Better Days will Come

‘Now look here, Norris,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m not going to be anybody’s tart. Me and mine are not for sale.’

His hand went up her skirt and groped for her knickers. ‘Come on, girl,’ he said huskily. ‘You know you’d like it. You used to be a little firebrand when you were young. I reckon I could relight that fire again.’

She flung her hand at his face and her finger caught him in the eye. He sprang back into his seat with a howl of pain and lashed out with his arm, hitting her on the side of her head. ‘You stupid cow,’ he spat. Now Grace wasn’t sure what to do. The most sensible thing would be to get out and walk but he had brought her at least three, maybe four miles from home. In the split second before opening the door and getting out, she heard voices. Grace glanced behind them and saw a woman and her three children heading in their direction. Up ahead was a little thatched cottage. There were no other houses in the lane. The woman most likely lived there.

‘Norris,’ she said as firmly as she could despite the sickening feeling gripping her whole body, ‘are you going to turn this car around and take me home or am I going to scream blue bloody murder and let that woman call the police?’

Without another word, he started the car. They drove back in silence but as he dropped her near the crossing, he snatched her arm again. ‘Think about it, Grace. I could cut your rent if you prefer. I’ll wait to hear from you.’

‘Then you’ll have a bloody long wait.’

As she slammed the door, he pointed a finger at the glass and shouted, ‘I’m warning you, Grace Rogers. You’d be a fool to make an enemy of me.’

Five

When Grace got back home, to her surprise, Rita still wasn’t back from school. She wasn’t unduly concerned. Rita had probably stayed on in the gym for netball practice or something. Grace set about getting the tea ready. She didn’t have many potatoes left in the enamel bin. She had seen some seed potatoes in Potter and Bailey’s but if you bought them, you had to sign a paper to say you were going to use them for planting. Grace supposed they would come round to your house and check up on you in the spring so she didn’t chance it. She only peeled two. That would be plenty for her and Rita. Bonnie was the one with the big appetite. She sighed and bit back her tears. This was almost as bad as the feeling she’d had when Michael was killed. Almost but not quite.

The loss of her husband was final, she’d known as soon as she’d got the telegram that she would never see him again, but the ‘loss’ of her daughter was cloaked in hope, the hope that one day she would walk through that door again. She sighed. She didn’t want to think of Bonnie ill or, worse still, lying in a ditch somewhere, but sometimes the darker thoughts crept in uninvited. She cleared her throat and swallowed the aching lump that had formed. Be rational, she told herself. There was no reason to think that any harm had befallen her. She had to accept that Bonnie had run away, that was all.

Seeing Norris had unsettled her again. Whatever women saw in the man now she couldn’t think, but when they were young, he had been a lot better looking and he could charm the birds from the trees with that silver tongue of his. He’d made no secret of his desire for her when they were youngsters but why now? Why did he still want her when he could have the pick of any girl in Worthing? The years hadn’t been kind to him. These days he was a thickset man with large jowls and a paunch. The richer he became the less attractive he became but he didn’t seem all that bothered. He really thought money could buy him anything and he was ruthless. The business with the rent had been going on for years and because people were reluctant to talk about money it had taken ages for them to realise that they were all paying different amounts. There was no doubt that if he cut Grace’s rent, it would make life a lot easier, especially now that Bonnie’s wage wasn’t coming into the house, but she wasn’t going to succumb to him – even if she had to wear frayed jumpers and eat half a potato for her dinner for the rest of her life. She still had her pride and her good name, for God’s sake.

As well as the potato shortage, there was a paper shortage and the butcher had said there was little hope of poultry being on the menu for Christmas, unless, of course, she wanted to use the black market. Grace had never done that. She didn’t want to do it on principle and besides, they charged such high prices.

Rita burst through the door in a state of high excitement and, hardly stopping to draw breath, she blurted out that she’d been to Hubbard’s.

‘Whatever for?’ Grace wanted to know.

‘I thought someone might be able to tell me something about Bonnie, Mum.’

