A Christmas Promise

THREE (#u104d1627-3b1e-5e0a-9cb3-2b5f1a997546)

‘I see there’s a new lodger in Ian Simpson’s house, Olive,’ Nancy Black said as she closed her front door and began to attack her pathway with a balding sweeping brush. Olive was not in the mood for Nancy’s prattle this morning but knew she that thinking of mundane things would stop her fretting about her daughter, Tilly. Nancy would jump at the chance of a bit of gossip, no matter how small or insignificant. Olive knew her neighbour, like a starving crow, fed on the smallest piece of tittle-tattle for as long as possible.

‘I heard on the wireless that the war might be over by Christmas,’ Olive tried changing the subject, knowing that Nancy, now leaning on the threadbare brush, enjoyed a good old moan about the war.

Keeping busy as usual, Olive intended to fill every minute of her day so she didn’t worry. She hadn’t seen Tilly since April, when she’d been home on forty-eight hours’ leave, and now it was September – and soon to be her twenty-first birthday. Tilly had written only sporadically, and Olive had no idea where she was posted. It was a big wrench to a mother who had watched and nurtured her only daughter so carefully for those twenty-one years.

Olive couldn’t stop the disturbing thoughts that sometimes filled her mind in the darkest, sleep-deprived hours of the night, not only because she had no idea where Tilly was since she moved out of London, but also because she hadn’t been honest with Tilly for the first time in her daughter’s life: she had kept the really important news that Drew was in London to herself. Sally had told her he was being discharged from hospital any day now and she wondered if he would go straight back to America as his father had wished.

‘There haven’t been as many raids lately and if the news is anything to go by, it looks like the Nazis are running out of steam,’ Nancy called over the fence, breaking into Olive’s thoughts. ‘All the hysterics from Hitler about taking over London have come to nothing, just as I knew it would.’ She gave an exaggerated nod of her turbaned head. ‘I could have told them that Hitler was full of hot air … silly man, doing all that ranting.’

‘Maybe Mr Churchill should have come to you first, Nancy,’ Olive answered drily. ‘It would have saved an awful lot of bother.’ She shook her head as she dipped her disintegrating chamois leather into the galvanised bucket and, having given it a good rinse, she then vigorously removed all trace of city grime from her front windows, saying as she wiped, ‘We’ve got Hitler on the run now for sure.’

Olive wished the war would be over soon for the sake of both sides. She recalled reading in the newspaper that the German industrial port of Hamburg, was bombed nine times in eight days! It must have been as bad as the blitz, she thought. She believed that not everybody was bad to the core, but though she felt a deep abiding pity for the thousands of people who had been killed in the resulting firestorm that had destroyed nearly half of Hamburg’s factories, she wouldn’t say so to Nancy.

‘Serves ’em right,’ Nancy said with a vehemence so unbecoming it made Olive flinch. Knowing that German towns were now being blasted to oblivion didn’t give Olive cause to rejoice. Instead she grieved for all the wives and mothers who had lost someone so precious they could never be replaced; she thought of the fathers and sons who would never live to see their families thrive, no matter what country they came from … It was difficult to delight in the misery of others.

‘I must say, though,’ Nancy continued unabashed, ‘it didn’t take Mussolini long to renege on his duties once Rome was bombed.’ The Italian Fascist had been arrested after surrendering, Olive remembered. ‘He soon changed his tune when the war began turning in Britain and the Allies’ favour.’

Olive realised the optimistic news did little to alleviate Nancy’s black mood when her neighbour said through pursed lips, ‘I never did trust that turncoat Mussolini.’

‘It’s easy to say that now, Nancy,’ Olive told her next-door neighbour, who was beating her doormat, causing plumes of dust to spoil the brightness of the sunny summer morning, not to mention Olive’s newly polished windows. ‘Here, isn’t it your Tilly’s birthday soon?’ Nancy’s sudden comment sounded more like an accusation and Olive nodded as she continued to work. Olive had never imagined Tilly celebrating her twenty-first birthday fighting for King and country, but then, she mused, nobody would have thought there would be another war after the last one. Olive nodded in reply to Nancy and swallowed the painful lump of fear-infused pride.

