A Ration Book Daughter Read online

  Within a few moments of leaving the rest centre, Cathy reached Commercial Road.

  Before the war, the main highway between Gardiner’s corner and Limehouse had been barely passable because of the cars whizzing past in both directions. However, since the abolition of civilian petrol rations a few months before, only lorries and buses and the occasional horse and cart now trundled along the wide road.

  ‘Look, Mummy,’ said Peter, pointing a chubby finger at a Charrington’s dray rolling along on the other side of the road.

  ‘Yes, Peter, it’s a black horse,’ she said, manoeuvring his pushchair across the road.

  Turning east, she walked past Arbour Square and then left into Head Street and left again. Pausing by the gates of Senrab Street School, Cathy’s eyes rested on the neat rows of three-storeyed houses running along either side of the street.

  The last few people were shutting their doors for the night as Winnie Master, the street’s part-time ARP warden, finished her early-evening round, ensuring Cathy’s neighbours were complying with the blackout regulations.

  Tightening her grip on the pushchair handle, Cathy headed down the street and turned into the side alley beside the red door halfway down. Reaching the end, she unlatched the side gate and walked through.

  Unlike her parents’ home half a mile away in Mafeking Terrace, the houses here had reasonably large back gardens. At the outbreak of war, most of Cathy’s neighbours had dug up their lawns and planted an Anderson Shelter instead of spring bulbs in their flowerbeds.

  Her corrugated refuge was buried under a great mound of earth, which looked as if the lawn was about to give birth. Unlike some, it had proper drainage and two good-size bunks. Her husband Stan had dug it for her and his mother to shelter in, but Cathy never used it.

  The weight surrounding her threatened to press down on her shoulders again, but Cathy lifted her chin, opened the back door and rolled the pushchair into the kitchen.

  The kitchen straddled the width of the house with a window next to the door. On one side of the room was a porcelain sink with an integrated draining board set into a white enamelled stand. At the far end of the room was a built-in dresser with long cupboards on either side of a central section with a pull-down worktop, which sat over a set of drawers. The room also housed two other items that, as far as she knew, no one else in the street or even the area had: a washing tub, with internal paddle and mangle, and, tucked in the corner on its squat little legs, a refrigerator.

  Stan had refitted the kitchen before he’d brought her home as his bride, and, in truth, most women would give their eye-teeth for a kitchen such as the one she was standing in. But for Cathy, there was a coldness about it that had nothing to do with the temperature outside.

  The smell of her shin of lamb hotpot wafted over to her, making her stomach rumble.

  Kicking on the pushchair’s brakes, Cathy took off her coat. Then, setting Peter on the floor, she unwrapped him from his winter layers.

  ‘Is that you?’

  Cathy took a deep breath. ‘Yes.’

  She pulled a smiley face at Peter.

  The little boy laughed but then his attention shifted to something behind his mother and his happy expression disappeared.

  Cathy turned to see her mother-in-law standing in the doorway.

  Wearing the long-ago fashions and muted colours of the Edwardian age, Violet Wheeler looked a decade older than her fifty years.

  ‘Now that the clocks have gone back and it gets dark so early, you might have come home sooner,’ said Violet, her pale lips drawing into a sullen line.

  Tying her son’s Noddy and Big Ears bib around his neck, Cathy didn’t reply.

  ‘Still,’ continued Violet, putting on her hard-done-by-little-old-lady expression, ‘after all this time, I should have known you don’t care about my poor nerves.’

  Cathy crossed to the dresser and pulled out the cutlery drawer. ‘I’ve been busy all afternoon, so I was late getting away.’

  ‘Busy!’ scoffed her mother-in-law. ‘Is that what you call gossiping with those do-gooding friends of yours at that centre?’

  ‘Busy helping families who’ve lost everything in the bombing,’ Cathy replied.

  Violet’s thin face pulled into a sorrowful expression.

  ‘And what about my poor little Stanley?’ She ran her bony hand over her grandson’s fair hair and the boy looked up. ‘Were you left all alone, my poor darling, while your selfish mummy was enjoying herself?’

