2. AN ESCAPE FROM MARRIAGE.

A prequel to my story An Escape From War.

Elaine Blockley hadn’t been married for long before it crossed her mind that she’d made a terrible mistake. She even knew why she’d made that mistake. She’d been too young to know her own mind and had been overwhelmed by William’s choice of underwear. He’d rejected the standard white which was available everywhere for more jolly colours, and she particularly liked the blue boxer shorts that he paraded around in when his parents were out and only she was around. It showed an originality of spirit. It showed rebellion against old fashioned standards.

It showed that William was his own man, and that just had to be respected, didn’t it?

So she had accepted his proposal and they had married days after her twenty-first birthday.

All had gone well to begin with, and then she’d found out a few little secrets about him that she hadn’t known until after she’d taken her veil and white gown off and they’d moved into the cottage left him by his grandparents.

He might have married her, but he seemed to prefer the company of men. He had one particular mate, David Parks, a scruffy lad, who was round their house so often she began to wonder whether she’d got two husbands, and although she had no objection to it to start with, David moved slowly into the spare bedroom with his goods and chattels. Without any input from her. And she became increasingly aware that she was being pushed out. William might as well have married David Parks.

William even went back to wearing white undies! Because, he said, it was what real men wore. And it was what David Parks chose to wear.

It was 1962 and she was emerging from the age of dancing to skiffle to screaming her lungs out when a virtually unknown band, fresh from performing in Hamburg, toured round her area. They were young, they were vital and in her eyes they were as sexy as sexy could be. Maybe virtually unknown at home, they would soon sweep all before them because they were the Beatles.

But maybe some of their popularity was a reaction to other matters that were occurring in the world. The second world war had ended, of course, and with it the fear of death from the skies every time an aeroplane’s engines droned anywhere near. But it wasn’t too long since the awakening of mere mortals to the power of the atom as demonstrated by the destruction of two Japanese cities replaced fear with dread.

And the two immovable forces, America and the Soviet Union, looked ready to fight it out as Russian missiles were being transported to a Cuban base in response to American missiles installed within striking distance of soviet territory. And it was in this world that William and Elaine were starting their married life.

It came close to being personal.

Warnings were put out on radio and television programmes. How to avoid radioactive fallout. How to stay, if not safe, actually alive should the third world war break out, and it might have done, any day.

Where to hide from the terror. That was in everybody’s mind, and it was in Jessica’s after a row with William after she found him in an intimate embrace with that friend of his.

She needed to hide from the bomb and she needed to distance herself from her new husband and his friend.

The news came to her rescue when an item demonstrated how a person could be kept safe from the after-effects of a nuclear strike by finding an underground shelter.

“What’s down there?” she asked William when David was on one of his rare trips looking for work. She meant the door that led from the pantry down to hidden depths below their feet.

“Oh, it’s a coal cellar,” replied William, “but we don’t use it because the last owners converted everything to gas.”

“I’ve never seen it,” said Elaine, “what’s it like?”

“Dark and spooky,” replied William, “I’d steer clear of it if I were you. In fact, I’ve discussed it with David and we’re going to brick the doorway up. I’d hate to think of you tripping and killing yourself if you happen to go sleep-walking.”

“I don’t walk in my sleep,” snapped Elaine.

“There’s always a first time,” replied William.

“But a cellar might come in useful,” pointed out Elaine, “somewhere to store stuff, somewhere to hide if the worst happens.”

“You mean the bomb? There’ll be no hiding from that. None at all,” he said flatly, and she could tell that was it, conversation over, he’d maybe have a great deal more to say to David but he wasn’t going to share his thoughts with her.

She realised at that moment that her big mistake was marrying him.

And that set in motion a series of thoughts in her head that would lead to her actually using that cellar as a hiding place if and when it came to war. She noted it in her diary, something she’d kept for her own day to day thoughts, a female and twentieth-century Pepys. At least, that’s how she saw herself.

She equipped herself with a torch, not a battery one but an acetylene bicycle light left over from an age when acetylene bike lights were all there was. She found it behind some tins in the pantry cupboard where the door to the cellar was, tins that had probably been there since tins were invented, she thought. She even found our that she could buy calcium carbide, it’s fuel, from the main bicycle shop in town. All it needed then, was water, and the light it gave off was brilliant, much better than batteries that always seem to run down when they’re most needed.

Whenever she had a few coppers spare she started buying tins of food. Baked beans and canned spaghetti were cheap enough, and she also bought as much cheap tinned meat as he could find.

Tackling the cellar door might have been a problem, but she found its key in the drawer she used for cutlery, lurking behind the spoons. William would never have found it because as far as he was concerned everything to do with kitchens was for women to labour in while he watched the small television they had bought.

So bit by bit and over several weeks the stocks of food, though fairly meagre, piled up in the cellar. William had no idea that some of his hard-earned money (he worked in a garage as a trainee mechanic) was being filtered off and used as a private supply of canned food to be stored in the cellar.

Meanwhile, in the world outside, it seemed that war was going to be inevitable, and if (or rather, to Elaine’s mind, when) it came it would be the end of life as she knew it. Radioactive poisons would linger for years, radiation sickness would take everyone who remained after the blasts had levelled cities and forests alike and life as she knew it would come to an end.

Then came the decisive row with William. The big one. The last one.

“Who do you prefer, me or David?” she asked him, out of the blue.

“Where’s this come from?”

“Well, you spend more time with him than you do with me…”

“Men get on together. Women don’t understand…”

Then she asked the killer questions “Do you love him, William, or do you love me?”

It was the punch he threw at her that provided the answer because she knew he’d never dream of punching David. It told her everything she needed to know, and so that evening when he was asleep she wrote in her diary: William will never love me. He never has, because he’s got David. So I’m going down into the basement where I’ll wait for the war to start and end, and then I’ll leave him and find a better life if there’s still a chance in a radioactive world…

It took William until hunger told him she was no longer feeding him to realise that she’d gone somewhere, and he was pretty sure he knew where. She wouldn’t have gone too far and he realised that the coal house door had been unlocked at some time, and not by him, and when he decided to take a look he saw her light down there. That was all he needed. Blast the woman! Why had he married her at all? It was the daftest thing he’d done!

“David,” he called the next day.

“Yes, duck,” replied his friend.

“Will you lend us a hand? I’ve ordered some bricks, and when they arrive will you help me brick up this doorway?

“Course I will, lover, course I will,” replied David.

“You see, I’m sure there’s a draught…” murmured William, “do you feel it sometimes?”

“Where’s that misses of yours then my love?” asked David, grinning at him, “you ain’t done away with her, have you?”

“What? Me? What do you take me for?” asked William, “tomorrow we’ll do it if you like. Brick the door up so’s the draught goes away…”

© Peter Rogerson 18.08.21

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Reviews

[Suzanne Sonderleigh]

Wow! What a great story! Love the twist at the end. But, I was rooting for the wife! Excellent storytelling.

[Peter Rogerson]

This was a prequel to the story An Escape From War that I wrote the previous day and somehow got drawn back to.