The Heart of the Family (8 page)

Just thinking about Katie brought him a confusing mix of emotions: fear for her safety, coupled with an fierce male urge to protect her, delight because she loved him, pride in her because of the important war work she was doing, and yet at that same time that pride was shadowed by a certain fear and hostility to that work in case it somehow took her from him.

Did Katie wish he was more like Seb, Grace’s fiancé? Seb was an easy-going sort, protective of
Grace, of course, but Grace wasn’t the kind who would give a chap any cause to worry about her. Did that mean that Katie was? Luke frowned. He trusted Katie – of course he did, and he knew he could – but she didn’t always realise how she might come across to other men; how they might see her smiling at them and think that her smile meant more than it did. He’d tried to tell her about that, but he couldn’t seem to make her understand. Luke didn’t like it when things weren’t straightforward and clear cut. Life had rules and Luke preferred it when people stuck to those rules. Katie was his girl and that meant that he didn’t want to lose her to another man. He wasn’t keen on that job of hers either. Not really, although he’d tried to pretend that he didn’t mind because he’d been able to see that that was what she wanted. And he did want to please her, of course he did, but it made him feel so frustrated when she wouldn’t understand the danger she was putting herself in.

If they were to get engaged then maybe he’d be able to have more say in what she did. He’d certainly not have her working doing what she did once they were married.

Come on if you’re coming, Lena thought irritably, as she scratched absently at a flea bite on her ankle and waited for the sound of the air-raid siren to start up. She didn’t own a watch and there was no clock in the room she shared with Doris. Doris wasn’t here tonight, though. She’d gone out to her boyfriend’s for tea, and his mother had apparently invited her to stay over in case there was an attack.

Lena laughed to herself. What a lie that was.
Lena knew for a fact that Doris’s fella’s mother would be spending the evening in the pub where she worked and that she’d use the pub shelter if the siren went off, and Lena knew that because she’d been in the salon in the morning getting her hair done and she’d said so.

No, Lena reckoned, Doris knew perfectly well that she and Brian would have the house to themselves and Lena thought too that Doris wanted to make the most of the opportunity to tie Brian to her. Well, good luck to the pair of them.

When was that siren going to go off? She heard a sound from the room next door – her uncle breaking wind. He didn’t half make a noise when he farted and he was a stinker with it, an’ all.

Bodily functions and the earthy humour surrounding them were part and parcel of life in the city’s slums. How could they not be with several families sharing the same outside lav, and everyone knowing everyone else’s business, right down to when a person opened their bowels?

Lena had been shocked at first to see half a dozen lads peering over the half-door of one of the lavvies whilst, she learned soon after, the girl inside delicately removed her knickers and then bent over to show them her bare bum, but then she hadn’t been able to help laughing when the girl had insisted that all the boys were to pay her a halfpenny each for the treat.

Of course, Doris denied that
she
had ever done such a thing. Lena knew that she never could have done. Oh, she hid how she felt from everyone because she knew it would make her a target to be tormented and bullied, but she had been brought up better than
that, and when her Charlie came for her he’d take her away somewhere decent; somewhere in Wallasey. Her heart began to beat faster. Should she write to him at his barracks and surprise him? She wanted to, but was held back by a memory of her mother telling her that decent girls didn’t go running after boys. Anyway, she didn’t need to write to him. When she’d put her arms round him and asked him when she’d see him again, he’d said, ‘Soon as I can.’

If she closed her eyes she could picture him now. She could always go over to Wallasey, of course, and introduce herself to his family. She’d got their address, after all. She could say something about him leaving his papers with her and her wanting to get them back to him. Her heart jumped a couple of beats. What were they like, his man and dad? Had he got brothers and sisters at home? Well, she’d have to wait and see, wouldn’t she, because she wasn’t going to go pushing herself in on his family until he was there to introduce her to them proper like, as his girl.

How proud she’d be when he took her home on his arm to meet them. Lena gave a blissful sigh, ignoring the hungry rumble of her stomach. Her auntie had been in one of her bad moods and had hardly spoken to her when Lena had come in for her tea. She’d not given Lena much to eat either, claiming that she couldn’t afford to, even though she’d made Lena hand over her ration book – well, not hand it over exactly. She’d taken it from Lena’s drawer when Lena was out at work, as well as making her tip up most of the money she earned to go into the family pot.

