After the War is Over
Read After the War is Over Online
Authors: Maureen Lee
For Juliet Burton, my friend and agent
Contents
Bootle, Liverpool
December 1945
‘After the war is over, After the fighting’s through, Now that the lights are shining, What shall we do . . .?’
Maggie stopped singing and grinned at her friends, eyebrows raised in a question. She looked incredibly pretty, with her black curls, no longer hidden beneath an army cap, tumbling on to her shoulders. She tossed her head to shake the tiniest curls off her forehead and out of her unusual violet eyes. ‘What
shall
we do?’ she asked. ‘Now that the war is over and we’ve been demobbed?’
‘I’m only going to stay at home till the new year,’ Nell said. ‘Then I’ll be off to live in London. I’ll find a job, a nice room somewhere, and live happily ever after like they do in stories.’ Nell was very tall, very clumsy and almost plain, but she had the kindest and most innocent eyes in the world, like soft brown velvet.
‘It’s only fairy stories that end happily,’ the third member of the group remarked darkly.
‘Iris Grant, you old misery-guts!’ Maggie snorted. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth! ’Tis my experience that stories always end happily.’
‘You haven’t lived long enough to know otherwise,’ Iris sniffed. She was going on for thirty, whereas Maggie and Nell were only twenty-one and had been friends at school. They had joined the army together three years before. Iris had joined up much earlier, just after the war had started. She had nothing in common with the girls other than the fact that they all came from Bootle. Not only that, she was a sergeant and they were privates; sergeants weren’t encouraged to mix with other ranks, so she always wore civvies on the rare occasions they went to the pictures together. As the years passed, she’d grown fond of the girls. She noticed that other passengers in the carriage were listening with amusement to their conversation.
They were on the electric train, the final leg of their journey home from an army camp not far from Plymouth in Devon. It had taken two days to get from Plymouth to Liverpool. In London they’d slept overnight in the ladies’ waiting room on Euston station. Maggie had remarked that it would probably be the last time they would sleep on a wooden bench and find it fun. There were women there from the other services who’d been demobbed like them, and they had sung songs, danced a bit, laughed a lot, cried occasionally, and slept hardly at all.
‘I feel sad,’ Maggie announced, grinning from ear to ear.
‘You don’t look it,’ Iris and Nell said together.
‘Maybe not, but I still feel it. In another two stops it’ll be Marsh Lane station, and we’ll get off and nothing will ever be the same. The war’s finished, we’re no longer soldiers, we’ll never wear our army uniforms again.’ She looked briefly sober for a change. ‘I already feel dead peculiar not wearing a cap.’
‘You can always wear a different sort of hat,’ Nell said sensibly.
‘Oh Nell.’ Maggie hugged her friend effusively. ‘You are such a lovely human being. How will I ever get used to waking up and not find you snoring your head off in the next bed?’
Nell looked embarrassed. ‘I’ll miss you too,’ she conceded. ‘And I don’t snore.’ Privately she wondered if she would manage to exist in London without Maggie. In Bootle they lived in the next street to each other. Ever since she could remember, they had waved to each other out of their back bedroom windows every night before they went to bed and first thing each morning.
The train was drawing into Marsh Lane station.
‘Good luck, girls,’ a man said as they were about to get off.
‘Good luck to yourself.’ Maggie patted him on the head and he looked pleased.
One thing she wouldn’t miss, Iris thought, was Maggie’s outgoingness, her forever patting people and kissing them, hugging them for no reason at all, telling everyone very loudly how much she loved them. Tears sprang to her eyes when she realised that despite this she would miss Maggie terribly, as well as Nell’s lovely nature, her patience, her inability to say a bad word about anyone.
They stood in a little huddle underneath the railway bridge in Marsh Lane, shoulders touching, suitcases at their feet. It was a dreary afternoon, almost dark yet it was only two o’clock. Being Wednesday, half-day closing, there weren’t many people about. A mist hung in the air and they could feel the moisture on their faces. It smelt of smoke and coal.
‘I had my first kiss in the army,’ Maggie said. ‘Went to my first dance.’
Nell blushed. ‘So did I.’
‘And I had my first shower,’ Maggie went on. ‘Used a telephone and a typewriter for the first time, rode a motorbike – only as a passenger,’ she added, not wanting to make herself sound more experienced than she actually was.
‘I cooked meals every day for over a hundred people.’ Nell spoke. ‘I peeled thousands and thousands of potatoes, baked hundreds and hundreds of pies. The thing I made best of all was Swiss roll.’
‘I loved your Swiss roll,’ Iris remarked. She was married and had kissed and danced and baked before she’d joined the army, where she’d become a driver and had chauffeured important people to their important destinations. She’d been happy in the forces, happier than she’d been in a long time. She was glad the war was over, but would miss being happy.
Maggie grabbed her and kissed her on the cheek. Nell kissed her more gently on the other cheek.
