Dancing in the Moonlight (44 page)

Tobruk was in the hands of the Allies again, Rommel retreated back into Libya and in the middle of November the church bells – bells of victory – were ringing out through the length
and breadth of Britain. From the towers of great cathedrals to the smallest parish church, the bells sounded the nation’s joy at the news from Egypt, and the whole world heard the sound of
Britain’s rejoicing through the BBC’s overseas services.

After a peal rang out from the bomb-shattered Coventry Cathedral – where the spire and bell-tower were still standing – an announcer asked: ‘Did you hear them in Occupied
Europe? Did you hear them in Germany?’

Had he heard?
Lucy was with the others in the sitting room listening to the wireless while their Sunday roast – or, thanks to rationing, their meat loaf – cooked in the
oven. She wished she could believe so, but she knew it wasn’t possible. Jacob was being held in Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany and he was not allowed to write more than two
letters a month by his captors. She knew that his letters to her were scrutinized by the guards, as were hers to him. Her letters could only be two sides of notepaper and no photographs or even
drawings could be enclosed. She couldn’t write about anything to do with the armed forces or the war effort, not even about rationing or food, and certainly nothing connected with politics.
Any infringement of these rules, she had been warned, would mean that all communication was stopped. Consequently, terrified she’d inadvertently say something she shouldn’t, her letters
tended to be almost carbon copies of the ones before.

His letters to her were similarly constrained. He couldn’t complain about his treatment, the conditions, what went on in the camp or his German guards. Even writing about his fellow
prisoners wasn’t encouraged. She had no real idea of the day-to-day nightmare he was enduring, although terrible stories about the German death camps, like Auschwitz and Ravensbrück,
were filtering through. It was known that massive gas chambers and crematoria capable of burning as many as 2,000 bodies at a time and reducing living and breathing human beings to ashes with
insane speed were present in some of the camps, and these were called death camps and were different from the concentration camps. But in the concentration camps POWs were dying too. No one was
exempt.

She was allowed to send him a ‘next-of-kin’ parcel four times a year, but again these were opened and inspected by the guards. She had despatched her first parcel as soon as his
whereabouts had been confirmed and intended to send another in time for Christmas.

Ruby, who always seemed to know what she was thinking, leaned across and said quietly, ‘The news will filter through to him in time, lass. The Germans won’t be able to keep it quiet,
however much they’d like to. And it’ll give him heart. It’ll give them all heart. And I tell you something else: we’re going to win this war, and they know it.’

Whether they did or not, the balance of power had changed. At the end of January 1943 the Germans surrendered in Stalingrad and in February Japan abandoned the Solomon Islands. Bombing raids by
the Allies began to smash the heart out of German industry, and new techniques by the Allies in the Atlantic war had the U-boats on the run. In July the Russians whipped the Germans in the greatest
tank battle in history on the flat cornfields south of Moscow, and the Americans took Palermo, the Sicilian capital, setting the scene for Italy to surrender to the Allies unconditionally in
September.

And in November all communication from Jacob ceased. The last time Lucy had received a letter had been at the beginning of October and for two or three weeks she didn’t panic. The Allies
had made great gains in the last twelve months, and it seemed – whether by coincidence or not – that every time there was a victory Jacob’s letters were held up. It was as though
the camp guards needed to assert their authority.

By the end of November she had written umpteen times and sent a parcel, but had heard nothing. December was the same. By Christmas she was frantic. She tried not to let her despair colour the
festivities, but it was hard.

On Christmas Eve, a Friday, she was sitting on a sofa set at an angle to the fire and thinking of Jacob. A border of snow festooned the French windows. It had been snowing for days and the
outside world was white. Ruby was with Ron at his parents’ house, and Charley and Daisy had met friends to go ice-skating on a field near Springwell Farm, which had flooded earlier in the
month and then frozen hard. The afternoon sky had been clear but icy cold, and now a rosy sunset was bathing the snow in a pink haze.

Lucy turned her head and looked to the windows, the beauty outside a subtle mockery of her dark fears. Everyone had kept assuring her that Jacob was alive and well, to the point where she
hadn’t wanted to talk about it any more. It didn’t do any good, not really.