  ‘His name’s Peter,’ said Cathy, collecting the knives and forks from the dresser. ‘And you know full well Peter was in the nursery playing with the other children.’

  Her mother-in-law’s eyes narrowed. ‘And if that’s not bad enough, you dump him on your mother every Wednesday to go gadding around,’ Violet added.

  ‘I’m taking typing and shorthand classes at Cephas Street, not dancing the night away in the Lyceum,’ Cathy snapped back.

  ‘Evening classes,’ sneered her mother-in-law. ‘What do you need evening classes for?’

  ‘To better myself,’ Cathy replied. ‘Perhaps I’ll get a little job when Peter gets older.’

  ‘You’ve got a job as a wife and mother and looking after me as you should. And if you think you’re going to get yourself a swanking job in an office somewhere then you’d better think again. My Stan won’t have you showing ’im up by letting people think he can’t provide for his family.’

  Turning her back on her mother-in-law, Cathy started to wash her hands.

  ‘I’ll be writing to him tomorrow, to tell him just how you treat me,’ continued Violet, speaking to the back of Cathy’s head. ‘Mark my words. He’ll sort you out good and proper when he gets back.’

  Graphic memories of her brutal and fearful life with Stan flashed through Cathy’s mind and panic fluttered in her chest.

  ‘And it’ll be no more than you deserve,’ added Violet.

  Reminding herself that her husband was two thousand miles away in North Africa, Cathy pushed the unsettling thoughts aside.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be off to the shelter with your mother in an hour,’ Violet said.

  ‘I will,’ said Cathy.

  ‘I don’t know why you don’t just go straight there,’ said Violet.

  Cathy said nothing. Stretching up, she went to take two dinner plates from the rack.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Violet. ‘I got fed up waiting for you, so I’ve had mine.’

  Placing her and her son’s plates on the table, Cathy picked up the tea towel from the hook by the cooker. Winding it around her hands, she crouched down.

  A blast of hot air hit her face as she opened the oven door and lifted out the enamel casserole dish. Placing supper on the table, she lifted the lid.

  Cathy stared at what was supposed to be her and Peter’s supper for a moment then raised her head.

  ‘What?’ asked Violet, with barely concealed malice glinting in her pale grey eyes.

  ‘What do you mean, what?’ snapped Cathy, pointing into the bowl. ‘You’ve had the lot.’

  ‘No I haven’t,’ her mother-in-law replied, giving her an airy look. She glanced into the dish. ‘See.’

  She pointed at the couple of potatoes, the handful of carrot slices and the bits of gristly meat at the bottom of the dish. ‘That’s more than enough for Stanley.’

  ‘And what about me?’ Cathy asked. ‘That was part of my weekly meat rations, too.’

  Violet shrugged. ‘Well, had you been here you could have said something, but as you weren’t, hard lu—’

  The door knocker echoed down the hall.

  ‘Who’s that?’ said Violet.

  Again, not answering, Cathy wiped her hands on the tea towel and went through to the hallway.

  ‘It’d better not be any of your bog-trotting family,’ shouted Violet, as Cathy reached the front door. ‘I won’t have them under my roof, do you hear?’

  Patting her hair into place and straightening the front of her blouse,
Cathy opened the door.

  Standing on the step was a post office messenger dressed in a navy uniform with red piping and a pillbox cap. He was about thirteen or fourteen, with the shadow of his first moustache on his top lip and acne sprinkled across his forehead. His bicycle was propped up on the kerb.

  Gathered on the pavement on the other side of the road were Cathy’s neighbours, all with pitying expressions on their faces.

  Cathy’s heart leapt into her throat.

  ‘Mrs Stanley Wheeler?’ the boy asked, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he spoke.

  ‘Yes.’

  Diving into the bag slung across him, he pulled out a telegram and handed it to her.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Touching the stiff peak of his cap, the lad climbed back on his bicycle and cycled away.

  Cathy stared at the envelope in her hand for a moment then went back inside, closing the door behind her.

  ‘Who is it?’ bellowed Violet.

  Cathy walked back into the kitchen and the blood drained from her mother-in-law’s face when she saw the telegram.

  Cathy broke the seal and unfolded the page.

