Over the next two and a half weeks, every man, woman and boy at Thompson’s shipyard – and the eight other shipyards dotted along the hem of the Wear – worked flat out to get ships sent down the ways. The month so far had seen the town’s biggest shipyard, William Doxford & Sons, send two tank-landing craft into the river, followed by Short Brothers and Pickersgill’s, who had launched one each.
The women kept up their classes in current affairs during their lunch breaks, their eagerness to hear what was happening in the world fired on by hopes of victory. The news, however, seemed to bring only death and destruction. Hundreds of British bombers hit Berlin and Essen, the Italian town of Monte Cassino was destroyed by Allied air strikes, a U-boat sunk the British corvette HMS Asphodel in the Atlantic Ocean, killing ninety-two of the ninety-seven men aboard, and in France, the former minister of the interior for the Vichy regime, Pierre Pucheu, was sentenced to death for treason and shot by a firing squad. Even Nature seemed bent on destruction when Mount Vesuvius erupted, killing twenty-six people and causing thousands to flee their homes.
The news back home was not particularly uplifting either. The Luftwaffe might have become strangers to the town over the past year, but the damage they’d already done was not easily fixed. Many wonderful Edwardian and Gothic structures that had been landmarks for decades had been destroyed: the grand Victoria Hall, the Winter Gardens and Binns, the town’s very own Harrods, had all been either totally demolished or badly damaged. However, it was the thousands of homes that had been made uninhabitable that caused the real problem. Overcrowding was rife.
The only positive amidst all the news of doom and gloom was that Polly’s worries about Tommy had abated tenfold since Gibraltar’s role in the war had shifted down a gear following the successful completion of the North African campaign and the surrender of Italy. This meant that the bomb-disposal unit Tommy was a part of, whose main aim had been to remove Italian limpet mines that enemy divers had attached to the hulls of Allied ships, was pretty much redundant. The work her husband was now doing was more akin to what he had done as a dock diver before the outbreak of war: underwater repair work on ships needed to transport supplies across the Mediterranean.
During this time, Dorothy suggested that Gloria change her own day for seeing Hope to give Bobby time with his mam, so that it would be just the two of them, enabling them to repair their fractured relationship, but Gloria had insisted that Dorothy keep to her normal routine. Seeing Dorothy’s puzzled look, Gloria had justified her decision by saying that it wasn’t that she didn’t want to patch up their differences, but she knew her eldest son needed the buffer of another person there – for the time being, anyway. ‘He’s struggling,’ she told Dorothy. ‘He mightn’t show it, but underneath that happy-go-lucky, cool-as-a-cucumber act, there’s turbulence.’
Dorothy, of course, didn’t mind being a buffer – she’d do anything for Gloria – and if mother and son needed an intermediary, she was happy to oblige. Besides, she was certain it wouldn’t be long before Bobby came round and saw sense. She’d make sure of that. Every time she walked with Bobby back to Foyle Street, she’d argue Gloria’s case and berate him for treating his mam like the Wicked Witch of the West and refusing to have anything to do with Jack. ‘He is Hope’s father,’ she’d say in a slightly exasperated tone into Bobby’s good ear.
Dorothy had told Angie she was convinced that if she could just explain to Gloria’s Neanderthal son that society’s conventions had changed – that the war had altered the way people lived and getting divorced and having children out of wedlock really weren’t anything to feel ashamed of – then all would be well. Bobby and Gloria would be close again and he and Jack would get on – they might possibly even be good buddies. Angie had no idea what a Neanderthal was, but knew when to keep quiet and simply nod and agree with her friend.
Helen also found herself subjected to similar tirades whenever Dorothy would drag her aside for a ‘quick chat’ that ended up being anything but quick. After listening, Helen would tell Dorothy that she didn’t think there was anything any of them could do other than wait it out, and she was sure the situation would sort itself ‘sometime soon’. To which Dorothy would huff and say, ‘Let’s hope sometime this century.’
Helen thought Jack was wise to agree to stay out of the way when Bobby paid his weekly visits to the flat, giving Gloria’s son the space he needed. If Jack went up against Bobby, it would only cause ructions, which would likely make Gloria feel as though she had to choose between her son and the man she loved. And she knew her father didn’t want that. It would be a recipe for disaster.
If Bobby didn’t want him around for a few hours on a Friday night, her father had told her, then that was fine with him. Even if Bobby never came round to accepting him in his mother’s life, then he’d deal with it. There were worse things.
Helen, though, could see that her father was becoming more impatient about when Miriam was going to file for divorce. She knew how desperate he was to make his union with Gloria legitimate. Living with her while still married to another woman did not sit comfortably on his shoulders. Not that it was something he talked about to Helen; she knew he did not want to bring his daughter onto the battlefield of his marriage.