The Chilbury Ladies' Choir(100)

Now, that made me sit up. How could this squirrel of a woman get one over on a man like that? I must have had the question on my face, because she smiled and said, “Don’t worry about the details, Miss Paltry. Just know that he won’t be bothering you anymore.”

Then it all fell into place. She was threatening him with exposure, which was why he was threatening me, and that’s when it dawned on me that the more Mrs. Tilling knew what happened, the more she could ensure that he never laid a finger on me.

And I know you’ll think me wrong, Clara, but I told her. I told her everything. Once I began my story, about the Brigadier pulling me into his office after the funeral, it all came tumbling out so fast I could hardly stop it. But then I went on, I told her more. How it wasn’t my fault, it was having to steal for food and shelter when I ran away from Uncle Cyril and found myself in King’s Cross. Thank God the Great War came along and I got that job in Bart’s Hospital, where they let me train as a nurse. But I was always broke, always running, taking chances when they came, however low and grimy. And as it all tumbled out, I realized that I had become a specialist in exactly that. Low and grimy had taken over my world.

Low and grimy was me.

She didn’t say anything, just nodded and occasionally creased her forehead, offering me sympathy, of all things. When I’d come to an end, she calmly patted my hand and told me they were expecting me at the Vicarage.

And you’d be surprised at me, Clara, as for once I was relieved. I needed to rest my hip, and Mrs. Quail is a down-to-earth sort. And a good cook.

“I thought it would be a good match for you,” she said, tidying my things into a bag. “At least until you find a place of your own.”

“And they don’t know about—” The truth seemed so open now, so loose and uncontained and out of my control.

She laughed, not a big laugh, but a laugh all the same. “No, no one else has ever suspected a thing.”

I let out a nervy kind of laugh, too, from pure relief, and that by some incredible stroke of luck I was still alive and free, that I had a roof over my head, a job.

I looked Mrs. Tilling square in the face and said, “Thank you.”

She must have known I meant it, as she put her warm thin hand on mine and squeezed it.

“Why are you being so helpful, Mrs. Tilling?” I asked, wondering what’s in it for her.

“We have to stand together and look after each other, Miss Paltry, or we’ll never have any chance against the Nazis.”

Funny, I’d completely forgotten about the war.

Leaving her looking on from her front door, I made my way up to the Vicarage. But as I limped up into the square, there was one thing I hadn’t been expecting. The sight of my old house, now a pile of rubble settling among the other piles of rubble that were once the houses on Church Row, lay strewn before me. My life had been in that place for years, and although I was never especially happy there, those were still my years.

A shiver of horror ran over me as I found myself drawn to the carnage. All that was left of my house was a mush of bricks and debris, pieces of wall still with my blue-striped wallpaper and those hideous green tiles from the kitchen. A fire had carried half the contents of my house to oblivion, and the ransackers took the rest.

There were still a few children out, nosing through the wreckage and showing off if they found anything. One of them held up a piece of a photograph, still clinging to part of a frame.

“Give me that,” I yelled, grabbing it from the little thief. “That’s mine. Now, get out of here.” I swatted them away, flailing around and giving them each a clip round the head. “All of you, get off my house.”

I have to confess that when they’d gone I slumped down and cried. Everything that I owned was in that house, now destroyed or burned or nicked.

I looked at the broken picture in my hand. It’s the one I have of you and me with Mum, less than a year before she died. You were about sixteen, and I was twelve, happy and innocent to this wretched world we live in. We were in the garden at Birnham Wood, I could see the house in the corner, the gables where the wisteria grew. Mum loved that wisteria. I wondered what had brought me so far away from that moment. How could I still be the same woman as the girl in the photograph? What has become of me?

After an hour or so of picking through my things, finding a fork and a spoon, some hairclips, a broken ornament, that dancing-couple statuette I always loved, I heard a voice behind me on the footpath.

“Miss Paltry, are you all right?”

It was the Vicar, come to take me home with him, and I realized that it had begun to rain without me noticing, fat drops of water splattering on and around us, getting harder as we made our way across the square to the Vicarage.

He showed me to the comfortable room they’d prepared, “especially for our midwife guest.” After I settled in, we had a fish supper, and then I sat listening to the wireless with news of the war, of the Battle of Britain, Nazi planes dropping bombs over the southeast, and I was suddenly struck by how precious it all is, how much we have to protect.

So here I am, in the most unlikeliest of places, writing this sitting up in my soft, warm bed, as the rain falls outside my window. I feel like I need to write it all out tonight so that I can start afresh tomorrow, move on to a new day, a new beginning.

I know that you will be cross with me, Clara, and I know you’re planning to come and give me a piece of your mind. But please stay away. My hip is sore, and I need to rest for a time, and then I need to earn a little money from a few births, find a small place of my own somewhere.