Women on the Home Front (136 page)

Ever since that first meeting his lecherous intentions towards Su were plain for all to see, but now he gawped at her with interest too. She tried to ignore his suggestive tone. The jokes she didn’t understand but sometimes Enid looked at her with pity when it was time for her to leave. ‘Take no notice, love, it’s the beer talking.’

When Enid was around it was easier to dodge his hands, but once she’d gone it was better just to stay close to the side of the stall. Thursday, Friday and Saturday mornings they were busy. That was when workers got their wages and came to buy their supplies.

The beginning of the week was worst. Levi would prowl behind her when she was stocktaking and dusting, far too close for comfort. He had not laid a finger on her yet but she sensed the time was coming and she desperately needed to distract him. She was not used to working alone with a man. In Crete before the war, women in villages were treated with respect and were never left alone in a room, even with their own father or brother, for fear of losing their reputation. An unmarried girl wore a headscarf to cover her beauty from display, and public appearances were kept to festivals and church. In towns it was different, and the war had changed everything. She’d even taken to wearing
trousers while tending wounded soldiers, living in hill camps with partisans who honoured their womenfolk by ignoring them. When they were captured and transported over to the mainland, she was imprisoned in a women’s labour camp, cooped up like cattle, working the land in terrible weather. All hope left her of ever surviving the hardship and starvation, but somehow she had done.

No use looking in a mirror to see the fairness of her youth. Her features had long shrunk to sharp bones on a craggy frame-starvation and the wind had seen to that. Yet Freddie and his soldiers had taken pity on her friends in Athens, picked her out, given her enough food and shelter to restore some bloom. There was never any danger of assault when Freddie was her escort with his Military Police red cap.

Levi was no gentleman, though, and she was not going to stand for any nonsense. There had been too many shameful incidents with guards in the camp. She knew how to defend herself now.

‘Can I go look round stalls? I need to find food for the big dinner,’ she shouted. ‘It is very quiet. No customers to bother you.’ She didn’t wait for an answer as she sped out of sight to the safety of the vegetable stall. There were plenty of stalls but little to buy that interested her, and she was not speaking to Su since last night.

‘What shall we cook?’ she had asked, but Su had shrugged her shoulders. ‘You said you cook for Tommy soldiers in canteen?’ Ana pressed.

‘Ah yes, with Chindhe ladies of the Women’s Auxiliary
Service when we march back into Burma. I follow them. I wash and serve and tidy but no cook. I had to do servant jobs. We all muck in for poor boys who worship us from afar. That is where I met Mister Stan.’

‘I don’t want to know where you met your blessed Mister Stan this and Mister Stan that…’

‘And you go on like a record on a gramophone, Freddie this and Freddie that. He only had you because he thought me dead. I am number one wife whatever Daw Esme say.’

‘We’re nobody’s wife,’ Ana screamed in frustration. ‘But we keep tongues under hat. That is what Kiría Esme say or we’ll be sent home. I no make big dinner all alone.’

‘I am not a good cook. Auntie Betty had a boy to do all that, but I can make
lepet
, nice juicy pickle and pretty flowers for table. I will be your helper.’

That was when Ana realised she’d be on her own. Susan had found a post in a nursery school so she must pay for the extra food and help in the kitchen. The meal must be cheap and simple and not use up too many coupons.

Grimbleton seemed to live on a diet of flour-and-water soups, stodgy pastry, soulless bread and sausages that tasted of sawdust. No wonder the herbal stall was so popular. Customers queued for liver pills, indigestion tablets, laxatives and flatulence potions. There were packets of dehydrated vegetables and eggs in a powder. There were shelves of canned meat and tinned fruit, jars of pickles. Where was the life in the food? These provisions were tasteless to her, cooked without love.

In Crete they could live on mountain greens,
horta
and wild spinach, pick living fruits and nuts from their own trees. They did not pour yellow custard over green shoots and call it salad.

The Tommies had turned their noses up at olive oil, at first saying it was fit only for lamp oil but some of them grew to love the delicate flavours of vegetables grilled with oil and lemon juice. Oh, just to pick a lemon from a tree!

