Bia's War Read online

  “I was thunderstruck by his revelation that he had only enlisted to prove himself to me and that he had known that I was the stronger of the two of us. I had never analysed our different strengths and weaknesses and hadn’t realised that he had, coming up with conclusions which I would never have drawn. An inferiority complex seemed a very strange reason for enlisting as a soldier, but it was what he had done and now we both had to live with the consequences.”

  “So we started the next stage of our lives together, but it was a very uneasy truce that we had called between us. William was often in great pain from the wounds to his legs and his missing arm and was very difficult to live with, although he was lucky that the shop produced enough income for us to be able to afford pain relief for him. I found him plenty of work he was capable of doing in the shop, while trying to keep him away from the financial side of the business, but he was regularly uncivil to Annie and Hannah and sometimes downright rude to customers. He had very restless nights when his legs pained him and the missing arm seemed to cause him equal pain and I spent many a night making up the doctor’s painkilling draughts and providing hot drinks. When he wasn’t in pain, he often woke screaming in the night having had nightmares about his times in the trenches and, again, I would provide hot drinks and try to settle him back down again.”

  “Those were the nights when he often woke Simon and Annie, although Peter and Hannah both managed to sleep through all but the worst of them. If Simon was awoken, then he had to be soothed back to sleep, because his father’s cries frightened him badly and I often wondered how I managed to stay on my feet, never mind work a full day in the shop, the lack of sleep was so draining. If it hadn’t been for Annie and Hannah, I think I could have gone under at that time, but they both helped me so much, even to the point of ignoring William’s rudeness when he snapped at them.”

  “That was also the time when I was grateful that Sammy had found these premises on Queen Street for me. There were enough rooms upstairs for William to have his own bedroom, ostensibly to stop him disturbing anyone else in the night, but really because I couldn’t stand the thought of him sharing my bed. Whenever he touched me, my skin crawled nearly as badly as it had done when Dennison had made his advances to me and I always made an excuse to step away from him.”

  “Throughout all this, Sam Lymer was my rock. He was placid and easy-going, with a quick wit and the capacity to make me laugh, even when I was at my lowest ebb. William often walked into a room and caught me laughing with Sam over some tale he was telling and, although Sam did his best to draw William into the conversation and share his humour with him, William was always temperamental when Sam was around. It came to a head one Sunday when William made a disparaging remark about Sam as we were all sitting round the kitchen table, eating our Sunday lunch. Hannah was very upset and rushed out of the kitchen, heading for her bedroom, closely followed by Annie who was intent on comforting her. Before she left the kitchen, Annie stopped at the door and turned on William, something she had never done before.”

  “‘You are a very small-minded man, William,’ she said, ‘and you have no right to try and belittle someone who has a generous spirit and a kind heart, particularly in front of that man’s daughter. It’s time you matured enough to appreciate those qualities in another human being.’”

  “I was amazed at Annie, because she had previously always treated William with respect, but he had gone too far even for her. William, as usual whenever he was criticised, immediately began sulking and wanted Annie and Peter to leave our home. Quietly, I reminded him that this was my house and Annie and Peter’s home and would remain so for as long as I had breath in my body; nobody would be evicted on his whim. What he said next left me speechless, not a state I usually inhabited.”

  “‘You are having an affair with Sam Lymer! I should have realised this when I first came home. I must be stupid if it’s taken me this long to realise what you are doing.’”

  “He wanted to carry on, working himself up into a frenzy but I brought him back to earth with a bump.”

  “‘Don’t be so ridiculous, William.’ I snapped at him. ‘Sam is and has been a very good friend to this family. Without his help, I wouldn’t have managed half as well as I have done, but we have never done anything reprehensible in the whole of the time I have known him, mainly because I am a married woman and he lost his wife last year. He still grieves deeply for her, but he throws his energies into working hard, caring for their children. He also has two boys who are fighting in those trenches that you have nightmares about, but he hides his worries and presents a happy face to the world, something of which you have no conception. Annie is right, you are incredibly small-minded, but I would also add that you are a poisonous little worm. Now, get out of my sight before I say even more.’”

  “He stormed out of the room and then out of the house, leaving me shaking with anger at his behaviour. I apologised to both Hannah and Annie on his behalf, knowing full well that he would never think of apologising himself and then set about the tasks of clearing up in the kitchen and getting the baking started for the next day. My mind wandered as I worked, kneading the dough for the bread, but I stopped short when the thought rose into my mind that I did admire Sam a great deal. He was a real man, tough and intelligent, but also sensitive and caring and William didn’t compare very well at all.”

  Nana Lymer faltered to a stop, reliving in her mind the worries and joys of that time of her life. Her recollections of her feelings of that day were crystal clear, more so than the more recent past and she was re-living the happiness she had felt when she had realised that what she felt for Sammy Lymer was more than mere friendship.

  “Are you ok, Nana?” Victoria asked, worried about the far-away expression on her grandmother’s face.

