A Family At War, page 29
She's always urging me to go down on the beach and sunbathe and this morning she's at it again. 'You don't want to sit there with your head in a book all day,' she says. 'Not when you're on holiday. Why don't you put your bathing costume on and come down on the beach and get a nice tan?'
I'm beginning to realise that I can do more with a look than a mouthful of words. She's given me a great whack across the shoulders only half an hour ago and now she's forgotten all about it. I turn towards her, give her a scathing look and pull my shirt off my shoulder so that she can see the long weal she's left across my tan.
She's so angry she jumps up and down, red in the face and completely beside herself.
'You're so vile!' she shouts. 'You're doing this deliberately. I've never had such a rotten holiday, never, and it's all your fault. All your rotten, rotten fault. You don't care what you do to me, do you, you rotten little thing. I don't know what I ever did to be treated like this. I've spent all this money and you can't even...'
It's a moment of pure malicious joy.
And now it's the very last week, thank God, and the holiday is nearly over. I take my books back to the library, pack my dirty clothes in the trunk and start to think about school and being in the fifth year and what it will be like to be a House Officer. I think about it all the way home on the train. By the time we get to Clapham I'm in a really good mood again and feeling a bit guilty to have been so horrid to her. But it's done now. Maybe she'll have learned from it.
'Well that's the last time I'm ever going there again,' she says as we walk up Longley Road.
'Oh Ella!' Gran says. 'After all the money you spent on it too.'
'It's ruined for me,' she says, glaring at me. 'I don't want to see it ever again. I shall let someone else have it. She doesn't care.' And she glares at me again.
'Oh Beryl!' Gran rebukes. 'Now see what you've done.'
But Mum's right. I don't care.
It’s lovely to be back at school. Now we're in the fifth year, we can choose ballroom dancing for our games lesson instead of netball and hockey, so Sheila Jarvis and I always do. She’s a very good dancer and one of my best friends. Now she’s just asked me if I’d like to go to the Lyceum with her.
'It's ever so good,' she says. 'I went last week. It's where all the Yanks go. They do the jitterbug. You ought to see them. Let's you and I go, shall we?'
It's a temptation. It would be nice to go to a dance on my own. I've still got six and ninepence left from Gran's ten bob note and Mum's been allowing me a lot more freedom since the holiday. I must have worried her more than I thought. I've been out to the pictures twice already and we've only been back at school a month. I reckon she'd say yes to almost anything.
'Saturday,' I say.
It's a smoky night with a smell of autumn about it but inside the old theatre the air is hot as high summer. She's right about the Americans. There are hundreds of them and most of them are on the floor, dancing with a wonderful stomping energy and spinning their partners like tops. The glitter ball shoots shards of white light into our faces and the band is so loud we have to shout at one another to be heard. We plunge into the mass and are carried along by it, very excited and a bit fearful, like swimmers in a surf wave, learning the movements as we go.
By the end of the first dance we're old hands, bouncing and jumping with the best of them and after that we get partners who throw us about and twirl us around until our foreheads are filmed with sweat and we're completely out of breath. I've never enjoyed any dance as much as this.
'We'll come again next week,' I say as we head home.
And the next week and the week after that. I'm down to a mere one and thruppence now so it can't last, but it's wonderful while it does. We're so much at home here that we've begun to know some of our regular partners quite well and so confident that we don't bother to search one another out after every dance. Providing we make sure to go home together, it's enough just to wave to each other while were dancing.
I'm standing by the edge of the floor at the end of a very energetic jitter-bug, trying to see where she is and getting my breath back, when someone comes and stands beside me.
He's saying something to me, but his voice is so soft and the band's so loud I can't hear what it is.
'What?' I say, turning to look at him. I have to be on my guard when I'm on my own for fear of attracting someone unsavoury.
It's a GI, of course, but he’s a nice quiet one, and he's looking at my face not my bust, so that's all right. I've startled him by being so brusque and he has to make an effort to repeat what he was saying. 'Would you care to dance with a guy with two left feet?'
