Authors: Kathleen McGurl
‘Look! I was in Woolworth’s, and they’d just had a delivery! I got us two pairs each!’ She was flourishing packs of stockings. Two new pairs was something to rejoice in, and Joan’s immediate thoughts were of how happy she’d have been a year ago to have had one new, un-darned pair, let alone two at once. She smiled at her sister.
‘Thank you. But you keep them. You go out more than me—you’ll need them. Or give them to Betty or Mother.’
‘I’ve already given them some, Joanie. Oh, do keep yours. Even if you don’t wear them. One day you might want to.’ She hugged Joan impulsively. ‘It’s good to see a smile on your face, even if it’s only a little one. And there’s something else might make you smile—there are rumours going round that Hitler is dead! Shot himself, they’re saying. Father’s going to put the wireless on for the one o’clock news to see if it’s true. Oh, Joanie, this war is nearly over! Isn’t that something to try to be a little bit happy about?’
‘Yes, Mags. That’s wonderful news. And I do appreciate you giving me the stockings as well.’ Mags kissed her and ran off to listen to the wireless. Joan put the stockings on her dressing table and sat back on the bed, hugging her knees to her chest. So the war was almost over. Life would return to normal. But not for her. There was no going back to normal for her.
The German surrender finally came on 8th May, and the day was declared a national holiday. There were to be street parties everywhere, and their road was no exception. Joan spent the morning helping Mother prepare jellies and sponges, sandwiches and salads, biscuits and punches. Every food coupon available was spent, and every family in the street pulled together to donate as much food and drink as possible to the party. Mags and Betty made bunting from an old sheet, dyed some red with beetroot, some blue with watered-down ink and left the rest white. They hung it between their house and the bombed-out remains of Mrs Johnson’s house next door. Father pulled the kitchen table out onto the street, and all their chairs, and lined them up with those of the neighbours. Children ran round excitedly getting in everyone’s way, and women bustled in and out with more and more cutlery, crockery and dishes of food.
Joan helped with everything. She lost count of the number of people who hugged her, lifted her off her feet and kissed her on the forehead, shouting in her ear that we were at peace! The boys would be coming home! The excitement was infectious—everyone was buzzing with joy and new hope for the future.
Except for her. Her smile was pasted on, her exclamations of delight at each new dish of food placed on the tables were fake, and her mind was far away in time and space from the festivities in the street. Everyone was so happy. She wished she could join in fully and feel a part of it, but she couldn’t. It simply wasn’t possible.
‘We’re starting at three o’clock,’ Mother told her. ‘That’s half an hour away. Everyone will sit down then, Father and the other men might say a few words, and then we can tuck in. It’ll be lovely, won’t it?’
‘Yes, it’ll be wonderful,’ Joan answered mechanically.
Her mother held her gaze for a moment, then patted her arm and sighed. ‘Good to see you making an effort, Joan. Perhaps this will be the start of a new life for you. Put all that unpleasantness properly behind you, at last.’
Joan turned away. ‘I’ll just go and freshen myself up. There’s nothing more to do in the kitchen, is there?’
‘No, love, it’s all done. Off you go, then. Three o’clock, remember.’
Joan went upstairs and lay on her bed. The sounds of the party preparations outside drifted up to her open window. She got up and closed it, then pulled the curtains across. It was easier in the dark, to go into her memories, to feel Jack with her once again. If only she could really be with him again, to see him, touch him, hear him, smell him.
She picked up the stockings Mags had given her a few days before, which were still lying where she’d left them on her dressing table. She took them out of their packets and ran them through her fingers, feeling the finely woven strength of them. One pair was tan, and the other pair grey. A thought struck her. There was, perhaps, a way in which she could be reunited with Jack again. The only way. Could she do it? She hadn’t been strong enough to insist on keeping their child, but could she do this? For Jack? Yes, for
Jack
she could do anything. She went out to the landing and ran her hand along the banister, around the newel post at the turn of the stairs, and looked down. It could work. A clock struck three. Everyone else was outside; the Victory in Europe Day celebrations had begun.
She went back to her room, found some paper and a pen and scribbled a quick note.
I have gone to find Jack. I cannot live without him any longer. Joan.
