As Time Goes By (12 page)

‘You have a job doing war work in a factory, so Mrs Brookes tells me, and your husband is a serving soldier, thus you will be receiving wages from your own work and service pay on account of your husband. Most women would find that ample income on which to manage under present conditions.’

‘My husband is a POW, not a serving soldier, and as for how much money I’ve got coming in and whether or not it’s enough, that’s my business and not yours. What do you know about the needs of people like us? You’re a doctor, living in a big posh house and—’

‘During my training I worked in the slums of Glasgow, and let me tell you that what I saw there
of the struggles of the true poor is something I will never forget. You don’t sing in a dance hall because you need the money, Mrs Walker, you do it because you enjoy it, because a woman like you – attractive and alone – feels she deserves to have male flattery and attention.
That’s
why you went out tonight, despite the fact that your little boy begged you to stay with him.’

Sally opened her mouth to defend herself and then had to close it again as her throat locked on choking emotions. How dare he say those things about her? How dare he judge her when he knew nothing whatsoever about her? Her pride stung from the lash of his harsh words. She took a deep breath and launched into a passionate defence of her actions. ‘My kiddies mean more to me than my own life. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them, and if I say I have to go out to work, then that’s because it’s the truth. Of course I’d rather be with them instead of having to go out singing, but I haven’t got that choice. It’s all right for you to stand there and look down your nose at me. I saw that photograph of your wife and kiddies, and I’ll bet those pearls she had round her neck cost more than someone like my husband could earn in a whole lifetime. It’s all right for men like you and women like her. She doesn’t have to worry about her husband getting killed or being taken prisoner, and of course she won’t be doing any proper war work, leastways not working in a factory, just a bit of collecting for the WVS, and a nice hot meal waiting on the table for you when
you get home,’ Sally told him scornfully. ‘It’s a different world for them like you—’

Abruptly and without saying a word, the doctor turned round and walked away from her, leaving Sally standing watching him in open-mouthed disbelief. Deep down inside she felt shocked by her own daring in speaking up like she had. She wasn’t normally the sort to make a fuss, never mind argue, especially not with someone like a doctor, but when it came to her sons …

She heard the doors to the ward open and she stiffened, expecting to be told to leave, but when she turned round it was Doris who was coming towards her, her plump face heavy with tiredness and strain.

‘Oh, Sally love …’

‘I’m sorry, Doris, I really am.’

Emotionally the two women clung together.

‘Sister Brookes, this really is most irregular. We don’t allow mothers on the ward other than at visiting time, you know that.’

‘It’s all right, Sister, I told Dr Ross that Sally here would be coming in to see her little ’uns the moment she heard, and he said that she was to be allowed to have a few minutes with them, seeing as it wouldn’t disturb anyone else with them being in a private room,’ Doris spoke up firmly.

Sally’s eyes rounded. This was news to her, and surely at odds with the doctor’s attitude towards her.

‘Come on, love,’ Doris urged Sally gently, guiding her down the ward. ‘They’re down here
in a room off the main ward. That was the only space they had for them; a private room, it is, an’ all. I thought Sister was going to refuse to admit them at first, but Dr Ross was that insistent, even—’ she broke off, looking self-conscious, and then said hurriedly, ‘I never thought I’d be saying this because I never thought anyone would be good enough to step into old Dr Jennings’s shoes, but Dr Ross has proved me wrong. One of the best, he is, and no mistake.’ She paused and shook her head. ‘I never thought, wi’ me being a nurse for all them years, that I’d ever need to call a doctor out to a sick kiddie, but I’ll be honest with you, Sally, when I saw how bad he was getting I was that scared. I’ve never seen a kiddie being that sick before. I don’t mind telling you, it fair put the wind up me. Dr Ross said straight off as how I’d done the right thing sending for him, especially when I told him about them fish paste sandwiches. Wanted to know all about them, he did, and if anyone else had eaten them. I said as how they hadn’t – just as well really, an’ all. Mind you, I didn’t feel as though I could say too much, what with Daisy’s hubby having given her the fish paste in the first place. And we all know how he came by it. Not that I approve of black marketeering for one minute, I truly don’t, but Daisy’s a neighbour and I wouldn’t want to see her husband lose his job and get into trouble, especially not now, when it’s fourteen years in prison if you get caught. Dr Ross said as how he’d have a word with you about it. Yes, that’s it, through them doors, Sally.’

