My Sweet Valentine

Olive nodded, but privately Mrs Dawson’s words had made her feel rather sorry for Archie Dawson. She must not be critical, though, she warned herself. The Dawsons – and especially Mrs Dawson – had had such a lot to bear, first with their son’s illness and then his death. Olive had worried a bit, when she’d first learned that the Dawsons were taking Barney in, that Mrs Dawson’s vulnerable emotional state might mean that she couldn’t cope with a healthy young boy in the house after the tragedy of her own son, but she’d obviously been wrong. Having Barney around had given Mrs Dawson a new lease of life, and she was pleased for her as well as for Barney himself, Olive reflected, as she headed for the shops.

‘Watch out, you’ll end up breaking that mug if you slam it down any harder,’ Sally told Dulcie, wincing. ‘What’s wrong with you, anyway?’ she asked. ‘You look as though you’ve lost a shilling and only found a penny. You’ve not had another row with Wilder, have you?’

It was common knowledge at number 13 that Dulcie’s relationship with Wilder was somewhat tempestuous.

‘Well, I dare say you wouldn’t be feeling too pleased yourself if your George had told you that he couldn’t get leave after promising to take you out somewhere special on Valentine’s Day.’

‘Well, Wilder is in uniform, Dulcie,’ Sally felt obliged to point out.

Dulcie’s scowl told her that her comment was not well received. ‘That’s as maybe, but he was able to get time off easily enough when he wanted to go to watch some silly boxing match last week. Of course, I know he wanted to take me somewhere special,’ she added hastily, ‘’cos he thinks a lot of me, Wilder does.’

Sally nodded. The truth was that she didn’t think that Wilder thought very much of anyone other than himself, but she knew that beneath her sharp exterior Dulcie had an unexpected vulnerability, so she kept her thoughts to herself.

‘A fine thing it’s going to be, me having to say that I had to stay in on Valentine’s Day when everyone else at work is talking about where they went,’ Dulcie continued.

Sally looked at her. ‘Well, if you’re at a loose end you could always come to Sussex with me for the weekend,’ she told her. ‘They’re having a dance at the hospital on Saturday for those patients who are well enough to attend. George was saying only the last time I spoke to him that they’re short of girls to partner the men. There’s two single beds in the room where I’m staying. I’m sure Mrs Hodges, the landlady, won’t mind you using the spare bed.’

‘What? Me go to some hospital to dance with sick men?’ Dulcie demanded scornfully. ‘I’d have to be hard up before I’d want to do something like that.’

Repressing her instinctive urge to let Dulcie see what she really thought of her callousness, Sally mentally counted to ten, and then told her firmly, ‘Well, it’s up to you, of course, Dulcie. I’d be the last person to suggest that you sacrifice having a good time to benefit anyone else, but those poor boys have been through an awful lot – and lost an awful lot – for our sakes, you know. They are always so grateful to have visitors. They’d be especially grateful to have the opportunity to dance with a girl as pretty as you. Of course, if you’re thinking that Wilder might not approve …’ she added craftily.

‘Huh, it’s not up to him to approve of what I decide to do. I’m perfectly capable of making up my own mind about that, thank you very much.’ Privately after what Sally had said, Dulcie was thinking that it might not be a bad idea to be able to tell Wilder truthfully that she had gone to a dance without him and been asked to dance by scores of smitten young men. That would teach him not to use his leave to go to boxing matches instead of taking her out.

‘All right then,’ she told Sally grudgingly. ‘I’ll go but if Wilder finds out that he can get leave after all, I’ll have to change my mind,’ she warned.

‘That’s fine,’ Sally agreed. Whilst George had told her how keen the hospital was to get girls to attend the Saturday night dance they were giving for their patients, she suspected that Dulcie wasn’t exactly the kind of girl he had had in mind. She hardly had the milk of human kindness flowing through her veins. As Sally had seen for herself on her first visit to the hospital the previous month, some of the men were terribly badly disfigured from the injuries they had suffered, so much so in some cases that their own relatives refused to visit them. It was too late now, though, for her to regret having made her impulsive suggestion.

On Valentine’s Day Tilly was up early, wishing that the morning wasn’t so dark and that she could watch for the postman’s arrival from her bedroom window.

However, when she went downstairs, she discovered that she had had her own personal postal delivery because there was a card lying on the hall floor with her name on it but without a postage stamp, showing that Drew must have posted his card to her on his way to work. Smiling happily, Tilly hugged the card to her.

On her own way downstairs, Olive watched her. It didn’t seem so very long ago that she had been the one to secretly send her daughter a Valentine’s card. Now Tilly had no need of such maternal care, because she had Drew. Olive could remember how she herself had felt on receiving that precious first Valentine’s card from Tilly’s father: the excitement; the longing; the shared stolen kisses. What was that ache in her heart? What was wrong with her? She was thirty-seven and not a girl any more.

No, she wasn’t a girl but she was a mother, she reminded herself as she followed Tilly into the kitchen, thinking sadly as she did so that these days she and Tilly were hardly ever alone together. Was Tilly avoiding being alone with her because she knew that her mother was concerned about the growing intensity of her relationship with Drew?

‘From Drew?’ Olive asked, nodding her head in the direction of the card Tilly was still clutching to her chest as she followed her into the kitchen.

‘Yes,’ Tilly acknowledged happily. She wasn’t going to open her card until she was on her own. Reading Drew’s first Valentine’s card to her was something very special and very private.

Olive started to fill the kettle and then stopped, turning round to put it down and look at her daughter.

