Chapter 2
Reg looked almost as shocked by this news as Bobby was.
‘Don’t waste any time, do they?’ he growled, his brow setting in a scowl. He raised his voice to call to his wife. ‘Mary! Better get that teapot in here. It’s an emergency.’
Bobby tried to collect herself as Reg hobbled from his desk, leaning heavily on the stick he used to support his lame left leg, and took the letter from her. The numbness within her had started to subside, giving way to a fist of icy dread.
‘Well, it’s not a sure thing,’ Reg said when he’d scanned the text. ‘You’ve not rightly got your call-up yet, have you? You’re to report for your medical in two days, that’s all.’
‘What’s the difference? It means I’ll have to go, Reg. In weeks, I’ll have to leave here and… I’ll have to go.’
‘Not necessarily. Happen you’ll fail.’
‘I won’t fail.’ She laughed. ‘I’m too damned healthy. I don’t even wear reading glasses. I’ll have to leave you and Mary, the girls, my dad… oh Lord, my dad.’ Bobby pushed her fingers into her hair. ‘He can’t live alone. Not again.’
‘Told him, have you?’
‘Not yet. Gil only just gave me the letter.’ She swallowed a sob. ‘Reg, I don’t know what to do,’ she whispered.
‘Now, now. None of that.’ Reg gave her shoulder a clumsy pat. ‘It’ll be reet.’
She gave a small smile as Mary came bustling in with the tray of tea things held out before her like the cure for all ills. Bobby could almost believe Reg’s statement that things would be all right in his wife’s calm, motherly presence. War was a force to be reckoned with, but so was Mary Atherton.
‘Now then, what’s to do?’ Mary said, putting the tray down on Bobby’s desk. She frowned when she caught sight of the OHMS envelope. ‘Oh,’ she said in a gentler tone. ‘You’ve not had bad news, love?’
‘You might say so.’ Bobby nodded to the letter in Reg’s hand.
Wordlessly, Reg handed it to her. Wordlessly, Mary read it and handed it back. Then she started pouring the tea with an air of businesslike efficiency.
‘Well?’ Bobby said.
‘Well what?’
‘What do you think?’
Mary stirred some tinned milk into the teas and handed Bobby a cup.
‘You knew it was a possibility, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘A lot of girls will be opening a letter like this since that new National Service Act has gone through.’
‘I knew it could happen, but I didn’t think it would happen quite so soon.’ Bobby stared into her teacup, hoping to find answers in the thinly brewed liquid. ‘What I can’t understand is why I’m to go to a recruiting centre for this medical. That means the forces.’
‘Is that not what you said you wanted when you’d to go register?’ Reg asked.
Bobby massaged her temples as she thought back to that day in the summer when she, along with a lot of other women her age, had been summoned to Bradford Employment Exchange to register for war work if it ever became a necessity. So much had happened since then, she’d half-forgotten it.
‘I told the clerk my preference was Land Army,’ she said.
‘I thought that if it did happen – conscription of women – then I might be able to get a place on one of the local farms. Then the Soviets came into the war, and the Americans, all those men joining the fight, and I started to hope…’ She gave a soft laugh.
‘…started to hope maybe they wouldn’t need us girls after all. ’
Mary’s gaze fell on Bobby’s reporter’s notebook, lying on her desk covered in shorthand. ‘Did you tell them all you could do?’
‘Well, yes, I…’ Bobby pressed her fingers into her eyes, suddenly unutterably weary.
She was so very, very tired of this damned war.
‘They asked about qualifications and work experience. I told them I was a reporter and I’d been a typist before that, and I’d learned secretarial skills at Pitman’s College.
I didn’t think it would make much difference. ’
‘Seems it must do.’
Another sob bubbled up. Reg gave an awkward little cough. Bobby had learned over the past fourteen months that a kind heart lay under her employer’s gruff exterior. Still, he was a man – a Yorkshireman at that – and he was naturally embarrassed by any display of emotion from the womenfolk.
