Jenny's War (29 page)

But maybe they wouldn’t have asked; Jenny was growing fast, was tall and leggy and filling out in all the right places. With her naturally blond, curly hair and her brilliant blue eyes, she was startlingly pretty. She looked older than her thirteen years and easily could have passed for having left school already.

Where Arthur disappeared to, she had no idea and didn’t ask. She didn’t even ask if he’d found work at the building site. It was enough for her that he didn’t involve her any more in whatever he was up to and for that she was thankful. As for Dot, Jenny knew exactly where she went; into the city, returning with items of clothing or shoes almost every time. Where on earth she got the money or the clothing coupons, only Jenny could guess: Arthur, of course. By this time, he’d built up a circle of mates in the city who were heavily into black market trading which included forging coupons and other documents.

Jenny sighed. They were all at it. Even that nice little man, Jim, the butcher, wasn’t above taking stolen meat from Arthur. And if either of them were caught, Jenny knew they’d probably both end up in prison. She’d seen a newspaper recently that Arthur had left lying about and in it had been the court case of five men who’d been sentenced to hard labour by the magistrates for stealing food from the docks in Bristol. And she’d read about two ten-year-old boys who’d carried out a smash-and-grab on a sweet shop. So, she wasn’t the only youngster involved, though she was an unwilling one. And there were several reports of both men and women stealing rationed goods and the punishments they received if they were caught. She just hoped her mother hadn’t resorted to shoplifting in the city to feed her obsession with clothes.

Dot never thought to bring anything for Jenny. The girl had grown out of the garments which Charlotte had bought for her and now she only had patched and mended dresses from second-hand clothes shops. Even her birthday in August had passed, yet again unremarked by Dot, and Arthur didn’t seem to know the date. By happy coincidence, though, that very evening he’d brought home a new supply of paper and paints for her. So Jenny regarded it as a birthday gift. Goodness knows where he got them, she thought. I’m probably as guilty as the rest of them now – receiving stolen goods.

Jenny couldn’t help thinking back to two years ago when Charlotte and Miles had been so upset to find out that her birthday had passed by without them knowing. She smiled pensively as she remembered the flurry of excitement, the party and the birthday cake.

She sighed. If only . . .

They stayed in the cottage near the reservoir through the winter and into the New Year of 1943 and still Jenny stayed away from school.

‘She can help me about the house. Time she made ’erself useful.’

‘I thought she already did,’ Arthur remarked mildly. ‘She washes up most nights after tea and I’ve seen her doing all the ironing. You want to watch she doesn’t burn ’erself swapping irons on to the hob one after the other.’ The ironing was done by spreading a blanket on the kitchen table and heating two flat irons on the hob on the range.

‘She’ll manage,’ Dot said shortly.

Arthur winked at Jenny and produced some new watercolour paints from his pocket.

‘Oh, thanks,’ Jenny said eagerly. ‘I can finish my picture of the lake now. I’d run out of blue paint.’

‘Paints, paper, brushes,’ Dot sneered. ‘That’s all you seem to bring home these days. For
her
. When are you going to bring me something nice, Arfer?’

Arthur’s eyes hardened and he jabbed his finger at her. ‘When you stop moaning, that’s when. You’ve done nothin’ but grumble lately. What’s the matter wiv you?’

Dot glared back at him. ‘’Cos I can’t get into town, that’s why. It never stops raining!’

Although the weather wasn’t as bad as it had been the previous winter, it was nevertheless very wet and cold. Dot hated it almost as much as she had done the snow. She became more and more irritable with both Jenny and Arthur too. Neither of them could do anything right for her. Even when spring arrived and she could get to the city more easily, she still came home in a bad mood, complaining that there was nothing in the clothes’ shops, not even in the second-hand ones. ‘Everyone’s hanging on to what they’ve got now. And I’ve no coupons left.’

‘Use mine,’ Arthur offered. ‘I don’t need fancy clothes now I’m a country bumpkin. Besides, you’ve only got to say,’ he added with a huge wink. ‘I can get plenty of coupons.’

One evening in April, when they were just preparing to go upstairs to bed they heard a low droning noise that came nearer and nearer.

Dot screamed. ‘They’re back. The bombers are back. Quick, under the table.’

They had no air-raid shelter here; Arthur had deemed it unnecessary out in the middle of the countryside. ‘Who’s going to bomb us out here?’ he’d said. ‘It’s the cities they’re after.’ And so no shelter of any kind had been constructed.

