Home for Christmas (4 page)
‘But, Mum, you can’t just up and leave London.’
As she spoke Dulcie couldn’t help looking at the firmly tied and bulging sacks of household goods in the middle of the floor of the main room of her family home, the bed linen tied up in a sheet. The family didn’t possess the luxury of proper suitcases. Very few of those living in Stepney did, unless they were the sort that, for one reason or another were constantly on the move. The sort her own parents had always kept clear of and thought were beneath them. The sort that couldn’t go to church unless they’d got enough money to get their good clothes out of hock at the pawnshop.
For Dulcie, seeing her parents’ possessions gathered together came far too close for comfort to the images from the newspapers she had inside her head: the dispossessed of the East End wandering helplessly and hopelessly through the streets of London clutching their sad bundles of whatever they had managed to rescue from their bombed homes.
The last thing Dulcie had expected when Sergeant Dawson had delivered her to the door of her parents’ home, before checking his watch and telling her that she’d got an hour before he came back for her, was that she would find her mother on the verge of leaving London. But her mother’s nerves were so shattered by the relentless bombing that her hands had been shaking too much for her to fill the kettle and make them a cup of tea.
Having taken over that task for her, Dulcie had waited for her mother to say something about her accident and to express maternal concern, but she might as well have not bothered because, despite the fact that Dulcie was on crutches with her ankle in plaster, her mother hadn’t said a word about her injury, merely greeting her with a blunt, ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’
‘You can’t just leave,’ Dulcie reiterated now.
‘Oh, can’t I? We’ll just see about that. It’s all right for you, Dulcie, living in Holborn. That hasn’t been touched. You’re safe. You should have tried living down here since Hitler started bombing us.’
Mary Simmonds’ hand shook so much that she had to put her teacup back in its saucer, spilling some of the tea as she did so.
‘I didn’t get this running for a bus,’ Dulcie felt justified in pointing out smartly as she held out her plastered leg, ‘and I’m going to have to keep this ruddy plaster on for longer than normal on account of me having such delicate ankles.’
When her mother still didn’t say anything Dulcie was unable to prevent herself from adding bitterly, ‘Not that you seem to care that much.’
‘Oh, that’s typical of you, Dulcie. You’ve always been selfish and thinking only of yourself. Not one word have you said about poor Edith. I can’t sleep at night for thinking about what might have happened to your sister, and how she might have suffered. I can’t stay here in London, knowing them Germans have taken her life.’
Tears filled Dulcie’s mother’s eyes, her hands now shaking so badly that she folded them together in her lap as she and Dulcie sat opposite one another on the two hard dining chairs either side of the battered oak table, which had to be pushed up against the wall to make space for people to walk past it. The fire that heated the room was, for once, unlit, the September sunshine cruelly bright on the faded striped wallpaper. The three plaster ducks, which had adorned the wall opposite the fireplace, and of which her mother had been so proud, had been removed, leaving brighter patches of paper. Even the curtains had been taken down, allowing the sunlight to highlight the shabbiness of the room.
It had been in here, on the rag rug in front of the fire, that Dulcie and Edith has squabbled and, indeed, fought, pulling one another’s hair and screaming over the possession of some toy; fights that Edith had always won, of course, because she had had their mother to take her side. Now any sisterly sense of loss was stamped out by Dulcie’s knowledge that her sister had always been their mother’s favourite.
‘You don’t know that she is dead yet,’ she reminded her mother.
Dulcie had never got on with her sister, but deep down, although she wasn’t willing to admit it, there was a small scratchy sore place, an unhappy feeling, because several bombs had fallen on the area where Edith had been.
‘There’s not been any official notice, or anything . . .’ A body, Dulcie meant; concrete evidence that Edith was in fact dead, but she couldn’t say that to her mother. ‘She might just be missing.’ But she offered these words more dismissively than comfortingly.