She picked up the stockings, knotted all four together, and then tied them firmly around the newel post. She made a loop in the other end and slipped it over her head, pulling it tight. Choking, and before she lost her nerve, she vaulted over the banisters into the stairwell. The stockings tightened excruciatingly painfully around her neck, compressing her throat. She held her hands together behind her back to stop herself pulling at the noose, and willed herself to think of Jack. He was waiting for her. They’d be together, for all eternity, and nothing,
nothing
could ever part them again. The stockings tightened yet further, and she tried to gasp but no air could reach her lungs. She relaxed, and let the blackness wash over her, knowing that beyond it, somewhere, was Jack.
November 2014
‘It’s been a week now. When is that girl going to come home?’ Pete pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down heavily, sloshing his mug of tea over the table.
Ali was clearing up the breakfast dishes. She sighed as she threw him the dishcloth to mop up the tea. They’d had this conversation every day since Kelly had run off from the hospital. But he had a point. The agreement had been that she could stay with Matt for a week, commuting to her nursery job by bus each day, and then they needed to review the situation. The week was up, and on her last phone call home Kelly had shown no signs of being prepared to return. ‘I don’t know, Pete. Well, at least it’s Saturday and I have a day off. So I guess I can go and talk to her about it again. I could take her to see Gran again, and perhaps finally hear the end of the story. That might help her.’
Pete snorted. ‘The end of the blinking story. Yes, about time we heard the end so Kelly can finally forget about it all and move on. It’s been long enough now.’
Ali hung up the tea towel and went to sit opposite Pete. ‘Yes, long enough. But as you said yourself, we have to lay this ghost to rest.’
‘Now you’re the one talking about ghosts!’
‘It’s a ghost in Kelly’s mind. Whether or not we believe in ghosts, she does and that’s what’s fuelling this obsession and her fear of living in this house.’
‘I just want her back here, so we can live together as a family. At least I’ve been able to get on and paint her room while she’s been away. But it’s done now and I’d like her here, living in it.’
Ali smiled. He’d done a good job on Kelly’s room. It was cream and maroon, with some hot-pink highlights as a nod to her Barbie-obsessed past. Young and feminine, but classy. Just as Kelly had wanted. She would love it. ‘She’ll be back soon enough. I just hope she’s happy to stay in that room and won’t want to swap to the spare room.’
‘She’d better not. She picked the colours, remember?’
She had. Not long after they moved in, before her obsession with the past kicked in. Ali sighed. ‘I just wish we could have that girl back again. The one who picked out the colours. Our girl. We should never have moved in here. We should have sold it, like I wanted to.’
‘Not that again. Ali, think about it. How were we to know this would happen?’
Ali took his outstretched hand across the table. ‘We weren’t. I know. But if we’d sold this place and bought somewhere smaller we’d have a pot of savings, and I wouldn’t have had to work all that overtime, and you’d have had more time to look for another job.’
Pete pulled his hand away. ‘Here we go. Back to me being out of work.’ He sighed. ‘As I’ve told you many times, as soon as the renovations are complete I will work hard at finding a new job. We’re nearly there. Not much more to do. Just hang on in there and soon I’ll be earning again, we’ll be living in a beautiful house and you’ll agree it was all worth it.’
‘All very well for you to say hang on in there, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to quickly find another job, is there? That’s my worry. What if you can’t find anything? At least if you’d been job-hunting and applying for jobs all through, you might have had a chance.’ She shook her head. The thought of many more months of being the only earner, having to skimp and save to make ends meet, and still not being able to put any money aside to help Kelly and Ryan through university was hard to contemplate. The house was shaping up to be beautiful, she had to admit, but while Pete was jobless it felt like a noose around their necks. ‘And we’re nearly out of money. We’ll be living in an unfinished mess for months.’
‘Ali, it’s all right. I’ve done the figures and we have enough to finish. Only just, but it’s enough. It’ll be all right. Trust me.’
She stood, picked up their mugs and put them in the dishwasher. ‘Right, well, one thing at a time I suppose. I’ll give Kelly a call and see if she’ll come with me to Gran’s this afternoon. Good job I’ve got a day off.’