Dot was weeping with anger and fear and hitting out at Arthur as the three of them crouched beneath the table. ‘I told you we should have had an Anderson. I told you.’

‘Shut up, Dot, and listen.’

The noise grew louder and louder until it was shaking the china on the mantelpiece and rattling the doors and windows.

‘I’m going out to see what’s going on,’ Arthur said, crawling out from beneath the table.

‘No,’ Dot shrieked. ‘Don’t leave us. What’ll happen to us if you get killed?’

Arthur paused briefly. ‘Oh, you’re priceless, Dot. Ne’er mind what happens to me so long as you’re all right, eh?’

He turned away, stood up and moved towards the back door. They heard him open it and close it again, going out into the darkness. The planes kept coming, one after the other, right above their cottage. It seemed to go on for hours and still Arthur didn’t come back.

When at last the noise died away into the distance and Dot thought it safe to emerge from beneath the table, Jenny said, ‘I didn’t hear any bombs dropping, did you?’

‘No. Mebbe they’re just trying to frighten us to death. Well, they nearly succeeded,’ she muttered morosely. ‘And where’s Arfer?’

The quiet that now followed the deafening noise was just as scary. Arthur came in about half an hour later. ‘I’ve been watching them.’

‘Watching them? Whatever for?’

‘Because I wanted to know what was going on.’

‘You didn’t need to go outside to know. We could hear it in here. They’ve come back to bomb us all to kingdom come, that’s what.’

‘No, it ain’t, Dot. Jen, make sure the blackout’s tight shut and light a candle or two.’

‘You needn’t bother. I’m off to bed,’ Dot muttered, getting up.

‘Don’t you want to hear what I saw?’

‘If I must,’ she said grudgingly, sitting down again. But Jenny could see that her mother’s interest had been aroused. ‘Go on, then.’

‘They’re our planes.’

‘Our planes?’ Dot and Jenny both spoke at once.

Arthur nodded. ‘They’re flying low over the reservoir and between the two towers where the water falls over the dam. One after the other, time and time again. I reckon they’re training for something special.’

Dot’s lip curled. ‘Them RAF lads out joy-riding, that’s what it’ll be. Well, I won’t put up with that night after night. Yer can write to somebody in the morning, Arfer.’

‘Oh yeah. And let everybody know where we’re living?’

Dot glared at him in the flickering candlelight and Jenny sensed a row brewing. ‘Yer can send it anonymous.’

Arfer lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. ‘Go to bed, Dot. Yer’ll just have to put up with it.’

Dot – and everyone else in the area – had no choice. The RAF were indeed training for something very special and continued to fly low over the reservoir night after night. Some of the locals did write to the authorities to complain about the low-flying aircraft.

‘My milk yield’s down,’ complained one farmer and another declared that his hens had stopped laying.

It wasn’t until the middle of May when the papers were full of the raid that had been made on the German dams in the Ruhr valley that the locals realized just what had been going on. The aircrews of the Lancaster bombers, specially adapted to carry the ‘bouncing bombs’, had been practising low-level, night flying.

‘Ah well, then, if that’s what it was all about,’ the local farmers who’d protested to the authorities when all the noise had been going on said to one another, ‘in that case, I don’t mind my livestock being frightened half to death. If only they’d told us . . .’

But of course the training had been done in strict secrecy, known only to a few – apart, that is, from the people living near the Derwent reservoir, though at the time even they hadn’t known why.

‘Jen, I’ve got something to tell you.’

Dot stood uncertainly in the doorway of Jenny’s bedroom. Surprised, the girl looked up, her paintbrush suspended in mid-air. It wasn’t often her mother sought her out and she hardly ever came to find her. Usually, it was a yell from downstairs. ‘Jen, get yerself down here this minute.’

Dot came into the bedroom closing the door quietly behind her. That was something else that was different. Usually, Jenny thought, you could hear just where Dot was in the house by the noise; slamming doors, rattling pots and pans or the wireless blaring out the latest dance music. Dot loved the Glenn Miller band and was always begging Arthur to take her dancing. But now she perched on the end of Jenny’s bed, twisting her fingers nervously. ‘We’re leaving.’

Jenny said nothing. This news was no surprise. Her mother hated the country, but she’d thought that at least here, where her mother was able to get into the city regularly, it had been better than at the first cottage. At least, for Dot. And for Jenny. Apart from not attending school, she was drawing and painting every day with Arthur’s encouragement and even with Dot’s tacit approval.

