Her voice ended on a slight sob and Jenny squeezed her hand tightly and said, ‘I’ll go with you if you want.’
Linda shrugged. ‘I don’t care. Do what you like.’ She brushed the trailing tears away from her eyes impatiently and said, ‘You knew they was dead all the time, dain’t yer?’
Jenny hesitated for a brief second. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice so low it was almost a whisper.
‘Why dain’t you tell me? All the time we was together and you never said a word,’ Linda demanded angrily.
‘What could I say?’ Jenny cried. ‘You’d lain for hours alone, cold, in pitch dark and in pain. How could I add to that?’
‘You mean, I might just have given up,’ Linda said, reading her mind. ‘And you’d have been bloody right, too. In fact, I wish you hadn’t bothered to get me out at all.’
‘Don’t say that!’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ the younger girl said harshly. ‘You told me you wanted me to talk – well, this is what I want to talk about.’
Watching Linda, Jenny saw her face full of self-pity and though her heart ached in sympathy, she knew that Linda feeling sorry for herself would destroy her. Her own mother had done just that for years – and because of it, she’d taken no interest in anyone else besides herself. It had soured her life. And she wasn’t going to let it sour Linda’s. So she said quite sharply, ‘OK, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about the people who laboured for hours to release you. Let’s talk about the men, and some women, who worked all through the bitterly cold night with the rain lashing down, and then went straight on to work the next day.’
‘Well,’ said Linda mutinously. ‘They needn’t have bothered.’
‘They bothered because they thought you were brave and plucky,’ Jenny retorted. ‘They might not have been so keen to get you out if they’d thought you were just going to give up.’
‘What d’you know about it, any road?’ Linda cried. ‘What have I got to look forward to now, anyway?’
‘Oh Linda, I know how you feel,’ Jenny said. ‘At the moment it hurts like hell and you can’t really believe it, but it does get better with time. My gran says you never forget your loved ones, a piece of your heart goes with them, but you have to learn to live without them.’
‘How the hell do you bloody know?’
‘I know, because it happened to me too,’ Jenny said sharply. ‘The day of that massive raid we had a telegram saying the youngest and favourite of all my brothers had been shot down. He’d just turned eighteen in June.’
There was a short silence while Linda thought about what Jenny had said. She knew she was being unfair taking it out on her. Eventually, she said in a very quiet voice, ‘I’m sorry, Jenny, I know I’m being an ungrateful sod, but I’m as scared as hell. Where am I going to live when I get out?’
Jenny forced herself to speak brightly, ‘You’ll be looked after, don’t you worry.’
‘Where? In a home?’
Jenny couldn’t deny that and didn’t try. Instead she said, ‘The children’s homes are lovely today, and there will be plenty of others for company.’
‘I want to stay here,’ Linda said obstinately. ‘I want to stay with my friends and at my old school.’
‘Maybe they’ll find you a city orphanage,’ Jenny said. ‘Tell them how you feel when the time comes,’ but even as she spoke, she wasn’t at all sure that children’s feelings were considered that much.
Linda was obviously of the same mind. ‘I’ll tell them,’ she said, ‘but d’you think they’ll listen, or care?’
And Jenny couldn’t face her and say that they would. Instead she said, ‘It will only be for a couple of years. You’ll be at work then and have more choice in what you do and where you live.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Linda said. Again there was a small silence between them and then Linda said, ‘I thought shelters were bloody safe?’ and Jenny saw the tears beginning to trickle down the girl’s face.
‘Not for a direct hit,’ Jenny said gently. ‘Nothing could stand up to that.’
‘But they didn’t suffer?’
‘Not for a moment,’ Jenny assured her. ‘They wouldn’t have known a thing about it.’
‘I feel … I feel so bloody awful,’ Linda said with a sob. ‘It’s not fair that I survived and they didn’t.’
The tears came then – a wild torrent that spurted from her nose and eyes and threatened to choke her. Nurses came running, but when they saw the child gathered into Jenny’s arms as far as the drip and the leg cage would allow, and saw that she too was sobbing, they withdrew.
‘About time,’ the matron said to the doctor, recognising the tears as a good sign. ‘I honestly thought that lass was heading for some sort of breakdown.’
The doctor nodded in agreement. ‘Perhaps now she’ll begin to make some improvement,’ he said.
‘We can only hope so,’ the matron said grimly.
As the taxi pulled up outside Pype Hayes Road, the neighbours ran forward to welcome Jenny home. Others stood in the doorways and waved and cheered and Jenny, though embarrassed, was touched by their concern. A man from the end ran up with a jar of honey. ‘From my own bees Jenny,’ he said. ‘Enjoy it.’
Mrs Patterson, their next door neighbour, had baked a cake and everyone said they were glad to see her back safe and sound. Jenny was touched to see that Geraldine and Jan and their children had come down to the house to see her, and had been absolutely staggered when her grandmother arrived at the hospital in a taxi to bring her home.
The table was laid as for a party, full of things not seen since pre-war days. There were plates of chicken and ham sandwiches and a dish of tomatoes that Jenny found were from Mr Patterson’s greenhouse. But the bowl of hard-boiled eggs astonished her: her mother said they were from a man who kept hens. The cold sausages were a present from the butcher. ‘Sit down and eat up now,’ she told her, ‘before it’s all spoiled.’
It was all wonderful, and Jenny was only sorry her appetite was not able to do it justice, especially the jelly and blancmange the children demanded she try, and the cake baked by their next-door neighbour, which Geraldine pressed on her. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Being thin is one thing, but you’re just plain skinny, Jenny.’
‘You could do with more meat on your bones certainly,’ Jan, Seamus’s wife said. She herself was comfortably plump, and would have liked everyone else to be the same size, but she was a nice person and Jenny liked her. She wished Gran O’Leary had been invited because she could have done with her support that evening. She was going to make an announcement which she knew would spoil some of the joy of her home-coming for her family. But she knew she had to do it today: it had been growing in her ever since the previous day when Linda had cried in her arms.
Knowing it was best to get it over with, Jenny began as