Lena had managed to keep her tips back for herself, though. She’d even opened a Post Office account to
pay them into. Simone had shown her how, and Lena kept the book hidden in her handbag. Twenty pounds ten shillings she’d saved in it now, Lena thought with pride.

One o’clock. Seb frowned. They were normally here by now. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. What kind of cat-and-mouse game was Hitler playing with Liverpool now? He’d all but destroyed the city. Another heavy raid, certainly two, would be the fatal blow that would mean that Liverpool was done for. The port would no longer be a safe haven for the Atlantic convoys, bringing in desperately needed food and raw materials, as well as equipment under the recently signed Lend Lease agreement with America, which meant that the neutral Americans, not in the war, could provide much-needed military equipment to the financially hard-pressed Allies, with payment being deferred until a later date. The agreement was very complicated, with many of its terms still kept from the general public in the interests of national security. Its existence, though, had had to be acknowledged to account for the sudden influx to the country of American personnel and equipment to help with the war effort.

Seb stretched again and tried to suppress a yawn.

Grace would be lying in her bed in the nurses’ home waiting for the sound of the siren. Seb knew how much nursing meant to her, but increasingly he worried about her safety. The hospital had already been bombed once, and some of the medical staff killed.

He’d sensed her growing fear and desperation when he’d walked her back to the nurses’ home
on Sunday. When he’d taken advantage of the privacy afforded by a shadowy doorway, she’d clung to him and kissed him, trembling so much in his arms with her passion that he had started to tremble himself.

If they’d been anywhere half decently suitable, he’d have been tempted to answer the need he had seen in her eyes and truly make her his, whilst they were still both alive to share that special loving intimacy.

It had been Grace who had insisted that she wanted to finish her training and that meant that they couldn’t marry until she had, but he had respected that decision. These last few days, though, with the knowledge that each bombing raid could take Grace from him, Seb had burned with a fierce urge to make her truly his and to know that they had shared something that could never be taken from them. And Grace had wanted that too – he had sensed it in her even before she had told him so, clinging to him, her eyes wet with her tears as she told him how afraid she was of dying without knowing his love.

Bella couldn’t sleep. They’d been promised twenty cot mattresses, and only ten had been delivered. The driver had feigned ignorance but Bella knew she was right to suspect that the other ten would end up on the black market. She moved restlessly beneath her immaculately ironed sheets. Laura had simply shrugged and looked impatient when Bella had complained to her.

‘What do you expect with all this rationing?’ she had demanded sharply. ‘After all, those doing the black market selling aren’t the only ones making money from this war, are they?’

Bella had known that Laura was referring to
Bella’s own father whose business supplying and fitting pipes to merchant and naval vessels had become so profitable thanks to the war that Edwin had had to treble his work force. Her father liked a gin and tonic, and after the third glass was inclined to start bragging about the fortune he was making. Not that he shared it with his family, Bella thought sourly, or at least not with her. He was showering money on Charlie, buying him a new car, because his small sports car had been stolen, giving him a job, and her house.

She looked at her alarm clock.

Two o’clock. The bombers were normally here by now, dropping their bombs over Liverpool. Bella moved irritably, frowning as she remembered the knowing look Ralph Fleming had given her when he’d come to collect his children from the crèche earlier in the day, her face starting to burn with angry pride. Did he really think that she would be interested in him now that she knew he was married man, and that he’d lied to her?

What kind of girl did he think she was? Her heart started to thump angrily. Well, she wasn’t that sort, no matter what he might think. Why were people so horrid and mean to her? Especially men. Bella thought of her father, with his impatience and irritable manner; her husband, who had never loved her as surely she deserved to be loved; Jan Polanski, whose mother and sister were her billetees, and who was getting married in two weeks’ time, making out that she had wanted him to kiss her just because he was good-looking, when she hadn’t at all; and now Ralph Fleming, pretending he was free to ask her out and then actually having the cheek to laugh at
her and look at her as though he knew something about her that meant she didn’t care that he was married. Well, she did. She cared a lot. She was tired of other people – other women – treating her the way they did. It wasn’t fair that other girls like her cousin Grace ended up with good-looking men and had lots of friends, whilst she, who surely deserved better, was treated so unkindly.