Grace stiffened. ‘And did they?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Rita. ‘When I got there, the girl in the office thought I had come for an interview.’

Grace lowered herself onto a chair. ‘We always said you would leave school at Easter.’

‘I know, Mum, but hear me out, will you? This woman – she had tightly permed hair and a big tummy like you wouldn’t believe – she rattled off so many questions, I could hardly think straight. She looked such a sight, Mum.’ Rita waved her arms and strutted about, mimicking the woman and making her mother smile, in spite of herself.

‘What sort of questions?’

‘Was I punctual, did I have a clean bill of health, did I have clean habits, was I teachable and how would I treat a difficult customer. By the time I cottoned on to what was happening, Mum, I felt too embarrassed to say anything. So I ended up being marched up to the ladies’ fashion department.’

By this time, Grace was laughing.

‘It’s so different now,’ Rita went on. ‘There’s no trace of the fire and it looks really classy.’

The whole town had been stunned by the fire which ripped through Hubbard’s in the early hours of Wednesday 22nd August. The upper floors had been totally gutted and the damage below was extensive. The fire itself was put out in less than an hour but it took no less than twenty fire crews to do the job, some coming from as far away as Crawley. The family firm reopened the store in time for Christmas, just, and although they had paid their staff since the fire, it was rumoured that they were already short-staffed.

‘I was only there five minutes when I was introduced to Miss Bridewell, the manageress,’ Rita went on, her eyes dancing with excitement. ‘“Would you consider being a Saturday girl, Miss Rogers?”’ Rita mimicked her affected accent. ‘“The run up to Christmas can be hectic and you seem a very capable gel.”’

Grace stopped laughing and put her hand to her mouth. Rita was a bright girl. She had passed the eleven-plus and made it to the grammar school and for that reason, Grace had wanted Rita do an extra year, but she would be sixteen in February. Was it time to let her go out to work?

‘But what about your weekends at the Railway Café?’

Rita worked there every Saturday morning, clearing tables and helping with the washing up. The owners Salvatore and Liliana Semadini, Italians, had taken over in 1945. Before then it had always been a rather dingy place and not very clean but with Salvatore’s cheerfully optimistic outlook, it had completely changed. Liliana was a brilliant cook who could make a little go a very long way.

‘I’m sure they’ll understand,’ said Rita doggedly.

Her mother wasn’t about to give up so easily. ‘And then there’s secretarial college? We had such plans …’

‘Mum, they were your plans, not mine. Oh please let me go. This is an opportunity too good to miss. I like being around people. You know me, I like talking. If I was in a typing pool, I wouldn’t be allowed to say a word to a soul all day.’

‘But being able to type opens up all sorts of possibilities,’ Grace insisted.

‘Miss Bridewell said if I suit, I can start as a full-time shop assistant in January. January 5th. It’s a Monday.’

Grace couldn’t think straight. This was a disappointment because from the moment they were born, she had such plans for her girls. The war had changed everything. There were such good opportunities for women in the jobs market now. She knew Bonnie had wanted to be a nursery nurse, and Grace had been happy with that, but now that the girl had gone, would she get her training? She couldn’t do anything about Bonnie but she could do something about Rita. Grace knew that if Rita could get a secretarial post, she would never have the kind of worries about money that she had endured. Shop work was all well and good but it didn’t pay very well.

Rita was pressing for an answer. ‘So what do you say, Mum?’

There was no doubt that having Rita at work would be a godsend. Her money would make up the shortfall without Bonnie’s wage. Grace was already behind on the coal money and if they had another winter like last year and had to cut down any more, they’d both freeze to death long before the spring came.

‘Mum?’

‘I still want you to learn to type,’ Grace insisted.

‘I can go to night classes.’

Grace made a big thing of giving in, but in truth she was relieved. She agreed to let Rita become a Saturday girl for the whole of December and to begin in the fashion department on January 5th.

Bonnie was as content as she could be under the circumstances but she missed her home in Worthing and she missed her mother and Rita terribly. As she walked around the shops in Oxford Street on her afternoon off, she was missing her friend Dinah as well. How they would have loved trying on the dresses and taking tea in Lyons Corner House together.

