After the War is Over (2 page)

‘No, Mam,’ Nell said weakly, while inside a voice screamed,
You shouldn’t have come home, daft girl. You must have known something like this would happen
. The dream of living in London that she’d been nursing for almost a year had been shattered within minutes of being back.

She supposed she had known in a way; after all, it
was
her turn, like Mam had said, so how could she possibly not have come home? Theresa had served her time and was due her independence. But Nell was the youngest girl – who would take over when the time came for
her
to move on?

The front door opened and her dad came in, pausing to hang his overcoat and hat in the hall – Nell knew it was him by the way he stamped his boots on the doormat, making the house shake.

Alfred Desmond was a fine figure of a man, almost six feet tall, broad-chested, with the beginnings of a beer belly. He wore a pinstriped suit, a blue shirt and a red and blue striped tie. There was a red handkerchief in his breast pocket and he smelt strongly of a mixture of beer, tobacco and cheap cologne. His eyes were the same brown as Nell’s, but there was no warmth in them, and his whiskers stretched almost as far as his ears, stiff and bristly.

Alfred looked what he was – a crook. He could get anything for anybody – at a price: petrol coupons, clothes coupons, food coupons, cigarettes and tobacco, alcohol, lipstick and dead posh scent. Name it, and from somewhere or other Alfred could get his hands on it. The reason why the hall and parlour were so well decorated compared to the rest of the house was because it was there that he did his business, saw his customers and took their orders.

He looked Nell up and down. ‘So you’re home. See y’haven’t got any smaller while you were in the army,’ he sneered.

‘There isn’t an ounce of fat on her, Alfred. She’s tall like you, that’s all. You can hardly expect her to have shrunk.’

‘Shurrup, Mabel.’ He gave his wife’s feet an idle kick, then clapped his big hand on Nell’s shoulder. ‘Make us a cup of tea, there’s a luv.’

The hand stayed where it was, getting tighter and tighter. Nell gritted her teeth, determined not to let him know how much it hurt. But in the end it became so painful that she had to shrug the hand away, and her father laughed.

‘It’s due on the first of May,’ Sheila O’Neill said modestly. ‘I didn’t tell you, I thought I’d make it a surprise.’

Maggie laughed. ‘Well it’s a surprise all right. I didn’t think people you and me dad’s age got up to that sort of thing.’ Ryan, her brother, was twenty-three. After Maggie had been born, Mam and Dad had gone for nearly twenty years assuming they weren’t meant to have more children, so it was a pleasant shock when, at forty-one, her mother found herself expecting again and Bridget had come along. Now here she was, two years later, having a fourth child.

‘Are you all right, though, Mam?’ Maggie frowned. ‘You’re a bit old to be in the club.’

‘Dr Reynolds said I’m as healthy as a horse,’ Sheila boasted. She looked it, with her rosy cheeks and glorious smile. She was an older version of her daughter, just rather more careworn and already with a few grey hairs. ‘Anyroad, I always wanted a little playmate for our Bridie.’

Bridie, a pretty little doll of a child, was sitting on Maggie’s knee. She had arrived after her big sister had joined the army, so the two hardly knew each other, but there was a big photograph of Maggie in her uniform on the mantelpiece and Sheila had reminded Bridie of her sister every day.

A cat strolled into the room, a massive tabby with an arrogant bearing. On seeing Maggie, it leapt on to the back of her chair and began to play with her curly hair.

‘Tinker!’ Maggie gasped. ‘You horrible cat. You gave us a fright.’ She shook her head and the cat slithered down and rested itself precariously on the arm of the chair. ‘What time will me dad be in?’ she asked. She tickled Tinker under his chin and he began to purr. She felt very much at home with the cat beside her and her little sister on her knee.

Mam looked at the clock. ‘Any minute now. The morning shift finishes at two o’clock, but it takes a while getting home on the bus.’

Maggie’s dad worked in a marine engineering factory that had turned to manufacturing munitions during the war. It had recently gone back to producing ship’s parts. Her brother had started in the same factory as an apprentice. It meant both men had been regarded as essential workers and avoided being called up to fight, much to her father’s relief and Ryan’s frustration, as he’d badly wanted to join the navy.

