Keep the Home Fires Burning Read online

  Contents

  Map

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part 2

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part 3

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Part 4

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Copyright

  For Kerryn and Jess, without whom this book would simply not exist

  Prologue

  Pat Simms stood before a scene of such outlandish devastation that she couldn’t move. The harsh Cheshire wind drove icy drops of rain into her face and eyes at an acute angle, forcing Pat to wipe it away with her hands to get a clear sight of what lay before her. Having run from the village as fast as she could manage in her best dress and shoes, she was struggling to breathe. For a few moments she believed that perhaps it was the lack of oxygen that caused her to hallucinate the vision in front of her.

  A Spitfire was sticking out of a house in her village.

  As she gasped for breath, Pat thought it so ridiculous it couldn’t possibly be real. She must be imagining it – the tableau as a whole, but also its details. Smoke rising from the wreckage. The silhouette of a pilot in the cockpit, slouched against the closed canopy, splashed with red. The intact tail and broken wings. Even the smell of aviation fuel.

  Is it possible to hallucinate a smell?

  To prove she was imagining it all, Pat looked behind her to confirm there was no trace of where this phantom plane had come from. She then reasoned that if the Spitfire had come from the sky there would be no trace, and looked up. To her left she noticed the fresh damage to the church she had been sitting in just hours earlier. Then behind the church, Pat saw the shattered chimney stacks smashed from another rooftop, reduced to bricks and dust on the wet ground.

  I can’t be imagining all of this.

  She was getting her breath back. This was real.

  She turned back to the scene that had stopped her in her tracks. Only a sight as incongruous as this could have done that. Only something so utterly extraordinary would have overridden her mission to seek out her lover before it was too late.

  Pat stared at the Spitfire and realised it had crushed the house it was embedded in. It looked like a huge bird lying in a brick nest. Pat looked around for someone to call out to, then recalled that the entire village was celebrating the wedding in the village hall, from where she’d just run.

  And then Pat heard it.

  From beneath the doomed Spitfire.

  From beneath the fresh rubble.

  A newborn baby’s cry, struggling into the air through the gaps between the smashed, fuel-soaked masonry.

  Plaintive, outraged, and despairing.

  Calling out to its mother to save its life, wherever she might be.

  Chapter 1

  Two weeks earlier

  Overlooked by its fourteenth-century church at one end, and by Cholmondeley Castle at the other, attached to the outside world by a single thin road and the slender ribbon of the Shropshire Union canal, Great Paxford had quietly minded its own business at the intersection of three Cheshire hills for over six hundred years.

  Nothing came into the village that wasn’t seen by most of its inhabitants. Nothing of note took place that wasn’t heard by most as it happened, or told to the rest within the hour. Privacy within such a small, rural community was almost impossible. Gossip and secrets were commodities, exchanged and bartered day and night, the transactions part of the tight social fabric.

  Though the Great War had left deep scars on individual minds and families of Great Paxford, in subsequent years its citizens had fallen into the understandable habit of taking one another for granted. Prior to the declaration of a second world war just twenty-one years after the first, there would always be tomorrow to drop round for a chinwag, resolve a dispute, or do a good turn. But from 11.15 a.m. on 3 September 1939, anyone owed an apology for something, or who might benefit from a favour or a rebuke, could be killed by a bomb in the night. Every book read, every meal enjoyed, every cup of tea either drunk in haste or lingered over with a friend, every walk in the countryside, every moment of lovemaking, every breath and heartbeat might be your last. Every German bomb and bullet had someone’s name on it. War made life more fragile, and each lived moment more intense.

  Before war’s outbreak, the regulars at the Black Horse barely registered the voices of their wives, sisters and daughters singing ‘Jerusalem’ at the start of yet another monthly meeting of the village’s Women’s Institute. At 7 p.m. on the first Thursday of every month, their voices rose as one from Great Paxford’s small village hall, to the general indifference of the men a hundred yards up the road in the pub. But since the onset of war, on those Thursday evenings, the men had started to wander out onto the road with their pints, and stand in the soft moonlight to listen to their women sing with a distinct edge of defiance about their newly endangered green and pleasant land.

  The meeting on this Thursday evening in October 1940 was particularly important. Outside the village hall, crows in the trees that surrounded Great Paxford were settling for the night under a cloudless sky. Inside the hall, members of the WI sat back into their seats after the last notes of ‘Jerusalem’ signalled the start of the evening proper. The women sat shoulder to shoulder in silence, facing the executive committee on the raised platform before them. The hall was charged with nervous excitement, for tonight was to see the return of their elected Chair, Frances Barden, to lead the branch for the first time since her husband had been killed in a rather horrific car accident just five months earlier. Joyce Cameron, the previous Chair, had been asked to helm the branch while Frances had stepped down to grieve, and sort out her husband’s considerable and complicated affairs.

