Bia's War Read Free Page A

you? Please, Victoria,
this is very important to me.”
    “I promise, Nana. I’ll never
tell another living soul. Cross my heart and hope to die.” Victoria
was very concerned over just how agitated her Nana was getting.
Whatever the story was, it was troubling her deeply and it probably
would do her a great deal of good to get it out in the open.
    “Don’t use that phrase lightly,
Victoria. We none of us know when we’re likely to die and there’s
no point putting a jinx on yourself.” Nana was very stern, which
was highly unusual for her.
    “I promise I won’t breathe a
word of what you tell me, Nana.” Victoria agreed. “Is that good
enough?”
    “Your word is good enough for
me.” Nana hesitated, composing her mind and deciding where exactly
she should start with the terrible tale with which she was about to
burden her granddaughter. “Your Granddad Sam was my second
husband,” she began, realising that she had to start right back at
the beginning of the whole episode. “My first husband was a man
called William Drinkwater whom I married in 1910, a long, long time
ago. He was three years younger than me, but I thought he was the
best of the bunch I had to choose from and I was twenty five years
old. I didn’t want to wait for marriage for any longer, because I
was desperate to have a child and I was worried that, if I didn’t
get married soon, I might get too old to have one. Looking back on
it now, I can see how silly that was but, at the time, I thought my
time was running out. It was a stupid thing to do, to marry someone
just because he was the best of the bunch, but that’s what I
did.”
    “So you didn’t love him, Nana?
Not at all?”
    “No, child.” Nana smiled at her
granddaughter. “No, I didn’t love him, but I know that he loved me,
in his own way, and I thought that would be enough. He had a decent
job in the iron works and he wasn’t a drinker, so I knew he
wouldn’t squander his wages in a public house or become a
wife-beater like some of them did. So I agreed to marry him and we
had a very quiet and very cheap wedding in May 1910. After the
wedding, we moved in with his parents and his two sisters, because
we couldn’t afford to rent a house of our own, but by the summer of
1912, four months before our baby was due, we moved into a house on
Albion Street and I thought we were set for life. I had a husband,
a house and a baby on the way, what more could I wish for?”
    “Were you happy? Isn’t that
important?” Victoria wanted to know.
    “I thought I was at the time.”
Her grandmother continued. “I had everything that I had wished for
from being a young girl. What more could I possibly want? Then,
just before my baby was born, I realised that I had achieved what I
had been aiming for and that it wasn’t enough. William was a
pleasant, hard-working young man, but he was beginning to bore me.
I organised everything in our lives and he went along with
everything I said or did. I was in charge of the family finances
because William gave me his pay-packet, unopened, the day he
received it. There weren’t many who did that in those days. I had
chosen the house we were living in because I was the one who had
discovered it was up for rent, I was the one who had viewed it and
put a deposit on it; I was the one who had chosen the furniture,
whether second-hand or new and I was the one who was carrying the
child I had craved for. William didn’t seem to be doing anything;
we didn’t even have conversations anymore. But there was nothing I
could do about it. I had made my bed and I had to lie in it. What
else could I do?”
    “Couldn’t you have left him, or
got divorced?” Victoria asked. “Then you could have lived on your
own and you might have met a man who didn’t bore you.”
    Nana Lymer smiled sadly at her
granddaughter’s innocence.
    “I had no reason to divorce
him.” She said. “He wasn’t a philanderer or a drunk. I and my
unborn child weren’t in any danger