Keep the Home Fires Burning (17 page)

‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I just didn’t think.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Marion whispered back. ‘I had thought that with the girls at work all week and Sunday teas being a thing of the past, they might never need to meet my mother, or at least not very often. I did explain to Peggy and Violet just the other day that my mother was very old-fashioned and didn’t really approve of women taking over many traditionally male occupations, but really this had to come out sooner or later. After all, Peggy and Violet are doing nothing they have to be ashamed of. That being said, I don’t want a scene outside church so we will all slip away in the last hymn.’

She knew, though, that her mother never let things drop and was heartily glad she had said something to the girls when she saw Clara come in the back gate, just as the family were finishing their bowls of porridge. Marion and Sarah exchanged looks across the table and Marion gave
an inward sigh. She guessed Clara was here to finish the tirade begun before Mass and, because she had come alone, that her father had not approved of what she was doing.

However, the two girls stood up as Clara came in and Peggy turned to face her with a smile on her face and her hand outstretched as Marion said, ‘Mammy, these are the two girls I told you about, Peggy and Violet.’

Clara ignored her daughter’s words and Peggy’s hand. She glared at them both with a face that Peggy maintained later would have soured cream, and almost hissed, ‘I’ll have you know that this was once a respectable home.’

Peggy dropped her hand and said mildly, ‘Yes, I know that. That’s one of the reasons we chose to stay here.’

Clara was outraged. ‘You have the effrontery to … Don’t you realise that your presence here has tainted that respectability?’ she almost snarled.

‘Just how do you work that out?’ Peggy asked in a reasonable tone.

‘Because you are two sluts, for only sluts would work in a drop forge, of all places,’ Clara said. ‘You are not wanted here so the sooner you go back where you came from, the better it will be for everybody.’

Sarah wanted to floor to open up and swallow her, and Marion gasped at her mother’s insults. But she was angry too and she burst out, ‘Just a minute. In case it escapes your notice, this is my
house and I say who stays here and who doesn’t. And just now, and for as long as it takes, Peggy and Violet are more than welcome. I will thank you to keep your nose out of my affairs.’

‘I’m telling you they will corrupt your children.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Marion snapped. ‘They will do no such thing. And now if you have said your piece and thoroughly upset and insulted everyone, it would be better if you left.’

‘I’ll go when I am good and ready.’

Richard knew it was up to him. It was what his father would have done and so he stepped forward and said, ‘No you won’t, Grandma. As Mom said, this is her house and just now she doesn’t want you in it.’

Marion was astounded and yet very grateful to her son, but her mother, she saw, was even more amazed. Her malicious eyes raked round them all, from the nervous younger children to Sarah, her face red with shame, and Richard, with the steely glint in his eyes that she had never noticed before, and finally rested on her daughter. ‘On your own head be it then,’ she snapped. ‘I think I will write to Bill and tell him what’s going on under his roof.’ And with this parting shot she swept from the room.

‘Phew!’ Tony said with feeling, and Marion hadn’t the heart to chide him because she felt much the same.

‘Will she do that?’ Peggy said to Marion. ‘Write to your husband, I mean.’

‘I’ve given up trying to work out what she might do next,’ Marion said. ‘She may write to Bill, but she’ll be wasting her time because I’ve already written and told him all about you and Violet, and where you’re working. In contrast to my mother he has nothing but praise for the two of you because he knows the hard, though essential, work you will be doing working in a drop forge. But after that little upset it wouldn’t surprise me if you intend to look for other lodgings straight away.’

‘Oh, don’t be daft,’ Peggy said. ‘As if we would let ourselves be pushed out by one sad and embittered old woman. Anyroad, that’s how I feel. How about you, Vi?’

‘I agree with you,’ Violet said. ‘But, Marion, as you said, it is your house and if you would like us to go—‘

‘Oh, no!’ Marion cried. ‘No I don’t, not at all, but at the very least, you deserve some sort of explanation as to why my mother behaves the way she does …’

Marion explained about Clara’s life and how many of her siblings had died, and then about the death of Michael on one of the coffin ships en route to America.

