Tuppence To Spend (35 page)

‘Things don’t look good in Greece,’ he remarked. ‘I saw in the paper they’re talking about getting the men out. With Yugoslavia giving in, it gives the Germans a real hold. They’ll be all over the Med soon.’

Dan grunted. Now that the evenings were lighter, he’d noticed a few flowers coming out in the back garden. They were ones Nora had planted when they first came to April Grove. He thought he might pick some and take them up to her grave.

It seemed a hundred years ago that Nora had died. It was like looking back down a tunnel, a long, dark burrow of misery that he’d have to crawl through to reach her again.
But I
can’t
reach her again, he thought in sudden panic, I can’t
ever
get to her again. She’s gone. She’s gone for ever.

To his dismay, he felt the pricking of tears in his eyes. Frank was still talking about Greece. It was said that Mr Churchill had agreed to withdraw from the mainland, but was insisting on holding Crete, where there were Australian and New Zealand troops as well as British. ‘Now that Yugoslavia’s gone, it puts those boys in a bad spot. To my mind, he hasn’t got no choice, he’ll have to get them out. It’ll be like Dunkirk all over again—’

‘Sorry, Frank,’ Dan said, turning abruptly aside. ‘I’ve got to go down this way. Something I’ve got to do—’

He marched off down a side road, leaving Frank Budd looking after him in some surprise. And no wonder, Dan thought, as he realised he’d turned into a cul-de-sac. Well, it didn’t matter. He’d just needed a bit of time to himself, to recover from the shock of feeling tears in his eyes, the pain of remembering.

When she’d first died it had happened twenty times a day. Each morning, when he woke in an empty bed, and thought she must have gone down to the lav before the truth flooded back. The silence of the house, without her or Gordon, with only Sammy creeping about like a shadow and getting on his nerves. Getting his own breakfast – a cup of tea, a slice of bread and marge – and sorting out his own dinner. Nora had always made up a box for him, till those last few weeks when she’d been too poorly, but now he couldn’t seem to manage it. He got himself a pie and chips from the stall outside the dock gates instead, and left Sammy a few pennies to get his own. And then there was the moment he came home again, letting himself into the cold, dark house. No fire – no lights – no Nora. It was then that the despair overwhelmed him, and it was that moment he feared most and postponed for as long as he could.

It wasn’t quite so bad going home on a lighter evening, but as a rule overtime went on until dark anyway. Tonight
was an exception. Tonight the sun was still in the sky, the house would be light and there were flowers in the garden. Tonight he’d go and see his Nora, and take her some.

There had been no raids on Pompey for three nights now. Plymouth had been the main target, and by all accounts it had been almost flattened. There had been pictures in today’s paper of a huge area of devastation, barely a thing left standing, the whole of the city centre smashed to pieces. Thirty thousand people made homeless, it said. Thirty
thousand
! It was impossible to imagine, all those families trudging through the streets with their few remaining possessions piled into prams or wheelbarrows, or just lugged in battered suitcases or shopping bags. Your whole home reduced to the size of a shopping bag. Dan thought of the house in April Grove, poor and shabby as it was. They’d never had much, him and Nora, but even so it was more than would go in one shopping bag. It didn’t bear thinking about.

He walked round the back way, past Tommy Vickers’ garden with the Anderson shelter and the neat rows of vegetables that Tommy had just planted, and down the alley. His own garden looked a mess, he hadn’t done any of the ‘digging for victory’ they kept on about – when had he had the time? – but the flowers Nora had planted were struggling bravely through the weeds. He didn’t know what they were all called but they were pretty enough – bright little things, like coloured daisies, and those others were tulips, he knew that – and they’d look all right, tied in a bunch and stuck in a jam jar of water. He’d take them up straight after he’d had a bit of tea.

Shopping was another problem for Dan. He left for work at a quarter past six every morning and never got home before the shops shut. There was one place on the way home that stopped open late but you had to be registered at one shop now to get your proper rations, so he could only buy a few bits and pieces there. He worked on Saturday
mornings too, so the afternoon was the only chance he had. Just about the worst time of the week, he thought bitterly, looking at the butcher’s empty slab and the few scrubby vegetables left at the greengrocer’s.

‘Couldn’t you keep something back for me once in a while?’ he’d asked Mr Hines a week or two ago. ‘A bit of stewing steak or a few sausages? You know I always come in on Saturday afternoon, and you got practically nothing left then.’

