Jack leant against the back yard wall and smiled a lazy smile at noone in particular. He had a straw boater on and Albert laughed and said, ‘He looks like a real toff, eh, Nelly?’ and gave her a wink so that she didn’t know where to look. Underneath the hat his black hair was slicked back from his forehead and he was so cleanshaven that Nell wanted to reach out and touch his skin just above where it met the whiteness of his collar. She didn’t of course, she could hardly bring herself to even look at him as they stood in the yard, waiting for Albert. ‘We’ll miss the train if he doesn’t hurry,’ Frank said, and Lillian said, ‘Here he comes!’ as they heard their brother’s boots on the stairs, and then Lillian smiled at Jack with her cat-green almond eyes and gave Nell an invisible prod in the back and hissed, ‘Go on, Nellie – say something,’ because she knew how sweet her sister was on Jack.
But then Albert came out and said, ‘Come on, we’re going to be late,’ and all three turned to go and were half-way along the lane at the back of the house before either Nell or Lillian remembered the lunch they’d packed for them. Lillian shouted, ‘Wait!’ so loudly that an upstairs window across the way shot open, the sash rattling, and Mrs Harding looked out to see what the fuss was about. Nell ran back into the kitchen and grabbed Tom’s old haversack off the kitchen table and ran back out into the lane.
The packed lunch had been the subject of much discussion between Lillian and Nell because originally they were only going to do enough for Albert, but then it struck them that Frank didn’t have any family so maybe he wouldn’t make himself a good lunch – if any at all – and then they thought about Jack and decided it wouldn’t be right to leave him out, and in the end Lillian laughed and said they were going to end up making lunch for the whole football team if they weren’t careful. Eventually, inside Tom’s old knapsack they placed – a dozen ham sandwiches wrapped in a clean tea-towel, six hard-boiled eggs in their shells, a big piece of Wensleydale, a slab of parkin, a bag of cinder toffee, three apples and three bottles of ginger beer (even though they knew there’d be crates of beer going with the lads). Needless to say, Rachel knew nothing of this largesse.
Jack broke away from the other two and walked back towards Nell and, taking the haversack from her said, ‘Thanks Nell, that was right good of the two of you, we’ll think about you when we’re sitting up on the Front eating this lot.’ Then he gave her his boyish, cheeky smile and said, ‘Maybe one evening next week you’d like to walk out with me?’ and Nell nodded and smiled and kicked herself because he must think she was a deaf-mute for all she ever said anything to him, and eventually she managed to say, ‘That would be nice,’ with a tremulous little smile.
She almost ran back to Lillian at the gate and the two of them stood, framed in pink clematis, watching the three men walk to the top of the cobbled lane where they all turned and waved. The sun was behind them so you couldn’t see their faces, but Lillian imagined their smiles and she had to put her hand to her mouth and blink away the tears that had formed because she was thinking what fine young men they were and how afraid she was for them, but all she said was, ‘I hope they’re careful if they go out on a boat.’ Nell said nothing, she was thinking how sad Percy Sievewright’s mother would have felt if she’d been here at that moment, seeing his three pals going off to Scarborough and knowing Percy couldn’t go with them.
Nell didn’t know whether she’d never loved Percy properly or whether she simply couldn’t remember what it was like to love Percy, but either way, what she felt now for Jack seemed nothing like anything she’d known about before. Just the thought of him made her feel hot and alive and she prayed every night that she’d be able to carry on resisting him until their wedding-night.
She kept on visiting Percy’s mother, although she changed the night to Monday because she saw Jack on Friday nights now. She didn’t tell Percy’s mother that she was in love with someone else because it was hardly a year since Percy had died and they continued to talk about him over the endless cups of tea – only now he felt like a person they’d invented between them rather than a man who had ever been flesh and blood. If she looked at the photograph of the football team it was with a sense of guilt because her eyes skimmed over Percy’s lifeless face and fixed on Jack’s impudent smile.
