After the War is Over by Maureen Lee Read Free Book Online

leapt to her feet. ‘I’d better be getting home. Look, don’t tell anyone about Chris, will you, Nell? I’m not going to tell me mam or anything, not yet at least.’
    ‘All right,’ Nell said reluctantly. ‘But can I tell Iris?’
    ‘Yes, it’s all right to tell Iris. Perhaps we could meet in Jenny’s Café one Saturday for a chat.’
    After Maggie had gone, Nell went into the kitchen to find the sink piled high with dishes and dirty clothes thrown on the floor. She ran the water, which was still warm enough for the dishes. When she’d finished, she filled the kettle and made tea. There was no sugar left, but she’d stopped taking it in the army. The dirty clothes she’d put in the wash house in the yard when she went to the lavatory before going to bed.
    She shivered. It was freezing in the kitchen, where there was no heat at all except when the gas was lit. It was like one of those buildings made out of snow that Eskimos lived in. She wondered how they were kept warm. They couldn’t light fires, surely.
    She took the tea into the living room, where a few embers in the fire were still red. In the street, two men walked past arguing violently. ‘I’ll bloody kill you,’ one of them shouted. People could be heard singing outside the Queen’s Arms in Pearl Street. ‘Bless ’em all,’ they bellowed. ‘Bless ’em all.’
    Monday, she thought gloomily, she’d have the washing to do, stacks of it. Mam, who loathed any sort of physical activity, was inclined to leave her visits to the lavatory until the last minute – or well after the last minute – and the washing usually included several pairs of knee-length bloomers that really stank. Dad wouldn’t dream of giving his dirty clothes to Rita Hayworth to launder, so there’d be his to wash too. Kenny didn’t leave much, but the moleskin trousers he wore for clearing up bomb sites were difficult to get clean, and it was impossible to get the heavy material through the mangle.
    It was so different to what she’d been planning for herself during her last months in the army. Nell closed her eyes and indulged in the delightful daydream that kept her mind occupied during the long, tedious days that made up her present life. She was living alone in London in a big room overlooking a tree-lined street. The room was on the first floor and she was able to see inside the top deck of the trams and buses that went past. Occasionally people would wave and she would wave back. Weekends, a Salvation Army band played on the corner. The Catholic church was only a few minutes’ walk away, so she could go to Benediction as well as Mass on Sundays.
    In her imagination, the room always remained the same, but her job would change. Sometimes she worked behind the counter of a posh shop – the scent counter, for instance, or the department that sold handbags. Or she might have a job in a cake shop – a confectioner’s, it was called, or a bakery. Or a nice little tea shop like Jenny’s on Stanley Road.
    She was designing her uniform in her head, when the backyard door opened and someone came in. It could only be their Kenny. She heard him put his bike in the wash house.
    ‘Would you like some tea?’ she asked when he appeared. She was fonder of Kenny than she was of any other member of her family. He was a slight, delicate lad with butter-blond hair and long dark eyelashes, who’d shot up over the last year or so until he was at least six feet tall. For a boy, he was undeniably pretty, prettier than all his sisters. It must have been the reason why, when he was only a little lad, their father had needed only the slightest of excuses to beat the living daylights out of him, ashamed perhaps of his pretty son, wanting to make a man of him.
    ‘I’d love some tea, Nelly,’ he said now.
    ‘Don’t call me Nelly; it’s Nell,’ she remonstrated. She lit the gas underneath the kettle. It started boiling straight away.
    ‘You always used to be Nelly,’ he