‘Wouldn’t be fair to me other customers,’ Mr Hines said reprovingly. ‘Queue up for hours, they do. I can’t keep stuff under the counter for you, now can I?’

‘Don’t see why not,’ Dan muttered, looking sullenly at the scrag end of mutton the butcher was weighing out. ‘I work hard enough, don’t I, getting ships out to fight this bloody war? I should’ve thought I was entitled to a decent bit of meat now and then.’

The butcher shrugged. ‘You could always get registered somewhere else.’ But Dan couldn’t and they both knew it. And even if he could, the new butcher wouldn’t be any more helpful.

‘You want to get one of your neighbours to do your shopping for you,’ Alf Hines suggested. He didn’t really want to be unhelpful, even though he didn’t like Dan Hodges all that much. It was just the way things were. He felt a bit sorry for the man, if truth were told, losing his wife the way he had. Mrs Hodges had been a nice little body and you could see she’d had a hard time of it, especially with that older boy of theirs getting into trouble. ‘Wouldn’t Mrs Vickers help out a bit?’

Dan shrugged. Freda Vickers probably would, if he asked her, but he wasn’t going to. She and Tommy had done enough already, coming in to help Nora in those last weeks and then looking out for young Sam. The trouble was that when you let people help you they took over your life, stuck their noses in where they weren’t wanted. He
wasn’t at all sure it hadn’t been their doing that Captain Whiting had come nosing round and arranged for Sammy to be taken away. No, he wasn’t going to ask the Vickerses, nor anyone else, to help him out.

And then, last Saturday, when Dan went in there were a few sausages and a bit of liver put by. Alf had produced them as if they were leftovers that no one else wanted, and his look had almost dared Dan to thank him. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad bloke after all, Dan thought, as he picked some of the flowers, ready to take them to Nora’s grave. The liver and sausages had been really tasty. He’d fried them together and there’d been enough for two good feeds with some mashed potato and a bit of cabbage. There was still a bit left for tonight. He’d have it with a tin of baked beans.

Thinking about all this had kept his mind off Nora. He went indoors and put the flowers into a jam jar. They made a bright spot of colour in the dingy room and he realised suddenly just how grubby it was. The spring sunshine seemed to show it all up, and it was made worse by the state of the windows. It all needed cleaning, he could see it, but how was he to get that done?

Dan made himself a cup of tea and warmed up his supper. Then he had a wash at the kitchen sink and brushed his hair. Time he went to the barber, he thought, looking in the cracked bit of mirror above the sink. Nora used to cut his hair, to save money, but when he’d tried he couldn’t seem to get a proper cut with the scissors and it had looked more as if it had been chewed.

He stared at it with dissatisfaction. He’d wanted to smarten himself up a bit for his visit to Nora. Perhaps a shave would help. He took his cut-throat razor out of the drawer and started to sharpen it on the strop that hung behind the kitchen door. He mixed up the shaving foam and then hesitated, staring at his bristly face in the mirror.

He glanced through the scullery door and saw the
flowers Nora had planted and would never see, their colours bright and clear in the grubby jam jar. The silence of the house seemed to press down on him, like a weight that was too heavy to bear.

The sense of despair swept over him again, sudden and unexpected, and he lifted the razor to his throat.

The third Blitz over Portsmouth began that same night.

Scarcely had the wail of the sirens died away and people rushed into their shelters than the bombs and the mines began to fall. They came by parachute, floating down like deadly mushrooms, or they came direct, whistling with ferocious intent. The Royal Hospital was hit, the town railway station, the main post office, the prison. The big McIlroys store was burnt out. One way and another, more than half the city was affected, and once again there were fires to fight, railway lines blocked, water and gas mains broken and electricity out of action. It seemed that the hell of it all would never end.

Tommy Vickers met Dan in the pub next evening. Both men had been out firefighting all night and both had gone to work that morning just the same. They were red-eyed with exhaustion.

Tommy brought his pint over to the small table where Dan was sitting, staring at nothing. He sat down and they looked at each other.

‘Bloody mess,’ Dan said. ‘It’s all a bloody mess.’

‘I know, mate.’ Tommy hesitated, then said, ‘Did you hear about young Graham Philpotts?’

‘Philpotts?’ Dan shook his head. ‘Never heard of him.’

