seem to mind all that much. Our Betty’s having the time of
her life out in the country, even though the work’s hard.
Her dad and me wonder sometimes what she gets up to out
there.’
‘I think a lot of the young women are getting the sort of
freedom they’d never have had otherwise,’ Freda agreed.
‘Our Eunice is the same, proper let off the leash she is, in the ATS. If it hadn’t been for the war they’d have all
stopped at home, under their parents’ eyes, till they got
married. Now you don’t know what they’re doing.’
‘And some of them aren’t getting the lives they thought
they’d have,’ Cissie said quietly. ‘Look at our Polly, a widow
at thirty-five. And Judy, deaf at twenty-two.’ She looked at
Annie Chapman. ‘And what about your Olive? It must have
been ever so hard for her to say goodbye to her husband
only a day or two after their wedding.’
The others nodded soberly. There was no making sense
of it all, they agreed. They came to Alice Thomas’s front
door and said goodbye. Cissie went indoors and found Dick
sitting in his usual chair, his latest rag rug spread over his
knees.
‘I dunno as I’ll be able to go on with this much more in
the hot weather,’ he said, looking up. ‘It’s like having a
blanket over me. Have a good natter?’
Cissie nodded and went through to the scullery to start
getting tea ready. ‘Gladys Shaw’s getting a medal,’ she
called. ‘The British Empire Medal, it is, for what she did in
the raids. She says she doesn’t deserve it, that there’s plenty of others did just as much, but she’ll have to go and be
presented with it all the same. And Peggy says she’s going in
the Wrens now.’
‘Peggy Shaw? She’s too old, surely!’
‘Not Peggy, Gladys. And Diane, their youngest, she’s got
a job at Airspeed, wants to learn to fly.’
‘They’ll never let her. What is she, sixteen? Mind you,
she’s always been the flighty one!’ Dick laughed at his joke
and rolled up the rug. ‘I’ve had enough of this, Cis, it’s
making my eyes go funny. What’s for tea?’
‘I thought we’d have sardines on toast. I got a tin
yesterday.’ Cissie came in and looked at him a little
anxiously. ‘You feeling all right, Dick?’
‘More or less. I’m just a bit hot. And it’s all these
different colours, dazzling me. I dunno who’s going to get this one, but they’d better like bright colours.’ He grinned
again and Cissie laughed too but put her hand on his
forehead. ‘It’s all right, Cis, I haven’t got a temperature.’
‘No, but all the same … It’s not long since that
pneumonia, Dick. You’ve got to be careful.’
‘Careful!’ he said. ‘I don’t know how I could be any more
careful than I am now. All I do is sit in this chair all day
making blinking rugs and listening to the wireless.’
‘You go for a walk every day.’
‘Yes, up to the end of the street and back. Well, I tell a
lie, this morning I walked all the way up to the newsagent’s
shop. That Alice Brunner, she’s looking a bit better these
days. Gave me a nice smile, she did. I reckon that girl of
hers told her to pull herself together.’
‘Joy’s a big help to her mum,’ Cissie said, ‘and Alice has
had a lot of worry, with Heinrich being taken away like that.
I ask you!’ she went on indignantly, coming through the
door and waving a bread-knife. ‘Interning a man like
Heinrich Brunner who’s been in England and running his
own business all those years! As if he was a spy. It’s
criminal. And then sending him off on that ship and getting
him torpedoed. It’s no wonder poor Alice nearly had a
nervous breakdown.’
‘Well, you needn’t stab me to death because of it,’ Dick
said, pretending to cower in his chair. ‘But you’re right, Cis, it was a bad do. There must have been hundreds like
Heinrich Brunner, been living here for years not doing no
harm to nobody, and all put in prison like common
criminals. It was like a sort of panic’
‘They’ve let a lot of them out now,’ Cissie said, goin
back to the scullery. ‘But that doesn’t help men like poor
Mr Brunner, who got killed on that ship.’
