Far From Home (41 page)

Polly put the brushes and polish away, screwed up the dirty paper with that pervert’s face on the front page and committed it to the fire in the range. The all-clear had just sounded and it was time to make some cocoa so that when the others came in they could have a nightcap to beat off the chill.

Less than twenty minutes later, she heard the sound of a heavy engine rumbling to a halt outside, and the laughter and chatter of many voices. Rushing to open the front door, she was met by such a curious sight she burst out laughing.

A fire engine was parked outside the house, and Peggy was protesting uproariously as Jim hoisted her out of the driver’s cab and over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Ron was riding shotgun on the back with the ladders and hoses, and he clambered down to pluck Mrs Finch from the cab and carry her, twittering and flustered, up the front steps. Wearing a fireman’s helmet, Cissy giggled as she slid from the cab and showed rather a lot of leg to a very admiring
fire
officer, and Anne was in the arms of another sturdy man and blushing furiously as he set her gently on her feet.

‘Put me down this instant, Jim Reilly,’ laughed Peggy as Jim carried her up the steps. ‘Everyone can see my knickers.’

‘To be sure they’re very fine knickers,’ he chortled. ‘And a very fine arse inside them too.’ He patted said arse and gave it a pinch.

Peggy yelped and kicked as she beat her fists on his back, her face scarlet. ‘Put me down this instant,’ she ordered furiously.

He swung her down as if she weighed nothing, and carried her in his arms the rest of the way into the house, then dumped her unceremoniously in her favourite chair. After giving her a hearty kiss on her cheek, he began to rummage in the dresser cupboard. ‘Time for a nightcap,’ he said, his voice slightly slurred by the amount of beer he’d already sunk.

Polly heard all this while she waited for the others. Mrs Finch was all of a dither as she straightened her hat and thanked Ron. ‘I didn’t realise you were so strong,’ she said admiringly. ‘Goodness me, I’m feeling quite light-headed.’

Ron grunted something unintelligible and stomped into the kitchen in search of another drink.

Cissy was still flirting as Anne thanked the men and slowly climbed the steps. ‘They were so kind to give us a lift home,’ she murmured happily as she stretched her back. ‘I do hope they don’t get into trouble, but the trolleybus doesn’t go after ten and none of us wanted to leave the party early.’

Cissy gave the fireman back his helmet and rushed up the steps. With a broad grin, she waved goodbye to him. ‘Gosh,’ she breathed. ‘That was fun. I’ll have to write to Bob and Charlie and tell them all about it. They’ll be ever so envious.’

Now everyone had come home, it appeared they were not at all interested in cocoa. Jim had found the last of Aleksy’s vodka and was slopping it into glasses as Polly returned to the kitchen.

‘Before you drink that,’ she said, cutting through the babble, ‘I have some wonderful news to tell you.’ She grinned as silence fell and they all turned to look rather blearily at her. ‘Alice is alive, and I’m going to Scotland tomorrow to be with her.’

She was hugged and kissed by Peggy, Cissy and Anne, and Jim and Ron gave her an awkward pat on the back as they congratulated her.

‘This calls for a toast,’ roared Jim, who’d already toasted just about everything he could think of tonight. ‘Here’s to Alice Brown. Slainte!’

It was some time before Polly could escape to her room. She really needed to get a good night’s sleep before her long journey, but Peggy’s family had been so lovely in their joy at her news that it would have been rude not to have had one or two drinks with them as they talked over the wedding and her plans for the future.

As she lay in bed and listened to the noise slowly die down, and the various bedroom doors close, she wondered what her future held. To go to Scotland certainly; but then what? Adam still needed her – did she dare bring Alice here – or was it safer to leave her where she was? Peggy couldn’t guarantee there would be room for her if she came back after too long, which would mean finding a new billet and one that accepted children if she dared to bring Alice with her. Her head and heart tussled with the worry of it – it was a huge dilemma, and one that she was in no fit state to solve tonight.

