The Forgotten Seamstress (36 page)

Authors: Liz Trenow

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical

After a bit, Freda came and sat down beside me and put her arm around my shoulders.

‘What was it all for?’ I wailed. ‘They’ll never come home, never get married, have children or grow old.’

‘But my brother’s alive, Rose,’ she said, putting her arm around me. ‘That’s a blessing, isn’t it? It won’t be long before he’s home.’

We sat there for a while, both of us lost in our thoughts despite the great noise going on around us, until we realised that we were both ravenously hungry. Freda managed to grab the last two baked potatoes from a street vendor, and a cup of tea, which made us feel a little better.

The afternoon was drawing in and it was starting to rain. ‘Let’s get home,’ I said. ‘Our folks will be wanting to see us.’ I couldn’t imagine what Mum might be doing – she’s spent so long in mourning for my brothers I wasn’t sure she’d have the heart to celebrate.

The best sight of all was as we crossed London Bridge and it seemed every craft on the Thames had taken to the water: ferries and tugs and steamboats and skiffs, all decorated with flags and full of happy cheering people.

My hand is so tired I can write no more, except for these words:

THE WAR IS OVER!

Yes, my dearest Alfie, perhaps it won’t be long until we are together again. I must stay strong for you and prepare for the start of our married lives together.

Tuesday 12 November 1918

Thick head and early shift, ugh.

When I woke this morning I thought at first I must have dreamed it, but it must be true because it’s all over the newspaper billboards. You wouldn’t have thought they’d still need us to carry on making shells, now the war is over, but the manager says there is still a job for us for the moment and we will continue until they tell us to stop. I don’t care. We’re earning good wages and heaven knows what we’ll do when they lay us off.

At tea break we had such a laugh, telling tales of yesterday and what we’d all got up to. When Freda and I finally made it back to the Old Kent Road we’d found her mum and my Ma and Pa well ensconced at The Nelson, singing old wartime songs along with the rest of them – except those who were past it, slumped in their chairs and on the floor.

Ma was weeping even while she sang, not even bothering to stop and wipe the tears flowing down her cheeks, so I managed to squeeze in beside her and tried to comfort her. But what can ever make up for the loss of two sons? Nothing, I suppose, except perhaps grandchildren. When Alfie comes home we will do our best to oblige.

At teatime today Pa told me I had to be patient. It would be weeks before we were likely to hear anything and I shouldn’t expect ‘young Alfred’, as he calls him, to be demobbed any time soon. There was all kinds of clearing up to be done after a war, he said, and it takes time to get all those thousands of troops back to the boats and then ferry them home. We haven’t heard anything from him for weeks, but there’s been no telegram, no knock at the door, so surely that means he is safe? And that is enough for me.

Freda says her brother’s got the luck of the innocent, though I haven’t a clue what that means and nor do I believe it, either. Were Ray and Johnnie not innocent enough to be saved? May they rest in peace, wherever they lie.

Monday 18 November 1918

Cutting from a feature in the
Daily Sketch
. It made me cry:

All over the world, on November 11, 1918, people were celebrating, dancing in the streets, drinking champagne, hailing the armistice that meant the end of the war. But at the front there was no celebration. Many soldiers believed the Armistice only a temporary measure and that the war would soon go on.

As night came, the quietness, unearthly in its penetration, began to eat into their souls. The men sat around log fires, the first they had ever had at the front. They were trying to reassure themselves that there were no enemy batteries spying on them from the next hill and no German bombing planes approaching to blast them out of existence. They talked in low tones. They were nervous.

After the long months of intense strain, of keying themselves up to the daily mortal danger, of thinking always in terms of war and the enemy, the abrupt release from it all was physical and psychological agony. Some suffered a total nervous collapse. Some, of a steadier temperament, began to hope they would someday return to home and the embrace of loved ones. Some could think only of the crude little crosses that marked the graves of their comrades. Some fell into an exhausted sleep. All were bewildered by the sudden meaninglessness of their existence as soldiers. What was to come next? They did not know, and hardly cared. Their minds were numbed by the shock of peace. The past consumed their whole consciousness. The present did not exist, and the future was inconceivable.

I thought about the ‘crude little crosses’ which might be the only thing that marked my brothers’ graves and sent up a prayer that we might one day see them laid to rest in a proper place, where we can visit and spend some time with them, that time we’ve been denied.

Then I set to wondering about the living, and whether Alfie is one of those with a ‘steadier temperament’, or one of the other types? Does he find the future inconceivable? I have been so consumed with planning his homecoming in my mind (I imagined a party with banners and barrels of beer, a feast of meat pies and mash and then, of course, some quiet time just for ourselves), that I haven’t for one moment imagined that he might actually be worried about returning to ‘normal life’.

Saturday 14 December 1918

Nearly a month has passed since my last entry but it is so hard to keep up my diary when I am still working hard and so little seems to be happening.

Rationing is getting worse and there seems no end in sight. Meat, butter and sugar are all very short, though surely the blockades must have stopped by now and supplies will start up shortly. Dad hoped to recruit a new boy to help him in the butcher’s shop but with hardly any meat to sell he’s opening just a couple of days a week and barely making enough to pay the rent. It’s only from my earnings and the little that Ma makes taking in mending that we manage to cover the other bills.

So I don’t know what we’ll do for money, now my job is finishing. At the end of our shift today the boss called us all together and told us that the factory will close early for Christmas – ie at the end of this week – and would not be re-opening. Of course we’d been expecting it, but that didn’t stop it being a real shock. Some of the girls were in tears.

‘Merry Christmas maties, thanks for working your fingers to the bone and ruining your complexions for the past few years. Now you can go back to being obedient little housewives,’ Freda whispered as we watched the boss’s departing back.

When we clocked off this afternoon someone started to sing, softly at first: ‘Good-bye-ee, good-bye-ee, wipe the tears, baby dear, from your eye-ee’, till all the rest of us picked it up and there was a great chorus of us going down the street.

It’s not just the pay I’ll miss. It’s a terrible job, dangerous and all (none of us can forget the explosion at Silvertown), but we’ve had such a good time with the other girls and made so many good friends here, it will be a wrench to leave them.

Some of the men are starting to come home now and most seem to be in good heart. The Nelson is doing great trade and the dance halls are busy.
But yesterday today a young stranger came into the corner shop when I was buying needles and thread for Ma. He looked like a ghost, so pale and thin. When he came to the counter and spoke, he could only manage a hoarse kind of whisper and seemed struggling to get his breath, but I recognised the voice from somewhere. It was only later I realised that it was Percy Gittins, who used to be a great lardy lump at my old school who terrorised the smaller boys. Now he was reduced to a wraith who walked in a shuffle and could barely speak.

‘Must have been gassed,’ Ma said, when I told her about it later. ‘Destroys their lungs.’

The lost generation, they’re calling it. All the sacrifices they’ve made. Was it really worth it? That’s the main topic of conversation in the pub these days.

Still no word from Alfie.

Download Liz’s debut novel The Last Telegram
here

Copyright

Avon

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

Liz Trenow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007480845

Ebook Edition © December 2013 ISBN: 9780007480852

Version: 2013-10-03

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