All the Sweet Promises. Elizabeth Elgin
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Breathing deeply, fighting sudden fresh tears, she stared at the whitewashed walls of the tiny, tidy yard. Gerry was gone, but his rose still grew there. Last autumn he had planted it.
‘A red rose for Lancashire, girl.’
‘But Gerry, it’ll never grow.’ Not here, she had thought. Not in this airless back yard with its cat-fouled alley, yet now it bore shining green leaves and four fat flower buds – and Gerry would never see them.
The fingers on the clock of St Joseph’s church pointed to eight, though it had long since ceased to chime the hours. Chiming clocks and the ringing of church bells were forbidden for the duration of hostilities, or until the invasion came. They’d ring out loud and clear then.
But maybe there wouldn’t be an invasion. It was nearly a year since Dunkirk, and if they’d been going to come, surely they’d not have waited this long.
The potman at the Tarleton had it all worked out, though. The Germans would invade, he said. The air raids on London and Liverpool and Birmingham and Clydeside were to knock out communications and close roads and railways and make everybody so pig-sick that they’d welcome Hitler with open arms. He’d gone on saying it until people complained and the landlord was forced to tell him that such talk amounted to the spreading of gloom and despondency; it was almost as bad as careless talk and would land him in the Bridewell if the police got to hear about it.
Eight o’clock. Soon it would begin to grow dark, and she hadn’t seen to the house yet.
Since the bombing had started, the ritual checking of number seven Lyra Street had given Vi comfort. It was all she had left of Gerry, now. The ugly little terrace house was her husband, her lover and the child she had never conceived. It was, she supposed, her last link with sanity.
Almost without thinking she reached down to turn off the gas and water taps, then climbed the narrow stairs and pushed open the door to her right, smiling at the riot of roses that covered the walls. Her bedroom wallpaper never failed to give her pleasure. It was like awakening each morning in a garden in the country, though Gerry had cursed something awful, matching up the roses and rosebuds on the uneven walls. They had ignored the seriousness of the news bulletins that night and taken a trip down the Mersey on the Royal Iris to celebrate the finishing of their bedroom, though Mr Chamberlain had told them next day that they were at war with Germany. So Vi called them her last-day-of-peace roses and vowed they would remain there until the war was over, even if it lasted four years, like the last one had done. Now those roses reminded her of Gerry, who had pasted them there, and she wondered if she would ever find the courage to scrape them off.
Sighing, she began to fill a carrier bag with essentials; an insurance, she supposed, in case the worst happened. Shoes first, then a towel, soap and toothbrush; and stockings and knickers, of course, and room enough left for her handbag, gas mask and a warm woolly scarf.
There was nothing to check in the front parlour; hardly anything to say goodbye to, for the room was empty of furniture and must remain that way until the shops would once again have chairs and sofas and rugs and curtains to sell.
Vi walked across the echoing emptiness to gaze at the mantel shelf and the reminders it held of Gerry. A vase from Shanghai; a pair of plates, hand-painted with gold dragons, from Hong Kong and, on his last trip but one, the two goblets. They were heavy and sparkled when she held them to the light, and she thought they were the most beautiful things she would ever own.
‘But whatever’ll we do with crystal glasses, Gerry?’
‘We’ll drink out of ’em, thick ’ead,’ he assured her solemnly. ‘When this old war’s over we’ll have wine every Christmas, and that’s a promise, girl.’
So she had placed them on the mantel with the vase and the dragon plates, and Gerry had promised her two more, next time he docked in Cape Town. Now, not knowing why, she lifted them down. Usually she never took anything but essentials to the shelter, but tonight, after Richie Daly had blundered into her kitchen, she needed the comfort of those glasses. Gently she placed them in the carrier bag.
‘That’s it, then.’ She drew the thick blackout curtains and the nightly ritual was finished. Carrier bag and coat lay on the kitchen table beside the attaché case. Everything was ready and she returned to the yard to sit on the bench beside the rose tree, to sit and wait, eyes closed, and will her clenched fingers one by one into relaxation.
The bombers were late tonight, but there was still time, she supposed. Double British Summer Time added two hours of daylight and the Luftwaffe needed the cover of darkness. But soon the light would begin to fade; then fire watchers would take up positions on rooftops and each air-raid warden and ambulance driver would feel a churning in his stomach. At fire stations and first-aid posts and rest centres, men and women would look up at the sky just as she, Vi McKeown, was doing now.
She closed her eyes, concentrating once again on her tightening fingers, trying not to think of Richie Daly and the Emma Bates; trying not to weep when she thought about the waste of a good life, of fifty good lives.
She was still sitting there when the silence began, those few moments of suspended time that came before the sounding of the air-raid sirens. She had come to recognize that silence, to smell it, almost. It was a void so strange and complete that there was no mistaking it. They were coming again; coming to kill and maim and blast and burn.
Reluctantly she rose to her feet, her breathing loud and harsh, the weariness she had been fighting since the air raids started overpowering her senses. God, but she was so afraid. Afraid of tonight and tomorrow and all the empty tomorrows. It was as if the bombing was draining her of all feeling, leaving her so spent that all she wanted to do was to close her eyes and not open them again until it was all over.
The first of the sirens sounded distantly and she ran to the kitchen, gathering up her belongings with hands that shook. Her mouth had gone dry again, fear writhed through her. Turning the back-door key, she looked longingly at the lavatory door. Why did that awful wailing always make her want to pee?
Now another siren had taken up the warning. Nearer, this one, its strident undulation beating inside her head. For just a few seconds she stood petrified; then, taking a deep, shuddering breath, she ran down the entry and into Lyra Street.
The ARP warden, out of work since 1930 and now a man of standing with his steel helmet, army-style respirator and dangling whistle, banged on the door of number five pleading through the letterbox with its occupant.
‘You’ll be safer in the shelter, Mrs Norris.’ Grumbling, he turned to Vi. ‘She does this every blasted night, the stubborn old biddy.’
‘Best leave her,’ Vi offered. ‘She says it’s more comfortable under the kitchen table. Reckons that if her name is on a bomb it’ll find her, wherever she is.’
‘And who are you, then?’ The warden had no time for niceties.
‘Mrs McKeown from number seven, and you’ll not get Mrs Norris out of there, not if you rattle that letterbox all night.’
Poor, silly Ma Norris, who had never been quite right since her three sons were killed on the Somme in the last war. Three telegrams, all in the same week. Enough to drive a saint round the bend.
‘And what about number nine?’
‘Gone to Preston, to relations,’ Vi called over her shoulder, hurrying to the gate of St Joseph’s, where Father O’Flaherty would be checking in his flock. Then, against all her better instincts, she stopped and slowly turned to look back down Lyra Street. Amazed, she shook her head. Never look back, Gerry always said. Just four weeks ago, as they stood at the dockyard gate he had said, ‘Tara well, girl.’ Then he’d kissed her and walked away; and though she waited until he was out of sight, he had never once looked back to where she stood.
All right, so sailors considered it unlucky, she thought defiantly, but women were different. Women did silly things all the time; that’s why they were women. Gently, sadly, she smiled at her house; her house and Gerry’s.
‘I’ll