Women on the Home Front (8 page)

The thin mousy-haired and obviously anxious girl, standing outside in her grey serge underground uniform immediately broke into nervous speech.

‘Please, miss, I'm Agnes and I'm ever so sorry. I was supposed to come yesterday only I didn't. It's about the room. Matron at the orphanage said that you had a room for me.'

Olive's heart sank. The girl looked so on edge, and so much more the kind of lodger she had expected and wanted than Dulcie, who had now taken her room.

‘I'm sorry,' she said with genuine regret, ‘but the room's already gone, I'm afraid. When you didn't come yesterday, I thought you didn't want it.'

Olive's words made Agnes feel as though a bucket of icy cold water had been thrown over her, drowning the hopes she had begun to build up and leaving her feeling as close to tears as she had done when Ted had found her on the stairs.

Poor girl, Olive thought, seeing the shocked despair on Agnes's face. Tears weren't very far away, Olive could tell.

‘Look, why don't you come in and have a cup of tea?' she offered kindly. ‘It's a warm evening and you'll have been working all day.'

‘Oh, no, you're very kind but I don't want to be a nuisance,' Agnes began, but before she could turn to walk away, Olive was reaching for her arm and drawing her inside, guiding her down the hallway and into the kitchen, where a girl of her own age, but much prettier than she, with her dark curls and cherry-red lips, was standing in front of the sink, drinking a cup of tea.

‘Tilly, this is Agnes who was supposed to come yesterday about the room. Agnes, this is my daughter Tilly,' Olive explained, adding, ‘I've told Agnes that I've already let the room, but she's going to have a cup of tea with us before she goes home.'

Tilly nodded and set about removing a clean cup and saucer from the cupboard and filling the kettle with some water to make a fresh pot of tea, setting it on the stove and then lighting the gas.

The girl who her mother had brought into the kitchen looked dreadfully upset, and so small and thin that Tilly immediately felt sorry for her.

‘I don't know what Matron is going to say to me,' Agnes told them both once she had been coaxed into a chair and a fresh cup of tea put in front of her. ‘She'll be ever so cross. I should have come yesterday, but all I really wanted was to be evacuated with them. You see, the orphanage is all I've got – the little ones and Matron and everyone – but like Matron says, they can't take me with them because really I shouldn't be there at all, me being seventeen.'

A tear rolled down her face and splashed onto her hand, followed by another.

‘Oh, I'm sorry, acting like this. It was just that I'd got my hopes up. And now I'd better go.' Agnes looked agitated and even more upset as she finished her tea and then stood up. ‘You've been ever so kind.'

She was trying to be brave but Olive could see how upset she was. There was nothing she could do, though. Dulcie was the kind who would make a first-class fuss if Olive tried to persuade her to give the room up, Olive knew.

She walked with Agnes to the front door. Then, just as she was about to open it, Tilly called urgently from the kitchen, ‘Mum, can I have a word? Now!'

Olive frowned. It was unlike Tilly to be forgetful of her manners, and not wait to say whatever it was she wanted to say until their visitor had gone.

Agnes was waiting for her to open the door. Feeling desperately sorry for her, Olive did so, watching as she walked down the garden path, her head down, no doubt to hide her tears.

‘Mum!' Tilly's voice was even more urgent now.

‘Yes, Tilly?'

‘I've been thinking. There's two beds in my room, and if Agnes doesn't mind sharing with me then we could double up.'

Olive could almost feel her heart swelling with love and pride. Her wonderful kind daughter had not been rude; her impatience had been caused by her desire to help another girl whom she had recognised was desperately in need.

‘Well—' she began.

‘Please, Mum,' Tilly pleaded. ‘She hasn't got anywhere else, and if she doesn't like sharing with me then at least she'll have somewhere until she finds another room.'

‘It won't be easy, Tilly,' Olive warned. ‘You've always been used to having your own room.'

‘I know, but I really want to, Mum. Can we?'

‘Very well. If you're sure,' Olive agreed.

‘I am sure.' Tilly flung her arms round her mother and kissed her before running to the front door and pulling it open.

Agnes had almost reached the end of Article Row when she heard the sound of someone running behind her. She stopped and turned round, surprised to see Tilly, her black curls dancing in the early evening sunshine.