  Joyce was a small, well-dressed, intelligent woman with a natty taste in expensive hats that invariably sported a pheasant’s feather. Her face was soft and round, her skin smooth and pale, untroubled by the elements. Her expression could switch from benign to venomous in an instant. After moving to Great Paxford from Oxford with her solicitor husband some years earlier, Joyce had led a comfortable life of relative leisure, busying herself on local committees and organisations. While her husband became a local magi
strate, and joined the local Rotary and golf clubs, Joyce had immersed herself in the WI, had become a governor of the local school, and involved herself in several small local charitable organisations that gave assistance to the rural poor. In each organisation, Joyce earned a reputation as an effective scourge, frequently asking questions no one else dared ask, often bullying others to get her way.

  ‘Thank you, ladies. Settle down, please.’ Joyce’s voice was clipped and authoritative. When she asked for quiet she got it.

  Joyce’s beady eyes looked over the members, gauging the mood in the hall. She wondered if it hadn’t been a mistake to have held back from trying to take over as Chair on a permanent basis, while Frances had been mourning for her husband. Joyce’s younger self wouldn’t have hesitated. Joyce had always been one-tenth demagogue – probably two-tenths, perhaps three. She instinctively knew which levers to pull to get her way on most issues. Where others may have hesitated, Joyce never lacked the steel to drive home an advantageous hand. She not only had the stomach for Machiavellian wrangling, she possessed the liver and kidneys too. Her younger self would have seized back control within a month, ‘in the best interests of the branch’.

  But Joyce was no longer that woman. Having left the village with husband Douglas ten months earlier for a safer environment along the north-west coast at Heysham near Morecambe, ‘beyond the interest of the Luftwaffe’, as Douglas had put it, Joyce had reappeared in the village just a month and a half later. It hadn’t taken Great Paxfordians long to notice the change in her. It was as if the time away had been an ordeal that had knocked her sideways. Indeed, the month away had been the most difficult of Joyce’s life. During that period, she’d finally admitted that her marriage had been sterile for many years. Moving to Heysham had been Douglas’s decision, and Joyce’s loathing of life on the coast came upon her almost immediately. If it wasn’t the wind it was the rain. If it wasn’t the rain it was the salt on the air, or the lack of people like her, or the smell of fish everywhere, or the impenetrable grey sea stretching beyond the horizon, intensifying Joyce’s sense that her life had become becalmed, and deepening her conviction that she no longer wanted to be Douglas’s consort, wheeled out at social events to help him drum up business for his legal practice. If she didn’t act decisively she felt this existence would claim her sanity. So she’d packed her suitcase and returned to Great Paxford, alone.

  ‘Douglas,’ she told those who asked, with a tone of fatigue in her voice, ‘has long-standing ambitions to become a Conservative member of parliament, and is remaining in the north-west to pursue that. I wish him every success, but for myself . . . I want to see out the war among my friends, at home, in Great Paxford.’

  Joyce concluded her potted explanation with a tired smile that said: That is all I shall say on the matter.

  While Alison Scotlock considered Joyce’s explanation characteristically grandiose, her fellow WI members weren’t so certain about the change. Sarah Collingborne, the vicar’s wife, was more charitable, believing the swiftly returned Joyce did appear to be less self-confident, less spiky, more subdued, even a little vulnerable.

  Joyce looked down at the rows of women seated in front of her. Great Paxford’s village hall wasn’t large, but it always looked bigger than it was on WI nights, when it was full of local women. On those evenings, the old, whitewashed wooden walls and cobwebbed, gabled ceiling could barely contain their energy. Joyce could see the excitement in the women’s eyes, and knew it wasn’t for her. With a smile of resignation, she swallowed her inclination to speak, and turned to Frances. With a subtle nod of concession, Joyce ceded the chair of the branch committee back to the elected Chair and sat down behind the trestle table.

  Frances was a dignified, educated, elegantly dressed woman in her early fifties, known to the women of Great Paxford as a woman of integrity and passion, given to acts of extreme kindness, but also extremely short on patience – a quality her sister Sarah described as ‘my sister’s Achilles heel’. Frances tried to hide her uncharacteristic nerves with a broad, confident smile as she stood to address the women in front of her.

  ‘Before anything else, I should like to thank Mrs Cameron for helming the branch so competently in my absence.’

  Frances turned to Joyce and began to applaud her. Immediately, the membership followed suit. Given that she had been a competent but never an exciting branch Chair, the applause for Joyce was appreciative but not what anyone might call enthusiastic – managing to express a level of gratitude one might offer someone who turned down the heat on a pan before its contents boiled over. Joyce nevertheless accepted the expression of thanks with a graceful nod of the head. She was about to take advantage of the moment to say a few words, but as soon as she opened her mouth to speak, the applause abruptly stopped, and the moment immediately passed. Joyce closed her mouth and turned, with the others, to Frances.

