A Rose in No-Man's Land (25 page)

“Ain’t looking for anyone.”

“Well, Missus…um…”

“Call me Olive.”

“I’m desperate for somewhere to stay, Olive, and I need a job, too. Everything I own is in this case. I’d be prepared to work for food and lodgings until my papers arrive, and then hopefully I can get a job as a nurse.”

“She’s an army nurse just back from France. Fell for some man who betrayed her, the bastard,” Charlie said fiercely.

“Are you breeding?” Olive asked.

“No, we just had a frightful row. He told me to leave, so I did. I don’t know anyone in England except Mark.”

“Wealthy, luv?”

“Yes.”

“Married?”

“Yes, but he hadn’t lived with his wife for years.” That was only half a lie. “We only wanted some happiness before the war swallowed us all up.”

“Officer and a gentleman, I suppose?” Olive sneered through pursed lips.

“Sounds a right mongrel,” Charlie butted in. “Now, Olive, leave the girl alone. Can she stay or not?”

“I’m a good worker, I like people, and I’m prepared to do anything within reason.” She smiled at Charlie.

“The lass saw duty at Gallipoli, too.” He was a gossip, but also a kindly man trying his best to help.

“You’d have to cook, clean, and wait the tables. You can have as much to eat as you want, and I can give you a room of your own, but I can’t pay much.”

“Sounds good, Olive. Give me what you think is fair. I’d prefer to be nursing, naturally. Silly, isn’t it? The boys at the front need me, I’m a nurse, but they won’t let me do what I’m trained for.”

“Have to get back to the pub. Thanks, Olive. I’ll call in soon, lass, to see how you’re getting along.”

“I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to repay you, Charlie. You were certainly my knight in shining armour.”

He chuckled. “Aw, go on with you.” With a wave, he hurried off, muttering, “A knight in shining armour, eh?”

“He’s a kindly soul, is our Charlie,” Olive said after he left. “Had a bloody hard life one way and the other. Oh, he’s no angel, I grant you. How about a cup of tea, luv? You look like you could do with one.”

“Yes, thank you. I’m eternally grateful you’ve taken me on trust, and I won’t let you down.”

Sitting in the scullery with a cup of tea and a chunk of bread spread with margarine, as they could not buy butter, Olive got the whole miserable saga out of her. It was like a tap being turned on. Once the words started flowing, they would not stop.

“You’ve got me bloody sniveling,” Olive complained when the story ended. “I’ll take you upstairs when you’ve finished eating.” She heaved herself out of her chair. “We do tea from five until eight, so have a lie down for a couple of hours. You’re as white as a ghost.”

“Thanks, I’d be grateful for a rest. I feel exhausted. It’s emotional, I expect. I’ve been so worried about what could happen. I did a lot of walking, as I didn’t want to waste money on unnecessary bus fares.”

“You could have gone back to your captain.”

Amy’s head snapped back, and fire rekindled inside her. “Never. I don’t stay where I’m not wanted.”

“That’s the spirit. All men from the gentry are bastards,” Olive growled, jigging her head so her double chins wobbled. “Hell-bent on destroying decent, working-class girls. I’ve seen too much of it.”

Mark wasn’t like that. She must believe it, or she would go off her head.
I gave up everything for him—my country, my family, my career. I did it gladly, but it wasn’t enough. He wanted more
. Total domination, absolute capitulation. He was obviously not prepared to accept anything less.

****

Olive watched as the fire extinguished from Amy’s eyes, leaving only dying embers. Bloody men. She wondered why this pretty girl touched a chord in her when they had just met. Integrity, compassion. Her son Freddy often said how kindly the nurses had treated him when they tended his wounds. The Roses of No-Man’s Land, the soldiers in the trenches called them. She sniffed again.

“I’ll take you up the first flight of stairs. There are eight rooms in all, four on the first floor, three on the second. My room is at ground level.”

Olive huffed and puffed as they went upstairs. “I get a woman to come in and clean up here,” she explained between wheezing gasps. “I’m not up to climbing stairs anymore.”

You certainly aren’t.
Amy feared Olive might have a seizure as she stopped to rest on the landing at the foot of the second flight of stairs.

“Just point out the way to me. It will be easier.”