In the dark area through the ward doors, Sally could just about make out a door. She reached for the handle and then hesitated.

‘You open it, Doris,’ she begged. ‘I’m in that much of a state …’

The room beyond the door, like the ward itself, was lit dimly, to aid the nurses in their work, Sally guessed absently. It contained a small bed and a cot, and in them … Sally pressed her hand to her mouth to suppress the soft moan of love and relief at the sight of her two sleeping children. Dim the light might be but it was enough for her to see the familiar and much-loved faces of her sons, in separate beds but sleeping in identical positions. She went first to Tommy, aching to pick him up.

As though she guessed what she was thinking, Doris touched her on the arm and said softly, ‘Best not to wake them, Sally. Poor little lad needs his rest. I’ve never seen a child so sick, not even those that had had appendicitis. The doctor said himself that he didn’t know if he could pull through. Stayed with him every minute, he did, right until he knew he was over the worst.’

Tears filled Sally’s eyes, blurring her vision. She did not want to hear about how wonderful the doctor had been, nor how Doris felt that he had saved Tommy’s life. She should have been the one to be with her son, not some stranger, even if he was a doctor, and she would have been with him if it hadn’t been for …

The tears welled up and spilled over to splash down on her sleeping son. He turned over in his
sleep, his forehead furrowing as he murmured, ‘Mum.’

‘Mum’s here, Tommy,’ Sally told him chokily, placing her hand on his forehead and smoothing away his frown, her heart pierced by the sharply sweet pain of mother love as he relaxed beneath her familiar loving touch.

‘They’ve offered me a bed here for the night, in the nurses’ home, so if you want to go home …?’ Doris offered.

Immediately Sally shook her head. ‘I’m not going anywhere without my boys.’

‘Well, the doctor’s said that he wants to keep him in until the morning, just to make sure that everything’s all right.’

‘Very well then, I’ll stay with them.’

‘Sally love—’

‘I mean it, Doris. I’m not leaving this hospital without my boys. I can sleep here on the floor. Not that I’ll be doing much sleeping, after what’s happened. I’ll never forgive myself for not being there.’

‘You mustn’t go blaming yourself, Sally lass.’

‘Who else is there to blame? I’m their mother, after all.’

‘It was Daisy who made them sandwiches.’

‘Mebbe, but it was me that went out to work and left him, even though he’d told me he felt bad.’

‘You weren’t to know. I didn’t think anything of it myself at first, and I’ve bin nursing for over forty years.’

Sally shook her head. ‘It’s all very well you saying that, Doris, but I should have known.’

And if she hadn’t been so worked up about having to sing, then she
would
have known, Sally admitted, after Doris had gone, leaving her to curl up on the floor between the bed and the cot, in the blanket the ward sister had reluctantly and disapprovingly produced at Doris’s insistence.

Sally was as deeply asleep as her two sons when, just before dawn, the doctor eased open the door, frowning when he saw the unexpected third presence on the floor before turning away from her to stand in the shadows, listening to the calm breathing of his patient.

A live, healthy child snatched back from the maw of death. He wiped his hand across his face. His eyes felt gritty from lack of sleep, his unshaven jaw rough and itchy.

What had he expected? That saving other children would wipe out the burden of guilt he carried over those he had not been able to save? When was he going to understand that for him there could never be an easing of that guilt? He must carry it for ever, without a loving wife who understood, without a wife who cared enough about him to want to understand. What a fool he was to ache so intensely for that shared closeness, that oneness and completeness. He looked down at Sally. No one seeing her singing at the Grafton, as he had done, could have imagined that she was a married woman with children. She had sung like a single girl, using her smiles to tempt any foolish
male to believe they were meant for him. This war was bringing out the worst in women like her, selfish women who felt that life owed them “a good time”, whatever that was, and who were prepared to let their children suffer so that they could have one. He had seen the results of that selfishness so many times: in war-weary, heartbroken men, returning to find their wives had found someone else; in blank-eyed, unloved children, unwanted because they had the wrong father or had been born inconveniently. And yet this woman, whom he had judged as a selfish uncaring mother, had turned into a tigress in defence of her cubs when she had confronted him earlier, refusing to leave them and exhibiting a fiercely protective maternal love completely at odds with his assessment of her feelings for them. She was a singer, he reminded himself; a woman used to projecting her charms to deceive and delude.

