The Hills and the Valley (65 page)

‘Barbara …'

‘I mean it!' she said. ‘I won't sleep with you any more, Marcus.' She turned her back on him, collecting her hairbrush from the dressing table, her nightdress in its case from the pillow. ‘For tonight I'll sleep in Hope's room. After that you can work something out. This is a big house. There are plenty of rooms in this wing. Deny me one of them and I leave.'

‘Please …' He was crying now. She looked at him scornfully.

‘I don't care what you tell your mother and father, or if you tell them at all. But as far as I am concerned, Marcus, our marriage is over. Do you understand?'

She swept into Hope's room. Miraculously, the child was still sleeping peacefully, one thumb in her mouth. Barbara leaned over her protectively for a moment, half expecting Marcus to follow her. He did not. She collapsed onto the bed that had been provided for the nanny they had never employed, her anger dying once more into despair, and wept as if her heart would break.

If the first five years of the war had dragged by interminably the last months seemed like a lifetime. Everyone had assumed that once a successful invasion had been launched in France, the Third Reich and its allies would collapse. France had been liberated, it was true, but as Christmas approached things dragged on with the boys still in uniform, the Japanese fighting for their lives and their prisoners as far from being freed as ever.

At the beginning of December the Home Guard were stood down in a grand Final Parade, when two hundred out of the two hundred and sixty-four members presented themselves for a final march through Hillsbridge. ‘We shall be forming an Old Comrades Association,' Ralph told Amy after she had watched, moist-eyed. ‘It's important that we keep all the old ties intact when things get back to normal.'

One family, however, approached Christmas in a happy mood. Margaret and Harry had set the wheels in motion to formally adopt Marie and for the first time since she had grown to love the little girl, Margaret felt aglow of security and happiness as she pinned up the paper chains Marie had glued together and wrapped parcels in sheets of wrapping paper she had saved from last year and carefully ironed to remove the creases.

Thankfully, Marie seemed to have recovered from her ordeal very well. She had settled back into the bedroom she had once shared with Elaine with remarkably little fuss and though she had become a little tearful when the Christmas decorations came out and she saw the squashed trimmings she and Elaine had made the previous year, Margaret never once heard her cry for her mother.

In a way, Margaret supposed, it was as if she had lost her at the beginning of the war when they had been evacuated; the brief reappearance of Mrs Cooper had been a little like a dream to the child whose roots now seemed to be firmly entrenched in Hillsbridge.

As always the Hall clan gathered at Greenslade Terrace for tea on Christmas Day, though for the first time ever Charlotte had been persuaded not to cook her own Christmas dinner but to go instead to Margaret and Harry's. Theirs had been only one of a number of invitations, which she had turned down for various reasons.

Jack and Stella had asked her to stay with them at Minehead over the holiday but she had not wanted to go so far away from the rest of the family even though they had all thought the change would do her good; Dolly's house was too far for her to walk back in the afternoon in time to prepare the family tea she was determined to put on as usual, since Victor had no transport except for his trusty bicycle; and she could not face the thought of waiting until the evening for her main meal as she would have had to do if she had gone to Amy's. So, instead, she accepted the invitation to spend the first part of the day with Harry and Margaret, who were also entertaining Margaret's mother, Gussie. The two women had never been close, in spite of their relationship by marriage, but since they were both now widowed they formed a slightly awkward alliance, sitting together on the front room settee to chat whilst Margaret prepared lunch, sipping the sweet sherry that Harry poured for them and taking it in turns to help Marie crochet with the brightly coloured oddments of cotton which Father Christmas had left for her in her stocking.

Lunch and the ritual of listening to the King's Speech over, it was time for Charlotte to go home and prepare for her guests. The plan had been for Gussie, Margaret and Harry to spend the remainder of the day at Margaret's house, but by this time Charlotte and Gussie were getting along so well that she and the others were readily persuaded to join the gathering at Greenslade Terrace.

