Only a Mother Knows (2 page)

Thankfully Alice was the least of Olive’s worries at the moment. It was becoming more and more difficult to satisfy her pristine requirements around the house, with cleaning utensils being rationed and requisitioned for the war effort, and with dust and smoke everywhere it was a job and a half to keep things as clean as she would like. With all these things vying for attention, in the end, it just seemed easier to let Tilly have her few days with Drew – and now she wondered what she ever worried about.

Tilly had looked so happy when Olive said yes. Starry-eyed, she promised they would have separate rooms and a landlady who would give Hitler a run for his money. Everything would be proper and above board, there would be no hanky-panky. Olive gave an involuntary, indignant shiver at the thought, and … if she was honest, she had a sneaking regard for her daughter who was being open about her devoted feelings for the man she loved. To say nothing of the decent way she had been brought up; her daughter was a credit to any mother.

Her only nagging concern was that Drew would still love and respect Tilly when she came home. But why shouldn’t he? she thought, knowing her daughter was head-in-the-clouds happy with adoration. Although Olive realised it was possible that Tilly’s judgement could be clouded, she also understood that wartime had a way of clarifying one’s heartfelt emotions. Life was precious and, above all, love was precious too. It must be nurtured and protected at all costs, Olive sighed.

‘Well, let’s see if she does know how to behave when she’s away from home,’ Nancy Black said, her eyebrow cocked, ‘away from the confines of a protective mother’s watchful eye.’ Straightening her back Nancy clasped her hands under her voluminous bust, her mouth scrunched like a wrinkled prune.

‘Time will tell, Nancy,’ Olive said suddenly, not really caring what her neighbour thought any more.

‘Well I never!’ Nancy exclaimed, blowing a long stream of outraged air from ballooning cheeks.

‘Oh go on, you must have done!’ Olive, feeling reckless now, bit her lips together to stop herself from saying anything else she might repent later, and for once Nancy seemed dumbstruck, lost for words. If it were any other time Olive would have been thrilled. But all too soon Nancy recovered her equilibrium and sallied forth regardless.

‘Well,’ she gasped, ‘I must say!’

‘Yes, Nancy, I know you must and everybody else knows it too.’ Olive could not stop herself now, her words, like water through a ruptured dam, bursting uncontrollably forth. ‘And let me tell you something, you are an interfering busybody whom everybody tries to avoid, and if it’s all the same to you I’ll bid you good day!’ At that Olive pulled on her gloves and, with her head high, she slammed her front gate firmly behind her and marched straight-backed up the street. Nobody, but nobody, was going to cast aspersions on her daughter.

Olive had just reached the top of the street when she literally bumped into Sergeant Archie Dawson, who was ambling around the corner. She was heartily glad that Nancy had retreated into her own house as he caught her deftly around the waist to stop her stumbling into the road and into the path of a horse and cart. Olive could imagine only too well what her vindictive neighbour would insinuate about her innocent friendship with the upstanding policeman. Feeling the warmth of colour rising to her cheeks, she chided herself for being so gauche. She wasn’t a girl any more, with a head full of starry dreams; she was a grown woman with a grown-up daughter … who was having starry dreams of her own right now.

‘Oh, hello, Archie, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going.’ Olive could feel her heartbeat quicken and reprimanded herself for being foolish. However, she didn’t want to dwell on what Archie, a married man and serving police sergeant, would think. Instead she concentrated on a couple of children stretching a length of rope across the street and wondered where they came about such a good length, as everything was needed for the war effort.

‘Hello, Olive,’ Archie Dawson said with that usual warmth in his kind, mellow voice as he held her securely until the cart had passed. ‘You look a little flushed, is everything okay?’ He used the latest expression that seemed to be doing the rounds due to the huge influx of American soldiers, who the young ones referred to as GIs on account of the initials on the padded shoulders of their very smart uniforms which stood for Government Issue.

Olive smiled. She never would have imagined someone as upright and respectable as Sergeant Dawson using American slang, but it showed that he was keeping up with the times and that he wasn’t as buttoned-up as the impression he gave to the rest of the community. And if she was honest, she thought it sounded quite good coming from him.

‘Oh, I’ve just had a bit of a run-in with Nancy Black,’ Olive explained. ‘That woman would try the patience of angels.’

