The Hills and the Valley (3 page)

‘And what's that? The last I heard you were planning to seek the bright lights.'

‘Oh, that's gone by the board.' Barbara sipped her coffee; it was bitter and half cold but with Huw sitting opposite she scarcely noticed. ‘I think I'm going to join one of the women's services. If there's going to be a war I want to be in it.'

‘Barbara.' Huw's face grew serious and he leaned towards her across the table. ‘If there is a war – and I'm pretty certain there's going to be – it's not going to be any picnic.'

‘You'll be in it.'

‘That's different. I'm a man. Not that they'd let the women do anything dangerous, I suppose, but still …' He felt in the pocket of his uniform jacket and got out a packet of Players and a cigarette lighter.

‘That's new isn't it?' Barbara said curiously. ‘I haven't seen that one before.'

He ignored her, lighting his cigarette and drawing on it deeply.

‘Can I have one?' she asked, holding out her hand.

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because you are not old enough. You're not old enough to join up, either.'

‘I'm sixteen!' she protested. ‘I'll be seventeen soon!' He only smiled and she flared suddenly: ‘I wish you'd stop treating me like a child! It's because I'm wearing this stupid school dress, I suppose. I hate it. I absolutely hate it!'

He smiled at her, his eyes narrow behind the curling smoke.

‘When you talk like that you not only look like a child, you sound like one. But you are growing up, Barbara, I grant you that.'

She returned his gaze, uncertain whether to be flattered or annoyed. Then she decided this stolen episode was too precious to spoil with petty squabbling.

‘Tell me what you're doing,' she said. ‘If you're allowed to, that is. It's much more interesting.'

They sat chatting over the bitter coffee, Huw regaling her with tales of life in the mess at his RAF station and she listened intently, laughing at their escapades. Then Huw glanced at his watch again.

‘Barbara – I'm going to have to go.'

‘Oh Huw …' There was a sudden catch in her throat. All this and over so soon …

‘You know I'd stay longer if I could. Though I'm not sure you shouldn't be going yourself. How are you going to explain to the nuns?'

‘Oh, they won't suspect a thing. They live in another world.'

‘That is more than can be said for Squadron Leaders,' Huw said ruefully. He stood up. ‘Come on, Barbara. I'll see you to your train.'

‘No, it's all right. My platform is miles away. If you've got to go – go!'

‘I think perhaps I'd better.' He chucked her under the chin. ‘Be good.'

‘And you.' Tears were springing in her eyes; angrily she blinked them away.

‘When have I ever been anything else?'

‘Plenty of times if the stories Mum and Ralph tell are true.'

‘All right!' He raised a hand in surrender. ‘No need to go into all that now. Bye-bye, love.'

‘Buy Huw. Come home soon.'

With a smile and a wave he was gone. She stood watching while his airforce blue uniform was swallowed up in the crowds, swallowing at the lump in her throat. Then, with a characteristic lift of her chin, she turned and went back down the steps looking for a porter who could tell her how long she would have to wait for a train back to Bath and which platform it would go from. Barbara had been back at school for only ten minutes when the summons came.

‘Sister Claude wants to see you in her office.'

Her heart sank. It could only mean one thing. She had been too long and suspicions had been aroused. On her way up the staircase between the wood panelled walls her imagination worked overtime on what excuses she could offer. She had seen someone taken ill, perhaps, and stopped to do what she could. Or rescued a kitten from a tree and become ledged herself. A bit unlikely, one had to admit, but it would also account for the bent brim of her boater – another sin that was going to need explaining.

And if I have to make up a story it might as well be one that shows me in a good light, Barbara reasoned.

She tapped at the headmistress's door.

‘Come!'

A nun shouldn't have a harsh voice like that, Barbara thought. It should be soft from praying and singing Aves, not sounding like a sergeant major. She opened the door and went in.

Sister Claude looked up and her expression told Barbara her worst fears had been realised. There was something very unholy about the tight set of her narrow lips and the way her eyes glared from behind her spectacles.

‘Well, Barbara,' she said.

