Lizzie, who knew that not everyone would be kind to Georgia, hoped that confidence would stand her in good stead for the future. But she began to take the children out more, and fine weekend afternoons would find them away from the streets, she and Celia taking turns to push the pram and the children cavorting beside them.
Everyone began feeling more hopeful in 1943, especially after the fall of Mussolini on the 25
th
July. Everyone knew then, the surrender of the Italians was a foregone conclusion. ‘No fight in the Eyeties,’ Barry remarked.
‘Bloody good job,’ Violet retorted, ‘for there’s plenty of fight left in the Germans and bloody Nips.’
Violet was right, but everywhere there were successes, the Allies making inroads in Africa and the United States, taking over the Philippine Islands one by one. Italy officially surrendered on 3
rd
September, and just a few days later the paper reported the United States and Australian Forces in the Pacific had invaded New Guinea. In October, letters from Scott ceased.
At first, Lizzie wasn’t too concerned, for his letters were spasmodic. Sometimes she’d have none for a couple of weeks or more and then a batch together. A month had passed before Lizzie received the letter from Scott’s mother, and although she’d had many her hands felt clammy as she picked the envelope up from the mat.
Dear Lizzie,
I am writing to you with tragic news, for I received a telegram today to say that Scott is missing, presumed dead. I cannot begin to express the extent of grief I feel. Scott was my son, my friend, the rock I leant on, the one all the family looked up to, and he was loved so very, very much.
He talked of you often, my dear, in his letters, and I know he loved you too. Maybe he never told you. He never told me in so many words, but I know him so well and I could read between the lines, and I thought you had a right to know.
I know too, he was sending an allotment of his wages to you each week and I will continue to do that. I know he would want that done…
There was more, but Lizzie couldn’t read it. Her eyes were blurred with tears and she crushed the letter in her hand and sank onto the chair. She felt so low and depressed with the news and yet there was something else disturbing in the letter. Had Scott really felt something other than friendship? And had she? She didn’t really know the answer to either, and it wasn’t as if it made any difference now anyway.
In this frame of mind she was almost unaffected by the news announced from the pulpit the following Sunday that Flo had died.
‘Gladys was glaring at me,’ she told Celia on her return from Mass, ‘and a couple of her cronies too, but for God’s sake the woman was evil and no great loss to society.’
‘I’d go further,’ Celia said, ‘and say the world will be a better place without her.’
‘And,’ Lizzie continued, ‘I don’t care what anyone thinks, I’m not going to her funeral; though I might trot along later and dance a jig on her grave.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Celia said with a laugh. ‘Let’s do the whole hog and make it a highland fling.’
‘You’re on,’ said Lizzie.
‘The pair of you are clean barmy,’ Violet put in, but she was pleased to see a smile on Lizzie’s face, for she’d been more upset about Scott’s death than she let on. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if Neil will be at the funeral.’
‘Oh God,’ Lizzie cried. ‘That’s a good reason not to go, for if I see his mean, sneaky face near me again, I won’t be responsible for my actions.’
‘We’d have to go armed with a poker and give him another crack of it.’
‘Aye, and do the job properly and kill him outright this time,’ Lizzie said. ‘And then we could roll him in on top of his mother.’
Lizzie’s laughter had a hint of hysteria to it, but Violet didn’t wonder at it and hoped her life would be smoother from now on.
Tressa came back in November, when everyone was aware that something big was happening on the south coast. No one knew anything; the south coast was out of bounds to civilians and a veil of secrecy drawn over it, and yet by the New Year rumours were abounding.
‘They say the roads are impassable, blocked with army trucks and such like,’ Celia told them.
‘That’s what I heard an’ all,’ Violet said. ‘And the fields covered with tents and the place full of soldiers.’
‘They’re building up for invasion,’ Lizzie predicted. ‘They have to be. Oh God, another Dunkirk.’
‘Come on, girl, it needn’t be like that,’ Violet said. ‘They’ll be better prepared this time.’
‘And so will the Germans,’ Lizzie retorted. ‘I mean, they’ll hardly stand on the beaches and shake hands with the invading armies. No, Violet, whichever way you look at it there will be great loss of life.’
Violet was silent, knowing Lizzie spoke the truth.
And yet nothing happened, though everything seemed to be heading south. Tressa came to see her with four-year-old Nuala, the only one not at school. As the youngest at home, she was delighted to find Georgia was younger than she was and the two little girls got along famously.
