Authors: Maggie Ford
But in the taxi she couldn’t help herself. Clinging to him, she buried her head in his shoulder. ‘What am I going to do, Matthew, when you’re gone? I’ll be left all alone.’
‘No you won’t.’ His voice shook. ‘Mum will look after you as though you were her own daughter. And I’ll come back. I’ll come back.’
He heard the desperation in his words. Susan clinging to him made him ever more afraid of what lay ahead. Would he end up fighting in North Africa? The papers were full of Britain’s new offensive against Rommel out there, but British soldiers were still being killed and who could say Rommel wouldn’t turn and push them back again with even more men slaughtered, himself, Matthew Ward, perhaps one of them? Never to see Susan again. She would become a widow when she had scarcely become a wife.
The thought stayed with him throughout the interminable journey to London. Their train stopped and started, which seemed the normal thing these days; the delays got worse still as it hit fog just after Watford.
The thought persisted even as he smiled greeting at his parents, his mother taking Susan up to his old room which would now be hers until his return – if he returned. What would happen to Susan if he didn’t? Where would she go? She’d marry again, in time … God, he had to stop thinking about it, think positive. Of course he’d come back. Yet a premonition that he might not haunted his troubled sleep that night, even though lovemaking helped him wipe it away for the while.
It wasn’t that bad coming home, Jenny told herself firmly as, in scarves and warm coats, she and Mumsy walked down to the shops, her mother hanging on her arm in the jaundiced mist of this October Saturday morning. So long as she didn’t have to do it every time she had a couple of hours off.
Mumsy, on the other hand, would have relished every second of her free time. But Jenny needed some time with her friends, and there was Ronald too, their off-duty hours coinciding so seldom. What chance they did have to go out together they usually spent going somewhere to eat. Hospital canteen food tasted disgusting and there was not much of it.
A forty-eight-hour week and sometimes eight weeks of night duty when all she wanted to do was go home to sleep, exhausted, until it was time to catch a bus back, took away any desire to go rushing off to see Ronald if he too was off duty. Time off came seldom enough and if he wasn’t available it was fun spending it with friends now and again. While she made her way home, which was only a bus ride away, they, getting back after lights out, evaded the porter at the gate by climbing the railings; whispers and stifled giggles erupted as they clambered back into the nurses’ residence through purposely unlocked windows before the night super began her rounds. She missed all that coming home.
If only her mother would make some attempt to join some women’s group or other. There were plenty of them: wives whose husbands had been called up, elderly widows, spinsters, all knitting socks and scarves for ‘the boys’, or planning charity events, all an opportunity for socialising and filling in their lonely lives, but her mother had never been outgoing and that first approach towards a group of virtual strangers was always the hardest step for anyone to take.
‘I couldn’t go alone. I wouldn’t mind if I had a friend to take me.’
‘Then find a friend. Mrs Crompton next door. She lives alone. Or your other neighbour. I know she’s younger than you, but she’s on her own with her husband away.’
It was easy to say, but she wasn’t the one having to do it. Her mother had gripped her arm hopefully. ‘Perhaps you could come with me.’
‘I’m a nurse, Mumsy. I can’t have afternoons off whenever I please.’
She had hated the reluctance that made itself felt, wished she didn’t feel so glad at having an excuse not to have to sit with those women with little else to do but discuss children, home life and the ever-tightening restrictions on food rationing as they knitted or planned their events.
Her mother would never understand. Hospital was another world, a little kingdom behind whose walls existed a strictly graded society of doctors and nurses, over which, next to the Matron’s, the sister’s authority was law. The outside world never penetrated that kingdom; even patients became changed creatures once they came in, lying in their beds in stiff rows, obedient to the ward sister. But Jenny loved it.