‘Sister.'

‘You know why you are here, I'm sure.'

Barbara opened her eyes very wide and attempted an innocent expression.

‘I'm sorry if I was a long time at the dentist's, Sister, but on the way back I saw the most terrible accident. A poor woman stepped off the kerb and …'

‘Barbara!' Sister Claude thundered.

‘Yes, Sister?' She said it with less conviction.

‘Save yourself the trouble of lying. It only adds to your wickedness.'

‘But Sister …'

Sister Claude closed an exercise book she had been marking with a snap and laid it on a pile with the rest. ‘I happen to know, Barbara, that you have not been to the dentist at all. You have been to Bristol.'

Barbara's jaw dropped. This she had not expected.

‘How …?' It was out before she could stop it.

‘You may well ask that, Barbara. Suffice to say that very few movements of a girl in the uniform of our convent go unnoticed – and
all
are known to God.'

‘Oh.'

‘Yes, I hear you were in Bristol, Barbara. Bad enough, but that is not all, I fear. I understand you were on the station meeting some
boy.
' She spoke the word with distaste, as if boys belonged to some strange alien race, Barbara thought.

‘Not some boy, Sister,' she protested. ‘Huw.'

‘Huw?'

‘My … my brother.'

‘Don't lie, Barbara. You do not have a brother.'

‘Well, he's not my brother exactly …' Barbara broke off. She had not realised Sister Claude did not know about Huw, though she supposed there was no reason why she should. Now she wondered just how she could explain him. My stepfather's adopted son, sounded so far-fetched, even though it was the truth. In her present mood Sister Claude would never believe her. ‘He lives with us,' she said lamely.

Sister Claude's tight lips told her exactly how truthful she was being.

‘I had thought, Barbara, that a school such as ours would have set your feet on the right path for life. I don't know where you met this boy, I don't know what possessed you to lie to me and to miss your lessons to go cavorting with him. But one thing I do know. I shall not stand for it. This school has a reputation to maintain …'

Oh God, she's going to expel me! Barbara thought in horror.

‘… and I shall do all that is necessary to maintain it. What will your mother have to say about this, Barbara?'

‘She … I …' Useless to protest that Amy would have no objection to her being with Huw, She certainly
would
object to her missing lessons and telling lies to do it.

‘You realise she will have to know about this?'

Barbara swallowed. ‘Yes, Sister.'

Outside the door Barbara let out her breath in a long, sustained ‘Phew!' So she hadn't been expelled – more was the pity. In the end Sister Claude had cared more about her fees than the school's much vaunted reputation. But she would certainly tell Amy – and Amy was going to be furious …

Barbara straightened her shoulders and tucked an irrepressible curl behind her ear.

Oh well – trouble in store.

But she knew it had been worth it and that given the same circumstances she would do the same thing again.

In her office at the yard which served as headquarters for both Roberts Haulage and Roberts Transport, Amy Porter signed the last of the day's mail, replaced the cap of her Parker fountain pen and tucked it away in her bag.

As usual the depot had been a hive of activity and it seemed to Amy she had scarcely had time to draw breath since she had unlocked the office at 8 o'clock that morning. Never mind, she liked it that way, liked to see the lorries busy and the diary full. She would willingly have worked out estimates and costings until the figures sang in her head and written dockets till her fingers blistered if the need arose. She could remember all too clearly the days when things had been very different – the days when she had first inherited the tiny struggling business from her first husband, Llew Roberts, who had been killed in this very yard when he was crushed by a lorry he had been working on. Roberts Haulage had been a two-vehicle concern then, employing only one driver and two mates, and she had fought long and hard, not only against the day-to-day problems but also against the prejudice she encountered as a woman, to turn the business into the thriving I concern it was today – six lorries, two of them artics for working long hauls such as Llew could never have imagined when he brought his first small lorry home from Birmingham in 1922, a coal haulage company and a charabanc business which was run from a separate depot in Purldown, some three miles away.

