15
SHOPPING
December 1944Mum had slit open the telegram and scanned the message. She then burst into tears and began to mumble something about Dad ‘being ill’. Miss Kitchen and Mrs Brown took hold of her arms.
Mrs Brown kept repeating “It means absolutely nothing. Could have been much worse. There’s many a telegram comes with worse news than that. Anyway, it could be for the best — he might be invalided out.”
Miss Kitchen didn’t say anything. She just brought round titbits each day for a whole week: jams she had made with the fruit of her brambling trips, a jar of pickled onions, some holly off a market stall, coupons she had not used for clothes or knitting wool.
Mum stood in the front room window every morning to watch for the postman, although Grandma told her several times that ba
