Keep the Home Fires Burning
‘I had a dress like that once,’ Sarah said, remembering her First Communion day.
‘I know,’ Magda said. ‘Mom told me. She said she gave it to Aunt Polly after.’
‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘Poor Mary Ellen had to have a dress loaned from the school, but my dress came in for Siobhan and Orla.’
‘I would have hated to have a First Communion dress loaned that way,’ Missie said. ‘Wouldn’t you, Magda?’
Magda nodded and Sarah said, ‘You thank your lucky stars that you didn’t have to, but there are far worst things about being poor than a secondhand Communion dress.’
‘I’d hate to be poor as well.’
‘Be glad that you’re not then,’ Sarah said. ‘There are a great many poor these days. We are luckier than a lot of families, and don’t you ever forget that.’
The twins knew all about the poor. Uncle Pat and Auntie Polly were poor, and their children wore boots and clothes donated by the Evening Mail Christmas Tree Fund. They knew that despite the help their mother gave Polly, without the Christmas Tree Fund their cousins would probably have had to go barefoot to school a lot of the time, and been without warm, adequate clothing through the winter. Sarah was right, they were luckier than many families. But the twins didn’t feel lucky when they filed into church that Friday afternoon for their confession.
When it was Magda’s turn she slid from her pew, aware her legs were all of a dither, and went into the little box. It was quite dim with the door shut, and when she kneeled down beside the grille she could just about see the outline of Father McIntyre on the other side and she whispered the words they had been practising at school: ‘Bless me, Father for I have sinned. This is my first confession.’
She stopped then, not sure what to say because whatever her grandmother said, Magda thought she hadn’t sinned much. She was never cheeky or disobedient to her parents, grandparents or teachers or any other grown-up, because she would have had the legs smacked off her if she had been, and the same thing would happen if she was found to be telling lies. She’d never dream of taking something that didn’t belong to her and had never even put half her collection money in her shoe as she had seen Tony do sometimes.
Then she remembered how lax she was about prayers and how she was often in bed before she thought of them, but she always told her mother that she had said them when she came to tuck the twins in, so that was adding lying to it as well and so she told the priest that. She didn’t mention the fact that she sometimes hated Tony, and her grandmother too, and she supposed that was a sin, though not, she thought, the sort of thing she could admit to a priest. She had to say three Hail Marys and a Glory Be as a penance. Missie and most of their classmates had been given the same.
‘We must make sure that we don’t do something really dreadful tomorrow,’ Missie warned as she and Magda walked home together afterwards. ‘The teacher said that our souls must be as white as snow to receive Holy Communion.’
‘We never get the chance to do something really dreadful,’ Magda said, but she made a mental note that she would make sure she didn’t forget her prayers that night, or Saturday either, to make sure she’d have no stain on her soul when she went to the rails.
That Sunday morning all the girls were to the left of the aisle and Magda sneaked a look at the boys on the other side. Many had smart new white shirts, and the richer amongst them also had black shiny shoes and new grey trousers, and socks that probably stayed up better than the ones many wore to school, which resided in concertina rolls around their ankles unless they were held up by garters. But all in all the boys’ clothes were very commonplace when compared to the girls’ finery. In fact, the only thing that marked this day as a special one for the boys was the satin sash they each had around their shoulders, which lay across the body and fastened at the hip.
The strains of the organ brought people to their feet. Marion watched all the children looking so angelic on this very special day. They were quieter than she had ever known them. The sense of occasion had got into even the most mischievous, and there was no fidgeting or whispering, and no one dropped their pennies for the collection. As they left their seats to go up to the rails a little later, she felt tears stinging her eyes as she wondered what was in store for these young children if their country went to war.
THREE
Everywhere that sultry summer there was evidence of things to come. Big trenches were dug in Aston Park, swathes of brown where once there had been green grass, and the following week all the railings were hacked down. By early August, strange windowless buildings appeared everywhere and the older children were drafted in to fill sacks with sand.
By mid-August they heard about the blackout that would come into force on 1 September. Every householder was told to black out the windows, streetlights would be turned off, no cars would be allowed lights, and even torches would be forbidden.