‘Agnes,' Tilly called out breathlessly, ‘wait. I've got something to tell you.'

Silently Agnes waited.

‘I've spoken to my mother and, if you're in agreement – that is, if you want to – you can share my room. There's a spare bed, and it's a good size. I know it won't be the same as having your own room, but I thought that, well, for now, until you find somewhere better, it might do?'

Somewhere better than number 13 Article Row and Tilly and her mother? Could such a place exist? Agnes didn't think so.

‘You really mean it?' she asked, hardly daring to believe it. ‘You'd really share your room with me?'

‘Yes,' Tilly assured her, taking her arm and leading her back.

* * *

Half an hour later, after another cup of tea in number 13's kitchen, it was all arranged. Agnes would return to the orphanage to inform Matron that she was moving into Mrs Robbins' house.

Her heart flooding with joy and gratitude, Agnes thanked her saviours, and this time when she headed back down Article Row she held her head high, her tears replaced by a smile.

‘So you're doing it then? You're really going to go ahead and move out?'

Despite the fact that she could hear disbelief and censure in her brother's voice, Dulcie tossed her head and demanded, ‘Yes I am, and so what?'

They were in the cramped shabby living room of their home, empty for once apart from the two of them.

‘So what?' Rick repeated grimly. ‘Have you thought what this is going to do to Mum? We're a family, Dulcie, and in case you've forgotten there just happens to be a war about to start. That's a time when families should stick together.'

‘That's easy for you to say when you're leaving home to go and do six months' military training. Have you thought about what that's going to do to Mum?' she challenged him, determined to fight her own corner.

‘I don't have any choice. It's the Government that's said I've got to go,' Rick pointed out.

‘And I don't have any choice either, not with Edith treating my things like they belong to her and Mum backing her up.' There was real bitterness in Dulcie's voice now. ‘Mum always takes Edith's side; she always has and she always will. All she wants me for is my wages.'

‘Aw, come on, Dulcie, that's not true,' Rick felt obliged to protest, but Dulcie could see that he was looking uncomfortable. Because he knew the truth!

‘Yes it is,' Dulcie insisted. ‘Mum's always favoured Edith, and you know it. It's all very well for you to talk about families sticking together, but when has this family ever done anything for me? Mum hasn't said a word to me about wanting me to stay. If you ask me she's pleased to see me go. That way she can listen to Edith caterwauling all day long.'

There was just enough of a grain of truth – even though Dulcie had deliberately distorted and exaggerated it – in what she was saying for Rick to fall silent. During their childhood his sister had always been the one who seemed to get it in the neck and who had borne the brunt of their mother's sometimes short temper, whilst Edith was indeed their mother's favourite. Despite all that, though, he felt obliged, as the eldest of the family, to persist doggedly, ‘We're family, Dulcie, and families like ours stick together.'

‘Fine, but they can stick together without me.'

‘You'll regret leaving,' Rick warned her, ‘and I'm only telling you that for your own good. Moving in with strangers – no good will come of it.'

‘Yes it will. I'll not have a thieving sister helping herself to my clothes, nor a mother always having it in for me. Besides, it's a really nice place I'm moving to, and you can see that for yourself 'cos I need you to give me a hand getting my stuff over there tonight.'

Rick sighed. He knew when he'd lost a fight, especially with Dulcie, who had her own ideas and opinions about everything, and who was as sharp as a tack when it came to making them plain.

‘All right, I will help you,' he agreed, ‘provided you promise me that you'll come home every Sunday to go to church with Mum.'

Dulcie was tempted to refuse, but she needed Rick's help if she was to get her things to her new digs in one trip, and besides, something told her that her new landlady was the sort who thought things like families and going to church on Sunday were important. If she didn't accept Rick's terms she could end up finding herself dragged off to church by Olive. It would be worthwhile coming back once a week, if only to show off her new – unborrowable – clothes to Edith.

‘All right,' she conceded.

‘Promise?' Rick demanded.

‘Promise,' Dulcie agreed.

