A Mother's Spirit (19 page)

‘He is very sick, but he is holding his own, and the doctors are pleased and a little surprised,’ Gloria said.

‘Daddy is hardly ever ill,’ Ben said.

‘I know,’ Gloria said. ‘They said that your daddy has the constitution of an ox, and I will see him every day and stay with him as long as the hospital will let me stay,’ Gloria said. ‘I have taken time off from work to do just that.’

‘And he will get better in the end, won’t he?’

Gloria gathered Ben into her arms and the tears seeped from her own eyes as she said firmly, ‘I promise you I will do my level best to see that he does just that.’

The day after Gloria told him about his father, Ben declared there was no need to take him to school each day as if he was a baby. Gloria knew that he was saying that it was his dad who needed her attention, not him, so each morning they set off in separate directions.

The hospital was always bustling and busy, whatever time of the day Gloria arrived, and the staff seemed rushed off their feet. She’d wondered at first if they would allow her to visit daily, but they seemed to have no problem with that, so she sat in the room, holding Joe’s left hand because it wasn’t burned like the right one, and told him how much she loved him, and that he had to recover from this because she needed him and so did Ben.

On the third day, Joe opened his eyes. They were vacant and unfocused, and she doubted he was aware of anything much. He had shut them again by the time the doctor Gloria had summoned had come to examine him. However, the doctor told her it was a very good sign.

She went home not long after this, glad that she had something positive to tell Ben that evening, and then when she reached home she found a letter on the mat from Tom. In it he said that he had been so shocked at the news and that all of them were in his thoughts and prayers constantly. He expressed the deepest regret that he couldn’t travel over to give her some practical support, and if there was anything
else she wanted, then she only had to ask. The love and concern that dear man had for them all could almost be lifted from the pages of the letter, and Gloria put her head on the table and cried as if her heart was broken because she had felt so alone.

She wrote back to Tom, thanking him and telling of the small sign of recovery Joe had made. When Tom sent his next reply it was in a parcel addressed to Ben, and inside the package were sweets, chocolates and comics for him. Ben had never ever received a parcel in his life before and he was almost speechless with pleasure. He wrote a thank you letter straight away.

Joe continued to recover very slowly, and Gloria kept Tom updated on his progress so he was aware of when he passed the crisis, when he fought against the fever that threatened his life, and when he began the first of the painful skin grafts. Each time in his reply Tom included something for Ben, often with a little note attached.

Gloria began back to work when her holiday pay was used up, but left at dinner-time so that she could spend time with Joe and still be home for Ben when he had finished at his after-school club. At weekends she took Ben to the hospital with her, but had to leave him in the visitors’ room, for the hospital was adamant that children under twelve were not allowed on the wards. Ben was more than grateful then for the comics and sweets his uncle kept sending him because they whiled away the hours very pleasantly until his mother came back and told him all the news about his father.

In the middle of April, there was another raid. Ben was in bed and asleep, and Gloria roused him quickly. He struggled into his siren suit while she packed the shelter bag.

‘It will likely be a light skirmish like the last few,’ the shelter warden said, ‘but better safe than sorry, I say.’

He ruffled Ben’s hair in a way Gloria knew he hated and said to Gloria, ‘How’s your husband?

‘He’s doing all right,’ Gloria said. ‘He’s been having skin grafts for three weeks now.’

The shelter warden whistled. ‘Very painful business, I hear that is.’

Gloria pursed her lips and gave an almost imperceptible but definite shake of her head. She never discussed the pain Joe was in with anyone when Ben was in earshot, feeling the separation from the father he loved was enough for him to cope with.

Before Gloria could say anything, however, there was a terrific explosion that seemed to be right above them. Ben gave a yelp of terror and the shelter warden exclaimed, ‘Christ Almighty! That was close.’

But the words had barely left his lips when there was another explosion just as close and then another. He looked at Gloria and said, ‘I think it might be Tottenham’s turn tonight.’

