Past Remembering Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked as the tea lady started filling cups from a lukewarm teapot.
    ‘We’ve had the first unofficial estimates. It looks as though there’s at least five hundred and fifty enemy planes up there, so you tell me, where aren’t they targeting?’ The news hound turned Haydn’s question back on him.
    ‘The river? The East End?’
    ‘That’s a fair guess. They always come a cropper.’
    ‘Come on, Haydn, you know it’s too early to say for certain.’ Joe took his arm. ‘Let’s go down to the basement and sit it out. I know where we can find a bottle of whisky.’
    ‘I’d rather try to get home.’
    ‘You got a death wish?’ the sub-editor enquired tactlessly as he picked up his tea and left.
    ‘It’s not far,’ Haydn protested to Joe, as soon as the door closed and he could be heard.
    ‘Far enough for you to get blown to bits on the streets? And how do you expect me to explain that to a nice, sensible girl like Jane? “Sorry, love, but he insisted on viewing the blitz first hand?”’
    ‘But she could be …’
    ‘In the cellar, tucked up fast asleep with the baby.’
    It was Joe’s voice, calm, matter-of-fact, that finally broke Haydn’s resolve to tear out of the building right then and there.
    ‘You really think she will be all right?’
    ‘As all right as anyone can be in this God-forsaken city tonight. Come on, let’s find that whisky, go downstairs, and get plastered. At least we’ve a bloody good excuse this time.’
    ‘She’s still awake …’ Mrs Lane faltered when she saw a man walking up the stairs behind Alma. ‘Oh it’s you, Mr Charlie,’ she stammered in relief, embarrassment scorching her cheeks. But then, it was hardly her fault for thinking the worst. Not when Ronnie Ronconi was back and everyone was waiting to see if he and Alma would pick up where they had left off, now that poor Maud was dead and Charlie away soldiering. And it wasn’t just Alma. It was practically all the young women in town. Munitions money had given them the wherewithal to visit pubs – and drink. An unheard-of phenomenon before the war. Morality was being flung out of the window as all the unmarried girls and half the married ones used the war, their husbands’ absence, and loneliness as an excuse to comfort any and every soldier who passed through Pontypridd.
    ‘Mrs Lane.’ Charlie touched his cap-as he swung his kitbag down on to the landing.
    ‘Thank you for sitting with Mam. I’ll go in and see to her now.’ Alma pushed past Mrs Lane and went into her mother’s room, closing the door behind her.
    ‘It’s nice to see you home.’ Mrs Lane reached for her coat. ‘These past months have been hard on Alma. You away, her mother on her last legs, all the responsibility of trying to run two shops at opposite ends of the town …’
    The news of Alma’s mother’s illness and a second shop came as a complete surprise to Charlie, but skilled in the art of concealing his emotions, he gave Mrs Lane no indication that Alma hadn’t written to inform him of all the happenings.
    ‘… and of course it’s only a matter of time. Days, or so old Dr John told us this morning. That’s why I was so pleased when that nice Nurse John persuaded Alma to go to the restaurant tonight. Not that it was really a party. More of a wake for poor Maud Ronconi, Powell that was. To think of her being dead and buried for over a year and a half, and her own father and sister not knowing a thing about it. God only knows, none of us have much to be happy about these days, but poor Nurse John has less than most. One brother dead at Dunkirk, now her sister gone, and her husband in a prison camp for the duration. And then there’s the Ronconi girls. What with the rest of the family being enemy aliens and forced to leave Pontypridd, and now their brother coming home a widower …’ Alma’s mother’s bedroom door opened and Mrs Lane started guiltily. ‘Well, listen to me going on when you’re on leave. You got long,