After the War is Over by Maureen Lee

Author:Maureen Lee [Lee, Maureen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409140245
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Judging by the excited whoops and stamping of feet, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves downstairs. The music was really catchy, an Irish jig played by an Irish duo, Flynn and Finnegan, one on the piano, the other on the fiddle. Nell hadn’t seen them yet, so didn’t know who played what.

She spread margarine on another slice of bread. This wasn’t a Crown Caterers job, just something she was doing as a favour for the Irish-night party being held in the Labour Party offices below. She had worked every day except for Christmas Day. When she’d finished the sandwiches, she would go down and join in the party herself.

Rosie O’Neill came in. She was expecting her second baby soon and was enormous. ‘Shall I take them sarnies down, Nell? It’ll be the interval soon. What’s on this lot?’

‘Grated cheese – it goes further when it’s grated – and brown sauce.’

‘Yum, yum.’ Rosie’s eyes glowed. ‘I’m starving.’

‘Well, you’re eating for two, aren’t you?’

Iris Grant was also expecting another baby, her third – or so everyone thought. Only Nell knew that the first, William, hadn’t been the fruit of Iris’s womb, but her own. She didn’t think about it often, but sometimes, when she did, the memory hurt, and she would recall the feel of her baby in her arms, his mouth tugging on her breast. How many teeth did he have now he was more than two and a half years old? And had Iris breastfed her daughter, Louise? There’d been no chance of that with William.

‘He’s a fine little feller,’ her mam had said a few times after seeing Iris shopping in Marsh Lane with her little boy in the pram. ‘Really big for his age and full of mischief; you can tell from his face.’

Mam and Iris didn’t have proper conversations, they had never formally met, but they always nodded to each other, and since William had come along, Mam would ask after him in the painfully polite voice she used when she considered that the person she was talking to was posh.

‘I can’t understand why you two aren’t friendly any more,’ she would say to Nell after she’d finished reporting on William. It was Mam who’d told Nell that Iris was having another baby. She claimed she was able to tell from a woman’s face that she was expecting before the woman actually knew herself.

Rosie left with a plate of sarnies and Nell continued to make more. There were jam tarts for later, and a tin of almond cookies from America that someone had donated to the party.

This new year, 1950, was pretty significant, denoting the end of the first half of the century and the start of the second. A few nit-pickers pointed out that the new half-century didn’t start until 1951, but people weren’t prepared to wait that long. They were only too glad to bid farewell to the first half, which had seen two world wars, not to mention the Boer War, the Spanish Civil War and no doubt many others they hadn’t heard about.

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