Our Last Goodbye: An absolutely gripping and emotional World War 2 historical novel Read online

  Our Last Goodbye

  An absolutely gripping and emotional World War 2 historical novel

  Shirley Dickson

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  The Orphan Sisters

  A letter from Shirley

  Books by Shirley Dickson

  Acknowledgements

  For Wal and all the rest of my wonderful family.

  1

  October 1943

  North East town of South Shields

  As the cinema house lights went up and the strains of the National Anthem filled the hall, May Robinson and her mam rose from their seats and stood to attention. May began to sing but the cigarette smoke that fogged the air caught in her throat. She coughed before trying to carry on, ‘God save our gracious king… long live our noble king…’

  Mam, standing at her side, turned to her daughter and her plump face split into a fond smile. She too sang along, ‘God save the king…’

  When the music faded, folk began collecting their possessions – mackintoshes, umbrellas, handbags – and made for the aisles. May helped Mam on with her black woollen coat, which reeked of mothballs, and, checking they’d left nothing behind, they joined the throng heading to the Regal’s front of house, where they waited with the rest for the doors to open. The lights went out and the foyer was plunged into darkness. May and her mam followed the queue for the exit.

  ‘Eee, that film did me the power of good,’ Mam said in an enthralled undertone, ‘I’ve never laughed so much in an age. Mind you, not that I’ve had anythin’ to laugh about lately… not with that lazy sod drivin’ us to distraction. I swear your da’s getting worse…’ Mam continued, ‘Those two – Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland – with their dancing and singing, were just the tonic I needed.’

  Mam began to hum, ‘I Got Rhythm’, as the pair of them inched forward, into the damp air wafting in from the open doorway.

  Today was Mam’s birthday. She didn’t expect a fuss, and as far as Dad was concerned, neither did she get one. But May always tried to make her mother’s birthdays special and today was no exception. She’d planned this trip to the flicks and had used her sweet coupons on two ounces of aniseed balls – Mam’s favourite – from the sweetie shop. Sweets, like most household goods, were in short supply and at times simply unobtainable.

  ‘And another thing… did you know you resemble yon lass in the film? You’ve got the same look about you.’

  May was startled and felt her cheeks flush in the dark. Folk all around were absorbed in their own conversations, but she would die if anyone overheard her mother. Fancy being compared to a famous star!

  ‘Mam… that’s ridic—’

  ‘Have you looked in the mirror lately?’ May heard the smile in Mam’s voice. ‘With your bonny wavy hair, dark brown eyes and those Cupid’s bow lips, you’re the image of her.’ Mam sniffed indignantly. ‘And though I say so mesel’… with those high cheekbones, you’re far prettier.’

  May sensed folk listening in, and looked around shyly, hoping no one was paying too much attention.

  ‘I’ve got a ma just the same,’ an amused male voice piped up from behind. ‘She’s never happier than when she’s embarrassin’ us.’

  Just then May was swept forward by the queue and the moment mercifully passed. Leaving the cinema, she stepped out into the dark and foggy night.

  * * *

  As she waited for Mam, beside her, who fumbled in her battered leather handbag, May heard the voices of the rest of the picture-goers as they receded into the distance.

  ‘I know I brought it,’ she despaired. There was more rustling as she searched in the seemingly bottomless bag. ‘D’you know I’ve even found me compact that’s been lost for months?’ She let out a troubled sigh. ‘But no torch.’

  The night was foggy and claustrophobic. May felt disorientated and Mam’s disembodied voice only helped to increase the illusion. She felt somehow unreal, like when she was a kid and needed to fling her arms around Mam to be comforted by the warmth of her ample body. The blackout had been introduced so that enemy planes wouldn’t realise they flew over built-up areas. Householders hung heavy curtains over their windows; no welcoming light shone from street lamps, and torches, if used, were masked with tissue paper. Bus and car headlamps were also fitted with black discs with a narrow slit arranged to point downward.

  ‘We’ll manage without.’ May hoped her voice conveyed more conviction than she felt.

  ‘I know we will, pet, but what use is a torch if I can never find the damn thing?’ Mam’s frustration was clear as she berated herself for leaving such a vital piece of equipment at home. ‘And what use is it painting white stripes on kerbs and lines in the middle of the road if folk can’t damn well see a hand in front of them in this fog…’

  That moment a crackle sounded in the air, before a blue spark from the overhead wire of a trolleybus flashed from the roadway.

  ‘A trolleybus!’ Mam cried. ‘Can you see its number? Hopefully it’s goin’ our way.’

  The smell of sulphur lingered in the atmosphere, like just before a thunderstorm, and May thought that it might be caused by the trolley’s spark.

  She squinted into the fog but couldn’t see any light from the trolley’s number box. ‘It’s too far away.’

  ‘I’ll put a hand out,’ Mam called. ‘Maybe the driver might see us and stop.’

