Ruby's War Read online

  ‘Is that Jack Lathom’s dog?’ the girl asked. ‘What you doing with it?’

  ‘I’m taking her out for Mrs Lathom,’ Ruby said, as Bess dragged her over to the swing. ‘She lives near my granddad.’

  ‘Have you been evacuated?’ the girl asked.

  ‘No. I’ve come to stay with my granddad for a bit, but I usually live with my auntie.’

  ‘Where’s your mum and dad?’ the older boy asked.

  ‘Shut up, our Jimmy,’ the girl said, ‘that’s rude.’

  ‘My mum died in an accident,’ Ruby said, bending down to stroke the dog.

  ‘Throw her a stick,’ the boy said. ‘Jack used to.’

  ‘I’ve not to let her off the lead.’

  ‘Was she hit by a bomb?’ the girl asked, climbing on to the swing with the smaller child and adjusting his grey balaclava.

  ‘No. It was an accident in the blackout. She was hit by a taxi.’

  ‘We saw a bomber,’ Jimmy said, pointing over the rows of terraced houses. ‘He come swooping over here. Right over the rec. You could see the Jerry pilot inside. He comes right over here and then he turned and headed over to the railway lines and the factory. Then there was this bang, and he’d killed some folk on Ward Street. Twenty-five. One kid was killed on his way to buy some toffees.’

  Contemplating this particularly cruel injustice, the children gazed silently over the rooftops.

  ‘Are you coming to our school?’ the girl asked. ‘It’s over there by the church.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ruby said. ‘I only got here last night, and I’m fifteen, but I sometimes helped with the little ones at my school.’

  ‘You can have a swing,’ the girl said, lifting her little brother off the swing horse. ‘You could put Bess on your knee. She’d like that.’

  The children took turns to hold the dog on the swing, and Bess, who appeared to be enjoying the novel experience, smiled broadly.

  ‘Have you ever tasted ice-cream cake?’ Jimmy asked, sticking out his bright-red knees to take Bess’s weight. ‘We have. The Yanks give us a party, ’cos our dad’s in the war. They come and collected us in trucks and took us to the base. We’re going again at Christmas. We’re all getting a present from Father Christmas. He’s coming there to see us. He’s an American. I bet you didn’t know that.’

  The girls grinned at each other over the younger child’s head, and Ruby was about to ask the girl her name, when she jumped off the swing and picked up the smaller boy.

  ‘We’ll have to go,’ she said. ‘Jack sometimes took Bess down by the churchyard, and then up the road. If you keep on going, you’ll come to a crossroads. Turn right, go up to the next crossroads and turn right again. Then go up that road, until you come to the river. You’ll be able to see the Lathom’s cottage from there.’

  As she watched the children go, Ruby pushed her cold fingers deep in her pockets and felt the raw wind on her cheeks. The rec was deserted, except for the hens clucking in their run on the other side of the field. She turned and headed back to the road. On one side, there was a newsagent and a butcher, and on the opposite side, there was a row of terraced houses with a clog shop at one end and a chemist shop at the other. As the main road spooled out into the distance, she could see more shops, a petrol pump and at the edge of the village, rows of privet hedges and larger houses.

  Bess trotted by the blacked-out shops, until they were almost opposite the turning between the chemist shop and a white pub. There was no traffic on the road, and all the house doors were shut tight against the cold, grey afternoon. Ruby walked along, until she could see up the road the girl had pointed out. There were two larger terraced houses facing the crossroads. In one, the curtains had been drawn right back. A lady with a pale face sat in the window, and as they walked by, she raised her frail hand and waved.

  Bess crossed the main road and walked purposefully by a small whitewashed chip shop that was squashed in between the pub’s yard and a row of terraced houses. At the end of the row of houses, she trotted by the church and into a small wood at the back of the churchyard the girl had mentioned. Once inside the wood, she put her head down and snuffled through the deep, dry leaves, drawing Ruby further into the shelter of the little copse. It was clear that this part of the walk was going to take some time, and Ruby found a seat on a bare oak branch low enough for her feet to touch the ground. As the dog rummaged around her, a thick warm smell of autumn rose up from the earth. Bess’s tail went on busily wagging until she found a stick. Then sitting down with her discovery in her mouth, she looked quizzically at Ruby. When she didn’t move, the dog dropped it at her feet and leant her silky warmth against Ruby’s knees.