It soon became apparent the shelter warden was right. As the relentless attack continued, people streamed in from the neighbourhood, seeking some sort of refuge from the harbingers of hell spilling down on top of them. The raid went on for hours, and so close around them that Gloria almost waited for the shelter to be hit. The whistle of the descending bombs made her insides crawl with fear.

When the raid was over at last, she stumbled out of the shelter with Ben to scenes of utter devastation, a large sea of rubble stretching out as far as the eye could see.

With fingers of apprehension trailing down her spine, Gloria, with Ben by her side, walked down the short streets to where their small block of flats had once stood. All that was left was a gigantic mound of rubbish, littering the pavements and most of the road.

Gloria stood and stared at it, as if unable to believe the evidence of her own eyes. She tried to tell herself that she should be grateful they were not hurt at all, that all the planes had destroyed was bricks and mortar, but it wasn’t just bricks
and mortar to her. She had loved her flat, had kept it spotless and was always buying things to make it cosier. It symbolised the new future she was building with Joe and Ben, and now it was gone for ever.

‘What we going to do now, Mom?’ Ben asked, and Gloria didn’t answer him because she hadn’t the least idea. All she and her son had in the world were the clothes they stood up in – pyjamas, in Ben’s case – the shelter bag and their gas masks.

Just then an ARP warden approached them. ‘You used to live here, ducks?’ he asked.

Gloria nodded dumbly.

‘Have you got any relatives or friends who might take you in, like?’

Gloria shook her head. Tears seeped from beneath her lashes and trickled down her cheeks.

‘Here now, ducks, you don’t take on so,’ the man said. ‘I’ll take you round to the WVS van and give you a feed first. It puts a new complexion on things on a full stomach, I always think.’

Gloria wasn’t the slightest bit hungry. She felt sick with worry and thought that food would probably choke her.

‘But where will we sleep?’ she cried.

‘Don’t you worry about that,’ the man told her cheerfully. ‘Woodberry Down Mission has been taking people in. You won’t be the first I have taken there this evening. Now you follow me and I will soon sort you out.’

Two days later Gloria wrote to Tom, but knowing what a worrier he was, she played down the despair that she was feeling.

In fact Gloria was trying hard to keep a brave face on everything, for Ben’s sake, and particularly for Joe, who knew nothing about the way they were living now. Inside, though, she really grieved for her lovely flat, which she had lavished such love and care on, reduced to a pile of masonry and everything in it crushed to bits. They had been down in the depths of poverty and despair for years, and the flat had been the outward sign that they were on their way up again, that the future was rosy once more.

She had shed tears at night when all were asleep, muffling her sobs in her pillow, but after a few days she knew she really had to get over it. What she told Tom was right: she was by no means the only person in such circumstances, and some were far worse off than she and Ben. Anyway, moaning never did any good and the kind people at the mission were doing their level best to help them.

So when they were sorted out with clothes – a couple of shirts and pairs of trousers, socks and shoes for Ben, and a couple of dresses and cardigans, and shoes that had seen better days for Gloria, and the bare minimum of underclothes for both of them – she accepted them with good grace. Such few clothes, though, did mean that she seemed to be constantly washing them in the big laundry room at the back of the mission hall, but there again she wasn’t the only one.

Gloria forced herself to get into the routine of living there, though the lack of privacy did bother her, and there was often too much noise for Ben to sleep very well.

She had given her ration books in to the mission hall staff, and they provided the meals. It was always porridge in the morning and slices of the grey national loaf spread with margarine, and at night a stew of one kind or another with lots of vegetables and little meat, which they were all well used to now, and there was never much left.

But however Gloria looked at it, she thought it a depressing way to live, and the only bit of good news as the spring unfolded into summer was that she could see Joe improving week by week. But when the doctors suggested discharging him at the beginning of July she was thrown into a panic.

‘We can do no more for him here,’ the doctor told her. ‘He will not be able to do much yet, and he needs peace and quiet in order to rest and recover properly.’

