Audrey Barton was fast asleep when her husband, Charlie, left. Kitbag slung over his shoulder, he carefully closed the bakery door behind him, quietly slipping from one life into another. The ink-blue sky peppered with stars, Audrey hadn’t stirred when he’d dressed, silently, in the darkness, tying the laces of his heavy leather boots with trembling hands. She had slept on under the rose-print eiderdown, as he propped a handwritten note on the dressing table, glancing back at her dark blonde hair fanned on the pillow and breathing in the fragrance of her Pond’s face cream, locking his wife’s image into his heart.
I can’t say goodbye, he had written.
When Audrey had awoken before dawn that freezing cold morning, to join Charlie in the bakehouse as she did every day, she discovered the note. Pulling her nightgown closer to her body, shivering slightly, she bit down hard on her bottom lip, quickly unfolding the paper to read his troubling words.
‘Charlie Barton!’ she cried, screwing up the note and hurling it across the room. Clenching her jaw and blinking away tears, she quickly processed what he had done. Of course, she knew he was joining up. He’d wanted to join the British Expeditionary Force since Britain declared war against Germany in September 1939, but because he was a baker, his occupation was ‘reserved’, and so he had food production duties at home. After fifteen grim months of war and in the midst of the Blitz, unimaginable calamity across the country and with millions of people’s lives in peril, Charlie had eventually persuaded the authorities to let him enlist, on the proviso that the bakery could continue to run without him. Yes, Audrey knew he was leaving, but he hadn’t told her when. She had planned on organising him a farewell meal with his favourite dishes, herring plate pie and marrow surprise, and on packing him up with all the comforts she could think of: knitted socks, gloves, long johns, balaclava helmet and a gingerbread cake for sustenance.
A kiss at the very least.
‘How could you?’ she muttered, dashing to the window, the gnarled floorboards creaking underfoot. She lifted up the blackout blind and threw open the window, leaning out into the bitingly cold January air, to peer up and down Fisherman’s Road, the street in east Bournemouth where they lived. There was nobody in sight. Whereas once the lamplighter would have been putting out the gas lamps, at this hour, to make way for dawn, the blackout meant the only light was provided by a sliver of moon hanging in the sky like a fingernail clipping, shining onto the deserted, snow-covered street.
Audrey spotted a trail of Charlie-sized footprints in the snow, leading away from the bakery, continuing past the butcher’s and the post office, their blackout blinds still closed. He had gone. Audrey didn’t cry easily, but this morning, she wept.
‘Oh Charlie,’ she said to nobody, her voice quavering. ‘What kind of husband leaves his wife without saying goodbye? Goodbye might be all we have.’
Tears streamed uncontrollably down her cheeks as her thoughts flew to the argument they’d had the previous night. Heavens, she knew not to go to bed on an argument, yet that’s exactly what she’d done. It had blown up out of nowhere when Audrey had been getting Mary, the eight-year-old evacuee girl billeted with them, ready for bed.
‘Your hair is so soft,’ Audrey had said, brushing the little girl’s hair while sitting in front of the roaring fire, where a line of woollen stockings and gloves dried in the heat from the crackling flames. ‘It feels like rabbit’s ears, or butterfly wings, or the softest velvet you can imagine. Mary, I do believe you have the hair of a princess. You’re a special girl, do you know that?’
She’d noticed Charlie’s face dark as a thundercloud when he’d walked past, heading down to the bakehouse to knock back and prove the dough for the next day’s bread, but it wasn’t until Mary was tucked up in bed and Audrey was elbow-deep in washing up the crockery that he told her what was on his mind.
‘You shouldn’t fill the girl’s head with such fanciful rot,’ he had said, his muscular arms folded across his chest. ‘You’re setting her up for another fall. She’s not a princess but a kiddie with more problems on her shoulders than Winston Churchill. Her brother’s dead, her mother topped herself, she’s got no home to go to and her father’s fighting on the front line, if he’s even alive. Mary needs toughening up, not softening up.’
