The Soldier's Bride
Read The Soldier's Bride Online
Authors: Maggie Ford
Contents
Torn between love and duty...
Letty Bancroft longs to be married but her father has other ideas – he wants his daughter to stay at home and help run his East End shop.
Heartbroken, Letty must remain unwed while her sweetheart goes off to fight in France. But her love affair has had consequences that will see her more determined than ever to be a soldier’s bride...
Maggie Ford was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.
She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s.
The Soldier’s Bride
is her first novel.
Dedicated to Charles Titchen, my late husband and patient friend, and to my loving children, John, Janet and Clare
Letty Bancroft shivered deliciously, a tingle of anticipation briefly replacing tension. Not long now and she’d be wearing her new corset.
Stiffened with whalebone, strengthened with buckram, moulding her already narrow waist as near the rich and fashionable ‘S’ bend as its cheaper version allowed, it had cost twelve shillings and elevenpence.
‘How much?’ Mum had looked disparaging. ‘It’ll kill yer wearing a thing like that, trying to be something you ain’t.’ But Letty had been eighteen two weeks ago. Now she wanted to be transformed, to look rich and fashionable, even if she was only a bridesmaid. At least, when she could get into the bedroom to put the thing on and
be
transformed!
Letty, or as her dad insisted, Letitia, drew back her head from out of the open parlour window above his secondhand shop, the sash pushed up as far as it would go for a bit of fresh air, and glanced again at the clock on the mantelshelf. Eleven-thirty! She’d never be ready in time.
It was Saturday 15 June 1908. Her eldest sister, Vinny, was getting married at one-thirty at Holy Trinity church in Old Nichol Street. Letty and her other sister, Lucy, were bridesmaids.
From the bedroom along the passage came girlish voices, high with excitement. All right for them! Lucy was ready, Vinny almost. And here she stood, still in her old everyday frock, hair tumbled around her shoulders in an auburn mass, waiting for Lucy to comb it, pin it up and puff it out fashionably over cloth rats.
Her mother looked round the parlour door. ‘You orright, Letty, luv?’ The tone sounded weary, almost like a sigh.
Letitia looked at the thin face, flushed by the disease that afflicted so many in the East End; squalor, narrow back alleys, lack of fresh air, it was said, made a perfect breeding ground. Mum had contracted it about ten months ago but had been determined it wouldn’t spread to her three pretty daughters with all their lives ahead of them. She never kissed them now, which hurt a little; used a hanky for her smallest cough; had her own crockery, her own utensils, her own towel and face flannel, the family being just a bit better off than some who could hardly afford a towel between them at times. If Dad’s shop did only moderately well, at least it managed to keep their heads above water.
‘I’m orright, Mum,’ Letty answered her enquiry. ‘Just a bit fed up of waitin’, that’s all.’
‘Never mind, luv,’ Mabel Bancroft soothed. ‘Not much longer. It do take a bit of time fer a bride to get ready.’
‘Hmm!’ Letty pulled a face, the grimace in no way marring its looks. She got her retroussé nose, her firm oval chin and high brow from Dad; her tallness she’d inherited from both parents, rare in a Cockney.
Her wide green eyes could make any boy blush to the roots of his hair when she treated him to that sideways
glance of hers, a natural action, but she could make the most of it when she wanted to. Trouble was, she seldom wanted to, certainly not with the class of boy round here. Oh, for a well off young man like Vinny had found. She envied Vinny her luck. It would never be hers.
‘Looks like I’ll still be dressin’ when everyone else is leaving,’ she mumbled sulkily. ‘I should of known I’d look a mess. Some bridesmaid I’ll make – me hair all over the place.’
‘It won’t be all over the place, luv,’ Mum said in a tired voice. ‘Lucy’ll do yer ’air lovely.’
The wan face withdrawn to save further argument, Letty turned back to the window and stuck her head out again. Her face framed by the heavy lace curtains, elbows folded on the soot-grimed sill for support, black-stockinged feet up on tiptoe, she peered down.
The street below was quiet. On Saturdays most people went to Brick Lane market a few streets away, the faint cries of the stallholders could be heard from here, above the rattle of trams on the main road. Tomorrow morning, however, would see the quiet street below erupt in a confusion of song birds, thousands of them, their concerted twittering like the sound of huge sheets of crisp tissue paper being vigorously rubbed together.
This was Club Row, London’s caged bird market. Running off from the Shoreditch end of Bethnal Green Road, its stalls spilling across into Sclater Street and Hare Street, people came here on Sunday mornings to buy pigeons, chickens, but mostly to look for a caged bird as a pet – a linnet, a goldfinch or a canary.
In summer London’s streets echoed to their sweet trills and warbles when new owners hung the tiny cages outside tenement windows. In winter the streets lay silent when the birds were taken indoors out of the cold, but even in winter Club Row had birdsong; cages stacked high in doorways, on stalls, each little captive singing as if to keep itself warm until someone bought it and took it home out of the cold.