She rose to her feet, walking restlessly to the windows. A bright-eyed blackbird was busy pecking at a few morsels that she had put out earlier after she’d cleared a small space on the
concrete. She wondered how he fared on a day-to-day basis now that rationing had caused everyone to tighten their belts. He caught sight of her, pausing with a chunk of the coarse-grained bread
they now ate, since the baking of bread with white flour had been banned the year before, hanging out of his yellow beak. He tilted his little head to one side for a moment, summing her up, and
then, deciding she was no threat, made short work of his meal.

She smiled. The blackbird was one of the few that had no objection to the change of diet. ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said softly. And then wondered if she’d finally lost her
reason, talking to a bird.

When the doorbell rang, she thought it was Charley and Daisy, having forgotten their keys again. Stitching a seasonal smile on her face, she opened the front door.

‘Hello, Mam.’ Matthew stood there, balancing on crutches. No mean feat in the weather conditions. ‘Any room at the inn for a wounded sailor?’

Christmas was transformed, the more so when it transpired that Matthew’s leg had been smashed so badly that he had been told by the Navy doctor there was no chance he’d be going to
sea again.

‘But why didn’t you write and
tell
me you’d been injured?’ They were sitting together on the sofa that Lucy had recently vacated, a pot of tea in front of them
and a slice of Daisy’s Christmas cake, made without eggs and with a great deal of grated carrot, raw potato and a cup or two of breadcrumbs, besides other ingredients. Matthew had taken a
bite of his piece and declared it ‘interesting’.

‘Once I knew how bad it was, and that they were going to boot me out, I wanted to get home for Christmas and surprise you.’ Matthew grinned at her. ‘And I did surprise you,
didn’t I?’

‘You did.’ Lucy sat, her eyes drinking him in. Amazingly, he was still the same Matthew. Tanned, taller, but still her boy. ‘Now, tell me what happened, and don’t leave
anything out, mind.’

They talked for a couple of hours until it was pitch-dark outside. Matthew had been injured during a skirmish at sea with a German U-boat at the end of November, and Lucy was so glad to see him
that she didn’t have the heart to reprimand him for keeping her in the dark. She told him their news in a way she could never have done in letters, finishing with the fact that she
hadn’t heard from Jacob for nearly eleven weeks.

‘Don’t worry about it, Mam. He’s likely got up some guard’s nose and they’re not letting him write,’ said Matthew, as though he was an authority on life in
the concentration camps. ‘Jacob’s a survivor, he’s proven that, hasn’t he? First when he was a young lad, and then when Tobruk was taken. If anything had happened to him
they’d have let you know. They have to do that, same as we do with theirs.’

They both knew that, with the death camps and the concentration camps, normal treatment of POWs had broken down in this war, but neither of them voiced it. It was Christmas Eve. Matthew was home
and done fighting. With that she would be content. And tomorrow, and all the tomorrows following, she would believe Jacob was coming home, she told herself, watching Matthew eating his cake as
though he was enjoying it. A miracle had happened: her boy was home. Not quite in one piece, perhaps, but although he would always have a gammy leg, he’d be able to lead a good life. She
would believe for another miracle. It was Christmas.

That resolve was tested over the next months when there was no word from Germany.

The year of 1944 was a struggle for many Sunderland folk. Large areas of the town had been flattened, but people got on with their lives as best they could and without grumbling.

Charley tried to enlist in January, but was turned down when the doctors discovered a hitherto-undetected heart murmur. Matthew took on both of the fish shops, proving himself to be an astute
businessman and a very good fishmonger, which left Lucy and Charley to run the other side of the business. Ruby married her Ron in the autumn, and Lucy’s wedding present to the happy couple
was the deeds of a small terraced house close to the shipyard where they worked. She had bought it outright for them.

And then it was Christmas again. Lucy no longer looked immediately to the hall table when she came home from work, and her heart no longer raced if the doorbell rang. If she had been going to
get a telegram, it would have come by now. Jacob seemed to have simply disappeared, and the frightening thing – the terrible thing – was that so many other POWs had met the same fate.
But she still believed and hoped. She had to. It was that which kept her going, along with the fact that everyone knew the end of the war was in sight.

