It was very dark inside the house, for the blackout curtains were drawn, the oil lamp was out and the fire had dwindled to a single coal which was little more than a pink glow in a heap of whitening ash and gave out no light at all. Fortunately, being in the dark didn’t worry Barbara Nelson. Not that she would have admitted to it if it had. Having grown up in the North End, with a harsh-tongued fisherman for a father, she’d learned to keep her fears hidden from a very early age. In fact, it was her mother’s proud boast that ‘our Babs’ was the toughest thing in shoe-leather. ‘Blust gal!’ she would brag to her neighbours. ‘She don’ turn hair fer nothin’.’
Until that evening Barbara had shared her opinion. Now she wasn’t quite so sure, for her hair was bristling from nape to forehead and her head was so full of unfamiliar emotions that she felt quite giddy under their impact. Had she really agreed to go out with a soldier? She, hard-to-get, wise-cracking, independent Spitfire Nelson, the girl who made mincemeat of wolves? What on earth had got into her?
She picked her way through the furniture to the mantelpiece, scrabbled her fingers along it until she found the candlestick and matches and produced a light. But then, instead of removing her coat and tiptoeing upstairs to bed as she usually did on a Saturday night, she stood before the hearth, candlestick in hand and leant forward towards the mirror. She’d never been vain. She was too busy and too sensible for that. So it was most unlike her to spend time gazing at her reflection. But everything she’d done that evening had been unlike her – at least everything she’d done after she met Steve Wilkins. Just talking to him had made her feel special. And the look on his face when he’d asked her out had been the best of all. That had made her feel beautiful. To remember it made her blush, even there in the chill of that small cold room.
She put her free hand against her cheek to hold back its rising warmth, and thought how silly she was being. She wasn’t beautiful. She was just Barbara Nelson who lived in the North End and was very ordinary.
But the person who gazed back at her from the mirror was unlike any image of herself she’d ever seen. The funny face she’d accepted until then, with its odd-shaped nose, its rough skin and its mop of uncontrollable hair, had been transformed. What she saw now was almost ethereal, heart-shaped and dreamy and set off by a halo of thick, dark, contented curls, with skin the colour of apricots, brow and cheekbones gilded by candlelight, eyes huge and lustrous. She gazed and gazed until her breath misted the glass. How could she look so serene when her thoughts were in such a turmoil?
And come to that, how could she look so innocent when she’d just been telling lies? Well not exactly lies perhaps, but not the whole truth, and she’d always been a stickler for the truth. But tonight, when Steve had asked her whether she and Vic were related, she’d said no, at once and without thinking, and that wasn’t strictly true. And it wasn’t fair to Vic either. Until that evening, she’d accepted that they were as good as engaged. Not committed, with a ring and everything, but sort of understood so that she knew what sort of direction her life was going to take – a few years earning her living and larking about with her friends, dancing and going to the pictures, keeping her admirers at arm’s length, a little while in the army if the war was still going on when she was eighteen, and then she and Vic would get married and settle down and raise a family the same as everyone else in the North End. They’d been going out, off and on, since she was sixteen and although she didn’t exactly love him, she liked him well enough, they got on all right, they were well matched. And she knew how to handle him, which was half the battle when it came to being married. Now she wasn’t so sure that that was what she wanted to do. In fact, she wasn’t sure about anything. I don’t know what’s got into me, she thought.
But that wasn’t true. She did know. It was because Steve was so attractive. Because he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Because he was tougher than she was. Not tough in the way she was used to in the North End, all fists and mouth, but in a gentle way. Strong and silent, leading her away from trouble, with his hand under her elbow, insisting without saying a word. She’d never been treated like that before, not in the whole of her life. And especially by such a looker. The way he laughed, throwing back his head, brown eyes shining. You could like him for that alone. And she did like him. There was no doubt about that. She liked him very much. He couldn’t jitterbug for toffee nuts but waltzing with him had been terrific. She’d fancied quite a lot of young men in the last couple of years but always in a rather cerebral way, aware of their charm but physically unmoved by them. Now it made her blush for the second time that evening to remember what she’d been feeling as she danced with this one.
Behind her, the room was in its usual evening order, clean, tidy and swept speckless, but for once that was an irritant to her rather than a comfort. It wasn’t right for the world to be so ordinary and predictable when she had changed so much. She could still smell the sausage and chips that she and her aunt had eaten for supper although the gate-legged table had been cleared, folded down and stood against the wall, all crumbs had been burnt, the frying pan scoured clean, and the remaining food carefully stored away, marge in its dish, bread in its tin. Her aunt Becky was a careful housewife and did constant battle with cockroaches and ‘other such vermin’. Even the rag rug had been given a beating before she settled for the night. The red circle at its centre might keep out any devils that happened to be looking down the chimney but lack of dust and crumbs was the best deterrent to black beetles.
The two rules of the house were clean as you go and a place for everything and everything in its place. Even now, excited as she was, Barbara was careful to take her coat upstairs to put it away and she carried the candle guardedly, shielding the flame with the palm of her hand so that it wouldn’t splutter and drop wax.
Like most of the cottages in the North End, Becky Bosworth’s was a basic two-roomed dwelling with no hall, no kitchen, no bathroom, no running water, no means of cooking other than the open fire and no sanitation. The two rooms were built one on top of the other like a pair of boxes and the stairs were in one corner, closed off by a door at either end and rising in a very steep spiral and complete darkness. So a candle was a necessity. As was a chamber-pot under the double bed to save you having to run out to the privy in the cold. And a stone hot-water bottle for warmth in the winter.