Up until now, the full extent of bomb damage in the capital had eluded her. There had been several bombing incidents in Worthing but nothing on the scale she saw in London. Large areas were screened off but the obvious gap in the buildings told her straight away where a house or a shop was missing. Although it was strictly forbidden, the bombsites were swarming with boys playing war games and cowboys and Indians. In some areas, whole streets had been reduced to rubble. Shortages of building materials meant that rebuilding the nation’s capital was a slow business.

Shortages of other commodities were acute as well. Women still found it necessary to queue for hours outside a butcher’s or a grocer’s and Bonnie was surprised to see that large areas of public parks were still given over to allotments. There were few cars on the streets either. Petrol rationing kept their numbers down to a bare minimum.

Bonnie was lonely and friendless but the money in her post office account was mounting up. She was careful not to spend a shilling more than she had to. Once her waistline started to expand it wouldn’t be long before she’d have to dip into her savings in order to live. Soon she’d have to find a place where she could go to have the baby and then there was the thorny problem of what she would do after that. Where would she live? More importantly how could she take care of the baby and support them both?

When these things weren’t swirling around in her head, Bonnie struggled with a terrible ache in her heart. Why, oh why hadn’t her romance with George worked out? What had she done wrong? She couldn’t … wouldn’t believe he was a rotter. Hadn’t he told her time and again how much she meant to him? He’d made plans for his son from the moment she’d told him she was pregnant. She smiled fondly. He’d been so sure the baby was a boy.

‘Of course it’s a boy,’ he’d said with a mixture of indignation and pride when she’d challenged his assumptions. ‘That’s my boy. In my family, the first one is always a boy.’ And when she’d laughed, he’d kissed her until she was breathless.

It was quite ridiculous but the thing she worried about most of all was the locket George had given her. It was her first real present and when he had given it to her, George had declared his undying love. It wasn’t new. The catch looked a bit insecure but she was sure that if it did come off it would only fall into her bra. She must have dropped it in the factory because she remembered fingering it just outside the door.

When she’d arrived at the old factory on that last day in Worthing, it was deserted but the door leading to the street was open. She’d heard someone moving about in a room somewhere inside and had gone to see if it was George but she was met by a man in a brown overalls she presumed was the caretaker. He had his back to her and didn’t know she was there but she’d panicked and made a bolt for the entrance, tripped and dropped her bag. She was just by the door when he spotted her and shouted. She’d been so anxious to get away she’d just stuffed everything in her bag and run. The locket must have been lost then. If only she had stopped and turned around for a minute, she might have seen it on the ground. She missed it very much. Apart from the baby, it was the only thing she had to remember George by.

To ease her anguish, Bonnie began to write letters to the address in Pavilion Road. She didn’t post all of them, but every chance she got she told George about her day. Of the three or four that she did post, she wrote her address at the top of the page and begged him to let her know how he was. Through her tears, she promised not to make any demands on him. She only needed to know that he was alive and well. She did her best to make the letters upbeat. He mustn’t know how miserable she was. Once the envelope was sealed, she put her name and address on the back so that Mrs Kerr could get in touch with her and tell her if George was ill or something. Sometimes Bonnie was so miserable she thought she was losing her mind with grief but there was something within her that wanted the whole world to know how much she cared for him.

She did make contact with someone – Miss Reeves. Bonnie had remembered seeing an advertisement in the local paper with a box number for replies. That gave her the idea of going to the post office and asking about it. Bonnie discovered that, for a small rental fee, she could have her own box number with a key in the local branch. It was an ideal way of keeping in touch without anyone knowing where she lived. She reasoned that she had upset her mother enough so she would not worry her again but she was desperate for news of her and her sister. Miss Reeves was the obvious choice. At Sunday school she had made much of honesty and being trustworthy, so Bonnie wrote to her, asking for information about her family. In her letter, she explained that she could not, for very personal reasons, contact them herself, and asked Miss Reeves to send her news of her mother and sister.