The dim light etched hollows beneath the sharp slant of his cheekbones, emphasising his weariness as he studied the two sleeping children, and it was them that Sally saw first as she woke up and opened her eyes, sensing someone’s presence.

Without moving she watched as Dr Ross bent over Tommy, checking his pulse and then gently smoothing his hair back from his face. The dim light revealed an expression of exhausted anguish shadowing his face. A lump formed in her throat, her chest seizing up with inexplicable pain at the sight of this man who was a stranger to him touching her son as a father might do, with tenderness
and love. But how could that be when she had seen for herself his cold sharpness with them in the street?

He had turned away from the bed now, his shoulders bowed as though he carried the sorrows of the world on them, giving both boys a final look before he left the small room.

‘Lord, but I’m glad today’s over and done with. Had me running about all over the place, they have today,’ May complained, dropping down onto her bed. ‘Lend us a cigarette until I can buy some tomorrow when we’re at the barracks, will you, Alice?’

‘You said that last week and you never gave me one back,’ Sam heard the other girl complaining.

‘Well, that’s not my fault. I came looking for you, only you was out with some chap. Speaking of chaps, what about that sergeant you was fancying then, Lynsey? Proposed to you, has he, yet?’ May teased.

‘I was supposed to be seeing him tonight,’ Lynsey responded, glowering at Sam. ‘Only we’re all confined to quarters, thanks to a certain someone.’

‘Give it a rest, will you, Lynsey? You’ve done nothing but go on about it all the way back on the bus,’ Hazel told her sharply.

‘Well, you don’t expect me to be pleased about it, do you?’ Lynsey demanded bad-temperedly.

‘At least we haven’t been given jankers, like Sam, and made to skivvy all day in the kitchens.’

‘It’s her own fault she got put on a charge, and I don’t see why the rest of us should end up getting punished as well, having to get up an hour earlier and march round that ruddy parade ground, with Toadie watching us just in case one of us should miss a step.’

Since the former school wasn’t a proper military establishment, its tennis courts had been adapted to make a parade ground. All the girls billeted at the school had to turn out for parade every morning before breakfast as a matter of course, but Sam and the others were having to spend an extra hour ‘square-bashing’ every morning as part of their punishment. And, of course, the other girls blamed her and Mouse for this.

Sam looked down at her hands, red raw from hours of peeling potatoes over a bucket of cold water.

‘That’s the army for you,’ Alice sighed, adding with a grin, ‘I hope you haven’t gone and left any eyes in them spuds you’ve bin peeling, Sam.’

‘Huh, it wouldn’t matter how many eyes she left in ’em, they taste that bad. I reckon that the Naafi lot that does the cooking here must think that mash has to have lumps in it,’ May said.

‘It’s because there’s no butter to mash them with. I remember how, before the war started, my mother used to put in a good dollop of butter and a bit of onion and then—’

‘Don’t,’ May groaned. ‘You’re torturing me. How do you think I’m going to be able to eat me dinner after what you’ve just been saying?’

‘Same way you always do, I reckon,’ Alice responded cheerfully. ‘Come on, everyone, get a move on otherwise we’ll be late for supper and that will be another black mark against us.’

‘Where’s Mouse?’ Sam asked.

‘I dunno. She came back on the bus with us,’ May answered. ‘She was sitting with you, wasn’t she, Lynsey?’

‘Driving me mad. She was going on and on about that ruddy bear. I mean, there’s me not being able to go out on a date and all she can go on about is a bear. As if it were real or something. Told her straight, I did, that she wanted to stop going on to us about it and go and tell Toadie she wanted it back. That way we’d all get a bit of peace.

‘What’s up with you?’ she demanded defensively when Sam looked at her in angry disbelief.

‘Do you really need to ask? You know how afraid of Toadie Mouse is. You shouldn’t have said anything to her.’

‘Oh, shouldn’t I? And since when have you had the right to tell me what to do, may I ask?’

‘That’s enough,’ Hazel warned.

‘Oh, I might know you’d take her side. She’s been sucking up to you ever since she got here.’

‘That’s not true,’ Sam defended herself indignantly.

‘Give over, Lynsey. You’re just in a foul mood because you can’t see your sergeant,’ May objected.

‘And whose fault’s that?’

‘I’m going to look for Mouse,’ Sam announced.