'I'm a great one for a challenge,' I say. I quite like the look of him and his dancing can't be all that bad.
But it is. He's got no sense of rhythm at all, although he tries really hard, and apologises every time he treads on my feet.
When the music stops, he makes a self-deprecatory grimace. 'I did warn you,' he says and sighs. 'That's it I guess.'
He looks so woebegone I feel I have to comfort him. 'We could try a slow one, if you like. That's easier.'
But he says he'd rather sit the next one out and talk, if I wouldn't mind. So we talk. He says his name's Len and he's a Polish American and lives in Chicago, 'down by the stockyards', which is a helluva place. He's been in the army for three years and he thinks England's wonderful - 'London knocks me out' - but he can't wait to get home.
I tell him I was born and bred in London and he asks if I was here during the blitz, so I tell him a bit about that. Proudly, because I'm very proud of the way we endured things then. He's very easy to talk to and when one of my regular jitter-bugging partners arrives to drag me back to the floor, he says, 'You won't forget the slow dance...' as if he really wants to dance with me again.
We dance three times in all. He's marginally better in a smoochie number because all he has to do is sway from foot to foot and I do what I can to lead him. During the last waltz he asks if he can see me home. I give him my standard reply. 'I always go home with my friend.'
'Could I see you again?' he says.
I tell him I come dancing every Saturday so I'll see him next week if he likes, and he asks me what time I arrive and says he'll be waiting for me on the steps. I suppose I've got a date. Better not let Mum know.
My life's been pretty good since term started and I'd like to keep it that way, so it's important to maintain her ignorance and keep her sweet. I don't tell her what I'm doing at school because she isn't interested. And I don't say anything about the orchestra either, which is really good fun. I just live in two separate worlds and enjoy the academic one on the quiet.
And now I've got a boyfriend. Or I suppose I've got a boyfriend. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
He's waiting for me on the steps, just as he promised, and he insists on paying for me, which is actually just as well because I'm pretty skint. And halfway through the evening, he suggests having something to eat and takes me off to Piccadilly Circus to a place called a Donut Dugout. The doughnuts are huge and absolutely delicious, light textured and covered in sugar, not a bit like our stodgy things. And the coffee's good too, strong and tasty and very hot. But the most amazing thing is that we sit and talk about poetry.
When we left the Lyceum he asked me which one was Westminster Bridge and I took him along the Embankment to Charing Cross and showed him.
To my surprise he suddenly started quoting poetry. 'Dull would he be of soul who could pass by, a sight so touching in its majesty.'
'Wordsworth,' I said.
'Right. A great poet. I've been studying him.'
So we talked about the great poet all the way to Piccadilly Circus and we're still talking over the doughnuts. I've found a soldier who likes poetry. Imagine that. Dunois wasn't a rarity after all.
As we say goodbye at the end of the evening, he asks if I'd like to go to the pictures with him on Wednesday. 'There's a great film I'd like you to see,' he says. 'You'd love it.'
I don't understand a word of it. I think it's a social drama but they talk so fast and their accents are so difficult, it's hard to follow the plot. However he's thrilled with it and, when he asks me what I thought of it, I tell him it was wonderful because that's what he wants me to say.
'I've got a little present for you,' he says as we walk to the tube, and pulls two narrow paperbacks out of his pocket. One's by Wordsworth and the other's by an American poet I've never heard of, called Walt Whitman. 'I thought you might like them.'
I do like them. Very much. This time I can mean what I say. I dip into them as we're travelling to Tooting and the Wordsworth is lovely with all my favourites in it. We walk away from the underground station at Tooting Broadway arm in arm, talking poetry.
But then we reach 49 Longley, and that brings me up hard against a problem that's been lurking for me ever since we met. I can't ask him in or Mum'll go round the bend.
'Gee,' he says, looking up at the wide windows on either side of our porch. 'Now that is one helluva house. D'you have an apartment here?'