‘His death, more than any of the others, seemed to break my mother up completely,’ she said. ‘To tell you the truth I often felt the lack of a mother because mine has always been so linked to the past and those she had lost.’

‘I never knew you felt that way, Mom,’ Sarah said. ‘You never said.’

‘There wasn’t any point to saying anything, was there?’ Marion said. ‘It would have changed nothing.’

‘I know exactly how you felt,’ Peggy said. ‘Our family had something similar. My mother had a little boy stillborn when I was not quite two years old and my elder brother, Sam, was four. My mother said the doctor warned her not to try for a baby too soon, to give her body time to recover, but she had a little girl the following year that she called Therese. She was a frail little thing, always ailing, so everyone has told me since, but I can’t remember that. What I can remember is seeing her lying in her little coffin as if she was fast asleep and would wake up any minute.’

‘How old was she?’ Marion asked gently.

‘Three,’ Peggy said. ‘And she had died from whooping cough. I was six and I remember her funeral and everyone crying, and my mother’s white face. Afterwards it was like my mother was behind a pane of glass. It was as though I could see her and hear her and yet seemed unable to touch her and there was no light in her eyes. I just felt so lonely and so did Sam. We sort of looked after one another. My father seemed at a loss too.’

‘That describes it very well,’ Marion said. ‘I was lonely too and my mother stayed behind that pane of glass.’

‘I thought mine would,’ Peggy said. ‘In the end, Mom said the vicar went to see her and, while he commiserated with her and acknowledged the deep sorrow she was feeling, he told her that a mother with other children couldn’t allow herself the luxury of wallowing in grief for ever, and she should be thankful for the two healthy children she did have.’

‘I so wish that someone had had the courage to say that to my mother,’ Marion said.

‘It might have helped you all if someone had,’ Peggy said, ‘because from that moment, it was as if our mother returned to us. Then my brother Peter was born when I was eight years old and Daisy three years later.’

‘We dealt with it by giving our mother incredible licence,’ Marion said, ‘always making allowances, and you see the result. Now I wouldn’t know what to do to correct it.’

‘I don’t think you can,’ Peggy said. ‘Not now. What you can change is the way you respond to it. Stand up to her like you did today.’

‘I’ll try,’ Marion said. ‘I do see that you’re right but it’s incredibly hard to face up to her when I’ve spent a lifetime appeasing her.’

A couple of days after this, there were more important things to worry about because German troops marched into Denmark and Norway, and both countries surrendered without really putting up any sort of fight. Everyone assumed that Hitler
would turn his attention to the Low Countries next. However, the news broadcasts claimed he wouldn’t conquer them so easily. Belgium and Holland were protected by a heavily manned impregnable fortress, which guarded three strategic bridges to prevent the German army just marching through their countries. The French had the Maginot Line, which they also claimed was impregnable, a strong line of heavily manned forts that ran from the Swiss border to the Ardennes.

‘With Hitler and his armies getting closer,’ Violet said that night as Marion switched off the wireless, ‘I’m really glad me and Peggy didn’t throw the towel in at that drop forge.’

‘Did you think of it?’

‘I’ll say. It was pride kept us going for the second week – and money, of course. Three pounds a week is not to be sneezed at.’

‘I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had given it up,’ Marion said. ‘I’d say you earn every penny. I remember the exhaustion and strain was written all over your faces that first week, and you were as grateful as Richard for a bowl of water in the scullery to wash when you got in.’

‘Yeah, and we used to go to bed not long after the evening meal as I remember,’ Peggy said. ‘God, we were not prepared for such intense heat. I mean, sweat broke out on our foreheads as soon as we entered the shop floor, and within minutes we would feel the bead of sweats trickling between our breasts and down our spines.’

‘It must have been awful,’ Sarah said, and Marion agreed.

‘And we wear these horrible green overalls,’ Violet said. ‘But most of the men wear flannelette shirts as well, to soak up the sweat, and they have scarves around their necks that they use to protect their faces from the heat when they have to open the furnaces.’

‘Do you have to do that as well?’