She went on getting the tea ready. Presently, Alice came
in from her own afternoon spent helping at the loca
Clothing Store, and then Polly arrived. She had been
working at the salon, cutting and setting hair. With no raids for a fortnight, and then just a few bombs dropped in the
sea, it seemed almost as if normal life was beginning to
return.
‘There’s another letter for you, Poll,’ Dick said, nodding
at the mantelpiece. It had come by second post, not long
after Polly had left for the salon, and Cissie and he had
indulged in some conjecture about it before placing it
behind the photo of Terry in his naval uniform. Letters
weren’t all that common unless they were from Sylvie out at
Ashwood or Terry, somewhere at sea, and this wasn’t from
either of them. It bore a London postmark, and it wasn’t the
first to have arrived in the last couple of weeks.
Polly took it and blushed. ‘I’ll just slip upstairs and
change out of this skirt and blouse,’ she said, trying to
sound casual, and Dick winked at Cissie who had come
through from the scullery.
‘Reckon she’s found herself a fancy man?’ he asked in a
whisper.
‘Well, I don’t know. That’s the third, isn’t it? But I never
thought she’d be interested again, not this soon after losing
Johnny.’
‘It’s eighteen months or more,’ Dick pointed out. ‘And
she’s not old, Cis.’
Cissie pursed her lips. ‘Well, I wouldn’t object myself,
but you know what Mum is like about second marriages.
She wouldn’t like it if Polly got serious about another man.’
‘Yes, but that’s just being old-fashioned. People aren’t so
strict these days, and with so many men getting killed—’
‘Ssh.’ Cissie put her finger to her lips. Alice was coming
in from the outside lavatory, already beginning to tell them
about a woman she’d had in the Clothing Store that
afternoon, trying to exchange a tattered old jacket for a good
three-piece suit. Cissie gave Dick a warning glance and went
back to the scullery where she was spreading margarine on
bread and getting out a new pot of jam from the store Alice had made last summer.
When Polly came down in her old skirt and blouse, they
all sat down round the table. Cissie set the plates of sardines on toast in front of them and looked at her sister, hoping for
some remark about the letter. But Polly didn’t mention it.
Instead, she said, ‘I had that Ethel Glaister from number
fifteen in for a perm this afternoon. What a cat she is!
Doesn’t have a good word to say for a soul. Seems to think
she’s too good for April Grove or anyone in it.’
‘Dunno why she goes on living here then,’ Dick
remarked. ‘If she’s so posh, why doesn’t she move up to
Hilsea or somewhere?’
‘Oh, she says they were just going to when the war
started, and then of course everything stopped. Her hubby
was in the Territorials and he went straight off into the
regular Army. Honestly, you’d think he did it just to spite
her.’ Polly giggled. ‘I dare say he was glad of the excuse to
get away! It must have seemed like a dream come true to
him when war broke out.’
‘Polly! That’s a terrible thing to say,’ Cissie reproved her,
but the others were laughing and she had to smile. ‘Well, I
can’t say I’d like to live with Ethel Glaister for long. How
did you do her hair, Poll?’
‘Oh, the latest fashion of course - Marcel waves. And I’ll
tell you something else.’ Polly leaned over the table and
glanced from side to side as if there might be a spy lurking
behind a chair. ‘That hair of hers isn’t really yellow at all!
It’s practically grey! We have to touch up the roots every six
weeks to stop it showing through.’
‘Dyed. Well, I always suspected it,’ Alice said disapprovingly. ‘You know, I sometimes wonder about Ethel Glaister and where she goes off to every afternoon in her smart suit
and high heels. Now I wonder even more. If you ask me,
she’s no better than Nancy Baxter.’
‘Well, you’d better not say so,’ Polly advised her. ‘You
could get into trouble. And don’t any of you dare tell anyone about her hair. I’d get the sack if Mrs Carson knew I’d let
out something like that about one of the ladies.’
‘Why?’ Dick asked. ‘It’s not that bad, surely. Plenty of
women dye their hair.’
‘Not decent women,’ Alice retorted, but Polly shook her
head.