  “Ok?” Nana replied. “I’m more than ok, I’ve got more happy memories than any woman deserves, but where had I got to? Oh yes, the problems I had with William when he returned from the war. Those problems were soon surmounted by even bigger ones. I found out what the lesson was that Butcher Dennison wanted me to learn. But I think that will have to wait until tomorrow. It’s tea-time now and I’m tired. I think I need a snooze and your mother will be wanting you to help with making the tea. We’ll carry on again tomorrow, if your mam allows it.”

  Victoria had to accept that that was all she was going to get that day, but she was worried that her mother wouldn’t let her sit with Nana the next day, not when she had spent the whole afternoon with her. The shop would be closed again the next day because it was Boxing Day, so nobody would be doing any work apart from preparing meals. If she helped her mother cooking lunch she might manage to snatch the afternoon with her grandmother.

  Chapter Eight

  For a reason Victoria couldn’t fathom, her mother was in an incredibly good mood the next morning, singing as she prepared breakfast and not requiring any help at all. The reason behind it became apparent after breakfast was over and Victoria had started the washing up.“Have you got anything planned for today, Victoria?” her mother asked, as she passed the plates over for her to wash. “Have you got homework to do for school or anything?”

  “Nothing that I’ve got to do today.” Victoria replied, wary at her mother’s pleasant tone of voice. “I’ve got revision I’ve got to do for my mocks, but I don’t intend doing any of that today. It is Boxing Day, after all.”

  “Yes, I think you should have a rest from schoolwork today. Your dad and I have been invited to have lunch at the Welsh’s new house in Great Ayton and I wondered if you would look after Nana Lymer for me so that we can go. You wouldn’t be interested in looking at their new house, but I would like to go and I can’t if there’s no-one to look after Nana.”

  “Of course I’ll look after Nana.” Victoria replied, absolutely ecstatic that she wasn’t expected to spend any time with a family she really didn’t like. She couldn’t bear that her mother, unusually for her, saw the Welsh family as the perfect family with a won
derful home and was extremely jealous of them. A visit to their house usually produced a shopping spree when her mother would acquire items which she had seen at their house, convinced that they were the epitome of good taste and worth acquiring. Victoria had found their old home incredibly ostentatious and disliked the articles her mother would buy in her desire to copy them. She had no desire to visit their new home and would much rather spend the afternoon with Nana, free from any interruptions.

  So, by two o’clock, her parents had set off on their trip and Victoria was free to make tea and biscuits and take them up to Nana’s bedroom.

  “Victoria!” Nana exclaimed when Victoria entered her bedroom carrying a tray. “I didn’t think we would get two days of freedom!”

  “Mam and Dad have gone to see the Welsh’s new house and she wanted me to stay at home and look after you. So I’m here, ready for the next part of the story and I’ve brought tea so it doesn’t make you thirsty, talking to me.”

  “You’re a good girl, you really are. I just hope my story lives up to your expectations. Now, where had we got to?”

  “William had come home wounded and was taking it all out on you. You were working your socks off, trying to keep the shop going and look after Simon, as well as spending many hours during the nights helping William through his pain and his nightmares.”

  Victoria was pleased that she could explain it all so well.

  “Yes, pet. Life was difficult at that time. It was January 1917 and the snow lay thick on the ground. The winds seemed to be coming directly from the arctic, they were such lazy winds.”

  “Lazy winds?” Victoria interrupted. “What’s a lazy wind?”

  “A lazy wind is one that can’t be bothered to blow round you, so it blows straight through you; it’s as cold as that.” Nana explained. Victoria smiled. She had experienced a ‘lazy wind’ the week before when she had been shopping in the town. That wind had blown through all her layers of clothing, obviously too lazy to blow round her.

  “As I said,” Nana continued, “The winds were very cold and very strong, it snowed regularly and there were bitter frosts at night. I often thought about those mothers’ sons who were huddled in trenches in France and Flanders, waiting to be blown to smithereens and shivering with the cold and the fear. I also thought about their mothers and wives, sitting in their homes and worrying about their husbands and sons and praying for them to come home in one piece, or even slightly less than one piece, like William.”

  “William continued with his pain and his nightmares and his bad temper and his maudlin self-pity, all regularly spaced throughout the day, every day and I tried to hold it all together, often feeling so stretched out with the strain and the tension that, if anyone had plucked my strings, I would have twanged like a heavenly harp.”

  “Simon breezed sunnily through all our lives, always happy and smiling, always so loving, my ray of sunshine when everything else seemed so dark. Annie watched and listened and took note of all that went on between William and I, but she rarely spoke of it and, if she did, it was to let me know that she was always there if I needed a shoulder to cry on. Good friend that she was, she knew that if she had shown me pity and sympathy I would have dissolved in front of her and not been able to continue. She and Peter and, of course, Hannah and Sammy, kept me sane at that time and I thanked God every night for sending the four of them to me.”