Audrey had stopped pot washing and stared for a moment at the shelves in front of her. The jewel-coloured bottles and jars of rosehip syrup, pickled cucumbers, apple chutney and carrot jam she’d made in the summer months in preparation for winter blurred in front of her eyes. Placing the dishcloth down on the Belfast sink, she had turned to face her husband, hands on her hips.
‘That girl has seen enough sadness to last her two lifetimes,’ she said coolly. ‘I will do everything in my power to raise a smile on her sorry little face and give her a taste of what childhood should be. There can be no denying that the horrors she’s seen are unimaginable to us, Charlie.’
‘Not for long,’ he had challenged, raising his chin. ‘I’ll be going out to the front line with my eyes wide open. I’m prepared for anything, nothing can shock me.’
Suddenly weary, Audrey shook her head. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Charlie Barton,’ she said, ‘but the man I married was not bloodthirsty, or begging for a fight. You should open your eyes to what’s around you. Folk are managing to put a smile on their faces, like a sticking plaster, but families are being pulled apart; husbands, sons and brothers dead before they’ve even started their lives. Millions of children just like Mary have been evacuated hundreds of miles away from home, not knowing if they’ll see their parents again. What the world needs is more simple kindliness and common humanity.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’ he said, incredulous. ‘Are you suggesting I don’t go and fight for our country?’
Unsure of quite what she was saying, Audrey sighed. She knew, deep down, that Charlie had a heart of gold and had married him because of his dependability, kind nature and strength. She shook her head.
‘No, I’m not saying that,’ she said, her shoulders sagging. ‘Nothing I can say will stop you wanting to fight, even though this bakery and the neighbourhood depends on you for bread in a time when people are having to forgo foods other than what is absolutely necessary. It’s like you’ve been somewhere else since the war started. You might as well have already gone!’
Audrey knew she was treading on thin ice, but she couldn’t help herself. The prospect of Charlie leaving the bakery – leaving and potentially never returning – was hanging over them both and tearing her apart. She knew she was being unfair. She knew that Charlie wanted to defend his country against Hitler and the potential threat of invasion, to help put a stop to the horrific pain and suffering that people across the globe had so far endured, but the fear of losing him deeply affected her. Though she would never admit as much, when she met and married him seven years ago, he had, in some ways, rescued her. Their marriage, the bakery and his extended family had plucked her from the lonely road she was travelling, giving her direction and strength. Without him, would she fall apart?
‘You don’t understand,’ said Charlie, but she turned her back on him and plunged her hands back into the soapy water.
No, you don’t understand, she thought.
‘I should get this done,’ she sighed, her cheeks burning. She felt Charlie’s eyes boring a hole into her back for a long moment, but she didn’t turn to face him, much to her deepest regret.
Now, he was gone. She stared at her wedding band and rotated it slowly around her finger, the gold bright and smooth to touch. Her thoughts went back to their happy wedding day and she glanced at the photograph on the dressing table of the two of them about to cut their wedding cake. She had baked and intricately iced the rich, fruity celebration cake herself, carefully positioning the hand-painted bride and groom wedding cake topper she kept, to this day, wrapped in tissue paper in her jewellery box. Averting her gaze, she tried to work out what to do. Should she follow the footprints in the snow to try to find Charlie? Or should she respect his wishes and not say goodbye?
Realising he had probably left hours earlier and as through the window a flurry of light snow began to fall and cover his footprints, she wiped her eyes and quickly dressed in her bakery overalls, pinning back her hair and fixing the bakery cap on the top of her head. She pushed her feet into her wooden clogs and looked in the mirror at her twenty-seven-year-old self. Slim in build and naturally pretty, Charlie used to say her blue eyes changed shade depending on her mood. This morning they were dark and gloomy as the bottom of the sea. Her beloved Charlie was joining the thousands of other men away from home, who might never return.
I can’t say goodbye.