Gran was on better form this time. She appeared to have fully recovered after her ‘funny turn’, as she called it, from the previous week. With Kelly sitting beside her in her room holding her hand, and Ali perched on the bed, Gran picked up the story where she’d left off.
Kelly had hung her head, tears rolling down her cheeks, as Gran recounted how Joan had killed herself on VE Day. She’d clung on to Gran’s hand as though it was her lifeline, but the contact seemed to help Gran tell the most difficult parts of the story. She kept looking at Kelly, smiling gently and sympathetically at her, as though it was Kelly who’d lost her little sister in such tragic circumstances. Ali listened in silence. No wonder poor Gran had been so shocked seeing Ryan’s Halloween skeleton hanging from the banisters. That must have been exactly where Joan had hanged herself.
‘Father found her,’ Gran said, quietly. Ali had to lean in close to hear her. ‘We were all out in the street, for the VE Day celebrations. Father went back inside for his pipe, and to see where Joan had got to. He let out the most enormous roar. She was hanging, you see, from the banisters.’
‘Oh, how terrible,’ said Ali. Her words sounded so inadequate. What could be worse for a parent than finding a child dead by her own hands? She glanced at Kelly, who was now sitting motionless, staring at Gran.
‘I heard his shout, and ran to our front door, but Father closed it in my face. He didn’t want me, or Mother or Betty, to see her like that. His face—it was ashen. He aged twenty years in a minute, that day. I hammered on the door, wanting to know what was wrong, but he shouted out that I should go back to the party, tell Mother that he was going to stay inside and rest.’ Gran shook her head sadly. ‘But I knew something was terribly, badly wrong. The look on his face—it was something I have never forgotten. It was an expression of the utmost horror.’
‘Was she dead, when he found her?’ Kelly spoke stiffly.
Gran nodded. ‘Yes, he told us later. She was quite dead. Even so, he cut her down at once and tried to revive her, but there was no hope. She’d used some stockings as a rope—I’d bought them for her! I felt so guilty—I’d given her the stockings she used to hang herself with. What if I’d not given her them? Maybe she wouldn’t have done it.’
‘She’d have used something else,’ Ali said, taking her grandmother’s hand. ‘Of course it’s not your fault. She’d decided to kill herself and I suppose the stockings were the first thing she found.’
‘Don’t blame yourself, Great-gran,’ said Kelly. ‘I can’t bear it if you do that. She’d have cut up a sheet or something if the stockings hadn’t been there. Or used a scarf. She’d made up her mind to do it.’
‘All these years,’ whispered Gran, not taking her eyes off Kelly, ‘I’ve beaten myself up about it, wishing I could rewind time and not give her the stockings, not even buy them. It felt like she was pointing the finger at me, in death. And here you are now, my granddaughter and great-granddaughter, finally telling me not to blame myself.’
‘Of course you mustn’t,’ said Kelly. ‘I’m sure she never meant to hurt anyone. She probably wasn’t really thinking about how it would affect anyone else.’
‘It ruined us,’ said Gran. ‘We were never really a proper family again. Father retreated into himself. He blamed himself, for being so harsh on her when Jack died and she found out she was pregnant. Mother just became even more distant—her way of blocking it all out I suppose. They both died within the next few years. Father more or less wasted away, and died of pneumonia in 1949. Mother already had cancer by the time he died, eating away at her, and she went in 1951. I met my Roy at the end of 1945, married him in 1946 and moved out. I couldn’t wait to leave home.’
‘It must have been so hard for all of you,’ Ali said.
‘Father didn’t telephone the authorities until after the party was finished. He carried her body up to her room, where he laid her on her bed and covered her with an eiderdown. He had never acted as tenderly towards her as he did then, when she was dead. Finally he showed her, too late, that he loved her. When Mother, Betty and I came in, he told us she was sleeping, and bade us be quiet, for fear of waking her. I knew then, I think, that she was not merely asleep. His face—so grey and drawn. Mother fussed around him that evening, thinking he was sick. Finally, when the street party was over and the road was clear, he told us what had happened and telephoned for an ambulance.’
Gran looked tired, Ali thought. It must be so draining having to remember these terrible events from seventy years ago. A tear ran down her face, and Ali passed her a tissue. ‘I’m sorry to make you go through all this, Gran. Stop if you feel too tired.’