Dead to Me Page 21

  Other countries weren’t having it so easy; there were some awful stories circulating about what the Nazis were doing to the Poles, and Denmark and Norway had been invaded at the start of April. Now Germany’s troops were smashing their way through the Low Countries with columns of massed tanks, motorized infantry and backed up by aerial bombing. Even the most optimistic people couldn’t fail to realize that it was actually possible that England could be invaded soon too.

  Chamberlain had resigned as Prime Minister and his place had been taken by Winston Churchill. It was thought he was the man to pull the country together in its adversity.

  Verity was still just as interested in world news, but since going to work for the Post Office she didn’t have much time to go off to the library and read all the papers. Now she had to rely on the wireless and the odd glance at a daily paper. Although she had been taken on as a telephonist, she was also being trained for outside maintenance and installation work. This had previously been men’s work, but with so many of them joining up, women had to be pressed into service. Young ones like Verity were nimble enough to shin up telegraph poles and didn’t mind heights.

  It was this new work which was making Verity happy. Each day was different, and she liked the challenges of the job and feeling she was doing something useful for the war effort. She even enjoyed donning her dungarees and tying a scarf around her hair to climb up telegraph poles. Back at Cooks nothing had been vital, or even important, and there was no social life with the job. The other staff had been friendly, but no one really met up after work or at weekends.

  It was quite different at the Post Office. In the main the other girls lived in or around Lewisham, and they wanted to socialize. Hardly a week went past without someone inviting her to their home, for a drink or to a dance.

  Amy was Verity’s new lodger. A twenty-year-old buxom brunette with a heart of gold, until she met Verity at the Post Office she had been staying in digs in New Cross. She had hated it there and missed her family in Southend badly. Verity had expected it to be hard to adjust to someone taking Miller’s place, but it hadn’t been. Amy was easy-going, enthusiastic and fun, they had a lot to talk and laugh about, and when they were working on the same shift it was so nice to have company on the way to work and coming home, especially when it was dark.

  But it was light and warm this evening, and Verity thought they could sit out in the garden with a fish and chip supper, the way she used to do with Miller.

  He wrote to her every week, always funny, interesting and affectionate letters. He was very happy in Scotland. The other foresters were a mixture of men too old for call-up, some who, like Miller, had been turned down because of a health problem, and some were ‘conchies’, men who for religious or moral reasons would not join up.

  Verity noticed from his letters that it was the ‘conchies’ who Miller appeared to get on best with. He said the old men tended to be bossy, far too keen on boasting about their abilities as young men. Those exempted on medical grounds were often very lazy and found fault with everything, but he admired the conchies’ commitment to their beliefs, and that they were cheerful and worked hard.

  ‘You go and sit in the garden,’ Amy said when they got home. ‘I’ll pop down the fish and chip shop to get the grub.’

  Verity put some knives and forks, the pepper, salt and vinegar on a tray and took it outside in readiness for Amy getting back. She sat down with a contented sigh, still thinking about Miller.

  He’d only come back to London once, and that was at Christmas. She’d only had one full day off to spend with him, but it was still wonderful.

  She understood now what people meant when they talked about ‘getting carried away’. If it hadn’t been for Amy in the house, Verity was pretty certain they would have spent that whole day in bed.

  She smiled as she remembered how they kept stealing kisses every time Amy’s back was turned. Each one sent Verity’s heart pounding.

  Amy had fallen asleep by the fire in the parlour after Christmas dinner, and Verity and Miller went into the kitchen intending to wash up. But instead she sat on his lap by the kitchen table for more kisses.

  ‘It’s so hard being away from you,’ Miller said, stroking her face with such tenderness. ‘I go to sleep thinking about you, and wake up with you still on my mind. Just having a few days like this with you isn’t enough, but what can we do?’

  ‘Everyone says the trains are terrible now, so very slow and crowded with servicemen,’ Verity said. ‘You mustn’t try it again until later in the year when the weather improves, it’s too difficult. Or maybe I could get a week’s holiday and come up there to see you?’