‘So you are right as usual, Bill,’ Marion said. ‘They must expect attacks from the air or they wouldn’t be going to so much trouble. And there’s a fine of two hundred pounds if there is a chink of light showing. I’d better go down the Bull Ring Saturday and see what I can get.’ She sighed as she went on, ‘It will cost something, too, to recurtain the whole house. Thank God Polly’s two lads are working now. She will probably have the money to buy the material. Mammy has an old treadle she won’t mind us using, especially if we offer to make hers up as well.’
But before Marion got to go down to the Bull Ring, an education officer called round with the headmaster of the school to talk about evacuation of the children. Though Marion was worried about them, and how they would cope in the event of war, she thought it a monstrous plan to send her children to some strangers in what the Government deemed ‘a place of safety’. She rejected the idea quite definitely, and Polly, she found, had done the same.
‘Whatever we face, we face together. That’s how I see it,’ Polly said to Marion. ‘I mean, they could end up going to anyone.’
‘Couldn’t agree more,’ Marion said. ‘The twins are just seven and Tony was only nine in April. They’re far too young to be sent away from home, and Sarah said she wanted to go nowhere either. It would feel like running away, she said, and anyway, she’s looking forward to leaving school and earning some money.’
‘Can’t blame them, though, can you?’ Polly said. ‘Can’t do owt in this world without money, and that I know only too well.’
One Friday evening towards the end of August Marion turned on the wireless and caught the tail end of an announcement: ‘As a precaution gas masks are being issued to every person in Britain. These will be available from 1 September. Please study your local papers to find out where your nearest collection point will be.’
‘Gas masks, Bill, for God’s sake,’ Marion cried, and her face was as white as lint.
‘It’s just in case,’ Bill said. ‘You heard what he said.’
‘Yes, but even so …’
‘In the last war the Germans used gas to disable the troops,’ Bill reminded her. ‘You know that yourself. You’ve seen some poor sods down the Bull Ring with their lungs near ate away with mustard gas. Twenty years on they might have worked out how to drop it on the civilian population. I’m not saying they will,’ he added, looking at Marion’s terror-stricken face, ‘but surely it’s better to be safe than sorry?’
‘I suppose it is,’ Marion said. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to think of it.’
Bill put his arms around her. ‘None of us do, not really, and there is something else that I must tell you now that war seems inevitable.’
‘What?’
‘Well, it has been in my head for some time, but I haven’t wanted to upset you by speaking of it sooner,’ Bill said. ‘But now you really need to know that when war is declared, I intend to enlist.’
‘No, Bill!’ Marion cried. ‘No, Bill, you can’t.’
Bill tightened his arms around her. ‘Don’t take on, old girl,’ he said. ‘You must have known this was on the cards.’
But Marion hadn’t known. Such thoughts had never crossed her mind. Bill had a family, responsibilities, and she had thought that would make him safe, or as safe as anyone can be in a war. She pulled herself out of his embrace and said, ‘Just how did you expect me to react, Bill? Did you think that I would be jumping up and down with delight?’
‘You know how I feel about Hitler and his bloody bunch of hoodlum Germans,’ Bill protested. ‘I’m doing this because I want to try and protect you.’
‘Sorry, Bill, that doesn’t make me feel any better.’
‘Look,’ said Bill, ‘Hitler and his armies are marching all over Europe. He already has Austria and Czechoslovakia, and now he is casting his eye over Poland. Where will he look next? If he conquers the Low Countries he will make his way to France, and if France falls we are just a step across the Channel. Believe me, Marion, Britain will need every man they can get to take on the German Army and try and stop them in their tracks.’
‘I can see they might need young men,’ Marion conceded. ‘But not men as old as you, and family men at that.’
‘I’m thirty-nine and that’s not old,’ Bill said. ‘Not according to the army, anyway.’
‘But what of your job?’ Marion cried. ‘How will they manage at the foundry if all the men go off soldiering?’
‘The foundry will manage well enough without me,’ Bill said. ‘And I imagine the families of men fighting for their King and Country are well enough provided for. After all, I am unlikely to be the only family man in the Forces. Pat’s enlisting with me.’
