The Soldier's Bride Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Torn between love and duty...

  Letty Bancroft longs to be married but her father has other ideas – he wants his daughter to stay at home and help run his East End shop.

  Heartbroken, Letty must remain unwed while her sweetheart goes off to fight in France. But her love affair has had consequences that will see her more determined than ever to be a soldier’s bride...

  About the Author

  Maggie Ford was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.

  She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s. The Soldier’s Bride is her first novel.

  Dedicated to Charles Titchen, my late husband and patient friend, and to my loving children, John, Janet and Clare

  Chapter One

  Letty Bancroft shivered deliciously, a tingle of anticipation briefly replacing tension. Not long now and she’d be wearing her new corset.

  Stiffened with whalebone, strengthened with buckram, moulding her already narrow waist as near the rich and fashionable ‘S’ bend as its cheaper version allowed, it had cost twelve shillings and elevenpence.

  ‘How much?’ Mum had looked disparaging. ‘It’ll kill yer wearing a thing like that, trying to be something you ain’t.’ But Letty had been eighteen two weeks ago. Now she wanted to be transformed, to look rich and fashionable, even if she was only a bridesmaid. At least, when she could get into the bedroom to put the thing on and be transformed!

  Letty, or as her dad insisted, Letitia, drew back her head from out of the open parlour window above his secondhand shop, the sash pushed up as far as it would go for a bit of fresh air, and glanced again at the clock on the mantelshelf. Eleven-thirty! She’d never be ready in time.

  It was Saturday 15 June 1908. Her eldest sister, Vinny, was getting married at one-thirty at Holy Trinity church in Old Nichol Street. Letty and her other sister, Lucy, were bridesmaids.

  From the bedroom along the passage came girlish voices, high with excitement. All right for them! Lucy was ready, Vinny almost. And here she stood, still in her old everyday frock, hair tumbled around her shoulders in an auburn mass, waiting for Lucy to comb it, pin it up and puff it out fashionably over cloth rats.

  Her mother looked round the parlour door. ‘You orright, Letty, luv?’ The tone sounded weary, almost like a sigh.

  Letitia looked at the thin face, flushed by the disease that afflicted so many in the East End; squalor, narrow back alleys, lack of fresh air, it was said, made a perfect breeding ground. Mum had contracted it about ten months ago but had been determined it wouldn’t spread to her three pretty daughters with all their lives ahead of them. She never kissed them now, which hurt a little; used a hanky for her smallest cough; had her own crockery, her own utensils, her own towel and face flannel, the family being just a bit better off than some who could hardly afford a towel between them at times. If Dad’s shop did only moderately well, at least it managed to keep their heads above water.

  ‘I’m orright, Mum,’ Letty answered her enquiry. ‘Just a bit fed up of waitin’, that’s all.’

  ‘Never mind, luv,’ Mabel Bancroft soothed. ‘Not much longer. It do take a bit of time fer a bride to get ready.’

  ‘Hmm!’ Letty pulled a face, the grimace in no way marring its looks. She got her retroussé nose, her firm oval chin and high brow from Dad; her tallness she’d inherited from both parents, rare in a Cockney.

  Her wide green eyes could make any boy blush to the roots of his hair when she treated him to that sideways glance of hers, a natural action, but she could make the most of it when she wanted to. Trouble was, she seldom wanted to, certainly not with the class of boy round here. Oh, for a well off young man like Vinny had found. She envied Vinny her luck. It would never be hers.

  ‘Looks like I’ll still be dressin’ when everyone else is leaving,’ she mumbled sulkily. ‘I should of known I’d look a mess. Some bridesmaid I’ll make – me hair all over the place.’

  ‘It won’t be all over the place, luv,’ Mum said in a tired voice. ‘Lucy’ll do yer ’air lovely.’

  The wan face withdrawn to save further argument, Letty turned back to the window and stuck her head out again. Her face framed by the heavy lace curtains, elbows folded on the soot-grimed sill for support, black-stockinged feet up on tiptoe, she peered down.

