I Only Came For The Music: 6 - Departures
...On the Saturday afternoon Dad went to the library and Mum and I went shopping. We returned to an empty house. On the living room table lay a letter addressed to my parents. As my Mother read it, her usually pallid face became quite pink, and she said in a funny voice: "Go up to your room Betty."
I took a book and sat on the stairs reading, until I heard Dad open the back door. Mum said: "She's gone! I hope you're satisfied." Then she started to cry.
I heard Dad say: "I'm sorry Nell."...
Continuing her vivid life story Betty McKay tells of amily friction. To read earlier chapters of her autobiography please click on I Only Came For The Music in the menu on this page.
Two months later the Second World War began, and within eighteen months both my sisters had left home. Eve's departure, strangely enough, was quite dramatic.
One Sunday lunchtime, in our house always a propitious time for family arguments, Eve accused my father of reading a letter from her current boyfriend, which Dad hotly denied.
I expect Eve's suspicion was well-founded. Dad since his retirement really didn't have enough to occupy himself. Having a little 'snoop' wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility. For the whole of the following week the atmosphere remained chilly, with nobody speaking very much.
On the Saturday afternoon Dad went to the library and Mum and I went shopping. We returned to an empty house. On the living room table lay a letter addressed to my parents. As my Mother read it, her usually pallid face became quite pink, and she said in a funny voice: "Go up to your room Betty."
I took a book and sat on the stairs reading, until I heard Dad open the back door. Mum said: "She's gone! I hope you're satisfied." Then she started to cry.
I heard Dad say: "I'm sorry Nell."
Eve had joined the WAAF and after her first home leave Joan, no doubt inspired by the tales she'd been told, enlisted in the ATS. I was proud of my big sisters. Probably because I saw less of them they seemed much nicer people. Eve eventually reached the dizzy height of Flight Sergeant and Joan became a Corporal.
Dad, to everyone's amazement got a job as a batman to the officer in charge of the Barrage Balloons at Padgate Camp. I was happy for him, because he was working; doing something which contributed to the war effort made him much happier than he'd been since he retired.
Cora and Anna became Land Army Girls and eventually they both married farmers, and Nicky went into the Royal Air Force as a Navigator. Doris continued playing the field and married an American Airman in 1943. After the war she went to live in Texas. I don't know what happened to Charlie. He quietly disappeared into the night, and perhaps he just went along stealthily leaving a trail of broken furniture behind him.
Rose didn't have a war like the rest of us. Six months after the party she entered Weaverham sanatorium and in March 1941 she died of Tuberculosis. I have never forgotten her.
It must have been about three years later when Mum surrendered one of her treasures to me. I raffled it for Mrs. Churchill's Aid to Russia Fund. It was a model of a fully rigged sailing ship in a glass case, made many years before by my asthmatic grandfather. I bore it proudly to school, where tickets were sold at sixpence each, raising the amazing sum of ten pounds.
One of my friends was delighted to win it declaring she would give it to her father for his birthday. When I asked her how he liked it, she laughed and told me he said: "What on earth am I supposed to do with this!" I didn't dare tell Mum!
That wasn't quite the end of the story. Sometime afterwards I was overjoyed to receive a letter of thanks addressed to me personally and signed by Clementine Churchill. - That moment was the high point of my war.