I feel quite proud of my house and tell him that we own it, which impresses him even more. 'One helluva house, one helluva gal,' he says and bends his head to kiss me goodnight.
I like being kissed because he's got a nice soft mouth and doesn't make a meal of it the way some men do. But my mind's ticking away all the time, because the house isn't what it seems and neither am I and I can't help wondering what he would do if he found out what I was really like - jealous and cruel and born bad and rotten to the core. He wouldn't want to take me out then.
But he wants to take me out now. So I shall make the most of it. I've nearly run out of cash, which is another problem. I wonder whether Gran would give me some. Just enough to get up to the Strand. Maybe I'll ask and see. I'll tell her it's to go dancing with Sheila, which it is in a way.
Our dates are beginning to fall into a pattern. We meet in the Lyceum on Saturday and half way through we get passes and he takes me off for coffee and doughnuts; we go the pictures during the week and I meet him in London and he escorts me home; I tell him about the music I'm learning and the books I'm reading and he tells me about his life in the army and what it was like to grow up in Chicago. On our eighth or ninth date, when we're back in the Donut Dugout again, he suddenly lets drop that he was half way through a degree course when he was called up.
It doesn't surprise me. 'What were you reading?' I ask.
'English Honours.'
What else? I knew he was clever. I decide to swank a bit to show him I can keep pace with him. 'That's what I'm going to read.'
'You'll be a graduate before me,' he says, putting down his coffee cup, 'the rate I'm going.'
'I doubt that,' I tell him. 'I shan't be going for a while yet. I've got to take my Higher School Certificate first.'
'That's what you’re doing now, right?'
'Good heavens no,' I say. 'I haven't done my general schools yet. Give me a chance.'
He looks at me for a disquietingly long time. Finally he says, 'How old are you kid?'
'Fifteen.'
He's so shocked he puts his head in his hands. 'Jesus H Christ!' he says. 'Fifteen!'
I've lost him and I know it as clearly as if he's already said goodbye to me. It's wrong to be fifteen. I didn't think it was but it is to him. Does he think I've been leading him on? Is that it? That I'm a good time girl or something? He's still got his head in his hands and I don't know what to say to him if I can't see his face. Oh please look up. Please don't be cross with me. I can't help being fifteen.
Eventually he lifts his head and he isn't cross, which is a relief. But he's got the oddest expression on his face, sort of wry and resigned. 'Time we were getting back, I guess. Your friend'll be wondering where you are.'
We go back. We dance. He says goodnight, the same as ever. But he doesn't say he'll see me again.
I feel sad going home on the tube with Sheila. I'm not in love with him or anything silly like that but I like him a lot and if it really is over I shall miss having him to talk to. But I knew this would happen. I've known it all along. How could I be off knowing it when Mum's been predicting it ever since I can remember? She always said people would drop me once they found out what I was really like and now it's happened. I've only got myself to blame.
CHAPTER 25
We're in the middle of an absolutely dreadful winter. I thought it was cold during the war but that was nothing compared to what we've got to put up with now. It's been snowing for weeks. Dad goes out with a shovel every morning to clear the path so that we can get out to school and he can go to work but as fast as he does it, there's another snowfall and it all comes back again. The pavements are heaped with uneven piles of dirty snow. It's been lying there for weeks with all sorts of rubbish frozen into it, and it's all sharp edges and streaks of black dirt and revolting yellow stains where the dogs have been peeing on it. Out in the country there are drifts twenty feet high. The army have been using flame-throwers to try to clear them. And lots of roads are completely impassable, which means that food supplies are scanty. Some weeks we can't even get our ration. There was no fresh meat at all last week, only corned beef, and we can't fill up on bread and potatoes because bread's rationed and they're limiting potatoes to 2lbs per person. God knows what we would have done if it hadn't been for the chickens and the eggs Mum keeps preserved in isinglass.