‘Missing?’ Mary retorted. ‘Of course she isn’t missing. Me and your dad have been to all the hospitals and all the rest centres. I know my Edith: the first thing she would have done once the air raid was over, if she’d been all right, was come home to let me know that she was safe.’ Her voice shook, tears filling her already swollen eyes. ‘No. She’s gone. Killed by Hitler when she was singing her heart out trying to do her best for other people. The theatre she was in took a direct hit, after all. She didn’t have a selfish bone in her body, Edith didn’t. Always thinking of others, she was.’
Always thinking of herself, more like, Dulcie thought, but she knew there was no point in saying that to her mother, who had thought that the sun shone out of Edith’s backside. It felt odd to think that Edith had gone, that they’d never quarrel with one another again, that she’d never see her sister again. Dulcie’s heart started to beat faster, a lump of emotion clogging her throat as unexpected feelings gripped her. There had been no love lost between her and Edith, after all, so there was no cause for her to go all soft about her now. It was a shock, though, to think of her being dead.
Unsettled by her own emotions, Dulcie reached for her mother’s hand but immediately her mother shrugged her off, saying despairingly, ‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to go on without Edith. She was the best daughter any mother could want.’
A far better daughter than she was, Dulcie knew her mother meant, the brief moment of sadness and loss she had been feeling overtaken by the bitterness their mother’s favouritism always aroused in her.
‘There’s nothing to keep me here now,’ her mother continued bleakly.
‘What about Dad?’
‘Your dad’s leaving as well. Dunham’s that he works for had their yard bombed and everything in it destroyed, and so Paul Dunham has decided to get out of London and go into business with a cousin he’s got who’s a builder down in Kent. He’s offered your dad a job with him, and there’s a couple of rooms we can have with a chap who’s already working for this cousin of his. We’re going down in Dunham’s lorry tomorrow morning.’
For once in her life Dulcie was silent, struggling to take in everything that her mother had told her and all that she hadn’t said as well.
‘And what about Rick and the Dunhams’ son, John?’ she finally demanded in a sharp voice. ‘What about them when they get leave from the army and find that they haven’t got a home to come to any more?’
‘Your dad wrote to Rick last night to tell him about Edith and what we’re doing.’
‘And I suppose you were going to send me a letter as well, were you?’ Dulcie asked sarcastically, causing a dull flush of colour to spread up under her mother’s previously pale face.
‘Don’t you take that tone with me, my girl. You were the one who chose to move out and go and live somewhere else.’
‘I only moved to Holborn, not Kent, and I came back every Sunday for church,’ Dulcie pointed out, using her anger to conceal the pain burning inside her.
‘Your dad was going to arrange to send a message round to Holborn to let you know that we’re leaving. ‘
‘But you weren’t going to take the trouble to come and see me,’ Dulcie accused her mother, ‘even though you knew I’d got a broken ankle.’
‘Trust you to make a fuss about yourself, Dulcie. Your dad and me knew that you were all right and, after all, a broken ankle’s nothing compared with what’s happened to your poor sister.’
Dulcie didn’t know what she might have said to her mother if there hadn’t been a knock on the door. She looked at her watch.
‘That will be Sergeant Dawson, come to help me get back to Holborn. Luckily for me at least some folk think enough of me to worry about me,’ was her parting accusation as she stood up and reached for her crutches, making her way along the narrow hallway to open the front door.
Despite the justification she felt for simply walking away with Sergeant Dawson and slamming the door behind her without another word, somehow Dulcie couldn’t stop herself turning back into the house and hobbling down the hall.
‘You’d better write and let me know where you’re staying,’ she told her mother in a curt voice, ‘just in case Rick doesn’t get his letter from you and turns up in Holborn, wanting to know where you are.’ She paused, whilst her mother wrote down their new address for her and then, against her will and awkwardly, Dulcie leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled of dust and tiredness mingled with despair.