Before the war came the Cretan market stalls were full of raisins and fresh fish, the scent of roasting coffee, sacks of beans and rice, barrels of feta cheese and rounds of hard cheese from their sheep, thyme honey, kegs of raki, blocks of chocolate, Turkish delights, halva and fruit syrups and every colour of olive oil; before the tanks came and flattened the olive groves and there was not a walnut or raisin to be had.

If only there were
chios
here, shaped like eggs with their soft flesh,
kalimata
, black and purple bittersweet, earthy old Cretan wine, olives marinated in oil and vinegar dressing.

The taste of the olive was a taste as old as the world itself, a taste of life and love and home. How she missed the silkiness of its texture on her tongue.

How quickly you could learn to exist on boiled porridge dotted with snails and mountain greens, rough corn breads and goat’s-milk yoghurt thinned out with stream water. The enemy stole everything from their cellars, their sheep and goats, chickens, their fruit and olive harvest and their honeycombs. They were left destitute. Hunger was a terrible thing. It changed people into animals, scavenging, stealing.

In the labour camps it was worse: in the harsh winters living off soup made from stolen greens and roots and the bones of anything they might snare for the pot. Sometimes Ana lay on her bunk, dreaming of the day when her belly would be full of oil and wine and cheese,
dakos
and sharp spicy sausages.

Cretan food was full of colour and guts and strong smells. There were always garlands of garlic and mountain tea, onions and dried herbs hanging from the kitchen rafters. The family had lived from their garden, the mountains, from hives and orchards. There was kid and lamb for festivals and a harvest from the shore.

The Papadakis were just village folk, her father worked leather. They were proud and wanted for nothing in the stone white house close to the church. She had gone to Canea to help in the Red Cross station until it was overrun, then escaped into the high hills above the port. She was lucky to be alive when so many of her school friends were dead. Sometimes she dreamed that Eleni was chasing after her into the fields. When she turned to wait for her, she vanished and Ana woke with tears down her face.

Ana didn’t know whether any of her relatives survived when the village was razed to the ground in reprisal after an ambush in the hills on that terrible day when Eleni died. They were scattered like seeds into the wild wind.

There was no point going back. The country was at war with itself now. She dare not write for fear of more bad news. Here she could pretend all was well now the
war was over. This was where Dina must grow up, in this strange town in this foreign country amongst the people who had taken them in. It was the honourable thing to do.

All this daydreaming would not put a meal on the table, she sighed, knowing she must go back to the stall. Maria would help her out with food if stuck, but she was already beholden to their new friend. Why should a guest provide her own dinner?

Getting out of Division Street each Sunday afternoon was the treat they most looked forward to. Maria was always so full of life and energy, scurrying round the tiny flat that she kept like a palace. She hardly stopped to draw breath, with her two jobs and her husband, Marco, making such slow progress. Ana sensed that if Maria stopped for a second she’d collapse and sink down with exhaustion. Keeping busy was how she dealt with her pain.

Everyone was keeping busy after this war, queuing, cleaning, tidying up the bomb sites, making the best of very little. The Winstanley women never stopped, and if she was married to Levi she’d not stop until she’d run a mile from him.

For a moment she could feel just a flicker of sympathy for the sharp little wife who must share his bed. There was a bitter taste to the two of them and Levi’s eyes were hungry for something sweeter.

Ana’s own sadness made her feel lethargic. It was an effort to eat, to sleep in the middle of the night, to get up in the morning, and now she had a big meal to prepare so Su must help with the shopping. Su had the
money for extras but how to manage a meat ration for eight people?

As she scoured the butchers’ stalls for inspiration she thought of pig for
souvláki
chunks skewered on knitting needles and marinated in lemon, herbs and oils. That was out, for a start, and they could only get meat from the counter where they were all registered. Perhaps some beef or lamb for
stifado
, cooked slowly and eked out with vegetables, but beef for eight? Impossible.

Lily said Walt couldn’t spare any coupons because his mother was old. Ivy refused to give a single coupon because Neville needed extra rations, and Levi thought the idea of a meal made from ‘foreign muck’ a big joke. When she’d asked him to order some olive oil he refused, saying she must use dripping like everyone else. Then he’d laughed and said he might get hold of some if she made it worth his while.