‘You’re on a charge, remember, Sam,’ Hazel reminded her, ‘and if you get yourself into any more trouble …’

‘I’ve got to find her. She’ll be upset.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss about. She’s probably crying for her mummy in the lav.’ Lynsey pulled an unkind face. ‘She gets on my pip at times, she really does. I mean, all this fuss over a kid’s toy.’

‘That bear isn’t a kid’s toy to her. Her mother gave it to her and she feels it’s all she’s got left of her,’ Sam pointed out angrily.

Lynsey tossed her head stubbornly.

‘Look, Sam, it’s almost suppertime – why don’t you leave it until after supper and then I’ll go and look for her?’ Hazel offered. ‘We all know that she doesn’t like the food here and that she tries to avoid eating it if she can. She probably won’t thank you if she’s deliberately avoiding having to go in for supper.’

Sam hesitated, then shook her head. ‘No … If she did try to see Toadie and ask for her bear back,’ she paused meaningfully and looked at Hazel, relieved to see from the small nod she gave her that she hadn’t forgotten what its fate had been, ‘I can run down now and be back before we have to go in for supper.’

‘Very well then,’ Hazel agreed, adding, ‘She’d have had to make a formal request to see the warrant officer, so it’s bound to have been recorded.
You could ask whoever’s on the desk to check for you, but remember – no getting into any more trouble. You go straight down there, you speak to whoever is on the desk and then you come back and tell me what they said.’

Sam nodded, already halfway out of the room.

The girl on the desk looked up at her and then back at what she was doing, announcing mechanically, ‘If you’ve come down to ask for a weekend pass, you’re wasting your time. If you want cigarettes, you are also wasting your time. If you want—’

‘I wanted to know if there’ve been any requests from Private Hatton to see the warrant officer,’ Sam stopped her.

‘That’s not the kind of information I can give you,’ the girl answered immediately, but Sam could see that she was looking at the book in front of her and that she had moved her arm as though to conceal something.

‘She said that she was going to ask to see her,’ Sam persisted stubbornly, ‘but that was when she came in off the bus, and no one’s seen her since. If she did see T— Is the warrant officer in her office?’ Sam looked over to the closed office door.

‘I really can’t say, I’m afraid. What do you think you’re doing?’ the other girl demanded sharply when Sam started to head for the closed door. ‘You can’t go in there …’ She made to bar the door but she was too late, Sam had moved too quickly for her and was already turning the handle. Only the door wouldn’t open properly,
as though there was something wedged against it.

‘You’re wasting your time. The warrant officer is not in there.’

‘But Mouse did ask to see her, didn’t she?’ Sam demanded, still pushing at the door.

‘It’ll be a court martial you’ll be facing, not a charge, and no mistake if the warrant officer comes down here and finds you trying to break into her office.’

Sam gave another firm push and then exhaled in satisfaction as she finally managed to get the door open.

‘You can’t go in there …’ the girl repeated.

Ignoring her, Sam stepped into the small room, and then realised what had been jamming it.

Somewhere in the distance she could hear the angry voice of someone saying something to her, but she didn’t pay it any attention. She couldn’t. All she could do was stand and stare in paralysed disbelief and horror at Mouse’s body as it swung from the rope with which she had hanged herself. On the floor beneath her feet Sam could see some small pieces of gold fur. She kneeled down and picked one up. Mouse’s bear. Toadie must have kept some of the pieces after she had destroyed it. Had she shown them to Mouse? Tormented her by telling her that she had done? Sam shuddered violently, knowing what that would have done to Mouse.

‘Can’t you hear me? I said come out of there, otherwise—’ the voice was getting louder as the
other girl came towards her, her angry objections followed by a small silence, and then the sound of her screams tearing into the musty air filling the hallway, bringing girls and officers running to see what was going on.

Sam was distantly aware of the commotion going on all around round her, but it couldn’t touch her. Without knowing she had done so, she had reached for Mouse’s hand, and was trying to chafe warmth into it with her own.

‘Let go of her hand … Yes, that’s a good girl …’ The captain’s voice was quiet and calm, the medical officer taking her place at Mouse’s side. Their faces shimmered in front of her as though they were reflected in a puddle, and it took her some time to recognise that the puddle was her own tears.

‘She couldn’t live without her bear. It was all she had left of her mother, you see,’ she told the captain dully.