  King Street, with shops closed and no one about, resembled a ghost town. And in the eerie silence, Mam’s moderately high-heeled shoes clip-clopped as she edged towards the road. She never wore heels, May thought, with a pang. So excited had she been about tonight’s treat, she’d worn her Sunday best rig-out for the occasion, though it was a shabbier Sunday attire than in days past; an aged, dark green felt hat, worn at the heel black lace-up shoes and a limp floral scarf.

  The trolley whirred nearer and, sensing it looming in the dark fog, a feeling of foreboding gripped May.

  ‘Where are you, Mam?’ Like the blind, arms outstretched, she groped into the void ahead.

  ‘I cannot see a thing, hinny,’ Mam said. ‘But I’m stayin’ put till we catch a trolley… It’s madness to walk home in these conditions.’

  Before they’d set out the weather had been fine but it had changed for the worse while they were inside the cinema.

  A noise in the air she couldn’t identify caught May’s attention, then a cry of pain.

  ‘Bugger me…’ came Mam’s perturbed voice. ‘I’ve fallen over the kerb… me ankle hurts like blazes.’

  Before May could move, a trolley, its diffused beam a hazy light, silently loomed large out of the wall of fog.

  ‘My God… Help!’

  There w
as a sickening muffled thud.

  ‘Mam! Are you all right?’

  As May catapulted forward, she knew, with heart-wrenching clarity, that this was the last birthday she and her mother would ever celebrate together.

  2

  November 1943

  May was the last to receive a brown pay packet from the floral tray.

  ‘There you go, pet,’ the lady from the wages section said. ‘The princely sum of forty-two shillings. Divvent spend it all at once, mind.’ Cackling, she handed the pay packet to May and hurried away.

  The factory hooter blew then; the time was half-past five and it was the end of the ten-hour day shift. Switching off her machine, May collected her bait box, flask and knitting and filed with the rest of the machinists down to the basement cloakroom. She shrugged out of navy overalls and took off her peaked hat whose fishnet covered her glossy, chestnut-brown hair. She put on her coat and checked her handbag for her identity card. She knew her number off by heart.

  Following the rest of the lasses to the exit, May punched her time card and made her way outside into the night’s oppressive darkness to the bicycle shed where, by the light of a dim torch, she unlocked her bicycle chain. She manoeuvred the Raleigh past the low, camouflaged buildings and made her way down to the plant’s main gate.

  As she waited in the snaking queue, a voice beside her piped up, ‘Is that you, May? How you gettin’ on, hinny?’

  May recognised the voice of Bertha Cuthbertson, someone she used to work with. Bertha, who’d worked at the factory since the beginning of the war, was now supervisor on a different production line.

  May, forever truthful, was stuck for what to say. Since Mam’s accident, life had been one long day of sorrow after another.

  She managed to mutter, ‘I miss Mam.’

  ‘Aw! Of course. How insensitive can a body be?’ Bertha whispered, her tone exuding sympathy, ‘You’ll still be floored after the tragedy.’

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  Bertha squeezed her arm.

  May’s thoughts turned to the one person she wanted to be here to comfort her. But Billy was away abroad fighting for his country.

  ‘Next,’ the Local Defence Volunteer on the gate barked.

  As she stood before the LDV’s cabin, the dim light from his torch waved her past, and May relaxed. She constantly worried she might be searched and that somehow she might have made a ghastly mistake – a lapse of concentration, maybe – and some item from work would be found in her possession. She could only guess what the LDV bloke searched for – a precision instrument, cutlery pinched from the canteen or an important document someone could plant on her person to retrieve once she was safely outside the factory gates – and if found, May would forever more be labelled a thief, or worse still, an enemy spy.

  ‘One of these days, lass, your imaginin’s will get you into trouble,’ Mam’s voice spoke in her head. May’s chin trembled. She sorely missed Mam and couldn’t bear to think back to the day of the accident, and what her mother might have suffered.

  * * *

  Once outside the sprawling factory grounds, May mounted her bike and made for home. These dark days before Christmas she craved natural light but, like a mole underground, she felt she lived her life in darkness.

  May’s work at the factory was making precision instruments for aeroplanes. The job was monotonous, and she worked in a dungeon-like machine room beneath mercury vapour lamps that shed misty greenish-white light that hurt her eyes.

  ‘Speed is what’s important,’ the foreman had informed May when she trained. ‘It takes fifteen people working flat out to keep a pilot flying.’

  May was proud to be one of those fifteen, but since Mam had died she had a hankering to do something more meaningful. Something that would make a real difference to people’s lives.

  As she pedalled in the half-light, May was reluctant to go home. This was the time of day when she had to face reality. Mam wouldn’t be there with a pot of tea to greet her. Mam was gone – dead and buried – never to be seen again. The finality of it left May with a panicky, powerless feeling. She couldn’t face another evening alone in the house reminiscing about Mam and of course… Billy. She constantly worried for his safety and knew that in her present forlorn state she’d rake up not the good times she’d spent with him but the upset and heartache. The trouble was, with no one else in the house, May had too much time to think.