‘I’m – leaving Arthur.’

Now Jenny was surprised, shocked even. ‘Leaving Uncle Arthur?’ She regarded her mother steadily, but Dot was avoiding meeting her gaze.

‘Has he got another woman?’ Jenny asked bluntly.

Dot bit her lip and shook her head. ‘No – no. It’s – it’s me. I – we’re – going to live with Jim.’

‘Jim? The butcher?’

Dot nodded.

Jenny was silent for several moments, digesting the news, taking it all in and its implications before she said, ‘What about Arthur? Does he know?’

Dot nodded.

‘So – was that what the row was about last night?’

It had been nothing unusual to hear the couple quarrelling. Jenny had hidden her head beneath the bedcovers, trying to block out the raised voices. But now she realized that the noise had gone on longer than usual and had ended with a slam of the back door and the sound of Arthur’s van driving off.

She’d fallen asleep then and hadn’t heard the van return. When he hadn’t appeared at breakfast, she’d just thought Arthur had had another of his late nights on ARP duties. She hadn’t realized that he and his van hadn’t returned at all until Dot said now, ‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

Dot shrugged. ‘He’ll have stayed with one of his mates in the city, I ’spect.’

Jenny paused a moment, staring at her mother, before she asked, ‘Don’t you care?’

‘Not really. He was a bad lot. Getting you involved in his thieving.’

Jenny almost laughed aloud. It hadn’t bothered Dot at the time and, young though she still was, Jenny knew her mother would bend the truth to fit her own needs. Whilst she’d been with Arthur and he’d been generous with money and had looked after her – looked after both of them – Dot had turned a blind eye to his bad ways. She’d said nothing at the time about Arthur using Jenny as his accomplice. Only now, when it suited her, was it a useful excuse to leave him.

‘How long’s this been going on? You and Jim, I mean?’

‘Er – well – soon after we got here, really. When I went into town, I’d call and see him and we’d have a cuppa in the back when the shop wasn’t busy. And we got to talking. You know how it is.’

Not really, Mum, Jenny wanted to say. I’m only thirteen. But she didn’t say a word because, yes, in a way she did know how it was. At least, she knew what her mother was like.

Arthur Osborne had lasted longer than most of the previous ‘uncles’. Some had lasted only a few weeks, others a few months. Only Arthur had lasted over four years. But now even his time was up.

‘Are you sure about this, Mum? Uncle Arthur’s been good to you. To both of us.’

‘I know he has, Jen, in his own way. But he’s going to get caught eventually. Oh, I know he thinks he’s got the Devil’s own luck, but one of these days – ’ She broke off and then added, ‘And I don’t want either of us to be accused of being his accomplice.’

‘I agree with you there, Mum, but is Jim any better? He’s been taking the meat that Uncle Arthur’s been supplying. Maybe he’s not doing the actual stealing, but he’s receiving stolen goods, isn’t he? And that’s a crime too.’

Dot looked uncomfortable. Her pathetic excuse for leaving Arthur was not standing up to Jenny’s shrewd assessment of both men. One was not much better than the other.

Dot stood up suddenly. ‘Well, we’re going and that’s an end to it. We’re moving in with Jim above the shop and you can go to school and help him in the shop when you come home and at weekends. And he says when you’re old enough to leave school, there’s a job for you with him.’ She smiled brightly as if she was trying to convince herself as well as her daughter. ‘Now what could be better than that, eh?’

Jenny’s eyes narrowed. ‘Staying on at school, passing my exams and getting into Sheffield School of Art, that’s what.’

Dot stared at her for a moment and then burst out laughing. ‘Well, you can forget about that, sunshine. You’re not with them bloody Thorntons now.’

Jim came with his butcher’s van and loaded all Dot’s clothes and shoes together with Jenny’s few belongings into the back.

‘You can both squeeze into the front, girls,’ he said, his round, florid face sweating, causing him to mop it with a handkerchief. ‘Now then,’ he said, climbing into the driver’s seat, ‘off we go.’ Jenny saw him put out a podgy hand to touch Dot’s knee. ‘I can’t tell you how happy you’ve made me, Dot love. It’ll be wonderful to have you living with me. Both of you,’ he added hastily. ‘I’ve been very lonely since my wife died. And we weren’t blessed with children, so there’s been no one – only my brother, and I don’t see him very often.’