‘I’ll make some tea.’ Sheila struggled to her feet. ‘Stay there!’ she commanded when Maggie made to lift Bridie off her knee so she could help. ‘I’ve got five months to go yet. Your father would have me permanently stuck in bed if he had his way, and your Auntie Kath brought in to look after Bridie. I told him I’d go stark raving mad, stuck in the same house as our Kath while she lectured me on women’s rights and why we should get rid of the monarchy.’

Maggie sighed blissfully. It was the gear to be home again. She’d badly missed her family during her stint in the army, though the heavy bombing of Liverpool was over by the time she’d joined up in 1942, so at least she didn’t have that to worry about. Knowing they were safe had meant she could take advantage of the glorious freedom and at the same time put up with the tight discipline of army life.

She looked around the warm room. Her mother had a way of making pretty things out of bits of this and that. There was a crocheted runner on the sideboard on which stood two jars covered with seashells painted in pastel colours, a vase filled with paper flowers, and an old wooden clock that had been painted white and decorated with flower transfers. The Christmas decorations were home-made too – Maggie and Ryan had made the tree fifteen years ago, out of green crêpe paper.

This was going to be a really smashing Christmas without the clouds of war hanging over them. There was so much to celebrate. Maggie thought about the last three Christmases, spent on the base in Plymouth. There’d been a magic to them, an air of frantic merriment, a feeling of sadness too. She was wondering if she would miss those things when the back door opened and her dad came into the kitchen.

‘Our Maggie’s home,’ Mam said.

‘Is she now! Where’s my big girl?’ roared Paddy O’Neill in his strong Irish accent. He appeared in the doorway, big and handsome, full of smiles. ‘Welcome home, darlin’! Welcome home.’

Nell remembered, a long time later, that she’d been invited to Maggie’s house in the evening. She really liked Mrs O’Neill, who always made a fuss of her. Her own mother had gone to bed, her father to the pub, Kenny to play billiards, and Theresa had gone to the pictures with Joan Roberts and two French sailors.

She wasn’t used to quiet after the noisy life on the base. She put on her coat and walked around to Coral Street. For nearly six years a blackout had been in force, with everyone obliged to close their curtains so that not even a chink of light showed. Now, like a sign of belated defiance, curtains were being left wide open with lives exposed for all to see.

The O’Neills were in the parlour. Maggie and her brother Ryan – Nell had had a crush on Ryan for as long as she could remember – were jiving in the middle of the room. Mr and Mrs O’Neill were seated on the settee with their arms around each other, the little girl, Bridie, squashed between them nursing Tinker, the cat. And Auntie Kath, who oozed politics from every pore, had just come into the room with a tray of tea.

There was no place for Nell in that happy scene. No one would want to see her long face. She turned and went back to her own silent house, wondering if it was always going to be like this now that she was home.

The men had gone to the pub more than an hour ago: Tom, Iris’s husband, his brother Frank, and their father, Cyril. Their wives were sitting in front of the first-floor window of Iris and Tom’s house overlooking Bootle docks, admiring the view. Iris was aware of her own reflection; out of uniform, she looked small, pale and insignificant. She had natural blonde hair and a quiet face – people didn’t properly notice her until they’d met her two or three times, when they suddenly realised how attractive she was.

As it had gone ten and the pubs had closed, the husbands, all doctors, were expected home any minute.

‘I don’t know why alcohol tastes better when they’re standing knee deep in sawdust, rather than sitting at a table drinking from a crystal glass,’ Constance, who was married to Frank, had said earlier. ‘It must be something to do with their caveman instincts.’

‘Did cavemen have pubs?’ Adele Grant queried idly.

‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Constance snapped.

Adele, Iris and Constance’s mother-in-law, plump and motherly, was one of Iris’s favourite people. She had no close family herself, and Tom’s mother had proved a perfect substitute for her own, who had died not long after she was born. Her father had gone to meet his maker a short time afterwards, and Iris had been raised by a rather distant aunt and uncle until she had left home at eighteen. She had only seen them about half a dozen times since.

It was Adele who’d had the idea of making a special dinner to welcome her daughter-in-law home. She must have been saving her meat coupons for several weeks in order to buy the tender sirloin steak, and Lord knows how much the two bottles of ten-year-old French wine had cost – or where it had come from. Despite the war having ended, rationing was still very much in force.