‘He may as well,’ Marion said bitterly. ‘He at least has no job to leave, nor ever has had.’ Marion began to sob in earnest then for she knew that before making any big decision, Bill would always weigh up the pros and cons, and he would have done it this time because this was one of the biggest decisions he would ever make. Once he was resolved on a course of action, though, he was immovable. She saw the lift of his chin and the glint in his eyes, and though tears gushed from her eyes she knew her husband would leave her – leave them all ? and go to a war from which he might never return.
When Tony, Magda and Missie were told about their father going to be a soldier they thought at first that it was the most exciting news in the world. They couldn’t understand why their mother wasn’t as delighted as they were.
‘Well, I suppose that she doesn’t want him going away,’ Sarah said as they walked to school the following day.
It was news to Magda that her father would have to go and live elsewhere and she said, ‘Won’t he be able to be a soldier and stay at home then?’
Tony gave a hoot of laughter. ‘Course he can’t stay here, stupid. He’ll have to go away and kill Germans, won’t he? He’ll be shooting them with his rifle and sticking his bayonet in their innards and …’
‘That’s enough, Tony,’ Sarah said sharply.
Tony gave a shrug. ‘Well, Magda is such a baby.’
‘No I ain’t.’
‘Yes you are,’ Tony said. ‘I bet you thought all he would do was march around all day in his smart uniform behind a big brass band. You did, dain’t you? That’s all you thought they did?’
Magda didn’t know what soldiers did, but she wasn’t going to admit that to Tony, so she stuck her tongue out at him, taking care that Sarah didn’t see, before saying, ‘No I dain’t, see.’
‘Yes you did,’ Tony retorted. ‘You really are stupid, Magda Whittaker. We’re at war, ain’t we?’
‘I know that, don’t I?’ Magda cried. ‘But what’s war, anyroad?’
Tony wasn’t absolutely sure either, but he said, ‘War means that our dad has got to go and kill people before they kill him, don’t it, Sarah?’
Both the twins’ faces paled ? they’d never thought of anyone killing their father ? and Sarah was cross at Tony just blurting it out like that. But that’s what was going to happen eventually and it would be doing the twins no favours to tell them lies, so her voice was gentle as she said, ‘Tony’s got it about right, because that’s what soldiers have to do.’
Magda caught Missie’s eyes and suddenly thought maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for her father to be a soldier after all. She knew that Missie felt the same.
Tony saw the look and said, ‘The pair of you are plain stupid.’
‘Tony, I won’t tell you again,’ Sarah said sharply. ‘Magda and Missie are over two years younger than you. How are they to know these things? We have never been to war before. And don’t worry,’ she added to the twins as they went into the school yard, ‘Dad won’t be in danger for ages yet, because he will have to be trained to be a soldier.’
Magda sighed with relief. Tony was probably right, she thought. She didn’t know much about going to war but she knew one thing: just talking about it made everyone bad-tempered.
The following Sunday the children’s grandparents came to tea as usual. Bill had known that his mother-in-law would have something to say about his decision to enlist and he wasn’t disappointed. As soon as he entered the house with the twins after their walk, she started on him, berating him roundly for his lack of concern and understanding, and was still going strong when they sat down to tea. Tony had sloped off as usual, so it was just the twins sitting on the horsehair sofa, being stabbed to death with its stuffing, while their grandmother continued to carp on in her thin, shrill voice, even more vitriolic than she usually was.
Magda, casting a glimpse her way, thought that it was just as if she had anger bubbling up inside her, so much so, that it was coming up in spittle and forming a white line along her thin bloodless lips. Her grandfather valiantly tried to deflect the conversation away from Bill until in the end she snapped, ‘Be quiet, Eddie. What are you going on about? There is only one concern here and that’s Bill and his stupidity.’
Bill looked up at Clara’s face and sighed before saying mildly enough, ‘Well, Clara, I know from experience you won’t let a matter drop until you have worried it to death like a dog with a bone so you might as well have your say.’
Clara glared at him and wiped her mouth and fingers on a napkin before saying, ‘What I really want to know is whatever possessed you to even think about enlisting like this? It’s totally irresponsible.’
Bill shook his head. ‘I don’t see it that way.’
