The War Widows (3 page)

Money was always a sensitive topic between them. His wage was small but steady, and her family had two wages and a war pension and shares from Esme’s connection with Crompton’s Biscuits. Better not to go down that route again.

‘It must be hard,’ was all she could say. ‘Did you go and see that house for rent in Forsyth Lane, the old cottage by itself? It’ll need doing up. But it’s worth a second glimpse, don’t you think?’

‘Oh, no, love, Mam says they’re built over wells, and damp, and it’s a bus ride away from Bowker’s Row. It’s much too far for her to travel.’

‘You didn’t even look, then?’ Lily felt the flush in her cheeks. When would he do anything off his own bat? ‘That’s a pity because I thought it was ideal for us, half in the country but on a bus route. It was you who wanted to have fresh air and a nice view.’

‘Perhaps we should try for something bigger and bring her with us? She gets mithered when I’m not there.’

And I shall go mad if Elsie Platt is on the other side
of the wall listening to our sweet talking, Lily thought, but swallowed her words back just in time. ‘It says in my
Woman’s Own
that a young married couple should be alone for a while to set up their home.’

‘What about your Levi and his wife? They live with you.’

‘That’s different…’

‘No it’s not.’

‘It’s just that Waverley House has five bedrooms. They have their privacy and a baby.’

‘So, we’ll be having babies and Mother can look after them for us so you can do all your gallivanting.’

‘I’m not gallivanting, just serving my community. I’d hardly call choir practice and Brownies gadding about!’

‘There you go on your high horse over nothing. It was just a suggestion,’ he barked.

‘I’d like us to start off together on our own,’ she repeated, sipping her Bovril and noticing his shirt collar was frayed at the edge and needed turning round.

‘Then we’ll have to keep on looking until we find something that suits us both.’ His voice was hard and his lips were pursed up just like Elsie’s whenever they arrived back late.

Lily looked at her watch. There was still no sign of Levi. ‘I’d better get back. Are you coming for your tea tonight? We can look in the
Gazette
to see if there’re any more flats to rent, then borrow the van and go and view them together.’

‘If you can give us a lift back home first and get my mam’s washing. Now you’ve got that new-fangled
machine, she was wondering if you’d lend us a hand and throw a few things in for us.’

Anything to oblige, Lily mused. Word travelled fast and Elsie was not one to miss a trick. Would she expect the washing to come back ironed as well?

Oh, don’t be mean, she sighed. Walt’s mother was widowed young in the Great War, her son is the sun, moon and stars to her. The thought of him leaving her clutches is painful and threatening. Be grateful you can help them out.

They were just about to part company when Sam Parker from the upstairs office suddenly appeared round the corner, waving to Lily. ‘There you are…I’ve just had a phone call from Levi. Can you shut the stall and come home?’

A flush of panic rushed through Lily’s body. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I don’t know, he didn’t say, but he said you were to get back to Waverley at once.’

Her mind was racing with possibilities. Had Mother been taken ill? Had the washing machine blown up and left them homeless, or was it a pleasant surprise? Was it the one surprise they were all waiting for? Freddie was back at last! That was it. He had docked and turned up without telling them, sprung a big surprise on everybody. That was just like her young brother, giving them no time to make preparations. They ought to have bunting fluttering over the street, and flags flying and lots of balloons if there were any in the shops.

‘Freddie’s come home. Oh, Walt! He’s sprung one
on us, the devil. Mother’ll be beside herself. What wonderful news! I’ll call out Santini’s for a taxi.’

‘That’s a bit extravagant,’ he said. ‘Fred won’t be going anywhere fast.’

‘I haven’t got the van and I haven’t seen my brother for six years. I’m not missing a precious second of him.’

Ten minutes later she was riding through the town with a grin from ear to ear. Just wait until she saw that cheeky monkey. She’d be giving him an ear-bashing.

Suddenly the whole town looked brighter. They rose up the cobbled street to the top end where the Winstanley residence stood foursquare on its own.

