Where the Heart Is. Annie Groves
Auntie Jean to be put upon. It wouldn’t be right.
Automatically she picked up the clothes her mother had left scattered around the room, putting those that needed washing aside, pulling back the bedclothes and remaking the bed. The furniture – bought new when her parents had first moved to the house, and of which her mother had been so very proud – like the rest of the house had an air of neglect about it.
The Bella who had lived in this house, spoiled and selfish, wouldn’t have had the first idea about how to keep house or cook, or do anything that the Bella she was now did with such accomplishment and pride, and all the more so because they were lessons hard-learned and self-taught.
She and Lena had had such fun learning to cook together. Her own kitchen had been filled with the sound of laughter as well as the smell of food, both seasoned with love.
Her poor mother. Bella couldn’t think of anything worse than being married to a man like her own father, a cold-hearted bully who thought of no one but himself, but her mother continually made it plain that she would rather be married to him than deserted by him.
Back downstairs Bella filled two hot-water bottles, one for mother’s bed and one for her own.
It was eleven o’clock before she finally went to bed herself, having seen her mother safely up, and then having gone back downstairs to make a start on cleaning the kitchen. Now physically tired, she should have been ready to sleep but instead, as though it sensed her weakness and that her guard was down, the news of Bomber Command’s continuing raids on enemy targets allowed her thoughts to slide towards Jan, who was a fighter pilot and not a bomber pilot, but whose life was still in danger with every mission he flew, and who she had no right to be thinking of at all. They might have admitted their love for one another and shared a little precious time together, but Bella had told him then that there must be no future meetings, no letters, and even no thinking of one another in their most private thoughts because Jan was married. She had meant what she said.
Bella knew she had made the right, indeed the only possible, decision but there were times when the temptation to let Jan into her thoughts betrayed her. As she knew all too well, letting him into her thoughts was only a heartbeat away from letting him into her imagination – and her memory – and that once there, in no time at all she would be remembering how it felt to be held in his arms, and to hold him back. How it felt to be kissed by him and to kiss him back. How it felt to be loved by him and to love him back, and then the pain would begin all over again. A double-edged pain – for herself and for the woman Bella believed she was betraying with her thoughts. She loved Jan beyond any shadow of doubt, and loving him surely meant wanting the best for him, and the very best future happiness for Jan would be for him to be happy with his wife. That was what she must pray for and hope for him, no matter what the cost to herself, because any other kind of lesser, more selfish love was not the love Bella believed her wonderful Jan deserved.
‘I can’t believe we’ve been here over a month already,’ Lou announced as they all lined up outside their hut, ready for morning inspection, blinking in the late March bright morning light.
‘A month? It feels more like a year,’ Betty groaned, shivering in the cold wind that seemed to whistle round the base. ‘It’s all right for you, Lou,’ she complained. ‘You’re so good at what we’re supposed to be doing, but I just can’t seem to get the hang of it.’
‘Watch out, Corp’s on her way,’ Ellen, always the cautious one, warned them. They all stiffened into a dutiful silence as their corporal started to walk down the line of uniformed young women in her charge, checking the cap angles, hair length, shoe and button shines.
She was finding that she had a natural aptitude for what they were being taught, Lou admitted as she stood to attention. Perhaps it came from the fact that her father was, as they said, ‘good with his hands’ and worked for Liverpool’s Salvage Corp, although her father had never in Lou’s memory suggested that his daughters understand what a plane or a vice or a file was, never mind try to use one. The very thought was enough to make Lou grin.
‘Something funny, is there, Campion?’
Oh Lord. She’d been so lost in her thoughts that hadn’t realised that the corp had reached her.
Somehow managing not to make any retort but instead to stand to attention and look straight ahead, Lou cursed herself inwardly. Their corp – Corporal Carter, to give her her full name – was a real tartar, and had seemed to take a dislike to her after she had made the mistake, during her first week, of mentioning that her brother was also a corporal in the army. She’d only been making conversation but obviously the corporal had thought she was trying to be clever or, even worse, to curry favour, and since then she’d been coming down hard on her, finding fault as often as she could, or so it seemed to Lou.
If it wasn’t the shine on her shoes that wasn’t bright enough, then it was the curl in her hair, or – on one occasion – the length of her eyelashes, which the corporal had accused her of darkening with either mascara or shoe blacking, both of which were banned whilst the women were on duty.
The last thing Lou wanted now, with Easter only ten days away, was to provoke the corporal into putting her on a charge, as she had threatened to do the last time she had given her a telling-off. The pettiness of the rules and the discipline irked her at times, Lou admitted, but on the other hand she was enjoying what she was learning, even if she still felt disappointed about the fact that she was never going to get to learn to fly.
All the recruits were looking forward to their promised long weekend off over Easter, and Lou had already written to her family telling them that she would be coming home. She’d even got Sasha to promise that the two of them would go out together to the Grafton Dance Hall on Easter Saturday – just the two of them.
Lou had missed Sasha, but she still felt a bit on edge at the thought of being reunited with her twin.
She’d have so much to tell her family and, of course, so much that she couldn’t tell them. Halton was a busy base with, if the grapevine was to be relied on, any number of top brass being flown in and then out of it almost daily.
‘They’ve got some American military top bass coming down today, so I’ve heard,’ Betty whispered excitedly to Lou a bit later whilst they were queuing for their breakfast. ‘Bomber Harris is going to be here as well.’
A fully fledged leading aircraftwoman in the queue ahead of them had obviously overheard and turned round to give them each a reproving look. ‘It’s Air Marshal Harris to you, and we don’t make a fuss about Yanks here. This is an RAF base, remember?’
Lou and Betty exchanged rueful grimaces, whilst Ruby, cheeky as always, pulled a face behind the other Waaf’s back.
‘I’m surprised she didn’t start reminding us that walls have ears,’ Betty grumbled, when they were sitting down with their breakfasts. ‘Anyway, everyone knows that the American military are here and that they’re going to be flying those enormous bombers of theirs out of all those airfields that are being built for them. I’ve got a cousin who’s based in London. She’s been out with one of them already – one of the Yanks, I mean. She says they really know how to treat a girl.’
‘A lot of people think it’s fearfully bad form to step out with one of them when our own boys are overseas fighting,’ was all Lou felt able to say, remembering how anti the Americans her own brother, Luke, had been when they had first arrived in Liverpool the previous year.
‘I’m really looking forward to Easter. It seems ages since I saw my family – or wore civvies,’ Betty complained. She heaved a heavy sigh. ‘I can’t wait to go to a dance wearing a dress and decent shoes. My ankles were black and blue the other Sunday, from being kicked accidentally by chaps in uniform, after we’d all been to that dance in the mess.’
‘Well, at least the RAF boys get to wear a pretty decent uniform,’ Ellen reminded them, coming to sit down