Gloria thought of the noisy, clamorous mission hall and knew Joe would never recover there. But she knew where he would recover, and that was back in his old home in Ireland, where she imagined he would get all the peace and quiet he would need.

Her mind recoiled from such a move, yet what was the alternative? In her heart of hearts, she knew there wasn’t one, and not one person who would be able to help her except kindly Tom Sullivan.

All night she tossed and turned, but by the morning no solution had presented itself. So before she went to visit Joe that day she wrote a letter to Tom, explaining everything. Tom’s answer came by return of post.

All Gloria had to do then was tell Joe, and in such a way that he would have no idea of the desperation she felt at the thought of living for months in a remote cottage in the back of beyond. He was delighted that the doctors thought him well enough to be discharged, but not so happy about the things his wife and son had endured.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you had been bombed out?’ he asked.

‘For what purpose?’ Gloria replied. ‘You would have fretted and worried, and that would have done nothing to change the situation, but could easily have made you ill again.’

‘And now you are proposing to go back to Ireland with me,’ Joe said. ‘In fact, you have it all sorted, but you hate the countryside and this is as rural as it gets.’

Gloria leaned forward and kissed Joe gently on the lips. He felt his heart turn over with love for this wonderful women when she said, ‘You need a place where you can get the peace and quiet that the doctor prescribed, and that is all that matters to me. Now all I need are some clothes for you, for yours were crushed in the flat, and I need a case or something to carry our possessions, though there are precious few of them. Everything else is in hand.’

Ben was waiting for his father in the visitors’ room of the hospital, and though it was very early, the place was all astir. He watched all the white-coated doctors with their stethoscopes swinging, striding about importantly, the nurses scurrying from place to place, the porters pushing trolleys or wheelchairs around, and the cleaners with their mops and buckets tackling the corridors.

He was impatient to see his father and wished he would hurry up, but when he did appear in the threshold of the room, Ben was shocked to the core. He knew his father had been very sick, but when his mother said he was well enough to leave hospital, as far as Ben was concerned, he would almost be back to normal.

However, the man that shambled into the waiting room just a little later bore little resemblance to the father that he hadn’t seen for over four months. The clothes his mother had got for him seemed too big, his face was grey and his cheeks sunken.

Ben knew that he couldn’t rush at him the way he usually did, the way he wanted to, and so he approached him slowly and Joe saw him biting his lip in agitation.

Joe felt like death warmed up. Even dressing had exhausted him, and the material felt rough against the newly grafted skin, but he forced a smile and said, ‘Hello, Ben. Haven’t you a hug for your dad?’

‘I might hurt you.’

‘Away out of that,’ Joe said. ‘When did a hug ever hurt anyone?’ He put his arms around his son and had to bite back the grimace of pain as Ben’s arms tightened around him.

Ben gave a sigh of relief, turned to his father and said, ‘You’ll get properly better soon, won’t you, Dad?’

‘I will certainly,’ Joe said. ‘I need good fresh Irish air in my lungs and nourishing food in my body and I will be as right as rain in no time.’

‘Mom said there won’t be no bombs in Ireland,’ Ben said. ‘So we won’t have to go to the shelter in the middle of the night, and you won’t have to go out and fight fires any more, will you?’

‘No,’ Joe said. ‘That’s one good thing, anyway.’

‘Come on,’ said Gloria. ‘If we don’t get a move on we will miss the train. Come here, Ben, and I’ll help you put that haversack on.’

‘Let me carry it,’ Joe said. ‘Or give you a hand with the case at least.’

‘Joe, we have such few possessions now that there is no weight in the case,’ Gloria said. ‘All you need to do is put one foot in front of the other and you can take my free arm to help you, if you need it.’

‘It doesn’t seem right.’

‘None of it is right,’ Gloria said. ‘War isn’t right. What happened to you isn’t right. Let me and Ben take care of you now, Joe, and try and make you well again. OK?’

‘Have I a choice?