The Lost Soldier (49 page)
Authors: Costeloe Diney
“Not too badly,” Nick said. “In some ways I’d have preferred to have got a bit more done before I moved, but Bradley needed the access to the building site. Still,” he smiled, “I love the house and I’m glad to be living in it.” He thought for a moment and then said, “Do you think Rachel might live in it with me, one day?” So far her independence had demanded that she keep her own flat.
Rose laughed. “Don’t ask me,” she said, “ask her!”
“Oh, I will,” Nick assured her with a grin.
When Rachel got back to the house almost an hour later she was flushed and excited. She had spoken to all the families who were connected with a memorial tree and had arranged proper interviews with the few whom she had only met for the first time that day.
She flopped down in an armchair and said, “It went well, don’t you think? The Ashgrove is a real memorial again, now.” She smiled at the two favourite people in her life and went on, “And I’ve more news, two letters came today,” she said. “Perfect timing!”
“Who from,” asked Rose.
“One’s from the convent at St Croix. You know I wrote to them, Gran, about Sarah? Listen I’ll read it to you.” Rachel extracted a letter from her bag and read,
7th March 2002
Dear Miss Elliott,
Thank you for you letter of enquiry about Sister Marie-Pierre. I am sorry to take so long to respond. She joined our Sisters in 1917. In 1938 she was elected Reverend Mother. During the Nazi occupation in the war, she sheltered many Jewish children in the convent and in 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a camp. She was never heard of again and we can only imagine that she died continuing the Lord’s work there.
Our numbers are small now, but we too continue in the Lord’s work, looking after the elderly.
With prayers and blessings
Marie-Therese
Mother Superior
Convent of Our Lady of Mercies
Rachel looked up at them, bright-eyed. “So, you see, Sarah was an unsung heroine in both wars,” she said. “She must have been very brave don’t you think? Now that I know the end of it, I can write her story. If he knew what she had achieved, I don’t think Sir George would have been disappointed in her after all, do you?”
“No,” agreed her grandmother. “I think he’d have been proud of her.” She smiled at the eager Rachel and asked, “Who was the other letter from, then? You’re obviously very pleased with that one as well.”
Rachel beamed at her and produced the other letter saying, “This is the other one, and it affects us more. You know I told you I wrote to the Belshires’ Regimental Archivist about Tom? Well, his reply came today as well. Listen. ”
10th March 2002
Dear Miss Elliott,
Thank you for your letter of the 25th February. I was very interested in what you had to tell us about Private 8523241 Thomas Carter of the 1st Battalion, Belshires. Of course, we knew of his execution in 1916 from our regimental records. In view of the move to obtain pardons for men shot for desertion and cowardice during the 1914–18 war, and in line with other regiments, we have already restored his name to the Regimental Roll of Honour. We are delighted to hear that he will also be commemorated in the Charlton Ambrose War Memorial Ashgrove, and that his daughter, Mrs Rose Carson will be at that ceremony.
Yours sincerely
David Hobart
Curator of the Belshire Regimental Archives
“So,” Rachel said, “all we need now is a pardon from the government.” Smiling at the surprise on the faces of Nick and her grandmother, she went on, “There’s a campaign already up and running, called the Shot at Dawn campaign, which is working for just that, and I’m going to join it. That’s what we need, a pardon for Tom and all the others like him.” And looking at the determination in her face, Nick knew she would never give up until she had got it.
T
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Gritty, heartrending and unputdownable – the story of two sisters sent first to an English, then an Australian orphanage in the aftermath of World War 2.
Rita and Rosie Stevens are only nine and five years old when their widowed mother marries a violent bully called Jimmy Randall and has a baby boy by him. Under pressure from her new husband, she is persuaded to send the girls to an orphanage – not knowing that the papers she has signed will entitle them to do what they like with the children.
And it is not long before the powers that be decide to send a consignment of orphans to their sister institution in Australia. Among them – without their family’s consent or knowledge – are Rita and Rosie, the throwaway children.
Belcaster 1948
Raised voices again. Rita could hear them through the floor; her mother’s, a querulous wail, the man’s an angry roar. For a moment she lay still in bed, listening. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was clear that they were arguing.
Rosie, her sister, was peacefully asleep at the other end of their shared single bed, the stray cat, Felix, curled against her. She never seemed to wake up however loud the shouting downstairs. Rita slid out from under the bedclothes and tip-toeing across the room, crept out onto the landing. Limpid green light from a street lamp shone through the small landing window, lighting the narrow staircase. A shaft of dull yellow light, shining through the half-open kitchen door, lit the cracked brown lino and cast shadows in the hall. The voices came from the kitchen, still loud, still angry. Rita crouched against the banister, her face pressed to its bars. From here she could actually hear some of what was being said.
‘…my children from me.’ Her mother’s voice.
‘…another man’s brats!’ His voice.
Rita shivered at the sound of his voice. Uncle Jimmy, Mum’s new friend. Then Mum began to cry, a pitiful wailing that echoed into the hall.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ His voice again. ‘Cut the caterwauling, woman… or I’ll leave right now.’
