Though the small terraced house in Queen Street was half-collapsed, with bricks and broken furniture spewing onto the pavement, it was impossibly hard for Betty Mitchell to say farewell. Her hopes and dreams, she thought, as she gaped at her bombed-out home one last time, had literally been reduced to rubble. The house that she’d once loved now resembled a doll’s house that had been ripped in half and stamped on. The upstairs bedroom was half-intact, the marital bed upended at a hair-raising angle against a backdrop of floral wallpaper. Broken fragments of her wedding gift teapot and crockery lay in the dust. The smell of burning lingered, and if she closed her eyes for a second, the backs of her eyelids filled with flames. After months of standing like this, abandoned and precarious, the house would soon be demolished. All traces of her life would be eradicated, which was – Betty had bravely convinced herself – for the best.
‘This is all your fault, Robert Mitchell,’ she muttered to nobody, lifting her moist eyes to the sky, which bulged with rainclouds. Thinking about what she’d secretly discovered about her husband, Robert, after their house had been bombed by the Luftwaffe months earlier, she was resigned to the fact that she had no choice but to disappear. Gulping back tears at the memory of the sight, which had felt like a knife through the heart, she swallowed hard and wrapped her arms round her narrow waist. Despite being tiny, at just under five feet tall and as thin as a reed, she was going to have to be stronger than she had ever been. Her life in Bristol was over. She was going to wipe the slate clean and start again, in a new town where nobody knew her name. In the chaos of wartime, with swathes of the population evacuated out of cities to safer areas in the countryside or on the coast, she would have to erase all memory of her former life as if it was a spelling mistake in a school exercise book.
She blinked away the tears in her grey eyes and tucked her long honey-blonde hair behind her ears with trembling hands, then stared in horror as a large brown rat scuttled into a mangled bread bin in the pile of bricks before her. She pushed her toe into a pile of gravel.
‘More rats than people round here now,’ piped up Frankie, one of her neighbours, who, in among the debris of her own house, was erecting a sign appealing for scrap metal for munitions, in aid of the Red Cross.
‘Are you not working today?’ she went on. ‘Haven’t seen that husband of yours in a while. At the docks, is he?’
Betty smiled sadly and smoothed down her blue day dress that had been patched and darned more times than she cared to admit. At breakfast that morning her pale complexion had burned scarlet when she’d told Robert and his great-uncle, with whom they were staying, that she was working a long shift at the tobacco factory and wouldn’t be back until late. She’d expected Robert to look up from his porridge, slam his rough hand on the kitchen table, look into her eyes and accuse her of lying, but he simply stirred more than his fair share of sweetened condensed milk into his tea and nodded. In truth, of course, Betty hadn’t gone into the factory at all, but had instead sent a scrawled handwritten note to her superior to say she was unwell with a high fever.
‘I’m not due in today,’ she lied to Frankie, before shrugging. ‘And Robert is… well, he’s an essential worker, isn’t he? All the dockers are part of a scheme where they’ll go wherever their labour is needed, so I don’t know where he’ll be from one day to the next.’ Registering the irony of her own words, Betty tried to keep the emotion from her voice, before sighing. ‘Let’s just say he’s keeping busy,’ she finished with a shrug.
‘Course he is,’ said Frankie. ‘Everyone’s busy with the business of just surviving. Every day I come back here, and more bits and bobs have been looted, and nobody’s doing a thing about it! It’s as if all the rules have been turned on their head since this war started, ain’t it, lovey?’
Betty nodded, taking one last glance at her old house, now a flattened dream, and said goodbye before Frankie could ask any more questions.
She walked briskly towards Stapleton Road railway station with a pounding heart and one word on her lips: Bournemouth. She’d been there on a seaside trip once as a child, with the orphanage, and remembered how the sea had glittered like an open jewellery box and the ice cream had melted in the sun faster than she could lick. It would be as good a place as any.
She had been unable to bring luggage with her and had only a liver-paste sandwich, a pair of sharp sewing scissors, one change of clothes, her identity card, gas mask case and Robert’s life savings stuffed into her small bag. There was enough money to get her a train ticket to Bournemouth and pay rent for new digs for a month or two. Course, she’d need a job, but she was a hard worker and would quickly prove herself wherever help was needed.
Approaching the impressive station building, Betty passed row upon row of houses that, like her own home, had been destroyed by heavy bombing. She stared in surprise at an old man who was boiling up soup on an open fire. Of course, she thought, the gas mains have been destroyed. He gave her a cheerful wave and she waved back.