Pushing back her shoulders, standing tall, Audrey took a deep breath and raised her chin. The faint noise of the clattering of loaf tins came from the bakehouse, where she knew Charlie must have arranged for his Uncle John to step in and take over his baking duties. In a time of rationing, when shipping losses meant that food imports had radically fallen, bread was an essential part of everyone’s diet and, as the local family bakery, the neighbourhood depended on Barton’s bread. She thought of their small but spotless shop downstairs, the shelves waiting to be filled with warm golden loaves and counter goods, to satisfy empty bellies. The locals said the smell of Barton’s bread was so good it was impossible to walk past without coming in. Offering everyday comfort and sustenance in an uncertain, tense and dangerous time; she would never, ever, let her customers down.
Giving her reflection a long, hard stare before turning away, she picked up Charlie’s screwed-up note and placed it in the dressing table drawer for safekeeping.
The lengthy list of what needed doing that morning pressed on her mind. She would need to open up the shop in a matter of hours and paint on a smile for her customers. There were hotel orders to fulfil and a celebration cake to be baked. Life must go on. Today, she would show fortitude and strength, however heavy her heart.
Like a nightingale at dusk, the sweet sound of William’s harmonica drifted from the open attic window of the bakery, stopping Audrey in her tracks.
‘Are my ears playing tricks on me?’ she asked Elsie, William’s fiancée, as she paused from pushing a sodden apron through the wooden rollers of the mangle to listen, staring up at the window in disbelief. It was the first time in six months since her brother William had returned home from the front line, severely injured, that she’d heard him play, and his mournful notes plucked at her heartstrings. Her cheeks pink with the exertion of scrubbing dirt from the bakery’s aprons, caps and overalls, Audrey’s eyes misted over. Hearing him play loosened the knots across her shoulders; in truth, she had been worried sick about William for months.
‘I’ve never been more pleased to hear the blues in all my life,’ said Elsie, a huge dimpled smile exploding onto her pretty face. ‘When he starts playing boogie-woogie, we’re going to throw a party.’
Audrey smiled at this remark and watched as Elsie quickly dropped the apron she was wringing soapy water out of, dried her hands on a towel and pulled the red headscarf from her black curls, which fell around her face in soft ringlets. Walking away from the mangle to go inside the bakery and see William, Audrey gently caught hold of Elsie’s wrist.
‘Wait,’ she said, her eyes sparkling as his mournful music continued. ‘Let him play a while undisturbed. That harp will be better for him than any dose of medicine.’
Elsie nodded her agreement and the two women shared a glance that conveyed a myriad of emotions. Since William had come home, Audrey knew only too well that life had been difficult for him and Elsie, to say the least. The couple were supposed to have been married the previous year, but William’s injuries had kept him away from Bournemouth on the wedding day. Thinking of the tension that day – not knowing whether he was going to turn up or not – made Audrey feel quite sick. When he had finally come home, they’d discovered that his right foot had been amputated and the right side of his face, including his eye, severely burned, so he’d misguidedly thought Elsie would no longer want to be his bride. He couldn’t have been more wrong, but expecting the couple to take up where they left off was a mistake. It wasn’t just William’s body that had been injured. It felt, to Audrey, as if part of his soul was lost in no man’s land. Not knowing what he’d seen in battle, or exactly how he’d suffered in France when his truck was hit by a bomb killing all the men travelling with him, meant that she and Elsie tiptoed around his dark moods as if the floor were covered in eggshells.
The knowledge that William was up in his room at the bakery, a mere shadow of his former self, while Elsie struggled to keep their relationship going, pained Audrey immensely. Though he volunteered as one of the neighbourhood’s fire-watchers, struggling on his crutches, with binoculars pinned to his eyes, for several hours every night, on the lookout for incendiary bomb fires, he was otherwise sullen and distracted. Her lovingly made hotpots and casseroles seemed not to tempt him, her freshest, warm cakes too indulgent in a time of austerity, and long walks along the coast too physically painful for him. She’d tried discussing the news with him – with Yugoslavia and Greece under his belt, in an operation with the codename ‘Barbarossa’, Hitler had now invaded the Soviet Union – but William seemed to shrink even further inside himself. He preferred to stay in his room writing letters to soldiers in his regiment, or would sit out in the bakery yard absorbed in simple tasks such as podding broad beans or scraping clean the carrots. The doctor said it was a matter of time – and warned that some men returned from war in body but not in mind. It certainly seemed that William’s mind was elsewhere, perhaps Audrey feared, trapped in a memory too horrific to fade, but maybe, just maybe, there was hope.
