A Woman's Place (35 page)

‘Don’t you think I’m frightened for Albert too?’

Aware how sharp that must have sounded, she hastily changed the subject to the increasing lack of food items in the shops. ‘Stuff is simply beginning to disappear off the counters. I bet the people with money have started to hoard. They’ll make sure they won’t go short even if others do.’

It made her think suddenly of Laurence Jones-Fairbrook: no shortages for well-off people like him. Where was he now? Probably married to some daughter of wealthy parents. That’s what wealthy people like him did in the end, once the little bit on the side had been forgotten about. She’d been a fool thinking he would ever have married anyone like her from a totally different class to his.

Resolutely she put him from her, turning her mind again to the BEF defeats; of the seventy thousand men many had already been killed. The war, so confidently spoken of as being over in a couple of months, now didn’t seem so certain of conclusion. The army was calling for half a million more men. Yesterday her brother Len had answered the call. Mum was devastated, but what could she do? Eveline decided she would pop over this afternoon and try to offer comfort.

‘I couldn’t stop ’im,’ her mother said bleakly, moving away from Eveline’s attempt to cuddle her. ‘Twenty-one now, he can do what he likes.’

‘But he’s courting, isn’t he?’

For a moment her mother’s mind was distracted from her son going off to fight, her hazel eyes taking on a mild look. ‘Nice little girl, that Flossie. I suppose that engagement of theirs’ll ’ave ter wait even a bit longer now. They’ve ’ad ter put it off once due ter lack of funds.’

The mild look was again replaced again by concern for Len, leaving Eveline to utter the phrase that was becoming almost tedious, and lately losing its former optimism, that the war had to be over soon.

Then suddenly news was good again. Not just good, heartening – the first decisive battle so far, fought on the banks of the Marne in France with French forces pushing the enemy back to the river Aisne.

PARIS SAVED: GERMANS IN RETREAT
, blared the headlines dated the fourteenth of September.

‘I said all along they took on more than they could chew,’ said her dad, scanning the headlines as belligerently as if he personally were in charge of this successful counter-attack.

Eveline had taken to popping over each Monday around lunchtime when Dad closed up for an hour. She’d have a bite to eat with them, pick up a few groceries Mum let her have for a few pence off, then go home. Though why she hurried away she wasn’t sure. There was only herself and Helena to get a meal for.

Popping in on Mondays would help break up the day after a lonely weekend. She would have Sunday dinners there too, once or twice but not too often in case it looked as if she was relying on them all the time. Mum was a little more inclined towards Helena these days and she was more sociable then she’d once been, so long as Eveline didn’t make a habit of popping over too often.

There was Connie of course. Bound by a common sense of loneliness with their men no longer here, especially acute in Connie’s case with no family willing to console her, they’d become even closer, so she supposed she should count herself lucky. And they had something to do with their time, for which she thanked the suffragettes even though they no longer had need to raise any ruckus. Queen Mary had appealed to women of the Empire to knit socks for the troops, three thousand pairs according to Her Majesty; the old suffragette branches were among the first to organise knitting circles.

Using the room behind the canteen, Eveline was able to have Helena with her now, which she hoped took some of the weight off Gran. The child was able to play on the floor beside her and in safety with the door to the canteen tightly closed. She and Rebecca kept each other company, and a couple of other little ones too. They couldn’t go far in this one room and for the most part played at knitting with odd bits of khaki wool.

‘Go on like this,’ Eveline’s father was saying, beaming at the
Daily Express
headlines, ‘and it’ll be over before we know it. I always said it’d be all over by Christmas.’

‘So do a lot of other people,’ Eveline laughed, at last able to feel some real optimism. Albert home for Christmas, demobilised and back to work, coming home at regular hours to the meal she’d have on the table for him: it was a lovely and hopeful thought. They might even try again for a baby.

Connie couldn’t help thinking of her family at times like these. It still hurt that they had estranged themselves from her.

‘You would think they would put our differences aside and let bygones be bygones with all that is happening,’ she said to Eveline in October.