‘Luck be with you,’ she whispered. The people of Bristol were undeniably ingenious and resilient but lives everywhere had been turned upside down and shaken about. It was as if they were all living inside a broken snow globe. Frankie was right: the rules had changed. You only had to think about the moon to realise that. Before the war Betty had adored the romance of moonlit nights in the city, but during the Blitz she had come to dread moonlight because the moon’s reflection on the River Avon gave the Luftwaffe a guide to the heart of Bristol, like traitorous torchlight. Night after night she’d prayed for cloud and rain, a cloak of darkness to hide under. And of course, before the war, Betty had believed Robert was a fine, upstanding, dependable husband whose heart was as strong and capable of love as his hands were of hard physical labour. A husband she could trust with her whole self, and who cherished her as he’d so passionately proclaimed on their wedding day. How bitterly wrong she had been. Well, she thought as she arrived at the railway station platform, where girls were waving their handkerchiefs to their sweethearts through a veil of steam, now it was her turn to break the rules.
Blinking in amazement as a small loaf flew across the bakery, skimming the noses of a queue of astonished customers, Audrey Barton didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Britain was in the midst of the third year of a seemingly never-ending war with Germany, but this morning Barton’s bakery shop was a battleground. Blushing at some of the ripe language erupting from the customers’ mouths as the bread landed with a thud on the black and white tiled floor, Audrey tucked her hair into her bakery cap, then rested her hand on the swell of her pregnant stomach as she eased herself out from behind the wooden shop counter.
‘Ladies!’ she said, stamping her wooden clog on the floor, before raising flat palms in the air. ‘Please, calm yourselves.’
‘You won’t catch me eating that grey muck!’ Flo, one of Audrey’s regular customers, said, dusting off her hands, after throwing the bread. ‘Why, after all the years I’ve been coming here, are you selling bread that tastes like sawdust? If your Charlie were here, he wouldn’t allow you to use that black flour!’
Audrey sighed at the mention of her darling husband Charlie, who was away fighting overseas. She missed him dearly and painfully. Keeping the bakery going in his absence had been a challenge and wasn’t getting easier, especially now she was heavily pregnant. She winced as the baby growing in her belly elbowed her in the ribs, as if to say: ‘That woman needs a flea in her ear! Tell her what for!’ Audrey sighed. Flo was objecting to the government’s introduction of the National Loaf – a 14oz loaf of bread made with wheatmeal flour with the bran left in – which, thanks to significant British shipping losses, bakers nationwide were now obliged to bake instead of the usual selection of white loaves.
‘Even the Royal Family have to eat the National Loaf,’ soothed Audrey. ‘And even if he was here, Charlie wouldn’t be able to change the regulations. We don’t have any choice. Sliced white bread is illegal now except under special licence. The local bread officers regularly inspect us to make sure we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. Would you rather see me behind bars?’
Audrey knelt to retrieve the loaf from the floor. Wasting food was now a punishable offence – just last week a Bournemouth woman had been fined £3 for wasting a whole fresh loaf – so the Barton household would have this loaf for tea, spread thinly with creamed margarine and home-made jam.
‘Rate we’re going, we’ll be surviving on peas and porridge come winter,’ Flo said. ‘Mark my words.’
‘There are sacrifices one has to make in wartime, Flo, and this is one of them,’ said Elizabeth, another bakery customer. ‘If you’re that desperate, why don’t you sieve the wheatmeal flour through your nylon stockings and bake your own white bread?’
Several women in the queue laughed, while Flo remained indignant.
‘Mind you, who’s got nylon stockings to spare these days?’ continued Elizabeth. ‘I’ve been making do with gravy browning on my legs in place of nylons for months. I’m beginning to feel more like a brisket of beef than a woman!’
The women in the queue cracked up laughing again, but Elizabeth held her finger to her lips, lowered her voice and pointed outside to where a group of smart and dashing American soldiers, newly billeted in the town, stood in the sunshine in Fisherman’s Road, smoking Camel cigarettes. Two of them held either end of a long rope stretched across the width of the road. With smiles on their faces they swung the rope round and round, so that no fewer than eight of the local children could skip, all the while chanting: ‘Got any gum, chum?’ before exploding into giggles.
‘You know where you could get some new nylons from though, don’t you, Flo?’ Elizabeth whispered, her eyes on a gaggle of young women in the street who stood close to the American GIs, trying to attract their attention. Audrey sighed again. Though the American soldiers were already a popular addition to the town, for being fun, rich and for handing out chewing gum, candy, Coca-Cola and nylons to girls, some young women were dropping at their feet to such an extent they were already getting a name for themselves as ‘Yankee bags’. Audrey didn’t blame those young women for wanting to attend their parties and have some fun during the bleak wartime evenings, but she suspected some would throw caution to the wind and regret it later. War was like that – it made people live like there might not be a tomorrow. Her stepsister Lily’s illegitimate child was testament to that.
‘What do you reckon, Flo?’ persisted Elizabeth. ‘Shall I ask one of those boys for you?’
‘I’m not putting up with this whiffle-whaffle a moment longer,’ Flo said. ‘I don’t want free nylons. I want a white oven-bottom loaf, with a beautiful golden crust, that’s soft and light to the touch. A loaf that smells so good and is so warm still that you can’t resist pulling at it as you walk home, so it looks like a squirrel’s been at it! You know what I mean, Audrey. The lovely bread you’ve baked for years that’s so good you don’t even need butter on it. I want my usual loaf and I won’t leave until I get one!’