‘There is no other way to see it,’ Clara burst out, ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I am prepared to fight, because I see the Germans gaining more and more power as each day passes,’ Bill said. ‘They won’t stop until they have the whole of Europe under their dominance and we must all fight to prevent that. I’m going to war because I love my family and want to protect them, and I would feel less of a man if I didn’t do it.’
Even Marion, who didn’t want her husband to join in any war, was impressed by the sincere and yet firm way Bill had answered her mother. The children were all awed, not so much by the words their father had used, but by the fact that he was the first person they knew to render their grandmother speechless.
Before Clara had time to think of some retort, Bill spoke directly to his father-in-law, for whom he had always had great respect. ‘Do you see my point in any of this, Eddie?’
Eddie glanced first at his wife, but then he said, ‘I do, Bill. You’ve put it very well and you’re right. It is no good expecting the man either side of you to volunteer while you stay safe and dry. Britain is a much smaller country than Germany and so needs all the soldiers that it can get. This will not be just a young man’s war. Sometimes, however painful, sacrifices have to be made.’
‘Pat is enlisting along with me,’ Bill said.
He heard the snort of disapproval from Clara because she had less time for Pat Reilly than Marion had. ‘You can be as scornful as you like,’ he snapped, ‘but Pat Reilly at least has as much courage as the next man, for we all know that what we’re going to be involved in will be no picnic.’
Marion knew it wasn’t, and while she had exercised her right to say something to Bill on the subject, she hated her mother criticising him so, and in front of the children too. Anyway, she knew the die was cast. As she got to her feet, she said to her mother, ‘There’s no point in going on and on about it now, Mammy. The decision has been made and Bill has told you why he made it and that’s an end to it as far as I’m concerned.’
Bill looked at Marion with astonishment.
She never stood up to her mother, but she had suddenly thought that if Bill wasn’t going to be around, it was time she developed some backbone and she was far too old to allow herself to be browbeaten by her mother.
‘And if we’ve all finished, shall we clear up here so that the children can eat?’ she went on. ‘I’m sure they think their throats have been cut.’
Still Clara said nothing, but the atmosphere could have been cut with a knife as, with a sniff of disapproval, she rose from the table. She left the room in silence, outrage and anger showing on every line of her body.
‘Methinks it’s a little frosty on the Western Front this evening,’ Bill commented quietly, and both Richard and Sarah had to bite their lips to stop their laughter escaping.
‘Why are you putting those horrible black curtains up at the windows?’ Magda asked her mother a few days later.
‘We have to, and that’s all there is to it,’ Marion said from her precarious stance on the dining chair. ‘They have to go up at all the windows.’
‘Even ours?’ Magda said. ‘Our bedrooms and that?’
‘Fraid so.’
‘But why?’
‘So the enemy aircraft won’t see us, that’s why,’ Tony said.
‘How do you know that?’ Marion asked sharply.
‘Jack told me.’
‘He would.’
‘Well, he’s right, ain’t he?’ Tony said.
Marion sighed. She knew that she couldn’t protect her children with a load of lies – the time was past for that. They had a right to know what might happen if the country went to war. She said, ‘Yes, Tony, Jack is right.’
And then Tony turned to his younger sisters and said, ‘Jack told me that enemy aircraft will carry bombs that they’ll drop on us and try and blow us all up.’
‘They won’t, will they, Mom?’ Missie said, and Marion could hear the nervous wobble in her voice.
She knew Missie and Magda wanted an assurance that she couldn’t give them and so she got off the chair and put her arms around each of them as she answered carefully. ‘No one knows yet what the Germans will do when the war begins, but your dad is having someone come to look at our cellar in the next couple of days, and if necessary they will reinforce it and then Hitler and his planes can do his worst and we will be as safe as houses, especially if it is pitch black here, because then the German pilots wouldn’t know where to drop their bombs, would they?’
‘Won’t they see by the streetlights?’ Magda asked.
‘No, because they won’t be on either.’
‘Ooh,’ Missie said, ‘it will be real scary to go out then.’
‘It will take some getting used to,’ Marion conceded. ‘But if that’s how it must be then that’s how it must be.’