‘Tilly, I hope you haven’t forgotten what I said to you about you being so young and—’

‘I’m old enough to know how I feel about Drew, Mum,’ Tilly stopped her mother immediately. This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have – not today on Valentine’s Day, when all she wanted to think about was Drew and their love for one another.

Olive could feel her heart thumping.

‘You’re eighteen, Tilly, that’s all, and there’s a war on.’

‘Exactly,’ Tilly shot back. ‘I’m eighteen and there’s a war on. Boys my age are joining up to fight and die for this country, Mum, just like my dad did. If Drew was one of them I—’

She broke off as the kitchen door opened and Agnes came in, her face pink as she clutched a white envelope. ‘The postman’s just been,’ she beamed, breathless with an innocent happiness that for Olive contrasted painfully sharply with Tilly’s hostility towards her.

Now wasn’t the time to talk rationally to her daughter, Olive recognised.

Later, when the girls had all left for their respective jobs, as she put away the washed and dried breakfast things and then set about sweeping the kitchen floor as she listened to more of Elsie and Doris Waters’ Home Hints on the wireless, Olive reflected that all she wanted to do was protect her daughter, and it hurt her that Tilly couldn’t see that. It was a pity that she had agreed to be on WVS mobile canteen duty tonight to fill in for a colleague from another branch of their organisation, before her regular WVS meeting, Olive reflected. Now she would have preferred to remain here at home so that she could mend things with Tilly before she went out for the evening. The last thing she wanted was her passionate and sometimes headstrong young daughter going out in a rebellious mood, and with discord between them. Despite what Tilly seemed to want to believe, Olive could remember perfectly well how it felt to be young and in love on Valentine’s Day.

It had, after all, been on the evening of Valentine’s Day that Tilly’s father, Jim, had proposed to her.

Without realising she had done so, Olive stopped sweeping, her gaze clouding with memories as she clasped the handle of her brush.

There had been no special meal out for her and Jim the night he had proposed. He’d arrived home on leave unexpectedly, and she’d found him waiting patiently in the rain for her outside the small clothing company where she’d been taken on as a machinist. He’d had a bit of a cough even then, she remembered. They’d been walking out together for just over a year. She’d met him through one of the other girls at the factory whose brother he’d been on leave with. She’d liked him right from the start. Tall, and handsome, and with the kindest eyes and smile she’d ever seen, he’d made her feel so safe with him and so proud to be his girl, even if his parents, especially his mother, had thought that he could do better for himself and hadn’t really approved of her, left orphaned as a teenager and with no family of her own to support her. It had brought her so much joy to see him standing outside the factory, smoking a Woodbine as he waited for her, the collar of his army greatcoat turned up against the drizzle, that she had felt as though the sun had come out. He’d brought her a Valentine’s card that he bought for her in Paris. She still had it upstairs, along with the letters he had written her. As if in a dream, Olive leaned her sweeping brush against the table and headed for the stairs.

Upstairs in her bedroom she kneeled down on the floor to pull Jim’s battered suitcase from underneath her bed. Since Olive kept a spotless house there wasn’t so much as a speck of dust on the case, the familiar lock clicking open beneath her fingers. Fingers that trembled slightly as though she were still that young girl he had courted with so much love and tenderness. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done this, Olive acknowledged as she opened the case.

Inside it was Jim’s greatcoat and the medal he had received for his bravery in the field. ‘Everyone gets them, if they live long enough,’ he had told her. There had been so much pain in his eyes on that leave home – his last before the end of the war. She’d found out later from his nightmares that he’d been the only member of his platoon to survive when the trench they were in had come under attack, and that he’d stayed with two of his dying fellow soldiers until the end rather than make his own escape. That had been Jim all over, always thinking of others before himself. It had been the gas from those attacks that had damaged his lungs, which had ultimately led to his death. The man who had come home to her after the war had been a shadow of the young man with whom she had fallen in love, but today it wasn’t that sick dying Jim she wanted to remember. Today she wanted to remember the handsome young soldier who had brought her a Valentine’s card from Paris, and with it a special bottle of scent.

Very carefully Olive folded back Jim’s greatcoat, smoothing the front of the fabric, much as she had smoothed Jim’s poor damaged chest in those last awful months and weeks of his life.

Beneath the coat, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and tied in blue satin ribbon, were the letters he had written to her and the cards he had sent her.

That special Valentine’s card, though, wasn’t with the others. Instead it was in the box in which she had received it – a lovely silver-coloured box with a red satin heart on the front of it and the words ‘To my Sweetheart’ written on it.

Was it her imagination or did even the box still smell of foreign places and war? For a moment tears blurred Olive’s eyes as she opened the box to reveal the card inside it. On top of a delicate cream lace underlay, hand-painted pink and blue flowers on their green stems twined all round the red satin heart decorated with tiny seed pearls at the centre of the card. Inside there was a small verse: ‘Here is my love, from a heart that’s true. A true blue heart that beats just for you.’

Jim had told her that there was a shop in Paris that sold cards made especially for the British servicemen to send home to their girls. Olive’s hand shook, a tear rolling down her face. Quickly she brushed it away, her desire to protect her precious memento overcoming her emotions.

What was she doing up here behaving like this? She was far too old for this kind of silliness. And too old to sometimes miss and long for the comfort of a protective loving pair of male arms to hold her, for that special something that a loving couple shared?

Yes. She really didn’t know what was getting into her these days, Olive berated herself, as she replaced the card in its box and put it back in the case, closing it and pushing it back under the bed.