Tears of self-pity welled in Bella’s eyes.

It just wasn’t fair.

That surely couldn’t be dawn, could it, edging slowly and warily up under the darkness, hesitating as though fearing what it might reveal?

Sam rubbed his eyes in case he had got it wrong and he was imagining things. He was tired from being on fire-watch duty. Even though tonight there were no new fires, the acrid smell of smoke still hung in the air and stung the eyes, but no, that was definitely dawn lightening the sky on the horizon.

As he watched, the band of light grew wider, revealing the tired buildings that still remained standing sharply etched against the skyline, black against the dawn sky.

Something – relief, disbelief, gratitude, Sam couldn’t pin down exactly what it was – dampened his eyes and made him want to shout his discovery from the rooftops.

The German bombers hadn’t come. Incredibly, unbelievably, the final death blow had not been delivered.

On other buildings Sam could see other fire watchers now. Like him they were stretching, and looking around, shedding the burden of the night
watch, straightening up and standing tall, and it seemed to Sam that the city itself was doing the same thing, that he could feel in the air its pride in its survival through a night when everyone had thought that all must be lost.

It was a miracle, that’s what it was, Harry Fitch, who had shared the watch with Sam, announced, and Sam didn’t argue.

It was a mistake – everyone was agreed on that – a breathing space, that was all. The bombers were bound to return, and yet there was a lightness of heart as people went about their business, a sense of reprieve even if it was generally acknowledged that it wouldn’t last.

But it did, and finally, by Sunday morning, after three full nights without a raid, even Sam was cautiously agreeing that maybe there had indeed been a miracle and what was left of the city was safe.

‘Mind you, I still think it’s a rum business that Hitler didn’t send the Luftwaffe in to finish us off,’ he told Jean as the family set out for church.

For once the whole family was together, Luke, like the other soldiers who lived locally, having been given compassionate leave, and Grace being off duty.

In with her other prayers this morning there would definitely be one thanking God for saving her from having to go begging Vi for a favour, Jean decided fervently, as she paused to check that her family were looking their best.

The twins must still be growing, she thought, switching her attention from the outer world to her
own small family. Their frocks certainly needed letting down. At their age they really shouldn’t be showing quite so much leg, Jean decided with maternal concern, even if their legs were very well shaped. Thank goodness she had asked Mrs Nellis, who had run up their red and white gingham frocks on her machine for them, to put on good hems, disguised with white rickrack braid.

‘Lou, that isn’t a dirty mark on the sleeve of your cardigan, is it?’ she demanded, sighing as she saw that it was. ‘Just keep your arm by your side, then,’ she instructed.

‘I don’t know if I agree with Mrs Braddock saying that the cinemas should open on a Sunday,’ she told Sam.

Bessie Braddock, a local councillor, had been quoted in the papers saying that people needed to be able to celebrate and enjoy themselves, and for that reason the cinemas should be allowed to open on Sundays.

‘Well, to be fair, she did say that them as don’t approve don’t have to go, and there’s plenty who will want to have a bit of a fun after what’s bin happening,’ Sam responded so tolerantly that even if she hadn’t already done so Jean would have known how much these three nights without bombs had lifted his spirits. Even so, as a mother of daughters still at an impressionable age, Jean felt it necessary to protest.

‘Fun on a Sunday?’

‘But remember, Mum,’ Luke and Grace chanted together, laughing, ‘there’s a war on.’

‘Oh, give over, you two, as if I didn’t know that.’

It was hard to remain stern, though, when the sun
was shining and everyone was in such good spirits and with such good reason.

No wonder it felt as though the whole city, or those who were left in it, were turning out to give thanks for being spared.

Grace hung back from the rest of her family deliberately, slipping her arm through Seb’s.

‘We are so lucky. I was so afraid, Seb, afraid that something would happen and that you and I would never … But here we are, both still safe and well …’

‘And we still haven’t …’ Seb began teasingly, but Grace blushed and laughed and shook her head at him.