  The street below was quiet. On Saturdays most people went to Brick Lane market a few streets away, the faint cries of the stallholders could be heard from here, above the rattle of trams on the main road. Tomorrow morning, however, would see the quiet street below erupt in a confusion of song birds, thousands of them, their concerted twittering like the sound of huge sheets of crisp tissue paper being vigorously rubbed together.

  This was Club Row, London’s caged bird market. Running off from the Shoreditch end of Bethnal Green Road, its stalls spilling across into Sclater Street and Hare Street, people came here on Sunday mornings to buy pigeons, chickens, but mostly to look for a caged bird as a pet – a linnet, a goldfinch or a canary.

  In summer London’s streets echoed to their sweet trills and warbles when new owners hung the tiny cages outside tenement windows. In winter the streets lay silent when the birds were taken indoors out of the cold, but even in winter Club Row had birdsong; cages stacked high in doorways, on stalls, each little captive singing as if to keep itself warm until someone bought it and took it home out of the cold.

  Sunday morning the air would vibrate with the confused chatter of people buying, and stallholders yelling their heads off. The street would be a jostle of people milling between the fuliginous brick and dirty shop windows and the tatty awnings of stalls. Letty always loved looking down on the swirling river of hats; men’s faces hidden beneath greasy cloth caps or dusty bowlers, ladies’ beneath straw hats, plain sombre black or cream or yellow, banded with blue or red or brown ribbon; a few wide-brimmed hats decorated with wax fruit, half a yard of tulle, a feather or two, the poor of the East End aping the more opulent West End fashions.

  This was still the same impoverished area Letty had known as a kid, but things were gradually changing. It was 1908. The well-to-do set the fashions, and every girl from scullery maid upward copied them. A girl could, with a paper pattern, a bit of cheap material and ribbon, make a dress for almost next to nothing and stroll in the park on Sunday looking quite the lady, even if she was in reality a mere factory worke
r.

  Reminded sharply that shortly she too would look very much a lady in her bridesmaid’s dress, Letty drew her head back inside finding the room dim after the brilliance outside.

  ‘You two goin’ ter be much longer, Lucy?’ she yelled, petulance heightening the cockney accent Dad was always trying to curb in her.

  ‘Ooh, keep yer ’air on!’ Lucy’s reply came back in the same vernacular, forgetting that she had been practising rounding her vowels and sounding her aitches, because she was going out with a boy who did. ‘Nearly ready. Vinny looks a picture! Wait till you see ’er, Let.’

  ‘And oo’s Let, when she’s at ’ome?’ Dad’s voice came sharply from the bedroom across the passage; Dad, who tried to practise what he preached, sometimes didn’t do so well. ‘She’s got a name yet know. Letitia!’

  ‘What, Dad?’ Letty called back automatically, hearing her full name. Arthur Bancroft’s voice became even more irascible. ‘I wasn’t talkin’ to you!’

  ‘I thought you was.’

  His narrow face with its bristling sandy-grey moustache came round the edge of the door, followed by his tall thin frame. At fifty, he still bore traces of the handsome man he’d once been.

  ‘Not so much of your lip, my girl! I was talking to Lucilla. And you, I ain’t ’aving you bawling out like some factory ’and. I brought you up to behave a bit better than that. Lucilla watches her words – or do sometimes.’ Lucy’s reply was still grating in his head. ‘And Lavinia is a proper lady since she met ’er Albert. So I ain’t ’aving you talking like that in front of ’er ’usband to be and his people. I ain’t havin’ you show us up.’

  He looked agitated, even less ready than before he’d started dressing for the ceremony. In his shirt and braces, his Sunday best trousers even so held up by a belt, his stiff celluloid collar popped off its stud, protruded at right angles from his neck like a seagull’s broken wing. His hair, touched faintly with grey, parted in the centre and brushed flat as a natural wave allowed, shone with brilliantine to keep it so, except that one wave with its own ideas was sticking up like a cockscomb. The bane of his life, was his persistently wavy hair.

