Ella awoke in a sweat, her heart pounding, fearing she was late. The gritty feeling behind her eyes and the heaviness of her limbs told her that she had had very little sleep and it was going to be hard to get through the day. Beth was still sound asleep, so Ella climbed wearily out of bed and dressed before shaking her niece awake.
‘Time to get up now. I must get on. We’ve got tea this afternoon for the war widows. Where Mrs Ward imagines we’ll find the wherewithal to make scones for everyone, I don’t know. I promised Elsie I would give her a hand. I’ll see you downstairs.’
The day was going to be a busy one but Ella was glad of the distraction, resolving for the time being to put the matter of Beth and John’s arrangement out of her head. Beth had volunteered to run the crèche today so Ella took her place at the tea party. She had started to find tea with the war widows hard to endure. It reminded her forcefully of the loss of Thomas and today she felt remorse for not having written recently to Lilian, his widow.
Ella was still unable to think a great deal about Thomas’s death. It felt as though there was something terrifying hidden behind a door, a door that she only dared to open a little at a time to catch a glimpse of what lay behind. She hadn’t grieved properly yet and she wondered when she would. Perhaps it was because he was buried so far away, in France where he had fallen. The absence of a grave, of a proper burial service at home, seemed to have made his death feel unreal.
It certainly wasn’t a topic she could touch on with the war widows. She dispensed tea and scones, along with the last of Elsie’s precious strawberry jam, a sympathetic smile on her lips at all times. The atmosphere was a little subdued; whenever one of the ladies laughed she would quickly stifle it, as if mirth was unseemly at such a time. The widows were mostly young; younger than Ella. One or two had brought young babies into the room with them and these provided a common bond for many of the group. Yet Ella saw that others stayed away from the babies, gravitating towards each other and forming their own small group around a table. She guessed they must have been widowed before they had had a chance to start a family. Like her sister-in-law Lilian, they were left with nothing but memories of the husband they had lost.
When Ella at last fell into bed that night, she hoped her weariness would carry her swiftly into a deep sleep, but it was not to be. Beth had stayed downstairs, presumably in the hope of having a few last words with John before he left the next day. Ella found herself lying awake with her thoughts, which she could not prevent from following a loop. Albert, Thomas and now John. Was it possible that anyone could go to the Front and survive? She knew that of course they must, but tiredness dragged her down and muddled her thoughts until it seemed to her that everyone her family loved must be cursed.