Keep the Home Fires Burning (46 page)

‘Sarah, it’s nothing to do with your face at all,’ Sam cried. ‘It isn’t even to do with you. The problem is mine.’

Sarah was too distressed to hear anything more, however, and from the door she said, ‘Goodbye, Sam,’ before fleeing down the corridor.

Afterwards, Sarah remembered walking for hours and hours sobbing until she was awash with tears and yet unable to stop because she didn’t know how she would bear this unhappiness and despair. Shafts of pain seemed to pierce her heart and still she trudged on and on till her feet burned.

Eventually, when she had cried herself out and she was a little calmer she wondered what to do and realised she would have to make for home. She didn’t really care what happened to her any more, but she knew that her family would worry if she didn’t go home, and one way and another she had put them through enough already. This was a pain that she would have to learn to live with, to go through life with this ache in her heart.

However, darkness had descended to blur the streets and she had no idea where she was or how to get to the train station. At last she came upon a road she could just make out was called High Street, and she walked along that hoping that it might lead to Sutton Coldfield town. Eventually she came out at the top of a hill. In the dank and murky darkness she saw a large church to her left-hand side and remembered walking past it
earlier that day. Then she knew the station was halfway down the hill and to the right.

It was a busy station, for all it was only small, and there were a good many people waiting for the train. Sarah hid herself as far as possible in the shadows. She felt desolation fill all her being as her vision of the future unfolded in her mind’s eye and she bit her lip to prevent crying out against it. Never had she been more grateful for the concealing veil on her mother’s hat that hid her ravaged face and wretched eyes from the curious, both in the station and later in the train when it had been impossible to get a carriage to herself.

In Albert Road, Marion looked out of the bedroom window for the umpteenth time that evening before returning to the living room. Everyone looked up as she entered but she shook her head. ‘No sign. Where on earth could she be?’

Peggy was more worried than anyone because she knew what her brother would have said to Sarah that day, and how upset Sarah would be. Her innards were gripped by fear. Surely Sarah wouldn’t do anything silly. She was a sensible girl, but everyone had their breaking point. Peggy didn’t think it would help anyone to share the burden of her knowledge and so when Sarah’s key was heard opening the door a few minutes later, her relief matched Marion’s and she let out a sigh as Marion opened the door to the hall.

‘Where have you been?’ Marion asked sharply,
because she had been very worried. Then her voice changed. ‘What ails you?’

Peggy sprang to her side to see Sarah lurching from in the hall as if she were drunk and Peggy leaped forward to help her.

‘Oh, Peggy,’ Sarah cried and even her voice tore at the older girl’s heartstrings as she fell into her arms in a dead faint.

With March nearly over and spring fast approaching, Sarah didn’t seem to be improving at all. Although she no longer covered her face from the family and didn’t hide away in her room she grew more silent than ever. In that austere spring, as the war drew agonisingly slowly to a close, and food was as hard as ever to obtain, Sarah ate less than a bird. It was impossible to find tasty things to tempt her and she grew desperately thin so that her clothes hung on her and her sorrow-filled eyes looked huge in her gaunt white face, the blue smudges beneath them evidence of her disturbed nights.

The twins could have told their mother of the anguished moans Sarah sometimes made when she managed to doze off and the nights she sobbed until her pillow was damp. But they were not sneaks. They knew what she was fretting about, and thought it very bad of Sam not to want to marry their Sarah.

‘I don’t blame her crying about it,’ Missie said one day as she and Magda made their way to school.

‘Nor me,’ Magda said. ‘Don’t think we should tell Mom, though.’

‘No,’ Missie said. ‘If Sarah ain’t saying nothing then I don’t think we should.’

But Marion didn’t need the twins telling her exactly how upset Sarah was because it was apparent. Eventually she sought the advice of her sister.

‘Don’t know why you’re all at sixes and sevens about it, anyroad,’ Polly said. ‘In your heart of hearts, this is the outcome that you wanted.’

Marion didn’t deny it. ‘All right, maybe I did deep down, but I just didn’t think our Sarah would be so upset.’

‘Why on earth not?’ Polly said. ‘She loved Sam, wanted to marry him, despite his disability. She told you that much. What did you expect her to do, go and dance a jig up the High Street?’