By the time they were ready for bed that night, all the horrid black curtains were hung at the windows, but not before Sarah had crisscrossed tape on the glass. She saw the twins’ eyes upon her and explained, ‘If the bombs do fall, then this prevents the glass from flying into the room.’
Magda imagined bombs exploding loud enough and near enough to blow out a person’s windows. She shuddered in sudden fear as she said, ‘So this is just in case as well?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Some of the kids at school are going to the country the day after tomorrow, in case there’s a war,’ Magda said.
‘Yeah, Mary Cox had to get her gas mask early ‘cos her mom is sending her to the country,’ Missie said. ‘They told her the kids’ masks look like Mickey Mouse, but she said they don’t and they stink like mad. She said we’ve all got to get them.’
‘That’s another precaution,’ Sarah said. ‘In case the Germans drop gas.’
‘I think war, even preparing for war, is all really frightening,’ Missie said.
‘Not half,’ Magda agreed. ‘Bloody terrifying, that’s what it is.’
Sarah cuffed her sister lightly on the side of the head. ‘War or no war, Magda Whittaker,’ she said sternly, ‘I will wash your mouth out with carbolic if I hear you using words like that.’
‘Dad uses words like that, ‘cos I’ve heard him,’ Magda maintained.
‘That’s different, and you know it, and if you don’t listen to me, I’ll tell Mom. Then you’ll be sorry.’
Magda knew she would be. Her mother had far harder hands than Sarah. So, though she still thought the world a bloody scary place, she kept those thoughts to herself.
On Friday morning the children to be evacuated were assembled in the school yard and Marion took Tony and the twins down to see their friends go off. The evacuees had labels with their names on pinned to their coats, and boxes, which Marion said held their gas masks, were hung around their necks. Some had their change of clothes and personal bits and pieces in carrier bags, while others held small cases, or had haversacks strapped to their back, like Mary, who was standing in the playground looking a little lost, but hanging on to her five-year-old brother, Raymond, for grim death.
She gave a half-hearted attempt at a smile when she saw the twins, but despite that, she seemed cloaked in misery. In fact most of the children looked the same, and the mothers were little better, for many of them were in tears, though some were trying to put a brave face on it.
The teachers going with them rallied the children into some sort of order and then the headmaster led them in a rendition of ‘Run Rabbit Run’ as they marched towards the gate and to Aston station.
‘Where is the place of safety they’re going, anyroad?’ Magda asked as they walked home.
‘No one knows,’ Marion said. ‘That’s the terrible thing. Phyllis, Mary and Raymond’s mother, said all they were told was that wherever it was there would be host families ready to take in the children and care for them. She has no idea where that place is or what sort of family her two will end up with.’
‘Mary dain’t want to go,’ Magda said, ‘cos she was blarting her eyes out on the bus.’
‘Her mother was as well,’ Missie added.
‘Ah, yes,’ Marion said. ‘Poor woman was in a right state about it. One of the problems is that she doesn’t know whether she’s doing the right thing or not. She was just thinking that if the raids do come, she has to see to the two other little ones at home, so the eldest two would be better out of it for a while. If there are no raids she will have them back quick as lightning, I think.’
No one made any response to this because as they turned into their road, right beside their front gate women had gathered, earnestly discussing something.
‘What is it? What’s up?’ Marion said.
Marion’s next-door neighbour, Deidre Whitehead, answered, ‘News just came through on the wireless. Hitler’s armies have invaded Poland and they are fighting for their lives.’
Marion felt quite faint, although it was news that she had been expecting.
Ada Shipley said, ‘That’s it then. The balloon has definitely gone up. We’re going to have another war and if my lad’s right it will be bloodier even than the Great War. God help him, wherever he is tonight.’
Hear, hear, thought Marion as she hurried the children indoors. God help all of us.
The gas masks that Marion brought home for them later that day were just as awful as Mary had said, and they didn’t look a bit like any picture of Mickey Mouse that Magda had ever seen.
‘I can’t wear that,’ she complained, frantically tugging off the mask that Marion fitted on her. ‘I can’t breathe with that flipping thing covering my face.’
‘Of course you can,’ Marion said unsympathetically. ‘You will be glad enough to wear it if there are gas attacks. This is not the time to make a fuss about little things.’