Lizzie was glad to see her cousin. She also saw that Tressa, freed from the rigours of a pregnancy every year or so, had begun to get a grip on her life. She’d had her hair cut and a Marcel wave put into it and had begun using a little make-up.
‘Only what I bought in Ireland,’ she said when Lizzie commented on it. ‘God knows what I’ll do when this lot is finished. It’s hard to get a bit of lipstick here.’
‘They probably think lipstick isn’t necessary for the nation’s survival.’
‘Probably not,’ Tressa said with a chuckle and a nudge in Lizzie’s ribs that reminded Lizzie of the time they’d been young girls together. ‘But it gives a girl a lift.’ She patted her ample waist and said, ‘This has got to go too. It’s all right Mike saying there’s more for me to get hold of, but God—I’m beginning to look like Two Ton Tessie. Anyway, Mike will find me half the woman I was when…I suppose I should say “if” he comes back from this.’
‘Course he’ll come back.’
‘There’s no “of course” in this war, Lizzie,’ Tressa said.
And Lizzie was silent. There was no certainty Mike would return. She remembered how she had felt when Scott had been killed, and yet the man was nothing to her really. How would Tressa feel if Mike, her first and only love and the father of her six children, was to fall in battle? And yet she wouldn’t be in a unique position.
Lizzie decided to change the subject to prevent Tressa getting thoroughly depressed and they started to discuss Georgia.
‘Do you still hear from the people in America?’ Tressa asked.
‘Aye. Well, Scott’s mother writes a fair bit, and in nearly every letter she asks for photographs of Georgia. She even sent me a present of a camera. I suppose she thought I hadn’t got one because I won’t send her any photos.’
‘Why not?’
‘Look, Tressa,’ Lizzie explained. ‘They’re moneyed people. God, you should see the lavish gifts she sent for Georgia’s birthday and Christmas. The last was a dolls’ house. It was in a kit and Celia and I spent ages putting it together, and it turned out to be an enormous place with furniture too, all beautifully made, and wee dolls. I tell you, I thought Niamh’s eyes would pop out of her head and she’s played with it far more than Georgia.’
‘What’s wrong with a gift like that?’
‘I’m afraid that Scott’s mother will try and take Georgia away from me.’
‘Would she?’
Lizzie shrugged. ‘Scott says not,’ she said, ‘but people are funny. I mean, whatever way the child was conceived, she is part of Matt, the only child he will ever have. Oh, Tressa, I went through so much for this child, I think I’d die if she was taken from me.’
‘Ah Lizzie.’
‘No, I mean it Tressa,’ Lizzie said fiercely. ‘I know people are losing their lives daily on the battlefield, and I know too your Mike is in the firing line, but I also know as long as the war goes on Georgia is safe.’ She turned worried eyes to Tressa. ‘I know it’s selfish,’ she said, ‘but, in a way, the longer the war goes on the better. Sarah is kind, though, and every month forty dollars come for me with a wee note. I didn’t want to accept it at first, only she said Scott would expect it of her and it was him that started it. He said Niamh would think it odd if he was to send nothing when Georgia was supposed to be his child.’
‘Aye, she would, very knowing is that child.’
‘Too knowing,’ Lizzie said with feeling. ‘I said to her yesterday, she’s so sharp she’ll have to watch she doesn’t cut herself.’
When Lizzie heard the waves and waves of a planes flying overhead on the evening of 5
th
June, she knew with dreaded certainty that the invasion was imminent. She was out in the yard with everyone else, watching, for as Minnie remarked, ‘It’s like they’re emptying every aerodrome in the bloody country.’
The news broke the following evening with a broadcast from Reuters News Agency:
’The official communiqué states—under the command of General Eisenhower—Allied Naval Forces began landing Allied Armies this morning on the northern coast of France.’
So that was it, the invasion had happened and everyone knew this was make or break, victory or defeat. There was no middle way.
The scale of the massive operation unfolded gradually as everyone scoured papers and listened to every news bulletin in the quest for news. It seemed Minnie was right about emptying the aerodromes, for 487 squadrons of the International Air Force had marshalled eleven thousand, five hundred planes.
The British people weren’t told of the bloodbath, the carnage, the beaches littered with bodies, though they weren’t stupid and the sight of the telegraph boy delivering tragic news compounded people’s fears. And
yet the sheer scale of the invasion awed most listening to or reading reports.
But the allied troops were pushing forward too. Pictures in the papers showed liberated towns and grateful people lining the streets to cheer them on, and hope began to flourish in many a heart that the end of this dreaded war was in sight.
