Read Home for Christmas Online
Authors: Lizzie Lane
Home for Christmas
Contents
Will her soldier sweetheart make it home for Christmas?
Lydia is in training to be a nurse when she first meets Robert and, despite the differences in their class and background, they fall head over heels for one another.
Robert is the nephew of a Lord, and Lydia a mere doctor’s daughter – and a German doctor at that. While her parentage is no hindrance to their relationship in peacetime, when war is declared Robert’s family makes it clear they no longer approve of the match.
With no means of contacting Robert on the Western Front, Lydia volunteers herself, joining the Red Cross. But her love affair with Robert has had more than one consequence...
Lizzie Lane was born and brought up in one of the toughest areas of Bristol, the eldest of three siblings who were all born before her parents got round to marrying. Her mother, who had endured both the Depression and the war years, was a natural-born storyteller, and it’s from her telling of actual experiences of the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century that Lizzie gets her inspiration.
Lizzie put both cities and rat race behind her in 2012 and moved on to a boat, preferring to lead the simple life where she can write and watch the sun go down without interruption.
Wartime Brides
Coronation Wives
A Christmas Wish
A Wartime Wife
A Wartime Family
The Soldier’s Valentine
(digital short)
To my husband Dennis, who sometimes wonders if he’s living alone. That’s what it’s like being married to a teller of tales.
Christmas, 1913
The main defect of the papier-mâché angel was that its nose had broken off. Lydia Miller, whose nose was perfect, eyes dark grey, and complexion as clear as northern light, decided that nobody would notice, seeing as the place for a Christmas angel was on the top of the tree.
‘Now, where are the wooden animals?’ she muttered to herself.
The wooden animals were brightly painted and, although not perfectly shaped, looked pretty in the light of the candles.
Determined they would take their usual places on the tree, she delved further into the large tin box in which they were kept, far deeper than she usually needed to go.
The tin box had her father’s initials on the lid and the address in Dresden where he’d been born. Although a bit battered on the outside, the inside of the box was divided into neat layers from the top to the bottom.
She’d never removed the bottom panel before because everything she’d wanted had been on the top. Today she found herself struggling to dislodge the final division even though the wooden animals had never been there before.
There was no real need to struggle on, but once Lydia had set her mind on doing something, she rarely gave in.
Gripping the tin layer with one hand, and forcing her fingers beneath the gap at the edge of the metal, finally produced a result.
The wooden animals, no more than three inches in size, had fallen through the gap. She picked them out one by one, placing them to one side with the angel and the other decorations.
Her attention strayed to the only other item at the bottom of the box. At first glance, it looked merely to be a piece of pale blue silk, shimmering slightly in the pale wintry light.
On reaching in and touching it, she realised the silk contained something firm.
Leaning back on her haunches, she placed the package on her lap. Once unwrapped, she found herself looking at a book – not a book to read, but a diary or journal. The cover was of burgundy leather. The initials
EJM
were engraved on the cover. Her mother’s initials.
Fingers shaking, she opened the cover. The pages inside were crisp and clean, unwritten on except for the first page.
‘This is the journal of Emily Jane Miller. Today the doctor confirmed I was expecting a child. My husband will be overjoyed. I myself am quite petrified.’
Lydia felt her throat tighten. It was as if she had known she would die in childbirth. Tears sprang to Lydia’s eyes as she caressed the pages lovingly. Her mother’s journal, but with nothing written in it except for those few cryptic – and rather prophetic – words. Her mother had died giving birth to her.
She lifted her head to look at where the chill light of a December day filtered through a round window. Finding the journal had put an end to her task of seeking out Christmas decorations. Finding this journal was much more important, a small link between the mother she had never known and herself.
She reflected on the words her mother had written, wondering whether she had felt any joy at her predicament, or purely fear. There was no way of knowing and no one to ask, certainly not her father. However, there was Aunt Iris.
She hugged the journal to her breast and vowed never to part with it. Up until this moment, the only memento of her mother was a small, grainy photograph in an oval frame, given to her by Aunt Iris.
‘You’re very much like her,’ Aunt Iris had proclaimed. ‘The same grey eyes, dark lashes and glossy dark hair. You can have it,’ she’d said. ‘Just don’t let your father know that I’ve given it to you. You know how he is.’