Sally looked round her small Spartan room in the nurses' home. The few possessions she had brought with her from Liverpool – apart from the photograph of her parents on their wedding day, in its silver frame – were packed in her case, ready for her to take to Article Row. As soon as she'd come off duty she'd changed out of her uniform, with its distinctive extra tall starched Barts' cap, much taller than the caps worn by any nurses from any of the other London hospitals. Sisters' caps were even taller, and even more stiffly starched, Sally guessed.

Workwise she'd fitted in quite well at Barts. She loved theatre work and had been welcomed by the other theatre staff, most of whom were down to be evacuated should Germany's hostile advances into the territories of its neighbours continue and thus lead to a declaration of war by the British Government. Normally, of course, Sally would not have been allowed to ‘live out' but these were not normal times.

Not normal times . . . Her life had ceased to be what she thought of as normal many months ago now.

She sat down on the edge of her narrow thin-mattressed bed, nowhere near as comfortable as the bed waiting for her in Article Row, and nowhere near as comfortable as the bed she had left behind her in Liverpool in the pretty semi-detached house that had always been her home. The house that she had refused to enter once she had known the truth, leaving Liverpool in the pale light of an early summer morning to catch the first train to London, with nothing but a recommendation to the matron at Barts from her own Hospital, and the trunk into which she had packed her belongings. Heavy though that trunk had been, it had been no heavier than the weight of her memories – both good and bad – on her heart.

She hadn't told her father what she was planning to do. She'd known that he would plead with her and try to dissuade her, so instead she'd asked the taxi driver to take her first to her parents' house, from her temporary room at the nurses' home, where she'd put her letter to her father very quietly through the letter box, before going on to Lime Street station.

Her father would have read her letter over breakfast. She could picture him now, carefully pouring himself a cup of tea, sitting down at the blue-and-white-checked-oilcloth-covered table, with the paper propped up against the teapot, as he read the words that she had written telling him that she wanted nothing more to do with him.

Pain knifed through her. She had loved her parents so much. They had been such a happy family.
Had been
. Until the person she had thought of as her closest friend – close enough to be a sister – had destroyed everything.

A mixture of misery and anger tensed her throat muscles. The death of her mother had been hard enough to bear, but the betrayal of her closest friend; that had left a wound that was still too poisoned for her even to think of allowing it to close. As with all wounds, the poison must be removed before healing could take place, otherwise it would be driven deeper, to fester and cause more harm. Sally could not, though, see any way to remove that poison or to salve its wound with acceptance and forgiveness. She couldn't. If she did she would be betraying her poor mother, who had suffered so dreadfully. She reached for her photograph and held it in both her hands as she looked into the faces of her youthful parents, her father so tall and dark and handsome, her fair-haired mother so petite and happy as she nestled within the protective curve of his arm.

Her mother had been such a happy, loving person, their home life in their comfortable semi so harmonious. Sally had grown up knowing that she wanted to be a nurse and her parents had encouraged her to follow her dream. Her father, a clerk working for the Town Hall, had helped her to enrol for their local St John Ambulance brigade as soon as she had been old enough. Those had been such happy days, free of the upsets that seemed to mar the childhoods of others. In the summer there had been picnics on the sands at Southport and Lytham St Annes; visits to Blackpool Tower and rides on the donkeys, trips across the Mersey, of course, in the ferry boats that plied between Liverpool and New Brighton, whilst in the winter there had been the excitement of Christmas and the pantomime.

And then when she had started her formal nurse's training at Liverpool's prestigious teaching hospital she had felt as though all her dreams had come true, especially when she had palled up with Morag, the pretty girl of Scots descent, whom Sally had liked from when they had first met up as new probationers.

Sally could still remember how awkward and excited at the same time she had felt when Morag had first introduced her to her elder brother, Callum, with his dark hair and piercing blue eyes. Callum, who looked as handsome as any film star and whose smile had made her insides quiver with delight.

Morag and Callum had become regular visitors at her parents' home, welcomed there by her mother once she learned that they had lost their own parents, when the small rowboat they had taken out on Loch Lomond during a holiday there had sunk, drowning them both. That had been two years before she had met them, and before Callum's job, as a newly qualified assistant teacher, had brought them both to Liverpool, where Morag had decided to train as a nurse.