  It was the gentle friendliness, as though they had always been pals, that brought the tears. Ruby rested her cheek on the dog’s bony head and rubbed her gauzy soft ears. For a while, inside the green house of rhododendrons and laurels, Bess allowed herself to be hugged, kindly licking each tear as it dripped from Ruby’s chin, before tactfully placing the stick on her lap.

  ‘All right,’ she said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her mac, ‘you show me where, and don’t run off, or we’ll never get to come again.’

  Bess led the way through the copse and on to a field at the back of the church. When Ruby slipped off her lead, the dog did two excited circuits of the uncut grass before returning to wait expectantly by her stick. Ruby had little experience of dogs – they were not permitted at Everdeane – but she’d watched as people walked their pets on the sands, and threw the stick as far as she could across the field. When the dog returned and she took hold of the stick again, there was a great deal of growling and wrestling. Then Bess dropped it but continued to guard her prize, growling softly when Ruby tried to pick it up. Eventually, to indicate the first part of the game could begin again, she suddenly sat down and looked up hopefully at Ruby, who threw the stick once more. They played happily, until the long, wet grass soaked into Ruby’s socks and made her shiver. The pale-grey sky was growing darker, and the next time the dog raced back with her prize, Ruby clipped the lead back on to her collar.

  The road from the church to the crossroads was edged with an orderly border of semi-detached houses, daintily curved street lamps and a number of short avenues, each with its own identical row of dwellings in the same red-brick and pebble-dash.

  At the first avenue, a woman with a smart new pram turned the corner, and a railwayman who was peddling by on a heavy, black bike waved to her.

  ‘How’s babby, Mrs Smith?’ he shouted, as his bike squeaked by.

  ‘Oh, she’s grand now, thanks,’ the woman said. ‘Her chest’s much better.’

  The woman smiled at Ruby and bent down to pat Bess. She wore a fitted brown coat and a round crocheted cap embroidered with a daisy chain on the crown of her light brown hair.

  ‘Look, Kathleen, a doggy,’ she said.

  A beautiful, dark-eyed baby looked around the pram’s hood, pointed a pink-mittened hand at Bess and made a gurgling sound.

  ‘Doggy,’ the woman said, beaming with pride. ‘That’s right, love, it’s a doggy. She’s just started talking,’ she said to Ruby. ‘It’s the first time she’s been out in three weeks. She’s been really poorly.’

  At the crossroads, Bess turned by a decrepit wooden garage with a charabanc parked beside it and headed towards a railway bridge. The land around was flat, with little to break up the long hedges, except for a couple of stands of trees, a few scattered cottages and a large house partly hidden by trees. The nameplate on the gate read: Doctor H. Grey MD. The house looked older than the smaller ones along the main road and had high windows and a handsome porch built of pale stone.

  In between investigations, the dog kept up a steady pace, and Ruby found that if she shifted the lead from hand to hand, holding it in one and keeping the other in her pocket, she could manage to stay quite warm.

  When they reached the river and were in sight of the cottages again, Ruby dawdled. She picked up a leaf and dropped it
from the stone bridge into the shallows, imagining it riding the rippling water, until it met a much larger river travelling west. After a while, Bess became restless and they wandered to the end of the lane. For a moment, before she turned the corner, when her view of the cottages was still partly obscured by the trees and hedgerows, Ruby’s heart lifted. It was a familiar sensation: after her mother had died, each time she’d arrived back from school or from an errand, and sometimes just before turning on to the prom, she would suddenly feel sure that her father would be at Everdeane waiting for her. Yesterday, when she’d heard Granddad’s voice, she’d felt the same involuntary optimism. It was a delusion that reason and experience couldn’t crush, and now it had followed her to Granddad’s cottage. Ruby quickened her pace, expecting some sort of sign that he’d arrived at the cottage to collect her. At the gate she hesitated, gazing at the blank windows, hoping to see some hint that her father was already there. Hiding Bess’s beloved stick under a bush, she ran up the path and pushed open the door.

  Mrs Lathom was nodding by the open fire, a half-knitted sock for a deserving soldier unfinished on her lap, and Granddad was reading the newspaper. He looked up and smiled.