There was method in Charlotte's madness. She wanted the house to be as full as was humanly possible in order to help her through this first Christmas without James. That morning, waking for the first time to find herself quite alone in the house on Christmas morning, she had felt more lonely and vulnerable than ever before, even in the early days after James's death, and the carols that were being played when she tuned in on her wireless and the shrieks of children along the Ranks as they showed off their presents to one another only served to heighten the feeling of isolation. She had wept quietly over her cup of morning tea, remembering the days when her own house had been full of love and laughter, impatient with her own self-pity, yet quite unable to stop the tears.

The loneliness had ebbed a little in the warmth and companionship at Margaret's house but once back in Greenslade Terrace it returned once more, in spite of the arrival of Dolly and Victor with Noel, whose birthday it was, and who was still as boisterous as if he were eight instead of eighteen, Jim, Sarah and May with May's two little terrors and the Porter contingent. No matter how many of them there were in the house, they could not fill the gap left by dear quiet James; though he had seldom contributed more than a word or two to the proceedings his absence was a raw wound, a void in Charlotte's heart which she knew would never be filled. And there were other gaps, too – Alec, Fred and Bob, and Huw and Barbara, besides Jack and Stella and Ted and Rosa whose absence, though customary now, was still a cause for regret.

‘If they were all here we'd never get into the house!' Charlotte thought with a wry smile as she sliced Christmas cake, made from the special wartime recipe, but that did not stop her from thinking how wonderful it would be to have all her family under one roof.

Ah well, perhaps next year …

Perhaps, by next year the war would be over and all the wanderers returned at least, safe and well, please God …

Charlotte, though once a staunch chapel-goer, was not a woman who often prayed. But she prayed now, silently and fervently, that soon this terrible ever-lasting war would end and they would all be together again.

The end came haltingly, not with one great final moment of glory, but in a series of death-throes for Hitler's Germany and the regime which had threatened the whole of the civilised world.

For a week before the end finally came the wireless was predicting victory, but the whole country was too war-weary and worn down to jump for joy as it had at the end of the Great War. The pictures of Mussolini and his mistress hanging upside down on a Milan lampbracket after being shot by Communist partisans caused a mild stir when they appeared in the newspapers and Charlotte, amongst others, branded the display of the mistress's voluminous undergarments as disgusting. But since Italy had been out of the war now for almost two years it was not an event of any great significance.

Much more heartening was the news, two days later, that Hitler and Eva Braun, whom he had married the previous day, had killed themselves in Hitler's bunker and that their bodies had been burnt in the yard outside. But still the end did not come for there was a new name to be reckoned with – one which few people had heard before – Admiral Doenitz. Although he made an attempt to end the war on the western front whilst continuing the fight against the Russians, this proposal was rejected and so for more confusing days the news remained inconclusive.

‘I don't know, they seem to be enjoying themselves!' Stanley Bristow remarked in the bar of the Miners Arms. ‘Would'st think they'd be only too pleased to end it, wouldn't'ee? But no. They've still got to hang on to their little bit of power.'

It was a sentiment echoed wholeheartedly by the other men.

‘I'm going to tell'ee some'ut,' Stanley went on. ‘I blame Churchill meself. He's a warmonger, al'us was.'

There was a moment's shocked silence. To criticise Winnie out loud was to commit a heresy of the worst kind. But privately many of them agreed. All very well to have a leader of Winnie's stature to lead them into battle. Now all any of them wanted was a bit of peace.

‘T'wouldn't surprise me if Atlee don't get in next time,' Walter Brixey said. ‘One thing's for sure – I shall be voting for'im.'

The others nodded. But that was no ‘turn up for the books', as Walter might have phrased it. Hillsbridge miners were Labour to a man and had been from the moment the party had risen from obscurity.

On the evening of 7th May, Londoners at least decided they had waited long enough. With the announcement of Victory in England imminent, thousands converged on the West End and the sky which had once been lit up by the Blitz glowed red for victory as bonfires blazed throughout the capital, rockets streaked into the sky and a pile of straw filled with thunder-flashes salvaged from some military dump cracked and spurted darts of flame. But though London might have gone mad with uncontrollable joy, the more conservative Hillsbridge waited for the official announcement before joining in the celebrations.

