8. FRIENDS AND LOVERS

Times and years move on

The new school, Overslade Primary, when it opened, was a clean, fresh and light building with more glass than brick, it seemed, and Wallace fell in love with the place. Besides being airy and welcoming it was hardly any distance from his new home, and more important than anything, his friend Ricky’s family had also moved to the new estate and he was at the same school and in his class. The two of them were ready to continue sharing life’s little secrets.

His fifth birthday came and went, followed by Christmas and the ending of a year that had seen so much sadness, and in the following February Auntie Amy dropped a very unexpected bombshell.

She appeared one Sunday noon after church arm in arm with a man who limped noticeably as he walked. Helen had noticed that her sister had been out quite a lot in recent weeks and this presented an explanation, if, indeed, one were needed. She knew her sister well enough to know that all the talk of never falling in love again might have seemed right back when William had perished during the war, but time had passed since then and Amy was still young enough to enjoy a full life and probably even have another child if one came along.

“I want you to meet Jess,” Amy said to Helen, nervously.

“Is this the fellow you’ve been so secretive about?” teased her sister.

“He’s a good friend,” replied Amy, almost defensively, “and it’s not exactly been a secret. It’s just that subject hasn’t come up.”

The man coughed softly and butted in. “He’s a good friend who’s also asked for her hand in marriage,” he said, his voice well modulated and containing within it a hint of humour and good spirits.

But it was his simple statement that caused a sudden silence in which Helen opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out, and Maureen, who was also there, paused, eyes wide open, then shouted “I don’t want a new daddy!” and Wallace grinned and said “wait till I tell Ricky!”

And the man Amy had called Jess smiled at Maureen and said “and I don’t want a daughter but I don’t mind having another friend,” which might well have been exactly the right thing to say had the girl stayed long enough to hear it all. But by the time he was half way through the sentence she had run off, to her room, sobbing.

“Leave her,” suggested Jess, “I’ll have a wee word with her when she’s absorbed everything.”

“I’ll tell you about it, then,” sighed Amy to Helen.

She explained that she had finally done the impossible and had met and fallen in love with a man, Jess Cambridge. They first met in the library where she had a part time job and he had been a regular reader. She went on to to say that somehow they had got to know each other rather well, had discovered that they had quite a lot in common and had decided rather hastily to get married that spring.

“I don’t want you to think I’m in the family way because I’m not,” she said, “but we’ve both learned that life is something that should be grabbed with both hands and clung on to before something takes it away from us.”

Jess was an ex-pilot, had flown Hurricanes during the war and been shot down, fortunately on the right side of the channel, but the crash had seem him quite badly injured, hence the permanent limp they must have noticed as a result of his injuries. but Amy insisted that she wasn’t put off by it.

“It means that he can’t hope to catch me if I choose to run away,” she joked, “man with metal rod in leg can’t run as fast as women in cotton skirt! But at least he survived and that’s all that matters,” she said, “and I know that I love him.”

“Who knows,” mused Helen, “I might find another man myself, maybe one a little further from God than Jack was!”

“He was a vicar,” Amy explained to Jess.

“I’ve seen enough of life to know that creation courtesy of the Bible and clergymen may be quite wide of the mark,” muttered Jess.

“Then you and I may have at least one thing in common, future brother-in-law,” said Helen quietly.

“Getting back to the real world,” put in Amy, “I’ll be moving out as soon as we’re married. Jess has got a nice little house in the old part of town, on Templeman Street, a terraced home but cosy and just right for the three of us with a nice bit of garden for vegetables and a chicken shed at the bottom. I’m sorry, Helen, but I’ve got to move on.”

“You look after number one, and of course you must do what your heart tells you to when you’re married,” said Helen, minding really but big enough to know that her sister’s happiness was more important than her own petty concerns. It would be harder finding the rent with Amy’s wages not coming in, but she’d manage. She herself had a part-time job at the grammar school where Wallace would probably go if he passed his eleven plus in a few years time, in the kitchen, helping with the cooking and serving of school meals. But it didn’t bring in a huge income and she might have to look for something that involved more hours away from home.

So with Amy moving out with Maureen, so began the second big change in Wallace’s life. They weren’t moving far, but it was a bus ride if you were going to visit them. It was still the nineteen forties and very few women drove and even fewer owned a car. Public transport was the order of the day for most.

Until that move Wallace and Maureen had been virtually inseparable. The girl had always maintained a closeness and fondness for him that the cynical might have thought bordered on the unnatural, and if ever he needed someone to comfort him he often chose her rather than his mother.

He was fortunate in that he had Ricky Shepherd. Without that friend, who magically tied the strands of his life together and provided them with a continuity they otherwise wouldn’t have had, he might have left lost and bewildered.

As it was the two boys formed a friendship that saw them through the next few years, through the rest of the nineteen forties and into the nineteen fifties, and right up to the dreaded week when they both sat the eleven-plus examination together, and the heartbreak when one of them passed and was to go to the grammar school and the other failed, and was to go to the secondary modern school.

The teachers said it was a way of selecting the right school for the right child, but they knew, in their hearts, that one had passed and the other had failed.

Very occasionally Wallace had seen Maureen but he did hear that when she was in her teens she had been seen out with a boy, the same boy on quite a few occasions, and he experienced a sensation that might have had something to do with jealousy had he known anything about that emotion.

Thus came to an end what might be the second big stage of Wallace’s life so far and the parting of too many ways for comfort.

© Peter Rogerson 04.06.19