  ‘I could book a hotel room for Mr and Mrs Grantham?’ he suggested, and blushed scarlet. ‘I don’t mean to, well, you know, presume. I just want to hold you.’

  She almost told him she loved him then. He was wearing a ridiculous yellow and red spotted bow tie she’d made him for a joke present, and a paper hat from a cracker. He was looking at her with puppy dog eyes that made her feel they could be this happy together for the rest of their lives.

  But she didn’t say she loved him, or even that she’d risk booking into a hotel with him. He was her first boyfriend, and she was mindful that she had to be absolutely sure of him and her own feelings first. She longed to ask someone’s advice but the girls at work were all the kind who would laugh at such a question. Most of them had boyfriends they said they loved, who were away in the forces, but that didn’t make them all faithful. Even some of the married women with husbands away went dancing up the West End now and then. Verity found this very puzzling, she didn’t want to dance with or kiss other men, and although she went to dances with Amy sometimes, the girls always outnumbered the men, so they danced together.

  Besides, she felt a girl was supposed to let the man talk of love first. Miller might have said she was the girl of his dreams, that he fell asleep at night thinking of her, but that wasn’t the same thing as declaring his love. So until he did say that, Verity wouldn’t allow herself to dream of anything more than kissing him; she certainly wouldn’t hope for an engagement or marriage. She remembered how Ruby with all her experience of boys had allowed herself to be fooled into thinking she’d found the perfect man who would love and protect her for ever. And look what happened to her.

  Thinking of Ruby again brought Verity up sharp. She wondered if she was still in Devon with Wilby, and what she was doing. She also wondered if she ever regretted their falling out. Time and even Miller, or her new friend Amy, hadn’t erased the hurt and injustice of it for Verity. Yet right now, while she was feeling happy and contented, she could only really think about what they’d meant to one another before it all went wrong.

  She knew that if Ruby was to contact her, the hurt would be wiped out immediately. It was obvious Ruby had made that terrible statement in a moment of fear that she’d messed up her life for good and would lose Wilby’s love. It was understandable; Wilby was the first adult who’d ever cared about Ruby, she had in fact become a mother to her. But Verity hoped Ruby realized now that she’d cared just as much as Wilby, and it was she who had sat by her friend’s bedside afraid Ruby was going to die.

  The front door banged, disturbing Verity’s reverie, and Amy came out into the garden.

  ‘I almost opened the paper on the way home, I’m so hungry. But then I remembered you said it was common to eat in the street,’ Amy said as she put the two newspaper parcels down on the table.

  ‘Did I say that?’ Verity grinned. ‘I’m a fraud, then, as I’ve been known to eat fish and chips in the street occasionally. My headmistress used to rage about us eating while in school uniform. She once said, “There is nothing worse than a large girl licking a lolly.” We all used to mimic her.’

  ‘You are quite posh,’ Amy said thoughtfully after they’d been eating for a little while. ‘You always put the milk in a jug, I think that’s pretty grand.’

  ‘We’ve got more important things to think about
now than whether to put milk in a jug,’ Verity said, sprinkling a little more vinegar on her chips. ‘I caught a bit of the news today at lunchtime and it sounds bad. Our boys and the French army seem to be on the run from the Germans. They can’t retreat much further cos they are already right by the coast, near Dunkirk in France. They say ships will be sent to rescue them, but there are so many men.’

  Amy never read the newspapers or even listened to the news. She called Verity ‘Major News Reporter’, and relied on her for information.

  ‘I’m sure Mr Churchill will come up with a plan,’ she said, getting to her feet and screwing up the paper from the fish and chips in her hands. ‘And my plan is to go to bed now, I’m bushed.’

  ‘I’ll stay out here a little longer,’ Verity said. ‘Goodnight, sleep tight.’

  It was good to be alone in the garden as it got dark. Before the blackout there had always been some light, from windows and street lighting. But now, once it was pitch dark, the stars and moon seemed so much brighter and nearer. She could smell the honeysuckle and see the glint of white roses just coming into flower.

