Free Polly's War by Freda Lightfoot Page A

end. They weren’t made of brass, as Big Flo would say, but they could manage if they all worked hard.
    ‘What if I can’t pull my weight? What if these dratted aches and pains of mine won’t go, even when I’m working inside?’
    Polly couldn’t bear to think about such a prospect. She’d have him back up St. John Street to see that doctor like a shot. Useless though he’d been the last time, claiming it was nothing more than age creeping up on him, as if Charlie were in his eighties instead of only just over fifty. ‘Then you can sit in a comfy chair in a swanky office and do the paperwork, and won’t that be a relief? You know how I hate doing it.’
    Charlie was only too aware that paperwork was something Polly never shunned. She’d sat up night after night making her plans: endlessly going over the estimates for machinery, drawing up lists and costings, yet she always made it sound as if she couldn’t manage without him, as if she were weak and helpless, when all the time she was the strongest woman he knew.   But then he wouldn’t have her any other way. Charlie looked at her and loved the way her eyes shone with confidence and optimism for this new venture. He loved the way her head tilted and the impish grin that puckered her lips, the way she brushed back her hair with one languorous gesture. As always it made him want to kiss them, and he wasted no time in doing so.
    ‘I’m the luckiest man alive and not a day over twenty-five, in my head at least,’ he whispered, leading her upstairs to their private domain.
    ‘And isn’t it about time you realised that?’

    When Benny arrived home the following afternoon, he felt greatly in need of sympathy after failing yet again to find a job or shop premises. Worse, he was suffering from deep disappointment over the fact that he’d waited two long cold hours in the park for Belinda, who hadn’t turned up. She can’t have heard him after all, over the roar of the bus engine and, since he didn’t know where she lived, or even what her last name was, this put Benny in a self-pitying frame of mind. Yet no one seemed in the least interested in his troubles. He could almost feel the family shunning him.
    Sean had apparently howled all the way home from the nursery because it was closing the following week. Lucy was almost as distraught, worrying over how she could possibly earn a living if she had no one to care for her son. It was all apparently due to the fact that since husbands had come home from the war, wives could now go back to being mothers instead of factory workers, and child care facilities were no longer considered necessary. But where did that leave her, and others like her?
      The small boy was now in the throes of a huge tantrum, drumming his heels on the floor in a sound fit to wake the dead, while Sarah Jane wept in sympathy. Polly was struggling to instruct a confused Big Flo on how to pull back an old blue and white cardigan, on the grounds that if she could keep the old woman occupied, she might not wander off again. She’d seemed even more vague since the incident.
    Benny looked upon the scene in despair. ‘Its bloody pandemonium in here. Can’t a chap find a bit of peace in his own home? Isn’t somebody going to shut that child up?’
    ‘Will you mind your language please,’ Polly tutted, casting a nervous glance at Big Flo who, in her better days, would have clipped him round the ears for defying her Methodist morals so blatantly. ‘Let the child be. He’ll shut up when he runs out of steam,’ she finished, in a tone even Benny didn’t dare to argue with. He tried a different tack, by complaining that he was hungry but nobody heard, or troubled to answer if they did.
    ‘I said I’ve had no tea.’ He addressed this directly to his sister. ‘Or any dinner either for that matter.’
    ‘You’ll have to get it yourself for once.’
    Benny looked appalled, as if she’d asked him to build Blackpool tower in their front