A Mother's Journey

by June Hampson

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

A mother's love knows no bounds... Gosport, 1941. Fourteen-year-old Vera has led a sheltered life with her overbearing, religious mother and older sister. But her world is turned upside down with the arrival of the Lovell family on her street. Vera quickly befriends the daughter, Angela, an impulsive, worldly young woman who opens Vera's eyes to what she has been missing. But Vera, unaware of the effect she has on men, invites the unwanted attention of Angela's father, with devastating consequences. Outraged at the news that her teenage daughter is pregnant, Vera's mother sends her to a home for wayward girls. After giving birth to a baby boy, Vera manages to escape the brutality of the institution, only to end up homeless. Alone and struggling to make ends meet, Vera is determined to give her son a better life - at any cost. But just as their fortunes seem to change for the better, everything Vera has worked for is threatened...

Release date: March 1, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 331

Sample

Prologue

1962

‘There’s a bloke gonna come in any minute an’ I ain’t in Gosport an’ you don’t know me, Bert, got it?’

‘You, the top prossie in Gosport, don’t want to see a bloke?’

Bert was frying bacon at the gas stove, forking it over so it cooked evenly. He stopped smiling when Vera desperately cut in with, ‘Please, Bert. I’m not here!’

Vera didn’t dare stay any longer in the near-deserted caff. She flew back up the wooden stairs to her room at the top of the lodging house adjoining the caff and peeked out of the window.

She shivered violently as the man’s broad-shouldered body strode purposefully along the brightly lit pavement towards the caff.

It was obvious he’d come from the ferry. Suppose she’d been on her regular pitch there near the taxi rank? Suppose he’d seen her?

She dropped the net curtain back in place and looked down at the floor.

Her mackerel-coloured cat wound himself in a figure of eight around her feet encased in high-heeled mules. His fur was softer than the slippers’ marabou trim.

‘If I ’adn’t let you in, Kibbles, an’ looked out the window, I’d never ’ave spotted ’im.’ Despite her soft words her heart was hammering. She tried to put the man out of her mind and concentrate on the cat she loved fiercely.

She bent down and picked up the weighty feline, who immediately began filling the room with his throaty purr.

‘That man ruined my life. And I hoped I’d never see ’im again,’ she whispered.

Yet her first thought had been to go down and give him a mouthful, scratch his eyes out maybe. She was after all a Gosport girl and Gosport girls don’t take wrongs lightly. But Bert wouldn’t thank her for causing a ruckus in his caff and she wasn’t going to brawl in the street like some common tart.

Her heart still hadn’t stopped its fluttering and she realised she was too upset to behave rationally. She needed time to think.

Still carrying the cat she walked to the wooden draining board and set Kibbles down in front of a saucer filled to the brim with sardines. Another saucer held his milk. He began to eat as she watched him.

This room was her refuge.

At the top of the building, it looked down to North Street and along North Cross Street and over Murphy’s hardware shop where you could buy anything from a nail to a rose bush. Then the view swept across to the ferry pontoon where squat boats transferred passengers across the strip of murky, smelly Solent water to Portsmouth.

Vera took a deep breath in an attempt to calm her nerves.

She was trying hard not to think of Alfred below in the caff quite possibly interrogating Bert. She didn’t want to think about what had happened that fateful day of the party but it all came back to her as vividly as if it was happening now.

Vera’s skirt was pushed up. She couldn’t move. His bulk had her pinned to the scullery floor and she could feel the strange slippery heat of him. Grunting sounds came from him as he fumbled and tore one handed at her clothes. She was on the floor inches away from the grease-stained gas oven, its smell of years of burned fat sickening her. She wanted to scream but his other hand now completely covered her mouth. And then he pushed into her and was moving inside her and it hurt.

She had been only fourteen.

Now she was thirty-five and Alfred Lovell, the man who’d caused so much pain in her life and who she’d never thought she’d see again, was downstairs.

What had brought him back to Gosport?

The only way to find out was to go down and listen.

She kicked off her hard-soled mules and opened her door. She stepped out and began creeping past the other rented rooms and back down the stairs.

Crouching on a step where she was sure she couldn’t be seen, Vera hugged her nylon-clad knees close to her body. She prayed no one would need to use the lavatory and chance upon her sitting there and call out to her by name.

Even from the stairway she was aware of his almost forgotten spicy aftershave wafting up towards her.

Her body clenched as she heard his voice.

‘I need to talk to Vera.’