But the worst thing of all is that there isn't any coal. The mines were nationalised on New Year's Day so we ought to have plenty, but it hasn't worked out that way. One of the problems is that the points are frozen solid on the railways and the supplies can't get through. The factories have been running a three-day week and we have power cuts during what they call 'daylight hours', which is a misnomer if ever I heard one. Sometimes it's so dark at school that we can't see to read and they have to close the place down and send us home. We can't see at home either and it's bitterly cold here. We've got just about enough coal left in the cellar to heat the kitchen until March but that's all. The rest of the house gets colder by the day. There are ice flowers on every window but this year they're not pretty patterns etched out on a film of ice but a chunky coating of swirls and creases half an inch thick. We've piled all the blankets we possess on top of our beds and use our winter coats too but we're still cold. I wear an old cardigan over mum's nightdress to keep my arms warm and two pairs of holey socks on my feet, carefully arranged to that one sock covers the holes in the other, but I still wake and shiver most nights.
And in the middle of all this Pat's taking her 11+ exam. They're all making such a fuss about it. I've had several dire warnings about upsetting her, so I'm keeping well out of her way. Mum bought an old fashioned harmonium at Christmas so I go into our freezing drawing room and play it when I need to make myself scarce. It's bloody cold in there and playing in gloves is a clumsy business, but that way they can hear where I am and I shan't get blamed if their little favourite is weepy.
Now they've decided that she ought to have her friends round to cheer her up and they've bought a set of records of various country-dances so that they can leap about to keep themselves warm. I've been appointed to keep order and teach them the steps. Actually I quite like it, because I enjoy bossing the littl'uns about and I can keep warm dancing too. They're a nice lot and there's always at least seven or eight of them so rounds and hays are possible. There's one girl called Pat Beeney who is very bright and joins us every week, and another called Olive Kingston who has lovely blonde hair, and Edelweiss comes across too sometimes and keeps up with others really well considering how young she is.
We've been dancing this evening and the dust is thick in the air. I've been looking round at the clothes we're wearing and we really are a motley bunch. Nobody's got less than two jumpers on and we're all wearing socks over our stockings and Pat Benny's got two skirts on. I've taken my top jumper off for the moment because I've actually got quite warm dancing 'The Dashing White Sergeant' but I've got the thickest pair of lisle stockings you ever saw and an old pair of hiking socks that Gran gave me because I wear my PT skirt for this so that they can see what I'm doing when I'm showing them the steps and it's very short, which leaves a lot of leg exposed.
'What d'you want next?' I ask. And there's a clamour for 'The Shepherd's Hay'. As I put it on the turntable, somebody rings the doorbell. No one'll answer. They're all crowded round the fire in the kitchen keeping warm, so when I've I started the dance, I go off myself to see who it is.
It's a tall young man in another motley collection of clothes - R.A.F. trousers, black shoes, blue tweed jacket several sizes too small for him and tight over an R.A.F. jersey, thick fawn muffler wound round his neck - but such a nice face, strong and dependable with a wide forehead, square jaw, a nose that would have been classy if it hadn't been broken, dark wavy hair and splendid blue eyes. He says he's come to collect Olive Kingston. He's her brother Roy.
'I'll tell her,' I say. And do.
She is not pleased. 'What's he come for?' she says. 'I'm not going till I finish this one. You tell him.'
So I put my second jumper on again to keep warm and go back to the doorstep.
'Typical Wid,' he says easily. 'Ah well, I suppose I shall just have to wait for her.'
I'm intrigued by the nickname. 'What did you call her? Wid?'
'The Widdler,' he explains. 'Wid for short.'
I'm none the wiser but I don't press it in case it's rude.
'Wid from Widdler, Widdler from Tiddler,' he explains and smiles at me. 'She's the little one.'
Put like that, it's quite charming. And affectionate. So I smile back. It's jolly cold out there on the doorstep. I've half a mind to invite him in. But it's just as cold inside the house so there wouldn't be much point in it. So I stay where I am and dance up and down to the distant music to keep warm.