‘None of that kind of talk now. You know what we agreed.’

He should have seized his chance whilst he had the opportunity, Seb thought ruefully, but on the other hand Grace was well worth waiting for, even if her passionate response to him earlier in the week had had him lying awake every night since imagining how things might be.

Good girls didn’t ‘do it’ before marriage, supposedly, only of course sometimes they did, and it was such a long time to wait before Grace would have finished her training and they could get married. And now there was that other matter as well.

Seb frowned. He had been taken completely by surprise when his commanding officer had sent for him and told him that he was going to be transferred to a new Y Section that was being set up in Whitchurch.

At first it would just be him and some other trained operatives, but more operatives would join them once
they had received their training. The recent news that one of the Enigma machines and its code books had been captured had sent a buzz of elation and excitement through everyone connected with Bletchley Park, where they were working flat out now on the codes.

Seb had been told that his new post would be a promotion but he acknowledged that he would have been feeling much happier about it if it didn’t mean that he would be moving away from Liverpool and Grace.

He looked at her. The sunlight caught the curls in her strawberry-blonde hair, and revealed a small dusting of freckles across her nose. She was so pretty, his Grace, with her warm smile and those eyes of hers that reflected the depth of both her emotions and her loyalty. If the months since they had first met at the very beginning of the war, and all that had happened during them had brought a certain gravity and even sometimes sadness to her eyes when she talked of the courage of her patients, then Seb loved her all the more because of it. His Grace was more than a pretty face – much more – and he wouldn’t want to change anything about her.

His parents loved her, and he knew that when the war was over and the time came for them to make their lives wherever his work took him, Grace would create a comfortable and a happy home for him and their children, even if that meant she had to move away from her own family to whom she was so close. But for all the maturity she had gained since they had first met, today, in her relief after several nights without any bombing raids, and with her joyous smile, she looked so carefree and happy that he didn’t
want to spoil that happiness by telling her that he was going to be moved out of Liverpool.

Grace looked at Seb and smiled warmly at him, increasing his guilt at keeping something so important from her, but this wasn’t the time to tell her. He wanted to wait until they were on their own.

In front of them, neither Luke nor Katie was smiling.

‘Well, I still don’t see why you would want to go and see your parents behind my back and without me,’ Luke was saying, sticking doggedly to the point he had been trying to make ever since Katie had let slip that she was planning a visit to her family.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Katie defended herself unhappily. ‘I’ve already told you how it happened. When I thought that your mum and the twins were going to evacuate to Wallasey I decided I’d take some leave that was owing to me and go and see my parents. I couldn’t tell you because I haven’t seen you, and now that it looks like the bombing raids are over I don’t want to let Mum and Dad down by not going.’

‘But you don’t mind letting me down?’ Luke’s voice was bitter.

Katie suppressed an unhappy sigh. It upset her so much when Luke was like this, although she was trying hard not to show it. Katie hated scenes. They made her feel physically sick with misery and so anxious to get things ‘back to normal’ that she was ready to say anything that would appease him. Sometimes, though, no matter what she did say or how much she tried to agree with him, it just seemed to make matters worse.

Today this mood of Luke’s when he started accusing her of not loving him because in his eyes
she was not putting him first, had caught her off guard, making her feel vulnerable and spoiling things between them on what should have been a happy occasion, with the relief of the blitz having so miraculously ceased.

‘If you really loved me you’d wait until I can come with you,’ Luke insisted.

He had no idea what drove him to be like this with Katie, whom he loved so very very much, he only knew that somehow the more he tried to make her be open and straight with him, the more she seemed to withdraw from him to a place where he wasn’t allowed; and the more he wanted to secure her to him, the more elusive she seemed to become, and that hurt and scared him. Not that he could ever admit to that. He was a man, after all, and men had to be strong and in control of their emotions.

Katie looked away from Luke. She couldn’t bear this, she really couldn’t. It reminded her of the awful quarrels her parents had had when she had been growing up and brought back her old feelings of fear and misery.

‘Very well then,’ she gave in, ‘I’ll write and tell my parents that we’ll both go and see them when you’ve got some leave, if that’s what you want.’