Vera leaned forward and could just make out those broad shoulders, the strong neck and the glossy dark moustache, now threaded with grey, above full lips. His suntan only added to his good looks.

His piercing blue eyes were searching Bert’s face for answers. Bert was wiping plates, making each dish glitter with cleanliness.

Silently she willed Bert to tell Alfred nothing.

‘She’s not ’ere tonight.’ Bless you, Bert, she thought.

‘Later on? Will she return later?’

Bert moved an overflowing glass ashtray to the other side of the Formica table. It was a studied movement, like he was thinking hard.

Vera counted just three customers. It was well past twelve and, even though the summer evening had been warm, Gosport had closed down for the night.

‘Dunno.’ Bert now began the laborious business of rolling up his shirt sleeves. ‘What d’you want to know for? An’ what’s your name?’

‘Alfred Lovell.’ The man shifted his bulk from one foot to the other. Vera could sense his impatience. She remembered he had always been like that, irritated when things didn’t go his way.

‘Does she live here?’ He tapped one foot on the wooden floor. ‘If not, give me her address. I’ve heard you and she are pals.’

‘Do I look like I come up the Solent in a bucket? If I am her pal I can’t just give out her details, can I? That’s supposing I knows ’em.’ Bert hooked his thumbs into his braces and met Alfred’s glare unblinkingly.

‘I’ve come halfway around the world to see Vera, from Australia, to be exact. Not seen her for years, see? Though that’s between me and her and has nothing to do with you.’

‘That’s as may be. Or you might just be stringing me a line, an’ I do like to look out for our Vera. Very well thought of is our Vera. I’d be a mug to take you at your word, wouldn’t I? Anyway, she’s not ’ere.’

Vera held her breath as Alfred leaned closer to Bert. What if Alfred turned nasty? After all, he’d hurt her, hadn’t he?

But he pulled back and Vera breathed a silent sigh of relief.

It wasn’t that Bert couldn’t take care of himself. He’d been a bit of a gangster in his former days so was well used to dealing with slippery customers. But the younger man had the advantage of physical fitness.

‘Tell you what, mate. Why don’t you jot your address down ’ere?’ Bert fished in his greasy white apron pocket and pulled out a small stained notebook. He slid it along the table. Attached to the spiral binder by a piece of grubby string was a stub of pencil.

Alfred Lovell wrote on the pad and passed it back to Bert. Vera could still feel the tension in the air.

‘If I don’t hear from her in a week, I’ll be back.’

And then his voice went quiet so Vera had to strain her ears to listen. ‘When you see her, tell her Jen’s dead.’

Vera heard the main door’s bell chime its tinny sound as he made his way out.

Still Vera crouched there. So his wife, Jennifer, was dead was she? Alfred Lovell had lost his meal ticket. Vera, frightened the man might return, was too scared to move.

But he’d gone. The man who was constantly in her dreams and caused her to wake up crying and sweating had left.

Vera measured every man by Alfred Lovell and once more he was back in her life.

She held on to the banister and shakily pulled herself into an upright position. A cloud of her favourite perfume, Californian Poppy, rose with her and she breathed it deeply as though its scent could comfort her.

When she reached the bottom stair she fluffed up the ruffles on her red silk blouse and ran her fingers around the wide black plastic belt at the waist of her tight black skirt.

‘He’s left then?’

Bert was sitting at the table. He looked up at her voice. He’d lit a Woodbine and was scrutinising the address on the piece of paper. A fug of cigarette smoke hung around him.

‘You’re shivering,’ he said. ‘You ain’t in command of yourself, are you?’ Vera shook her head. Bert had done his best always to look out for her. He was a true friend in every way. Sometimes he knew her better than she knew herself.

‘He’s gone out the door but not out of your life.’ Bert held out the paper with the address and Vera took it from him as though it was contaminated.

‘Thank you for lying for me,’ she said quietly.

‘I didn’t so much lie as bend the truth. I could tell by the cut of his clothes and his suntan that he wasn’t a john. Anyway, you ain’t never brought a john back to the caff in all the time you’ve lived here. Couldn’t for the life of me see you starting now.’ He took a deep pull on his cigarette then stubbed it out in the ashtray. ‘Gosport’s favourite prostitute you might be but when I sensed you hiding at the top of the stairs …’

‘Do you think he knew I was there?’ Vera asked worriedly.

‘No.’

She sat down at the table. The caff was empty now. Bert got up and went over to the main door and slid the bolt along and turned the sign to closed.

