‘Yes,’ said Tom, ‘yes, I do. I must go, catch the next bus, or I won’t be there for tea. Mum’s so excited.’
‘I’m sure she is. Well, thank you for coming, Tom. It was very nice of you. It’s meant a lot to me, it really has. You take care of yourself. And come back to us . . .’
Laura was away until the next day, at a teachers’ training course in Southampton. He didn’t know quite how he was going to wait. He had a very small box in his breast pocket, which contained a ring bearing a very, very small diamond; he was going to place it on Laura’s finger tomorrow and ask her to marry him.
Chapter 7
1943
Tomorrow, tomorrow, she would see him. It seemed impossible; for not only years, but a complexity of emotions stood between them. The grief of their parting, the aching loneliness, the gnawing ongoing anxiety about his safety, the impatience for letters, all the things she had thought were bad, had been crushed into insignificance over the past few months. The terror at the news of his injuries (brought to her by his mother, waiting white-faced outside the school for her) the struggle to determine exactly what and how bad they were, the dread that he would not recover. These were the new and dreadful demons, increased by lack of news, and when that came, the impatience of his long, slow convalescence. Now at last he was home, still clearly frail, in the military hospital at Aldershot, and she was permitted to visit him. Tomorrow. After three years. It seemed scarcely possible.
He had been extremely ill; stationed with Montgomery’s forces at El Alamein, he’d survived two years of it, but then he’d caught a mine. His left leg was badly injured, and he’d also sustained serious damage to his chest; infection set in, turning to pneumonia and septicaemia. He’d very nearly died, but he had survived, written to her from the hospital as soon as he was well enough, making light of it all, praising the American nurses. ‘They’re fantastic, so kind and so efficient and brave.’ He complained only of his frustration at missing the Big Battle, the one that had been such a turning point in the war. Laura could only offer up fervent thanks to the God she didn’t believe in that he had.
The thought of seeing Tom, of being physically near to him again, able to touch him, hear him, smile at him, was so extraordinary, so dazzling, that she could only allow her mind to contemplate it occasionally, otherwise she would not have been able to function at all. As it was, she would still find herself struck unawares by it from time to time with a force so strong it made her physically dizzy, and she would stand, smiling foolishly at the children, unable to remember their names, what lesson she had been teaching, even. She had received two letters from him in three days, telling her how he was longing to see her too, begging her not to be late – as if she would be – and warning her that he wasn’t looking quite the fellow she’d last seen leaning out of the train window as it pulled out of Southampton. He had told her once again that day, before they left for the station, that he loved her more every day, ‘more than you could ever believe possible, Laura Leonard’, and the minute the war was over they would get married; she had had to live on that moment with its heart-catching sadness for three years, watching his face grow smaller until it was unrecognisable, and even his waving arm, lost in a forest of other waving arms, stilled with the distance.
It had been truly dreadful; she had gone home and, refusing to cry, had sat staring at the wall of her sitting room, willing him back there by the sheer force of memory, his smile, his eyes, his arms round her, his hands on her, his voice, telling her he loved her and for a very little time that was sufficient, it soothed and eased her, but soon the void he had left, the blankness before her, bore him away more finally than the train and she gave in to grief and wept for hours.
She had heard that when a limb was amputated, you could still feel it, feel pain in it; she felt the same, as if the part of her life he had filled was a huge, savagely painful void.
But while Tom was in deadly danger, day after day, so for much of the time was she, volunteering at weekends under the aegis of the Co-operative Women’s Guild, to work in Southampton. During the Blitz the city endured nights as harsh and as cruel as those in London. For fifty-seven nights it went relentlessly on, and the firestorm of the worst of the raids could be seen from France.
In spite of the pacifist doctrines at its heart, and its most famous heritage, the launch of the white poppy campaign, the Guild fought its own particular corner. Attendance at the often rather sparse peacetime meetings soared; women wanted to help, and the Guild helped them to do so, often joining up with the WVS, running canteens, mending and finding clothes for the homeless, helping shocked, terrified people into shelters, and, strictly unofficially, firefighting. All these things Laura hurled herself into; she would walk the streets at night, during raids if she wasn’t needed at the canteen or shelter, her tin hat perched jauntily on her curls, looking for people in need of help. Sometimes she stood behind the men as they drove the mighty hoses into the fires, the fires that always threatened to defeat and sometimes did, ushering people away from the scene, and more than once she helped to hold a hose herself, as a man overcome with heat and exhaustion fell.