‘No, but … oh, I don’t know. Course she thinks her disfigured face put him off.’

‘Why would it?’ Polly said. ‘I mean, quite apart from anything else, he can’t see what she looks like.’

‘I know, but she told Peggy that first day when she came round, like, that the men sharing his ward had been describing her face to Sam, taking the mickey and that, and it put him off. Peggy said, though, she couldn’t see that ever happening. There are so many badly wounded and damaged servicemen there, no one would mock anyone else. They’d probably know that Sarah’s injuries were due to some explosion or other.’

‘So why did he finish it?’

Marion spread her hands helplessly. ‘Peggy told me that it was her parents, who I suppose thought as I did, and told Sam that he would tie her down, that she would be throwing her life away, you know, the sort of things I said to you. The truth is that, probably for the best intentions, Sam’s parents succeeded in tearing apart Sam and Sarah and I don’t know that Sarah will ever get over it. I daren’t even speak the man’s name, and she is so cold with Peggy. Now she never speaks to her unless it’s absolutely necessary. I suppose it’s because Peggy is a link to Sam, who she is trying to rub out of her life, but it makes the atmosphere difficult at home.’

The only one Peggy could speak to about her brother was Violet, so Violet knew although Sam was improving physically, emotionally he was suffering just as much as Sarah. On Good Friday, as the forge was closed for Easter, Peggy had fitted in an extra visit to Sam and found him very despondent.

‘I mean, all the shrapnel is out now, and to all intents and purposes he is recovering,’ she told Violet, ‘but the flashbacks and nightmares I told you about have got steadily worse, and he has even done a bit of sleepwalking. After Mom and Dad visited last Sunday he had to be moved into a private room to avoid disturbing the other patients, and where he could be watched more closely.’

‘Ah, Peg, I’m really sorry for you.’

‘He told me today he thinks his life is over,’ Peggy said. ‘He said he can’t see the point of going on. Tell you the truth, I’m dreading going to see him again tomorrow.’

‘D’you want me to come with you?’

‘I would welcome it, Vi, but I never know how Sam is going to be, so better not.’

So Peggy went alone to see her brother. She had just entered the hospital when the doctor called her into the office.

‘Your brother’s fellow patients told one of the nurses the other day about words your brother had with a young lady just before the nightmares began again. Was it that she couldn’t go on with the relationship because he is blind?’

‘It was almost the exact opposite to that,’ Peggy said. ‘Sarah would have had no trouble accepting Sam’s blindness, but my parents thought that he should release her to find someone else and convinced him it was the right thing to do.’

‘And did she want to be released?’

Peggy gave a definite shake of her head. ‘She is broken-hearted. And you say Sam is …’

‘Without putting too fine a point on it, my dear, your brother’s mental balance is beginning to worry me,’ the doctor said. ‘Of course it must be the decision of the young people themselves, but I would say that he needs that young lady more than ever.’

Peggy soon saw how ill Sam had become. He would start a sentence and lose the thread of it,
lose concentration as he jumped from one subject to another, and his agitated manner worried her greatly. Peggy was angry with her parents for coercing Sam into finishing with Sarah. All the way home she thought of her beloved brother and the sadness that seemed to surround him, and Sarah, who was filled with heartache, and decided that enough was enough.

‘D’you think I should talk to her, tell her how he is?’ she asked Violet.

‘Course I do,’ Violet said. ‘Don’t know why you let it get to this stage in the first place.’ And then she added, ‘Tell you what, if it was Richard I’d do whatever it took.’

Peggy stared at her. ‘You and Richard? I thought you were just friends?

‘We were when we started writing to one another but I like him even more now I’ve been writing for a while, of course, I haven’t seen him for ages. After the war we’ll see … But Sam and Sarah are made for each other. It’s as plain on the nose on your face.’

‘So you think I should talk to Sarah?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Violet said. ‘The sooner the better. And it has to be up to Sarah because Sam can hardly come tripping down to see her.’

So immediately, before she got cold feet, Peggy sought Sarah out. She was in the kitchen helping her mother prepare the evening meal and when Peggy asked if she could talk to her, she saw the wary look flood across her face.