  ‘Is it my Stanley?’ asked Violet as Cathy’s eyes tried to focus on the lines of tickertape that were dancing about on the page.

  ‘Is he injured?’

  Cathy didn’t reply.

  ‘Tell me,’ screeched Violet. ‘Tell me if my son’s all right. Tell me!’

  Violet snatched the paper from Cathy’s hand. Her hard eyes darted across the page for a moment then she looked up at Cathy.

  ‘Missing in action,’ she shouted. ‘How can he be missing in action? I only got a letter yesterday.’

  ‘That’s what it says,’ Cathy replied.

  Peter toddled over and grabbed Cathy’s legs, so she lifted him up and slid him into his highchair.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Violet.

  ‘Giving Peter his dinner before we go off to the shelter,’ said Cathy.

  Her mother-in-law looked at her in disbelief. ‘But your husband’s missing! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

  ‘Of course it does,’ said Cathy, placing Peter’s plate in front of him. ‘If he doesn’t turn up or appear on a POW list in the next six months, I’ll be a widow.’

  Chapter Two

  ALTHOUGH THE DAMP from the London clay he was lying on was seeping through his khaki battle jacket, Sergeant Archie McIntosh barely noticed the discomfort. It was now mid afternoon on the first Friday in November and he had more important things to worry about. The main one being the 1,500-kilo German bomb, known ominously as a Satan, that he was lying alongside at the bottom of a ten-foot trench.

  On the other side of the bomb, hunkered down on his haunches, was Lieutenant Monkman, the officer in charge of North East London Bomb Disposal Unit’s D Squad. He was chewing the side of his thumb and, despite the chilly air at the bottom of the wood-clad shaft, Archie could see perspiration gathering on his senior officer’s forehead.

  ‘Can you see the number on the fuse yet, McIntosh?’ Lieutenant Monkman asked, the steam of his breath visible as he spoke.

  ‘No, sir, there’s too much muck,’ Archie replied.

  With thin Brylcreemed brown hair and elongated features, Nicholas Ernest Monkman was a bit younger than Archie’s thirty years. Although Monkman’s officer’s uniform was tailor-made rather than standard issue, the jacket still hung loosely from his shoulders and had plenty of room across the chest. According to Tubbs Croker, the mess sergeant who dealt with the officers’ lounge and bar, Monkman was the younger son of some earl. Growing up in Maryhill, Archie hadn’t had too much to do with the aristocracy or their offspring, but two years of serving under Monkman had given him a practical understanding of the words ‘entitled’ and ‘condescending’, and had confirmed to Archie why he was a card-carrying member of the Labour Party.

  Taking the cloth tucked inside his jacket, he wound it around his finger and, reaching across, gently wiped the mud from the circular disc in the fat belly of the explosive.

  The cavity made by the ten-foot-long bomb as it had ploughed its way underground after impact had been discovered by the local ARP warden earlier that morning while he was inspecting the damage of the previous night’s air raid. As the unexploded armament had come to rest between the three storage tanks of the St Pancras Gasworks and the mainline station itself, the control room at Islington Town had immediately phoned through to Wanstead School, where the bomb disposal unit was based. Archie’s team were on first call that morning and they had been sent out immediately. That was just after nine, and the men had been digging down for the past five hours to uncover the bomb.

  With his heart thumping against the inside of his chest, Archie gently cleared away the last few smears of mud. Taking his torch from his breast pocket, he flicked it on.

  ‘It’s a seventeen,’ Archie said, as the beam illuminated the number in the centre of the disc. Inching forward, he placed his right ear on to the dirty metal. ‘And the wee bugger’s ticking.’

  Fear flickered in Lieutenant Monkman’s close-set eyes and he scrambled to his feet. He glanced at the ladder leading up to the surface and, for one brief moment, Archie thought his senior officer was going to make a bolt for it, but then Monkman’s eyes returned to him.

  Holding the other man’s gaze, Archie stood up.

  ‘Chalky!’ he yelled up the shaft without taking his eyes from the man opposite.

  ‘Sarge?’ Corporal White shouted back.