And then on the 13
th
June a pilotless rocket landed in Kent. It did little damage and few knew then of the new danger that the Londoners would have to face. Called V1s, but termed ‘doodlebugs’ because of the high-pitched buzzing sound that would cut out seconds before impact, they were twenty-five foot long and carried a ton of explosives in their noses.
When these doodlebugs were joined by V2s that were completely silent, the effect on Londoners’ nerves was catastrophic, especially as they’d barely got over the Blitz. There was a second evacuation of men and women as well as children, all going northwards in an attempt to find somewhere safer to live.
But, this apart, everyone was feeling more hopeful and many sentences began with, ‘After the war…’ However, Lizzie wasn’t the only one who remembered the slump. Surely to God that couldn’t happen again. All those lives would be thrown away needlessly if the future wasn’t brighter for those that were left.
It was the Red Army that found Hitler dead in his bunker alongside the body of his mistress Eva Braun, who he had married just the previous day.
On 2
nd
May 1945, Berlin surrendered to the Red Army, and by 7
th
May the war in Europe was officially over. The people went wild with joy: the church bells chimed out the joyful news, bonfires were lit on every hilltop and many a bombed site in the cities. Shopkeepers produced fireworks they’d kept for years for such an event and people pooled resources to have street parties for everyone. Those that began in courtyards quickly spilled onto the streets, where people joined together in jubilation and happiness that the dark days were behind them.
Lizzie took joy in her children she had grouped around her and was sorry for Violet, who’d miss Colin afresh, and Minnie, whose husband Charlie was one of the D-day casualties. The death toll had been colossal and the bodies of Stuart and Roy were just two of the thousands left on the beaches of Normandy. Neil hadn’t been killed, but had lost his left arm above the elbow
and his left leg above the knee. The whole left side of his body had nearly been blasted away, and while the news brought Lizzie no satisfaction, she felt no pity either.
All in all, after V-E Day there was a bit of an anticlimax feeling. Lizzie felt it, for although the blackout had been lifted and the threat of bombs was no more, everything went on as before. She was also aware that the war with Japan was not over, and wondered bleakly one day, hearing fresh reports of battles in the paper, how long that carnage would linger.
Then, on 6
th
August, the Americans dropped a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The British people were used to bombs—God knew, they had had their fill of them and thought they’d seen them all: highexplosive bombs, cluster bombs, parachute bombs. But no one in the world had ever seen a bomb of this magnitude.
One observer, placed in the rear of the plane, wrote of what he saw after the bomb was dropped, and this was reported in the paper:
There was a giant ball of fire, as if the bowels of the earth were belching forth enormous smoke rings. Next, there was a pillar of purple fire tenthousand foot-high, shooting skywards with enormous speed. By the time our ship [aircraft] had done another turn towards the atomic explosion, the purple flame had reached the level of our altitude. Only forty-five seconds had passed. Awestruck, we watched it shoot upwards like a
meteor from earth instead of outer space, becoming more alive as it climbed skywards through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species being born right before our incredulous eyes.
‘Oh my God,’ Violet said, looking at the pictures in the paper. ‘Them poor, poor sods.’
‘Seventy-eight thousand of them, by all accounts,’ Barry added. ‘But don’t forget, American soldiers are dying every day, and if this shortens the war it’s got to be a good thing.’
‘But still,’ Lizzie said. ‘Seventy-eight thousand.’
‘It’s hard to visualise that number of people,’ Celia commented.
‘Not half,’ Barry said. ‘But surely to God they’ll surrender now?’
But Japan didn’t, not even when a second smaller bomb was dropped in Nagasaki on 9
th
August and killed thirty-five thousand people. And so, on the 13
th
August, a massed armada of one thousand, six hundred allied aircraft attacked Tokyo and at last Japan gave in. The war that had dragged on for six years was finally at an end.
‘Welcome Home’ banners fluttered from many windows that autumn, and the men began filtering back in their light grey, chalk-striped demob suits with the booklet on ‘Resettlement Advice’ to help them live on civvy street.
Violet’s daughter Carol came home too, but not for long as she was engaged to Gavin Honeyford, the young
pilot she’d brought home the Christmas Lizzie had brought Georgia back. ‘Didn’t you get civilian clothes?’ Celia asked her. ‘Like the men.’