‘I’ll clear up in the mornin’.’ He walked to the now silent jukebox and pulled out its electric plug. ‘Let’s get out of this goldfish bowl,’ Bert said with a wave towards the glass windows. ‘Never know who’s outside looking in.’

He turned off the lights so there was only the thin gleam from the streetlamp illuminating the stairs.

He held open the door from the caff that led into the hallway.

‘Who’s this Jen what’s dead now? And what does this bloke mean to you? You want to talk about it, Vera?’

Vera stood up and felt the tears rise with her. She knew she was tough, and she’d held her secrets close all these years. But she so badly needed to confide in someone.

Using the back of her hand she wiped away tears as she went out into the hall.

In the big kitchen he pulled out a chair and Vera sat down. She watched him light the gas. The flames leaped up red and orange and blue until Bert finished filling the kettle and set it down, flattening them.

He pulled out a chair next to her and took one of her hands in his.

‘Come on, love, no arguments. I’ll make a cuppa an’ you can tell me all about it.’

Chapter 1

1941

‘If your ol’ man didn’t pour it down ’is throat so much in the Alma your mum’d be able to afford a sofa like that.’ One look at Tim’s stricken face told Vera she’d put her foot in it again. Why didn’t she think before she opened her big mouth? She felt for his hand which stuck out of his short dirty jumper sleeve. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ He looked down at her and smiled, but Vera could tell by the sadness in his eyes that her words had hurt him. He was a head taller than she was. She’d hardly grown an inch since the war started, so Vera decided that, at fourteen, five foot three inches was all she was ever going to be. Tim was the same age but his height and lanky frame made him look much older. He always had a book of some sort crammed into his back pocket. Today it was Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler.

He had his gas mask in a cardboard box slung over one shoulder. Vera had already thrown her gas mask in the hallway. She hated carrying it everywhere like they were supposed to do. The mask smelled of the same stuff the dentist put over her face to make her go to sleep to have a tooth extracted.

Tim waved a hand towards a cart and horse and the two brawny blokes unloading.

‘Bet whoever that lot belongs to was bombed out, like we was, Vera. Gosport’s gettin’ it bad now. The armament depot down Weevil Lane, the submarine base at Haslar and of course Portsmouth and the warships means we don’t stand a chance.’

‘Well, we must think we stand some chance of survival else we’d be billeted out in the country, wouldn’t we? We’d be evacuees.’

‘I wish we could have been evacuated. But I refused when I found out it was only us kids. I wasn’t goin’ to leave my mum alone with that devil.’ His hand slipped from her palm and fell to his side. Vera knew that too many hidings from his father had robbed him of his confidence. Sometimes at nights he and his mum walked the streets waiting for his dad to calm down after a day’s propping up the bar.

Vera tried to change the subject. ‘They got good stuff, ain’t they?’ She grinned at Tim, who was eyeing the two moquette armchairs now being carried from the cart and into number fifteen, right opposite Vera’s house. He brushed his overlong blond hair back from his forehead and it promptly fell back again.

Vera put her hands on her hips, hips that she’d suddenly acquired along with a very full bust. Sometimes as she walked along Gosport High Street she quite liked the attention of the boys and their wolf whistles but other times she felt shy and wanted to hide and wished she was flat-chested like most of her school friends.

‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ blared out from the passage of Vera’s house. Tim raised an eyebrow.

‘Our Patsy’s home early from work,’ Vera explained. ‘She likes that song. Reckons she’s goin’ to Paris one day.’

‘She’ll ’ave to turn the wireless off when your mum gets back from church.’

‘Not Patsy. She’s eighteen now an’ my mum don’t go on at her so much now she’s earning. We needs her wages. Patsy got the wireless off one of her boyfriends. She likes the BBC Forces Programme. All the same I’ll warn her when Mum comes so she can turn it down.’

Vera glanced up at Tim. She liked him best of all the boys in the street and he was the only one she confided in about her mum’s strictness.

Vera shivered in the early evening chill. Soon it would be dark. Tim said he never felt the cold, despite not having a coat. It was well known down the street that his mother sold their clothing coupons because she needed money more than clothes. Vera didn’t care how he was dressed, she just liked being with him.

Tim Saunders and his family had arrived in the street a year ago. They’d been bombed out of their house in Bedford Street and, Tim had told her, it was a stroke of luck they hadn’t perished. He and his mum had gone to the Criterion Picture House to see Fantasia. His dad had been drinking in the Barley Mow.