Albert was the first to join up. He told his sisters it would be ‘a bit of a lark’ and a chance to see something of the world. ‘A bit of Belgium, more like,’ Jack said sarcastically, but nothing would have put Albert off and they hardly had time to say goodbye to him properly before he was on his way to Fulford Barracks to join up with the 1st East Yorkshires and be transformed from a train driver into a gunner. They had a photograph taken though, that was Tom’s idea. ‘Whole family together,’ he said, perhaps having a premonition that there would never be another time. Tom had a friend – a Mr Mattock – who was a keen photographer and he came one sunny afternoon and posed them all in the back yard at Lowther Street, with Rachel, Lillian and Nell sitting on the newly mended bench, with Tom standing behind and Albert bobbed down in the middle at Rachel’s feet, just like Jack in the team photograph. Tom said what a shame it was that Lawrence wasn’t with them and Rachel said, ‘He might be dead for all we know.’ If you look very closely at the photograph, you can see the clematis growing along the top of the wall, like a garland.
Frank joined up the day that Albert crossed the Channel – Frank knew he was a coward and was terrified other people would find out as well so he thought he’d join up as quickly as possible before anyone noticed. He was so scared that his hand wouldn’t stop shaking when he was signing his papers and the commissioning sergeant laughed and said, ‘I hope you’ve got a steadier hand when it comes to shooting the Hun, lad.’ Jack was standing right behind Frank. The last thing Jack wanted to do was fight a war, privately he thought it was all a piece of nonsense – but it seemed wrong to let Frank just go off like that, so he went along with him and signed his name with a flourish. ‘Well done, lad,’ the sergeant said.
Lillian and Nell went to the station to wave them off but there were so many people crowded onto the bunting-decked platform that they only got a glimpse of Frank at the last minute, waving at nobody in particular from a carriage window as the train passed beneath the vaulting cathedral arches of the station. Nell could have wept from disappointment at not seeing Jack amongst this flag-waving, kit-toting mêlée and she was only glad that she’d given him that lucky rabbit’s foot the previous evening when they had said their fond farewells. She’d clutched onto his arm and started crying, and Rachel, moved to disgust, said, ‘Leave off that noise,’ and thrust the little rabbit’s paw into her hand and said, ‘Here’s a good luck charm for him,’ and Jack laughed uproariously and said, ‘They should make them standard issue, eh?’ and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket.
They had letters, they’d never had so many letters in their lives – letters from Albert, cheerful letters about what a grand lot the lads were and how busy they were kept. ‘He says he’s missing home cooking and he’s picking up a bit of the lingo,’ Lillian read out for Rachel’s benefit, because Albert never once sent her a letter, even though she went around telling everyone that ‘her son’ was one of the first from the Groves to join up, which amazed Lillian and Nell because although Rachel disliked all of her stepchildren, she disliked Albert the most.
Nell got letters from Jack, of course, not quite so cheerful as Albert’s letters, not as long either; in fact Jack wasn’t much of a letter writer at all, and generally never got beyond, ‘I’m thinking about you and thank you for your letters,’ in his blunt handwriting. They even got letters from Frank, because, ‘Of course, he has noone to write to,’ Nell said. His letters were the best of the lot because he told them all sorts of silly little things about his fellow soldiers and the daily routine so that they often laughed out loud when they read his funny, spidery scrawl. Strangely, none of them – Frank, Jack or Albert – ever wrote much about the war itself and battles and skirmishes seemed to pass with little apparent involvement from any of them. ‘The battle of Ypres is over now,’ Albert wrote cryptically, ‘and we are all very glad.’
Nell and Lillian spent a lot of time replying to these letters; they sat every night under the bead-fringed lamp at the front parlour table, either knitting blankets for the Belgian refugees or writing letters on special lilac notepaper they had bought. Lillian developed an uncharacteristic passion for maudlin postcards and bought whole sets like ‘The Kiss Goodbye’ that she sent off indiscriminately to all three men, so that none of them ever ended up with a full set. And then there were parcels to send containing peppermint lozenges, knitted woollen mufflers and tenpence halfpenny tins of Antiseptic Foot Powder from Coverdales in Parliament Street. And on Sundays they often walked all the way over to Leeman Road to see the concentration camp that had been built to house the aliens and Lillian used to take apples to throw over the wire because she felt so sorry for them. ‘They’re people just like us,’ she said sorrowfully, and as one of them was Max Brechner, their butcher on Haxby Road, Nell supposed Lillian was right, but it did seem odd to be taking fruit to an enemy that was trying to kill their own brother – although Max Brechner, who was sixty if he was a day and got out of breath if he walked a few yards, hardly seemed like the enemy.