Soon to be a second-year nurse, at the moment on the men’s medical ward, she was slowly climbing the ladder to the day when those magic letters SRN could be put after her name. Her feet had long ago stopped swelling like balloons and her back aching from long hours on her feet. She could take twelve hours on them almost, if not quite as lively as when she’d begun. She could fold counterpane corners to perfect angles; her mistakes were far fewer than they had once been, her intricate cap folded just right, the leg o’ mutton sleeves of her uniform perfect. She’d be sitting for her second state examination early next year and after that her Preliminary. Still a long way to go, but she would get there in the end in spite of Mumsy looking towards the day when she’d leave nursing and go back to doing a nine to five job.
They were coming back home, turning into Victoria Park Road, when two young people came towards them out of the mist through which the sun was at last beginning to struggle. Jenny immediately recognised the figure of Matthew Ward and they halted simultaneously, she pulling her mother to a stop just as he did the girl on his arm. His face lit up.
‘Ye gods, Jenny! Didn’t expect to see you!’
‘Home on leave then?’ she asked, trying to control the joy that leapt inside her at seeing him, angering her in remaining as acute as ever, for all the girl with him.
There was a noticeable tightening of his features but he grinned, she was certain, with forced cheerfulness. When he spoke it was in a similar vein, an effort at banter. ‘You’re not going to ask me when I’m due back, are you? Everyone asks that, as though they’ll be only too glad to see me gone again. But, no, I’ve been given fourteen days’ leave – out of the blue.’
Adding that last on a more intense note, it needed no lecture to know what it meant. The obvious effort he was making to be cheerful helped bear out the message. Her next question, ‘Where are they sending you?’ sounded stupidly superfluous. How could he know that? He obliged with a shrug, then collected himself and turned to the small, neat girl beside him.
‘By the way, this is Susan – my wife. Susan, this is Jen … This is Jenny Ross, an old friend from the crowd I used to go around with before the war. Jenny lives nearly opposite my parents.’
His use of her full given name, the first time she could ever recall, now spoken so formally, so neatly severed her from him that she actually felt pain. They’d gone their separate ways, yet even now her heart cried out to be the one on his arm instead of the girl to whom she now cordially smiled, saying it was nice to meet her and politely introducing her mother.
‘Me and Matthew’s staying at his parents,’ the girl supplied in a broad Birmingham accent, her small oval face quite beautiful and full of adoration as she glanced up at him; Jenny could clearly see why he had married her. ‘I’m going to live with them while he’s away. You living so near then, I might probably see something of you.’
‘I expect so,’ Jenny obliged, her eyes travelling to Matthew. All she wanted now was to be away from here to suppress the sick thumping in her breast. It wasn’t fair. ‘Well, I won’t keep you. This damp weather is chilly.’ On an impulse she took off a glove and held out her hand to him. ‘Well, wherever it is they send you, Matthew, keep safe, and …’
Words echoed inside her head, a sharp recollection of what he had once said to her: ‘And whatever happens, you’ll always be one of my nicer, memories.’ She had once had the audacity to think they might have been words of affection, a prelude to something more. But they had not presaged anything.
She had nearly begun to repeat them word for word. Would he have recalled himself saying them? And if so, would he have thought she was being just a little bitter? No, he’d probably forgotten, had never really meant them in the first place, flippant as he’d been those days. And yet, her mind conjured up the look in his dark eyes at the time. He had meant them when he said them, she was certain, but much water had flowed under the bridge since then, and now he was married and in love with his wife, his Susan – that could be seen with half an eye.
‘And come back soon,’ she finished instead, hardly realising that her voice had dropped to a whisper, almost a prayer, a secret shared between herself and him. But he hadn’t noticed as he too removed his leather glove and took her hand, his warmth on her chill flesh making her senses leap. Was it her imagination or did his hand hold hers just that bit longer than was necessary? Was there a spark remaining of that which she thought she had seen in his eyes that day? Silly fool, it had to be her foolish imagination, nothing more.
After they parted she repeated those last words to herself: ‘Come back soon.’ Now they had become truly a fervent prayer for his safekeeping as she fought the heavy lump in her heart.
He had meant to make his last night with Susan memorable. Instead, beset by anxiety, he’d failed her, the first time ever. She had been wonderful about it, told him it didn’t matter, but he knew she was tearful when she finally turned over to go to sleep, he with his arms about her, cuddling her close.