She dashed the tear away. It was pathetic, she knew.
People were being called up every day. Some of them – many of the men and even some of the women – would be sent to face horrors Bobby couldn’t begin to picture.
Some might never come home. But they had to go, because the consequences of losing this war were too horrific to even imagine.
Yet here she was crying because, what – she’d be homesick?
Miss her job, her friends, her family? Men and women made greater sacrifices all the time.
Her own Charlie had left a comfortable job in a reserved occupation to do his duty as a bomber pilot, risking death daily for a higher cause.
And here was Bobby Bancroft, sobbing because she was being asked to do a bit of typing for the war effort.
But it wasn’t only that she’d miss her home and job.
It was her father. The thought of letting him live by himself after what had happened the last time.
That dreadful night she had rushed home to Bradford, not knowing if he was dead or alive.
And then there was her sister Lilian, pregnant and unmarried, needing her…
Her gaze drifted to Reg’s lame left leg, damaged beyond repair in the last war.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I suppose I must seem like a scrimshank or something, when the two of you have given so much.’
‘Now don’t talk daft,’ Mary said. ‘Them sort of propaganda words is all well and good for the pictures, but that’s not real life.
We’re women, Bobby, not soldiers, and there’s more to that than keeping only our husbands and bairns – others who depend on us, when they’ve no one else to depend on. A woman makes a house a home.’
‘I can’t help feeling guilty though.’
‘Well, you’ve no need. Now have a mouthful of tea then come into the kitchen, the pair of ye, and we’ll talk it over while young Bobby has a bite of breakfast. You can’t deal with a shock on an empty stomach. The bairns have gone off to school, so it’s just we three.’
Bobby sipped her tea obediently, finding the tone of command a balm to the helplessness she was feeling. Mary was right: she did feel a little stronger after swallowing it. She followed Mary to the kitchen, Reg bringing up the rear holding the letter.
A homely scene met them. One of Mary’s hens was ensconced in a cotton wool-lined vegetable crate by the fire, her feathers fluffed contentedly. Ace the border collie, who belonged to the two evacuees, sat diligently to attention beside her as if he were the hen’s personal bodyguard.
‘Daft hound thinks yon Hetty’s a sheep,’ Mary said as she guided Bobby into a chair at the kitchen table and started filling a plate with bacon and toast.
‘Why is she in the kitchen?’
‘Jessie brought her in this morning coughing away, poor old biddy. Whisky and quinine’s the best thing for a hen that’s taken cold, but she should be so lucky nowadays. A warm spoonful of Reg’s brown ale is the best I can do for her. Lord knows what flavour our boiled eggs will be next week.’
Despite her worries, Bobby couldn’t help laughing.
‘You’re worried about your father, I suppose,’ Mary said as she put a plate of food in front of her.
Bobby nodded. ‘He needs someone to keep house for him. He couldn’t do for himself. He isn’t used to it, and the cow house is hardly replete with modern conveniences.’
‘You’ve no need to worry about that. Plenty of old girls round here missing sons and husbands who’d snap up a man to mother, and you needn’t fear I’d let any family of mine go wanting.’
Bobby smiled to hear Mary refer to them as family.
She knew that had nothing to do with her impending marriage to Charlie.
It was just what they’d become, somehow.
A little patchwork family: Reg and Mary, Charlie, her and her father, and the two Parry girls from London.
Funny how the war had pushed them all together.
And now, perhaps, the war was about to pull them all apart. She would have to leave her family and the Dales, for who knew how long. And there was Lilian, and the baby, and her dad…
‘It isn’t only about my dad getting his tea on the table,’ Bobby told Mary, choosing her words carefully. ‘He… he might be lonely.’
‘He knows he’s always welcome here.’ Mary refilled Bobby’s teacup from the pot. ‘We won’t let him sit on his own by an unlit fire, dwelling on the dark times.’
