A Ration Book Daughter Page 5

  ‘You do seem to be very unlucky with your volunteers,’ said Violet.

  ‘Indeed, I am, Mrs Wheeler,’ agreed the vicar’s wife. ‘The WVS is a uniformed service, after all, so why the women baulk at the least bit of discipline is beyond me. After all, there is a war on.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Goodness, is that the time? I should be getting back to the vicarage to supervise.’

  ‘Supervise?’ asked Violet.

  ‘Yes.’ Mrs Paget sighed. ‘Since our char Mrs Fowler had to go to tend her sick sister in Southend, I’ve got a new one, a Mrs Levin or Levi or something, and yesterday she served the reverend his afternoon tea in a coffee cup! We’ve got the archdeacon for luncheon so I want to ensure she doesn’t lay out dessert spoons for the soup!’ She gave them her Sunday-morning smile. ‘I trust I’ll see you in church for midweek communion.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Elsie.

  Violet gave a sweet smile. ‘It’s the highlight of my week.’

  Adjusting the handbag hanging on her arm, the vicar’s wife turned on her expensive heels and marched back across the hall towards the door.

  Violet watched her go for a few moments then turned back to Elsie. ‘And I’ll tell you something else that good-for-nothing daughter-in-law of mine said ...’

  As Sunday evening crept towards midnight, and with the fog from the River Lea swirling around the front wheels of Archie’s Triumph Tiger motorbike, he finally reached the dull brown door halfway down Wise Road where the hard-pressed billeting officer had allocated him digs.

  Like the dozens of streets running off the Romford Road in Stratford, Wise Road comprised two-storey terraced houses with bay windows. The small area in front of each house was separated from the pavement by a low wall with evenly spaced puncture holes running along the top of the brickwork, showing where they had once held ornamental wrought-iron railings, which were probably now part of a fighter plane or battleship.

  As a scabby-kneed kid growing up in a one-room tenement, the solid respectable houses lining both sides of Wise Road, with running water and their own toilets, would have been considered palaces where he came from.

  Yawning, Archie switched off the motorbike’s engine. Taking hold of the handlebars, he wheeled his bike down the arched alleyway between the houses.

  Lifting the gate latch, he rolled it into the handkerchief-sized backyard. Under the mound of earth, safe in their Anderson shelter, Mr and Mrs Charlton, his landlord and landlady, snored the night away.

  Careful not to kick the troughs sprouting carrots and turnips, or knock the zinc bath hanging on the wall, Archie guided the front wheel of his Triumph to the far side of the garden and heaved it on to its stand, then secured the tarpaulin over it.

  Satisfied his motorbike was protected from the elements, Archie nipped into the brick-built toilet by the back door. Leaving the cistern to rattle into a flush, he retraced his steps back to the street and, retrieving his key, opened the front door.

  Closing it and the blackout curtain behind him, Archie switched on the hall light and spotted a six-by-three brown parcel next to the telephone. His name was written in bold letters across the middle and it had ‘Glasgow PO’ stamped over the array of colourful postage stamps in the top right-hand corner. There was also a scribbled note from his landlady apologising for not leaving it out yesterday when it arrived.

  Slipping his key back into his pocket, he picked up the parcel and, with his feet feeling like lead, trudged up the stairs.

  The Charltons’ house had two decent-size bedrooms at the front, one of which Mrs Charlton insisted was her son Malcolm’s, and which, she was at pains to tell him, wouldn’t be touched until Malcolm returned, so Archie had been given the smaller bedroom on the turn of the stairs. Although it was half the size of the other upstairs rooms and sat over the scullery, Archie was more than happy with his billet because it faced full south and had good light from sun-up to sunset, even now in the winter.

  Flicking off the hall light, Archie opened the door to his room.

  He’d left before dawn that morning and Mrs Charlton hadn’t been in to sweep, so the blackout curtains were still drawn. Turning on the bedside lamp, Archie shrugged off his sheepskin airman’s jacket and hung it on the back of the door.

  With just a single wardrobe, three-drawer chest and free-standing oak vanity washstand with a flowery bowl in the corner, it was pretty basic, but Archie didn’t mind.