They had all got on so well together, her father and Callum sharing an interest in natural history and often going off on long walks together, whilst Morag had shown Sally's mother how to make the Scotch pancakes they all learned to love too much, small rounds of batter cooked on a flat skillet and then served warm with butter.

But then her mother had become ill, and had felt too sick to want to eat anything.

It had been Morag who had held her tightly after the doctor had broken the news to them that her mother had stomach cancer, Morag who had so willingly and, Sally had believed, lovingly helped her to nurse her mother through the long-drawn-out and heart-searingly hard to bear pain she had suffered in the last weeks and days of her life. Morag who had comforted Sally before, during and after the funeral, and not just Morag but Callum as well, both of them standing staunchly at her and her father's sides to support them through the ordeal of her mother's loss and burial.

In the weeks that had followed they had all become closer than ever, Callum calling regularly to spend time with her father, Morag too calling at the house to make hot meals for her father when she was off duty and Sally wasn't.

Sally had been grateful to her then, loving her for her generosity in treating Sally's father almost as though he were her own and helping to ease their grief.

Only it hadn't been as another adopted ‘daughter' that Morag had been comforting her father at all.

Sally closed her eyes and put the photograph face down inside her case before closing it, as though she couldn't bear to have her mother ‘face' the betrayal that still seared her own heart. It was time for her to go; her new life beckoned. It might not be what she had hoped for in those heady days when she had first felt the thrill of excitement that came from having her hand held in Callum's, nor the warmth she had felt at believing that Morag was her best friend and as close to her as any sister, but it was her life and she had to live it, doing what she had been trained to do and remembering always what she owed to the mother she had loved so much and who had loved her. How her father could have done what he had she didn't know, but she must not think of him. She must think instead of what lay ahead. There were those who had warned her that what she was doing was reckless when she had announced that she was leaving Liverpool to go to work in London, and right at its heart, the very place that would be most exposed and at risk if they did end up at war with the Germans. Sally had said nothing. What could she say, after all? That she didn't care whether or not she lived or died, that part of her actually wished that she might die rather than go on living with the feelings that were now tearing her apart, the memories of her father's voice, at first defensive and then angry when she had told him how shocked she was by his betrayal of her mother and the love they had shared? She had pleaded with him to change his mind and not to go ahead with his plans to marry Morag. How could her mother and she herself mean so little to him now when they had been everything to one another before? How could Morag actually expect her to ‘understand', as she had pleaded with her to do? How could Callum – how dare Callum – have stood there and told her that she was being selfish and cruel and that her mother would have been ashamed of her?

Whilst she didn't want Barts or its patients, or indeed anyone, to suffer the horrors of war, if there was to be war then she might as well be in the thick of it, she might as well risk her life in the place of another nurse who might have more reason to want to survive than she did. The truth was that she no longer cared what happened to her. Barts, like the rest of London, had laid its contingency plans for war. What could not be moved to a place of safety must stand and bear the onslaught of that war, and she fully intended to stand with it and to play her part. Better if anyone were to die that it was someone like her, with nothing and no one to live for.

‘And then when I told Matron what had happened she actually hugged me and told me that she was proud of me.'

After rushing headlong into her story the moment she had seen Ted waiting for her outside the café, now that they were inside sitting at ‘their' table, their tea and teacakes in front of them, Agnes finally paused for breath.

‘You were right to tell me to go and see Mrs Robbins. She's ever so nice, Ted, and Tilly, her daughter, has offered to share her room with me. She's lovely, and so pretty. It was awful at first, me thinking that I'd lost the chance to have the room, but then when Tilly came running down the road after me, well . . .'

Ted listened sympathetically whilst Agnes told him yet again of her astonishment and gratitude. When she was all sparked up like she was right now, Agnes was a pretty little thing, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining.

He'd told his mother about her over breakfast this morning when he'd finally got in from his late shift. She'd pursed her lips and said that she wasn't sure she held with orphans, on account of it being odd that someone shouldn't have any family at all, but Ted had insisted that Agnes was all right.

‘Look I've done this for you,' he told her after taking a bite of his teacake and chewing on it, reaching into his pocket to remove some sheets of folded paper. Spreading them out on the table, he explained, ‘See, this is a map of the underground, and these different colours, well, they're for the different lines.'