It came at 3 p.m. the following day.

Charlotte heard it in Peggy Yelling's kitchen where they and Colwyn, who had abandoned work for the day and shut up the shed where he carried on his boot-mending business, were gathered around Peggy's wireless set. As the stentorian voice boomed out above the crackling air waves there was a hush in the kitchen, broken only by the fall of the coals in Peggy's fire.

‘Yesterday morning at 2.41, at General Eisenhower's Headquarters, General Jodl, representative of the German High Command and of Grand Admiral Doenitz, designated head of the German State, signed an act of unconditional surrender of all German land, sea and air forces in Europe to the Allied Expeditionary Force and simultaneously to the Soviet High Command.'

‘What's he say?' Colwyn, who had been slightly deafened in the trenches in the Great War, enquired, and the others shushed him to silence, straining to hear every word. Only as it came to an end with the stirring words: ‘Advance Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God Save the King!' did they break into uninhibited cheers.

‘It's over, Lotty! It's over!'

‘Oh Peg, thank the Lord!'

‘It's over! Colwyn, see if there's a drop of sherry left over from Christmas in the sideboard. I'm sure we didn't finish it all. This calls for a celebration if anything does!'

The sherry was found, the glasses carefully dusted out and they were drinking a toast to victory when there was a knock on the door, which was then immediately opened before Peg could reach it.

‘Have you heard the news? Were you listening to the wireless?' It was Molly Clements, Walter's wife. She was invited in and another glass dusted out and filled.

‘Oh, it's lovely! It's over – it's over!'

‘I've still got the Jubilee bunting in the cupboard under the stairs. We ought to put it out.'

‘They're selling bunting down at the Co-op too – they took it off the rations as long as it's red, white and blue!'

‘Well, whatever colours would we want, I'd like to know!'

‘We must have a bit of a “do”. I've got a tin of salmon and some evaporated milk.'

‘I've got a couple of bottles of fruit.'

‘And a blancmange.'

‘Oh, thank the Lord it's over! I can't believe it, really I can't!'

Warmed by the sherry they caught one another's waists and began to dance so that the Yelling cat, Fluffy, whose tail was inadvertently trodden on, ran yowling out of the house and still they laughed, too delighted to care about anything but that at last, at last, there would be no more air raids or clothing coupons, no more blackout, no more goodbyes to loved ones off to fight a war from which they might never return.

‘Oh, give me land, lots of land, and a starry sky above. Don't fence me in!' Peggy sang loudly and tunelessly, and the others joined in.

After six long years it was freedom, wonderful freedom. For the moment all cares were forgotten and it seemed that nothing else mattered.

Barbara listened to the broadcast alone on the small modern wireless set in her room with Hope crawling around her feet playing with a wooden duck-on-wheels. She immediately went in search of her mother-in-law, but Lady Spindler as always refused to be excited by the news.

‘We've known it was coming. Didn't they celebrate it in London last night?'

‘Yes, but it's still wonderful news that it's official.'

‘Yes, dear, it is,' Lady Erica said and her emotionless calm made Barbara ache for the spontaneity of her own family.

A few minutes later her unspoken wish was realised when Maureen, unable to restrain her excitement, telephoned.

‘Isn't it great? Isn't it super-whizz-cracko?'

‘Yes. Yes, it is! Oh Maureen, I'm so glad you rang! My mother-in-law is taking it so calmly I could hit her!'

‘Oh Babs, I wish you were here! I do miss you. And you know what it means, don't you? Huw will be able to come home if he wants to!'

‘Oh yes!'

Huw. Her heart leaped at the thought. It seemed so long since she had seen him now. Shortly after their last parting he had been transferred to the north of Scotland, flying Beaufighters over the North Sea and the Norwegian coastal areas. They had corresponded regularly, long loving letters, but the arrival of each letter, longed for though it was, only increased her restlessness and the deeply felt yearning. But though Maureen's words started that leap of joy, she knew that the end of the war would make no difference at least to their separation. Huw would not be among those to come home. He had always intended to make the RAF his career. And besides, with things as they were …