‘Mr Green’s kindly taken the dog,’ he said. And then he sat by me to hold my hand.

Auntie Dorothy had had a stroke. They assured me at the hospital that she was killed outright and, honestly, truly, wouldn’t have known that when she fell she crushed poor Prudence flat. She’d only got off her lounger to put the closed sign up and measure out some of her blinking coconut ice.

At her funeral, burly, broad-shouldered, fat-handed butchers – Father and four of Auntie’s brothers – were gasping and sweating to lift her in her coffin. They had to rope in Bernard, who stepped forward without a word to put his skinny clerk’s shoulder under one end. Our singing of ‘Abide With Me’ was accompanied by their grunting and grumbling as they carried her up the aisle. She would have laughed. Her Montgomery, Auntie Dorothy would have told them, would have had no trouble lifting her because she was his Duchess.

Mother’s funeral outfit looked to be last worn for King Ted’s or his late mother’s passing. With her hand on my arm, which still clasped a damp, tear-stained handkerchief, she said, ‘Don’t worry, Queenie. You can come back home now. There’s plenty for you to do around the farm.’ And I’m not sure if I said it out loud because my elocution teacher would have despaired, but I know I thought it – Not on your nelly, Mother! You’ll not get me back there. I looked over at Bernard, smoking in a huddle with Father and the other men.

‘No,’ I told her. ‘I’ve some good news for you. I’m getting married, Mother, to Bernard Bligh.’

Twenty-five

Queenie

Bernard would untie his pyjama bottoms, loosen the cord then bunch the fabric into his hand so they didn’t drop and spoil the surprise. ‘Darling . . .?’ It was said as a question but the rest of it was never uttered: the shy missing words hanging between us were too lewd to show themselves. I’d stop reading to loosen my nightdress while he got into bed. He’d kiss me, in the early days, full on the lips with a timid tongue slipping gingerly into my mouth. Later it was the peck from a chicken’s beak. His hand would slide under the covers tracing my nightie until it could go no further. He would ruckle up the material, pulling it up and up until he slipped his hand between my legs to part them. Then he’d roll himself on top of me. In the early days his eyes gazed down on mine – his soft, warm breath panting. Later he looked into a distance in the headboard, the corners of his mouth filling with two spots of spit as white as breadcrumbs. With the concentration of searching for a light switch in the dark, he’d fumble about until eventually, located, he’d stick it in. Slippery as a greasy sausage sometimes but mostly it was the bark of a tree. And he’d sigh as if lowering himself into a hot bath, his hand creeping up my nightie to lie awkward on my left breast. A held breath that turned him pink, then a grunt that slathered spittle all down my neck, and it was all over. In the early days he kissed me before he rolled off but later he just left me with the indent from his pyjamas buttons.

All that lily-of-the-valley scent. Hours spent waving my hair and powdering my face to porcelain perfection. Silk stockings, red lips, and hands as soft as lah-di-dah. And I was married to a man who wouldn’t have noticed if I’d come to bed in my gas mask. If I could have asked Auntie Dorothy, ‘Is that all sex is?’ I know what she would have said: ‘Well, what did you think it would be?’

Babies, that’s what I thought! All those warnings of things that could leave me in the family way. I’d been scared simple from the time my breasts first poked up in my jumper. Kissing at the garden gate, canoodling at the pictures. If he stuck his tongue in your mouth that was definitely a baby. If he touched your breast, well, that was twins. And what girl didn’t know you could fall pregnant sitting on a toilet seat? So sex every Saturday, Sunday and sometimes twice in the week for over a year should surely have left me with child.

‘Do you take pleasure in conjugal relations?’ the doctor asked me.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

‘You’re not sure if you find it pleasurable, Mrs Bligh?’

‘Not sure what it is, Doctor.’

I was the most bothersome thing he’d had in his dingy surgery since he last squashed a buzzing bluebottle against the glass. If I didn’t partake fully and enjoy relations with my husband I would never get pregnant, he assured me. ‘A young, pretty, healthy woman like you cannot have a problem. My advice to you is to go home and try harder.’

The vicar at St John’s Church wondered if it was wise to want to bring a child into the world when there was almost certainly a war coming. Told me to go away and think very carefully about it. So I went to the Roman Catholic church instead and lit a candle. I knew they wouldn’t mind.

‘I would like children, Queenie,’ Bernard told me more than once. Accusing me or near as. He thought I didn’t realise that he searched in my chest of drawers to see if the packets of sanitary towels were open or still shut. He always knew when it was my time of month. But what he didn’t know was that with every curse that came and went I cried over those bloody rags.

From the basement to the top there were sixty-five stairs in the house in Earls Court. I told Bernard after I’d counted them. ‘Indeed,’ he said. And that was not counting the five up to the front door. Sixty-five stairs and endless rooms. But Bernard and his father, Arthur, lived like a couple of unwelcome mice in the few rooms in the basement. All the other rooms, except one, were empty. They used to have lodgers – men, mostly, who came to London for work, stayed a few weeks or months and then moved on. With every vacated room Bernard closed the curtains, covered the chairs and beds with newspaper and shut it up.

The wedding confetti had hardly finished floating to the ground when Bernard told me, ‘I don’t want my wife to go out to work.’

I’d hugged him. Who wouldn’t after so many years as a skivvy? I was to be a housewife. I could hear Auntie Dorothy: ‘Oh, Queenie love, you’ve landed on your feet there.’

‘Let’s open up the house,’ was this new bride’s suggestion. Wielding my lavender polish and duster all day I tried to show Bernard how it could be. I put flowers and a cloth on the table. Changed the heavy red brocade curtains for modern ones with roses climbing up. ‘We could have a sitting room for ourselves.’ I persuaded Bernard to move out some of the enormous old-fashioned bookshelves and cupboards that lurked like the ghosts of families past. ‘You could have a study, Bernard, use one of the rooms for somewhere to read.’ Let in some light. Open the windows. ‘It could be a proper home again,’ I said. But most things I suggested were met with Bernard’s shaking head. ‘Why not?’ I’d ask him.

‘I’ve got my reasons.’ But I never really got to hear them. Didn’t I have enough to do to look after him and his father, what with the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning? And, silly woman that I am, didn’t I know that there was a war coming? Or sometimes he’d mutter something about wanting to move to the suburbs.

Twenty-six

Queenie

That blinking grandfather clock went off every fifteen minutes. I’d near as begged Arthur not to keep winding it up. Bernard said it was his father’s clock and it had always been kept wound even when he was away in France. I think those two were deaf to it, it being so familiar to them. So with those ruddy bells tolling for me again I nearly missed Chamberlain’s speech. I was knitting. Bernard kept looking over to my needles as they clacked away. I could see they were annoying him. He pulled his chair a little closer to the wireless. Then slyly looked over at them again. You’ll have to say, I thought. You’ll have to open your mouth and make conversation. Queenie dear, could you please stop knitting for a little while? I can’t hear what is being said properly. But I knew he wouldn’t. He’d tut, maybe, but that would be it. I’d knitted this wool three times. ‘This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government the final note . . .’ Every time I finished I unravelled it and knitted it up in another style. ‘. . . withdraw their troops from Poland or a state of war would exist between us . . .’ He did ask once, ‘You’ve been knitting that garment for a long time?’ which made me smile. ‘. . . I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ So that was it, just ding-dong, ding-dong, clack, clack, clack, and there you go, we were at war.