in the day when I saw it empty, but I’d forgotten. Birds feed at first light, you see, and they need so much food in this intense cold. And it is just outside the kitchen door.’
‘Well, it’s as well the Pritchards heard you, that’s all I can say,’ Claire said, ‘because if you’d lain outside all night …’
‘I wouldn’t be here now, I know,’ said Mrs Wentworth with a hint of impatience. ‘But I didn’t and I am here, and surely you’re not going to go on and on about it until my dying day.’ She turned to Janet, gave a wink and said, ‘Bossy, isn’t she?’
Janet thought that she could probably get to like Miss Wentworth’s mother very much, and she grinned back and said, ‘Yes, she is.’
‘Don’t encourage insurrection in my pupils, please,’ Claire said with mock severity. ‘I have quite enough trouble with this one already.’
‘I don’t believe it, my dear,’ Mrs Wentworth said, taking a large bite of sponge cake. ‘Come and sit here beside me, Janet, and we’ll have a chat. Either bring up a chair or sit on the rug nearer to the fire.’
Janet plonked down beside the older woman and said, ‘What do you want to talk to me about?’
‘Before we go any further,’ Mrs Wentworth said, ‘I know you have to call Claire Miss Wentworth. It’s to do with rules and discipline. Apparently school would fall into a crumbling ruin if children knew their teachers’ names.’
‘Mother!’ Claire burst out in exasperation.
Mrs Wentworth waved a dismissive hand in her daughter’s direction. ‘I’m not talking to you, Claire dear, but about you. I’m addressing your pupil at the moment. Now, Janet, I’m sure you don’t want to call me Mrs Wentworth, do you?’
‘Um, I don’t know really.’
‘Well, I don’t want you to,’ said Mrs Wentworth decisively, ‘but I suppose you would feel awkward calling me Mary. Could you manage Auntie Mary?’
‘Er, I suppose, I mean … that is, if you want,’ Janet said, feeling that never in her life had she met anyone quite like Claire’s mother.
For all that, she sat at her feet all afternoon and talked as she’d never talked before. She told her of the tales she’d learnt from her gran, and how she and Grandad had both been born in Ireland but had had to leave to find work in England, where they met and married.
She told her about Duncan, and how they’d had to spend a lot of time with their grandparents while their mother was an ARP warden and their dad was fighting. She told of the two uncles killed and the twin boys born just before the end of the war. She didn’t say that her father hadn’t seen the point of her sitting the exams, but what she did say was:
‘My mom’s sick at the moment. I mean, she’s having a baby, but she’s sick with it.’
‘Is she, Janet?’ Claire said. ‘You never mentioned it.’
‘She didn’t tell anyone she was even pregnant until I’d sat the first part of the eleven-plus,’ Janet said. ‘I knew something was wrong, because I’d heard her being sick a few times and she kept saying she’d eaten something that disagreed with her. But she still keeps being sick and eats hardly anything. That’s why I couldn’t come till this afternoon. I have to help out a bit.’
Mary Wentworth met her daughter’s eyes over Janet’s head. They both realised that the young girl was worried.
‘I’m sure your mother will be fine, you know,’ Mary said. ‘Pregnancy takes it out of a woman, and of course, if she has to look after a family too, it can be hard. I only had Claire. Her father was badly injured in the First World War and died before Claire was out of babyhood.’ She added, as if to herself, ‘I was glad he died before the outbreak of the Second World War. I think it would have finished him to think of all that carnage starting again.’ She saw Janet’s grave eyes on her and gave a start.
‘Forgive me, dear, I was remembering for a while how it was. It affects one like that as one grows old.’
‘Stop fishing for compliments, Mother,’ Claire said briskly. ‘You know you don’t look anywhere near your age, and you’re not half as ga-ga as you make out. Now, if you will excuse me, government guidelines or no, I must get more coal for that dying fire or we’ll all freeze to death.’
Because of the national shortage of coal, people had been asked to put off lighting fires till late afternoon, and then not to pile them up with coal but to use as little as possible. It was not easy, for the winter was a particularly severe one and everyone was feeling the pinch.
Janet jumped to her feet. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘Mom went for a lie-down as the twins were having a nap. That’s why I was able to come. They’ll be up now, I expect, and plaguing the life out of her.’
‘Where’s your brother?’ Mary said gently. ‘The older one, Duncan, is it?’
‘Yes, Duncan,’ Janet said. ‘He’ll be playing football or something. He’s no good, he’s a boy. And my dad went down to the club after dinner and he’ll probably be snoring his head off.’
‘Ah, that’s men for you,’ Mary said.
‘That’s men all right,’ Janet said fiercely. ‘I don’t think I’m going to bother getting married.’
‘That’s what Claire always said too.’
‘Well, she didn’t, did she?’ Janet said. ‘I mean, you didn’t, did you, Miss Wentworth?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ Claire didn’t say that there had been somebody once who she had been willing to throw everything up for, but he hadn’t loved her enough and they’d gone their separate ways. That wasn’t the sort of confidence you shared with a pupil of not quite eleven years. Her mother knew. She was the one who’d picked up the pieces of Claire’s shattered heart and given her back her self-respect, but she didn’t want to tell the tale either.
As Janet trudged home, she determined that that was how she would be: single, independent and alone. People mocked single women, she knew that. They called them old maids and spinsters, but if you got married, you were little more than a slave.
This was further reinforced when she got home. It was just as she’d said it would be: Duncan kicking a football in the road with a crowd of mates, her father snoring in the chair. Her twin brothers had woken up from their nap, climbed out of their cots and systematically set about destroying the bedroom.
Janet popped in to see her mother, who was sleeping the sleep of the totally exhausted. Sighing, she ushered her young brothers downstairs and began to prepare tea for them all.
As Betty’s pregnancy advanced, she became more and more tired. Often, Janet would arrive home to find her mother asleep and the twins with Auntie Breda or Gran. Even with Janet home, Betty seemed loath to move.
‘Get me a cup of tea, pet,’ she’d say, ‘and I’ll be as right as rain.’
So Janet would make a cup of tea and fetch the twins and make up the fire and cook a meal for all of them. Duncan would come flying in and demand: ‘What’s for tea? I’m starving,’ and Janet wanted