  Letty smothered a giggle, kept her face straight. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ she said hastily, then tittered as he disappeared.

  High ideals had Dad, bless him. With never quite the means to carry any of them out, he’d tried to disguise his own lack of education, his poor background, by concentrating on his daughters, insisting they behaved like ladies, tried to be a little better than he ever had been.

  Even his choice of their names – Lavinia, Lucilla, Letitia – suited more to girls from Barnet than Bethnal Green, reflected that effort. Mum, more down to earth, had shortened them to Vinny, Lucy and Letty; neighbourhood mates went one better: Vin, Luce and Let. Dad gritted his teeth, and clung religiously to their original names.

  From her sisters’ bedroom came a wail: ‘Be careful, Lucy. You’ll break my neck, pulling my hair like that!’

  Far better spoken than any of them Vinny had become, since meeting Albert Worth whose people came from Hackney.

  At twenty-one, the same age as Vinny, Albert looked older. Round-faced and, to Letty’s idea, a bit pompous, he was training as an accountant in his father’s firm. Vinny had met him last year when the three girls had gone to see the Boat Race at Putney. He had accompanied her home when she’d torn the frilled hem of her summer dress and had taken to calling on her every Sunday afterwards, not put off by her background. Vinny could put on the posh talk when she wanted. She had won his family over and finally become engaged to him in January.

  Letty glanced again at the ornate ormolu clock on its marble stand where figures of a gallant and his lady posed decoratively on either side of the oval face under a huge glass dome. Tight-faced, she hurried to the parlour door.

  Leaning out of it, she blared into the dim passage: ‘It’s five to twelve!’

  ‘Ooh, you are impatient!’ Lucy’s reply, yelled from the bedroom, was no panacea. ‘I’m doin’ me best!’

  ‘That don’t help me much though, do it?’ Letty yelled back. ‘I can’t even use me own bedroom with all Vinny’s stuff in it.’

  A few stairs up were two tiny rooms, one hers, one full of Dad’s junk. Letty’s bedroom measured just six by eight. For weeks it had been full of Vinny’s wedding stuff with nowhere else to put it. Living space above the shop was in short supply. Besides the two tiny rooms at the top, there were just two slightly larger bedrooms, a kitchen and parlour, all of which opened on to a long dim passage with a flight of stairs down to the shop. The parlour was of a decent size if it hadn’t been crammed with Dad’s bric-a-brac and what had once belonged to Mum’s parents.

  At one end, the top of the piano was home to several big Victorian vases with painted pastoral scenes, some sepia photographs of various relatives staring out with fixed expressions, and some smaller vases. The piano had belonged to Mum’s mother. So had the six tall-backed chairs and the round dining table with extensions that opened with a winder, its polished mahogany usually protected by a chenille cover with bobbled fringes, an aspidistra in an ornate pot in the centre. Today its extensions were fully out, covered with a snowy Irish linen cloth and Grandma’s best cutlery laid for the wedding breakfast. The two-tiered wedding cake stood in the middle, like a silent honoured guest, in place of the aspidistra.

  At the other end of the parlour was a horsehair sofa with an armchair to match, the other one being wooden, with a padded back and padded wooden arms, such as Mum liked to use. ‘Keeps the back nice and straight,’ she maintained. ‘Floppy sitting makes a woman ungainly.’ She was still very Victorian in her ways, and it was too late to change her now. A lovely straight back she’d had once, a habit passed on to all three girls. It was sad to see how bent those shoulders had become over her slowly collapsing chest.

  Letty wandered to the piano, lifting the lid with one hand and picking out two bars of ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ with the other. Mum used to play on Sunday evenings. They’d sing their favourite songs, Dad’s voice powerful, Mum’s sweet, the girls’ mostly indifferent. They’d not done it much since Mum had become so tired and worn. Letty closed the lid despondently.