It was at the point where the grime turned to greenery, the country met the town and houses were spreading out with gardens backing on to fields. Waverley House had four bay windows edged with cream bricks, a smart tiled porch and steps leading to a small path with gaps where the wrought-iron railings had stood before they went for salvage.

She paid the driver and turned to face her home. Only then did she notice that all the curtains were drawn tight.

Esme Winstanley watched the colour drain out of her daughter’s face when she saw the telegram in her lap.

‘No! No! Not our Freddie…The war’s over. I don’t believe it. They’ve made a mistake.’ Lily collapsed in a heap, sobbing, and Neville stared up at her, not old enough to understand that their world had just fallen apart.

‘I thought he’d come home to surprise us…I was so sure…I never thought it was bad news. The war’s over…’ she repeated.

‘Not in Palestine, it’s not. That’s why he was sent over there to quell the terrorists. You know what happened when they blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Things have got worse since then,’ said Levi, not looking at her.

‘Have they got the right name? It could be all a mistake. They get things wrong, don’t they, Levi? Look how they thought Arthur Mangall was dead and he turned up as right as ninepence.’ Lily turned to her
brother for comfort but he just stood there stunned, silent, shuffling while Ivy fussed over them, trying to be the ministering angel, putting a cup of tea in Lily’s hand.

‘I’ve put you some extra sugar in it,’ she smiled.

‘I hate sugar,’ Lily brushed it aside. ‘He never said it was dangerous, or am I the last to find out?’

‘You don’t tell your nearest and dearest you’re living on a minefield that could blow up any minute. I’m sure there’s a number to ring for more news and there might be something on the six o’clock Home Service.’ Levi turned to his mother for support but she could only shake her head. The news had not yet sunk in.

‘They don’t tell you anything on the news. We found that out in the war,’ Lil snapped. Her face was ashen. ‘It’s not fair.’

Whoever said life was fair? thought Esme, but she bit her tongue. The girl was not up to listening to home truths and she hadn’t the energy to move from the chair and reach over to her. It was as if someone had kicked all the stuffing out of her.

‘Another cup of tea, Mother?’ whispered Ivy, hovering like a wasp about to strike.

Esme shook her head, wiping her glasses on her apron, trying to suck the last ounce of information from the telegram itself.

Not much to go on but enough to flood her imagination with dreadful pictures. She peered around the sitting room for comfort, but all the familiar objects were drained of colour: the patterned Axminster carpet square faded by the sunlight in patches, the holes burned by Redvers and his cronies smoking cigarettes; the grease stain that 1001 wouldn’t shift; the one when Freddie sneaked engine parts in to repair and didn’t put down newspaper.

How she’d shrieked at him! ‘Take that dirty thing out of my best room!’ He was always getting into mischief. But never to see her handsome son again…Now she could look Polly Isherwood in the face, a mother who had lost both her sons on the Atlantic convoys. There were no words for what she must have gone through.

Never to hear him shouting through the door, ‘What’s for tea? I’m starving!’ Not to see his size elevens dirtying her sofa covers as he lounged over the armrests, listening to the wind-up gramophone, driving them mad with his jazz records. Never to ruffle her hand through his curls and clip his ear in jest. He knew just how to wind her up into an elastic ball.

She turned her face to the fireside but it was only lunchtime and no fire was lit. Rations were strict and they needed to save supplies for the winter. She glanced
at the ghosts smiling from the row of silver frames lining the top of the pianoforte: baby Travis, her firstborn in his broderie anglaise christening gown, who never made it to his first birthday; Levi and Lily sitting on the piano stool in sailor collars, trying not to wriggle and squirm.

Lily had a face on her like a wet weekend and Redvers said that portrait had gone all through the war in his breast pocket waiting to scare off any Hun who dared get too close. She was always the serious one of the three, too tall and lanky for a girl, with her donkey-brown hair, straight as a die which was a dickens to tie in rags to make ringlets. It was the boys who got the looks in their family.

She stared at Freddie’s picture in a tortoiseshell frame. Her son would smile forever, as young as the day they waved him off from the station; their precious Victory child born after the Great War, now sacrificed in biblical lands.