‘When he plays it’s almost like before the war, isn’t it?’ said Elsie. ‘When everything was normal and ordinary. Can you remember those days? Feels like a different lifetime.’
Before the war, William had worked alongside Charlie in the bakery as his apprentice. When he wasn’t hard at work, he’d perch on a flour sack to drink a cup of tea and play on his mouth harp, earning him admiring comments from their customers and neighbours on Fisherman’s Road. He’d fallen for Elsie and everyone was delighted to hear they were to marry. Just the thought of him as the sorry soul he was now, who had opted out of the world and who spent far too much time stewing on his own, made Audrey blanch. Where had her valiant, bold and musical brother, who was desperately in love with Elsie, gone? Well, she’d be damned if she was going to let him disappear forever.
Audrey took a deep breath as she listened to him play, enjoying the fragrance of the red geraniums bursting out of pots in the yard and mingling with the scent of the onions, tomatoes and lettuces growing in soil, disguising the roof of the Anderson shelter. Perhaps his playing was a sign that better times were ahead.
Appreciating the sight of the bright white washing on the clothes line flapping in the warm July breeze against the blue sky, her heart lightened a little. This moment was a welcome relief from the last few months of running the bakery without Charlie – an arduous task. Uncle John had gladly come out of retirement to take over his nephew’s baking duties and Barton’s had reduced the numbers of delivery orders it took on, but even so, the old man was tired, Audrey knew that. She was tired too, she thought, staring at her fingers that were red raw from all the scaling, moulding, baking, serving, scrubbing and cleaning she did. Not that she was alone in running the bakery. Maggie, the shop girl, was a good egg and Audrey’s stepsister, Lily, who’d arrived in a ‘fix’ last year, now lived at the bakery with her baby, Joy, and helped out whenever she could. So why did Audrey feel as though she’d been through the mangle herself?
‘It’s the sleepless nights in the shelter and all the worry,’ she muttered to herself, running her eyes over an advertisement on a sheet of newspaper on the floor, where earth-covered spuds were piled up, ready for scrubbing and preparing and cooking for tomorrow’s dinner. The typeface was bright and bold, its message clear: Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution, will bring us victory.
Audrey gave a gentle laugh. There was no time for tiredness in wartime, was there? And she had no right to be tired, she told herself. Not when Charlie was away facing goodness knows what, and folk were having to live in shelters because their homes had been bombed out.
She began pegging out more washing. The strange thing was, despite being exhausted, when her head hit the pillow she couldn’t sleep. Instead, she lay there awake, worrying. Oh, there was so much to worry about – not least when the next air-raid siren would sound. Since the beginning of the year the siren in Bournemouth had sounded dozens of times. There had been heavy air raids all over Britain – and though Bournemouth hadn’t suffered a pounding like London, Coventry or Bristol, the Woolworths building in the Square had recently taken a hit, and swathes of Westbourne, Branksome Park and Moordown had been destroyed by parachute bombs. Churchill had been on the wireless, warning that Hitler may try to invade Britain ‘in the near future’ too and that civilians should prepare for gas, parachute and glider attacks. It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘No wonder we’re all tired!’ Audrey said to herself, shaking her head.
Then there were the wedding cake orders, of course. Audrey often made wedding cakes at short notice, because sweethearts had just days together before the groom had to return to active service, and often didn’t know, until the last minute, when those days might be. She never turned down a customer; Charlie always insisted they pull out all the stops for the customers.
Charlie. Of course, what she worried about most was whether Charlie was safe. She missed him dreadfully. Painfully. It was a difficult and complicated thing: love in wartime.
Looking sympathetically at Elsie, who was leaning with her back against the wall, her arms gently folded, listening to William’s harp, her eyes closed in relief that he’d started playing again, Audrey was heartened. Elsie would never give up on William, that was clear.
. . .
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