‘No, only men do that, thank God,’ said Peggy. ‘At first when the doors were opened the searing heat was so powerful we both found it difficult to breathe. And the furnaces have to be attended all the time, turning the load to make sure it’s the right consistency to be able to roll it.’

‘What happens then?’ Sarah asked.

‘Well, it goes through other rollers, getting finer and finer,’ Violet said. ‘Then it’s cut into lengths, loaded on to a bogey with tongs and weighed. That’s my job, manning the weighing machine, because they didn’t think I was strong enough to wheel the bogeys away to the other shop where they are turned into railway lines.’

‘Sounds like my idea of hell,’ Marion said.

‘And mine,’ Sarah replied.

‘It helps that I feel I’m doing something useful,’ Peggy said. ‘I suppose we could have chosen something else, but then I think of Sam – all the men, really. I mean, they had little choice, did they?’

‘I suppose not,’ Marion said. ‘And I think the hardest thing is not knowing where they are,
especially when Europe is such a scary place to be with country after country falling into German hands.’

‘Well, then,’ said Peggy. ‘Let’s hope that that fort holds up like it’s supposed to and protects Holland and Belgium.’

‘Oh, hear, hear to that,’ said Marion.

In early May Hitler’s Luftwaffe attacked Holland’s airfields. They called it blitzkrieg – lightning war – and the savagery of it left the Dutch Air Force with just twelve planes. At the same time, paratroopers were landed on the impregnable fort and it was in German hands in less than twenty-four hours, opening up the way for tanks and armies to cross unopposed into Belgium. No one was surprised when Holland finally surrendered after the Luftwaffe blitzed Rotterdam so badly that almost a thousand people were killed.

Then on the evening of Tuesday 14 May, Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War, gave a broadcast on the BBC Home Service. ‘… we are going to ask you to help us in a manner which I know will be welcome to thousands of you. Since the war began we have received countless enquiries from all over the kingdom from men of all ages who are for one reason or another not at present engaged in military service and who wish to do something for the defence of their country. Well, now is your opportunity.

‘We want large numbers of such men in Great
Britain, who are British subjects, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five … to come forward and offer their services … the name of the new Force which is now to be raised will be “the Local Defence Volunteers” … a part-time job, so there will be no need for any volunteer to abandon his present occupation. You will not be paid but you will be armed … In order to volunteer what you have to do is give in your name at the local police station …’

Richard was cross that he wasn’t yet even sixteen and could do nothing to help protect his country. He had a horror of jackbooted Nazis parading the streets of Birmingham and he knew it could easily happen for it really did seem as if the Germans were unstoppable.

Marion was also desperately worried about Bill because letters from him, which had previously come on a fairly regular basis, had stopped. Everyone was well aware of this except the younger children.

Sarah, worried herself, tried to assure her mother. ‘If Dad is actively engaged in something then he wouldn’t be able to write letters or get them to you, would he?’

‘No,’ Marion said sadly. ‘But it might be far worse than that, and you know it as well as I do. He might have been killed. Some of the fighting has been ferocious.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m not stupid. But,’ she added almost fiercely, ‘I shan’t think of it or
believe it until I’m told otherwise, and neither should you, if only for the sake of the twins and Tony.’

Marion knew that Sarah’s attitude was the right one and yet it was hard to accept for every day the news worsened. Then a directive was broadcast that all owners of boats of 30 foot long or more and capable of crossing the Channel, and living on the south coast had to register them with the Admiralty. This applied to yachts and pleasure boats of all sorts, barges, and fishing boats.

‘What’s that all about?’ Marion said.

Nobody knew then, but a few days later, when news reached them that the Allied army was in retreat, Richard could see from his map that the Germans were trying to drive the Allies onto the beaches.

‘If they manage to do that then the big naval ships won’t be able to go in very far to take them off, will they?’

‘Oh, you mean when they asked for the small boats capable of crossing the Channel it was all about rescuing our soldiers?’ Peggy cried.

‘I think so.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Marion said. ‘But I don’t see that little boats will get many off.’

‘No,’ Richard said morosely, well aware that one of those soldiers trapped on the beaches could be his father, and when his eyes met Sarah’s he knew that she thought exactly the same.