Margaret sounded just like her mum. Thelma would definitely have called me a weedy knickers. In fact, as soon as I started to think about it, I knew she’d have been furious at me for giving up on Woman’s Friend and the team. Worst of all, though, was what Margaret said next.
“If you’re worried about looking after us, we could probably find somewhere else to live. George and I can take care of Stan. Big children do it in books all the time.”
“Oh, Marg, not in a hundred years,” I replied, appalled that this was what she might think. “It’s got nothing to do with you and the boys. You’re all lovely. And The Children Who Lived in a Barn isn’t real life,” I added, now regretting the discussion we’d had about her favourite book the previous week. “Is this where George wanting a job is coming from?”
Marg denied it, but pressed home her view that having Woman’s Friend here would be the most exciting thing in the world, and actually if I could get on with it that would be good, as she was already planning her own novel called The Children Who Lived in a Magazine Office, and needed to do the research.
“Now I think I’m tired enough to go to sleep,” she finished. “N’night, Emmy. Don’t worry, it will be all right. Will you come and tuck me in?” Then she gave me a big hug and I followed her back to their room.
After I was sure Marg was asleep, I sat on my own on the landing. Here were three children going through the most dreadful time in their short lives, but doing everything they could to cope and get on with things, whereas I had sort of just stopped. Marg shouldn’t be the one giving me the hug and telling me things would be all right. It was supposed to be the other way around.
She’s so like you, Thel, I said to myself, and then I pressed my nails into the palms of my hands because I missed my friend so very much, and crying about it wasn’t going to bring her back. “Bugger you, Hitler.”
It was what Thelma and Joan and young Mary and I used to say whenever the raids got a little unruly when we were on duty during the Blitz.
The next evening after dinner, I dragged Guy into the garden to marvel at Bunty’s tomato plants, which were now thriving thanks to Horace Batley-Norris’ plant food advice
“Guy,” I said, “if it’s all right with you, I’m going to come back into the office. I’m sorry I’ve neglected everything.”
I had hardly mentioned Woman’s Friend since Thelma had died.
“That’s good,” he said mildly. “As long as you’re sure.”
“Entirely sure,” I said. “Thank you for letting me just wander off.”
Guy frowned. “It’s not wandering off,” he said. “You’ve been doing the right thing. We all want to help, and God knows I’ve felt useless. Giving you a little time is the least I could do.”
“I haven’t even asked about Mrs. Porter,” I said, apologetically. “How is she?”
“Largely absent,” said Guy. “And not giving a hoot. That’s why it’s been easy for you to be off work. I’m assuming she’s moved on to her next whim.”
“Is there any news about the sale?” I asked. “We’d just got going with our plan.”
“And it was right that we decided to stop,” said Guy firmly. “Frankly, I’m not sure that anyone would want to back us now, even if they took the briefest look at the accounts. Woman’s Friend is a dog’s dinner. We’re losing readers hand over fist, and I’m not surprised. The issues coming up are dreadful and the decline is painfully clear. The odd decent short story and a nice cover picture, but other than that, it’s hardly worth the paper it’s printed on, let alone thruppence a copy.”
Guy was right. He had brought me the new issue, and calling it a dog’s dinner was being kind. Mr. Brand’s cover was, as ever, lovely, but once you opened it up, nothing made any sense.
A small paragraph on becoming a bus conductor (cut down from an informative two columns) was stuck in the corner next to a photograph of a thoughtful-looking Mrs. Porter holding a pen, which took up the rest of the page. There was only one piece of fiction instead of three, and an article on Errol Flynn’s hair had replaced Nurse McClay’s popular series “Coping with Baby.” Mrs. Fieldwick’s News from the Shed column had survived but was far shorter than usual and now accompanied by pictures of expensive brooches shaped as bunches of grapes. That at least made me smile, as clearly the only inspiration taken from Monica had been on the sartorial front. But there were hardly any paid advertisements, either, which probably explained Guy’s concerns.
Woman’s Friend wasn’t one thing or another. It felt rather like going to the greengrocer and finding potatoes and greens as normal, but next to them, an elaborate hat that cost fifty pounds, while the lady behind the counter was dressed like Queen Mary and wanted to know if you were planning a holiday in Biarritz. You couldn’t help wondering where the nice helpful man in the apron had gone.
It was a mess.
Our magazine had had its ups and downs, but it had always come back in the end. It was awful to see everyone’s hard work reduced to a nonsense. The Yours Cheerfully page was a shadow of itself, with just a handful of letters ranging from the trouble in finding domestic staff to someone vaguely missing their five-year-old, who was boarding at school. I wondered if Mrs. Porter had written them herself. Worst of all, it no longer included the message to readers asking them to send in letters so that we could write back. As for Woman’s Friend to Friend, which three months ago had been a page full of optimistic letters about plans so that one day anyone might get to see a doctor for free, now it didn’t exist at all.
I couldn’t blame the readers if they had gone off us. I wondered if we could get them back. I wondered if we could get Woman’s Friend back as a start.
There was, however, one tiny spark of hope.
