Across the Mersey (23 page)

‘Very well. And you are …?’

Bella gave her details, imperiously beckoning over the refugee she had chosen.

‘She’d better be able to speak English,’ she told the WVS worker, who had now turned to the refugee and was speaking to her slowly and politely, for all the world as though she was a proper person and not someone who was only here because of the war, Bella thought contemptuously. It seemed that the Polish woman could speak English, although not very well.

It was horribly unpleasant in the hall, and Bella couldn’t wait to get home. She would have to tell
the woman to have a bath and make sure she washed all her clothes. She had been horrified when her mother had warned her that she must check to make sure that she didn’t need delousing.

‘Please sign this,’ the WVS woman told Bella, handing her a form.

Impatiently Bella signed it. ‘Do I have to take her with me now?’ she asked.

‘Yes, please.’ The WVS volunteer turned back to the waiting woman, and told her, ‘You and your daughter will both be billeted with Mrs Parker. She will take you home with her now.’

Her daughter? Bella stared at the WVS worker in furious outrage. ‘I never said anything about taking two of them.’

Was that triumphant dislike she could see in the volunteer’s eyes as she told her calmly, ‘Well, you’ve signed for them both, my dear, so I’m afraid you have no alternative. Next,’ she called out determinedly, ignoring Bella’s fury.

Two of them! Just what she hadn’t wanted, and she had been tricked into having them, she knew she had, Bella fumed as she glared at the two women who were now standing huddled together watching her.

The daughter was as plain and unprepossessing as the mother, both of them sallow-faced, with brown eyes and limp brown hair. They were as thin as sticks, and their clothes looked like rags. Bella was ashamed to be seen with them, even if they were only refugees and nothing really to do with her at all. How dreadful it was that these
wretched refugees should have come over here like this, expecting to be taken into decent people’s homes, and how wrong of the British Government to force people to accept them.

By rights Alan should have been here to help her with them instead of expecting her to manage on her own. It was his mother’s fault, after all, that she had been landed with them, Bella decided crossly, ignoring the two women following her as she walked quickly home, hugging the warmth of her fur coat around her, her feet snug inside the thick fleecy boots her mother had bought for her.

Luckily, because of his business, her father was able to get a regular supply of coal and had had the good sense to stock up with it down at his business premises so that Bella was able to keep two good fires burning in the house, which was more than Alan’s mother was able to do, she thought smugly as she turned her key in the front door.

‘You two are to go down there,’ she told the two refugees, indicating the pathway that led to the back door of the house. She wasn’t going to allow them to use the front door.

When she had let them into the back kitchen, Bella made them stand there whilst she went to telephone her mother.

‘But, Mummy, you’ll have to come round,’ she insisted. ‘Daddy can drive you. I can’t let them go upstairs until I’m sure they haven’t got you-know-what.’

Having persuaded her mother to come round, Bella went into the kitchen and lit a cigarette, sitting down at the table so that she could watch her unwanted lodgers through the open door.

Half an hour passed, by which time Bella had smoked another cigarette and made herself a cup of tea, without bothering to offer her lodgers one.

The daughter looked angrily at her and said fiercely, ‘My mother is very tired. Where is her bedroom, please? She needs to have some rest.’

Bella stubbed out her cigarette. The cheek of it – making demands as though she had every right to do so.

‘I don’t care how tired she is. She’s not going anywhere until I’ve made sure that she’s fit to sleep in one of my beds.’

‘Fit?’ The girl looked puzzled. ‘But I have just said that she is not fit. She is tired.’

‘Look, I’ve just told you, she isn’t going anywhere—’ Bella broke off when she heard the doorbell.

‘They’re in the back kitchen,’ she told her mother after she had let her parents in.

‘Where’s Alan?’ her father asked sharply. ‘This is his responsibility, not ours.’

‘He’s still at work,’ Bella told them. ‘He’s always at work. Just wait until you see them, Mummy. They’re virtually dressed in rags. No wonder Hitler doesn’t want them.’

Bella could see from the expression on the daughter’s face that she had heard her. Good! She needed to know how lucky she was instead of
looking at Bella with that proud angry look on her face.

‘Do they speak any English?’ Vi looked uncertainly at Bella.

‘We do speak English but my mother speaks less than me.’

Vi and Bella exchanged looks.

‘What are their names, Bella?’ Vi asked, still ignoring the refugees.

Bella began to shrug but the daughter spoke up again, saying proudly, ‘I am Bettina Polanski and my mother is Mrs Maria Polanski.’

‘I didn’t realise there were two of them,’ Bella told her mother. ‘And by the looks of her the older one isn’t going to be much good at doing my cleaning.’

