Anne Bennett - Love Me Tender

‘How old is your brother now?’

‘Thirteen,’ Chris said. ‘And I’m twenty. I went from boarding school to the army. Mother was a bit upset, she thought I’d go to university first – keep me safe, as it were – but I didn’t want to skulk at home, you know. Now she’s worried for David, who is keeping his fingers crossed that the war won’t be over before he’s through school.’

‘You say your mother wanted lots of children,’ Kathy said, ‘but both you and your brother went away to school. What can she know about having children around her all day?’

‘We didn’t go away till we were turned eleven,’ Chris explained. ‘David has only been boarding for just over two years, and unfortunately that coincided more or less with me joining up. Mother is so lonely now, though she seldom complains. All her life she’s longed for a daughter; she’d love yours.’

‘Maybe,’ Kathy said. ‘But I don’t like my children going to people I don’t know, however kind and well-off they are.’

‘Oh, but you will go with them, surely?’

‘No, I’ve explained to Barry,’ Kathy said. ‘There’s no way I can go.’

‘Then send your children before the bombs come,’ Chris pleaded. ‘I can vouch for their happiness there.’

‘No one can do that, Mr Barraclough,’ Kathy said, but she accepted the address that he scribbled down, and promised to think about it.

Back home, the place was in uproar, and Kathy was delighted to hear that Sean, Michael and Con had been in touch. They were all safe and sound and would be home for a week’s leave as soon as they were allowed, but it was nearly ten days before they arrived. It was wonderful to have them back and they were all interested in hearing about Barry, but terribly upset about Pat being missing. Not wishing to depress them still further, Kathy kept from them Barry’s revelations about what had really happened to Pat and confided only in Mary. ‘Shall I tell Bridie, Mammy?’ she asked. ‘Do you think it will help her to know the truth?’

Mary shook her head. ‘It would serve no purpose,’ she said at last. ‘She’s coming to terms with it in her own way, leave it so.’

The men were amazed that so many had escaped the beaches, and said so. ‘We were badly equipped,’ Sean complained. ‘One bloody tin hat, rifle and bayonet was all we had to combat the German panzer division. Bloody ridiculous it was.’

‘And then we had the order to retreat to the beaches,’ Con put in. ‘And that was just madness too. No one knew what was what, or where to go, or any damn thing.’

‘That had us by the balls right enough,’ Michael said.

‘Michael,’ warned Mary automatically. Sean and Con were convulsed with laughter, and even Eamonn had a twinkle in his eye. Mary rounded on them all. ‘You’re no help, any of youse.’

‘Ma,’ said Sean, wiping his eyes, ‘don’t be giving out. Michael’s a man now and he’s earned the right to say what he likes.’

‘Begorra he has,’ Mary said, but she knew Sean was right. The adolescent Michael who’d joined up in a fever of patriotism had shed his youth’s skin and had stepped over into the man’s world. Sean had also changed, and Mary supposed that the experiences they’d lived through would have affected anyone. He also seemed very worried about Rose, as her pregnancy seemed to be taking it out of her. He knew she had a lot to do with the little ones.

‘I don’t think she’s that strong,’ Mary confided one day to Kathy. ‘And she’s so thin, you’d hardly know she was pregnant.’

It was true. While Kathy and Maggie had ballooned out and had little to fit them, Rose had seemed not to change shape much at all. She tried to put on a brave face for Sean, but the lines of strain were visible to everyone and Sean was not fooled. ‘I’m not wishing anything against Sean, mind,’ Mary said one day to Kathy, ‘but it would help if he was sent overseas for a wee while, give her time to get over this one before he’s at her again.’

‘Mammy!’

‘Well, I’m only saying what I’m thinking, and it doesn’t have to go any further.’

‘Well, I shan’t say anything, and I do feel sorry for Rose,’ Kathy said. ‘I’m also glad Maggie gave up at the factory at the beginning of Con’s leave. I was beginning to think she’d have her baby on the factory floor.’ She looked at her mother and said, ‘Daddy seems all right with Con now.’

‘Oh, sure, that’s your father. He thinks him a fine fellow of a man now, so he does. Sure, it’s Carmel we have the problems with these days.’

Kathy knew a little about that. Carmel was turned fourteen now and was working in Cadbury’s. She loved her workmates and her new-found freedom, and the money she’d never had before, and she had become pert and cheeky in Mary’s opinion. ‘You should see how she dresses up to go to the cinema or dancing with the other girls; the skirts are positively indecent,’ Mary said.

‘You know the government have said skirts must be above the knee now,’ Kathy reminded her, but with a smile.

Mary sniffed. ‘There’s above the knee and there’s well above the knee, and don’t think it’s patriotism that decides Carmel’s skirt length. They chop and change with their friends to have different outfits. I told her there will be clothes rationing soon and I don’t know what she’ll do then.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said she’d worry about it when it happens.’

‘She’s right in a way, Mammy. I mean, why worry before you have to?’

‘You don’t see her plastered to the eyeballs with make-up, with gravy browning on her legs to make them look like stockings, and trotting off on high heels.’

‘Where does she find to go?’

‘Cinema, she says, or dancing. I’m sure she’s meeting boys. Your da would go mad if he thought that.’

‘You can’t stop her, Mammy, they’re probably all the same, you know, just having fun.’

‘She says they are, and the other mothers aren’t always giving out to them,’ Mary said wearily, and gave a sigh. ‘She often sneaks away when I go round to Rose’s to give her a hand with the weans. Eamonn caught her smoking a cigarette the other day and she wasn’t even ashamed. She said they all did on the line and what was the harm. She had a packet of ten Woodbines half gone and she had the nerve to offer her dad one.’

Kathy had to laugh at the sheer cheek of it. ‘Did he take it?’ she asked, and Mary pushed at her and shook her head as she said, ‘You’re as much help as our Maggie. She tells me to stop giving out or I’ll make her worse, but God, Kathy, the place is full of soldiers. What if she has a lad?’

‘What if she has?’

‘You know your da and you can say that?’ Mary said. ‘Dear God, if he caught her arm-in-arm with some soldier out for all he could get, he’d take his belt off to her.’

‘Mammy, she has to sometime,’ Kathy said. ‘She’s not a little girl any more. She’s mixing with older women, it’s bound to have an effect, but in the long run it will do no harm.’

‘You don’t think she’ll get herself into trouble?’

‘Why should she?’ Kathy said, and pushed away the revelations Maggie had made about sleeping with Con before they were married. They’d been older than Carmel and wanted to marry; this was entirely different. ‘She’ll be all right, Mammy,’ she told Mary confidently. ‘She’s a good girl and she knows right from wrong.’

‘Humph,’ said Mary, ‘I just hope you’re right,’ and Kathy hoped she was too.

It was almost the end of the men’s week’s leave and Lizzie’s birthday had been and gone days before, but her very best present of all was hearing that her dad had been transferred to the General Hospital in Birmingham. Her mam had been to see him often, but alone, because children weren’t usually allowed in the wards. But Mammy had worked something of a miracle with the nursing staff, because they allowed Lizzie to visit her daddy once in the hospital, together with her mammy and her uncles.