‘Can you see women all settling for wearing the same dress?’ Carol said with a laugh. ‘We get clothing coupons and a bit of cash to buy our own stuff. Not that there’s much to choose.’
Carol was only too right. ‘And don’t you just hate the word utility?’ Celia said.
‘Oh, too right I do.’
It wasn’t just clothes in short supply, but foodstuffs too, and there was little in the way of festive fare. Lizzie looked forward to the first Christmas of peacetime with little enthusiasm. Sarah McFarland sent a dress to Georgia, based on the one Shirley Temple wore in
The Good Ship Lollipop.
Georgia looked exquisite in it for it was basically white. The bodice was a sailorsuit design and the skirt had three petticoats of lace to make it stand out. Inside the box was a card and money for them all and a request to see a photograph of Georgia wearing the dress.
‘I don’t think it’s much to ask,’ Celia said. ‘Pity it won’t be in colour now.’
Lizzie thought so too and Scott’s mother had been very generous, and so she spent some of the dollars on taking Georgia to a proper photographer because he was able to take a coloured photograph of her. She used her Box Brownie to take photographs of family and friends, including Tressa and her children, for she wanted to show Sarah that the child was happy and settled into this life and surrounded by love.
Sarah knew as soon as she looked at the photographs what Lizzie was saying. She had secretly harboured a dream that Georgia would grow up with them one day, but now she saw and accepted that could never be. She couldn’t pluck a child from a family where she was so happy, and she could only hope that Lizzie might bring her over to see them when the world was a more settled place.
It wasn’t such a settled place in Birmingham, where too many people had lost everything belonging to them and taken shelter with friends or family. There was terrific overcrowding, while other families were camping out in deserted houses or church halls, and many servicemen came home horrified to find their families living in such conditions.
Prefabricated houses began being erected as a stopgap measure. ‘What are prefabricated houses?’ Celia asked, scanning the paper.
‘They’re built in sections and assembled on the site,’ Lizzie told her. ‘Not unlike that dolls’ house Sarah McFarland sent from America that we had to put together. They don’t need foundations. People say they’re lovely inside, and with a bit of garden for the kids. I tell you, I wouldn’t mind one myself.’
‘People say they’re for servicemen’s families first.’
‘I know,’ Lizzie said. ‘Fair enough, I suppose.’
Just then Violet popped her head around the door. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘don’t say I never give you owt,’ and from behind her back she produced something that hadn’t been on sale in the shops for six years.
‘Bananas! Oh, Violet.’
‘It weren’t me,’ Violet explained, ‘it was our Carol. Couldn’t resist them when she saw them hanging up. Wonder what the nippers will think of them?’
‘The older two might remember,’ Lizzie said. ‘Niamh, anyway.’
But Niamh didn’t and all three children regarded the bananas with suspicion. In her quest to eke out the rations and still feed her children nutritiously, Lizzie had produced many an odd concoction, and in their opinion this banana might be just one more.
‘What are they?’
‘I thought you might remember. They’re bananas.’
Niamh shook her head, and Tom asked, ‘What do they taste like?’
‘It’s difficult to explain,’ Lizzie said. ‘Anyway, you have to take the skin off first.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll show you,’ Lizzie said. The children’s faces were a study as she unzipped Georgia’s banana and cut it into pieces on the plate. They watched more intently as Georgia picked up a piece and popped it in her mouth. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘S’nice.’
The two older ones lost no time in removing the skin from their own bananas and devouring them, and afterwards declared bananas were the best fruit they’d ever tasted and when could they have them again.
‘They’re easy to please,’ Lizzie told Violet later. ‘They don’t see the headache I have each day to put food on the table—and now to talk about rationing bread! It’s madness.’
The idea of bread-rationing had caused a national
outcry, for as many mothers said, you can fill the family up with bread, especially as butter, margarine and cooking fat were cut to wartime levels, and all meat, including poultry and even eggs, were to be considered luxury items. ‘Make-do meals’, were reissued in papers and magazines and read out on the wireless.
The only bright light on the horizon was the introduction of family allowances for every child after the firstborn, five shillings for each one, and paid to mothers in an order book that was due to come in to force in August. There was also talk of a National Health Service where visits and treatments from doctors, dentists and opticians were going to be free.
‘Be bloody marvellous if it does come off,’ Violet said.
‘Aye,’ Lizzie agreed. ‘And rationing can’t last forever. Tell you the truth, I’m thinking of getting a job in September when Georgia starts school.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Violet said. ‘When our Carol gets married next month and moves down to bloody London, I’ll not know what to do with myself.
