Author's Notes.
A bit of a departure for me, Sandy and I had earlier watched Brief Encounter and at bedtime she asked why I didn't try writing something from that time period. I thought it was a good idea, I have always been fascinated by WWII. As a kid I can remember my mother teasing my father when I asked what he did in the war. My mother explained that as a farm worker my father had been exempt military service and had been in the LDV, Local Defence Force, or as my mother teased 'The Look Duck and Vanish'. Turned out my father used to be responsible for up to ten Italian Prisoners of War who worked on the farm. He said they never tried to escape, could even be left to get on with the work they'd been set.
My mother told me as a young woman during the war, before she married my father, she worked in a Jam factory near Leeds, she said it had more anti-aircraft protection than the nearby arms factory.
***
Wayward Wife Goes Out with A Bang.
It was the first week of March 1944 and nighttime Air raids over London were once again a regular thing, not as heavy as in the Blitz, but just as deadly. The population had again become accustomed to the sirens and taking shelter in the underground stations and communal shelters. Further afield in the suburbs people sought safety in underground Anderson Shelters, more so now that many Luftwaffe crews, not wanting to face the flak from the ack-ack batteries would jettison their bombs early and return to France.
Earlier that day, thirty-three-year-old Jackie Hardaker had received a letter from her husband Jack. She read it avidly, he was recovering in hospital. Jackie then grinned when she saw he was being discharged and he had added at the bottom that he hoped to be home soon, and in brackets 'maybe before you get this letter'. She saw the date when he 'hoped' he would be home, and he was nearly right, it was in three days' time.
Jack had barely survived the desert campaign thanks to a direct hit from a German artillery shell destroying the building he was sheltering in; he'd been lucky, he'd been buried two days before being dig out from what surely would have been his grave had he gone undiscovered for much longer. His injuries although not life threatening, they were bad enough to get him repatriated to blighty. Now he was coming home from the hospital cum sanitorium in Devon where he'd spent the best part of a year recovering.
Unfortunately, with the sanitorium being so far away from London, Jackie had only been able to visit her husband twice in the ten months since his admission. And these visits were only possible thanks to travel warrants obtained via the WVS.
Jackies inability to visit wasn't helped by the fact that Jack was roomed with a bullying Welshman who after seeing Jackie, would taunt Jack about his lack of visits, joking, "Bet that pretty wife of yours is too busy with those Yanks keeping her bed warm to come down here - 'Way hey' cockney Boyo. Overpaid, oversexed and over here..."
The Welshman would further taunt. "Hey cockney, you got any sexy photographs of that pretty wife of yours?"
Jack would try to ignore him, especially when the Welshman would start laughing and follow up with, "No... Want to buy some?"
Other laughing taunts, "Hey if that wife of yours ever visits, send her my way," he'd grab his groin, "I'll put a spring in her step, give her a reason to keep coming back to visit her cripple."
Jack was glad to see the back of him when, after a fight with another patient, in which the other patient nearly died, the Welshman was put on charges and sent elsewhere, hopefully where he could do no more harm.
Having recovered from his physical injuries, all but for a limp, what had been more worrying for the doctors, and more difficult to treat, were Jack's psychological injuries. The doctors told Jackie her husband was suffering from some form of traumatic shock, there was a medical name for it but Jackie knew it in its most simplistic term, Shell shock. Jackie didn't know what exactly was wrong with Jack, but knew he suffered from nightmares and bouts of depression. Jackie was being led to believe her husband was making good progress; his nightmares were under control thanks to medication - basically strong sleeping powders that induced a heavy sedated sleep. She was told that he appeared to be over the worst, any lingering feeling of depression should go away when back among family and friends. The hospital was eager to discharge him as it needed the beds, they'd been told to empty the wards to free up beds over the coming months. At the same time, the Army discharged him, and so he was to be sent home. A civilian.
***
Later that night, for the third night in a row the sirens sounded as if by clockwork, the Germans if anything were punctual. Jackie grabbed the pre prepared flask of tea and cheese sandwich. It was raining that night and even though she wore a scarf, she still dashed down the garden with her coat over her head to try and keep her hair dry. Upon reaching the Anderson shelter she pulled the door open and ducked into the entrance of the buried tin shed that they shared with their neighbour, Bill Peterson, whose garden backed onto theirs. The shelter itself was of substantial construction, more substantial than most as Jack, being a builder by trade, and Bill their neighbour, a carpenter, had combined resources to make both families a comfortable bolthole complete with table, two sets of bunks and a small heater-stove for the winter months. Unlike most shelters that had to make do with a bucket, adjacent to their shelter Jack and Fred had built a homemade 'closet' complete with seat and bucket should the need arise.
Pushing the Blackout blanket aside she pulled the door shut behind her. In the dark half-light she knew she'd be alone, nothing unusual in that, Bill Peterson, a widower, was an Air Raid warden so more often than not was on patrol. Shaking the water droplets from her coat Jackie then lit the paraffin lamp.
Just then the door pulled open and she jumped as her neighbour's twenty-two-year-old son, Trevor, stumbled in behind her. Though surprised, she knew him, had known him since he was a youngster, so it wasn't as if he was a stranger. Jackie knew he'd been in and out of trouble with the law but apart from pinching from Jacks vegetable patch now and again they'd had no trouble from him. The rumours were, since he'd managed to dodge conscription, he was now a spiv involved in the black market. He was one of those disliked but necessary evils of wartime, profiting from other people's misfortunes and the shortages created by war but at the same time providing the little extra's what would otherwise be unavailable. So, while other men fought, he stayed safe, hoping to grow his mini criminal empire into something more substantial.
Jack had warned his wife about him, even back when Trevor was a teenager, telling her he had bad blood in him, although he'd never dare say so to Bill, Trevor's dad. Jack had told her to have nothing to do with the young tearaway, to steer clear and so, despite seeing the good in most people, she'd abided by her husband's wishes, well mostly. Besides Trevor was rarely home.