‘I will pay good price,’ she smiled, but he just winked.

‘What I’m after don’t cost money, love, just a little time,’ he said, pointing to the cubbyhole and she fled, blushing. If his mother found out that his wandering hands were also in the till perhaps
that
would cool his passion.

With a heavy heart, Lily watched Levi ogling Ana from the cubbyhole that served as an office. Business was quiet and they didn’t need three staff on duty.

Taking the Greek girl down to Winstanley Health and Herbs to work was not such a good idea. It was nearly Christmas and shoppers were too busy trying to eke out their ration coupons to want to bother with
pills and potions. Their rush time would come after New Year, when the winter gloom set in proper: a time for tonics and pick-up remedies to prepare, stocktaking and weighing those who wanted to lose their winter excess baggage.

They kept all the more expensive items and spare stock in the back cubbyhole, and when Ana brushed past Levi to reach up for the boxes he would lean back on his stool to feel the brush of her skirt. There was often the smell of liquor on his breath in the afternoons these days, but should she say anything to him?

She sighed. If Ivy got even a sniff of his inclinations, never mind his breath, she’d banish the girls from the house, Christmas or not.

Levi was becoming a worry. Ever since Ana and Susan arrived he seemed to think Freddie’s lady friends were his personal harem. When she was on guard there was no bother, but out of eyeshot she guessed he was up to his old tricks. A pass was a pass in any language. It was up to her to put a stop to it and sharp.

‘If Levi is bothering you, I’ll have a word,’ Lily offered.

Ana shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. ‘It is nothing. Men are worse during the war. In my country a woman not work with a man alone,’ she said. ‘A single girl might be a slave to the kitchen and the fields but she has respect. All we have is a good name and I have bad name now. We keep headscarf over our face. War has changed everything. Now there is flesh everywhere and men are tempted.’

Sometimes when Ana talked a shutter came over her eyes like a veil, her eyes would flutter and the subject
was changed. Ana was suffering in ways Lily could only imagine. She was learning to respect this withdrawal into silence. ‘Look at me, just skin and bone. Who would want to look at such a face?’

There might be silver threads in her hair but her eyes still burned brightly and Lily could see how Freddie would have been attracted to her fierce spirit, her courage and kindness.

‘Lily, what shall I cook with no meat ration? This is big worry now.’ They had scoured the food stalls for ideas for that special supper, something that might remind them of warmer climates and better times.

It was the knitting patterns on the wool stall that did the trick: a picture of a matinée coat with a fluffy bunny embroidered on it. Lily suddenly remembered Allotment Billy, who’d kept them in rabbit meat all through the war. Rabbits were cheap and plentiful. The flesh was sweet and tasted like chicken if cooked slowly, and he might have an onion or two to spare if they explained their dilemma. Allotment Billy was an old pal of her father’s: another survivor of the Grimbleton Pals Brigade.

‘There’s always fresh rabbit,’ she offered in desperation.

‘You are angel from heaven, you save bacon. I can do plenty with rabbit and herbs.’ Ana flung her arms around her in gratitude.

No one had mentioned anything about herbs. Herbs were going to be a different challenge altogether, but she’d not be defeated now. If Winstanleys couldn’t rustle up a spice or two it’d be a poor do!

Mother was a plain cook and didn’t bother to flavour
food with anything other than white pepper and salt and sometimes stalks of parsley. There was Oxo cubes, of course, but Lily preferred to drink them like tea. The drink was harsh and salty, and warmed her through on cold days.

No one touched garlic except as a medicine, but if she threw in enough garlic salt and pearls from the stall perhaps no one would notice. It was the nearest they could offer in the way of exotic.

There were bay trees growing like ornaments in the Green Lane gardens. Perhaps Su could beg a few leaves when she came home with Dr Unsworth’s daughter and family from the parish church. Her being Church and not Chapel was causing quite a stir.

If the worst came to the worst they could scour the local park gardens for the last stalks of thyme, but the ground was under a foot of snow.