  The sparse nature of the room suited him perfectly. It gave him plenty of space to store not only his kit but also his collapsible fisherman’s stool and paint-splattered easel, which slid easily under the bed and out of the way, while the lack of furniture meant he had the whole wall opposite the window against which to lean his stretched canvases and art-grade cardboard without fear of them being knocked over or damaged. The stoneware jars with his brushes were kept under the vanity unit, while his paint box, with his mixing palette inside, sat on a folding card table in the far corner of the room.

  Loosening his tie, Archie sat on the bed, the rusty springs creaking as they took his weight. Weariness stole over him, but he shrugged it off and picked up the parcel.

  Breaking the sealing wax, Archie untied the knot and unwrapped the brown paper. As he opened the last fold, a three-page letter and two boxed tubes of Winsor & Newton block paints, wrapped in another sheet of paper, fell out.

  Archie smiled.

  Yellow ochre and indigo, just what he needed.

  Archie stood up and crossed the bare boards of his bedroom floor. Lifting the paint-box lid, he placed the unopened tubes alongside the half-squeezed, twisted ones lined up in colour order in their balsa-wood slots.

  Closing the lid, Archie unfolded the sheet of paper the paints were wrapped in and he smiled again.

  It was a picture, drawn in multicoloured crayons, of a woman with yellow hair and a little girl with long black plaits, standing side by side. They both had smiling red lips and were waving. The words ‘love to Da’ were carefully written above the figures, while at the bottom of the page it read ‘Kirsty McIntosh, age 6 ¾’.

  Archie glanced up at the picture of his daughter, all pigtails and freckles, sitting on the mantelshelf. It was a studio photo taken a few months back, and she was smartly dressed in her school uniform. As his tired eyes took in the image yet again, Archie’s heart ached to hold her.

  His gaze lingered on her laughing face for a second or two, then his attention shifted to the image of Moira sitting in a deckchair with a six-month-old Kirsty on her knee. He’d taken the photo with the second-hand box Conway camera Moira had bought him for his birthday a few weeks earlier. They’d been on a day trip to Largs, and for once the sun had shone. They’d spent the day pushing their baby daughter’s pram along the esplanade and stopping at cosy little tea shops from time to time, enjoying ice cream, fish and chips and the good weather, before catching the train back to Glasgow as the sun sank into the western sea. Studying his wife’s smiling face, Archie’s heart ached again for a very different reason.

  When, with twenty-month-old Kirsty in his arms, he’d stood and watched the undertakers lower Moira’s coffin into the grave on that damp winter’s day, Archie thought the pain of losing her would never go away. It hadn’t, not completely, but now, after all these years, it was like an old scar that ached from time to time but no longer shaped his life.

  As his gaze shifted back to his daughter, the image of the little boy he’d apprehended dashing from church that morning flitted through Archie’s mind.

  Actually, if the truth were told, it was the attractive young woman chasing the boy that Archie remembered vividly.

  Hoping her husband, whoever he was, appreciated his good fortune, Archie sighed and then, putting the memory of his early-morning encounter aside, he picked up a drawing pin from the little dish on the chest of drawers and pinned the picture to the back of the bedroom door facing the foot of his metal-framed bed.

  Sitting down, he unlaced his boots and kicked them off then, with
out undressing further, lay his head on the pillow. He studied his daughter’s artwork for a moment longer then opened the three-page letter that accompanied the package.

  Chapter Four

  JIMMY, THE SHOP’S assistant, was already unhooking scraggy-looking cuts of meat from the metal rail in the window outside Harris & Son when Cathy parked Peter’s pushchair outside.

  It was just before three and, having finished her Tuesday-morning stint in the rest centre, Cathy was picking up a few midweek groceries in Watney Street Market.

  The sun had almost disappeared behind the building opposite and, thanks to the cloudless skies above, there was already a layer of ice on the puddles. However, clear skies would mean more than just slippery pavements and popped milk-bottle tops in the morning to worry about.