‘I think it might rain later,’ Nancy said in her usual contrary fashion, looking up at the perfectly calm pale blue sky as Olive, once again, began to polish her windows. She wasn’t in the mood for Nancy’s constant whinging today; she had far too much to do before she left for the Red Cross shop where she helped out most days, and she had to try to get into town to buy Tilly a birthday present.

She had saved all her points and coupons as well as the money in the Post Office for just this occasion, and she couldn’t wait to have a look around the shops, although there wasn’t much to buy these days. Certainly, there wasn’t much in the way of luxury goods for twenty-first birthdays. It had been a long time since she had treated herself to a day in the West End.

Olive sighed as she brought her windows to a dazzling shine with the daily newspaper. So much had happened in the last four years it was hard to know a time when peace had been taken for granted. Taking a deep breath of warm morning air, Olive tried not to dwell on thoughts that would dim her usually positive outlook, knowing her temporary melancholia was caused by the lack of information about her daughter; she hadn’t had much in the way of letters since Tilly went back to camp after Easter leave, last April, giving her cause to worry – as any mother would.

But, Olive thought, at least she had the other girls to keep her going, and then there was Archie; he took her mind off her troubles, she reflected with a smile. At nearly forty, Olive recognised that although she wasn’t old, nor was she sixteen any more – even though Archie made her feel that young when he looked at her in that special way he had …

‘You are always on the go, Olive. You’ve been like a mother to those lodgers of yours. I never thought I’d see the day,’ Nancy said, breaking into Olive’s wonderful reverie of Archie.

‘I’m no different from anybody else, Nancy.’ But Olive felt a little glow of pride especially when she remembered that Dulcie had said she was her very own substitute mother. Dulcie, like all her belles, was like another daughter now, especially after her own mother had been tragically killed last March in the Bethnal Green underground crush. Brash, flinty, glamorous and a dyed-in-the-wool East Ender, Dulcie had married aristocratic RAF fighter pilot David, but she was still a frequent visitor to number 13, and Olive suspected she always would be.

‘But if Dulcie sees you as a mother figure, then she must also see you as a substitute grandmother,’ said Nancy, popping Olive’s little bubble of pride; knowing the grandmothers she had become acquainted with were all of matronly stock. Did she look like that? She hoped not, and she tried to keep herself neat and trim. And even if there was so little in the way of beauty care she still used her Pond’s cold cream every night, albeit more sparingly than she had done before the war.

‘I couldn’t stand Dulcie when I first met her,’ Nancy said. ‘ “Common” was the word that sprung to mind when she bobbed down Article Row with those swinging hips and all that fake …’

‘What fake?’ Olive stopped what she was doing and looked at Nancy, her brows furrowed.

‘All that lipstick and rouge, the dyed blond hair and the painted nails, not to mention those eyelashes – it’s a wonder she could see out of her own eyes!’

‘I thought she looked very glamorous,’ Olive lied – she wasn’t having Nancy push Dulcie’s reputation into the gutter – ‘and her hair was not dyed. She used to enhance her own natural blond with a lemon rinse and let the sun do the rest, that’s all.’ Olive wasn’t going to tell Nancy that she, too, thought Dulcie looked a little too ‘made up’ when she first came here. ‘Anyway, she worked on the perfume and make-up counter at Selfridges – she had to look glamorous, it was part of her job.’

It was funny how things turned out, Olive thought, remembering she hadn’t taken to Dulcie straight away when she first came to Article Row; she thought the girl from Stepney was a bad influence on young Tilly. But as it turned out, Dulcie was one of the kindest, most generously thoughtful people Olive had ever met; more so since she married David, who had been badly injured in the Battle of Britain in 1940.

David, Olive recalled, had spent many long months in hospital, and Dulcie surprised everybody by being one of his few visitors and had showed a deeply hidden, sensitive side to her nature that many people, including Olive, didn’t know she had. And now they had little Hope, their darling daughter, who had arrived prematurely– as had, it seemed, a lot of war babies. Olive gave a wry smile: terrible things, those air raids, she thought, knowing that as long as David and Dulcie were happy it was nobody’s business but their own how and when Hope had been conceived.

‘There is a telephone call for you, Mrs James-Thompson,’ said Dulcie’s housekeeper and mother’s help to little Hope and her sister’s boy, Anthony. ‘I will take the babies for their afternoon nap before you go to visit Mrs Robbins.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Wilson,’ Dulcie said, still not used to having help at home. She was surprised when she heard her sister’s voice on the other end of the line.