Luke frowned. He knew her agreement should have made him feel happy but somehow it didn’t. And as for what he wanted – Luke didn’t know what it was that he actually wanted, he only knew that whatever it was it would make him feel far happier than he did right now. What he wanted ultimately was for him and Katie to be so close to one another that he didn’t have to worry about what she was thinking, or if she really did love him, or was just
saying the words because he had pressed her to say them. His mum showed all the time how much she loved his dad. At home his dad’s word was law, not that his dad ever had to raise his voice or make demands for anyone to know that. His mother was the one who made sure that everyone knew that Dad was the boss.

Luke admired his father more than any other man he knew, and now that he was a man himself the two of them were every bit as close as a father and son should be. But Luke had grown up seeing his father always being more openly affectionate and loving with Luke’s sisters than he had been with him, and somehow that had made him feel left out.

He’d seen how, when all three of his sisters over the years had gone up to their father, put their arms round him, leaned their heads on his shoulder, and sat on his lap when they were small, Sam had always laughed and responded. But when he had gone to his father for the same comfort, say with a cut leg or on those occasions when for one reason or another he was hurting inside in a way that he couldn’t explain and had needed his father’s reassurance, Sam had always been brusque and offhand with him, pushing him away.

Sam might say that he loved him and that he was proud of him, but sometimes when he felt the way he was doing now, deep down inside Luke couldn’t help comparing the difference between the way his father had treated him when he was growing up and the open affection he had shown Luke’s sisters.

What did words mean after all? What if the truth was that he just wasn’t someone that could be loved? Words were easy enough to say, but how did you
know what was really inside someone’s heart. How could he give his trust and his own heart to another person when he wasn’t sure how she really felt?

Surely if Katie loved him as much as she said she did then she would understand all of this, even though he couldn’t understand it or talk about it himself. Women were, after all, the guardians and protectors of their men’s emotions, or so it seemed to Luke from witnessing the relationship between his own parents. It was always his mother who did the bending and the coaxing and who was at pains to make sure that her husband and her children were happy. She did that because she loved them, but Katie didn’t seem to want to make sure that he was happy.

Luke hated it when these dark moods came down over him. This one had started coming on after the lorry driver had been killed. The sight of the man’s crushed body had shocked and nauseated him so much that he had had trouble controlling his reactions, and had been afraid of showing himself up in front of his own men and the Americans.

That had made him angry with himself. If he was close to crying like a baby because he’d seen one body, what would he be like when the time came for him to go into action? How could he be a proper corporal to his men if deep down inside himself he was worrying that he might be a coward? He had gone through Dunkirk, Luke reminded himself now. But that had been different. They had been running from the enemy then, not fighting them.

How was it possible for him to feel so alone when he was surrounded by his family and when he had Katie at his side?

Luke didn’t know. He just knew that he did.
He couldn’t explain why quarrelling with Katie gave him that sore scratchy feeling inside, nor could he explain why he found it so hard to trust her and believe her when she told him that she loved him.

‘It just doesn’t seem right to me that you’d want to go without me in the first place,’ he told her now, returning to the argument like a child worrying at a scabbed knee, even though it knew that the end result of its messing was going to be pain. ‘Unless there’s something you aren’t telling me?’

‘Oh, Luke,’ Katie sighed, pulling her hand from his as the misery inside her grew into despair.

She hated the thought that she and Luke might end up like her own mother and father. What Katie longed for was a marriage like Jean and Sam’s; a contented and placid marriage based on trust. She didn’t want excitement and drama. She wanted the security of knowing that her husband and her marriage would always be solid, dependable and unchanging. She could never for one minute imagine Sam saying the things to Jean that Luke had just said to her, or provoking a quarrel in the way Luke did between them. She knew that Luke had been treated badly by a previous girlfriend, but he had promised her that he would stop being so unnecessarily jealous, and she had thought he meant it. But now …

‘Do you want to try for those jobs at the telephone exchange then?’ Sasha asked Lou.

Lou dragged her foot, scuffing the side of her shoe, a childhood habit to which she still sometimes reverted, especially when she was feeling on edge.

‘I suppose so, only it isn’t very exciting, is it?’ Lou
answered as they followed their parents towards the modest church they had attended every Sunday for as long as they could remember.