“All right. Keep going up the stairs until there aren’t any more left to climb. There’s an attic room up there. Ceiling isn’t very high, so I don’t let it out much. As a kid, young Freddy used to play there.”

“I’m obliged, thanks.”

“There’s linen in a cupboard on the second floor landing. Help yourself to what you need.”

“What time do you want me to come down to help?”

“About five. You can help dish up and serve. Since 1915 we’re only allowed to open for lunch from noon to two-thirty, dinner from six-thirty to nine-thirty. All public restaurants and hotels have lights out at ten-thirty. They’re even talking about regulating meal sizes,” Olive complained. “For lunch two courses, dinner no more than three courses. Won’t affect us much. Most people around here can only afford one course anyway.”

“What about your tenants?”

“They’re single working girls, and a couple of men. Quiet types, bank clerks and the like.”

“Why aren’t the men in the army? I don’t have much time for shirkers, Olive.”

“Me neither, but they’ve got something wrong with them, medically unfit for the army. I wouldn’t have them here otherwise, not with my Merv in Egypt and Freddy being wounded. He’ll never be any good for the trenches now, but he’s doing some office work for the army. Sorting through the personal effects of the poor buggers who’ve been killed, I think.”

“He’ll be kept busy.” A feeling of cold dread enveloped Amy. “The big brass don’t care how many lives they expend gaining a few yards of French mud. Too busy swilling Champagne in some chateau to bother about seeing first-hand what it’s really like in the trenches.”

Amy continued climbing the stairs. The higher she went, the steeper they got. She helped herself to some grayish-looking sheets, but they smelt clean, thank goodness.

The last flight of stairs became extremely narrow, steep and twisting. She was puffing by the time she reached the top. Just a few inches from where the stairs ended she spied a door. She opened it warily and entered the room. Her head nearly touched the low sloping ceiling even though she was only five feet three inches tall.

There was a single bed with a flock mattress and a chest of drawers with a chipped bowl and jug resting on top. The floorboards were bare, but the room appeared clean. No windows as such, but a glass trapdoor in the ceiling above the bed let in the rays of a weak autumn sun.

She made up the bed with its single blanket and added the one from her case. Obviously she would share a bathroom with the other tenants.

You’ve been lucky.
She stared up at the dark boards lining the ceiling.
You could have ended up sleeping under a park bench, or
worse.
If it had not been for the two young prostitutes who took her to Charlie, she would be in diabolical straits. Olive might be fat and slovenly looking, but this belied a kind heart.

If it weren’t for poor Harry, she’d be lunching at the Savoy now. The irony of it all caused her to laugh out loud.
You’ve finished with Mark. He doesn’t want you anymore. Move on with your life.
How on earth could she raise enough money to pay for a fare home to Australia?

Chapter 14

Amy closed her eyes and dreamed of golden wattle blooming in the gullies, and brightly colored parrots. If she tried hard, she could almost smell the perfume of the gum trees.

At exactly five o’clock, she slipped back into her skirt and blouse and went downstairs. She tapped the face of her watch. If the wretched thing had kept proper time, she wouldn’t be here in London’s seedy East End.

In the scullery, Olive struggled to write the menu on a blackboard.

“I’ll do that for you,” Amy volunteered. “You seem to be having trouble.”

“I am. Bloody writing, never much good at it. The board hasn’t been changed in years, but I have to put the prices up. Things cost so much now. With rationing and all, I can’t get a lot of stuff. Have to queue up for bloody hours sometimes. Thank God, Charlie has a few connections.”

The prices seemed quite reasonable. Soup two pence, meat pie three pence per portion, greens and potatoes a penny each, and raisin roly-poly two pence a slice. For six pence, a patron could have sausages and vegetables. Not much of a menu, but there was food rationing, at least for working-class men. Undoubtedly the rich would buy whatever they fancied on the black market. They would not begrudge themselves luxuries, war or no war.

Amy drew squiggly lines at the bottom of the menu with a couple of flowers at the top. “What do you think?”

“Love your flowers.” Olive’s chins wobbled. “Gawd, the customers won’t know the place.”

“What else would you like me to do?”

“Vegetables need preparing.”

“All right.”

Olive dumped a pile of potatoes in front of her, and Amy started washing and peeling them. “I’m happy to do anything you want me to.”