“Guy,” I said, “did you say that the accounts are looking groggy?”
“Groggy?” he scoffed. “Virtually unconscious.”
“Do you think they could be revived?”
“Actually, I do. We’ve overhauled the Friend before, so we can certainly do it again. If the readers aren’t all happier having jumped ship to other magazines. It’s a crowded playing field.”
“Perhaps that works in our favour,” I said. “Maybe no one else will be interested in Cressida’s sale. Have you or Monica heard anything?”
Guy shook his head. “Rumours, but nothing concrete.”
“Well then,” I said, starting to perk up, “that may not be the disaster we think. After all, who’s going to want to invest in a dud? Anyone with half a brain will look at the books and see that the magazine’s not working. As you said, there comes a point when it will stop being worth buying.”
“This isn’t cheering me up,” said Guy, throwing a tomato into the air and catching it as if it was a tennis ball.
“Well, maybe it should,” I said. “What if the playing field doesn’t have anyone else trying to play?”
“True. But it would also mean we’ll struggle to find anyone to back us,” argued Guy.
Now I sighed heavily. “Have you read Winnie-the-Pooh?” I asked.
“No.”
“You should. You’re just like Eeyore. He’s lovely but not terrifically optimistic.”
Guy raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Help me feel hopeful.” Now I cut to the chase. “The children think we’re buying the magazine. Marg told me they’re looking forward to us working at the house and they’d all like to help out. Properly, with jobs. I have to admit she gave me pause to look at myself.” I felt my words catch in my throat. “Guy, I know I’ve taken my eye off things since Thel died, but if no one else has made an offer to the Egg and I’m not coming back into this far too late, do you think we could still give it a go?”
Guy looked at his tomato for what felt like ages. Finally, he slowly nodded.
“Monica and I did speak with a couple of people who were interested. We can go back and see. It might be too late, though,” he warned. “Cressida may still have found someone herself.”
“Why don’t we call Monica?” I said, trying not to look jubilant at bringing him round.
“Good idea,” said Guy. “But you have more than enough on your plate. Between going back into the office and looking after the children, if we do try to get financing, I’d like you to leave the work to Monica, Harold, and me. You can’t do everything, Em.”
As his answer, I gave him a big hug, which he put up with manfully.
“Eeyore,” he said once I’d let go, “what kind of a name is that?”
Before I returned to work there was something I needed to do. That evening after Guy had gone home, I went up to my room, sat on my bed, and got out my writing set.
“My dearest, darling Charles,” I wrote. “I am not sure where to begin…”
It was true. Finding the right words was still almost impossible at first. However, I kept going, doing my best not to dwell on the awful desperation of the last weeks. Sometimes I had to stop as tears blurred my eyes; but agonising though it was to have to relive even the most general of details, finally telling him lifted a weight from my shoulders. It was one thing to have avoided saying how awful Mrs. Porter was, but keeping the news about Thelma from Charles had felt like a betrayal of our relationship. He was my husband, and he deserved to know the truth.
“The children are being enormously brave,” I wrote, “and everyone is being so helpful and kind.” I thought for a moment. “Darling, you must promise not to worry about us, or I shall be ever so cross.”
Then I told him how much I loved him. “Come home safely, my darling,” I wanted to write. “I don’t know how I could bear it if you don’t.”
But on the paper I said nothing like that. I just drew kisses until the end of the page.
First thing Monday morning, I left the children having breakfast with Bunty and headed off for my bus. It was August the second. A new month. The first without Thelma.
As the children were now all on summer holiday, Bunty had managed to take the week off. The War Office had been kind. She and Harold were taking them swimming at Parliament Hill Lido. Thel would have loved it.
I felt almost guilty as I ran up the steps into Launceston House. Waving a good morning to Miss Poole on reception, I dashed across the shiny floor and into the lift, just as the doors began to close. It felt good to be back at work, even if I wasn’t quite sure what I was about to walk into. For the last weeks at home, I had felt so out of my depth. At least here I knew what I was doing.
“Someone’s keen,” said a grizzled-looking man in the lift.
“Yes, I am,” I replied, which he hadn’t expected.
It had been three weeks since I was last in the office, and it felt like three years. Oddly, I expected things to have changed, perhaps because so much had at home, but of course it was exactly the same.
Exactly, that was, other than the stacks and stacks of letters that covered my desk, and it turned out, all the spare desks in the journalists’ room next to Mrs. Shaw and Miss Peters.
“Welcome back, Emmy,” said Guy, appearing behind me.
“We’ve been trying our best,” said Mrs. Shaw.
“I’m so sorry I’ve been away,” I said. “I’ll make up for it.”
Mrs. Mahoney and Hester had both been over to the house several times, Hester in particular being a hit with Marg. It made it easier to come back, but it was still a welcoming and overwhelmingly sympathetic team that offered condolences and kind words. Even Mrs. Pye managed a “So sad,” without lapsing into schoolgirl French, which was a relief. Mr. Elliot did not appear.
“It’s like working with one of those amphibians,” said Mrs. Shaw. “My Gerald used to keep a lizard when he was a boy, and Mr. Elliot’s just like it.”
