War Baby (29 page)

 

 

‘HEY! SWEETIE!'

Frances knew very well that Paul Martin had seen her turn down into Court Road on her way to Powells' shop but had pretended she hadn't. Paul brought a flush to her face, though not such an intense flush as Deacon, the boy she had met when living with Ada Perkins in the Forest of Dean. She had turned fourteen, and having left school she was now too old to be evacuated under the children's scheme, but she had promised herself to go back there for a visit and Uncle Stan said she could once he had enough petrol coupons.

Frances slowed so Paul could catch up with her.

‘You coming to the Sunday School ramble? We're walking to Lansdown.' He sounded desperate for her to say yes.

Frances kept her chin up and her eyes straight ahead. She considered herself too old to go on rambles with the Sunday School. ‘No. I don't think so. It's just for kids, isn't it?'

Paul latched on to her mood and matched his own to suit. ‘Yeah. Just for kids. That's why I'm not going either.'

Frances knew he was lying. He didn't want to be thought of as a kid.

‘How about the Christmas party? We'll have jelly and blancmange and Mum's saving some cream from Fat Polly. Fat Polly always gives creamier milk than any of our other cows so the milk people won't notice there's a pint or two short here and there. And my brother's got a gramophone. We can dance.'

Frances sighed. ‘Of course I'm coming to the Christmas party. Ruby's made a cake. A sponge. She used dried egg to make it. Mary's made a Christmas crumb cake. It's got nuts and fruit in it.'

‘Yummy. Bags me a piece.'

Frances was under no illusion that Paul didn't have a clue what a Christmas crumb cake was. Basically the Sweets had enough fruitcake ingredients to make one cake and that was for the family to consume at Christmas. All baking ingredients were in short supply but Mary had enlisted the help of a few other women whose children were looking forward to the Sunday School Christmas party. Without much persuasion they'd all scrimped and saved enough ingredients from their rations to make a Victoria sponge, but that wasn't going to provide enough cake for all the kids in the village.

The idea for the Christmas crumb cake had been Ruby's. The main ingredient, rather than flour, was stale cake and breadcrumbs. Frances had watched as Ruby had wetted the crumbs, most of which had been gathered from the bread baskets that lined the shelves, some from the counter, some from the stale end of a loaf or any stale cakes they had left over. The rest of the crumbs came from stale crusts. Nobody dared waste crusts nowadays. It was rumoured that inspectors from the Ministry of Food came round in the middle of the night to inspect the bins. There had been reports in the newspapers that those who wasted food were fined.

The Sweets were not ones for wasting food and were creative in their use of leftovers. After all, the Sweet sisters gave lectures on how to make the best use of food.

‘This is a bit experimental, but I'm sure it will work. What I need you to do is to write the ingredients down,' Ruby had said to her.

Frances had studiously found a pencil and paper.

‘Right,' said Ruby. ‘A pound of breadcrumbs – more if possible. A pound and a half might be better. No. Wait. Seeing as we're making this for the Sunday School kids, let's say two pounds of crumbs.'

‘That's a lot of crumbs,' Frances had remarked.

Ruby had agreed with her and decided to settle on getting as many crumbs as possible.

‘Mix with three tablespoonfuls of sugar. Two ounces – no – four ounces of fat. Any fat.'

Frances had duly written the instructions down while wishing they could find enough butter to make the cake – not likely, of course. Butter was rationed and when a joint was roasted or meat fried – even bacon and sausages at breakfast time – the fat, once cooled, was collected and used in baking. It didn't matter whether the baked dish was sweet or savoury, fat was fat and always made full use of.

‘Nuts. I think we have enough hazelnuts left over from the ones we gathered in the autumn to crush and mix with the mixture. I've also got some dried blackberries. Luckily for us they were quite sweet this year.'

‘And treacle,' Frances had suggested.

Ruby had stopped stirring the mixture while she considered the rightness of her cousin's suggestion.

‘I was thinking honey, but perhaps you're right. A good dollop of treacle. That should make it sweet enough.'

And so Ruby's Christmas crumb cake was created.