The variety of tenants surprised Amy. James, a thin and wheezing young man with thick glasses, worked as a clerk in a lawyer’s office. Two sisters from Yorkshire worked in the shell factory, plain girls whose faces and hands had turned yellow, but friendly enough. Elsie worked as a conductor on the buses, while the other tenant, Brian, a schoolteacher, had a club foot.

The tenants ate together at the middle table, customers anywhere they could find a seat. Tea was the only beverage on the menu. The tenants served themselves from large dishes of greens and potatoes, and they shared a pie already cut into generous slices.

Olive dished up the food in the scullery, and Amy carried the plates out to the customers. She watched a couple of boy soldiers come in, obviously members of Lord Kitchener’s new army.

“How are you, boys?” She gave them extra special attention. “Have the pie. It’s just like your mother would make. Off to France?”

“Yes, we’re on pre-embarkation leave. Didn’t have enough time to go home.”

“You’ll get a good meal here. Olive knows how hungry young soldiers can get.”

Back in the scullery, Amy rubbed her hands down the sides of her white pinafore. “We’ve got a couple of hungry young soldiers on pre-embarkation leave out there. I assured them you knew how to look after them.”

“I do. Hungry young soldiers are my specialty. You have a way with people, Amy. I only wish I could afford to pay you what you’re worth.”

“I’m grateful for food and a roof over my head for the time being.”

Amy did not have time to eat until about seven o’clock. By then she felt ravenous. The pie tasted delicious, the pastry as light and fluffy as Sophie made.

“This is nice, just like we have at home, but our meat is better than yours.”

“The meat would be tough as bloody boot leather if I didn’t boil it first. Hard to get a decent cut these days.”

****

Over the next few weeks, life settled into a busy routine. Olive took her to the market, where Amy loved the atmosphere, with fishmongers yelling out about their fresh produce. She tripped lightly along while Olive trundled ponderously beside her. The good-natured woman knew everyone. She argued and haggled with her suppliers, but never offensively.

“You’re a bloody rogue, Bill Jackson.” Olive jabbed the middle-aged fruiterer in the chest with a stubby forefinger. “And I don’t want no old stuff, neither.”

“For God’s sake, Olive, a man would go broke if all the customers haggled like you. Heard from Merv lately?”

“ ’Course not. Lazy bastard hardly ever writes. What about your Dennis?”

“All right, last we heard. He’s in Flanders somewhere now. My boy Dennis is a sergeant in the Engineers,” he boasted to Amy. “Works in all those tunnels under the ground.”

“They do a marvelous job.” Amy nearly said how dangerous it was for the sappers, but she stopped herself just in time. Daily they risked getting blown up or entombed under tons of dirt, but a parent didn’t need to know that.

“Amy’s been to France. She’s an army nurse,” Olive told just about everyone they came in contact with. She obviously felt it was a feather in her cap having someone like that working for her. It was embarrassing, Amy thought with a grimace, making her out to be some kind of heroine when she only did her duty. The big woman did it for the best of reasons; she didn’t have a mean bone in her ample body.

Bill Jackson reminded Amy of Charlie, a generous-hearted soul who wanted everyone to think of him as tough. Any bruised or leftover fruit he gave away to the hungry, ragged little urchins swarming out of the dank laneways behind the tenements. Two pieces for each child, one for each hand, he always said.

“You’re an old softie, Bill,” Amy smilingly chided him.

“I am not. If I didn’t give it away to those dirty little urchins, I’d have to take it away and dump it.”

“You could do what a lot of the others do, sell it cheap,” Olive chipped in.

“Nah.”

“You’re bloody mad, Bill Jackson.”

“What about you, Olive? You’re a silly old cow, giving your leftovers away all the time.”

Amy liked the way the two of them chafed each other.

“You’re both a couple of old softies,” she jeered good-naturedly.

****

Winter bore down upon them, bitterly cold. It broke Amy’s heart to see children shivering in rags as they squabbled and played in the gutters. It was a disgrace; she fretted about not being able to help them.

Olive fed a family who lived in a derelict house not far from them. She took over every scrap of spare food. Amy was appalled to see the thin, worn-out mother with a hungry, wailing baby clinging to her shriveled-up, empty breast. The poor woman looked to be pregnant again. Molly Dawson’s husband, a hard-drinking laborer, shared his time between work, the pub, or some dockside brothel.