“You’re right,” said Mrs. Mahoney. “He’s always there, just lurking.”
Miss Peters and Hester nodded in silent agreement. Clearly, relations with Mrs. Porter’s second-in-command had not improved while I was away.
“I have missed you all more than I can possibly say.” I smiled.
“You’re back now,” said Mrs. Mahoney kindly.
“Shall we go through some letters?” said Mrs. Shaw. “We’ve got ever such a lot to catch up.”
By the end of the day, I felt better. Here were problems I had answers to. When I returned home, the children all talked at the same time, keen to tell me about the lido. In turn, I told them about a lady who had a cat in a basket on the bus.
“That’s nice,” said Marg. “When are you buying Woman’s Friend?”
For the next two weeks everyone at the magazine worked flat out. It was a peculiar job, partly working on what Mrs. Porter wanted, but also desperately trying to keep the old version of Woman’s Friend in the best health we could.
Guy still did his best to be civil to Mr. Elliot, even though he had become even more unbearable, acting as Mrs. Porter’s gatekeeper and hardly deigning to communicate. The upside to this was that as we worked diligently on, he could gain little idea that we were actively trying to buy out his boss.
I did as I had promised Guy and let him, together with Monica and Harold, shoulder the bulk of the business plan needed for Monica’s contacts. I still pulled my weight, however, compiling editorial plans for Woman’s Friend, combining what I knew readers loved as well as new ideas I was confident they would take to. None of them involved ten-guinea frocks.
I certainly had enough on. I still felt uneasy about being away from the house, although for the first week, as Bunty was off work, I went into the office full time and brought more letters home. Bunts and I worked out a schedule so that one of us was always nearby after the children had gone to bed, with me two flights down in the kitchen, typing away like mad, while Bunty and Harold stayed quietly upstairs. My mother went home to check that my father was fine, which of course he was, even if she did say that in her absence he had forgotten to have a haircut. He had cheerfully reported that someone had said if he wasn’t careful, he would start looking like Grigori Rasputin, so he now was thinking of starting his own cult.
There were good days and bad. The children, as Mother had predicted, seemed to enjoy as much normality as they could. Marg was now firm friends with Belinda and they started their own society called The Orphans’ Association, which you could join only if at least one of your parents was dead or officially missing. I thought it the saddest thing I had ever heard, but Mrs. Ginger said that Belinda was full of chat about belonging to something that involved a home-made badge and secret meetings, as well as a special if wobbly crest that spelt out the initials T.O.AST. She and Marg and a quiet boy called Terry were the founding members. The rest of us hoped more than anything in the world that they would stay the only ones.
Stan hurled himself into looking after the animals, where without doubt he came closest, at times, to being happy. Both he and George did sometimes go off to play on the bombsites with their friends, at which point Bunty and I had to hold our nerve and not think about them being crushed to bits by piles of falling debris. We were not much comforted when George said that if anything did happen, the Scarey brothers were the best Heavy Rescue men in Britain.
“Did someone mention the Scareys?” boomed Harold, who was in the next room. “Don’t worry, darling, if anyone can get the children out, it’ll be them.”
“Good grief,” said Bunty.
“This is hypothetical, George Jenkins,” I said sternly. “Not a challenge to see if you can get yourselves stuck.”
George smiled. It made my week.
Harold had been hard at work helping Guy and Monica put together a business case for investors. He had quickly become invaluable, and from his increasingly cheery and hearty appearance, his claim that it had given him a real boost certainly looked to be true. It was my feeling that falling in love with Bunty probably had something to do with it as well, but I knew better than to mention it, even though it was screamingly obvious. I understood why they didn’t want to make a show of it at the moment, when so many things felt dark, but it was an enormously welcome little light that I hoped one day would be allowed to shine brightly, as they both deserved.
For now, Harold set about collating all the information we would need to persuade investors that Woman’s Friend had a future and we were neither amateurs nor entirely mad. Guy brought home the magazine’s accounts, Mrs. Mahoney met with him secretly, Monica phoned him with ideas and suggestions, and Harold wrote everything down in longhand, then checking and editing it, before Bunty typed it all up. In triplicate. It was just like planning the design for a building, Harold said. Now we had become architects of the potential future of Woman’s Friend.
Thank goodness for Captain Thomas. While the rest of us juggled our day jobs with hurried conversations and surreptitious meetings, he set up a war office of his own in the dining room at the house. Every day he was either at his “desk” there or with one of the children, building or listening or cheering them on with their hobbies. From applauding wildly as Marg played a trombone duet in her lesson with Buzz, to studying military plane recognition booklets with Stan. And of course woodwork with George. He was always building things with George.
Slowly and surely, Harold had become part of our world and a very big part of Bunty’s.
One day when Bunty was at work, Mrs. Harewood asked if we needed a typist. She was rusty, she said, but soon our neighbour was part of the team. The junior members, meanwhile, were now doing their bit. Once George built his first set of pigeonholes for “the post room” out of bits of old beer crates, the pressure was on. Now we really did have to make sure we bought Woman’s Friend.