A chair crashed over, and the shaft of light broadened as the kitchen door was pushed wider. Rita dived back into her bedroom, making the door creak loudly. She leaped into bed, kicking a protesting Felix off the covers and pulling the sheet up over her head. She tried to calm her breathing so that it matched Rosie’s, the peaceful breathing of undisturbed sleep, but her heart was pounding, the blood hammering in her ears as she heard the heavy tread of feet on the stairs.
He
was coming up.
‘Rita! Was you out of bed?’ His voice was harsh. He had not put on the landing light, and as he reached the top stair, Felix materialized at his feet, almost tripping him over.
‘Bloody cat!’ snarled the man, aiming a kick at him, but Felix had already streaked downstairs.
Jimmy Randall paused on the landing, listening. All was quiet in the girls’ room. Softly he crossed to the half-open door and peered in, but it was too dark to see anything, and all he could hear was the steady breathing of two little girls asleep.
Must have been the damned cat, he thought. Don’t know why Mavis gives it houseroom, dirty stray. If it was my house…
It wasn’t. Not yet. But it would be, Jimmy was determined about that. A neat little house in Ship Street, a terrace of other neat little houses; well, not so neat most of them, unrepaired from the bombing, cracked windows, scarred paintwork, rubble in the tiny gardens, but basically sound enough. Jimmy wouldn’t mind doing a bit of repair work himself, provided the house was his at the end of it. His and Mavis’s, but not full of squalling kids. All he had to do was get his name on the rent book, then he’d be laughing.
Rita heard him close the door but lay quite still in case it was a trick, in case he was standing silently inside the room waiting to catch her out. It was a full two minutes before she allowed herself to open her eyes into the darkness of her room. She could see nothing. Straining her ears she heard his voice again, not so loud this time, and definitely downstairs.
For a while she lay in the dark, thinking about Uncle Jimmy. He had come into their lives about two months ago, visiting occasionally at first, smiling a lot, once bringing chocolate. It was for Mum really, but she’d let Rita and Rosie have one piece every day until it had gone. But Rita was afraid of him all the same. He had a loud voice and got cross easily.
Rita wasn’t used to having a man in her life. She hardly remembered her daddy. Mum said he had gone to the war and hadn’t come home. He had gone before Rosie was even born, fighting the Germans. Rita knew he had been in the air force, flying in a plane high over Germany, and that one night his plane hadn’t come back. There was a picture of her daddy in a silver-coloured frame on the kitchen shelf. He was wearing his uniform and smiling. Wherever you moved in the kitchen, his eyes followed you, so that wherever she sat, Rita knew he was smiling at her. She loved his face, his smile making crinkles round his eyes and his curly fair hair half-covered with his air force cap. Rosie had the same sort of hair, thick and fair, curling round her face. Rita’s own hair was like Mum’s, dark, thin and straight, and she always wished she had hair like Rosie’s… and Daddy’s.
Then, a while ago, the photo had disappeared.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ Rita demanded one morning when she sat down and noticed the photo had gone. ‘Where’s Daddy gone?’
Without looking up Mum said, ‘Oh, I took him down for now. I need to clean the frame.’
Daddy had not reappeared on the shelf, and Rita missed him. ‘I could clean the frame,’ she offered. ‘I’m good at cleaning.’
‘It’s being mended,’ explained her mother. ‘When I came to clean it I found it was broken, so I’ve took it to be mended.’
Rita didn’t ask again, but she somehow knew that the photo wasn’t coming back and that this had something to do with the arrival of Jimmy Randall.
Jimmy Randall had changed everything. He was often there when Rita and Rosie came home from school. Mum used to meet them at the school gate, but since Uncle Jimmy, as they were to call him, had become part of their lives, Mum was too busy, and it became Rita’s job to bring Rosie home safely.
‘You must hold her hand all the way,’ Mum said, ‘and come straight home.’
So every school day, except Thursdays, Rita took Rosie’s hand and crossing the street very carefully, walked them home; almost every day when they got home, Uncle Jimmy would already be in the kitchen with Mum.
On Thursdays Gran met them at the school gate and gave them tea. Sometimes she let them play in the park they passed on the way.
‘I don’t like Uncle Jimmy,’ Rita confided to her grandmother one Thursday when they were having tea. ‘He shouts. I dropped a cup yesterday, and he sent me upstairs with no tea. It didn’t even break, Gran. It’s not fair.’
Gran gave her a hug. ‘Never mind, love,’ she said. ‘Perhaps he won’t be around for long.’ But Lily didn’t like him either.
Lily Sharples was Mavis’s mother. A widow herself, she still lived in the small brick house in Hampton Road, where she had lived all her married life. It had been spared by the Luftwaffe, when others in the vicinity had been flattened, and despite further raids, Lily remained, stubbornly, in occupation.
‘It’s been my home for nigh on thirty years,’ Lily told Mavis, ‘and when I leave it’ll be feet first.’
Lily was worried about Mavis and her family. Mavis had been on her own for five years now, and Lily wasn’t surprised that she had found herself another man, it was only natural, and anyway, the girls needed a father. It was just that she wished that the man wasn’t Jimmy Randall. She could see why Rita was afraid of him. He wasn’t used to children and his temper was short. On one occasion, Lily had seen him slap Rita across the face. The child had run to her, burying her burning cheek against her grandmother, and, holding her close, Lily turned on him, saying, ‘There was no need for that!’