Free Better Days Will Come by Pam Weaver Page B

some areas, whole streets had been reduced to rubble. Shortages of building materials meant that rebuilding the nation’s capital was a slow business.
    Shortages of other commodities were acute as well. Women still found it necessary to queue for hours outside a butcher’s or a grocer’s and Bonnie was surprised to see that large areas of public parks were still given over to allotments. There were few cars on the streets either. Petrol rationing kept their numbers down to a bare minimum.
    Bonnie was lonely and friendless but the money in her post office account was mounting up. She was careful not to spend a shilling more than she had to. Once her waistline started to expand it wouldn’t be long before she’d have to dip into her savings in order to live. Soon she’d have to find a place where she could go to have the baby and then there was the thorny problem of what she would do after that. Where would she live? More importantly how could she take care of the baby and support them both?
    When these things weren’t swirling around in her head, Bonnie struggled with a terrible ache in her heart. Why, oh why hadn’t her romance with George worked out? What had she done wrong? She couldn’t … wouldn’t believe he was a rotter. Hadn’t he told her time and again how much she meant to him? He’d made plans for his son from the moment she’d told him she was pregnant. She smiled fondly. He’d been so sure the baby was a boy.
    ‘Of course it’s a boy,’ he’d said with a mixture of indignation and pride when she’d challenged his assumptions. ‘That’s my boy. In my family, the first one is always a boy.’ And when she’d laughed, he’d kissed her until she was breathless.
    It was quite ridiculous but the thing she worried about most of all was the locket George had given her. It was her first real present and when he had given it to her, George had declared his undying love. It wasn’t new. The catch looked a bit insecure but she was sure that if it did come off it would only fall into her bra. She must have dropped it in the factory because she remembered fingering it just outside the door.
    When she’d arrived at the old factory on that last day in Worthing, it was deserted but the door leading to the street was open. She’d heard someone moving about in a room somewhere inside and had gone to see if it was George but she was met by a man in a brown overalls she presumed was the caretaker. He had his back to her and didn’t know she was there but she’d panicked and made a bolt for the entrance, tripped and dropped her bag. She was just by the door when he spotted her and shouted. She’d been so anxious to get away she’d just stuffed everything in her bag and run. The locket must have been lost then. If only she had stopped and turned around for a minute, she might have seen it on the ground. She missed it very much. Apart from the baby, it was the only thing she had to remember George by.
    To ease her anguish, Bonnie began to write letters to the address in Pavilion Road. She didn’t post all of them, but every chance she got she told George about her day. Of the three or four that she did post, she wrote her address at the top of the page and begged him to let her know how he was. Through her tears, she promised not to make any demands on him. She only needed to know that he was alive and well. She did her best to make the letters upbeat. He mustn’t know how miserable she was. Once the envelope was sealed, she put her name and address on the back so that Mrs Kerr could get in touch with her and tell her if George was ill or something. Sometimes Bonnie was so miserable she thought she was losing her mind with grief but there was something within her that wanted the whole world to know how much she cared for him.
    She did make contact with someone – Miss Reeves. Bonnie had remembered seeing an advertisement in the local paper with a box number for replies. That gave her the idea of going to