As 1945 began to unfurl, a glimpse into hell – as the Nazi death camps fell – shocked even the most seasoned veteran of war. In March, Allied prisoners who had begun to be liberated
were reporting horrific stories of life in German POW camps, with frequent beatings, starvation rations and no contact with the outside world. Only about thirty of the seventy known camps of Allied
prisoners had been liberated by the first week of May when, strangely suddenly, peace came to a battered Europe on the seventh of the month in a small red schoolhouse in Rheims, where General
Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander, had his HQ, and where the German Army Chief of Staff signed the document of unconditional surrender.

The next day, VE Day, the whole of Britain took to the streets to celebrate the victory.

For Matthew and Charley and Daisy’s sake, Lucy went with them to the Town Hall in Fawcett Street, where a fanfare of trumpets and a speech by the Mayor, with the police brass band playing
before and after the announcement and the National Anthem being sung with great fervour by the 10,000-strong crowd, heralded the celebrations.

Unlike London, where the whole population went crazy with joy, Sunderland’s celebrations were more subdued. Many local servicemen were POWs of the Japanese, some still fighting, and others
like Jacob had been interned in German concentration camps and still had to return home.

Matthew, Charley and Daisy were disappointed by the lack of fervour, although some streets were decked out for parties and their houses had flags flying. Some sailors tried to liven up the day a
little by firing off a gun on a ship berthed in the Wear. Around a dozen 20mm antiaircraft shells fell in the Roker and Fulwell areas, damaging houses, but no one was hurt.

Lucy didn’t say so to the youngsters, but the sober mood suited hers perfectly. It was awful, and she knew it was, she told herself, but she didn’t want to celebrate, not without
Jacob. And not knowing if he was alive or dead was a hundred times worse now, with the war over and people happy and expecting you to be the same.

After they had listened to the band in the pouring rain and people were beginning to disperse, one of Daisy’s old school friends joined them and invited them to the party that her street
was holding. ‘Everyone’s welcome,’ she insisted. ‘The more, the merrier. And my da and some of the other men have put tarpaulins up and whatnot, so you won’t get wet.
Well, not much anyway.’ She smiled at Matthew and Charley, fluttering her eyelashes. ‘It’ll be a bit of fun.’

Lucy was reminded again, by the girl’s forwardness, that her own daughter was no longer a child. Daisy had turned sixteen at the end of February and although she was small and slight, she
was turning into a beautiful young woman. She had insisted on leaving school the year before, the minute she could, working in a day-nursery with children whose mothers were occupied in jobs for
the war effort, but it had only been a stopgap until she could fulfil her main ambition and start to train to become a nurse. As always, she knew exactly what she wanted.

Sixteen years old. Lucy’s breath caught in her throat. Sixteen years that she and Jacob had lived without each other. She smiled at the others. ‘Go and have fun then,’ she
said, ‘and I’ll see you later.’

They began to protest, but she waved their objections aside, knowing they were worried that she would be alone on VE Day. But she wanted to be alone. Away from all the smiling faces and laughing
and gaiety. And if it meant she was turning into a cranky old woman at the ripe age of thirty-two, so be it.

She walked home rather than getting a taxi, her tears mingling with the rain. Matthew and Charley were grownup, young men, and soon they would be courting, and her Daisy had determined her own
road already. And that was good. All of it was good and right and how it should be. She had fulfilled her promise to Perce: she had brought his boys up and they were fine young men and would make
good husbands and fathers. But they would leave her. And, again, she wouldn’t have it any other way; it was the natural order, but suddenly, today, it was also unbearable. She felt so alone,
so lost. She wanted Jacob, more than life itself. To share everything with him, the ups and downs, to know that there was one person in this world she would always come first with, always be adored
by.

Was that selfish? She blinked the raindrops from her eyelashes. Maybe. But she didn’t care. She wasn’t old, she didn’t want her life to be over, and it would be if he
didn’t come back. She wanted to have more babies, Jacob’s babies, while she was still young enough to enjoy them. She wanted . . . Oh, she wanted it all. She wanted her miracle.