‘No sign of a man on the horizon for Celia yet?’ she added.
Lizzie shook her head. ‘She still goes dancing and to the pictures, but she says most men she knows or she’s heard about have been untrustworthy.’
‘God, girl, she couldn’t have had that much experience,’ Violet remarked. ‘She was only a bit of a kid when she was put in that bloody convent.’
‘I know, and that’s the problem,’ Lizzie said. ‘Some of the tales the girls told us, well, you wouldn’t credit it and it’s put her off all men.’
‘Yeah. Seems to have affected you as well. Never go anyroad but out with me a time or two.’
‘I’ve got the children, Violet.’
‘Oh that’s it, is it? I’ve got kids and my life’s over?’
Lizzie grinned at her. ‘Shut up, you. Stop nagging me. I’m not interested in any man and I can’t see the situation changing, so don’t hold your breath for me to go floating up the aisle.’
In early September 1946, Georgia started school as she would be five in November. It would be her first real foray out of the streets and courts where she was known and accepted. Now she had to stand alone against people who might pick on her because she was different.
There was no way Lizzie could prepare her for this, but she needn’t have worried. Both Tom from the junior playground and Niamh from the seniors kept a weather eye on their little half-sister. Niamh ripped verbally into any she saw tormenting Georgia, while Tom was more physical. When he saw three bigger boys picking on her one day when she’d been at school less than a week, calling her names, pushing her over and laughing at her tears, his blood boiled and he let fly at them. Before the chant of ‘Fight, fight, fight,’ had alerted the teachers, one boy had a black eye and another a bloodied nose. It was worth three strokes of the cane on each hand, Tom thought, but he was no sneak and wouldn’t say why he’d attacked the boys. However, there were plenty who would, and Mr Steele thought he should nip racist attacks in the bud and the three tormentors were given the same punishment as Tom.
‘I’ll get you for this, Gillespie,’ one of the boys said, leaving the headmaster’s office holding his burning hands under his armpits.
‘Oh yeah? You and whose army?’
‘I’ll get my big brother on you.’
‘Well get him,’ said Tom. ‘He’ll think you’re terrific, won’t he, when I say you was picking on a little girl half your size. You just leave our Georgia alone or you’ll get more of the same.’
After that Georgia had no further trouble, and Lizzie guessed much by the grazes on Tom’s face and cane marks on his hands. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Tom said. ‘Not really. Something had to be sorted out. Now, it is.’
Lizzie asked no further questions and was just glad Georgia had such great protectors in her two older children, who loved her so much.
By early October, Lizzie was alone in the house, and so far her and Violet had done nothing about looking for a job. This might be a good day to start, she thought, for it was fine and quite warm, with shafts of autumn sunlight lighting up the yard. ‘I’m sure if I’m busier, with less time on my hands, I’ll feel better,’ she told herself.
There was a knock on the door at just that moment.
Lizzie sighed, wondering if it was the priest, virtually the only one who knocked on doors, and she held herself straighter and told herself she wouldn’t be intimidated or browbeaten by the man.
When she opened the door she was so surprised she
had to hold on to the door frame for support. ‘So…Scott?’ It was said hesitantly and questioningly. The man was said to be dead, and this wasn’t the Scott she remembered. Scott had been a fine build of a man, strong and broad without being fat, his face open and honest and his curls jet-black. This man appeared to have shrunk, his face was heavily lined and his hair peppered with grey.
Pity flowed all through Lizzie as Scott said, ‘Aye, no wonder you are surprised. I’m not half the man I was.’
‘But it’s not only that,’ she protested, drawing him inside the house as she spoke. ‘Your mother said…I had a letter…’
‘I know,’ Scott replied. ‘But I wasn’t dead, though I might well have been when I was captured by the Japs. They didn’t bother informing anyone, probably because they didn’t think many of us would survive, and a fair few didn’t.’
‘Oh, Scott, I can hardly believe it,’ Lizzie said. She’d thought this man dead and gone, lost to her, lost to them all, and for him to be here, alive! God, it was wonderful, marvellous! She wanted to touch him all over to convince herself he was real, hold him close, even kiss those lips. She flushed with embarrassment at the thought, for whatever his mother had written about his feelings for her, he’d never shown her he thought of her that way.
He looked at Lizzie and the pain in his eyes was so evident she forgot all her reservations and put her arms around him and felt him sag against her with a sigh of contentment. ‘When did you get out?’