The Soldier's Bride by Ford Maggie

Author:Ford, Maggie [Ford, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

October in rural Chingford or in Walthamstow was golden, the leaves in mellow sunshine quietly turning from green to bronze and copper.

October in Bethnal Green was burnt sienna, the same sun reddening brick walls, adding a pearly blush to grey pavements and a jaundiced tinge to smoke-begrimed lace curtains.

October in Flanders held no colour at all, unless it was that of mud churned by shells and men’s boots after an appalling summer, the sun leaden behind the fumes of cordite, smoke of gunfire and the thick, crawling, silent yellow-green cloud of chlorine gas.

At the warning whistles, the corporal dragged out his mask, stepped back, tripped over the body behind him and went sprawling, the mask dangling uselessly from its respirator.

Stumbling over him, a comrade grabbed the mask, managed to help him on with it, but the man’s lungs were already burning, damaged. Corporal William Beans, having got himself a blighty one, was sent back to England to recover as best he could.

In October Arthur Bancroft had his fifty-ninth birthday; he’d had no intention of making much of it, but Lucy insisted.

‘Cheer you up, Dad,’ she said to him on the telephone. ‘We all need cheering up – the way the war’s dragging on. Three years! Me and Vinny thought we’d come over and make a day of it with you. Bring the children. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Dad? Seeing the children?’

‘Lavinia, she won’t … will she be bringin’ … the other one?’ he asked circuitously, his moustached lips close to the mouthpiece in case Letty overheard.

His other grandchildren he took on his knee and gently teased. ‘K-A-T, cat.’ He’d chuckle at the slighting way they looked at hm. ‘No, Grandad, C-A-T!’ He would regard them solemnly, say, ‘No K-A-T, cat.’ Until they either got off his knee in a huff or he would give in and have them hug him, relieved that he was wrong and they were right. His way of loving them was to tease.

But that one … From the very first, squalling and red-faced in its crib, he’d felt nothing for the baby Letty had given birth to; could not abide the boy if truth was known. Two years old now, the narrow delicate features framed by dark wavy hair, the dark eyes wary and uncertain. Not a bit like his mother, he was the image of his father, the man who’d had his fun with her and gone off to war and never come back – damn whether it was the war’s fault or not!

‘You mean Christopher?’ Lucy’s voice held total innocence, her father’s fumbling for words utterly lost on her. ‘She wouldn’t leave him at home all on his own, now would she?’

‘There’s that woman who looks after ’er boys sometimes.’ Silence at the other end denoted a shrug from Lucy. Arthur Bancroft went on purposefully, ‘It ain’t fair on Letitia, yer know. The circumstances regarding ’im bein’ what they are.’

‘It’s about time she got over that.’ Lucy’s voice had gone huffy.

‘Ain’t fair on me neither, you don’t ’ave ter live with ’er.

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