  Frances cleared her throat and took a deep breath. Every face beamed at her, bathing her in goodwill. It was entirely in character that Frances had prepared for this moment by drafting many possible speeches in recent days. She had abandoned them all on Sarah’s advice to ‘just speak from the heart’. Frances looked along the ranks of friendly faces, eager to hear from her after months away. She felt pleased to be back, yet carried an anxiety that with everything she had gone through in the aftermath of Peter’s death she might have lost her capacity to lead. I’m not the woman I was. Do I remain the woman the branch needs me to be?

  ‘It is so wonderful to be back. To see you all. To hear that hymn sung from the bottom of your hearts once again. With each day of war that passes, it grows in poignancy.’

  She saw the women nod in solemn agreement. Frances clasped her hands in front of her, pressing the palms into one another, urging herself on.

  ‘So much has changed since I last looked at you from this platform. I’ve lost my husband . . .’

  She stopped for a moment. Every heart in the hall skipped a beat as the women wondered if Frances was yet ready to come back to them. Frances took a deep breath.

  ‘I have taken in a child evacuee. While you . . . you are all so different too, in so many ways . . .’

  Pat Simms, the WI’s efficient, watchful and diligent Branch Secretary, sat on the platform behind Frances and reflected on what was different about herself since Frances last addressed them. Nearly everything, she concluded. Because of Marek. Pat smiled to herself as she recalled making love with the Czech soldier in her bed at home. She remembered the calm, reassuring look in Marek’s eyes as they made love, the feel of his soft hands electrifying her skin. Though they were last together over two weeks ago, the intensity of the memory left Pat feeling it could have been that afternoon. She felt not one drop of remorse about the affair she was having.

  Where her husband Bob had used Pat for his own satisfaction over the course of their thirteen-year marriage, Marek had been a tender and generous lover.

  Where Bob existed in a state of perpetual anger and discontent, Marek had always been calm and effortlessly at ease with himself.

  Where Bob’s words towards Pat were patronising, dismissive, and stripped of affection, Marek’s were always warm and elevating.

  Where Bob was occasionally brutal towards Pat, Marek – well, when she had looked at his face in the concealing long grass outside the village, Pat had never felt more protected or more valued.

  ‘I love you,’ she had said tentatively for the first time, not knowing how he might respond. He had looked at her directly, his gaze only intensifying. Early in their relationship Pat had realised Marek never wasted words, or said anything he didn’t mean.

  ‘And I you,’ Marek had replied, his English beautifully correct. It sent a pulse of relief and reassurance and love coursing through her. Before she could speak again Marek kissed her.

  From then on, whenever Marek told Pat he loved her, she’d smile and reply, ‘And I you’ in his accent. Until Marek had come into her life Pat had long forgotten what it was to p
roperly kiss and be kissed, to hold and be properly held. Marek told Pat that he and his men would soon be mobilised, though they had no fixed date. For security reasons, it would come at short notice.

  Though they knew Marek’s time in the region was going to be limited, his imminent departure had crept up on them. Pat couldn’t bear to think of life without Marek.

  Life without him means life only with Bob. I can’t bear the thought of it. How can I go back to that now?

  The prospect left Pat feeling sick, even at the WI, among friends. Determined not to think about it, Pat focused her attention on Frances.

  ‘The war has bitten into each of us,’ Frances continued. ‘Whether we win or lose, the changes we will experience individually, as families, as a community, are likely to be irreversible.’

  The women looked at Frances intently. For this moment in this hall in this village, she was their leader every bit as much as Churchill was the country’s, and her words tonight struck a chord every bit as much as his when he addressed the nation.

  Frances’s mind went suddenly blank. Her mouth became dry as her confidence drained away.

  What am I doing? What nonsense am I talking? Who am I to lecture these women? My loss was an accident. It could have happened at any time. It had nothing to do with the war. I sound like a fraud, I’m sure of it. They can sense I’m making this up as I go along. How could they not?

  Frances looked at the front two rows of friendly faces looking expectantly at her, and tried to draw strength from them to continue.

  Sarah looked at Frances and nodded encouragingly. Frances could almost hear Sarah’s voice saying: You can do this. Keep going. Joyce isn’t what the branch needs now. The branch needs you, Frances, and you need the branch . . .

  Next to Sarah was Steph Farrow, who had come straight from her farm, and had offered so much no-nonsense fortitude to the Institute since her hesitant first meeting nearly a year ago. She now looked up at Frances, willing her to continue.

  You’re why I joined. Joyce has been . . . all right. But if you hadn’t come back I’d probably’ve left. You made the WI somewhere I feel I belong. And not just me . . .