She was nowhere near sleep for she was too overwrought and excited, the alcohol making her head buzz. She switched on the bedside lamp when she heard someone creep upstairs and into the bathroom, and climbed out of bed, wrapped herself in her dressing gown and waited until Danuta crept in some twenty minutes later. ‘It’s all right,’ she murmured. ‘I’m not asleep.’

Danuta dumped her coat on the chair and sat down to untie her sturdy boots. ‘Well, I will sleep the moment my head hits the pillow,’ she said through a vast yawn. ‘There was a terrible accident, and we have spent most of the night digging people out and getting them to hospital.’

‘But I didn’t hear any bombs hit the town.’ Polly drew her knees to her chin and hugged them as she sat on the other bed.

‘They didn’t,’ said Danuta, keeping her back to Polly as she stripped off her sweater, dungarees and liberty bodice before slipping on the winceyette nightgown Peggy had given her. ‘A bombed-out house had not been made properly safe and it fell on top of the house next door, which then fell on the next. It was a terrible mess, but we managed to get everyone out, even though two of them were dead.’

‘How awful,’ Polly breathed, ‘and to think that only a short distance away Peggy and the others were celebrating a wedding.’

Danuta, still shielded by the nightgown, stepped out of her knickers and slung them towards the rest of her things that were now strewn across the chair. ‘How did it go?’

Polly frowned as Danuta moved across the bedroom. The light from the bedside lamp was meagre, and the nightdress was voluminous, but it couldn’t quite hide the fact that Danuta seemed to have put on a suspicious amount of inches around her middle.

‘It went very well,’ she replied distractedly. ‘Everyone came home in a fire engine, and we sat up drinking until gone midnight to celebrate.’

Danuta perched on her bed and frowned. ‘You celebrate too? But you do not know this Sally, I think. She live here before I come.’

Polly decided the light had been playing tricks with her. She grinned at Danuta. ‘I was celebrating something far more important,’ she said. ‘My Alice is alive, Danuta. She was alive all the time, and tomorrow,’ she glanced at the clock, ‘no, today, I’m going to Scotland to be with her.’

Danuta leapt off her bed and flung her arms around Polly and, as the two young women embraced, Polly knew the light had not been playing tricks. They eventually parted and, as Polly tried to answer Danuta’s bombardment of questions, her gaze kept returning to the other girl’s midriff.

Danuta eventually became aware of her scrutiny and hastily clambered into bed, pulling the covers to her chin. ‘I’m very tired,’ she said, turning off the light. ‘I must sleep now.’

Polly’s whisper floated into the silence. ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’

Danuta shifted in her bed and didn’t reply for a while, and when she did, it was on a sigh. ‘Yes.’

‘How far along are you? Five, six months?’

‘Five months,’ she admitted softly. She sat up and switched the light back on. Her green eyes were pleading for understanding. ‘Please say nothing. I must keep this baby secret for as long as I can.’

Polly questioned her gently but firmly about her antenatal care. ‘Well,’ she said when she was satisfied Danuta was doing all the right things, ‘at least you’re not leaving anything to chance. But you’re entitled to extra allowances of milk and cheese and all sorts of things now. You will have to sort that out, Danuta – and tell Peggy.’

‘I am afraid she will tell me to leave,’ said the other girl softly. ‘It is a big disgrace, I think, to have child and no husband.’

Polly heard the quiver in her voice and her heart went out to her. She’d been hiding her pregnancy for months, and despite all her steeliness and verve, she was just a frightened girl with no one of her own to turn to in her time of need.

‘I’m sure it won’t come to that,’ she soothed, perching on Danuta’s bed. ‘Peggy isn’t the sort of woman to turn away someone who needs help. She’s far too soft-hearted.’

‘But what will happen when the baby comes? I cannot expect her to let us stay.’

‘I think you need to talk to her – and soon. I’m sure everything will be fine.’ Polly took Danuta’s trembling hand. ‘I’m sorry I can’t be with you for a while, but you’ve got friends here, Danuta. They’ll look after you and the baby.’

‘I wish Jean-Luc was here,’ Danuta murmured, the tears glistening on her cheeks.

‘Where is he? Back in Poland?’

