When the Lights Go On Again. Annie Groves
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Grace had the same pretty features.
As always, Francine was beautifully dressed, in a floral silk frock. She’d had the foresight to have some new clothes made whilst she’d been posted to Egypt with ENSA. You simply couldn’t get clothes of the quality and style Fran had brought back with her in England now, not with rationing and the rules the Government had laid down for austerity clothing. Not that Jean minded having to stick by those rules, not when she knew the danger the country’s poor merchant seamen had to endure bringing raw materials into the country for the war effort.
No, she didn’t feel the lack of pretty things for herself, but she did feel it for her girls sometimes, Jean admitted, although Fran had been wonderfully generous, not just bringing a whole trousseau of clothes, including her wedding dress, back from Egypt for Grace, but also bringing lovely fabrics that she had shared with them all.
Fran pulled a face. ‘I know that it can’t be easy for Vi with Edwin having left her for someone else, but she doesn’t exactly make it easy for others to sympathise with her, does she? I’ve never heard anyone complain so much, and over next to nothing.’
‘That’s just Vi’s way,’ Jean tried to defend her twin. ‘She’s always been like that, boasting when things are going well for her and complaining about life not being fair and her being hard done to when they aren’t, but Edwin wanting a divorce, and the war, have made her worse. You can carry that tray through for me, if you will.’ Jean nodded at the tray with the pretty china tea set that Grace had given her the first Christmas of the war. ‘And I’ll bring the teapot.’
Over a decade younger than Jean and Vi, Francine had been through such a lot. Pregnant at sixteen by a married man she naïvely believed loved her, Francine had given in to pressure from Vi and her husband to allow them to bring up her baby as their own before she left for America to make a new life for herself there as a singer.
But then the war had brought her back to do her bit for the country, and Francine had found out that Vi and Edwin had not been the loving parents to little Jack that she’d expected. That had been ever such a bad time. Poor Jack had run away from the people Vi had sent him to, supposedly to keep him safe from the war, and Jean had seen what Francine had gone through, wanting to claim her little boy and mother him, whilst Vi and Edwin did their utmost to stop her. And then had come the terrible tragedy of Jack being killed when a bomb had dropped on the farm to which he’d been evacuated. Such a terrible thing to happen. Of course, things had never been the same between Francine and Vi after that.
‘I don’t know how Bella puts up with Vi,’ Francine told Jean. ‘Vi’s done nothing but complain about how hard done by she is since she got here, when it’s perfectly plain that she has poor Bella running round after her, as well as working full time managing that nursery.’
Bella, the elder of Vi’s two children, was in charge of a government nursery in Wallasey where she and her new husband, a Polish fighter pilot, lived.
‘Vi’s worried that, now that Bella’s married, once the war’s over she’s going to be left on her own. She might complain about having Bella living with her when Bella has got a perfectly good house of her own, but she’d be lost without her,’ Jean told Fran.
Fran had picked up the tea tray but now she put it down again, the tone of her voice softening, as she told her sister, ‘I had a letter from Marcus this morning. His regiment is still on home duties but he thinks now that we’ve got Sicily, if we can win Italy, it won’t be long before we invade Western Europe, and that his regiment is bound to be part of that. I feel so guilty at times, Jean. One half of me is jubilant because we’re beginning to win the war at last, even though I know that there is still more fighting to be done, but the other half of me is so terribly afraid for my own happiness and for Marcus. Life is so precious and so very fragile, and loving Marcus makes me feel so vulnerable. If I should lose him…’ She gave a deep shudder. ‘I’m being selfish, I know. After all, there isn’t a woman in the land who doesn’t feel as I do for someone.’
The two sisters exchanged understanding looks.
‘You have Luke with the Eighth Army,’ Francine continued, ‘Bella has Jan with the RAF, and even Vi has Charlie in the army, although to listen to her she seems more concerned about him losing out if Edwin’s mistress has a son than she is about Charlie losing his life.’
Jean knew what Francine meant. With a victory predicted for the Allies and an end to the war, peace seemed so tantalisingly close that it was harder than ever for those at home to hold back their fears that their loved ones fighting for that peace might not survive to share it with them.
‘Mum, Auntie Vi’s complaining that she’s parched,’ Grace announced, coming into the kitchen. Pulling a face, she added, ‘She’s done nothing but complain since she and Bella got here.’
‘We’re on our way,’ Jean answered, laughing.
As Francine followed Jean through the door with the tea things, her mind was still on Marcus. Neither of them had said so in as many words, but Francine knew how much it would mean to him were she to start a baby before he was sent overseas, and not just because they loved one another, or even because his child would be a living reminder of their love, should he fall in combat. Each of them had already lost a child to the war: Marcus when his first wife, who had been pregnant with their first child, had been killed in an air raid, and Francine herself when the same thing had happened to Jack, the child who had never even known she was his mother and with whom she had shared such a short and poignant handful of days on her return to Liverpool from America. Superstitiously, Francine felt that if she did conceive then Marcus would survive the war because, after all they’d been through, God simply wouldn’t let them have a child if both of them weren’t going to be there to love and protect it.
For that reason she had waited with eager anticipation each month, only to be disappointed when her period arrived with relentless regularity. And now Marcus was warning her that he was expecting to be sent into action.
As she pushed open the door to Jean’s small front room the sight of its exclusively female occupants reinforced everything that she had been thinking about the reality of the war and what lay ahead.
‘I wish you could stay up here long enough to spend a couple of days in Whitchurch with us,’ Grace told Francine later on when they were washing up, whilst Jean took some sandwiches and a flask of tea down to the allotment for Sam and Seb.
The kitchen should have been cold and unwelcoming, facing north as it did, but Sam had painted it a bright yellow before the war, and Francine always thought that in addition to the warming colour the homely room held something of Jean’s own comforting warmth about it.
‘Next time I come up I’ll have to do that,’ Francine agreed,
‘Will you be coming back up soon? Only it’s so hard to get Mum to come out to see me, she’s always so busy here, and I know she’d come if you were coming,’ Grace pressed her, adding coaxingly, ‘Seb’s going to be away in a month’s time on a course at Bletchley Park and it would be lovely if you could both come then.’ She gave a small sigh. ‘I know I’m lucky to have Seb stationed here in England, and even luckier for him to be living out so that we can be together, but I do miss Liverpool and home.’
Poor Grace, Francine thought. It was obvious to Fran that what her niece didn’t want to say was that she missed her mother.
‘Of course I’ll come,’ Francine agreed on a rush of sympathy, ‘and I’ll make sure that your mum comes with me.’
Grace’s face lit up. Putting down the cloth with which she was carefully drying the tea set, she gave Francine a fierce hug.
‘Thanks ever so, Auntie Fran.’
‘You are happy in Whitchurch, aren’t you?’ Francine asked. What she really meant was, was Grace happy in her marriage, but that was something she was reluctant to ask straight out.
‘Oh, yes,’ Grace answered immediately and, very obviously,