An Ordinary Life Read online

  And surely she was not the only one who felt that her life happened in a blink, with time passing so quickly she sometimes wondered if the whole thing had been some ghastly trick.

  ‘We are all but dust . . .’ This she spoke in her mind.

  Molly felt another wave of unexpected emotion and hated the feeling of hot tears crawling over her temple and along her nose. With one hand in plaster and the other trapped under a top sheet, she realised that to reach her face was not easy. Suddenly the thought of dying without giving Joe his letter was almost more than she could bear.

  Is this it? she pondered. Is this where I die, in this horribly bland corridor? This was quickly followed by the question: did it really matter? Her life, had, she believed, been an ordinary one and therefore an ordinary death was befitting. This she surmised without the modesty that so many feigned, and with the glorious benefit of being able to stand on the mountain of her years and look back at the path she had trodden. A path littered with pitfalls and rocks into which she had fallen or clambered over, and some of it done with her hand in his, holding her steady, upright, calm. Even after he had gone . . .

  Despite her withering body, Molly’s thoughts remained exact and clear, which seemed most cruel. She sometimes wished she did not have such ability for perfect recollection, thinking it might be preferable for her musings to dull a little so the reminder of what she had lost might also be blunted. But there was no such luxury for her. Her memories remained sharp and taunting, jostling her from sleep. Not only the bad memories, but the good too, and for those she felt some small gratitude. She could lie in bed and taste a fresh peach placed on her tongue over seventy years since, still sweet in her mouth, making the slippery, tinned, syrup-soaked variety often spooned in her direction most revolting. An insult! And the memory of her lover’s palm running over her back beneath the winter sunshine on a stolen afternoon, as they lay close together on a tartan blanket among the ruins of war was, even now, enough to make her weep like the willow beneath which they had sought shelter. His face, captured in her mind like a picture, a particular smile, lips closed, one side of his mouth raised more than the other, his hair flopping forward, his eyes mid-laugh . . . It had always been him.

  And now, here she was. Lying alone on a trolley in a corridor, unable to imagine whatever might come next, able to think only about what had gone before: each step, each breath and each day that had led up to that point in time. Her body quite useless now, but oh! The miraculous thing it had done: bearing a child, a boy! A beautiful son . . .

  She cursed her inability to finish the note she had started, wishing nothing more than to place it in the hand of the boy who had shaped her whole life. She needed to tell him of her history. Her story, her ordinary life, and thus his story, the full truth he’d never known but that she’d promised, finally, to tell him. The truth that now he might never know.

  TWO

  Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London

  December 15th 1943

  Aged 18

  ‘Goodnight, Geer, Molly. See you in the morning,’ Mrs Templar called from her desk.

  Molly raised an eyebrow at her friend. ‘Well, she’s in a good mood for once!’ The two girls laughed.

  ‘Please come for one drink,’ Geer begged. ‘Oh, don’t be a bore, Moll!’ She studied her reflection in the shard of looking glass on the back of her locker door. Opening her compact, she patted powder over her nose, forehead and chin, licking her index finger to smooth her shapely brows.

  ‘I don’t think so. Not tonight.’ It was the last thing Molly felt like after such a long day. Her back ached, she was tired, and in truth was hoping for no more than a wash with hot water, a cup of hot cocoa and to feel the joyous contact of clean, starched cotton sheets against her skin, in anticipation of a good night’s sleep. That was unless the bloody Jerries had other ideas and she would yet again be forced to tramp down to the Anderson shelter for the night, where some could snore the hours away, but not her. Once seated inside the corrugated-iron structure she always found herself thinking of her father and wondering what in God’s name he had fought for only a couple of decades or so ago in the ‘war to end all wars’, if this was how she and thousands of others were now living: like moles underground, with the scent of the earth filling their nostrils and the sound of the bombs going off overhead. She would think of a poem her father had written, damned if she could recall any more than a line or two:

  ‘. . . and there in the clearing, somewhere in France,

  I spied two moles engaged in a dance . . .’