The first person they knew that came home on leave was Bill Monroe from Emerald Street and he was followed by a boy from Park Grove Street and one from over on Eldon Terrace, which seemed unfair as Albert had joined up before any of them. There was a big to-do one day because Bill Monroe hadn’t gone back when he should have done and they sent in military policemen to take him back. His mother barred the front door with a broom handle and had to be lifted out of the way by the military policemen, one at each elbow, and Nell, who happened to be walking home from work along Emerald Street at the time, was reminded of Percy’s funeral.
She had a further shock when an ordinary, civilian policeman appeared from nowhere and for a second Nell thought it was Percy. For a ridiculous moment she wondered if he’d come back to ask her why there was a little pearl and garnet ring on her engagement finger instead of the sapphire chips he’d given her which were now wrapped in tissue paper and put at the back of her drawer.
Bill Monroe was hauled off eventually and Nell didn’t linger on the street. She felt embarrassed for him because she’d seen the look of terror on his face and thought how awful it must be to be such a coward – and how unpatriotic as well – and she was surprised how many women came up to Mrs Monroe, who was raging and shouting and crying on her doorstep, and told her that she’d done the right thing.
Frank came home after the second battle of Ypres; he’d been in hospital in Southport with a septic foot and was given a few days’ leave before going back to the Front. It was odd because before the war they’d hardly known him yet now he seemed like an old friend and when he came knocking at the back door they both hugged him and made him stay to tea. Nell ran out and got herrings and Lillian cut bread and put out jam and even Rachel asked how he was doing. But when they were all sat round the table, drinking their tea from the best service, the one that had gold rims and little blue forget-me-nots, Frank found himself unexpectedly tongue-tied. He had thought there were a lot of things about the war he wanted to tell them but was surprised to discover that the neat triangles of bread and jam and the prettiness of the little blue forget-me-nots somehow precluded him from talking about trench foot and rats, let alone the many different ways of dying he had witnessed. The smell of death clearly had no place in the parlour of Lowther Street, with the snowy cloth on the table and the glass-bead fringed lamp and the two sisters who had such soft, lovely hair that Frank ached to bury his face in it. He was thinking all these things while chewing his bread and casting around desperately for conversation, until with a nervous gulp from the gold and forget-me-nots he said, ‘That’s a grand cup, you should taste the tea we get,’ and told them about the chlorinated water in the trenches. When he saw the look of horror on their faces he felt ashamed that he’d ever wanted to talk about death.
They, in turn, told him about Billy Monroe and he tut-tutted in the right places although secretly he wished he had a mother who could somehow – anyhow – prevent him having to return to the Front because Frank knew he was going to die if he went back to the war. He listened politely while they told him about all the things they were doing – they showed him their knitting – they’d stopped knitting for the Belgians and now they were knitting socks for soldiers, and Nell told him about her new job, making uniforms, where she’d just been made a forewoman because of her experience with hats, and Lillian was working as a conductress on the trams and Frank raised both eyebrows and said, ‘Never!’ because he couldn’t imagine a woman conductress and Lillian giggled. The two sisters were so full of life that in the end the war was left more or less unspoken of, except, of course, to say that Jack was well and sent his love and that he hadn’t seen Albert at all but he was a lot safer behind the big guns in the artillery than he would be in the trenches.
And Rachel, the toad in the corner, unexpectedly spoke up and said, ‘It must be dreadful in those trenches,’ and Frank shrugged and smiled and said, ‘Oh it’s not too bad really, Mrs Barker,’ and took another drink from his forget-me-not cup.