With that Flo sat down heavily on the wooden chair Audrey kept in the shop for the older ladies to rest their legs, folding her arms across her chest. Audrey rested her hand on Flo’s shoulder.
‘What’s really the matter?’ said Audrey. ‘I know this can’t be about the bread. We’ll have white again one day. Is it your sons? Have you heard from them?’
Flo shook her bowed head and fat tears dripped down her cheeks. Her twin boys were in the Royal Navy and last time Audrey had asked, she hadn’t heard from them in months. Just like all the women in the queue whose lives were touched in some way by the war, it was sometimes too difficult to ‘keep calm and carry on’ as the Prime Minister Winston Churchill repeatedly ordered on the wireless.
‘Not a word,’ said Flo quietly. ‘Every time I see the messenger boy delivering telegrams round our way I’m convinced it’ll be me next. I’m beginning to fear that they’re in one of those filthy prisoner-of-war camps, or that they’re badly injured in a field hospital or that nobody has noticed that they’re…’
Audrey’s stomach turned over as Flo swallowed and left her unfinished sentence hanging in the air. Though some women heard from their menfolk every week, others rarely got word and Audrey herself hadn’t heard from Charlie, who was somewhere in the Mediterranean, for weeks. He wasn’t the type of man to write often, but she wished he’d send word. Despite convincing herself on a daily basis that ‘no news is good news’, fear followed her around like a shadow. Some days she couldn’t even look at their wedding photograph because it upset her too much.
‘You would have got word if they’d been captured or were injured,’ said Audrey. ‘I should imagine it’s just difficult for them to write. Someone was telling me it can take more than a month for mail to get out. Who knows what they are up against on a daily basis? If my William’s injuries are anything to go by, writing a letter home isn’t going to be a priority.’
Audrey was referring to her brother William’s war wounds after his truck was hit by an incendiary bomb while fighting in France: horrific burn scars across one side of his face and a foot so badly injured it had been amputated. Not to mention the mental scars, invisible to the eye but ever present. She and Flo exchanged concerned glances and the other customers in the queue murmured and nodded their heads, thinking about their own loved ones who they were praying were safe.
Everyone was absolutely sick to death of the war and the worst thing was the not knowing. Every time you opened the newspaper or listened to the wireless, there was news of another part of the world ripped to shreds by the war. British troops were in Japan, there was a campaign in Libya and a battle in Russia – it was hard to keep up.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Flo. ‘I just keep hoping for some good news.’
Audrey nodded. Though for Bournemouth, after the horrific months of the Blitz the previous year, the dreaded air raids had eased off slightly, people were still having to dig deeper than ever to stay cheerful. Rations made life hard, no petrol was permitted unless for emergency, firesides had to be shared with neighbours to save on fuel, bathing was restricted to no more than five inches of hot water per bath and clothing coupons were down. It was tough to be optimistic, even for Audrey, whose reason for living was to keep her customers and her family happy. But with no word from Charlie since she’d written to tell him about her pregnancy, and with her favourite shop girl Maggie gone to London to be near her new husband George’s family, she was missing the pre-war days. She wished she had paid more attention to the simple happiness of peacetime. Peace itself was a reason to celebrate and she’d taken it for granted. Now, it seemed that every day turned up a new set of problems. She needed a new shop girl to replace Maggie, the customers didn’t much like the new National Loaf and she couldn’t even create the celebration cakes she so loved to bake because the Food Minister, Lord Woolton, had banned the sale of iced cakes. There was no denying it – being cheery was a challenge. You just had to be grateful for small mercies: a sunny day, a night without an air raid, an extra rasher of bacon from the butcher.
‘We could all do with some good news,’ said Audrey wistfully, patting Flo’s shoulder before returning to her post behind the counter. ‘That’s for sure.’
Audrey’s attention was caught by her stepsister Lily, who had lived at the bakery since she’d arrived on the doorstep pregnant out of wedlock over a year ago, loudly clearing her throat. Standing in front of the floral curtain that led through to the bakehouse out back, her face was lit with the brightest smile, showing off the signature ‘lucky’ gap between her front teeth, her copper hair glowing in a halo around her head. Audrey was continually taken aback by Lily’s natural beauty.
‘I’ve got some good news,’ said Lily, clutching a telegram in her hand, her cheeks flushed bright pink and her blue eyes glassy with tears. She put her other hand to her throat and fiddled with the locket on a chain she wore. ‘You won’t believe what I’ve just heard, Audrey,’ she said. ‘I can hardly believe it myself. I feel quite peculiar.’
In the waiting room at the railway station, where the wall clock ticked loudly, Betty had locked herself into the ladies’ room and pulled the sewing sciss. . .
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