  This would never fail to make her smile – a happy distraction from the thought of the sirens and the bells of the fire trucks, which were not quite enough to drown out the wailing grief from those who had lost their homes and their loved ones. The Blitz had been devastating to both the fabric of the city and the people in it. She knew they would never forget it. Not that she ever let on to her mother quite how anxious she was, preferring to smile and say, ‘Well, here we are – snug as bugs!’ before tucking the crocheted blanket around their legs, while her heart hammered and fear made her limbs tremble.

  Back in the present, she heard Geer’s entreaty once more: ‘Oh come on! What else have you got going on? Is Clark Gable popping over again for a corned-beef sandwich?’

  Molly looked at her friend and replied without missing a beat, ‘No, that’s Thursday.’

  Geer hooted with laughter. ‘Oh please, Moll! Just one! That’s all – one measly drink and then you’re free to go.’ Geer slipped her arms into her blue wool coat and buttoned up the front, looping a silk scarf around her neck, letting the two pointed ends hang down over her shawl collar in the style they had seen favoured by Princess Elizabeth. She fished in her handbag for her lipstick. Red, of course.

  There was nothing special about Molly’s own face and her body was practical rather than seductive. The thought of being considered even vaguely alluring seemed quite alien to her. She had decided long ago that her lack of bosom might be just the thing to help her gain traction in the world of diplomacy, which was very much the domain of men.

  ‘I don’t think so, Geer. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in an age.’

  ‘Yes, dear, we’re all exhausted – that’s wartime for you! Herr Hitler and his chums can rob us of street lighting, stockings and all the lovely men who are withering on the vine in some godforsaken bunker, but we absolutely cannot let him stop us having fun. Please come with me – it’s nearly Christmas! Plus I’ve told my brother all about you. He does like a clever girl.’ Geer grinned to reveal her enviable dimples.

  ‘Oh God, no!’ Molly felt her spirits sink even further. The very worst aspect of being set up with some ‘terrific guy’ was when he saw her for the first time and all of his hopes and all of his fantasies of meeting a Jayne Mansfield type trickled from him so obviously that she could almost see them pool on the floor. It certainly carved away at a girl’s self-esteem. ‘I’m in a crumpled blouse and my hair is a bird’s nest. I have ink-stained fingertips and creases in my skirt.’ She pulled the olive and mustard tweed material of her tapered skirt, trying and failing to smooth the material.

  ‘Darling, he’s been living with a gang of chaps in a bunkroom who no doubt have smelly feet and snore like billy-o! Trust me, the sight of a gorgeous girl while he’s home on leave for a day, and one who can hold her beer to boot – I can guarantee the last thing he’ll be thinking about is your inky fingers or your lack of pressed clothing.’

  ‘Night, Molly. Night, Geertruida!’ Marjorie brushed past them on her way out. She liked to use Geer’s full name – a nod to her father’s Dutch heritage. It put a level of formality into their interactions, highlighting their different status as colleagues in the translation department of the Ministry of Information. Their work here was classified, and both Marjorie and Molly were senior translators, with a bigger wage and a higher level of security clearance, although it would have been unthinkable to Molly herself that she might pull rank
on any of her work chums.

  ‘Night, Marjorie!’ Geer called out as the other girl dashed along the parquet flooring of the corridor on the fifth floor of the building in which they all worked, translating and typing missives, notes and pamphlets, often in triplicate with the fiddly carbon paper pressed between the standard-issue watermarked sheets.

  This was a job for smart girls – ones like Molly who had excelled academically and fallen through the net of domestic bliss that had failed to catch them as they fell from education. Not that Molly was fussed. Unlike her sister, Joyce, or her mother, for that matter, she didn’t want to be caught – not while she was still trying to figure out the kind of marriage she wanted or indeed if she wanted one at all. There were two things of which she was certain: first, she wanted a career of her own, and second, she knew that to be stuck at home darning and cooking for a man, or worse, beholden to the needs of some wailing child, was not for her. It wasn’t that she didn’t respect the lives of her sister, mother and most other women with whom she came into contact – indeed she sometimes envied them, doubting that they had the same mental itch that made it hard to think about settling down, and then having to justify her nonconformist views on the topic. But the thought of being tied to the house and enslaved to domesticity was horrific.