The previous night his mum had gone through his dad’s trouser pockets when he was snoring in bed and extracted as much money as she’d dared without him becoming suspicious when he woke. If she hadn’t they’d never have gone to the pictures.

Tim said he’d always think of the Walt Disney picture as his favourite film.

All along the street, women in flowered wraparound pinafores were standing gossiping at their doorsteps. The hum of voices floated on the air. The neighbours’ steps were either cardinal red or whitened to a snowy brightness. Vera marvelled that even after a raid and all the dust that floated through the air the steps were the first thing to show signs of normality again.

The women’s eyes never left the cart and its ever decreasing pile of furniture.

‘Done your homework?’ Tim asked.

Vera knew Tim always did his homework at school because once, in a fit of temper, his dad had torn up his exercise books.

‘Don’t ’ave any tonight.’ She glanced up at Tim. ‘Do you like being at the Grammar?’ she asked suddenly.

She was surprised when he answered, ‘Yes. It’s all right.’

It wasn’t really a mixed school, for the girls didn’t have many lessons with the boys. Only French and geography. And at break times she spied Tim alone, reading. He was always alone.

‘What you want to do when you leave?’ Vera asked.

His face became gloomy but there was a far-away look in his eyes. ‘I want to travel. Maybe write about foreign countries.’ He sighed. ‘Not a hope. I’m not staying on at school. Someone’s got to bring in some money.’ He smiled at her. ‘What about you?’

‘I want to be me own boss. I don’t want to be answerable to anyone. I don’t ever want to eat Spam again as long as I live!’

Tim laughed, then said, ‘Vera, that’s a tall order. Wouldn’t it be better to get married an’ let your husband earn the wages?’

‘What like my dad and like your dad?’

Tim was silent.

‘We ’ave got the vote, you know. Women can do what they like. We’re working on farms, in factories, drivin’ lorries, in the forces. Showin’ the world that women can do jobs same as blokes.’

‘You’ll definitely ’ave to stay on at school to change the world, Vera.’

‘This war is already doin’ that but I do want to go on to university. Though I can’t expect my mum and Patsy to go on working to keep me.’

‘Your mum’s just come round the corner.’

Vera’s heart missed a beat.

‘Patsy! Mum’s comin’!’ Vera immediately heard the music lowered to a more sedate level.

The endless backwards and forwards of the men unloading was forgotten as Vera watched her mother stride along the pavement. Small and slight, her black raincoat tightly belted, she was, as usual, in a world of her own. Vera knew she would smell of carbolic soap. She would be wearing no jewellery or make-up and she wouldn’t smile at her neighbours. Her plain black low-heeled court shoes, freshly mended with Blakeys’ heel tips, could now be heard. A few wisps escaped from the tight knot of hair pinned back from her face.

The other children ran to meet their parents if they spotted them walking up the street. Not Vera. She had been chastised too many times for ‘making a show’. Vera could see the usual Woodbine cigarette tightly clamped in her mouth.

‘Hello, Mum.’ Vera let her smile drop for her mother wasn’t looking at her.

‘I want you in in five minutes for your tea.’ Her mother’s voice was throaty due to all the fags. Vera hoped she wouldn’t have a cigarette dangling on her lip when she put the final touches to the evening meal. Vera got fed up with picking bits of grey ash out of the food.

Vera’s mother was totally ignoring the movement across the road. She wouldn’t lower herself to stare out of her own doorway but later Vera knew she’d want every single detail.

‘I’ve peeled the potatoes. What’s for tea?’ Vera suddenly realised she was hungry.

‘Spam and spuds.’

Vera’s mum had crossed the step into the open doorway.

‘You know I don’t like Spam,’ Vera protested. ‘Why can’t we have chops?’

‘I have to queue for them, and one tiny chop each is sometimes all I can get hold of. Anyway, you eat meat too quickly. You could at least taste it before you swallow it whole. If you realised four ounces of butter, one of cheese and an egg is all you’re allowed per week you wouldn’t moan about the food so much that God provides.’

‘But you always buy that awful tinned meat stuff an’ I hate it.’

The hand was so quick that Vera never saw it coming but the sting around her cheek and ear made her head swim.

‘There’s a war on. Think yourself lucky you got something to eat! There’s plenty of people who are starving. The good Lord provides food and you dare to say you don’t like it? I spend my life on my knees cleaning other people’s houses so I can keep you and your ungrateful sister! Get to bed!’