  ‘That fresh air has given you some colour,’ he said. ‘Take the dog round to the back door. I’ll get some water for her, and we’ll use the old towel under the sink to wipe her paws. Then you can help Grandma and Sadie to make the tea.’

  The disappointment sank quickly; it was an accustomed sensation and didn’t last. By the time she’d finished helping her granddad rub Bess’s muddy paws, the feeling had been replaced by the hope that there would soon be a letter from her father asking her to go to him.

  ‘There’s stewed plums in that pan,’ Jenny said, handing Ruby a china bowl, ‘you can put them in here. I’ve made some cream. It should have thickened up by now, though I’d almost run out of vanilla essence to flavour it. It’s in a mixing bowl in the scullery. If it’s thickened, pour it into that glass jug on the top shelf of the kitchenette. Be careful, mind, that’s my best jug.’

  When Ruby returned with the mock cream, Jenny was carrying a white enamel dish from the meat safe over to the kitchenette. The contents were covered with a plate and a flat iron had been balanced on top. Jenny put the dish on the flap of the kitchenette, took the iron off the plate, carefully inverted the metal dish, and tapped the bottom with the tip of the flat iron. Then she gently lifted the dish to reveal a wobbling mass of clear jelly with fragments of pale meat suspended inside.

  ‘This brawn’s set lovely, if I do say so myself,’ she said. ‘I was lucky to get a whole sheep’s head.’

  Years ago, when she and her parents once stayed at Everdeane as guests, there’d been brawn for tea. Ruby hadn’t been able to look at the wobbling mess on her plate. She’d been afraid that Auntie Ethel would be cross, but her mother had winked and slithered the foul stuff on to her father’s plate. Then they’d giggled so much that her dad said they’d nearly given the game away.

  The pressed-brawn sandwiches were to be eaten with pickled onions and beetroot. When she took her first bite, Ruby felt her stomach begin to rebel. She tried not to look at the glutinous substance oozing out from between the slices of bread, and Bess, sensing that Ruby needed her help, quickly settled to the task of delicately licking the gluey stuff from her fingers.

  Unlike her, Mrs Lathom, Granddad and Jenny were all munching happily, but Sadie only nibbled at her sandwich and refused the pickled onions.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘Me and Lou’s been invited to a farewell do at the Railway.’

  ‘I’d forgotten about that,’ Granddad said. ‘Some of the Yanks from the base are leaving. Should be a good do. Hal and his mate asked me to call in for one last game of darts. I said I might call in to wish them all the best. Why don’t you come, Jenny?’

  ‘How can I?’ Jenny said. ‘I’ve still got the washing to put to soak.’

  ‘Oh, leave the washing for once. It’d be nice to give him and his mate a good send off. Very generous, they’ve been. A bit loud, but grand blokes. Hope the next lot’s as friendly. You could come with us as well, Nellie.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got the doctor’s shirts to put to soak, Yanks or no Yanks,’ Jenny said, collecting the empty plates.

  ‘Ruby can do them shirts and these pots,’ he said, handing his granddaughter his empty plate. ‘Go and get that dish of plums and the cream for us, Ruby, love. She can manage the washing-up, and you can show her what to do with the shirts.’

  The dish of spiced fruit was waiting on the kitchenette, along with a set of five smaller matching dishes. Each was decorated with a repeating pattern of soft fruits in red, yellow and purple. Ruby took in the dishes, collected the heavy glass jug of mock cream and put the teapot to warm in the hearth.

  ‘I’ve always thought these dishes were lovely,’ Nellie said, taking a bowl of fruit from Jenny. ‘I remember how your poor Lucy loved them, Henry. They were a wedding present from her side of the family, weren’t they? They look expensive. But I don’t recognise this,’ she said, pouring the mock cream from the glass jug. ‘Lucy had a lovely cream jug. Is this one new? It’s the war, I suppose, you can’t get the quality.’

  ‘You want a cup of tea, Ma?’ Sadie asked. ‘Look, Ruby’s warmed the pot.’

  ‘Oh, that would be nice,’ Nellie said. ‘Then I’ll take Bess home, before we go out.’