  ‘It’s a Satan with a number seventeen fuse, so the lieutenant will be needing the clock stopper and the stethoscope,’ Archie bellowed up.

  ‘Right you are,’ White yelled back.

  ‘And have the drill and steamer ready to go once we’ve stopped it ticking,’ Archie called.

  The lieutenant took his handkerchief from his pocket.

  ‘What in the devil’s name is taking them so long?’ he asked, mopping his brow and casting anxious glances at the bomb at their feet.

  ‘Dinna fret, they’ll be here presently,’ Archie said.

  ‘I’m not fretting,’ snapped the lieutenant. Taking a packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket, he sneered, ‘I just don’t want them aping around, that’s all, Sergeant.’

  Archie held Monkman’s mocking gaze.

  The officer took out his lighter, a silver one with his initials stamped on the side.

  ‘Good God, man,’ he said, flicking it, ‘it’s not too much to ask that they get a shift on, is it?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Archie replied.

  ‘I bet they wouldn’t be monkeying around if they were standing next to a sodding ticking bomb,’ said Monkman, frantically flicking the lighter cap to get a flame.

  Irritation flared in Archie’s chest.

  Chalky and the lads had finished their shift the previous night at ten, after cleaning and reordering the equipment and loading it back in the truck, a full three hours after Lieutenant Monkman and a couple of his fellow officers had disappeared up West for an evening out. Today, the lads had already shovelled out several tons of mud and set the shaft props in place before Lieutenant Monkman arrived, pulling up at the scene in his sports car just after lunch.

  Stifling his resentment on his men’s behalf, Archie took a deep breath to steady his pulse.

  At last a flame flickered, illuminating Monkman’s thin face in an orange glow. However, as he held the tip of his cigarette to the flame, he lost his grip on the lighter and it clanged on to the bomb casing.

  Fear flashed across Monkman’s narrow face and he froze.

  Archie’s eyes locked with his and both men held their breath.

  The dripping water from the oozing mud counted down the seconds for what seemed like an eternity then Archie bent down and picked up the lighter.

  ‘Allow me, sir,’ he said.

  Stepping forward, Archie offered his senior officer a light.

  Monkman’s hands shook as he held the tip of his cigarett
e into the flame.

  Archie gave back the lighter and the officer forced a laugh.

  ‘Damn cold. Freeze the balls off a brass monkey, wouldn’t you say?’ he asked, his thin moustache lifted in a smirk.

  Archie’s eyebrows raised a fraction but he didn’t reply.

  They stood in silence for a moment then a two-tone whistle echoed down the shaft.

  ‘Mind your heads,’ Chalky called.

  Archie looked up to see the cradle with the equipment in it being lowered down the shaft. Stepping carefully around the bomb, he reached up and guided the mesh box down.

  ‘About bloody time, too,’ muttered Lieutenant Monkman as he joined Archie.

  The clock stopper was a two-foot-wide, four-inch-thick device that stopped the fuse’s internal mechanisms by means of a magnetic current. The earlier versions resembled a horse collar; however, the one D Squad now used was square with handles. Monkman tried to lift it out of the cradle but hit the metal sides instead, sending a loud clang back up the shaft.

  ‘Perhaps it might be best if you let me position the clock stopper, sir, while you listen in with the electronic stethoscope,’ Archie suggested, taking the solid ten-pound piece of equipment from his senior officer’s hands and moving it clear of the bomb.

  Ten minutes later, with Lieutenant Monkman crouched opposite him with his earphones on, listening to the fuse mechanism and puffing on the last half-inch of his cigarette, Archie tightened the last bolt on the clock stopper’s metal strap.

  He looked at Monkman, who nodded.

  Turning on the balls of his feet, Archie switched on the hand-held generator and block battery attached to the clock stopper by two leads.

  A low hum signalled the cumbersome equipment’s response to the electrical charge passing through it.

  Holding his breath, Archie looked across at his senior officer again.

  Monkman gave him the thumbs-up, indicating the ticking had stopped, and Archie’s shoulders relaxed.

  Rising to his feet, he pressed his hands into the small of his back to relieve the tightness, then cupped his hands around his mouth.