‘Talk away,’ she said.

‘I mean in private,’ Peggy said, and her eyes sought Marion’s over Sarah’s bent head.

So when Sarah said, ‘I must help my mother,’ Marion said, ‘It’s virtually done now, just needs to be put in the oven. Go and see what Peggy wants.’

There was nowhere private but the room Sarah shared with the twins, and Sarah followed Peggy up there reluctantly and, once inside, with the door shut, said ungraciously, ‘What do you want anyroad?’

‘I wanted to ask you how much you love my brother?’

Sarah said stiffly, ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

‘You must, because both you and Sam are pining for one another.’

‘Sam is?’

‘I’ll say he is.’

‘Then why …?’

‘He thought that he was giving you your freedom to look for another, and my parents helped him reach that decision.’

‘It isn’t to do with the way I look?’

‘Of course not, nothing at all to do with your face.’

Peggy saw Sarah give a deep sigh. ‘Peggy, I don’t want anyone else.’

‘I know.’

‘But that hardly matters because he finished with me, so what’s the point of all this?’

‘Well, if I loved a man like you so obviously love Sam, I would fight for him.’

‘And how do you suggest I do that?’

‘You could start with a letter telling him exactly how you feel about him.’

‘After what he said to me you expect me to—‘

‘Sarah, he’s ill,’ Peggy said. ‘He doesn’t know how much he wants you, but he does need you and the doctor has said that himself.’

‘What do you mean, he’s ill?’

‘He is having flashbacks about the war and nightmares, and now he has begun sleepwalking.’

Sarah remembered her father having that awful nightmare that woke her and the twins not long after he came home from the hospital, and that Mom said he was helped by talking it over with their uncle Pat. She said, ‘He doesn’t need me, but he will probably be helped by talking it over with someone.’

‘Yeah, like you.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘The doctor said he needs you,’ Peggy said, ‘and I would say that he knows what he’s talking about.’

‘A letter, you said,’ Sarah said grudgingly. ‘And what good is a letter to a blind man?’

‘One of the nurses will read it to him,’ Peggy said assuredly. ‘I’ve seen them do that for other patients.’

‘That cuts out our writing really personal stuff, like about feelings and that.’

‘Will you just write the letter? If you post it
today, even with the Easter Holiday it should reach him by Tuesday.’

‘I’ll write it,’ said Sarah. ‘But I don’t hold out much hope it will make any difference.’

She began that evening before the twins were sent to bed, and though she hadn’t intended the letter to be too intimate and personal because a nurse would be reading it to Sam, once she began the words flowed out like a stream.

She told him of the way her stomach contracted when she just spoke his name, and of the butterflies in her stomach when she’d read his letters, and how the endearments he used often caused the breath to stop in her throat. She told him that she remembered every minute of the first visit he had made to their house and, despite being so young, she believed she had loved him from the first moment she had seen him. That love had deepened when she’d met him again when she was sixteen, and then the letters he wrote just made her love him even more.

She went on to say that when she saw him in the hospital bed, even knowing he was blind made no difference to the way that she felt about him. She would always love him, heart, body and soul till the breath left her body. In fact, she said, she didn’t think she could live without him.

The nurses were surprised when Sam received a letter.

‘Maybe from someone who doesn’t know he’s blind,’ one suggested.

‘Maybe,’ another said. ‘Anyroad, whoever it’s from he’ll have to know about it and one of us will probably have to read it to him.’

‘I’ll do that if you like,’ said the first nurse. ‘I feel quite sorry for him, to tell the truth.’

‘Who’s it from?’ Sam asked later as the nurse told him he had had a letter delivered that morning.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I haven’t opened it yet. Do you want me to do that and read it to you?’

‘Please.’

The nurse slit the envelope and withdrew the letter. ‘It’s from someone called Sarah.’

Sam stiffened on the bed and said through tightened lips, ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

However, the nurse had scanned the letter and she said to Sam, ‘Oh, Mr Wagstaffe, I really think you should hear what she has to say.’

Sam clenched his hands into fists and, through tightened lips and with tremendous trepidation, said, ‘Go on then.’