‘Well, let’s get them bathed first, darling. It’s a pity there isn’t one of those old-fashioned tin baths, like the poor have.’ Raising her voice, she looked at the refugees.

‘You will both have to have baths and wash your hair, and your clothes will have to be washed before you can wear them again. I’ve brought them some things to wear in the meantime. Luckily Mrs Forrest had left some things with me for the Red Cross.’

‘Come along, the bathroom is this way.’

‘My mother is hungry. She needs food before anything else. We were told we would be given a meal and a comfortable bed. Your government has told us this and said that it will pay for us to have these things; they did not say that we would be treated like this.’

Bella looked at her mother.

‘You can’t expect my daughter to make you a meal at this time of night.’

The older woman turned to her daughter and said something in Polish. Her voice was quiet and as tired as her expression. The daughter looked bitterly at Bella before very gently taking her mother’s arm and guiding her through the kitchen and into the hallway as they followed Bella’s mother.

‘But are you sure that they didn’t have any … anything?’ Bella asked her mother anxiously for the umpteenth time. ‘It’s all very well saying that they’ve both had a bath and that you’ll get their clothes laundered, but …’ Bella shuddered theatrically. ‘I can’t bear to think of having to have them here in my lovely house. It just isn’t fair.’

‘At least it’s only two women, Bella,’ Vi tried to comfort her. ‘No children, thank heavens.’

Bella certainly wasn’t prepared to give up two bedrooms to them, and had told them that they would have to share. Heavens, for all she knew they probably slept in a cowshed or something wherever it was they had come from, she thought.

‘I do hope they aren’t going to make a nuisance of themselves, Mummy,’ she told her mother now. ‘The cheek of it, actually asking for food.’

‘Well, yes, darling, but the Government has said that they must be given their meals, but that doesn’t mean that you should have to put yourself out for them. The girl looks healthy and strong. I dare say between them she and her mother can do all
the cleaning and the cooking. It’s the least they can do for you, after all the trouble they’re putting you to. I should suggest it to them in the morning, if I were you.’

Bella’s face brightened a little. She hated cooking, and the thought of having someone to take over her domestic responsibilities was certainly appealing.

‘Seeing that ambulance driver of yours tomorrow, are you, Campion, seeing as it’s your day off? Mind you, I have to say that it’s a bit of a rum do, you and him, with you saying that he’s not said anything to you about you being his steady. You’d never catch me allowing a lad to monopolise me like that if I didn’t have a bit of a promise from him that he was serious. You don’t want to let him go messing you around, you know.’

Grace knew that Doreen meant well but that didn’t stop her from feeling self-conscious and uncomfortable. Not that she was going to show it. Instead she smiled brightly and said firmly, ‘Oh, me and Teddy are happy as we are, just as friends.’

‘Has he really not said anything to you about you and him being an item, Grace, or are you just keeping quiet about it because we’ve got to stay single?’ Hannah asked her later on, when they were on their own. ‘Only with you being such a good-looking girl I’d have thought he’d at least
have tried a bit of something on, if you know what I mean.’

Grace did, but she wasn’t going to say so. She was beginning to feel increasingly uncomfortable when the other girls asked her about her relationship with Teddy.

Should she say something to him or should she just leave things as they were? She was happy enough when she was with him, after all, and it was only sometimes, like when she saw other couples whispering together and snatching kisses, that she felt that funny ache in the region of her heart that made her feel that she was missing out on something very special.

Did that feeling mean that she was in love with Teddy? Grace admitted that she didn’t know. And there wasn’t anyone really that she could ask. None of the other girls was going steady, not even Lillian, who seemed to have given up on the doctor she was supposed to have been chasing. According to Luke, he and Lillian were still writing to one another and it was obvious from her brother’s letters how he felt about her. Grace wished she was a bit closer to Lillian so that she could have talked to her properly about Luke and how she really felt about him, but Lillian seemed to have taken a bit against her and was making comments she knew Grace could overhear about ‘people who went around interfering in other people’s lives’ without ever coming out and saying exactly what was on her mind.

‘Take no notice of her,’ was always Hannah’s
advice whenever Grace worried about what she should do. ‘Now that she’s acting like she’s keen on your Luke, she’s probably afraid that you might go saying something to him about the way she was.’

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ Grace had protested. ‘I wouldn’t do anything that might hurt him.’

‘People like her don’t understand things like that because they don’t mind who gets hurt so long as it isn’t them,’ had been Hannah’s pithy response.

Tonight was Grace’s last stint on night duty, and she was looking forward to her day off tomorrow.

All but two of the young merchant seamen who had been admitted to the ward in February had been discharged now. Only Davie, who had had his toes amputated, and Harry, who had lost both his legs, were still with them.