If she had hoped to feel her mother’s arms coming round her in a maternal hug then Dulcie had hoped in vain because her mother sat rigidly, not kissing Dulcie back or even looking properly at her, staring straight ahead.
It was her mother’s lookout if she was too wrapped up in ruddy Edith to remember that she had another daughter, Dulcie told herself fiercely as she rejoined Sergeant Dawson, pulling the door, with its peeling paint, sharply closed behind her, then carefully negotiating the front step. She certainly didn’t care!
Wearing her London Transport uniform of grey worsted fabric piped in blue, and trying to look as official as she possibly could, Agnes stood at the top of the stairs leading down into Chancery Lane underground station where she worked, watching the crowd of people making their way down to take refuge in the underground in case the night brought yet another attack from the German Luftwaffe.
When Mr Smith, who managed the ticket office, had asked for volunteers to help organise and keep an eye on things in anticipation of the number of people who would want to use the underground to shelter in, Agnes had been the first to shoot up her hand, but not just because she wanted to do her bit. Ted, the young underground train driver with whom she was walking out, and to whom she was going to become officially engaged at Christmas, had told her that he intended to bring his widowed mother and his two young sisters down to Chancery Lane for protection. This would be Agnes’s first opportunity to meet them. Ted had hoped to arrange for them all to meet up at the small café close to the station where Ted and Agnes often went, as Ted had explained to her that his mother was reluctant to invite Agnes round to their home. They lived in a tiny two-roomed flat owned by the Guinness Trust, which provided rented accommodation to respectable but poor working-class families in London.
‘The truth is that there isn’t room for the four of us to sit down together at the table all at the same time, never mind five of us,’ Ted had explained to her, and Agnes had understood. She might have been abandoned at birth by her mother and raised in the orphanage attached to the Row’s local church, but Agnes had seen how proud Olive, her landlady, was of her home and she had quickly grasped what Ted was not saying, which was that his mother felt embarrassed about inviting her to their small home. Or at least that was what Agnes hoped Ted had meant. She couldn’t quite stop worrying that Ted’s mother might think an orphaned girl who didn’t know where she came from was not be the kind she wanted her son to get involved with. Agnes didn’t like thinking about the circumstances of her birth and subsequent abandonment. Doing so made her feel all prickly and upset inside.
Now that the children and staff from the orphanage had been evacuated to the country, the building was used as a drill hall, and potential rest centre, should the unthinkable happen and the area be bombed, making people homeless.
Of course there was no question of her and Ted getting married any time soon. Not with Ted being the only breadwinner in the family and having his mother and two sisters to support. Ted had been honest with her about that, and Agnes fully understood what he had said to her. He wouldn’t have been her good kind Ted if he hadn’t looked after his family.
Ted was off duty at the moment and he’d told her that he would bring his family down early in the evening to make sure they got settled in a good spot before he went back to work, but the stream of people approaching the station was getting heavier now, and Agnes was worried that she might somehow miss them in the crush.
Predictably, of course, Mr Smith had initially thoroughly disapproved of and objected to the public more or less ‘taking it upon themselves’, as he had put it, to have the right to sleep in the underground. But once Winston Churchill himself, of whom Mr Smith was a great admirer, had sanctioned this, his objections had slowed to muttered grumbles about the mess people were making, especially those who had no homes to go to any more, and who brought with them what belongings they had been able to salvage.
Agnes, on the other hand, felt sorry for them. She was so lucky to have her lovely room at number 13 Article Row, her kind landlady Mrs Robbins, and her wonderful friends there, especially Tilly. She didn’t want to think of how it would make her feel if she were to lose any of that.
She scanned the growing crowd of people approaching the steps to the underground, searching for Ted’s familiar face, feeling both excited and nervous at the prospect of meeting his family – and especially his mother – at last.
However, when they did arrive Agnes almost missed them. An elderly woman was so laden with the weight of her possessions that her slow progress was holding other people up. Some were losing patience and starting to mutter complaints so Agnes stepped in to help her.