‘You'll love it,' Frances stated in a superior voice. Of course she wouldn't be divulging the ingredients. They were a secret between her and her cousin Ruby, a person she considered to be the greatest cake and pastry maker in the world. Along with Mary, of course. Mary was a super baker too and her cakes were mouth-wateringly good.

Paul gave Charlie a little wave. ‘Hello, Charlie.'

Charlie looked at him with a puzzled expression on his face.

‘He's not all that friendly.'

‘Of course he's not. He doesn't know you,' remarked Frances with an air of self-assured tolerance.

‘If you didn't have him with you, I could show you the piece of bomb shrapnel my cousin Eddie gave me. He got it in Bristol. That's where he lives. A bomb fell on a house in his street. Everyone plays on the bombsite – not me, of course. It's just for kids. Still, it's a great place for making dens like when I was a kid. Do you want to see my shrapnel?'

Frances endured a sudden conflict between the child she had once been and the adolescent in waiting. A piece of real shrapnel harvested from a genuine bombsite had an almost magical connotation about it. Paul was quite tempting too; in fact, boys were becoming more interesting all the time.

‘Is it at your house?'

‘The den. The one we call the Dingle. Down in the Pit. I know I'm not a kid, but it's a good place to hide if the Jerries ever invade.'

It amused Frances to hear Paul trying to be a man one minute and sliding back into being a boy the next. It didn't occur to her that she was doing the same thing.

The Pit was a copse of young willows and birch down the bottom of the hill next to the brook. It was where the boys made dens in the summer, some of them in the centre of thick bramble bushes well hidden from view.

Frances was sorely tempted. The fact was that if she collected the cod liver oil and then took Charlie back home, the twins or her uncle Stan would find her something to do. What was to stop her taking Charlie with her? He'd love it!

‘I'd like to see it, but I've got to get Charlie's cod liver oil first. Can you wait out here and look after him while I do that?'

Paul screwed up his face and looked as though he were considering the matter, which wasn't really the case at all. He liked Frances and wanted to show her his most treasured possessions. And the den was the ideal place to take a girl when you wanted to be alone with her. Nobody could call him sissy and anyway, most of the other boys who used the Dingle were at school. Nobody would know. Nobody would see him kiss her and that is what he very much wanted to do. He reckoned he was ready and it excited him. It also scared him. In the meantime he was out to impress her.

‘I'll wait.'

Paul beamed with satisfaction as the shop door clanged shut behind her. His stomach felt as though it were tied into knots. He'd never kissed a girl before – not in the way he wanted to kiss Frances, the way he'd seen his sister kissing her soldier boyfriends. Still, he'd started work and was a man now. Kissing a girl – Frances in particular – would make him more of a man.

He looked down at his long trousers and wondered if she'd noticed them. No more short trousers and long grey socks for him! No more grubby knees either.

Absorbed in thoughts of Frances, he didn't at first notice Charlie helping himself to a carrot, the brightest of vegetables on the display to the side of the shop door.

‘Charlie. That's stealing,' he hissed once he had noticed.

When he tried to take it from the baby's tightly clenched fist, Charlie began to cry.

‘No. Don't cry,' Paul whispered, glancing towards the door in case Frances had heard; if she had, it would ruin everything.

Preferring to placate Charlie rather than have Frances angry with him, Paul let go the carrot and Charlie stopped his yelling. If Charlie wanted to steal a carrot, that was fine by him. The last thing he wanted was for Frances to think he'd hurt the child in some way. He certainly wouldn't get a kiss if that happened.

‘All right, little 'un. All right. It won't be missed.'

Charlie chuckled before shoving the carrot into his mouth, his sparkling white incisors biting cheerfully into the bright orange vegetable even though it still had a crusting of dirt.

Paul went back to his plans for getting Frances alone and kissing her. He reckoned mentioning the shrapnel was a great idea. Everyone was interested in seeing bits of metal that had exploded from bomb casings and Frances was no exception. She'd be impressed; at least he hoped she would. But what if she wasn't?

The knot in his stomach tightened. What would he do if she laughed in his face and told him only little boys thought shrapnel was interesting?

