Home Front Girls

more than eighteen or nineteen, she found herself thinking as she wrung out a cloth from the bowl at the side of the bed to wipe his sweating brow. His eyes instantly sprang open and he reached out to grasp her hand. His was feverishly hot.
    ‘You must tell me mam that I love her,’ he muttered chokily and Annabelle nodded reassuringly.
    ‘Sh-she’s special, see? Me real mam couldn’t keep me when I was a babby an’ she took me in out o’ the kindness of her heart an’ treated me the same as her own.’
    Annabelle swallowed deeply as she looked gravely down at him. His breath was laboured but even so it seemed that he wasn’t going anywhere until he had passed on his message.
    ‘O-one in a million, she is. Yer will tell her, won’t yer?’
    ‘I’ll make sure she gets your message, I promise, Johnny,’ Annabelle whispered, and a look of contentment settled across his face as his eyes fluttered shut. She sat down on the chair at the side of the bed, gently stroking his hand until at last his chest became still and the sound of his rasping breaths ceased. He was at peace now.
    Annabelle sniffed and swiped a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand as her thoughts raced to the woman she had always thought of as her mother. Since the night she had learned of her true birth mother’s existence, she had held Miranda at arm’s length. She had even joined the VADs to get away from her. Yet this boy had only loved his adoptive mother all the more for bringing him up and loving him as her own. For the first time she wondered if perhaps she had been a little harsh, but this was not the time to be thinking of it now, so she folded his arms across his thin chest, then after gently drawing the crisp white sheet across his face, she quietly left the room.
     
    It was much later that evening when she was returning from a walk along the sea wall that she spotted Joel sitting in the day room having a cigarette. One of the nurses must have pushed him down there to give him a change of scenery, so she made a detour and popped in to join him, removing her red cape from her shoulders as she entered the room.
    ‘Hello there,’ he greeted her. ‘Care to join me?’
    ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ Annabelle answered, taking a Woodbine from the packet he offered. He lit it for her with a match then asked, ‘Been for a stroll, have you?’
    When she nodded, he went on, ‘Bad do about that poor young Johnny Reed, wasn’t it? I saw the porters come to take him to the morgue.’
    It was just the chance that Annabelle had needed and now she told him, ‘He asked me to pass on a message to his mother – only she wasn’t his mother, not really. He said she’d taken him in when he was a baby because his real mum couldn’t keep him, and she brought him up.’
    ‘Then she was his mother, wasn’t she?’ Joel said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘That’s the way I see it anyway. She was the one who no doubt nursed him through his childhood illnesses. She was the one who read him bedtime stories and kissed him better when he fell over, so in my eyes that makes her his mum.’
    Annabelle gulped. ‘Do you really believe that?’
    ‘Absolutely. Why do you ask?’
    Her lip trembled, and before she knew it she had blurted out the whole sorry tale of what had been disclosed on her birthday. Joel wisely let her get it all off her chest without interruption.
    When she was done, he fished a clean handkerchief from the pocket of his dressing-gown and handed it to her, and she blew her nose noisily. ‘How the mighty are fallen, eh?’ she said shakily. ‘There was me, all airs and graces, thinking I was a cut above everyone else when all the time I was a nobody!’
    ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘You’re still the person you were before. Nothing’s changed, only how you think of yourself.’
    ‘B-but my mother was a runaway! Who would ever want me now?’
    He shook his head. ‘That’s not the way I see it,’ he told her. ‘Look at it this way: your mother is at home in Coventry and you would still think of her as your mother if your grandmother hadn’t let slip what happened after you were born. Does she really deserve to lose you now after all the years she’s loved you? We all have secrets in our past,’ he went on bitterly, ‘but we have to learn to live with them and get on with our lives. And as for who would want you now . . .’ he suddenly took her hand and bowed his head. ‘ I would, Annabelle. You