Sunday morning the air would vibrate with the confused chatter of people buying, and stallholders yelling their heads off. The street would be a jostle of people milling between the fuliginous brick and dirty shop windows and the tatty awnings of stalls. Letty always loved looking down on the swirling river of hats; men’s faces hidden beneath greasy cloth caps or dusty bowlers, ladies’ beneath straw hats, plain sombre black or cream or yellow, banded with blue or red or brown ribbon; a few wide-brimmed hats decorated with wax fruit, half a yard of tulle, a feather or two, the poor of the East End aping the more opulent West End fashions.
This was still the same impoverished area Letty had known as a kid, but things were gradually changing. It was 1908. The well-to-do set the fashions, and every girl from scullery maid upward copied them. A girl could, with a paper pattern, a bit of cheap material and ribbon, make a dress for almost next to nothing and stroll in the park on Sunday looking quite the lady, even if she was in reality a mere factory worker.
Reminded sharply that shortly she too would look very much a lady in her bridesmaid’s dress, Letty drew her head back inside finding the room dim after the brilliance outside.
‘You two goin’ ter be much longer, Lucy?’ she yelled, petulance heightening the cockney accent Dad was always trying to curb in her.
‘Ooh, keep yer ’air on!’ Lucy’s reply came back in the same vernacular, forgetting that she had been practising rounding her vowels and sounding her aitches, because she was going out with a boy who did. ‘Nearly ready. Vinny looks a picture! Wait till you see ’er, Let.’
‘And oo’s
Let
, when she’s at ’ome?’ Dad’s voice came sharply from the bedroom across the passage; Dad, who tried to practise what he preached, sometimes didn’t do so well. ‘She’s got a name yet know. Letitia!’
‘What, Dad?’ Letty called back automatically, hearing her full name. Arthur Bancroft’s voice became even more irascible. ‘I wasn’t talkin’ to you!’
‘I thought you was.’
His narrow face with its bristling sandy-grey moustache came round the edge of the door, followed by his tall thin frame. At fifty, he still bore traces of the handsome man he’d once been.
‘Not so much of your lip, my girl! I was talking to Lucilla. And you, I ain’t ’aving you bawling out like some factory ’and. I brought you up to behave a bit better than that. Lucilla watches her words – or do sometimes.’ Lucy’s reply was still grating in his head. ‘And Lavinia is a proper lady since she met ’er Albert. So I ain’t ’aving you talking like that in front of ’er ’usband to be and his people. I ain’t havin’ you show us up.’
He looked agitated, even less ready than before he’d started dressing for the ceremony. In his shirt and braces,
his Sunday best trousers even so held up by a belt, his stiff celluloid collar popped off its stud, protruded at right angles from his neck like a seagull’s broken wing. His hair, touched faintly with grey, parted in the centre and brushed flat as a natural wave allowed, shone with brilliantine to keep it so, except that one wave with its own ideas was sticking up like a cockscomb. The bane of his life, was his persistently wavy hair.
Letty smothered a giggle, kept her face straight. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ she said hastily, then tittered as he disappeared.
High ideals had Dad, bless him. With never quite the means to carry any of them out, he’d tried to disguise his own lack of education, his poor background, by concentrating on his daughters, insisting they behaved like ladies, tried to be a little better than he ever had been.
Even his choice of their names – Lavinia, Lucilla, Letitia – suited more to girls from Barnet than Bethnal Green, reflected that effort. Mum, more down to earth, had shortened them to Vinny, Lucy and Letty; neighbourhood mates went one better: Vin, Luce and Let. Dad gritted his teeth, and clung religiously to their original names.
From her sisters’ bedroom came a wail: ‘Be careful, Lucy. You’ll break my neck, pulling my hair like that!’
Far better spoken than any of them Vinny had become, since meeting Albert Worth whose people came from Hackney.
At twenty-one, the same age as Vinny, Albert looked older. Round-faced and, to Letty’s idea, a bit pompous, he was training as an accountant in his father’s firm. Vinny had met him last year when the three girls had gone to see
the Boat Race at Putney. He had accompanied her home when she’d torn the frilled hem of her summer dress and had taken to calling on her every Sunday afterwards, not put off by her background. Vinny could put on the posh talk when she wanted. She had won his family over and finally become engaged to him in January.
Letty glanced again at the ornate ormolu clock on its marble stand where figures of a gallant and his lady posed decoratively on either side of the oval face under a huge glass dome. Tight-faced, she hurried to the parlour door.
Leaning out of it, she blared into the dim passage: ‘It’s five to twelve!’
‘Ooh, you are impatient!’ Lucy’s reply, yelled from the bedroom, was no panacea. ‘I’m doin’ me best!’
‘That don’t help me much though, do it?’ Letty yelled back. ‘I can’t even use me own bedroom with all Vinny’s stuff in it.’
A few stairs up were two tiny rooms, one hers, one full of Dad’s junk. Letty’s bedroom measured just six by eight. For weeks it had been full of Vinny’s wedding stuff with nowhere else to put it. Living space above the shop was in short supply. Besides the two tiny rooms at the top, there were just two slightly larger bedrooms, a kitchen and parlour, all of which opened on to a long dim passage with a flight of stairs down to the shop. The parlour was of a decent size if it hadn’t been crammed with Dad’s bric-a-brac and what had once belonged to Mum’s parents.