Focusing on the prospect of Frances ridiculing him before he had chance to kiss her, brought on a severe case of cold feet. Never mind the shrapnel; kissing suddenly became as frightening as facing a whole battalion of enemy troops. Worse still, it also brought back memories of Sunday teatimes with his father's sisters, spinsters one and all. His aunts used to coo over him, kissing him and ruffling his hair. He could still feel their papery lips on his cheek, their spidery fingers in his hair.

‘Yuk!' He shook his head in an attempt to dislodge the memory of those cold lips and skinny fingers. The memory refused to shift and because of that the whole idea of kissing Frances was no longer palatable. It wasn't so much that his feet were cold, he was cold all over. He no longer wanted to kiss her or attempt any of the other things that kissing led to. He knew this from watching his sister when she and her boyfriend thought they were all alone. He was growing up and figured he had to attempt those things too; it was expected of him. And anyway, it excited him.

He'd even been looking forward to those things beyond kissing, those things that you had to suggest after using sweet words. His sister went all soft and silly after Percy, the name of her latest boyfriend, whispered sweet nothings in her ear when he thought nobody was looking.

It was no good. He'd initially wanted to try all those things, but didn't now. The idea had excited him, but he no longer felt the urge to ask her to show him her knickers or unbutton her blouse, feel her chest to see if her boobies were beginning to grow. He'd learned all this stuff from the men he worked with, men in reserved occupations. They talked about ‘it' all the time: how far they'd got, how they lied to girls, telling them they were off to war and might never come back. Anything to persuade them to do all the things he dreamed about at night that made his bed damp in the morning.

When I'm called up, I can say things like that too, thought Paul. In the meantime he just wasn't up to the job. He couldn't stay.

‘You stay there, Charlie,' he said. As if the baby was likely to go anywhere. He was strapped into his pushchair.

A quick glance at the shop and he was gone.

Charlie didn't notice him go. Charlie was absorbed in chewing on his carrot. It wasn't until he was lifted from his pushchair by a pair of strong arms that he became aware that something had changed. The new person smiled and he smiled back before his sharp little teeth bit once more into the carrot. As long as he had that he was quite happy.

Inside the shop, Mrs Powell was heaving a big box up on to the counter. ‘It's only just come. It came by van today. The district nurse couldn't carry it all. I haven't opened it yet. You'll have to wait.'

Mrs Powell delivered short sentences in a flat monotone. She never smiled and nothing she did was done gladly. It was almost as though customers were supposed to give her good service, speak to her politely without her having to treat them well at all. She wasn't at all like her mother, Ada Perkins, a woman Frances had grown very fond of.

‘I need scissors to get this undone,' Mrs Powell declared before disappearing into the back of the shop.

Frances fidgeted. She was looking forward to seeing Paul's piece of shrapnel and perhaps being alone with him for a time in his den. She wasn't fooled by him suggesting he was going to show her a piece of shrapnel, in fact she was more than a little excited as to what he really had in mind. Charlie could come too, of course. The entrances to dens were kept small in order to keep adults out. Charlie would have no trouble crawling in – in fact he could probably walk right in – or toddle, at least.

Growing more and more impatient, she tapped the countertop with her fingers, her gaze fixed on the door Mrs Powell had gone through. Surely it didn't take that long to find a pair of scissors? In the end, she grew resigned to waiting. She turned slowly round until her back was against the counter and her elbows resting on it.

The shop was small and dark, the only light courtesy of a bare bulb above her head. The shop windows were narrow and cluttered with items for sale so not much daylight was let in.

The counter formed the bottom part of a letter ‘U' at one end of the shop. A bacon slicer, a big red thing, stood on the left-hand side next to a wooden board on which sat half a truckle of Cheddar cheese and a cutting wire. To her right a few jars of sweets, possibly pre-war if their faded colour was anything to go by, jostled for space with cabbages, leeks, tins of Brasso, Colman's mustard and Bird's custard powder. There had most likely been more of everything before the war, but even now because the shop was so small it didn't really notice.