topcoat.
There were no fresh flowers to be had at that time of year of course, but a neighbour lent me a posy of artificial roses, which I’m gripping with white knuckles as we pose on the Town Hall steps, me with the grin and him with his strangely shorn hair and a faraway look, as if his mind is already on his big adventure.
The second photo is with the families posed in the lounge bar of The Nelson after the ceremony: Alfie and me, Ma and Pa, Freda and my new in-laws, Mr and Mrs Barker. Pa is on the edge of the group and I noticed for the first time tonight that there’s a space next to him at the edge of the photograph: as if we’ve left a space for Johnnie and Ray. Johnnie was already dead by then, of course, and Ray was out in France. It’s tempting to draw their faces onto the gap, because if it is possible to conjure up the presence of the dead by the power of thoughts from the living, they were definitely there in spirit that day.
He promised me a weekend in Brighton when he gets home. I wish! A letter would do me, right now.
Tuesday 24th December
I had a miserable Christmas Eve. The Nelson was packed with newly-home soldiers and their families celebrating together. Everyone was in high spirits and why not, it’s our first Christmas of peace, after all?
But I had no Alfie, and I had to put up with Freda and her new beau Claude canoodling all the time without a thought for anyone else. I can’t bring myself to like him and I wish he would just tell the truth about what he did during the war. He seems to have too many sophisticated ways and too much money, and I can’t help wondering whether he’s one of those black marketeers who Pa says should be shot at dawn.
Ma couldn’t take it, and went home early. It was bad enough when all mothers seemed to be in the same boat, but the pain is even harder to bear now the war is over, and everyone else’s sons and brothers are returning. I worry about her: she is pale and listless and although we tell her that getting on with something will make her feel better – even just taking Bessie for a walk up the park – she prefers to sit in the house by the fire. Which is all very well but coal is getting so short and pricey we can ill afford to keep the fire banked up all the time. This time of year there are no vegetables growing in our little plot at the back, which she would normally tend, and there’s been no laundry or mending coming in of late, either. Everyone’s pulling in their horns at the moment.
Most of the time she won’t allow us to mention them. But sometimes she says: ‘If only we could bury my boys, so’s we’d have a grave to lay flowers on.’ For the lack of a grave, she’s turned their bedroom into a shrine, with nothing touched since Ray’s last leave home. She sneaks in there when no-one else is around and, on their birthdays she places cards in the room, same as at Christmas, addressed to them as if they were alive.
I like to go in there too, from time to time, and think about my brothers, and what they might have become had they been allowed to grow into men, with wives and families and homes of their own.
A niggling worry eats at me: when Alfie comes back we won’t be able to afford a house of our own until we both get some work. He’s got a room at his parents’ place, of course, but it’s tiny. So we’d have to stay here, and my room is only big enough for a single bed. The most obvious thing would be for us to have the boys’ room, but I can’t see Ma ever accepting that.
What seems to upset Pa most is the fact that the boys won’t be around for him to train up as butchers, and there’ll be no-one to take over the family business my grandfather started back in the last century. Perhaps he could take on Alfie, now that he’s family?
All this thinking about my brothers has made me sad. It’s a bitter coincidence that they both died at the very same age, one I haven’t even reached myself, yet:
RIP: Johnnie
There were no fresh flowers to be had at that time of year of course, but a neighbour lent me a posy of artificial roses, which I’m gripping with white knuckles as we pose on the Town Hall steps, me with the grin and him with his strangely shorn hair and a faraway look, as if his mind is already on his big adventure.
The second photo is with the families posed in the lounge bar of The Nelson after the ceremony: Alfie and me, Ma and Pa, Freda and my new in-laws, Mr and Mrs Barker. Pa is on the edge of the group and I noticed for the first time tonight that there’s a space next to him at the edge of the photograph: as if we’ve left a space for Johnnie and Ray. Johnnie was already dead by then, of course, and Ray was out in France. It’s tempting to draw their faces onto the gap, because if it is possible to conjure up the presence of the dead by the power of thoughts from the living, they were definitely there in spirit that day.
He promised me a weekend in Brighton when he gets home. I wish! A letter would do me, right now.
Tuesday 24th December
I had a miserable Christmas Eve. The Nelson was packed with newly-home soldiers and their families celebrating together. Everyone was in high spirits and why not, it’s our first Christmas of peace, after all?
But I had no Alfie, and I had to put up with Freda and her new beau Claude canoodling all the time without a thought for anyone else. I can’t bring myself to like him and I wish he would just tell the truth about what he did during the war. He seems to have too many sophisticated ways and too much money, and I can’t help wondering whether he’s one of those black marketeers who Pa says should be shot at dawn.
Ma couldn’t take it, and went home early. It was bad enough when all mothers seemed to be in the same boat, but the pain is even harder to bear now the war is over, and everyone else’s sons and brothers are returning. I worry about her: she is pale and listless and although we tell her that getting on with something will make her feel better – even just taking Bessie for a walk up the park – she prefers to sit in the house by the fire. Which is all very well but coal is getting so short and pricey we can ill afford to keep the fire banked up all the time. This time of year there are no vegetables growing in our little plot at the back, which she would normally tend, and there’s been no laundry or mending coming in of late, either. Everyone’s pulling in their horns at the moment.
Most of the time she won’t allow us to mention them. But sometimes she says: ‘If only we could bury my boys, so’s we’d have a grave to lay flowers on.’ For the lack of a grave, she’s turned their bedroom into a shrine, with nothing touched since Ray’s last leave home. She sneaks in there when no-one else is around and, on their birthdays she places cards in the room, same as at Christmas, addressed to them as if they were alive.
I like to go in there too, from time to time, and think about my brothers, and what they might have become had they been allowed to grow into men, with wives and families and homes of their own.
A niggling worry eats at me: when Alfie comes back we won’t be able to afford a house of our own until we both get some work. He’s got a room at his parents’ place, of course, but it’s tiny. So we’d have to stay here, and my room is only big enough for a single bed. The most obvious thing would be for us to have the boys’ room, but I can’t see Ma ever accepting that.
What seems to upset Pa most is the fact that the boys won’t be around for him to train up as butchers, and there’ll be no-one to take over the family business my grandfather started back in the last century. Perhaps he could take on Alfie, now that he’s family?
All this thinking about my brothers has made me sad. It’s a bitter coincidence that they both died at the very same age, one I haven’t even reached myself, yet:
RIP: Johnnie
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