Mortified by his inability to fulfil her, and himself, Matthew lay awake listening to her occasional sighs as though she was grieving the loss of something precious, yet he knew she was asleep because when he asked if she felt all right there was no reply. Loath to disturb her he left unsaid the words he needed to say.
Awakening to grey light filtering through the curtains and immediately conscious of a deep anger at sleep itself having robbed him of those last few hours with her, he turned to gaze at her sweet face on the pillow beside him, the full lips in gentle repose. He was about to waken her and would have made perfect love to her but for the knock on the door and his father entering in response to his reluctant bidding with a cup of tea for them.
From then on things took on a sense of urgency, washing, dressing, packing his kit, forcing down the boiled egg and toast his mother insisted would ‘keep him going’, everyone’s conversation stilted, shallow, tense.
It had been agreed they’d say their goodbyes here in the privacy of their own home, the severing made clean, but at the last moment Susan pleaded to be allowed to accompany him the whole way to Charing Cross where he was to board the train for Southampton. The prospect of seeing her standing there, a small isolated figure among the seething crowds in that vast station as his train took him from her, was more than he could bear to contemplate; shattering him as well as her. He took her in his arms.
‘No, darling, I want you to stay here. It’ll only be dragging things out if you come, and the end will be just the same. On top of that you’ll have to come all the way home without me.’
She would not see it. In fact his final goodbyes turned into something like pandemonium. Having said farewell to his parents, his father gripping him firmly in a bear hug, telling him to watch himself, his mother kissing his cheek, assuring him she would look after Susan, charging him to look after himself in that cold, stiff manner which he knew hid emotions she had long ago taught herself never to show, Susan standing away from him with her back pressed against the wall of the hall, her naturally pale face now chalk-white, her small slender body as rigid as the wall that alone seemed to be holding her up, she flew at him as though unseen hands had suddenly propelled her forward.
‘Matthew, don’t leave me! Oh, don’t … please don’t leave me.’
He had to struggle to extricate himself, physically handing her to his mother who held her in a firm grip, her older face like granite. He’d wanted to crush Susan to him, but her demonstration threatened to undermine his own resolve not to give way to too much emotion, so while her tears flowed shamelessly unchecked, his had to remain unshed as he’d put her from him with futile words. ‘It’ll be all right, love. I have to go. You’ve got to be brave.’ Though what order he said them in he did not know.
He could still hear her calling his name, her voice echoing down the street after him as he stood now on Southampton docks amid long, snaking, khaki queues waiting to board the ship that would take them to God knows where – no one knew as yet, except that they all carried tropical kit.
A fine drizzle sifted down upon the shoulders of the slowly moving queues, upon the loose piles of kitbags ready to be loaded on board, and on trucks and other equipment to be transported the several thousand miles to, where? North Africa? India? It might be India, Matthew prayed. Far away from any war zone. It could be that those in charge thought there was some need of men in that region or perhaps South or West Africa? There they could expect a life of relative luxury, and in time to come back safely. Matthew crossed his fingers as he took his turn to move up the gangway leading to the ship’s dark innards.
As soon as permitted, he would write to reassure Susan how well he was and that there had been no need for her to worry about his safety – fair enough, only that he wished he was back with her instead of here. But one must not think of that. Every man here must have loved ones on his mind but knew better than to give too great a thought to it. Pushing that last sight of Susan’s tear-ravaged face from his mind, he looked down at the oily green swell rising and sinking between the troopship and the quayside. It was like some slow-breathing animal waiting to engulf them all. From it rose a reek of decayed seaweed, engine oil and bilge water which he could see gushing in small spurts from an outlet below him amid a wreath of steam.
Gaining a position against the deck rail as he and his platoon made it into the ship, he leaned over to watch the water still heaving and sinking, heaving and sinking below the slow climbing of soldiers up the three sets of gangways.
‘Get yer arse away from there,’ Sergeant Pegg interrupted his reverie. ‘All of yer – this way.’