Free Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys by Mary Gibson Page B

ought to be more careful, George, they’ll catch you one o’ these days!’
    ‘Can’t afford… get caught, your daughter, costs me… fortune!’ he wheezed, banging his chest. ‘Listen, had an idea about Jack, got on to a mate o’ mine. Tracked this down.’ George drew breath and dug into his inside pocket. Along with a number of crumpled betting slips, and a dog-eared black accounts book in which he meticulously recorded all his shady profits, he brought out an identity card. ‘Someone was tryin’ to flog it.’
    May took the identity card. ‘It’s Jack’s!’
    Her mother let out a small cry and took the card, staring at it as though she could extract Jack’s whereabouts from its mere presence in her hand.
    ‘But this is good news, Mum! He might be lying unconscious in hospital somewhere, and they wouldn’t know who he was.’ May felt hope surging through her, but her mother’s face didn’t show any relief.
    ‘He’d have to be in a terrible state not to be able to tell ’em his own name,’ was all Mrs Lloyd said.
    After George had got his breath back a little, he explained that his mate had ‘persuaded’ the black marketeer to reveal that the card came from a ring targeting bombed-out houses and bomb victims. This particular card, he said, had been stolen, along with a wallet, from the body of a young man found lying in a street not far from John Bull Arch.
    George looked at the silent white-faced women surrounding him in the kitchen, a puzzled look on his face.
    ‘Bastard, I know... don’t worry about him. My mate said he give ’im a right pasting.’
    May was the one to voice the unasked question on all their lips. ‘But, George, did he tell you if Jack was still alive?’
    ‘Didn’t I say? ’Course alive!’
    May stifled a cry and grabbed hold of Peggy.
    ‘Alive! Thank God!’
    ‘You could’ve told us that in the first place, George!’ Peggy said.
    Mrs Lloyd slumped forward, gripping the identity card even tighter. ‘Oh Jesus, me poor boy’s alive.’ And covering her face with her hand, she let fall tears of relief.
    ‘Well, alive then ,’ George said, silencing Peggy with a glare. ‘I’ve put the feelers out, got people looking Kent way,’ he added, looking vaguely aware that his revelation was not getting him the praise he felt it deserved.
    George’s ‘contacts’ were many and there wasn’t an institution in the South-east without some sort of under-the-counter trading going on that he wasn’t involved in, even hospitals. If anyone could track down Jack, May was sure it would be George. He gave a self-satisfied smile as he was rewarded with a kiss from Peggy and a cup of tea from her mother, who was even cheered enough to use the family’s butter and sugar ration to set about making George some fairy cakes, which, an hour later, he generously shared with them.
    *
    On the third day, May kneeled beside her bed in the early morning light. Her Catholic upbringing, with its straitjacket of confessions and its burdens of guilt had so often felt like an inconvenience, but now May groped for her faith, calling on God and all his angels and every saint that she could remember, promising that if Jack would only return to them alive, she would go and do her bit. Whatever it was, she didn’t care. Even if it meant facing her own worst nightmare – leaving her home. She would do whatever was asked of her, if it would help end the insanity, where young men were blown up on their way home from a party and babies left wailing in their dead mother’s arms. But as she rose from her knees, peering through the sash window at a pale, frostbitten dawn, a feeling – half dread, half excitement – stirred in her, as she strained to see where that vow might lead her. Just at that moment she spotted George. He was bundled up against the cold in a camel coat and scarf, hustling along Southwark Park Road like a chugging steam train, breath pluming behind him. If he was coming at this hour he