Wartime Wife by Lizzie Lane Page A

exchanged a nervous look with her sister.
    ‘Never mind, Daw,’ said Lizzie. ‘Go and get yourself ready to meet John. You can borrow that nice new red scarf of mine if you like. I’ll help you tie it into a turban once I’ve helped Ma clear the dishes.’
    Once Daw was gone, Lizzie silently piled the last of the dishes on the draining board.
    Mary Anne sensed she had something to say.
    The silence was pregnant with questions. Mary Anne waited, wondering what was on Lizzie’s mind.
    ‘What was it like? The Great War.’
    ‘Extremely bloody.’
    ‘Did Dad enjoy it? It sounds as though he did.’
    ‘Why don’t you ask him?’
    ‘Because you’re easier to talk to. Besides, I don’t want to know about big battles, I’m more interested how it affected people’s lives. Nothing was ever the same afterwards, was it?’
    Mary Anne shook her head and looked at her daughter with interest. She certainly had hidden depths, and her looks … well, it was almost like looking in a mirror and seeing a reflection of herself twenty years ago. She touched her daughter’s face with her wet fingers. ‘You look so much like me, or rather how I used to look.’
    Lizzie laughed, catching her mother’s fingers with her own. ‘You said it right first time. You don’t look that much older than me. You look more like my sister than my mother.’
    Mary Anne laughed and pushed a luxuriant lock of hair back inside her hairnet.
    Lizzie cocked her head, sending her own lengthy locks tumbling over her shoulder. ‘I saw the baker watching you from his van the other day. You were talking to Mrs Young and he was staring at you.’
    ‘I didn’t notice. If I had, I might have slapped his face.’
    Dimples appeared at the side of Lizzie’s mouth. ‘No you wouldn’t, and you did notice him. I know you did. I saw you purposely turn your back on him.’
    Mary Anne remembered doing exactly that, and for exactly the reason Lizzie had suggested.
    ‘Now why would I do that?’
    ‘He’s just a baker, not a knight in shining armour.’
    ‘I think they’re all dead.’
    ‘Bakers or knights?’
    Mary Anne laughed.
    Lizzie wiped the draining board down. ‘There will be knights in this war, but they won’t be wearing shining armouror riding horses. Some will be flying. Some will even be women.’
    Mary Anne eyed her daughter warily. Having a son in uniform was something she knew might happen. It hadn’t occurred to her that daughters might be called up too. Her fear that her family might disintegrate before her eyes intensified.
    Later, once the dishes were put away and the men were smoking, Mary Anne stood alone in the scullery considering the future.
    A droplet of condensation fell on her head. She shivered. The scullery was built of wood and glass, no more than a lean-to leading off the kitchen, housing a brown clay sink next to the water pump. Beyond that, and only reached by an outside door, was the washhouse, a place of soapsuds, piles of laundry and locked cupboards.
    Scrubbing hard at the pig’s head and scraping its bristles off with a knife kept her hands occupied. Narrowing her eyes, the triangle of pink flesh became Adolf Hitler. Her knife zipped faster over the bristled surface. War had come to the world and danger to her children. A cold blue eye stared mockingly up at her, for all the world as cold as the ones she’d seen staring out at her from the newsreels at the picture house.
    Firmly gripping the handle of her knife, she stabbed at it. The inner fluid spurted out, a mush made misty by the tears running silently down her cheeks and into her mouth.

Chapter Eight
    By teatime the next day, the pig’s head was in a saucepan, the snout sticking up through the water, and Mary Anne’s tears were under control when Doreen came out. She’d washed and changed ready to meet John. Usually she smelled of tobacco dust. The air in the tobacco factory was like a choking fog and everyone ended up smelling the same, the dust getting into