Read Return to Fourwinds Online
Authors: Elisabeth Gifford
âAnd don't put your head against the wall. Shock could knock you out,' she warned. âMight snap your neck.'
Ivy wanted a sing-song, but the landlord's wife stared her down and no one else had the energy to do anything but sit and try to decode the noise thundering around them. The mechanical drone of planes carrying their heavy load above the city, the whistle of bombs falling, the awful wait until the bomb exploded â somewhere else, somewhere else â then the wait for the next one. The constant thumping of the anti-aircraft guns in the distance. There was another explosion, the nearest yet, and the cellar jumped, the pressure in the air pulsing in a wave. Dad was white as a sheet, his face sweating. He passed a large handkerchief over his forehead.
Ivy led a foray back up to the bar, came waddling back with more bottles of beer. She'd kept her coat and hat on. Set up her own singsong. âMy old man said, “Follow the van, and don't you dilly dally on
the way.” Off went the van with me old cock linnet, and I ran behind shouting wait a minute.'
The landlord's wife had her eyes closed now, too terrified to give Ivy a piece of her mind. Peter sat between Bill and Kitty. She held tight to Peter's hand, squeezing it so hard each time a bomb resounded nearby that he winced with pain.
Bill brought out a pack of cards and Peter taught them Maudey's game, Gin Rummy. They all flinched each time the room shook, but carried on playing, arguing over points.
At around three in the morning everything fell quiet. They went up into the pub's backyard and looked up at a dirty red dawn, the light bruised and bloody. The air was thick with the bitter smell of smoke. Dad began coughing. Walking back to the terrace they found the pub on the corner gone. Several houses nothing but a gap and mounds of rubble.
Their house was still there, all the windows had been blown out this time. Inside there was an even layer of brown grit over everything. Ivy stood in the cold kitchen, swaying. She sat down on a chair, not bothering to brush off the dust. Kitty rinsed out the kettle and put it on to boil. She put Peter and Bill on sweeping up glass while she washed out cups. Dad went to see what he could find to board the front windows up.
They'd had no breakfast. Ivy said she was going to do a proper dinner for them all, but she didn't move.
Peter couldn't understand where Ivy had come from. And who had decided she should act like she was their new ma? She was nothing like Ma. But when Jim came back she made him hand over some money. She told Peter to come with her.
On the main road into town was a fish and chip shop with the glass window blown out and a new handwritten sign propped up in front: âOpen for business â just more open than usual.' Ivy carried
the newspaper parcels of fish and chips back with Peter and they ate from the paper, sitting round the kitchen table, sprinkling plenty of salt and vinegar on the hot chips.
âI'd eat this every day, me,' said Ivy. âDon't hold with all that slaving in the kitchen when you can go out and fetch this every day. Did you tell him, Jim? Me and your dad are getting wed, Peter.' Her face was bright pink, the grease of the chips made her lips shine. He felt embarrassed for Dad. Ivy sat with her knees apart and scratched inside her calf. Dad ate on, looked shifty.
He couldn't help it; Peter thought of how Ma would say Ivy was common, not their sort. And if Alice saw Ivy . . .
Christmas Day Kitty cooked a chicken like Ma would have. Everyone gathered round the table. There was a paper lantern hanging from the ceiling. Some straggly tinsel over the mantelpiece. Ivy had bought a slab of pink and yellow Angel cake from the shop. It tasted like the dusty shop cake they used to have for breakfast as a treat, coming home with Ma after the communion fast on Sundays. Ma always made them go to church with her early every Sunday, the priest blessing them all in a row at the communion rail. He swallowed hard to make Ivy's cake go down, his throat tight.
Ivy and Dad went to the pub in the afternoon. No heating in the house but for the fire in the kitchen.
On Boxing Day they went to the pantomime at the Hippodrome and laughed themselves sick at the bawdy jokes and the slapstick Widow Twanky. They all stood and sang their hearts out for âThere'll be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover'. Dad had tears running down his cheeks and he gripped onto Peter's shoulder. Peter stood up straight and sang his loudest, because they were together and he belonged to Manchester, and Hitler couldn't beat them. And that was the truth; and he was proud to be Peter, standing here with his people in the dim light of the huge theatre with the spotlight on the
girl in the blue dress and bright make-up, holding her arms to them and singing like Vera Lynn.
It was a long walk back. Ivy was complaining her feet were killing her. She said they'd get fish and chips, and then Dad and Ivy argued. He said did she know how much this was costing. He said Evelyn could make a meal from next to nothing. Ivy said she was sure Evelyn could, as if it wasn't something to be proud of.
âIsn't it time some of this brood were fending for themselves?' she muttered. âKitty and Peter'll just have to share a bag of chips if you're that stingy.'
They stood around on the pavement over the road from the chippy while Ivy and Dad argued, and the last of the Christmas cheer drained away. John sloped off back to his lodgings. He said Bill may as well come too since they had to get up for work on the morrow. They muttered goodbye to Peter, and then the two lanky, cowed-looking figures disappeared into the darkness. Then Kitty shouted at Ivy that she didn't need to bother about her because she'd be wed soon enough like Doris. She'd stay with her mother-in-law, who wanted her to go live with them.
There was the clanging of an ambulance in the distance. Unexploded bombs were still going off intermittently around the city. Ivy looked at Peter with a sour expression. She held out a palmful of coppers and said, âHere then, get four lots of chips.'
