Paper Faces by Rachel Anderson

saucers.
    â€œYou get ever such a lot of meals out here, don’t you?” Dot said. “Up London, we don’t do this one.” All things were done differently in London. “Up London,” Dot explained, “we waits for our high tea what Mrs. Parvis makes till evening when the real people get back from their work. And Mr. Brown has to have his straight off, no hanging about, because he wants to be an engineer, so he goes to night school. Mrs. Parvis says he’ll never make it. I know he will. He’s ever so nice.”
    On the dresser, Dot noticed a framed picture of a man in uniform. It was a black-and-white photograph that had been partially tinted with pastel colors so that though the young man’s face was paper-white, his eyes were sky-blue and his medal ribbons bright as a rainbow.
    Dot said, “Your husband was ever so brave, weren’t he? That’s what Gloria says. That him, up there?”
    â€œDo you know, it almost could be. Actually, that’s another of my sons. In the merchant navy. Though people do say he’s very like my husband.”
    â€œHas he had it too, your boy there?”
    â€œNot as far as I know, my dear. Though I must admit, we’ll be glad when it’s all over in the Far East and they can come back safe and sound.”
    So it wasn’t over yet. Dot had been right all along and Mrs. Parvis wrong when she’d insisted that it was all over bar the shouting.
    â€œIs he brave, too?”
    â€œWell, there’s so many different and wonderful ways of being brave, aren’t there, my dear? That’s the admirable way our good Lord arranged it, didn’t he? So that everybody can have a stab at it. Even Miss Lilian has shown great fortitude in her own way.”
    Loopy Lil was arranging and rearranging the teacups on their matching saucers.
    â€œAnd your mother, too, is a most courageous young woman, isn’t she? The way she’s carried on.”
    Dot wished she knew what it felt like to be brave, and wondered if she’d ever get the chance to find out. She wondered if eating when you didn’t feel hungry was brave. She wondered if her father was brave. Was he a secret hero and was that why Gloria never talked about him?
    She said, “I think maybe my old man had a stab at it.”
    The pale young sailor in the silver frame stared serenely out across the wide spaces of the kitchen with faraway forget-me-not eyes. Dot tried to remember her father’s face from the brownish photo that Gloria kept in her handbag. She wished she could recall it more clearly. Even when she had the picture in front of her, she seemed only to see the flat bloodless paper. She wished her father was like this young man who sat in his own shrine on a country kitchen dresser among used OHMS envelopes and sprigs of dried white heather.
    She said, “We don’t ever talk about my old man. But I think he liked bananas.”
    A group of men and women came in to share the meal called elevenses. They had muddy boots, which they kicked against the kitchen step, and muddy hands, which they washed at the sink. One wore a sack round his shoulders like a shawl; another had it round her waist as an apron. They didn’t sit but stood around the table. The china teacups seemed too dainty in their dark working hands. There wasn’t much talking between them, apart from pleases and thank-yous when Dot heard how two of them spoke awkwardly with unfluent foreign accents.
    The huge kitchen suddenly seemed too crowded. Dot felt the room lurch away, while the milk jug with its bead-decorated muslin cover, the flypaper dangling from the lamp above the table, the rosy faces of the gathered people, flew round through the air. Dot knew from their voices that those two young men who’d been working in the fields must be prisoners.
    â€œYou all right, my dear?” she heard Mrs. Hollidaye say.
    Them’s Germans, Dot wanted to say, but the