  The fog of the previous weeks had lifted and the weather had been clear and bright since the weekend, allowing the Luftwaffe to take full advantage of the unimpeded view of London from above. Spurred on, no doubt, by the drubbing the British Army had just given them at El-Alamein, the Nazi pilots had unleashed wave upon wave of bombers on the city for the past four nights.

  South of the river had taken the brunt of the attack for the previous few days, but every day Cathy had walked past newly burnt-out houses and destroyed factories as she went about her business. Each morning the first-aid station set up in the Old Dispensary in Cable Street was crammed with casualties, while the heavy-rescue crews dug out others from piles of rubble that had once been homes. Even though it was the afternoon, the air around Cathy was still filled with the smell of charred wood and spent phosphorus from the night before.

  ‘Be a good boy,’ she said, securing the brake with her foot. ‘Mummy won’t be long.’

  Peter gave her a solemn nod.

  Leaving her son to watch the stall-holders close down their displays, Cathy went inside the butcher’s, scattering dirty sawdust under her feet.

  Ray, who was the ‘son’ on the shop’s sign, was gathering up the last few handfuls of liver and preparing to deposit them back in the fridge. He looked up as she walked in.

  Being the size of a brick outhouse, with a wiry red face that could be described as lived-in, Ray hadn’t been all that lucky in love before the war but now, along with every other butcher in London and beyond, he was more attractive than Gary Cooper.

  ‘Hello, Caff,’ he said, wiping his hands down his blood-streaked apron. ‘What can I do you for?’

  Cathy eyed up the trays in the glass cabinet. The pork chops with the layer of plump white fat under the skin looked tempting but they were marked up as 1/3p a pound. Reluctantly, her gaze moved to the tray of tripe.

  ‘Thruppence’ worth of tripe, please,’ Cathy said.

  ‘Right you are,’ said Ray. Licking his fingers, he removed a square of white paper from the pile in front of him and slid it on to the scales. Leaning into the cabinet, he pulled the spiked price ticket from the tray of tripe and jabbed it into another part of the display. He lifted out a portion of quivering white flesh in his claw-like hand and slapped it on to the sheet of paper.

  Ray dropped a couple of metal weights on to the other side of the scales. He took a few bits off the meat until the upright needle settled in the middle.

  Satisfied, he wrapped it up and placed it on the counter in front of her.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Cathy ran her eyes over the trays again.

  ‘How much is the stewing steak this week?’ she asked.

  ‘A tanner a pound,’ he replied.

  Cathy pursed her lips as she considered the half a crown and couple of coppers she had in her purse.

  ‘I tell you what,’ said Ray, seeing her hesitation, ‘seeing as how your mum’s always been a good customer and your gran let me have a couple of eggs on the old QT last week, I’ll throw in a couple of ounces of kidney, too.’

  ‘Oh, all right, I’ll take a half-pound,’ said Cathy. Delving into her handbag, she pulled out her purse. ‘If I add carrots and potatoes, it’ll stretch for two days. How much?’

  ‘Nine pence in all.’

  Cathy handed over a silver florin.

  ‘You all right for lard?’ Ray asked, indicating the half a dozen waxed tubs on the end of the counter.

  Cathy nodded. ‘But keep some by for Friday when I come for my weekend meat, will you?’

  ‘Right you are.’ Ray threw the coin in the wooden drawer below the counter. After rummaging around, he gave her thruppence back then handed her two parcels of meat wrapped in newspaper. ‘See you Friday.’

  Cathy left the shop and went to collect Peter from outside, where an old woman was leaning over the handle of his pushchair and making faces at him.

  She looked up as Cathy stowed her basket in the tray beneath the seat.

  ‘Oh, hello, dear,’ the woman said, grimacing as she straightened up. ‘Such a handsome boy. I’m Mrs Wagstaff,’ she added, seeing Cathy’s puzzled expression. ‘Your mother-in-law’s friend from St Augustine’s.’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ said Cathy, doing nothing of the sort.

  ‘They grow up so quick, don’t they?’ said Mrs Wagstaff.

  ‘They do,’ Cathy replied.

  ‘He’ll be in long trousers before you know it,’ the old woman continued.