‘It’s because they don’t want people to know they’re
going grey. Women like Ethel Glaister who think they’re
smart and glamorous,’ the family hooted with laughter,
‘they like people to think it’s natural, see? So that everyone
thinks they’re younger than they really are.’
‘As if it mattered,’ Alice said in disgust. ‘We’ve all got to
get older. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If you ask me,
people like Ethel Glaister haven’t got enough to do. Ought
to come down the Clothing Store of an afternoon with me
and do a hand’s turn to help. That’d take her mind off being glamorous.’
The evening passed quietly with a game of whist, and at
nine o’clock they switched on the wireless to hear the news.
No matter how quiet it might have been in Portsmouth,
there was always news of some terrible event somewhere
else. A bombing raid on another city, a battle in Africa or
the Mediterranean, a ship sunk by a U-boat in the Atlantic.
‘What was that?’ Cissie gasped, her hand at her throat.
They stared at her, then at each other. Polly opened her
mouth but Dick gestured to her to be silent. In horror, they
listened again to the newsreader’s words, and then the
bulletin ended and Dick reached out a slow, trembling hand
and turned the knob.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Alice whispered, her face as white as
paper. ‘HMS Hood, blown up and sunk in just four
minutes. There can’t be anyone left alive, there can’t be.’
‘Our Terry,’ Cis whimpered, covering her face with her
hands. ‘He said it was the best ship in the whole of the
Fleet. Dick’ blindly, she reached a hand out to her
husband, ‘Dick, our Terry’s been killed. Our Terry’s been killed.’
‘We don’t know that, love.’ But his voice was shaking and
tears were trickling down his cheeks. ‘We don’t know it for
sure. They haven’t said everyone was killed. There might’ve
been survivors.’
‘When it was blown up and sunk in four minutes?’ She
shook her head. ‘How could anyone have lived through that?
Oh Dick.’ She began to cry, while the others wept as well.
Despite Dick’s words, they all knew that Terry’s chances
were very low. Even if he had survived the explosion, how
could he have lived more than a few minutes in the icy
waters off Greenland where the battle had taken place?
People said you froze to death almost at once. And none of
the family had any faith in the Germans having picked up
men in the water. That’s what they were supposed to do,
but would they have done it?
There was little sleep that night in number nine. Cissie
could not stop crying. Every time her sobs eased a little, she
thought of the news announcement, or some little reminder
of her son, and started all over again. She took his photo
down from the mantelpiece and wept afresh, stroking his
laughing face with her fingertips. ‘It’s the only one we’ve
got,’ she sobbed. ‘All those pictures of him at school and
that lovely one that photographer took of him out at
Southsea, with that parrot on his arm, we lost all those in
the Blitz. And all his toys and things, his Meccano and his
comics that he wanted saved - they’ve all gone. We’ve got
nothing left. It’s as if he never existed.’
‘Of course it’s not, Cis.’ Polly, her own eyes red and
swollen, tried to comfort her sister. ‘It’ll never be as if he
never existed, never. We’ll all remember him all our lives,
and so will lots of other people. All the neighbours who
knew him, and Dick’s brother and his family, and Jean
Foster.’
‘Jean!’ Cissie lifted her face and stared at her. ‘She’ll have
heard the news too. Oh, poor Jean - he was talking about asking her to get engaged, last time he was home. I’ll have to
go round and see her.’
‘Tomorrow.’ Alice, looking grey and weary, came in with
a cup of cocoa for them all. ‘Drink this, Cis. It’ll make you
feel better and help you to sleep. Come on, now, it’s no use
making yourself ill. And like Dick said, we don’t know he’s
dead. Miracles do happen.’ She sighed and Polly, glancing
at her, knew that in spite of her words, she too had almost
given up hope. ‘Drink it up and let’s go to bed,’ she said
gently.
Still sobbing, Cissie managed to drink her cocoa and the
family gathered up the cards that had been lying forgotten
on the table and prepared for bed. One by one, they went
outside to the lavatory, washed at the sink, cleaned their
teeth, each going through the motions like an automaton.
Then Cissie and Dick went slowly up the stairs and Polly