‘Just tired. You?’ Kate nodded.
‘Right as I’ll ever be.’ She took Hari’s arm and leaned against her. ‘Last night, I went out, only for an ice cream and the men there, they were horrible, taunting me, telling anyone who’d listen what I’d been up to with them. I was shamed so I was and furious at their cheek. I put them in their place so I did, telling on them crying, begging me to cuddle them before they went out to face the Hun. The cat got their tongues then and I left the ice cream parlour head in the air.’
Hari felt pity tug at her. Poor, misguided Kate, she thought she was helping the young men who were about to die and gave them everything but some of them lived to tell a spiteful tale. As the train shuddered to a halt at Swansea station, she pressed her cheek against Kate’s. ‘See you in the morning and try not to let them get you down.’
The busyness of the station gave way to silent streets and Hari breathed a sigh of relief as she turned into her road where their old, big family house was little more than a hole in the ground. A few doors down was her house.
A few weeks ago, Mr Paster, one of the neighbours, had approached her to buy the house; it was small, terraced, but it was a home of her own.
She had grown tired of the public house, the noise, the smell of beer. She had been saving for months now and she had raised enough for the small deposit and so now she was a property owner—well, she and the local bank.
As she approached the house she looked at it with pride; small it might be but it was hers, hers and Meryl’s and Father’s if he came home from the war safely.
It was dark in the house, so dark with the blackout curtains and the fire unlit in the grate. Hari sighed and sat on one of the chairs in the parlour feeling too tired to do anything but go to bed. Still, she had chores, some washing and cleaning up.
She made sure the blackout curtains were in place and switched on the lights. She was lucky the house had been modernized; she had electric while some of the houses in the area still had gas lighting.
She turned on the gas stove. She would heat a tin of soup, have some of the stale sandwich from morning and as soon as she washed out her stockings and underwear she could go up to bed.
She ate the soup with little interest but it was hot and warmed her stomach. The heat from the stove had taken the chill from the air and she began to doze. Suddenly, before her eyes were the long and short symbols of the Morse code. They untangled, became clear as the normal written word and she sat up with a start as her memories from childhood came back, the days she’d struggled to send messages by tapping on an old tin to the other girl guides. Quickly, she took the paper out of her bag and unfolded it. She was beginning to see the pattern; letters were transposed in complicated forms but, slowly, she would make sense of it all.
She did her chores mechanically and stumbled upstairs. Once in bed she tucked the blankets up to her chin as the bedroom was freezing. She was so excited she wanted to go back to work at once, turn on her machine and really understand what it was all about. That would take some time but she was prepared for that.
She would never sleep. She closed her eyes and didn’t open them again until an air-raid warning wailed into the night. She stumbled out of bed, pulled on a coat and shoes and followed all the other sleepy people on the road into the nearest shelter.
Twelve
So I was settled with Aunt Jessie and my dear Michael. I thought of him cuddling me in the barn and sometimes I felt shy of him. He had no such feelings, he seemed to have forgotten all about that night, but he talked and talked about Hari until I was sick of the sound of her name. One night at supper, over the pristine white cloth on the table in the dining room, the one place that was tidy in the whole house, he handed me a sheet of lined paper.
‘What’s this for?’
‘I want you to write your full name and your address,’ Michael said.
‘Hang on, Hari only gave it to me when she came down to see me. She’s bought a house, it’s a new address to me,’ I said hesitantly, ‘but I’ll fetch it later if you really want it.’
I knew what he was up to; he was going to write to my sister. It felt like ice was rubbing against my belly and my heart.
‘OK,’ he said carelessly and I held my breath.
‘Anyway—’ I knew I sounded aggressive—‘what do you want it for, do you think they’re going to shove me out of here any time soon and you want to know where I’ll be?’ If only.
Michael looked confused and then he lied to me. ‘Ah, something like that.’ He smiled his lovely smile and I didn’t know how to deal with what was happening. My Michael was falling for my sister and the pain was gut-wrenching. Jealousy was a fire inside my belly, worse than seeing John Adams with my friend Sally, much, much worse.
Later when Michael was gone to work in the fields milking the cows, planting things or whatever he did on the farm, I sat in the kitchen hunched over the fire. Aunt Jessie made me a cup of tea and sat opposite me. There was some kind of lecture coming.
‘About your sister—’
‘Hari? What about her, Aunt Jessie?’ For a minute I felt a pang of fear. ‘She’s all right, is she?’
‘Aye, she’s all right. She’s a lovely girl, a town girl, she’d never be happy in the country.’
‘Well, she doesn’t live in the country and never will.’ Then I saw what Aunt Jessie was getting at and thought it over for a few minutes.
‘At a certain age young folk get fancies but that’s all they are, fancies. Oppose them and they get stubborn, pretend to go with these silly, passing fancies and that’s it, they’ll pass and be forgotten.’
I ran to her and flung my arms around her neck. ‘Do you think I’d make a good country girl, Auntie?’
‘Maybe, maybe not, but you’ll probably have a lot of fancies yourself before you need to decide.’
I knew I wouldn’t have any fancies. Michael was my man for good and ever but Aunt Jessie talked a lot of, well, sort of hidden sense; she spoke like the Sunday School teacher, in sort of parables, but I knew what she meant all right.
‘Now, to something rather unpleasant—I want you to go to school this afternoon. Your teacher agreed to you having the morning off but this afternoon she wants you there to read the part of Titania in the school play; you’re the only one to learn the lines properly, so she says. It’s a good way for you to settle back in, Meryl.’ She smiled. ‘It’s the best offer you’re going to get, so my advice is take it.’
I adjusted my thought to school, to getting ready, putting on my skirt and my long socks, polishing my shoes, going back to meet up with George Dixon.
‘I don’t know why Miss Grist picked me, Titania was supposed to have lovely red hair, wasn’t she?’ We were back to Hari again.
‘Don’t ask me, I haven’t got time to read that stuff.’
I tried not to laugh. ‘Well, I suppose it’s better than going back to double sums or English.’ I loved both those subjects but I felt I had to give in with good grace, at least taking part in a play might be fun. I gave in. ‘It’s a long walk though and my leg still hurts a bit where George kicked me.’
‘I thought it might,’ Aunt Jessie said dryly, ‘I’ll take you in the pony and trap.’
School wasn’t as bad as I thought. Some of the kids crowded round me and asked what George had done to me. They all seemed to have garbled ideas about the attack.
‘Will you have a baby?’ Mattie Beynon whispered in my ear. I stared at her in astonishment.
‘How would I manage that?’
‘Well,’ she faltered, ‘when George attacked you did he put his thing inside you?’