The one in the bed that night still had quite a bit of heat in it. Barbara eased it over the mattress until it was underneath her cold feet. Now that she’d blown out the candle and opened the curtains to let in the moonlight, she could see that frost ferns had already grown halfway up the window and that her breath was pluming before her in the cold air of the room. She heaped the bedclothes round her shoulders and tried to settle to sleep. But she was as wide awake as if it were early morning. Steve, she thought. I wonder what you’re doing now. Halfway back to base, I s’pose. And she wondered whether he was thinking of her.
The minutes flowed pleasurably by, rich with remembered delights. Aunt Becky snored companionably. The last of the night’s revellers made their noisy way back to the North End. There was quite a racket going on in one of the adjoining yards, a gang of boys horsing around and hollering, singing rude songs at the top of their voices, ‘Roll me oover in the cloover …’ kicking the dustbins. They go on like that, Barbara thought, someone’ll be down after them an’ they’ll get a whack round the lugs. I bet you never see Steve kicking the dustbins – even if he did trip over the mangle.
On which thought, she finally drifted into sleep.
Three rows of houses away, over in Cooper’s Yard, Vera Castlemain was waiting up. She always sat up on a Saturday night, to keep the fire in until her son came home. When her husband Shrimpy wasn’t at sea with the fishing boats, he spent his evenings in the pub and took himself off to bed as soon as he got in, usually grumbling that she spoilt the boy and that she was wasting good coal. But she sat on, her head bent over the book she wasn’t reading, her ears strained for the first sound of her returning darling, eager for his company.
Even when he came home after midnight, she was glad to see him and got up at once to brew him a mug of tea or Camp coffee and to say, as she did that night, ‘Did ’ee have a good time, lovey?’
Vic settled in his father’s seat before the fire, propped his feet on the fender and smiled at her. ‘You know me.’
‘Was your Barbara there, my lovey?’
He smiled again. ‘Of course. I took her, didn’t I?’
She couldn’t help admiring him. He was such a good boy, so strong an’ clever an’ handsome, an’ head over heels in love with his Barbara. Had a picture of her on the ol’ wall upstairs an’ everythin’. Though she didn’t always treat him right, bad little mawther. Teased him ragged sometimes. ‘Be nice when you’re married,’ she said, handing him his mug of coffee.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It will.’ There’ll be a bit less of this silly nonsense in the dancehall then. He’d spent the last half of the evening in the pub with his friends drinking a pint of bitter and talking himself out of his ill-humour, but the memory of being manhandled still rankled.
He looks a bit down, poor lad, Vera thought, settling back in her own chair on the other side of the fire. And she tried to cheer him up by reminding him of how popular he was. ‘I s’pose all your friends was there.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘They were. Matter of fact, I went off to the pub afterwards with Spikey and ol’ Tubby.’
‘That was nice.’
‘We been planning our futures,’ he said. Actually they’d been bragging about their ambitions – but that was planning in a way. ‘I’m not going to be desk clerk all my life. You watch me, Ma. In five years’ time I shall have business of my own. Staff, big car. There’ll be no holding me then.’ And no frogmarching me out of a dancehall either. ‘You just watch. Then I’ll come back here an’ build you a big house by the river with a garden and a summer house, an’ you can sit out in the sun an’ eat strawberries all day an’ be a lady of leisure.’
Vera didn’t doubt it. He was so clever he was capable of anything. ‘That’ll be lovely,’ she purred, round face beaming. ‘Drink your coffee, lovey. Don’t let it go cold.’
‘I think I shall have a bit of a lie-in tomorrow,’ he decided, as he sipped the coffee. His father was at sea till midday so the luxury was possible. ‘I’ll probably nip round an’ see Barbara in the afternoon.’ She might need talking round a bit after all that stupid nonsense with the soldiers but she usually went out with the gang of a Sunday and he was part of the gang. ‘We might go to the pictures. There’s a cowboy on.’
‘Thass right, bor,’ Vera approved. ‘You like good cowboy.’
The sight of her bland doting face was making him feel irritable, the way it so often did, reminding him of how badly he’d been treated. Under the muddling haze of hurt pride and ignominy, grievance still swelled and prowled, a dark pirhana in a murky pool. ‘There’s too many soldiers in this town,’ he complained.
She agreed with him automatically. ‘Too many on ’em. Yes, my lovey, thass the size uv it. Millions so that say in the paper. Off to France, poor boys. An’ then what’ll happen to ’em out there? Thousands’ll be killed so that say in the paper. That don’t bear thinkin’ about.’
Vic was lost in his complaint and paid no attention to her. ‘Far too many,’ he said. ‘You can’t move for them. Great feet everywhere.’ He looked down at his own neat size eights and remembered the great feet of that soldier, walking out onto the dance floor with Barbara. Just because he’s tall and he’s got great big feet, that doesn’t give him the right to walk all over us and he needn’t think it.
Back in the barracks, the big feet were propped up on the bedrail while their owner stretched out on the inadequate length of his mattress and smoked his last cigarette of the evening – like everybody else in the hut. Their twenty-four, companionable red fireflies glowed and eddied in the darkness around him. It was long past lights-out and they were gradually settling for the night in a diminishing murmur of voices and a fug of stale sweat, beery breath, discarded socks and dying cigarette stubs. Despite the discomforts of army life, Private Steve Wilkins was supremely and utterly happy. Not for him the surprise of his dancing partner, far less the jealousy of Victor Castlemain. He had found his girl.