Octavia by Cooper Jilly

Author:Cooper, Jilly [Cooper, Jilly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2010-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Life was very quiet after their soldiers had gone and it seemed a long time before their first letters home began to arrive.

‘At last!’ Octavia said when Tommy’s letter was delivered and was annoyed to see that her hands were shaking as she opened it. To her disappointment, he hardly said anything at all. He’d arrived ‘in good order’, couldn’t tell her where he was, ‘they censor everything’, hadn’t seen anything of the others and hoped she wouldn’t forget him.

‘The others’ were equally terse. According to Emmeline, ‘Podge sends picture postcards and doesn’t say anything and all Squirrel ever says is that he’s ticketty-boo or in the pink and please send another parcel and can he have some more jam. Although he did say he hoped we were missing him. Soppy thing. As if we wouldn’t.’

Her children missed him terribly. Dora and Eddie, being seven and six years old, were grown up enough to understand that he’d gone to France and that it was a long way away and he couldn’t just come back when he felt like it, but Edith, who was only just five and often very babyish, fretted to see her uncles every time she came to visit Grandma and refused to be comforted, no matter how hard her mother tried to explain things to her. Two-year-old Dickie was too young to understand, of course, which was just as well, for Emmeline was now heavily into the seventh month of her fifth pregnancy and too weary to cope with tears and tantrums.

‘It’s all very well for people to say when you’ve got four you don’t notice another one,’ she complained to Octavia. ‘I do. My back’s killing me and I notice it every day.’

In September, Octavia started her second year at Bridge Street School and was soon enjoying it even more than she’d enjoyed the first one. She’d been given her old class in a different classroom. ‘It is a special dispensation you understand, Miss Smith,’ the headmaster told her. ‘In view of the good work you did with them last year.’

The children knew nothing about dispensations. They simply welcomed her back like an old friend. ‘Billy said you was gettin’ married, miss,’ one little girl confided, ‘but we knew you’d never.’ Octavia was touched by their confidence even though it renewed her guilt about the way she’d treated poor Tommy. She tried to assuage it by writing to him every day and as an extra sop to her conscience, she took to visiting Emmeline every Thursday to help with the children and swap such news as they had.

It would have been easier for them if the news had been good. But it wasn’t. It had been bad from the beginning, when what had been reported as a great victory at a place called Mons turned out to be a retreat, and as the weeks passed it got worse. The Germans overran Belgium and neither the French army nor the BEF seemed able to stop them.

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