‘But, Mrs—’ Tim had moved quickly towards Vera but her mother was faster and, pushing him aside with her other hand, dragged Vera inside. The front door slammed. The key, hanging from the letterbox, on its string, jangled noisily against the wood.

Patsy’s white face was staring out from behind the living-room door.

Vera ran up the thirteen narrow uncarpeted steps to her bedroom.

‘How many times have I told you not to hang around with that drunk’s spawn?’ her mother shouted up at her.

Vera pulled her bedroom door closed behind her. She was shaking. Once again opening her big mouth had got her into trouble. She crawled on to the bed and covered herself with the feather quilt.

She lay there until she’d stopped shivering and felt calm enough to get out of bed.

Her room was at the back of the house and the window looked across the narrow gardens. Vera pulled back the net curtain and stared beyond the flat roof of the scullery to the lavatory at the bottom of their yard.

She needed to pee but didn’t want to risk coming into contact with her mother, who might not have calmed down yet.

Vera didn’t like the lavatory. Not even in the daytime. Spiders as big as her fists lurked there.

Patsy had threaded newspaper on a string for the three of them to wipe themselves with. Vera wasn’t keen on the Daily Mirror as it left black print on her skin. She vowed when she grew up she’d have nothing but Izal paper in her lavatory, and no spiders.

Her bedroom was the only place she felt really safe. There was a double iron bedstead, a chest of drawers facing the bed with a brown oval-framed mirror perched on top, a green-painted trunk in the corner on the floor and her gramophone on a chair near the bed.

Not that she had many records as the gramophone was a present from Patsy. Some bloke had given it to her and Patsy didn’t refuse it, knowing Vera would like it. Patsy had a Decca wind-up gramophone that was much nicer. Another man had given her that. Patsy was always coming home with gifts from men she knew. Vera’s record collection comprised ‘Because of You’ and ‘I Hear Music’. Patsy had loads of records and as long as Vera asked first she let her borrow them.

There was a cross on Vera’s wall above the bed, and a large picture in a gilt frame of Mary holding the baby Jesus nailed opposite the bed.

Vera had stopped going to the cold Catholic church with her mother, who realised it was better to leave her daughter at home than drag her protesting down the road with all the neighbours gawping. Vera contented herself with the assembly that was held in school in the mornings and the prayers and hymns that were sung there.

Of course she believed in God and Jesus. Didn’t she pray every night for God to keep her and her loved ones safe during this awful war? At any time one of Hitler’s planes could send them to kingdom come.

But Vera was fed up with her mother ramming her beliefs down her throat. Quoting the bible was all right if you lived your life the way Jesus said you should. Calling Tim a drunk’s spawn wasn’t Godly, neither was smacking kids about, especially when it was Vera who was on the receiving end of the slaps.

Vera heard footsteps.

‘Can I come in?’ a voice asked. Vera went to the door and opened it and Patsy stepped inside.

She was as blonde as Vera was dark. Vera reckoned she looked just like June Haver the film star.

‘I’m just off out. Going to a dance at the Co-op Hall in Queen’s Road.’

Her eyes were sparkling and had Vaseline on their lids to make them glisten. Patsy got asked to loads of dances.

‘I like your suit.’

Patsy had on a green silk two-piece with a peplum at the back. And not for her a pencil line up the back of her legs: Patsy wore real nylons.

‘I’ve left you some tea on the top of the stove. If you stay up here a bit longer you’ll have the house to yourself.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Mum’s going back to the church to do the flowers as there’s a christening tomorrow. I swear Father Michael sees more of her than we do.’

Vera gave a small smile. Her mother rarely entered Vera’s bedroom, not even to change the bedding. Long ago, when Vera was eleven, she’d realised if she didn’t wash out her own clothes they wouldn’t get washed. Yet her mother took great pride in washing the delicate lace altar cloths from St John’s Church where she spent most of her time when she wasn’t working.

‘She’ll be seeing to the flowers brought to her by the congregation from their gardens and allotments. No one can arrange flowers like Mum.’ Patsy giggled and Vera began to feel better.

‘What’ll she do when all what’s growing in the allotments and gardens is vegetables? Ain’t we supposed to be “Digging For Victory”?’

‘Mum’ll make arrangements out of cabbages an’ onions, Vera. Come here an’ let me see your face.’

Vera went over and stood in front of the speckled, oval mirror. Patsy gently touched the finger marks on Vera’s cheek.

‘She don’t mean it, you know.’ Ever the peacemaker was Patsy.

‘What’s that . . .