So he dashed across the dark space to the chippy, heard the clanging of the ambulance bell getting louder, felt an explosion, something slamming into his side and then a weightlessness as he flew up into the air.
He woke up in the hospital, his arm wrapped in heavy plaster. It hurt to move it. Dad was standing by his bed looking uneasy, but he smiled
and let his eyebrows slide up his forehead when he saw Peter awake. All he wanted was to stay with Dad by him, the way he was now, his father's concern like a lamp, warming and close.
âBest get back to Ivy,' he said. Her nerves were that bad after what she'd been through with the accident and all; she wasn't used to doing a big Christmas. Dad looked shifty again and squeezed the cap in his hand. He gave Peter a shilling.
âI'll come home wi' you now, Dad?'
âPeter, you saw the state of the house now. The state of Ivy's nerves. Best you go back to the country, eh?'
As soon as his arm was set in its plaster they said he could go home. He waited for Dad to come. He thought he was dreaming when he saw Maudey walking down the ward between the ends of the beds, but there she was, her coat buttoned up over her shape like a risen cottage loaf, her round face and smile as plain and good as her own baking. How was the lad? She couldn't believe how he'd walked through the blitz like that.
Maudey and he went back on the train to Buxton. He thought of Ma, telling him stories about Dad in front of the fire, Kitty and Bill listening in. And he thought of the house covered in brown grit, the wind blowing in through the broken glass, Bill sloping off into the dark in his workman's overalls, Ivy's greasy lips and loud voice; and he was homesick, for a place that wasn't there any more.
CHAPTER 14
Derbyshire, 1981
As Sarah walked up into the quiet village she had no clear idea of where she was going, only aware of the anxiety pushing her to keep moving. She came to the wooden bus shelter at the top of the village. The early bus arrived in a burst of diesel and vibration.
It stopped, the engine still rattling. She speeded up her steps, as if the bus had been waiting for her, and got on. And there she was. The bus driver didn't look at her as he took the money, issued a ticket. He scanned the road and swung the bus out. She sat down, listening to the thrumming of the engine, letting it override the din of panic in her head.
She stayed on the bus until it drew into the bus station in Stanford. The engine cut. Propelled by the need for motion, like a vertigo in her stomach, Sarah walked round the dismal place two or three times on a loop.
Over the far side of the station she saw a row of coaches. Above the drivers' windows were the names of distant towns in white letters. She had some money in her account; she had a chequebook in her bag, a comb, some tissues and old receipts. Nothing else. She could take one of the coaches somewhere, stay in a bed and breakfast. After that her thoughts stopped.
She walked over to the ticket office and paid for the bus to Glasgow, because it sounded so far away. She had to write down where she wanted
to go. But reading the ticket she realised it was an hour before the coach left. She almost turned round and decided enough was enough, she was being silly, really selfish; she should go back. But what would happen when she got back, and what she would say exactly, left her blank.
She was sitting in the hot and dusty bus station, on a metal bench next to an old man and his large daughter, both of them dressed entirely in black. They were talking about the funeral they were going to, cross because they had to change coaches in the middle of nowhere. He wore a bowler hat and a long coat, like a phantom Edwardian businessman. His large and doughy daughter had a straw basket filled with a picnic and they spread food across their laps, oranges and Tuc crackers, all the while disapproving in very English tones of the various family members they were going to see at the funeral. Nothing malicious, simply correct and censorious, a knowledge of the faults of others run through their fingers like the beads of an abacus, the small elderly man surprisingly final in his judgements, the disappointed-looking daughter salting his words with tight-lipped nods.
They packed away and left, Sarah relieved and almost surprised to find she was no longer annexed to their lives. The dry wind across the asphalt pushed a paper bag, soft and dirty, against her ankle. She got up and bought tea from the van parked near the ticket office.
A little way away was a red telephone box. She could almost smell the air thick with metal and plastic if she were to push the door open and step in. She stared at the phone through the glass, a relic from another age, and then moved back to the metal benches. She was not a good person. Overcome with the need to stop thinking she lay down, curled up with her head on her jacket and waited.
It was beginning to go dark as the coach neared Glasgow. Most of the seats were empty. She had turned sideways, her back against the
glass window, bare feet pulled up, arms grasping her knees. The feel of her skin on her legs called up for a moment the touch of Nicky's arm against the back of her neck, and a vast hole turned over in her soul somewhere.
Two rows up a man with grubby denim flares and a grey ponytail leaned into the aisle, rolling a cigarette. He angled himself so he could stare at her, pointed at the roll-up, but she shrank back.
The lights in the coach dimmed. Nothing now but the thrum of the engine, the shadow of herself in the window glass, insubstantial, travelling through the dark. Far into the distance an oblique view of the lines of white headlights coded past the bus like a computer read-out, continually moving away.
The traffic thinned out. For a long time they travelled across a dark moor. Then buildings and areas of industrial landscape began to break up the darkness, and they came into the outskirts of Glasgow. A car park, deserted except for tents of light pooling in the rising mist. A stadium with a green glow. Industrial buildings painted with neon, floating in the night mist.
For a moment she saw Nicky in the kitchen at Fourwinds, her parents, and her heart lurched. What were they doing now?