  Amy didn’t seem to understand the implications of the retreat from France. Sweet as she was, she was a bit dense, and actually imagined the English Channel as some impregnable moat which the Germans could never cross.

  She had been just as dense when their Morrison shelter had been dropped off. ‘They expect us to sleep in that?’ she said indignantly as Verity finished putting it together. ‘It’s just a cage with a table top!’

  ‘Yes, it is, but it’s reinforced steel, which makes it far safer than being in our beds during an air raid,’ Verity explained patiently. ‘We’ll put a mattress, pillows and blankets in it, and if the siren goes off we needn’t go to a public shelter.’

  The girls put the kitchen table out in the garden and covered it in oilcloth to prevent it getting ruined in the rain, and then they hung a tablecloth over the shelter. It was far bigger than the real table, but then it had to be so they could lie down. Amy took some persuading to try it out, but once she was in it claimed it felt like the camps she and her brothers had made in the woods when they were children.

  She was stubborn about learning how to use the stirrup pump too. ‘How do they think we can put a fire out with one bucket of water and that?’ she complained. ‘Surely it’s easier to chuck the whole bucketful at it?’

  ‘The idea is to aim at shrapnel and cool it down,’ Verity had to explain. ‘Apparently, shrapnel is little pieces of red-hot metal which come off a bomb, and if we don’t soak them with water they could start a fire.’

  A sudden knock at the front door startled Verity. But assuming it was the officious little man who strutted around the street at night checking no lights were showing at windows, she felt she must answer the door. She hadn’t drawn the curtains in her room this evening, and maybe Amy had switched on the light to look for something in there and forgotten about the blackout.

  ‘I’m sorry, is there –?’ she began as she opened the door, but stopped short when she saw who it was calling so late. ‘Father!’ she exclaimed, her legs turning to jelly with fright. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Forget the twenty questions,’ he said, barging his way past her. ‘I can’t stand on the doorstep breaching the blackout rules.’

  She felt faint with shock, and she couldn’t believe he had the cheek to come here. ‘You aren’t welcome here,’ she blurted out. ‘Please go now, there’s nothing I want to say to you.’

  ‘There’s plenty I need to say to you,’ he said. ‘Now shut that front door, put the kettle on and take that look off your face. I’m not a murderer but your father.’

  Verity had always thought of him as tall, with wide shoulders, but she didn’t remember him filling space the way he was now. Granted there wasn’t much room in the kitchen now with the Morrison shelter in the centre, but he took it all up. He didn’t look smart the way she remembered, either. His dark hair was long and untidy, with touches of grey, he hadn’t shaved, and his moustache was no longer trimmed and waxed. In a crumpled dark suit and a shirt with grubby collar and cuffs, he could have been sleeping rough.

  Yet it was his face that had changed the most. He’d always looked so suave and well cared for. But now his face was bloated, and there was a redness to it which wasn’t sunburn. Even his eyes were bloodshot, with bags beneath them. He made her think of the man who was always waiting outside the Tiger’s Head at Lee Green for it to open at lunchtime. He was a drunk, and she’d been told he was often found out cold on the pavement outside after closing time. She could smell drink on her father too, so perhaps that was why he looked the way he did.

  She put the kettle on, so nervous she had difficulty lighting the gas. ‘What do you want?’ she asked, quaking inside.

  ‘Want?’ he repeated, his voice suddenly very loud and harsh. ‘Is it a crime for a man to wish to see his daughter?’

  ‘It was a crime that made you run away,’ she said more boldly than she felt. ‘And you half killed me before you left. Mother and I had a terrible time, forced to come here cap in hand to Aunt Hazel. So I ask you why you would imagine I’d want to see you?’

  He took a couple of steps towards her. Thinking he was going to strike her, she flinched and backed away.

