Now let’s get our tea. Then I think I’ll give the outside steps a good scrub!’
Stone steps leading to the thick, nail-studded door, worn into hollows by generations of Kenworthy feet. Safe and enduring, those steps, and four hundred years old.
Now, as she drank her tea, Meg wondered how many times Dolly Blundell had scrubbed them. It was a sobering thought.
The first few days in June, Meg was to consider as the end of her fortnight’s probabion drew close, had been interesting, especially with regard to Nanny Boag. Indeed, the more she thought about it, the more sure Meg became that her uneasiness seemed justified.
Take Sunday, for instance. Meg had insisted that collection of the Sunday papers would henceforth be her responsibility.
‘Fair’s fair, Polly. After all, you collect the milk.’
Daily papers were delivered as an act of kindness by Mrs Potter, together with the letters. Sunday papers, however, were left for collection in an outhouse at the back of the post office because, like anyone else, the postmistress needed a day off.
‘Will I take the papers upstairs, Mrs John?’ Meg asked on her return.
‘Later, perhaps. Think I’ll take a quick look at them myself first. After all, it is Sunday,’ she added almost apologetically.
‘OK by me.’ Polly Kenworthy hardly ever read newspapers; did not want to know that the war was not going as well for the Allies as it might. Nor did she want to see the obituary columns and lists of the names of men who were missing or believed killed in action. True, Davie wasn’t in action, but every one of those men who would never come home could have been the soldier she loved, and it hurt her to think that some other unknown woman had received one of the dreaded telegrams. Regretting.
‘Want porridge, Meg, or just an egg?’
Meg had been about to opt for an egg, when, ‘Oh, no! Would you believe it?’ Mary Kenworthy gasped. ‘I mean, it’s bad enough doing a thing like that, but to announce it on a Sunday when all the shops are shut so no one can buy in a few things is just – well – sneaky! Coupons for clothes! It just won’t work!’
‘Let me see!’ Polly shook open the second paper. It consisted of only four pages, so news of the rationing of clothes and footwear was not hard to find.
‘Well! If that isn’t just the last straw! No more luxury goods to be made and everything else to be manufactured under the utility mark. Shoddy, I shouldn’t wonder. And fourteen coupons must be given up for a winter coat, it says, and five for a pair of shoes! What on earth are They thinking about? How can anyone last for a year on sixty-six clothing coupons.’
‘If we’re to have utility clothes they’re bound to be cheap,’ Meg hesitated. ‘At least more people will be able to afford them – poor people, I mean …’
‘But no more luxury goods nor even wedding dresses!’ Polly pouted. ‘And I did so want a long white dress for my wedding! By the time Davie and me get around to it, though, they’ll be a thing of the past!’
‘Then why don’t you go to the shops tomorrow, good and early?’ Meg soothed. ‘Grab one while you can.’
‘But how, when I don’t have any clothing coupons? They haven’t given them out yet, and it doesn’t say when they will!’
Her eyes filled with tears, and she blew her nose noisily.
‘Hush, Polly. It isn’t the end of the world!’ There was a hint of admonition in Mary Kenworthy’s voice. ‘If you read what it says, you can give up your margarine coupons instead – till the proper ones are issued.’
‘But how can anyone do that? We need the margarine to eat! What a stupid idea!’
‘So how about waiting like we’ll all have to do? Then the minute you get your hands on the coupons you can nip off to town and hunt down a wedding dress – though how many coupons you’ll have to give up to get one, heaven only knows! There’s a lot of material in a wedding dress,’ Meg cautioned. ‘It seems that a dress is going to take seven coupons, but I don’t think it applies to long wedding dresses.’
‘I think what Meg says makes sense.’ Mary Kenworthy stared pointedly over the top of her reading glasses. ‘And if the worst comes to the worst, do you have to have a white dress?’
‘But every bride has one! It wouldn’t be like a wedding without one!’
‘Then it would seem to me, Polly, that you are more in love with the idea of walking down the aisle in white than you are with Davie!’
‘Mummy!’
With a scraping of chair legs Polly flung from the table, to run sobbing across the courtyard.
‘I’d better go –’
‘No, Meg. Leave her. If she loves Davie as much as I’m sure she does, then she’ll see how unimportant it is. Come to think of it, there’ll be a lot of shattered dreams, this morning …’
Polly returned ten minutes later, tears still wet on her cheeks, her expression contrite.
‘I’m sorry – I truly am. Forgive me? I acted like a spoiled brat. As if it matters what I wear! When I thought about it, I realized that if Davie turned up tomorrow on a week’s embarkation leave, I’d marry him in my best cotton frock and Sunday hat!’
‘You’d marry him, girl, in an old sack with a pan on yer ’ead,’ Meg grinned.
‘Yes, I would. It isn’t what you wear at a wedding, but how you say the words.’
‘And never forget, darling girl, that I know what it is like to have the man you love away at war. So don’t worry, you will wear white when you marry Davie – how ever many clothing coupons it takes. I promise.’
‘That’s settled, then,’ Meg beamed. ‘And we’d better listen to all the news broadcasts so we won’t miss bein’ told how we get the dratted coupons. And when we do, you can be off to the shops for a weddin’ dress – if they haven’t all disappeared under the counter, that is! An’ you must go with her, Mrs John. I’m not taking no for an answer. No excuses. I’m here now, and a day out at the shops will do you both good – even if there won’t be a lot to buy. Now what do you say to that, eh?’
‘I’d say,’ Polly smiled, tears gone, ‘that if I’d been lucky enough to have a sister – well, I wish she’d have been exactly like you!’
Indeed, it had been the matter of the unfairness of clothes rationing that gave strength to Meg’s suspicions about the true state of Nanny Boag’s mind the next day.
‘Awful, isn’t it, Nanny, and Polly so wantin’ a white dress and white shoes and some pretty nighties and things for when she gets married?’
‘That, I suggest, is Polly’s worry and not yours! For my own part, I have worked it out that I can manage quite well for the rest