‘It’s been an exceptionally pleasant homecoming,’ Iris said. She had expected to spend it alone with Tom. ‘And this is a wonderful sight: the lights and the glowing water.’ She nodded at the window. Perhaps it was the full moon that made the water shimmer the way it did. During the day, the view was nothing to write home about: cranes, a ship or two with goods being loaded on or off. But at night, with lights burning on the ships, the docks and the street itself, it was quite enchanting. ‘I still can’t get used to there not being a blackout,’ she said.

‘I can’t understand why it took so long for you to be demobbed.’ Constance always managed to sound a touch bad-tempered, suspicious almost, as if Iris had been getting up to no good in Plymouth since the war had ended, which to a large extent was true, though Constance had no way of knowing.

‘The camp couldn’t be closed down overnight,’ Iris said patiently. Constance might be bad-tempered, but she had a good heart. ‘There was still work to be done, meetings to be held, furniture and equipment to be transported to other camps, put in storage or sent somewhere to be sold. I got my Heavy Goods Vehicle licence,’ she said proudly, ‘and drove lorries all over the country.’

‘Did you really, darling?’ Adele remarked, impressed. ‘How clever.’ She patted Iris’s knee. ‘I’m ever so glad you managed to be home for Christmas. Don’t think of trying to get food together for a meal on Christmas Day – you and Tom must come to us.’

‘And to us on Boxing Day,’ Constance put in. ‘Beth and Eric are really looking forward to seeing you. They badly wanted to come tonight, but I told them it was only for grown-ups.’

‘Thank you both. And I’m really looking forward to seeing my niece and nephew again.’

Downstairs, the front door opened and the husbands came in singing the Eton Boating Song. All had gone to exclusive schools, but not as exclusive as Eton.

Adele laughed. ‘They sound a bit the worse for wear. Three inebriated doctors! They should be ashamed of themselves.’

The visitors had gone. ‘Were they all right?’ Tom asked anxiously. ‘I hope Constance didn’t get you down. She can be awfully abrupt.’

Iris was pushing the armchairs back into their proper places. Instinctively she closed the curtains. ‘She was fine, if a bit blunt. Not that I mind. Your mother was lovely, but then she always is.’ She sank into one of the chairs with a sigh.

Tom gave the fire a poke and came and sat in the next chair. ‘I wish I could have gone in the forces too and we could have both come home together.’ A broken leg as a child had left him with a slight limp and he’d been rejected by all three services. He was a very ordinary, dependable-looking man, with straight brown hair and a whimsical smile. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. His patients loved him, but Iris wasn’t sure if she still did. ‘It seems a bit strange not to have seen my own wife for the whole of last year,’ he said stiffly. The smile had disappeared.

‘We hardly ever got passes for longer than forty-eight hours,’ Iris informed him. ‘It wasn’t possible to get from Plymouth to Liverpool and back again in such a short time.’

‘I wouldn’t have minded not seeing you had I been in the forces too.’

‘That wasn’t possible, was it?’

He shook his head. ‘I wish I wasn’t hopeless in so many ways.’ His shoulders sagged.

‘You’re not hopeless in any way that I know.’

‘I couldn’t give you a baby.’

‘You gave me a baby. It’s probably my own fault I can’t have another.’ Iris closed her eyes, seeing her baby, Charlie, six months old, smiling at her, cooing, falling asleep in her arms. She imagined his bulk pressed against her, his mouth tugging at her breast, and remembered the morning she found him cold in his cot, his face as white as a ghost, lifeless and stiff. Her little boy was dead and she would never get over it for as long as she lived. If it hadn’t been for Charlie, she wouldn’t have joined the army, but she’d needed to get away. Once there, she’d told no one that she’d once had a child.

Now, perhaps because she was home, in the house where it had happened, it seemed terribly real. ‘Is his cot still here?’ she asked Tom.

‘No, I hope you don’t mind, but Mother took it away some time ago. Even if we had another baby, I wouldn’t want him or her to sleep in it. We put the toys and baby clothes in the loft, just in case you wanted them kept.’

‘I don’t think I do any more. I’d sooner they were given to another baby.’

‘I’ll ask Mother to see to it.’

‘It’s all right, Tom. I’ll do it myself.’ He’d also lost a son, and it shouldn’t all be left to him.

‘Shall I put more coal on the fire, or will we be going to bed soon?’ He was probably unaware of the longing on his face.