There had been times, and plenty of them, when Amy had wondered just what she had taken on, times when she had fought the seemingly endless battles with more desperation than fervour, times when she had not been able to see how she could pull the business out of a downward spiral of cancelled contracts and mounting expenses, but there had never been a moment when she had admitted defeat. At first, it had all been for Llew's sake to make certain the dream for which he had lived – and died – did not die with him. But later she had to admit it had not only been for Llew but for herself too. They had thought she would fail, all of them. Charlotte, her mother, who disapproved of her stubborn stand whilst failing to realise Amy had inherited that very same stubbornness from her; Eddie Roberts, Llew's brother, who had thought the business would automatically become his on his brother's death; the whole town of Hillsbridge, standing by watching and waiting for her to fall flat on her pretty face because she was a woman dabbling in a man's world, a woman daring to step outside the bounds of convention.

Only Ralph had believed in her – Ralph Porter, who was now her husband. ‘Oh I knew you could do it. Amy,' he had once told her casually. ‘The day we first met, when you took that lorry for a drive and ran into my car, I told myself you were a woman to be reckoned with', and his eyes had twinkled wickedly as he said it. But at the time she had believed even Ralph was against her, deeply involved in his own expanding timber empire, joining with the other men of the business clique to keep her out.

Amy signed the last letter, blotted it and pushed the pile across the desk.

It was the same desk that Llew had bought secondhand when he had started the business, scratched and inkstained but also large and comfortably solid, but there was another set at right angles to it now, a light modern desk topped with a typewriter and a stack of efficient looking wire trays – the desk which accommodated Violet Denning, her secretary.

‘There we are, Vi. You'll see these catch the post, won't you?' Amy said.

The girl looked up, keeping her place in the ledger she was marking up with her finger.

‘Yes, I'll make sure they're there in good time, Mrs Porter.'

‘And if Deacons ring tell them I've arranged things so that we can do the job for them tomorrow as they wanted.'

‘Yes Mrs Porter.'

‘If it's Mr Deacon himself you'd better make my excuses – you know he always likes to speak to me personally.' A small smile lifted one corner of her mouth – with some clients her femininity had been a positive advantage especially since she had become successful as well, but she had the way of dealing with them off to a fine art. ‘I'm off now, Vi. You'll make sure everything is locked up properly when you leave, won't you?'

‘Yes Mrs Porter. Don't worry. You get off home.'

Amy nodded, satisfied. Letting the reins go a little, even where mundane chores were concerned, had not come easily. After running the business single-handed she had felt herself responsible for everything that happened at the yard. But with expansion she had had to learn to delegate – there was no way she could possibly do everything herself. And Vi was a good girl, steady and responsible with a pleasant manner which the customers liked. She had been well trained at a secretarial college in Bath and her shorthand and typewriting speeds were good – essential as far as Amy was concerned, for patience had never been her strong point. But Amy fancied that Vi's telephone manner had been learned not in any college but at her mother's knee, for Vi was the daughter of Edna Denning, who had operated Hills bridge telephone exchange from the front room of her cottage for many years until a purpose-built office had been erected.

I wonder what Llew would say if he knew I had a secretary? Amy wondered as she paused in the doorway looking back at the girl who was once again busy with her work.

It was a thought which occurred to her sometimes at odd moments and while she found his imagined surprise amusing it also struck a chord of sadness. Maybe she was married again, and very happily, but that did not mean she had forgotten Llew, who had been her first love, the father of her children – and the boy who had made the dream of starting a haulage company into reality. Sometimes it all seemed so long ago, like part of another life, sometimes it might have been just yesterday when they had sat side by side on one of the grassy slopes that surrounded the Hillsbridge valley, where dust-blackened buildings clustered around railway sidings and pits, a young couple in love and with all their lives before them – or so they had thought. ‘I don't want to work for anybody else,' Llew had said. ‘I want to be my own boss. I'm going to get a lorry. Motor transport is the thing of the future.' She had almost laughed at him then. Back in 1922 there had been more horses and carts than motor vehicles on the roads in Hillsbridge. But he had been right and now it seemed to Amy very unjust that he should not have lived to see his vision realised.