  When she originally applied to work for the Foreign Office, she’d been informed that this role was a stepping stone into other governmental departments – most definitely where her sights were set. The plan was to make her mark while translating and after the war, having earned her stripes, figuratively speaking, she would apply for a role in diplomacy. This request had been stamped all over her application form, with emphasis on her outstanding language ability, something she had excelled at in school.

  It was only after having been in the role for the last year or so that eighteen-year-old Mary Collway (Molly to everyone who knew her) understood why their work was secret. She had translated propaganda posters from Germany, transcripts of conversations and notes from the enemy, intercepted and squirrelled away until they fell into her hands. She had quickly gone from wishing she was more directly involved in the war effort to realising that by providing understanding of the enemy’s written materials and conversations, she was indeed doing her bit. Molly had translated direct orders from Berlin to destroy food-supply ships in an effort to make England and her allies starve. Evasive measures had been taken and this had been in no small part down to the work she had done.

  She thought now about the cold cut of pressed brawn and pickles that awaited her at home, no doubt already on the kitchen table with a linen tea towel thrown over the top of it for preservation. She then pictured her mother, or rather the angry, critical shell of this woman who used to be her mother, wandering from room to room as if in search of something – or someone, who would not be coming home. Molly remembered when this veil of despair had descended: the day they had buried her father. It was as if, when the final clods of earth banged against the engraved plaque on the lid of his polished wood coffin, her mother knew she didn’t need to pretend any more, not now the very worst thing had happened. Molly drew breath. Even the thought of having to find her bright voice and holler ‘Hell-llooo!’ as she stepped over the shiny brass step of their Victorian terraced house on Old Gloucester Street, Bloomsbury, was almost more than she could stand.

  Unlike her mother’s beloved brother Max, who had been blown into a thousand pieces by an artillery shell at the Battle of the Somme, her father had survived the Great War, only to find his life blighted by two things: the memories that haunted his nightmares and his wheezing lungs, which had been irreparably damaged by the noxious mustard gas he had breathed in in the trenches. It was as though he had been spat out far from the battle zone and landed in his chair by the fire in his study, his face pinched, eyes hollow and with a lift to his nose as if the very scent of death still lingered. Her father thought he had been one of the lucky ones, dodging the bullet with his name on it, while those around him fell like dominoes in a line, the first having been pushed by the sharp finger of the Hun. The truth was, however, that he had not dodged it, not at all. His bullet had merely been delayed, delivered slowly. It had taken years for him to finally drown in his own bed without so much as a drop of water within reach.

  ‘Come on, Moll! Don’t let a girl down!’ Geer whined again.

  Molly sighed. ‘All right then, one drink. And I mean it, one.’

  ‘Come on – we need some fun after today!’ Geer linked arms with her friend and the two swept along the corridor with their gas masks nestling in khaki canvas boxes slung across their bodies. ‘You’re going to love Johan. He’s an absolute hoot!’

  ‘Is he? Oh good,’ Molly offered sarcastically as they made their way along the street with the chill of winter turning every breath crisp, heading for the Army and Navy Club in Pall Mall.

  ‘Who knows, we might feel a bit of that old Christmas spirit!’ Geer said.

  ‘Darling, it’s two weeks away and you obviously didn’t get the memo: Christmas is cancelled again this year. Bloody war!’

  ‘Yes, bloody, bloody war!’ Geer shouted.

  The girls huddled close together for warmth as they walked. Molly had got used to travelling at dusk without the comforting glow of streetlamps or the golden light pooling on the pavements from people’s homes, her eyes now far better attuned to a world where windows were darkened with heavy blackout curtains or cardboard and paint to hide signs of life from the enemy. Crews of fire watchers gathered on corners, guarding hand-pulled carts with water pumps and extinguishers, in wait for the sudden siren that signalled incendiary bombs or the urgent cry of ‘FIRE!’ that would send a shiver through to Molly’s very bones, knowing it meant devastation for great swathes of the capital’s residents, rich and poor alike. Hitler’s bombing raids were indeed the great leveller, in every sense.