‘Oh, you don’t have to say any more, the old witch gave me chapter and verse about …’ He stopped abruptly and Olive could see he was trying to be tactful when he continued ‘… about Tilly and Drew carrying a suitcase and going off in a taxi cab. But we’ll talk no more about it,’ Archie Dawson said gallantly, taking his hand from her waist and giving a low rumbling laugh that seemed to soothe Olive’s bubbling indignation. ‘Suffice it to say, Olive, you are right, she would try the serenity of a saint.’

‘Oh, Archie.’ Olive smiled for the first time that day and in doing so felt all her tension slip away.

‘Not that I’m saying you are not a saint, Olive, you are a very good woman, hardworking, a pillar of the community …’

‘Oh, Archie, you flatter me, I’m nothing of the sort,’ she laughed in that carefree way he always provoked in her. ‘You will have my head swelling.’ Olive could feel little sparks of delight shoot through her. However, they were quickly followed by a heaviness that reminded her she was a busy widow and he was a respectably married man with a young, impressionable foster son who needed the close eye of a decent man to keep him on the straight and narrow. Suddenly, her attention was drawn to Nancy, who was now hurrying up the street resplendent in her carpet slippers.

‘Some of us haven’t got time to stand around indulging in idle chit-chat,’ Nancy said as she hurried by. ‘There is a queue forming outside the butcher’s shop; Mrs Finlay just told me he’s got oxtails on the go.’ In seconds she had passed them and was halfway up the street before turning and saying in a loud voice, ‘Oh, Sergeant! Was that your wife I heard calling just now?’

Olive and Archie watched in stunned silence as Nancy scurried past them in the direction of the butcher’s shop. As she disappeared their gaze remained fixed on the corner of the street. Then, slowly, they turned to each other and, just for a moment, there was a shared intimacy as their eyes locked. But then the spell was broken when Archie’s attention was caught by a passing pigeon swooping down and landing on the road. It was an insignificant thing, but effective in reminding Olive she had things to do.

The lingering connection between herself and Archie … Sergeant Dawson … all at once consumed her with an overwhelming feeling of guilt. However, if she was truly honest, only to herself, even the feeling of guilt was deliciously pleasurable. Turning away quickly now, afraid her thoughts would be plain for Archie to see, Olive took a deep breath, hoping it would calm her obvious raging flush of colour.

They had never done a thing wrong. Nothing improper had ever occurred between them. But Olive had been a married woman. She knew the delights of a man’s strong arms holding her securely through the night. She knew the intimacy of an unexpected stolen kiss. And if she was honest she was finding it increasingly difficult these days to disguise the longing she felt whenever Archie was anywhere near her.

But disguise her feelings she must as Archie was a married man and pillar of the community as well as a serving police sergeant who must uphold all that was decent in these tragic times, in a world gone mad through the ferocious needs of a madman. What would happen if they all gave in to their desires? Everything would fall apart in no time.

Olive drew her fervent thoughts to a close. There never would be anything between them, she knew. There couldn’t be. He had a foster son who looked up to him and needed a stable home life in these uncertain times and she had the girls to look after.

‘Well,’ Olive said, uncomfortable now, ‘I’d better be off before those oxtails have all gone. Good day, Sergeant Dawson.’

‘Good day, Olive,’ Archie said, and she could feel rather than see his lingering look as she hurried up the street.

Only a Mother Knows

‘Will you be able to manage at home on your own?’ Dulcie asked in a rare moment of empathy, taking hold of David’s hand. His head was bent and she couldn’t quite see his expression as the sun was in her eyes. Slowly, she tilted her face to one side to try to take a peek.

‘Under Mr McIndoe’s instructions,’ he said, ‘the hospital has put into place a system whereby I can manage at home with the help of a daily nurse.’

Dulcie noticed he looked rather pleased with the news. However, she wondered if it was too soon and couldn’t keep the erratic feelings of alarm from her voice. ‘I should think you need more time, David.’ It seemed to her that he hadn’t long been sitting out of his hospital bed and now they were throwing him onto the street.