German forces had consolidated their position in Belgium. Ghent and Bruges and Ostend had fallen to them. The Belgian government had fled to France. But Connie was more concerned with her own troubles.

‘It is all so foolish. I have been married all this time and with a family and there’s nothing they can do about it, so why continue with this grudge?’

She’d heard from Verity, who although happily married had had three miscarriages and still no children. Her most recent letter said that Douglas, her husband, had felt obliged to enlist after seeing posters of Lord Kitchener calling for more men to join their country’s fight against tyranny.

‘With the man pointing straight at everyone, imploring Britons to join their country’s army,’ her letter went on, ‘how could I beg Douglas not to? I am devastated without him. He is an officer. I know I should be brave but I really am utterly in fear.’

Her lamentations prompted Connie to reply that if they were to win this war, every man must do his bit for his country, as her own husband was doing. ‘Even if he is only in the ranks,’ she hastened to add pointedly, suddenly made very strong by Verity’s fear.

Verity’s letter had also said that their brother, Denzil, at eighteen, had also enlisted instead of going up to Oxford. He too was considered to be potential officer material; the army sorely needed commissioned men.

‘If only my mother could have written to tell me about him,’ Connie said bitterly. ‘I feel I’ve no family at all.’

‘You’ve got mine,’ said Eveline, trying to comfort.

She had to admit that Eveline’s family did treat her almost as one of their own. She had even accepted invitations to Sunday dinner, but it was small compensation for her own parents’ attitude towards her. Verity’s letter had prompted her to write once again to them, this time to say that George had enlisted, but there’d been no response, embittering her even more.

‘I really feel that if my George was sent off to France and I made a widow, they’d still not write,’ she told Eveline, her needles working furiously on the khaki socks she was knitting.

The words made her shudder as if they had been prophetic, as in fact they appeared to have been when days later news came from George that his and Albert’s unit had indeed been sent to the front, as it was being called.

The anticipated movements of battle having come to a stalemate in early November, both sides were digging in. Newspapers reported trenches and barbed wire, monotony, and mud with the onset of winter, a series of small advances and small retreats getting both sides nowhere.

George’s letter, posted from France, sent Connie falling into Eveline’s arms, grateful for a shoulder to cry on. She was being a baby knowing so many women throughout the country must be feeling the same as her. She was well aware how weak she must seem but it helped to have someone to cling to and not feel she was being condemned for her frailty.

Eveline too had received a letter, from Albert. She said she’d managed to hold her emotion but Connie’s crying had finally made her give way to silly tears. This was spoken almost like an accusation. Connie felt some of her strength return as they comforted each other; Eveline was made of stronger stuff than she ever would be, for all her resolve now to face up to whatever came.

Christmas was like no other Eveline had ever known, everyone caught by a new fear. Ten days before, several towns on the east coast had been brought right into the war as, looming out of a December dawn mist, three German warships had shelled the east coast towns of Scarborough, West Hartlepool and Whitby. A hundred people had been killed, mostly civilians.

Most viewed it with something like disbelief. Not since the Civil War had any of England’s subjects died in hostilities on English soil. Zeppelins too had been seen over England and the likelihood of bombs being dropped on English towns from those slowly gliding shapes filled everyone with foreboding.

There’d been trouble across the country, mobs venting their anger on German shopkeepers and other suspect foreigners, breaking their windows, destroying their goods, threatening their lives until the police had to rescue them. And aliens were being rounded up and taken off to special camps. Even the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, German by birth and known to be related to the Kaiser, had been forced to resign because of anti-German feeling, even though his son was serving in the Royal Navy.

The Christmas many predicted would see the end of the war wasn’t one for celebrations, since so many remained without their men at home. Determined as Eveline was to make the best of things and, judging by Connie’s desperate smiles, she was trying hard to do the same, there was an emptiness about this festive season that couldn’t be filled, though her being at her parents for Christmas dinner helped a bit.

