The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [105]
She hadn’t been able to sleep, lying awake instead, thinking about poor Eddie Baker Johnson and his family. Tell the truth, she admonished herself mentally, you weren’t just thinking about Eddie, were you? She looked down the row of vegetables she had offered to weed as a small repayment to Mrs Lawson’s widower neighbour for his kindness in keeping them supplied with freshly grown food, leaning on the hoe he had loaned her, her expression haunted by the events of the previous day.
It was almost lunchtime and the sun was hot. She lifted her hand to brush a stray lock of hair out of her eyes and to her chagrin felt them fill abruptly with tears. Because a young man she had only met once had died? Because the major had kissed her? Or because she had kissed him back and that knowledge both angered and shamed her?
So what if, for a few seconds, she had let her guard slip, she told herself crossly as she dug the hoe into the weeds, slicing off their heads with a sense of great satisfaction, as she contemplated destroying her memories of her own unacceptable behaviour with the same thoroughness. But while the hoe might cut the heads off the weeds, their roots were still intact, unseen beneath the surface, waiting to spring into fresh life. What was she trying to tell herself? That a kiss had roots? That just trying to cut off her memory of it wouldn’t stop her from…This was ridiculous. There were no ‘roots’ to what had happened. No history of past longing or future desire. No life outside that single event. It had been a simple error of judgement; a reflex reaction to the dreadful sadness of Eddie’s death. It wasn’t, after all, as though she had never witnessed similar behaviour in others. War did strange things to people. It brought them together in situations they would never have experienced or shared in peacetime; it created an immediacy and an intimacy that led to…to the major kissing her and her kissing him back?
Forget about it, she told herself angrily.
If only it were that easy. Her inability to ‘forget about it’ was what had brought her out here so early in the morning, after a broken night’s sleep in the first place, desperate to force herself to do something, anything, that would banish yesterday from her mind for ever.
It was gone eleven now and her muscles were beginning to ache. She had reached the end of the row, and Mrs Lawson had promised her the luxury of adding Myra’s allocation of hot water to her own, which meant that she could wash her hair and have a bath, and she was certainly ready for both, she thought, as she returned the hoe to the small wooden shed at the end of the allotment and started to make her way back to the house.
Mrs Lawson was very proud of the fact that her house had its own bathroom; one of their landlady’s biggest fears was that the Germans would bomb Chestnut Close and destroy her precious bathroom.
Mrs Lawson was just leaving when Diane walked up the front path, explaining that she was going to spend the rest of the day with a cousin.
‘Might as well enjoy the sunshine whilst we’ve got it,’ she told Diane, adding, ‘And our Sarah’s got some soft fruit she wants me to help her to pick for jam making.’
With the house to herself, Diane stripped off her allotment-grubby working trousers and old blouse, putting them on one side to take downstairs to the back scullery where the washing was done either in the stone sink or the old-fashioned copper, if it needed a really hot wash or was too big for the sink.
Pulling on her dressing gown, she gathered up her precious supply of toiletries. Her mother had sent her some Pears soap for her hair, which Diane suspected was black market; she certainly felt guilty when she used it, but the alternative was to use boiled-down scraps of old soap bars, which, as everyone who used them knew, left the hair lank and slightly sticky, no matter how much one rinsed in cold water. With