She laid her hands on the coffin and felt the vibrations under her feet and through her arms as the bombs dropped and rattled the very fibre of her being.
As Lizzie listened once again to the whole of London splintering and shattering above her head, she’d never felt quite so safe as she did there with Jack at that moment. Is that what the window meant? she wondered, as she looked up at it again. Trusting even when there was nothing physically in this world you could count on?
‘Oh, Jack,’ she said as the flood of tears that had stayed away started to find their way down her cheeks again, dripping onto the new, stiff flag.
Diana placed one arm around Lizzie’s waist, the other on the coffin to steady it, and Julia did the same on the other side. The three of them stood in their mutual solidarity as the sound that echoed around the church was deafening; they had proved they were strong, they had all been through the worst of what life could offer, and if it was as if Lizzie knew all of their thoughts. One was thinking about the man who had just miraculously been spared, one about the husband who was still missing, and Lizzie about the man she would never see again.
42
It was as they arrived back from Jack’s funeral that Julia saw it, and she froze, her keys still in the lock, the door half-open. The telegram, screaming at her from the mat inside the hallway. Surely, after they’d just been through so much sadness, surely bad news wasn’t waiting for her here at her home.
Diana followed her gaze and, knowing automatically what it was, looked to Julia. ‘Would you like me to pick it up?’
Julia shook her head. She’d been dreading this telegram. Telling her that John was dead. She could do this. This was just something they had to do now. Deal with the death of their loved ones.
Her thoughts went straight to her children. Maggie’s tiny tear-filled face and Tom’s trembling lip, both of them on the doorstep saying goodbye to their father. That would be the last time they would ever have seen him. This suddenly felt so final. Scooping it off the mat, she walked into the kitchen and placed it on the table.
Diana helped Lizzie into the house, saying, ‘I’m going to put her in bed.’ Lizzie nodded, apparently oblivious to what Julia might be facing, or maybe she just couldn’t take any more sadness. No more pain this day.
As Diana and Lizzie went upstairs, Julia went into the kitchen and stared out of the window. She fixed her gaze on the corrugated Anderson shelter, the same bullet-grey as the sky today. Everything in her world was constantly there to remind her that there was no escaping this war; it surrounded her, trying to suffocate her at every turn. The cracked window pane she stared out of, the shelter in front of her and the telegram behind her on the table. Numbly, she started to fill the kettle with water as she stared at the shelter. Julia remembered that day in the spring when John and one of his mates had built it. His shirtsleeves rolled up, he’d been wearing his thick brown gardening trousers and his heavy work boots. They had both been being playful with one another as she had stood at the open window resting on her elbows, shouting out her instructions to her husband.
‘How about putting some pink frilly curtains on that escape hatch for me,’ she had joked.
He had given her one of his wry smiles, his thick hair matted with sweat as he drove a shovel into the ground.
‘How about you stop giving me so much lip and instead come and dig this hole for me,’ he had joked back as he flicked soil up the side of the building.
It had been such a lark then, this phoney war, before bombs dropped, before the call-up papers and telegrams arrived.
‘I just wouldn’t want to show you up,’ she had cracked back. ‘I would do it in half the time. Wouldn’t want to show you up in front of your friend.’
He had rushed into the house then as she squealed with the anticipation of their confrontation and tried to escape him. He’d chased her down and before long she had been swept into his strong arms; as he carried her out to the garden she had protested, kicking and screaming