Davie had had his nineteenth birthday the previous week and Sister had arranged for the kitchen to bake him a cake. His face had been a picture when he had seen it. Sister had turned a blind eye as well when both his parents and his sisters had come to see him at visiting time.

Grace had told her parents about both young men – the youngest on the ward, as Harry was even younger than Davie and only seventeen. Her mother had been moved to tears for them, like Grace herself worrying about what kind of future they would have.

Sister had said that since Davie was good with his hands he might be able to manage a factory job if he could work from a wheelchair.

Staff was just coming out of Harry’s room when Grace walked on to the ward.

‘He’s had a bad day today,’ she explained quietly. ‘Sister’s asked Dr Lewis about increasing his medicine and he’s said yes.’

Grace said nothing. Harry was on morphine, and sometimes he got the shakes so badly when the effect of it was wearing off that it was pitiful to see and hear him, but Grace acknowledged those things didn’t fill her with the fear and panic she would have felt at the beginning of her ward training, because now she not only knew the cause of them she also had the nursing experience to know how to deal with and alleviate them.

She may have learned a lot but there was a great deal more that she still had to learn, she knew. In another week or so the next lot of trainees would be coming on to the wards, and Grace and her set would be moving up a step, provided they were given good reports. She hoped desperately that she would be. She loved nursing even more than she had thought she would.

Jean had just finished drying up and putting everything away when she heard the knock on the front door. Since she wasn’t expecting anyone, and Sam and the twins were out, she wiped her hands carefully on her apron and then removed it before going to see who it was.

They weren’t back on daylight saving yet and because of the blackout she switched off the hall light before opening the door, but even though she
couldn’t see her visitor’s face clearly, she knew she would have recognised her voice anywhere as she heard her younger sister, Francine, exclaiming, ‘Jean, it’s me!’

‘Francine! My goodness!’

It was such a shock seeing her younger sister so unexpectedly that Jean didn’t know what to say, or do.

It was Francine who, with a sound somewhere between a sob and laughter, moved first, hugging Jean tightly, stepping past the large trunk on the pavement next to her, as she burst into a small torrent of explanations, of which Jean could barely comprehend more than a few words.

Somehow they were inside the hallway, although Jean had no notion of how they had come to be there. She looked anxiously at her sister, almost afraid of what she might see in her face. Nine years was a long time. They might have exchanged regular letters and photographs, but they couldn’t tell what was really in a person’s eyes – or their hearts.

At sixteen Francine had been a stunningly beautiful girl with the kind of looks that turned heads in the street, and a happy-to-lucky attitude towards life, a trust and joy that had shone out of her like her own special sunshine. The beauty was still there, and if anything had grown, but the trust and joy were not, Jean recognised sadly.

When she looked at Francine now what she saw was a woman, not a girl, and yet she still stroked her heavy curls off her face, just as she had done
when Fran had been a little girl and she her ‘big sister’ lovingly taking on the duties of a ‘second mother’ to her as instructed by their mother.

‘Oh, Jean.’ Francine was crying now as she gave Jean another fierce hug. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

‘I’ve missed you, an’ all,’ said Jean. She’d missed her, worried guiltily about her, wished so desperately that things might have been different for her.

‘What are you doing here anyway? Why didn’t you write and let us know you were coming back? It gave me ever such a turn, opening the door and seeing you standing there.’

‘Like a bad penny turning up when you thought you’d got rid of me for good?’

Francine’s words were light enough but Jean could see the pain in her eyes. Now it was her turn to hug her and reassure her.

‘I’ve never thought that about you, Fran. I just thought that you were settled in America, especially when you wrote that you were doing so well with your singing, an’ all.’

‘I was, but I couldn’t stay there, with all that’s happening. I had to come back, Jean, especially now with this war, and … and everything.’

A look passed between them that both understood, and it was Jean who looked away first, her heart suddenly heavy with foreboding.

‘This is still my real home, after all,’ Francine reminded her. ‘I was making plans to come back, and then what should happen but Gracie Fields decided she wanted to do her bit and she asked me if I wanted to go along with her, so we both
ended up in France entertaining the boys. Poor Gracie, you’ll have heard perhaps that she’s had to have an operation, and now there’s all this fuss with the Government not approving of her having married an Italian. Ever so upset, she is. They’re in Capri now, her and her new husband, waiting to see what’s going to happen.’

‘I remember reading summat about it in
Picture
Post
,’ Jean agreed, ‘Mind you, there are them that’s bin saying they don’t know why she should want to go and marry a foreigner in the first place.’

‘He’s good for her and he’s kind to her, and sometimes …’ Francine shook her head. ‘Never mind about Gracie, I want to hear all about the family and what’s been going on.’