  What would Dad do if anything happened to Mum? She’d always had to push him, being a bit of a dreamer, always talking of what he’d do but never doing it. He wasn’t hard enough, more of a leaner really. Mum’s people had been metal merchants, brought up hard on business. Had she been a bit sterner with him, Arthur too might have been harder, made good money. But he was in love with beautiful things. He and Mum used to argue a lot once, over some fine piece he refused to resell after buying it off someone trying to raise a bit more cash than the pawn would give. He could be stubborn sometimes, Mum said, in a silly way. But they no longer argued, hadn’t for months.

  A lot of his treasured finds graced the mantelpiece that reared above the fireplace like a mahogany monarch almost to the ceiling in whirls and scrolls and shelves on fluted columns, backed by small mirrors. Each piece reflected Dad’s passion for beautiful things.

  Letty knew how he felt. She felt the same. She loved to wander around the shop touching the smoothness of polished wood, the silkiness of good china, looking at shapes, staring at pictures.

  She heard Mum call out: ‘Time’s getting on, Lucy dear.’

  And Lucy call back: ‘The church is only in the next street, Mum. We ain’t going all the way to Timbuctoo!’

  ‘I know, luv. But it’s time Vinny got herself sorted out, then ’as a cup of tea and a bit to eat. She ’as to sustain ’erself through the ceremony till we all get back ’ere for the wedding breakfast. Vinny, don’t you forget to wear yer gran’s garter … something old. An’ you’ll have to borrer something too. You got a clean ’anky, luv? Can I help?’

  ‘No!’ Lucy’s cry was just a little panicky. ‘Don’t come in ’till Vinny’s ready. It’ll spoil the surprise.’

  Dad’s voice rasped irritably: ‘’Er name’s Lavinia! Da
mn this bloody collar! See if yer can fix it, Mum.’ He seldom called her Mabel.

  A sudden outburst came from the bedroom. ‘Lucy – it’ll fall down, I know it will! Right in the middle of the service. My veil will pull it down. I shall feel such a lemon.’

  ‘It won’t fall down!’ Lucy’s voice was full of effrontery, her effort with Vinny’s hair being criticised. ‘It’s well pinned.’

  ‘If it falls down, I’ll blame you! I won’t get married. I’ll run out of the church, I will!’

  ‘Lucy! Vinny!’ Mum was making for their bedroom. ‘You’ll spoil yer pretty face, Vinny, if yer start crying.’

  ‘But just look at it, Mum!’ she was wailing. ‘It’s all floppy.’

  Letty leapt into action, running in behind her mother, Dad following. There the bride stood in all her glory, except for a face creased in pique. Letty made her eyes grow wide with admiration. Not all in pretence either for Vinny was delicately pretty.

  ‘Luvaduck!’ she gasped. ‘I ain’t never seen anyone look so … so beautiful!’

  Vinny’s grey-green eyes grew hopeful. ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Think so? I think your Albert might faint away at the sight of you. I think the vicar might too. You look … you look as pretty as Carol McComas.’

  She couldn’t have quoted a more apt example of loveliness. Carol McComas was Vinny’s favourite actress on whose swan neck, small perfectly balanced features, clear skin as delicately blushed as a peach, Vinny strived to model herself. In her high-necked, white satin wedding gown, its bodice a froth of lace, with more flaring at the elbows and the train, Vinny looked so like her, it took Letty’s breath away.

  ‘Your Albert don’t know just ’ow lucky he is,’ she sighed, wishing for a brief moment it was she who stood there.

  Lavinia’s face sobered with uncertainty. ‘Oh, I do hope he’ll like the way I look.’

  Mum put her hands to her lips and stood back to survey her. Letty felt with a searing of sadness that Mum would much rather have cuddled her eldest daughter, soon to leave her family to share a new life with her husband, but dare not let this beautiful girl catch what she had. ‘He won’t be able to ’elp himself, luv,’ she whispered, and her voice wavered.