  “Hannah sang her way through every day, hymns, marching songs and even some questionable tunes and lyrics that she picked up as she went around town. I knew her father had this same capacity for enjoying life and he also hummed and sang his way through every day, although I knew he was extremely worried about his two boys who were fighting over at the Front. He hadn’t heard from either of them for a long time and, occasionally, he would let slip that he was worried about them, although he always quoted ‘no news is good news’ whenever anyone asked him if they had been in contact with him.”

  “The shop was doing well, despite the fact that there were shortages of some foodstuffs. I had held the farmers to their contracts, so I usually had the basics available in my shop and the boys who worked at the docks were very good about letting me know if a ship berthed carrying any goods which they thought would capture my interest. Some things were very difficult to get hold of because the enemy were sinking a fair amount of merchant shipping, but we managed to always have something to sell.”

  “Sam and I continued to buy houses whenever we had the resources available to pay cash for them and we made a tidy sum in rents, so I knew we would always have something to fall back on should the enemy succeed in sinking the bulk of our shipping and we couldn’t continue to stock the shop. What sort of a state the country would have been in if that had happened was something none of us wanted to think about, but we had to plan for all eventualities.”

  “I was still gathering a few pieces of jewellery when families hit hard times and needed to exchange their valuables for food. I was always fair over the value I placed on these items, although I did always factor a profit into what I gave in exchange. The size of the profit sometimes depended on whether I thought the owner of the jewellery would ever come back to redeem their goods and I must admit I was swayed by the person who wanted to pledge their goods against some food. I wasn’t a real pawnbroker in that I never gave money in exchange for items, I always used food as my currency and that kept most of the drunkards away. They didn’t want to pawn items for food, they wanted to pawn items for cash, so they mostly avoided me, although some did come to me in desperation and ask if I would give them money.”

  “The items which were never redeemed stayed in the belt round my waist that Annie had made for me and, when that got too full, I kept them in a strong box at Mr Vine’s. He never knew what I was keeping in there, but he was a true professional and never enquired. When I found I was holding something I didn’t like I would go to one of the main jewellers in the town and swap it for gems, following Mr Sanderson’s advice and the jeweller began letting me know when he got an item in stock that he thought I might like.”

  “This was a part of my business of which William was unaware, although Sammy knew that I was squirreling jewellery away. William knew that Sam and I owned and rented out houses, but he didn’t ask for any details about them partly, I think, because Sammy was involved in it and partly because he was frightened that I would refuse to reveal any information about them. He was right in his thinking because I had no intentions of ever letting William know just how much I was worth in case he attempted to appropriate any of it. He had taken to drinking to relieve the pains in his legs, but he only had what money I paid him when he worked in the shop. When this ran out he had to stop and I think it was only lack of funds that stopped him from drinking himself to oblivion every night.”

  “This was the year that Simon started school and William made it his task to take him and collect him every day, so that he was always out of the shop at these times. I noticed that people brought their items for pawning when William wasn’t around and I wondered why they did this. Was it because they knew that William wasn’t party to what business deals I did or was it because he was often unpleasant with customers, particularly if they refused to let him serve them and asked for me? I didn’t know, but it served my purpose to not have him hanging around when I was valuing items and he was never given access to the book in which I kept my records of the items pawned and the amount of food handed over.”

  “January moved slowly into February, with no let-up in the horrendous weather conditions. The snow still lay deep on the ground and bitter frosts froze the water supplies and made walking a nightmare on the slippery ground. If you went outside you were wrapped up in so many layers of clothes that movement was almost impossible, yet the cold managed to get through to your bones and made them ache as though you had climbed mountains. I didn’t want to have to go outside, but one day I got word from one of the dock labourers that a ship from America had arrived, with a consignment of me
at on board. He had kept some aside for me and wanted me to go and move it into my warehouse.”

  “I knew I would have to go, because I didn’t want to miss the opportunity of having good meat to sell, but Peter wouldn’t be able to go with me because he was at the dentist’s. He had been having a lot of trouble with one of his back teeth and Annie had wrapped his face in a warm scarf and bundled him off to the dentists to get it removed. I hesitated about going down the docks without Peter, but it was the middle of the day and I had never had any trouble whenever I had gone there before, so I went on my own. I left a message with Hannah for Peter to follow me down when he got back from the dentist and set off on my own.”

  “At the dockside, the labourer was waiting for me with a pallet of meat and, because I was alone, he happily helped me carry it into my warehouse and store it in the large cupboard I used for keeping meat. Then he left, taking with him some meat pies and ginger beer I had brought for him and his mates and the payment for the consignment of meat. I was alone in my warehouse; checking through my stock and collecting a couple of small items which I wanted to take back to the shop. It was only seconds later that I heard the outer door slam and I shouted to Peter that I was in the cold-store area. He didn’t reply, but I heard his footsteps as he crossed the floor towards me, so I turned to ask him to take some of the items I was holding. It wasn’t Peter who was standing there, but Butcher Dennison, grinning evilly at my discomfort. It took me a few seconds to recover from the shock of seeing him there, but I managed to croak a perfectly respectable ‘Good day to you’.”