‘In a minute. I want to hear what you’re doing first,’ Jean told her, taking up her old familiar elder-sister role now that she was over her initial shock.

Francine pulled a face and then laughed. ‘Very well. I volunteered for ENSA whilst I was in France with Gracie, but since they’ve gone and made such a mess of sorting out things – poor Billy Cotton was supposed to be playing for Gracie at her Christmas concert and he never even made it on account of them not getting the transport they’d been promised – anyway, I thought I might as well come home and see how you all are whilst I’d got the chance. The BBC has said that they might have some work for me, singing with Vera Lynn. Luckily I’ve brought my stage clothes with me.’

Whilst Francine was speaking Jean studied her
younger sister. Jean might have kept her own trim figure but Francine looked, if anything, slightly thinner than she had done when she had gone to America. Mind you, Jean acknowledged to herself, she’d need a good figure, wearing a frock so snugly fitting on the waist before its full panelled skirt curved out softly over her hips. Not that it wasn’t smart, it was, and in a lovely shade of soft blue as well. The collar of the little fitted jacket that went with it was trimmed with fur, and Jean could just imagine how Vi’s eyes would almost pop out on stalks when she saw how glamorously Francine was dressed. Her shoes and bag were the same colour as her suit, and her hat was trimmed with the same fur as her jacket collar. When you weren’t with her it was easy to overlook the mesmerising effect Francine could have on a person, Jean admitted. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful, which she was, it was more than that somehow. There was something about her that had you looking at her and not wanting to look away – warmth, somehow, and an excitement. It was hard to explain but it was impossible not to be aware of it, even though Francine herself never acted as though she cared two hoots about it. Singing, that was all that had mattered to her when she had been growing up. Mad on it, she had been, singing morning noon and night, determined right from being a little thing that she was going to be a singer. Mind you, she did have a lovely voice. Francine had a voice that was as different from other people’s as plain old walking was from dancing. You caught
yourself listening for it and straining to hear more of it even when she was just talking.

‘How is everyone?’ she was asking Jean, her voice suddenly strained with a tension that sent Jean’s heart plummeting.

‘Let me put the kettle on. You just be dying for a cuppa.’

As she bustled busily about her kitchen, Jean was glad of an excuse not to have to look directly at Francine.

‘Well, Luke and Charlie are both with the BEF in France. I dare say you might even have sung for them without knowing it. Bella’s married, of course, and our Grace is training to be a nurse. The twins will be leaving school this summer.’

‘And Jack?’

‘Vi’s had him evacuated into the country for safety.’

‘She never said anything about that when she wrote to me last.’

‘Let’s have that cup of tea, and then we can sit down and talk properly.’

‘I’ve got a favour to ask you,’ Francine warned her as she took the proffered cup. ‘I hate to put on you but I haven’t made any arrangements about where I’m going to stay and I wondered—’

‘You’re welcome to have Grace’s room,’ Jean told her immediately. ‘I know she won’t mind. She’s living in at the hospital. Mind you, I dare say it won’t be what you’re used to.’

‘No it won’t,’ Francine agreed quietly. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve lived in a proper home.
Everyone thinks that being a singer is glamorous. Well, it might look like that when I’m up on the stage, but it’s not much fun going back to a single room in a boarding house every night.’

Jean frowned as she heard the weariness and sadness in her sister’s voice. Francine’s voice betrayed her feelings in the way that other people’s expressions would betray theirs.

‘I thought you was doing really well in America, making records and that.’

‘I was, but then there was a problem.’ Francine gave a dismissive shrug.

‘A man?’ Jean guessed.

Francine gave her a small smile. ‘That was quick of you, but then I suppose …’ Her voice trailed away. ‘I suppose I was naïve. I thought I wasn’t, of course. But Hollywood is a different world, where they live by different rules. “Casting-Couch Rules”, they call them.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Only I didn’t want to play the casting-couch game, and because I didn’t all that talk of records and big deals remained just talk. Luckily for me Gracie took pity on me, otherwise I’d have ended up working in a car wash – or worse.’

‘Well, you won’t find the luxury here that you’ll have got used to, love. Especially not now with this rationing.’

‘It isn’t luxury I want, Jean. That’s not what I’ve come home for at all.’

There was look on her face that made Jean’s heart sink a little.

* * *

‘Come along, Campion, don’t dawdle.’ They were doing ‘beds and backs’, a process in which each patient had to have his sacrum, heels and elbows washed with soap and water and then rubbed with methylated spirits to harden the skin, which was then dusted with talcum powder. This was to help prevent bed sores, and it was Grace’s job to apply the methylated spirits.

Once that had been done, Staff Nurse Reid asked her, ‘Have you given morphia to a patient yet?’

Grace shook her head.