PART TWO
1944
16
RUBY
January
If it hadn’t been for Sam, Christmas and the New Year would have been unbearable. It was always a quiet affair, even before the war, but Father and I would decorate our little artificial tree – one we’d had for years that was starting to look decidedly tatty – and stood it on the parlour bureau with a few sprigs of holly cut from the hospital gardens, I’d cook lunch, and we’d exchange presents. Usually I’d get a book or something useful, like handkerchiefs, for me, and I’d give him a tie or a pen, though in recent years I’d often had to resort to something home-made because of the difficulty in finding anything suitable in the shops in Bartonford or Ilfracombe. And on New Year’s Eve, we’d stay up and listen to the wireless, toasting in the first of January with a mug of cocoa. It was perhaps a little dull as far as Christmases and New Years went, but it had always been pleasant enough.
Grandmother’s presence had changed all that. She had never spent Christmas with us before, claiming she preferred the comfort of her own home to ‘being a burden on relatives’, but of course, this year, she’d had no choice. She hovered over me as I decorated the tree (‘What a shame your father couldn’t get a real tree instead of bringing out that old thing! Although with this war on, I suppose one must make do…’), and tried to scratch together a suitable lunch from ingredients procured using hard-saved coupons and a gift of some vegetables from Alfie Blythe’s father (‘This dreadful war – I’d never have imagined I’d be eating rabbit for Christmas lunch. What a pity you couldn’t manage to find a goose!’), until I was ready to scream.
‘Oh, thank goodness that’s over!’ I exclaimed the Sunday after Boxing Day, flopping down on the old horsehair sofa in the lodge. Sam had already been there when I arrived, coaxing the little primus stove into life; with Christmas and Boxing Day falling on the previous weekend, I hadn’t been able to get away, so it had been a fortnight since I’d last seen him.
‘That bad, huh?’ he said. After he’d sat down beside me, we’d kissed, and I felt all the pent-up tension inside me melt away as I relaxed against him.
‘Worse.’
He got up again to make two mugs of tea – real tea he’d “borrowed” from the camp stores, which even had a spoonful of sugar in it, although we still had to make do with powdered milk.
‘Let me guess. Nothing was good enough for the old dragon and she made sure you knew it.’
I sighed. ‘In a nutshell, yes.’
He sat down again and we snuggled closer together, pulling a blanket across our legs. It was chilly, even with the paraffin heater burning. The tea warmed me, though; I sipped at it gratefully as we sat in companionable silence. It was one of the things I liked best about being with Sam; I didn’t have to scramble for conversation. We could just be.
‘Did you have a nice Christmas?’ I asked him at last.
‘Yeah… it was all right.’
There was a sad note in his voice. I remembered what he’d said about missing his mother and sister, even though they didn’t really celebrate because of his stepfather, and sighed. Why were families so difficult, and so complicated? Did anyone really have Christmases like in the articles in Vera’s magazines, the ones with pictures of everyone sitting around the tree smiling and laughing? Even Alfie, whose family all got on famously, had had a grumble to me about his various relatives descending on the Blythes’ tiny cottage.
‘Oh! I nearly forgot!’ I sat up again, reaching for my satchel. Inside was a small parcel, wrapped in a piece of the paper Sam had made for me with holly leaves and bells drawn on it. ‘I’m sorry it’s late. And I hope you don’t mind me reusing your paper – I hadn’t anything else.’
‘That don’t matter,’ he said as he unwrapped it. ‘Jeez, Ruby, you shouldn’t have.’ He gazed at the small tin of drawing pencils with a grin. ‘Where did you get these?’
‘That’s for me to know, and you to find out,’ I said with a mysterious smile. I’d actually enlisted Vera’s help to get them; as always, she’d managed to come up with the goods.
‘I love them. Thank you.’ He tucked them in his inside jacket pocket, still grinning.
‘You nearly didn’t get them, you know. Grandmother found them and oh, the grilling she gave me!’ I shuddered, remembering. ‘You should’ve heard her. ‘I didn’t know you sketched, Ruby. Where did you get these – weren’t they dreadfully expensive? I hope you’ve not been wasting coupons!’
‘Huh,’ he said. ‘What business is it of hers anyway?’
‘Oh, Sam, she’s just awful. And the worst thing is that it’s driving a wedge between me and Father. Oh, I know he can be difficult at times, and looking after him is sometimes a bit – a bit suffocating, but we’ve always rubbed along together OK. Grandmother’s changed everything. She’s the visitor, but I feel as if I’m the one who’s not welcome there anymore. Oh—’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘I don’t even know if I’m making sense.’
‘No, I understand,’ Sam said. ‘It was a bit like that with me and Ma. Before Kirk came along, things weren’t easy, exactly, but we were happy enough. We were a team – a unit, you know? Then he turned up like a bad smell and I’m the one who got pushed out.’
‘I just wish we didn’t have to sneak about like this,’ I said. ‘I wish we could be like Vera and Stanley, going to the pictures and out to dances and dinner and not having to worry one bit about who sees them or what they might think. Drat Father for believing everything he reads in the papers. And double-drat the soldier who got Jennie Pearson pregnant and made Father even more paranoid about the Americans!’
‘What’s happened to her?’
‘She’s being sent away somewhere to have the baby. Plymouth, I think. After that, goodness knows. I’d be surprised if she came back – the gossip’s been dreadful.’
‘Damn small-town narrow-mindedness. It’s the same the world over.’ Sam sighed. ‘I know it ain’t quite the same thing, but everyone back home judges me ’cause of Kirk, and we’re not even related.’
I squeezed his hand, then gave a little laugh. ‘Gosh, aren’t we being melancholy today? It’s the second day of nineteen-forty-four – we ought to be looking forwards. Perhaps this is the year the war will end!’
‘I hope so. I hope it ends tomorrow so I don’t have to go to France and leave you behind,’ Sam said, a little fiercely.
I laid my head on his shoulder. ‘Wouldn’t that be something?’
He picked up his mug. ‘Let’s make a toast to it.’
‘To the war ending tomorrow,’ I said, and touched the rim of my mug against his before taking the last mouthful of my now-lukewarm tea.
‘To the war ending tomorrow.’
‘And now let’s talk about something else – something cheerful.’
‘I’ve got a better idea than that.’ Sam kissed me, then got up and went over to the gramophone. His pack was leaning up beside it; out of it he took a record in a cardboard sleeve and he put it on the turntable. He wound the gramophone, and the record began to turn: not classical music but jazz, a stream of bright notes tumbling from the speaker.
Sam held out a hand and smiled. ‘Ms Mottram, will you dance?’
He whirled me around the room, using silly, exaggerated moves until I was breathless, both from the dancing and from laughter. Had I ever laughed with anyone the way I laughed with Sam? If I had, I couldn’t remember. Eventually, we collapsed onto the sofa again, still giggling, Grandmother and the war all but forgotten.