  ‘Don’t flinch from me, I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said, holding out his hands towards her. ‘Hear me out! You can have no idea of the forces that brought me to that point,’ he said. ‘Your mother was a spendthrift, I was under terrible strain. I’m not that person any more. I want to make it up to you.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that. But whatever kind of person you are now, I still don’t want you near me,’ she said defiantly. She pointed angrily at the oven. ‘Mother put her head in that because of you. Aunt Hazel might not have had a heart attack and died, if she hadn’t been put under so much strain. As for me, I had to deal with girls at school whispering about you, the police calling here all the time, and the stigma of having a swindler for a father.’

  ‘Cynthia gassed herself?’

  ‘Yes, she did, and I bet you knew that already. And that Aunt Hazel died, or you wouldn’t have come.’

  He didn’t answer immediately, just looked at her with a slightly hangdog expression.

  ‘You think that little of me?’ he said eventually.

  ‘I think nothing of you,’ she snapped back. ‘So get out now.’

  ‘Oh, Verity,’ he said, his voice suddenly very soft. ‘I am sorry I hurt you this badly. Let me make amends now and help you. It must be lonely living here all alone.’

  His sympathetic tone affected her momentarily, but she reminded herself of what he was. ‘I don’t live alone,’ she glowered at him. ‘I have a friend as a lodger, and I have a boyfriend too. I don’t need you or want you in my life, so get out now or I will telephone the police and tell them you’re here.’

  ‘You can, if you like,’ he shrugged. ‘They aren’t looking for me any more, I sorted it all out before I went off to South Africa. If I look a bit rough, it’s just because I came rushing back to see if you were alright now the war seems to be heating up.’

  She was just going to tell him that made no difference to her feelings for him, and she didn’t believe him anyway, when Amy came down the stairs in her dressing gown, looking curiously at him.

  ‘This is Archie Wood, my father,’ Verity said. ‘He’s just leaving, aren’t you?’

  Dense as always, and not picking up on a strained atmosphere, Amy smiled and held out her hand to him. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘Verity and I work together, but it’s late to leave now. I could go in with Verity, and you could have my bed.’

  Verity gritted her teeth. ‘Amy! I just said he’s leaving.’

  ‘I’m glad my daughter has friends with good manners,’ Archie smiled. ‘Verity promised me a cup of tea which hasn’t transpired yet, and as it happens I think I’ve missed the last train too.’

  ‘Then I’ll make you t
he tea,’ Amy said, going over to the kettle which was just coming to the boil. ‘When I heard the door, then raised voices, I was afraid it was that warden again. He’s told us off many times for not closing the curtains properly.’

  Verity knew she’d lost this battle. Amy didn’t know what her father had done, and this wasn’t the time to spill family secrets.

  She’d just have to go along with it and let him stay till the morning.

  Half an hour later, Verity and Amy were lying side by side in bed with the light out.

  ‘You never told me anything about your dad,’ Amy whispered. ‘Why not? He seems so nice.’

  ‘He’s not, he’s a real snake,’ Verity whispered back. ‘And thanks to you he’s got a foot in the door. So you are going to help me boot him out tomorrow before we go to work, understood?’

  ‘Okay,’ Amy muttered. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Amy fell asleep almost immediately, her breathing deep and steady, but Verity lay awake rigid with tension. However much he might deny it, she sensed that the only reason he’d come here was because he’d fallen on hard times and had nowhere else to go. That would make it hard to get rid of him.

  Was he speaking the truth about the police no longer looking for him?

  It was true they hadn’t come round here to check up for a very long time now, not since Aunt Hazel died, and they had said they thought he was in South Africa. So perhaps he had sorted it all out, or even had a spell in prison. Yet even if he had been punished for his crime, he still didn’t deserve any loyalty or sympathy from her.

  Ninety-nine per cent of her brain was telling her he was bad news, that he might hurt her again, but the remaining one per cent was telling her to give him a chance, that he was the only family she had left, and maybe it was her mother’s greed and idleness that had caused him to go wrong.

  She barely slept and shortly after six o’clock she got up, tired of tossing and turning. After washing and dressing very quietly, she slunk downstairs and took a cup of tea into the back garden to drink it.