  May was worried about Dad because it was only weeks after Mam died and he was never home, his whereabouts a mystery. When Mam was alive, he’d sit in the bay window, jug of ale at his side, expecting to be waited on hand and foot.

  ‘If you ask me,’ Mam confided on more than one occasion, ‘it’s boxing in his younger days that addled your da’s brain.’

  Dad was up and out first thing these days and usually late home at night, but to be truthful May preferred he was getting on with his life to the drunken state he was in when Mam was alive.

  Her mind made up, May decided she’d visit her good friend Etty Milne to pass away the evening. She cycled towards the dark and dripping Tyne Dock arches. In the gloom, May’s spirts took a nosedive as scenes from her mam’s funeral played in her mind’s eye.

  She remembered the huddle of neighbours that stood at their front door in Templeton Street as May climbed into the black limousine by the kerbside; the whisperings she tried not to hear.

  ‘Poor lass, did yi’ hear her mam was run over by a corporation trolleybus?’

  ‘I did. And what I heard was the bus had to be jacked up so’s the workmen could reach the corpse…’

  As she was driven to the cemetery, all May could think of was what state a body would be in after being run over by a trolleybus.

  The cortège proceeded at a snail’s pace through the cemetery gates and along the pathways and came to a halt at a newly dug grave surrounded by a mound of brown earth. As folk stood like black statues circling the graveside, May recognised the faces of neighbours and friends, seafaring gentlemen that had once boarded at the lodging house Mam ran, and ladies from the Women’s Voluntary Service where Mam helped twice a week at the clothing depot.

  Mr Newman, the funeral director, presided over the burial. Dapper in a black suit and bowler hat, he was accompanied, surprisingly, by his wife Ramona Newman – Mam’s sister. The two sisters didn’t get along, but they were relatives, and Mam, after all, believed in family, so maybe it was right that Ramona should be there.

  The thought of family brought May’s brothers to mind. Serving abroad in the forces, they couldn’t attend Mam’s funeral. Thanks be to the Lord, May silently prayed, as, under the circumstances, with emotions running high, there’d no doubt be trouble. Both brothers detested Dad for the way he’d treated their Ma over countless years.

  The vicar said prayers then gave, in a detached voice, a speech about Mam. As she listened May was appalled; the person he spoke about wasn’t the Mam she knew but someone humourless and proper who would never use a word of bad language. May’s nerves were in such tatters she almost giggled at the saintly person Mam had become.

  Halfway through the ceremony, Dad’s emaciated figure staggered up to the graveside. Dressed in a black wrinkled suit, shiny from wear at the elbows, he teetered to the grave’s edge. May tensed, anxious that in his drunken state he might fall in.

  ‘Serve the bugger right,’ Mam’s voice said in May’s head.

  Dad bent and picked up a sod of earth, which he threw down onto Mam’s wooden coffin. Then, turning on his heel, he departed.

  The ceremony over, folk moved away, though some stopped to share condolences and May was touched at how well thought of Mam was.

  When everyone was gone, the cemetery silent as the grave Mam would now spend eternity in, May looked out over greenery to the houses way beyond, where folk got on with their everyday lives. She realised life for her would never be the same, and tears spilled from her eyes.

  Then a thought struck. Wiping away the tears on her cheeks with t
he back of a hand, she made purposefully for the cemetery gates.

  She had Derek to take care of. A warm protective glow spread over May’s chest.

  * * *

  Only eight, Derek was the baby of the family, After the last terrible raid earlier in the year when buildings were blown to smithereens and fires raged against the early morning sky, Mam had declared, ‘It’s time Derek was safe and oot o’ harm’s way.’ So he was evacuated miles away in the country to a place called Allendale where he was billeted on a farm.

  The day of his departure, May watched with Mam as the train carrying Derek, his tear-stained face pressed against a window, steamed out of South Shields station. As far as May was concerned, the bairn was too little to be sent to live with strangers – but what could she do? As a sister her opinion didn’t count.

  Derek hadn’t been told about Mam’s death yet as that responsibility lay with Dad. But the oversight preyed on May’s mind. As she steered the bicycle through the damp arches and up the road towards Chichester roundabout, a car horn hooted, giving May such a fright, she nearly toppled from her bicycle. Blimey, she thought, making an apologetic face at the driver; she’d been so immersed in her thoughts she’d swerved right in front of him.

  ‘Lass, yer not safe to be let loose on the road,’ she heard Mam’s voice say.

  Cycling up Dean Road’s incline, May passed the shops – newsagent’s, chemist’s, butcher’s – and rows of terraced houses, until she reached Whale Street. She turned left and stopped outside number twelve: Etty Milne’s two-bedroom downstairs flat.