‘Dulce, are you in today?’

‘I’m going out later this afternoon, but I’m in now, obviously – you just rang me, you nit!’ She hadn’t seen her sister for weeks, which suited Dulcie, because every time she did hear from Edith it was because she wanted something. Last time it had been because she needed Dulcie and David to look after her little son, Anthony, for a few days, and that few days had been three months up to now.

‘Can I come over? I need to ask you something.’

‘Oh, ’ere goes,’ said Dulcie without preamble. ‘I thought it must be something like that.’

‘No, I don’t want anything from you – just a bit of your time, that’s all.’

‘Well, you’d better look sharp because I’m going shopping.’

Edith agreed and hung up while Dulcie wondered what it was her sister wanted this time. It was a shame that their mother hadn’t lived to see her grandchildren, after suffering a heart attack near Bethnal Green underground station, where Edith had actually given birth to the son her mum didn’t even know she was carrying.

‘Is Agnes still working on the underground then?’ Nancy asked conversationally.

Olive nodded, wondering what barbed comment Nancy was going to come out with next.

She didn’t have long to wait when Nancy said, ‘It was such a shame about Ted; but thinking about it now, Agnes would never have been able to compete with that grasping mother of his.’

‘Nancy!’ There was a warning note in Olive’s voice that she wasn’t going to listen to the venomous accusations her neighbour could spit out at will, even if Nancy did voice the things that other people thought. The girl had never known a family of her own, and Ted had become her whole life. When he was killed, Olive didn’t think Agnes would ever get over the shock. However, she soon realised that Agnes would have been stuck in a rut with Ted if he hadn’t been tragically killed in the same crush at Bethnal Green as Dulcie’s mother. Over a hundred people had been killed, though the tragedy hardly got a mention in the papers and not at all on the wireless.

Olive doubted Ted would have been ready to walk Agnes down the aisle while his mother still had breath in her body to disapprove, and that, Olive thought, was another thing she would keep her own counsel over, knowing Ted’s clingy mother and two young sisters depended upon him for everything.

‘Is Tilly still walking out with Dulcie’s brother, Rick?’

‘Are you training for military intelligence, Nancy?’ Olive asked, and immediately wanted to bite back the tart reply. She knew Nancy lived through the lives of others, maybe because she missed her daughter and two grandchildren more than she ever let on.

‘It was a shame about the American boy going home and not getting in touch again. They looked the ideal couple to me.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Olive answered. She could feel the heat of guilt creep up her neck and suffuse her face. If she had let Tilly know that ‘the American boy’, as Nancy called Drew, was here in London, her daughter would have been at his side like a shot. Despite the promise she had made to Drew’s father, after seeing the deep sorrow Tilly had suffered Olive wondered if she had done the right thing.

Sally had kept her informed as to his progress at St Barts, where Sally worked, and she knew that Drew didn’t want Tilly to see him confined to a hospital bed. ‘I’d have put good money on those two settling down together,’ Nancy continued, annoying Olive as she busied herself with everybody else’s business.

‘Tilly and Rick are walking out together, yes, and they seem very happy.’ Olive was quite pleased to talk about her daughter, although she must be getting on soon.

‘Is he still blind then?’ Nancy asked without preamble, making Olive wince at such tactlessness. How awful it would be if Rick, or even Dulcie, heard Nancy being so cavalier about Rick’s injuries, sustained while he was serving in North Africa last year.

But, sensing that her bluntness was intended to shock, Olive ignored her initial feelings of astonishment and said patiently, ‘Thankfully Rick has regained his sight, Nancy, and is even talking of going back into the army … but only to a desk job, mind.’

‘That’s a good thing,’ Nancy said, nodding., ‘He was such a good-looking young man. Such a shame …’

‘He’s still good-looking, and he’s on the mend now,’ Olive said with a hint of indignation. ‘He loves being a part of the army and can’t wait to get back.’ She knew Rick and Dulcie hadn’t had much of a home life but they had both found their own way now, especially since the war started. ‘He’s volunteered to go back, hoping to get the all clear from the medics any day now.’ Olive felt slightly peeved on Rick’s behalf.

‘I can’t say it did any damage to that confident personality of his. He was having a fine old time at Dulcie’s wedding last year,’ Nancy sniffed.