‘You don’t understand. When he lived alone in Bradford, he…’
Bobby hesitated, not knowing how to get out what she wanted to say.
Reg and Mary knew something of her father’s demons – his struggles with shell shock and liquor – but neither knew what had really happened that night nearly a year ago.
About the suicide attempt that had left her dad in hospital and almost cost him his life.
Bobby had vowed, then, that she would never again leave her father to battle his devils alone, no matter what she decided to do with her life.
But now King and Country had come to call, and it seemed the course of her life was no longer hers to decide.
‘When he lived alone, he really struggled,’ she finished lamely, poking at her bacon for Mary’s benefit, although she hardly felt as though she could eat. ‘He had a lot of nightmares. He was drinking too much. I know you’d look after him for my sake, but it needs to be family.’
‘Aye, I know what you mean. There’s some things as only kin ought to see.’ Reg, who had been poring over the letter, put it down beside her and pointed to a paragraph near the bottom. ‘But there’s provision made for that, look. Hardship cases.’
Mary bent to read it too. ‘You’re right, Reg. Clever old stick to spot it. Bobby, see what it says: after your medical you can tell the clerk you want to apply for a postponement certificate on the grounds of exceptional hardship and she’ll give you a form.’
Bobby frowned. ‘What does that mean though – exceptional hardship?’
‘Any situation where you’ve others relying on you, I suppose.’
‘But if it’s talking about money… my dad relies on me to keep house for him and, you know, for company, but he doesn’t need my wages. Topsy pays him a decent salary as gamekeeper – double what I earn.’
‘His house is courtesy of your job with me,’ Reg said. ‘Not that we’d throw the old man into the streets, but I’m happy to tell them we would. I don’t mind being the baddie if it’ll help you get out of it.’
‘Besides, you and our Charlie will be wed before long,’ Mary said. ‘It’s only unmarried women eligible for the call-up. Tell them you’ve got a wedding arranged and they’ll surely let you off.’
‘We’re hoping we can do it soon, but it isn’t arranged yet, Mary,’ Bobby reminded her.
‘Charlie will need official permission from his commanding officer at RAF Binbrook once he’s posted.
He’s just had a week’s home leave for Christmas so they’d be entitled to tell him he has to wait while some of the other lads take their turn. ’
‘Still. You’ve a ring on your finger, haven’t you? I’d have thought that’d be good enough.’
‘I doubt that would make a difference, now wheels are in motion. Marriage wouldn’t bring any change to my domestic responsibilities, with no children and Charlie away. It seems the war effort needs every man and woman it can get nowadays.’
‘Huh,’ Reg muttered. ‘They’ll have called up the whole ruddy country by the time we get to the end of this thing. They’ll even have my old bones hobbling out to face the Hun.’
Bobby was silent, passing stringy pieces of bacon rind to Ace under the table.
It was so much to take in. Only an hour ago, she had been just a country reporter: writing articles on their little rural affairs, keeping house for her dad, doing her small bit for the war effort by making up Red Cross parcels and acting as one of Silverdale’s air-raid wardens.
She had known call-up was a possibility, yet she hadn’t thought it would happen so quickly.
She had hoped it wouldn’t need to happen at all.
But now the war had come for her, she couldn’t just hide under the bedclothes and wait for it to go away.
Her dad needed her, Lilian needed her, but so, apparently, did her country.
Did she have any right to shirk, now the summons had come to join the fight?
If Charlie and her brothers were out there risking their lives, why should she stay cocooned in the Dales, where war had never felt truly real?
Britain needed every man, which meant it needed every woman.
That was how men were to be freed up so they could win this thing.
But then Bobby thought of her father as he had been a year ago: white and feeble in a hospital bed, his will to live sapped. Of poor Lilian: unmarried with a baby coming, needing her sister more than ever.
Never had the conflict between her duty to her family and her duty to her country been laid out more starkly before her.