  ‘Well, I’ve got a good few years before I have to worry about that,’ Cathy replied.

  The older woman’s gaze shifted on to Peter, wrapped up against the cold, and a sentimental look stole across her face.

  ‘And he looks just like your husband,’ she added. ‘Don’t you, Stanley?’

  ‘His name is Peter,’ said Cathy.

  Mrs Wagstaff looked confused. ‘But Violet calls him Stanley.’

  ‘I know what my mother-in-law calls him, Mrs Wagstaff,’ said Cathy, ‘but my son’s name is Peter. That’s what he was christened and that’s what he’s called. After my grandfather.’

  The woman beside her sighed. ‘Well, you’re his mother, dear, so I suppose—’

  ‘Nice to see you,’ said Cathy, grabbing the handle and kicking off the brake.

  Without waiting for Mrs Wagstaff to respond, Cathy bounced the pushchair off the pavement and headed towards the top of the market, the wheels rattling over the cobbles.

  Cathy had calmed down from her encounter by the time she reached the top of the market; she turned right at the hollowed-out shell that had been Christ Church and headed towards Limehouse.

  Within a few moments she was outside the solid double-fronted Victorian building of the Trustees Savings Bank. Parking Peter’s pushchair alongside the railings, Cathy unclipped him and lifted him out. Settling him on the pavement, she gripped his hand and guided him between the two neoclassical columns either side of the entrance and up the handful of steps into the bank.

  Pushing open the brass-plated door, she walked into the high-ceilinged interior filled with the sounds of typewriters pounding and telephones ringing. There were only a couple of people in the queue, so Cathy joined the end to take her turn at one of the two positions that had a clerk sitting behind them.

  The walls were a light shade of grey and running the length of the public area was a highly polished counter. A mesh barrier separated the customers from the public, who spoke to the counter clerks through arched hatches set at regular intervals.

  A woman stepped away from the far position and the clerk, a young woman with her ginger hair trimmed into a bob, looked expectantly at Cathy.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Cathy said, scooping Peter up and sitting him on the counter. ‘My husband Stanley Wheeler has a savings account with you, and a few days ago I received this from the army telling me that he’s missing in action.’

  A look of professional sympathy spread across the clerk’s round face.

  ‘Let me express the bank’s deepest condolences, Mrs Wheeler,’ she said, in an affected voice that couldn’t quite cover her cockney twang.

  ‘Thank you. However, life must go on.’ Cathy unclipped her handbag and
pulled out the official notification. ‘I believe he has left instructions with you that if he was missing or killed, the money should be transferred to me.’

  She handed the letter to the young woman, who regarded it through the round lenses of her gold-rimmed spectacles.

  ‘If you would be so good as to wait, I’ll go and check his account file.’ Holding the letter aloft, she walked over to the solid wooden filing cabinets that lined the back wall. Having found the W drawer, she pulled it out and retrieved a manila wallet.

  Resting it on the open drawer, she lifted a few papers out and read them. Giving Cathy an odd look, she hurried across the room to a man sitting behind a solid-looking desk. She handed him the manila wallet and said something to him.

  He nodded. Rising from his seat, he tucked the wallet under his arm and walked to the far end of the counter.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ asked Cathy as the young woman returned.

  ‘Mr Curtis, our accounts manager, will explain. If you would be so kind as to follow me.’

  Hauling Peter off his perch, Cathy walked to the other end of the counter where a middle-aged man in a well-worn navy suit was waiting for her.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Wheeler,’ Mr Curtis said, as she stopped in front of the opening at the far end of the counter. ‘You’ve come to apply for access to your husband’s bank account as he’s missing in action?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cathy. ‘I understand before he shipped out in April that Stan came down to fill out the required forms in the event of him going missing or being killed in action. I know you need the official notification, which is why I brought it with me.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Wheeler,’ said Mr Curtis. ‘I’m afraid in the file I have a solicitor’s letter, signed and witnessed, from your husband stating . . .’ He hesitated.

  ‘Stating . . . ?’ asked Cathy, looking incredulously at the manager.

  ‘Stating that we transfer the money in your husband’s savings account into his mother’s account.’