Danuta shook her head, the tears running faster now. ‘He is dead. The Gestapo take him.’

Polly held her as she wept, thinking how right it was for her to give comfort when Danuta had been so kind to her during those awful weeks when Alice was thought to be dead. She waited for the storm to subside and handed her a clean handkerchief. ‘Do you want to talk about it, Danuta? Or is it too painful?’

Danuta blew her nose and took a deep breath. ‘It is painful, yes, but I have learnt to live with it, and now it does not twist like a knife so sharply in my heart.’ Her eyelids were swollen as she looked at Polly. ‘I may tell you? It is not a pretty story, but I have kept it inside for so long, it needs to come out.’

Polly nodded, dreading what she might hear, but knowing she couldn’t let this girl down. By the sound of it she’d been through a great deal more than Polly could begin to imagine, and her kindness deserved to be reciprocated.

‘Take your time,’ she murmured, holding her close. ‘We have the rest of the night.’

Danuta felt the baby move inside her as she tried to control her emotions. The memories were flooding back, sharply cruel and bringing a return of the pain she’d thought she’d vanquished.

‘I met Jean-Luc in Warsaw before the war. He was a medical student, and I was training to be a nurse. His mother was French, his father was a Pole, but his grandparents were originally from Germany, so he was fluent in all three languages. Jean-Luc’s father’s family had moved to Warsaw many years before. They were Jews.’

She took a deep breath. ‘I am Catholic, and both families did not like us to be together. But for me and Jean-Luc it didn’t matter. We were in love.’

She could feel her face lighting up as she thought back to those far-off days – days of youthful
enthusiasm
and laughter, days when they’d believed they had the world at their feet, and a whole lifetime to live out their dreams.

‘We had such plans, Polly,’ she said softly. ‘Such wonderful plans. We would get our qualifications and marry, and Jean-Luc would set up his own clinic with me working as his nurse. We needed money to do this, so we were still working at the hospital when the Germans came last September.’

Danuta fell silent, the bitterness caught in her throat as the terrifying images of tanks rumbling through the cobbled streets returned. She could almost hear the shouts of the soldiers and the death rattle of their machine guns as they enforced their presence and their power.

‘You don’t have to do this, Danuta,’ said Polly softly.

‘Yes, yes I do,’ she said, her voice husky with the tears she refused to let fall. ‘I must tell it all.’ She grasped Polly’s outstretched hand and closed her eyes. ‘When the Germans came, Jean-Luc was forbidden to work in the hospital, or even run his own practice. He and his family were forced to wear the yellow star on their coats – and then they and all the other Jews in Warsaw were sent to live in the ghetto.’

Danuta shivered. ‘Jean-Luc was very brave; he came into the city through the underground passages they had dug, looking for food, blankets, medicines – anything he could find to help his family get through that first terrible winter.’

She angrily blinked away the tears. ‘Things got worse, and I was forced to leave my work at the hospital because I had loved him, and the Germans called me a whore – a Jew’s whore. But for Jean-Luc it was more terrible, and soon it was known by all in Warsaw that the ghetto was being cleared – whole families taken away in trucks to the railway station. None of us knew where they had been sent.’

She took another deep breath and battled to keep her composure. ‘My brother’s wife Anjelika and her little girl were taken too,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t know why. Perhaps she’d been caught stealing food, or insulted a German officer who tried to pick her up – or maybe someone had falsely accused her of being a Jew. Neighbour informed against neighbour in return for scraps of food that winter – they didn’t care that their lies cost others their lives. It was sometimes the only way to survive.’

‘Dear God,’ breathed Polly.

‘God had very little to do with it,’ said Danuta bitterly. ‘He turned his back on us – wouldn’t hear our prayers or strike out at our enemy. We were on our own.’

She gathered her thoughts and took a moment to find calm again. ‘Jean-Luc knew what was happening, but there was nothing he could do. After his parents were taken, he and several of the other men escaped the ghetto and joined the resistance. He sent me a message, and I went to meet him. I had no reason to stay in Warsaw. My family were gone.’

‘You were in the resistance?’ Polly stared at her, wide-eyed.