‘Well, you’ll have seen him around. Used to knock about with young Betty Chapman. Joined the Navy at the beginning of the war – matelot, red hair, you must have seen him. Family used to live round this way before they went off to Gosport.’

Dan nodded without much interest. ‘Yeah, I think I know who you mean. Not lately, though. That’s the girl that went to be a Land Girl, isn’t it? What about him?’

‘Killed,’ Tommy said briefly. ‘He was helping young Gladys Shaw from number 13 – I dare say you know she drives an ambulance – and they were just taking someone into the Royal when it got hit. Mine fell on the entrance.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘He was a good kid, young Graham. Cheeky, you know, but not a bit of harm in him. I brought him in here once, sat at this very table we did, and give him a bit of advice. He reminded me of myself when I joined the Andrew as a young sprog. And now he’s dead. Blown to bits, just because he was doing someone a good turn.’ He shook his head. ‘It don’t seem right. It just don’t seem right.’

‘It’s what’s happening, though,’ Dan said. ‘All over the place. People getting killed, dying. And yet if you don’t care – if you’d as soon be dead as alive – well, it seems you go through the lot without a scratch.’ He stared into his beer. ‘It all seems upside down to me. Don’t make no sense, none of it.’

Tommy looked at him. ‘You’re not saying
you
don’t care, Dan.’

‘Ain’t I?’ Dan gave a bitter laugh. ‘Why not? What’ve I got to look forward to, eh? What use am I to anyone?’

‘Well, you got your boys.’ Tommy was alarmed. There was something in Dan Hodges’ eyes that gave him the shivers. A sort of blankness. It looked as if he really didn’t care. ‘You got them to look after.’

‘Look after? Me? Come off it, Tommy, you know I’ve never done nothing for either of them boys. Nothing good, anyway. There’s Gordon in an approved school, getting the discipline he oughter’ve got from his father, and Sam out in the country forgetting all about me – and I don’t blame him, neither. I’m no good to neither of them, Tom, and
that’s the top and bottom of it. They’re better off without me.’

Tommy was silent. He couldn’t help agreeing with Dan, to some extent, anyway – and yet his heart told him this wasn’t right. The man was their father. Boys needed a father and Dan wasn’t such a bad sort when you thought about it. He’d had a rotten time in the Great War, Frank Budd had told him that, he’d been shell-shocked and you never properly got over that. And he worked all the hours God sent, and still did his bit of firefighting, same as the rest of them. He’d just never had much luck. That was his trouble.

‘It’ll be better after the war,’ he said. ‘When they both come home and things get back to normal – and they’ll be that much older then, won’t need so much looking after.’

‘Older!’ Dan said bitterly. ‘They’ll be bloody grown-up. And things aren’t ever going to be normal, not in our house, Tommy, you know that.’ He drained his glass and got up. ‘I’m having another one. What about you?’

‘No, thanks, Dan. I’ll just finish this one and then I’ll have to go. I promised Freda I wouldn’t be late.’ Tommy watched as the other man lurched over to the bar. Dan didn’t ought to be drinking too much either, he thought, he was dog-tired already and if they had another raid … And you’re not helping, Tommy Vickers, he berated himself. Talking about things getting back to normal, when the poor bugger’s still not got over losing his wife.

Dan came back and set down another full pint. He slumped into his chair and looked at Tommy.

‘I went up the churchyard last night, before the bombs started.’

Tommy glanced at him a little warily and took a sip of his beer. ‘Oh yes?’

‘I took Nora a few flowers out of the garden,’ Dan said. ‘Tulips and them others, I dunno what they’re called. She liked them. I wanted to put them on her grave.’

‘That’s good,’ Tommy said cautiously. ‘She’d be pleased you done that.’

‘There was already some flowers there,’ Dan said. ‘They didn’t look as if they’d been there long.’ He paused. ‘You’ve got some flowers like that in your garden.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Tommy said uncomfortably, ‘that’s because Freda give your Nora the plants, see. Took cuttings and give them her last year. She’ll be pleased to know they’ve come up and you took them to the grave.’

‘It was your Freda took them others, wasn’t it?’ Dan said. ‘I dare say she’s been going up there regular.’

‘Well – now and then, like … It’s not meant to be anything against you,’ Tommy said hastily. ‘Only we know how you’ve been placed, and Free was fond of your Nora, specially in the last few weeks … She didn’t mean nothing by it, Dan.’