The entire family squashed into the flat above the shop as if presenting a united front against the times they were now living in. With the dinner-table leaves extended, somehow twelve adults or near adults, five children and a baby in arms, which didn’t count, managed to squeeze round it, the younger ones secured between table and wall and all having to eat with elbows well in but with lots of goodwill and give and take.

Dad’s corner shop had made certain of a Christmas dinner to beat all Christmas dinners this year, in an effort to show that this war wasn’t going to get any of them down. But there were still the missing faces to remind them: her Albert, her brother Len, and Connie’s George.

Eveline’s sister, Tilly, chewing steadily, said, ‘My Stan keeps talking about needing to do ’is bit. He says most of the blokes he worked with ’ave enlisted. I keep telling ’im he’s a married man with children.’

She glanced across the table where her husband was talking to their father, then down at her small daughter, protectively holding her baby boy closer. ‘If he enlisted and anything ’appens to ’im, they’d be without a dad.’

‘I don’t think he’d be that rash,’ Eveline said, she too eating steadily. ‘He’s got a family to think of.’

But so had Albert. That hadn’t stopped him. Nor George. She felt let down and angry, for herself and for Connie. Without thinking, both of them had volunteered in the initial fever of excitement to see an enemy off. The recruitment stations hadn’t stopped to consider if a man had a family or not. But that first flush of excitement had died down and even though duty and patriotism still counted, some well knew the slaughter going on at the front. To Eveline’s mind Stan was being a bit inconsiderate even though they were still pushing for recruits.

If he was seeing only the glory of comradeship against a common foe the news alone from the front should make him stop and think. Albert’s letters were dismal, speaking not of glory but of poor food, cold, hard work, and little change of clothing. And he wasn’t yet in the fighting line; his job at the moment consisted of loading boxes of ammunition on trucks and mules to be sent on.

Eveline found herself reading more into his letters than he meant her to, fuelling a lurking fear that at any moment his unit could be sent to the trenches. He and George were still together; generals still remained happy for mates and even those from the same street to be so, for the sake of morale.

She would hear the same echo of fear in the letters Connie sometimes read out to her from her George. Only occasionally now, and getting less and less as each hesitated to confide in the other what they constantly read into those loving, lonely and often achingly soulful letters, each praying this war would finish before their man could be sent forward.

But while there seemed to be stalemate over there, elsewhere there had been encouraging news. Earlier this month the Royal Navy’s magnificent victory in the Falklands had meant sinking the German cruisers
Dresden, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau
and
Nurnberg
with, it was said, no British losses. People were still feeding off it come Christmas. Thinking of it, she felt a little more optimistic.

‘Time your Stan gets to thinking of joining up, the Germans will have surrendered,’ she said to Tilly. ‘We’ve got a great big Empire to call on. What have they got? A few more months and they’ll give up, you wait and see.’

It had been a good Christmas after all, despite her constantly missing Albert. Dinner cleared away, the men still at home, too young or too old to enlist, gathered in the kitchen to drink and smoke and discuss the present situation. Children had been put to bed for the afternoon to sleep off their meal, while the women reclined on the chairs Mum had pushed against the wall ready for a bit of fun in the evening. The mats and rugs taken up had left the linoleum clear for a bit of a knees-up later and to hell with the war for a day.

Later they’d made ham sandwiches for tea with shrimps and winkles and crispy celery. Dad had played records on his beloved gramophone to do the two-step to songs like ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and ‘Hullo-Hullo, Who’s Your Lady Friend’, everyone pausing as he rewound the spring, finally going all sentimental with ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and ‘You Made Me Love You’, which a friend of his played on his harmonica.

Tiring of it, they’d played cards for pennies and ha’pennies into the evening, the women finally going off to bed while the men got down to some serious betting at pontoon. The war had seemed a long way away.

Now it was January 1915, with still no end to the war in sight despite newspaper accounts of an unofficial truce on Christmas Day by ordinary troops in one corner of the Western Front. British and German soldiers had come out of their trenches to greet each other, exchange food and cigarettes as if giving Christmas presents, even having a game of football, much to the disapproval of the authorities.