  Nearly every man on the street was in uniform: both those walking with a straight back and a meaningful stare, working on home soil to keep the nation safe, and those giddy, lopsided, leaning on a mate, no doubt home on R&R, wearing the cocky grin of the inebriated and with a soggy Woodbine hanging from their lower lip and a hat or beret askew. Girls not unlike her and Geer, similarly dressed in winter coats and sturdy brown shoes, tripped along the pavements arm in arm, always in twos or threes: the days and nights of feeling safe to wander the streets alone were a dim and distant memory. Her world, like everyone else’s, was thoroughly changed, and the speed with which that change had happened was the most terrifying thing. It felt like mere weeks between the day her friends went from whispering the word ‘war’ and wondering if it could happen again to picking their way through rubble-strewn streets and turning up for jobs deemed unsuitable for women – unsuitable, that was, until all the men had grabbed a tin hat and a gun and gone off to do their bit, when suddenly they were very much in demand. Not that Molly was moaning about that.

  She would never admit to feeling cheated, not when there were so many suffering, so many fighting.

  ‘Evening, darlin’!’

  Molly heard the call from one of the only unaccompanied women in the street, a street worker loitering between a shop doorway and the edge of an alley, with smoke curling from a cigarette and the cloying scent of cheap perfume hanging around her in a pungent cloud. The darkness was kind to her trade, hiding the grimy, age-etched face of the poor woman, who, like everyone else, needed to put food on the table.

  ‘I was chatting to Beryl in the ladies earlier,’ Geer said, pulling her close. ‘She reckons Marjorie’s chap is back home tonight.’

  ‘I didn’t know Marjorie had a chap.’

  ‘Nor me – she’s a dark horse, that one, don’t you think?’ Geer raised her eyebrows. ‘But according to Beryl, she caught her reading a letter in the stationery cupboard and then squirrelled it away in her bra when she heard Beryl come in. How sweet is that!’

  ‘Terribly. And it does explain her eagerness to get away and her unusually pleasant
demeanour over the lunch table.’

  Molly didn’t have a fella of her own. This was at times an irritation, as she was keen to explore sex, wanting to unravel the great mystery of the physical, but sadly this adventure, too, would have to wait to launch, as all the eligible men were busy fighting. Unlike most girls of her age, she did not see her virginity as the jewel in the crown, nor was it a chip with which to bargain. Within the walls of their Bloomsbury home, sex and all its vagaries were completely taboo. Molly had once been on the receiving end of a stern stare and a not so subtle tut when she had casually mentioned her menstrual cycle. A crime she had dared not repeat, keen to avoid her mother’s censorial gaze on all matters physical.

  ‘She never really chats, does she, Marjorie?’ Molly found Marjorie either quiet and thoughtful or, on occasion, spiky and intense. There didn’t seem to be much space in her for fun or friendship.

  ‘I think she feels a little out of place, truth be told.’ Marjorie’s strong cockney twang was in stark contrast to the rounded vowels of the other girls. ‘And I don’t think she has an easy home life.’ Geer kept her voice low.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Oh, you know, she’s from the East End.’ Geer pulled a face. ‘One of six, apparently, and I heard a rumour there’s only two of them bringing in a wage. Her mother was French and died when she was young, and the father took to drink, by all accounts.’

  ‘Good Lord . . . Think I would, too, if I was left with six kids!’ Molly sighed. ‘She’s a bloody good translator, though – thorough. And if she’s half French, that explains her fluency.’

  ‘Well, I hope she has a nice time with her fella.’

  ‘How could she not?’ Molly winked and they both giggled. ‘Any news from Richard?’

  Richard, Geer’s beau, a friend of her cousin, was currently serving in North Africa. He was a wonderful letter writer. With his gift for penmanship, Molly loved to hear his second-hand protestations of devotion and the small snippets he was able to share of his life on deployment in such a hot, barren place. She was fairly certain that the poor chap would have been mortified to know his declarations of love were shared across the polished mahogany of the dining room, not that he would ever find out.