‘Hardly,’ David smiled. ‘Anyway, I can’t wait to get back amongst my own things and wallow in my own bathtub without having a nurse wash me. A man has to have some privacy, you know.’ He gave a guarded smile and Dulcie watched him quietly for a while, as if seeing him for the first time. He was the bravest person she had ever met, though more reserved now, unlike Wilder, the brash, dare-devil fighter pilot who paid her little attention since they discovered her sister, Edith, hadn’t been killed after all and who made a beeline for Wilder every chance she got. Whereas David always listened patiently whilst she poured her heart out. Now why couldn’t Wilder be like that, she wondered.

‘Seen something you like?’ David said, offering a beaming smile.

‘Sorry, I was miles away.’ Dulcie laughed, knowing she’d always had a short attention span, especially when other people were talking about themselves, it was so boring. ‘You were saying?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ David, sitting regulation upright, smiled and slowly shook his head.

With one arm of his striped pyjamas pinned against his proud shoulder, so it didn’t flap around getting in his way, and a plaid woollen rug across his knees, he looked just like any other patient and that was how Dulcie treated him; nobody would have known they were socially and economically worlds apart. David, being landed gentry, was distinctly upper class whereas she came from a terraced house in the backstreets of the East End. But that didn’t bother David or Dulcie; they were just good friends and she knew he would always be there to listen to her grumbles.

‘Did I tell you that Wilder is acting very oddly at the moment, David? He never listens to a word I say.’ She gave a half-smile of confusion when David took a deep, long-suffering breath of air.

‘What?’ Dulcie asked when she saw him smile. However, saying nothing, he indicated with a nod of his head that she should continue, which Dulcie was only too happy to do.

‘It’s not fair, really it isn’t,’ she resumed and then, seeing David’s quizzical expression, she explained. ‘It’s that blousy cat, Edith.’

‘Your sister?’ asked David, his face the picture of easy-going amusement.

‘The same,’ said Dulcie, eager to get on with the character-slaying. ‘She’s got no right carrying on the way she does with my boyfriend and her being my sister makes it even worse. Oh, I can’t stand her at times, she’s always been Mum’s favourite and doesn’t she know it.’ Dulcie gave an emphatic nod of her perfectly styled curls and carried on. ‘Edith’s been getting away with all sorts from the minute she was born, Mum can’t see any wrong in her – well, she should look at her through my eyes, that’s all I can say!’

Dulcie was forced to stop talking in order to breathe as they sat together in the beautiful sunshine, David in his wheelchair and she on the wooden seat next to him in the gardens of the hospital where he was staying whilst he recovered from his injuries and subsequent amputation of his lower legs which had been badly damaged when the aircraft he been piloting had been shot down.

He viewed her with grateful amusement. Dulcie, his little cockney sparrow – if sparrow could ever be used to describe a girl as stunningly beautiful as blonde-haired, brown-eyed Dulcie, with her luscious curves combined with a manner that told a man that he’d be very lucky indeed if he ever got close to actually touching those curves. She always cheered him up and took his mind off his own problems when she made him laugh. There were no such things as molehills in Dulcie’s life; all upsets were mountains.

They had known each other since the beginning of the war, when he had been a good-looking young barrister with the world at his feet and a wife-to-be with an eye on his future title. Dulcie had been a shop girl working on the perfume counter at Selfridges and very ready, he knew, to flirt with the fiancé of her upper-class colleague to whom, she later admitted, she had taken a distinct dislike.

Now his wife was, like his lower legs, feet, and most of one arm, destroyed by the cruelties of war. But they weren’t his only injuries; Dulcie was also privy to the information that the damage to his groin would, as far as anyone knew at this stage, prevent him from fathering a child. Such a shame, she thought, as David was one of the most devastatingly handsome men she had ever set eyes on.

Lydia, his wife, lay in her grave, having been caught up in the bombing raid on the Café de Paris where she had been dancing with her current lover, whilst he had lost his legs in the gun battle between his Spitfire and a German Messerschmitt.

Now he was a patient at the famous Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead under the care of the pioneering plastic surgeon Mr Archibald McIndoe, whilst Dulcie worked in a munitions factory and lodged at number 13, Article Row in Holborn, where she lived with the owner of the house, Mrs Olive Robbins, a widow, and her daughter, Tilly, who worked in the Lady Almoner’s office at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Two other girls also rented rooms: Sally, a Liverpudlian nurse who worked at Bart’s, and Agnes, a mouse of a girl who worked in the ticket office at Chancery Lane underground.