‘Yes. I know how he is.’
Her father had never got over the death of his wife. It was sometimes as though he denied she’d ever existed. Just mentioning her name would cause him pain. He kept no likenesses of her, no mementoes of their lives together.
‘As though he’s still in mourning,’ Aunt Iris had sighed.
The small oval frame with its picture of a lovely woman who looked so like her own reflection, Lydia had hidden in her writing bureau.
She ran her fingers over the smooth leather, tooled with her mother’s monogram on the front, presuming her father had given it as a present to her mother. It struck Lydia instantly that he must never know she had it. Everything to do with her mother brought him too much sadness, even any celebration of Lydia’s birthday, which just happened to fall on Christmas Eve.
Closing the attic door behind her, she made her way down the sweeping staircase. Halfway down she stopped and looked out of the huge window that filled the landing with light. The view was good enough; the rear garden with its mix of flower beds, vegetables and fruit trees.
Her father was a good man, a good doctor and a good father. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her or talk about – with the exception of her mother, and more specifically her mother’s passing. Although she would like to, she must not mention the journal. The wound left by her mother’s death was still raw.
She carried on down the staircase of the grand old house that she and her father called home.
Doctor Eric Miller’s house in Kensington was spacious, and the furniture well cared for and imposing. Large armchairs sat like sentinels either side of the fireplace and the polished surface of the Sheraton dining table that could easily seat fourteen people reflected the sky outside the French doors that opened on to the parapet above the rear garden.
Spacious consulting rooms took up one side of the front of the house where certificates gained at universities in his native Germany lined the walls.
He had arrived in England in the early 1890s following in the wake of Emily, the love of his life, whom he had met at a lakeside hotel in Austria.
Doris the parlour maid occupied one of the attic rooms at the very top of the house and Mrs Trinder the cook occupied the other. Discarded trunks, chests and furniture were stored in the attic space at the rear of the house, where the eaves swept low, diminishing the height of the attic ceiling.
The housekeeper Mrs Gander had a room on the first floor at the opposite end of the house to that occupied by Doctor Miller and Lydia. A locked door separated her realm from that of the family and was reached by the back stairs that went on up to the attic. It was obvious to all including Doctor Miller that Mrs Gander was in love with her employer. Locking the door that separated them had been his idea.
It was not a large staff, but the Millers were comfortably off and the doctor was ambitious. He lived and breathed the medical profession, and was pleased when his daughter decided to become a nurse. He would of course have preferred her to become a doctor, but Lydia had not attended a suitable university. Women did not become doctors unless they were exceptionally well educated.
With the journal tucked under her arm, Lydia hurried along to her room where the walls were duck egg blue, the curtains white and scattered with daisies. Soft muslin drapes rather than heavy lace gave her privacy from the outside world during daylight hours.
She sped quickly to her writing bureau, unlocked it and hid the journal behind a secret panel that sprang open when she pressed an inlaid flower. The small cavity was just big enough to hold the journal as well as the picture in the oval frame. Her father would never know that she had it.
With something akin to reverence, she shut the bureau lid.
My mother’s journal, she thought, laying her hands flat on the glossy walnut surface of the panel. I actually have my mother’s journal.
The sudden decision to tell her father that she had found it flashed into her mind. He knew nothing about the photograph Aunt Iris had given her, but the journal was not a likeness; it was just a thing.
With that in mind, she breezed off down the stairs. At this time of the day he would be in his study completing medical notes of the patients he’d seen that morning.
Perhaps she might indeed have told him about what she had found if she hadn’t heard excited voices coming from the front parlour.
‘Will you look at the monstrous thing? Rumbling and spitting like a train without rails.’
Lydia stopped at the sound of Mrs Gander’s voice and headed to the parlour instead, curious as to what could possibly be so monstrous.
The smell of freshly applied beeswax polish and lavender from the muslin bag hanging from Mrs Gander’s waist greeted her.
The housekeeper was standing with her hands on her hips, her elbows forming sharp angles. Thin as a stick and as tall as a church spire, she wore a pinched look on her face that was made more squashed by the ties of an old-fashioned lace-trimmed cap fastened in a big bow beneath her chin.
Doris the parlour maid was with her, peering out of the window from behind the thick lace curtain. A feather duster poked out from beneath her arm and her large backside was stuck out behind her.