  The tea was drunk in silence by everyone, except Mrs Lathom, who gave them a detailed account of her medical complaints. When she’d left, Jenny went upstairs, the sound of the bedroom door slamming behind her startling Granddad, who’d just poured his second cup of tea into his saucer and was gently blowing on it.

  ‘Come on, Ruby,’ Sadie said, rolling her eyes towards the ceiling and collecting the dishes from the table, ‘we’ll take this stuff through and wash up.’

  ‘Aye, good lass,’ Granddad said, abandoning his saucer of tea and hurrying towards the stairs. ‘I’d best get my collar and tie on.’

  When the sound of angry voices from the room above grew louder, Sadie switched on the radio and sang along, as they carried the pots through to the kitchen.

  ‘Put that lot on the draining board, and I’ll show you what you have to do with the shirts,’ she said, leading the way to the small brick scullery off the kitchen. ‘These are the doctor’s shirts, so be careful,’ Sadie said, pulling a shirt from a pile of clothes in a washing basket. ‘Before they’re soaked with the rest of the wash, you rub the collars and cuffs with that yellow soap over on the windowsill. Then, they go in the dolly tub. It’s easy, but make sure you rub them well. Now, I’ll get the hot water for the washing-up.’

  On the wall next to the sink, hanging by a wooden handle, was a small mesh box with thin slivers of soap inside. When Sadie had poured in hot water from the kettle and topped it up with cold from the tap, Ruby took the box down and whisked it through the water until suds appeared on the surface. Then she began washing the dishes, and Sadie unhooked the small shaving mirror that hung above the sink and began to apply her make-up.

  ‘Do you think this jumper’s too plain?’ she asked, eyeing herself critically through the little mirror. ‘I mean, we are only going to the Railway. Hal doesn’t call them jumpers. He says sweaters. I was wearing my white silk one when I first met him. When we was dancing, he says, “Gee, I like your sweater.” I love the way they talk.’

  ‘Is he your boyfriend?’

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ Sadie said, pausing her lipstick in mid application, ‘I was being friendly, that’s all. I mean, Hal’s too old for me for a start. He’s thirty. They come to dances in town and ask us back to dances at the base. Anyway, Jack’s … Well, we don’t know when we’ll see him next, when he’ll be back.’

  By the time Ruby had finished the pots, the house was quiet again. Granddad came downstairs wearing his collar and tie and looking quite cheery. He wandered around the kitchen humming to himself, jangling the coins in his pockets and inspecting their handiwork. J
enny appeared a few minutes later. She had long earrings swinging from her ears. The red and white stones matched those in the necklace sparkling on the expanse of flesh above her low-cut, black blouse.

  ‘You look nice, Ma,’ Sadie said. ‘I’ll just get my coat.’

  ‘Bring my fur jacket down will you, love,’ Jenny called after her. ‘I think it might be chilly.’

  As Jenny looked around the kitchen, noting the pile of clean pots and the empty flap of the kitchenette, the red and white stones chopped the air.

  ‘What’s she done with the rest of that brawn?’ she asked.

  Granddad looked over at Ruby and followed her gaze to the meat safe.

  ‘It’s in here, see,’ he said, opening the wire mesh door to display the remaining brawn quivering on its plate. ‘And Sadie’s been showing her how to do the laundry.’

  Jenny patted the row of stiff, yellow curls along her forehead and frowned.

  ‘He’s very particular is Doctor Grey. Well, at least, his wife is. She’d best make sure they’re really well rubbed and she’ll have to check for any missing buttons. There’s spare ones in a box, and the cotton’s in a toffee tin in the dresser.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Ma,’ Sadie said, handing her mother an off-white coat of baby-seal skin. ‘I’ll get the box and the cotton.’

  ‘You can shut that radio off as well,’ Jenny said, shrugging on the coat and heading towards the living-room door, ‘radio batteries are scarce.’

  Hal pulled up the collar of his coat and started the jeep. Since he’d arrived in England, a lid of grey cloud had been clamped permanently over the whole island. As far as he could see, there was no corner of the entire place that wasn’t damp. He sighed, stared out at the slick, dark road and watched his buddy Clayton jog over from his quarters.

  ‘Lieutenant Roach reckons it’s much warmer in the south,’ Clayton said, as he climbed in beside him. ‘Says the place is altogether different. No industry, for a start. Fishing, mainly, and farming. Less people altogether.’