You shouldn’t have favourites, she scolded herself, but he had stolen her heart the moment he’d snuggled into her breast.

None of this, Constance Esme. Bestir yourself! There’s a lot to do. They must think about a burial service, speak to the minister, inform the newspaper of their sad loss. Happen it was better to be busy after a loss. Less time to think.

Curtains closed on to the street meant only one thing, and soon the neighbours would come knocking. She must make sure they got her name right for the obituary notice. She hated her first name and had
dumped it as soon as she left school in favour of Esme. Constance had always felt like a tight corset, while Esme was a softer free-flowing garment like the white gown she wore on the Votes for Women marches, before marriage and the Great War put paid to all that gadding about. A lifetime ago.

She stared at her wedding portrait. She was so pinched and laced up tight there was a look of agony and apprehension on her face. She needn’t have bothered, for Redvers Winstanley had been a thoughtful husband and a good lover.

Freddie had had those same blue eyes and thick lashes, wasted on a lad, but Lily had got her own pale face and brows, and identical scowl when under threat.

There in her son was Redvers’ cheeky grin, which had wooed her across a football pitch. There’d been such an uproar about her wearing a short divided skirt in public but Richard Crompton’s daughter was not one to be put off in those days by a bit of derring-do. Pity Lily, with her long legs, hadn’t got her own get-up-and-go…

Both her lads had that mop of curls. A wide grin and curls were a fatal combination with the ladies, she reckoned. Even little Neville was going to sprout a fine crop of dark curls.

It was a pity poor Lil’s fiancé, with his jug ears, had nothing to recommend him but height. They were both stay-at-home birds, not fly-by-nights. Perhaps they were well suited; neither would set the world on fire. He would run her ragged with that mother of his, and she
would be like a lost sock in the Acme, going round and round after them. From where Esme was sitting he looked a lazy lummock, but she could be wrong.

Redvers took life at thirty miles an hour round the bend, lived fast and died early. His loss was such a blow and left a gap no other man would fill in her life, but to lose a child went against nature; to lose two was more than she could bear.

She could see Lil and Levi were too stunned to take it all in. Ivy would do her best for her husband. That one knew where her bread was buttered. Sometimes Esme caught her eyeing up her china cabinet as if she was making an inventory of all her best pieces.

Ivy was a jumped-up factory girl who was put in Crompton’s office to help out and began to call herself a secretary. She had collared Levi almost off the troopship home. Now she did nothing but moan and groan how hard it was to rear a baby on starvation rations. The doctor said her insides were all mangled up and she must have no more babies. Neville was to be an only child.

What a sissy they made out of him, in his silk romper suits and smocked blouses! His hair was still in ringlets and needed a good cut, and Levi never put his foot down enough. It would all end in tears.

I don’t know what’s happened to this new world, Esme sighed. In her day the Almighty just dished out kids and that was that. He then took a fair few of them back again one way or another. She would have words with Him about that. With family planning they could pick and choose the size of their families but the country
was crying out for more babies now. Everything was topsy-turvy.

Lily was right. It wasn’t fair to go through all that bombing and shortages, worry and uncertainty, sacrifice and service. What a relief it had been when it was all over-and now this…

Crompton’s Biscuits had turned production into special orders. She had helped in their nursery and on the market stall, joined the WVS and Welfare Clinic. ‘Family First’ was the Winstanley motto.

The town had pulled together like a family: rich and poor, old and young, in one valiant effort against the enemy. Now the threat was over it was as if everyone was scuttling back into their burrows. Neighbours were becoming strangers again, scurrying away behind their net curtains, and the pews of Zion Chapel were emptying fast now the threat was over.

You shouldn’t deal with the Almighty like that, picking and choosing your moment when to worship or mow the lawn. It was a matter of trust. She didn’t understand what He was playing at, robbing her of half her family, ripping her heart with such pain, but He must have a grand plan, like those Turkish carpets the Reverend was on about last week.