air of coolness in Father's manner towards him and I was designated to discover why. Of course, Father paid his rent, he was ‘entitled' to half the garden. It was difficult to apportion now that it was planted and in any case Chas had no idea that ‘the old Adam' lay unsatisfied in Father's breast. He couldn't understand why Father had the urge to dig and plant when he would have been presented with as much of our crop as he needed. However Father was given the piece of garden near the fruit-trees.

Now Mother had already bought and planted, in the small front garden, a forsythia bush of which she was very fond. Chas, reorganising the front garden, dug this out and laid a lawn. Looking forward to the birth of my second child and the modernising of the house I was not really aware that the removal of this bush had upset Mother for she had said nothing to me, always wanting a peaceful atmosphere around her. Whether my father knew this I don't know, but one of his garden bonfires ‘accidentally' destroyed the cherry-tree, and I began to feel like Piggy in the Middle for Chas would complain to me one day and then Father mumble about Chas's gardening capabilities the next. Father, all innocent, would dig and plant where Chas had already ‘put his mark' and then Chas would return the compliment. Father gave up first, possibly bored with gardening, and filled his whole patch with everlasting spinach. Fortunately this flourished always so his pride was salvaged and an uneasy peace restored.