Madame Barbara. Helen Forrester

same year Barbara and her mother had been very relieved to see the return of some of their usual clientele, commercial travellers. The gentlemen had little to sell. Wholesalers were anxious, however, to keep their company name in front of their old clients, so that, as soon as adequate goods were available, their pre-war share of the market would not be lost.

      Once or twice, thought Barbara, the old folk had been very nice to her. Back in June 1942, when she had married George, they had insisted that Phyllis use some of their points rations, which meant very limited amounts of tinned food, like Spam or golden syrup, to make a wedding breakfast for the young couple.

      In addition, all the ladies had set to work to embroider or knit or crochet little wedding gifts. Even the gentlemen, whom Barbara swore were the laziest bunch of old so-and-sos she had ever met, bestirred themselves. The result was a number of beautifully hand-carved gifts. Though she could no longer bear to look at them because it made her want to cry, she still treasured in her dressing-table drawer three neatly carved wooden spoons made from driftwood found on the shore.

      She went round the lot of them to kiss them in gratitude.

      They had been equally kind when they heard about George’s death; they had all expressed their sorrow at her loss, as those who knew about it had done earlier, when her father was killed. There had not been a single quarrel for at least two weeks.

      During the weeks following the loss of George, two of the residents lost grandsons and at last, it seemed to Barbara, the reality of the war truly came home to them; not even a string of bombs dropped across the Wirral peninsula, nor the news some had received of their homes being damaged or requisitioned had been able to achieve that.

      When the war began, Barbara herself had wanted to volunteer for military service and join the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service. It sounded exciting.

      Her mother would not hear of it. ‘With your dad at sea, I need you. Who else can I turn to?’

      So Barbara, who loved her mam, stayed home.

      When France fell to the Germans, Barbara broached the subject again. But Phyllis still would not hear of it either. Nice girls stayed at home with their mams. ‘And, anyway, wot am I going to do without you, and a house full of old folks to run?’ When her father was torpedoed, her mother was certainly glad to have her there.

      A domestic crisis had occurred when, in December 1942, all married women under the age of forty were called up for war work. Barbara was directed to a contractor who was busy repairing damaged docks in Birkenhead. She worked on shift as a labourer together with one other girl. Her hours were long and the work, with all its lifting and carrying, was very heavy.

      ‘At least it’s better than the ATS,’ Phyllis said, as she rubbed Barbara’s back with surgical spirit. ‘You can sleep in your own bed.’ She imagined that she was being comforting.

      Barbara’s bed was exceedingly cold, especially without George. She shrugged and looked down at her hands, which were rapidly being ruined by hard labour, and felt that the Army would probably have been easier. She had not, however, wanted to quarrel about it. She admitted to herself that, in comparison with pre-war earnings for women, her wages were very good. Since there was nothing much in the shops to buy, she saved as much as she could by opening a bank account and also purchasing war bonds. Between her work shifts she helped her mother, so her social life was negligible. They all prayed for a rapid end to the war.

      George’s fourteen-year-old sister had left school the previous summer. She had since been working as a shop assistant for a greengrocer. When Barbara was called up, she volunteered, for a slightly better wage, to come to work for Mrs Williams, to make beds and clean floors. In addition, two elderly women from the village came in as part-time help.

      As a result of these changes, the elderly residents found plenty more to complain about. None of them, however, moved out; the bombing of London was by then unremitting, and the heavy bombing of Liverpool earlier in the year was sufficient to keep them in the comparative safety of the village by the sea. Though, occasionally, their provoked hostesses wished them dead, not a single one of them died during the many years that they boarded with Phyllis.

      ‘We looked after them too well – or it was the good sea air,’ Phyllis replied acidly when Ada once pointed this out to her.

      When travelling to France, Barbara had passed through Birkenhead and Liverpool on her way to catch a train to London. She had been forcibly reminded of the toll of war in Britain by the destruction she could still see there, and she remembered, with a pang, the long civilian casualty lists pinned up in the city, the pitiful treks each night that the inhabitants had made to the outer suburbs such as Huyton, in the hope of survival. How had George’s few surviving comrades felt when they returned home to this?

      She was shocked at the miles of ruins she had observed in London. How many homeless people must there be in London? How many dead? She realised, with genuine distress, that there must be returning ex-service men who had lost their entire families in the broken, once close-packed streets of the capital. They must wonder what they had fought for.

      Wrapped in her own sorrow while she grappled with the day-to-day problems of existence, she had not thought of such a situation before.

      Seated in the train as it rumbled slowly into Euston, Barbara had queried mentally how careful, phlegmatic George might have faced coming home to a ruin – there had been bombs dropped close enough to the bed-and-breakfast for this to have been a possibility. And, in her self-searching, it dawned on her that she did not know; she really had not known him well enough to understand how his mind might have worked. And worst of all, now she would never know him any better – because he was gone.

      As she walked towards George’s grave, she thought her heart would break. Because she did not want to cry in front of Jules, she held back the heaving sobs that rose within her. Instead, she clenched her teeth and walked blindly beside him.

       Chapter Three

      Michel Benion, temporary taxi driver, ex-poultry farmer, slowly rolled up the front of his old black jersey and took his precious packet of cigarettes from inside his undershirt. Abstractedly he watched the little widow as she went with Jules to find the grave.

      As he lit a cigarette and then sat down to wait on the step of the antiquated taxi, he felt again the well of pain and humiliation under which he himself still laboured.

      It was ridiculous, he fretted in complete frustration, that nearly three years after the end of the war, because the Government had not yet cleared it of land mines, his chicken farm was still unworkable. In fact, the authorities, those mighty gods in Paris, were talking of buying the land from his family and making it into a park. Nearly three years – and they had still not made up their collective minds about it.

      Just now, American money is being poured into Rouen and Le Havre where there are lots of voters, he fumed for the hundredth time. Simply because we are only small farmers with no clout, we can wait for ever, exactly like the farmers on the Western Front after the First World War.

      And even if we got the farm back, would they lend us money to start again, build barns, buy breeding stock, sustain us financially until our flocks were rebuilt? What about our draught horse? Our cow, our pigs and vegetable garden that fed us?

      Save as he and his mother did, in a desperate effort to collect a modicum of capital – living on little more than vegetable soup, bread and cheese, and occasional cigarettes when they could get them – he was beginning to realise that, alone, the family themselves could never acquire enough money to start again.

      Of course, like most land in Normandy, their farm was owned jointly by all the members of the family: Michel’s sick brother, Anatole, their mother and their two married sisters in Rouen. It had been hard enough, even before the war, to scratch a living from two and a half hectares, when so many people held rights to it. It had meant intensive use of every inch of land.

      Michel’s