‘Let’s meet on Saturday morning for a cup of tea in Jenny’s Café on Strand Road,’ Maggie suggested.
They agreed to meet at half past ten. Iris pulled away, not wanting them to see she was crying, and went home.
‘She was close to tears, poor Iris,’ Nell said. She and Maggie linked arms as they walked towards the streets where both had been born.
‘You’d think she’d be thrilled to bits seeing her husband again. That’s a lovely posh house they’ve got in Rimrose Road.’ Maggie pulled the collar of her coat over her ears. ‘Is it as cold here as it was in Plymouth? Or colder?’
Nell sniffed and announced it colder. ‘The temperature of the Irish Sea is lower than the English Channel.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’ Maggie asked.
‘I’ve no idea. I must have read it somewhere.’
They turned into Amber Street, where Nell lived. Further down there was an ugly gap where two houses had been hit by a bomb during the Blitz. ‘Once we go inside, our lives in the army really will be at an end.’ Maggie stopped by a lamp post they’d turned into a swing with a piece of rope when they were little. She unhooked her arm from Nell’s and stood in the middle of the street, her hands on her hips, her lovely eyes scanning the line of small terraced houses on each side. Some properties still had blackout curtains at the windows; one had the Union Jack painted on the front door; decorations were up in some ready for Christmas – the first war-free one for six years. ‘No one will ever call me Private O’Neill again, we’ll never wake up to the sound of a bugle, go to a dance in uniform. Everything’s going to be completely different.’
‘We’ll soon get used to it,’ Nell said comfortably, not at all sure that it was true.
Maggie danced back on to the pavement and grabbed her friend’s arm. ‘Of course we will. And we’ll have memories, won’t we? Really gear memories of the wonderful times we had. And sad memories too.’ Her violet eyes narrowed. ‘All those lovely young lads that died. I promised to marry quite a few, only so they could tell their mates they had a girlfriend back in Blighty.’
Nell blushed again. ‘One proposed to me. His name was Jim Harvey, and he was a lance corporal.’ It had happened so quickly, and there hadn’t been time to fall in love before he was killed in Italy, the victim of a sniper’s bullet.
The girls walked another few feet and stopped outside the Desmonds’ house.
‘Home!’ Maggie said. She pushed Nell towards the front door. ‘Home at last. Shall we meet tonight? Come round our house whatever time you like. Me mam will be dead pleased to see you. Ta-ra, Nell.’
Maggie disappeared around the corner, leaving Nell feeling desperately lost and alone. She swallowed, took a deep breath, and pulled the key on a piece of string through the letter box. The first thing she noticed was that the hall had been redecorated. The shoulder-high Anaglypta paper had been freshly varnished and the wall above distempered dark green. A new picture hung there of a bowl of fruit that looked too perfect to be real. The parlour door was open and Nell peeped inside. The room was empty, and it too had been freshly painted the same dead miserable colours as the hall. The furniture was smart and well-polished, the cushions and curtains looked expensive and there was a new rug in front of the brown-tiled fireplace. Nell threw back her shoulders and went into the living room. Compared to the parlour, this room was neglected and shabby. The curtains were threadbare and the linoleum, which had been there for as long as she could remember, was full of holes that could be lethal if you didn’t look where you were going. A sparse fire burned in the grate.
‘Mam?’ she said. Her mother was asleep in the easy chair beneath the window, thin and pale and helpless. She opened her eyes, then her arms, when she saw her daughter.
‘Nellie, luv. Come here!’ she cried.
Nell knelt and allowed her mother to embrace her. Eight years ago, Nell’s father, Alfred Desmond, had quite openly taken up with another woman, who owned a hairdresser’s in Strand Road and lived in the flat above; Rita Brannigan, red-haired, green-eyed, with a voluptuous body, was frequently compared to her namesake, the film star Rita Hayworth. Alfred only spent his evenings and Sunday afternoons with Rita, preferring to live the rest of his time in his own house, where he was better fed and better looked after altogether.
Overnight, Mabel, Alfred’s wife, had become an invalid. She was no longer well enough to do the housework, too weak to do the shopping – and too ashamed, what with everyone knowing about Alfred’s whore and laughing at his poor wife, sometimes to her face. She’d hardly moved out of the chair since, except to go to bed or use the lavatory at the bottom of the yard.
The Desmonds had five children, four girls and a boy, Kenny, who was the baby of the family. Nell was the next to youngest. One by one the older girls had taken their mother’s place: Gladys first, then Ena, followed by Theresa when her older sisters had married and left home.
‘I’ve missed you, luv,’ her mother sobbed now. ‘Really missed you.’ She paused to wipe her tears on the pinny that she used as both a handkerchief and a towel. ‘And our Theresa asks every day when we can expect you home, ’cos she wants to move in with her friend Joan Roberts from Chaucer Street. Well, now you’re back, and she can move out. It’s your turn to look after us now. You’ll never go away again, will you, Nellie?’