"Sometimes"
Song by: Goldmund
Nothing could’ve shielded London from the Blitz. German lightning dropped time and time again from an unforgiving heaven. Deep within the city, a couple found themselves accepting a death that would save them from their greatest fear. The Blitz would stop them from ever losing each other.
On May 11th 1941, Marie and August found themselves in the cellar of the home they had bought forty odd years before. There wasn’t time to make it to shelter at the nearest tube station, so they made do. Under a card table, they held each other in the dark. Neither were afraid, but neither were calm. Turning out lights and rushing to shelter had become a fatigued nature they prayed would end. Outside, distant warnings sang into the air with a Doppler effect that buried itself deep into London’s bones.
Marie and August met in 1896, she was eighteen, he was nineteen, and they married the following year. They saw each other for thefirst time when Marie was walking home from her shift at Weggerman’s Shirt Factory. August noticed her hands first, seeing that her fingers were red and swollen. He looked up and saw her eyes were tired and puffy, her complexion was gray. She smiled at him as she crossed his path. He couldn’t let her walk away without having a piece of her to remember, so he asked her for directions to the pub he was already on his way to. Dead tired, Marie told him to make several wrong turns. She didn’t know up from down by that time of night, but she said it with a smile. August fell massively in love with her, and her smile.
From that day forward, he waited outside of Weggerman’s Shirt Factory at the end of first shift each day to catch Marie’s smile as he pretended to walk by. She was exhausted from a life of constant work but found it in herself to smile at the August. Before she had gotten to know him, she had an instinct that he was sad inside, and something called to her to give him any ounce of joy she could spare.
One evening as they crossed paths, he noticed her shoes were dated and torn, and that the sole had come away. A bit of newspaper was sneaking out beneath her holey stockings. For the next three nights after work, Marie looked for him, but he wasn’t there. She missed his red nose, and his blue eyes, and the delight of feeling connected to someone.
She shared a flat with six girls all as alone in this world as she was. She had started to feel less like them since the night August started looking at her.
After missing him for four nights, August made his appearance outside Weggerman’s Shirt Factory once again. Marie was relieved to see him and his weariness. He almost missed his mark of crossing her path but he ran to make it in time. Winded, he stopped her. She was prepared to give him directions thinking that’s all he could possibly want, until he handed her a box. August had made Marie new shoes. She refused them and tried to run away but only made it a few meters before she turned back and accepting them, begging to be indebted to him.
When he refused to accept her money, or her time, or her pain, she offered him a cup of tea at very least. Marie snuck August into the women’s hostel, and her roommates were much too tired to protest. Marie filled a kettle to boil for tea from the tap at the end of a landing next to an overused lavatory.
August fought off fleas that nipped at his legs while he waited for her to make the tea. Her cups were chipped, and the milk was spoiled. But, it didn’t matter. August and Marie were too busy feeling whole to take a sip. That night Marie fell in love with August as they shared their untouched tea on a wooden pallet designated as a table while six women painfully slept off their shifts around them.
Marie was embarrassed but unfazed by her living conditions. She knew it could be better but she herself had never seen it be better. She was born in a women’s hostel, and had seven older siblings, though she only knew the names of two. When Marie was three, her mother in a heroic act of desperation, entered a workhouse with her eight kids in tow.
When they entered the workhouse, Marie and her sisters, Joan and Diane, were too young to be sent to the children’s wing, so they stayed with their mother. Her brothers and sisters went separate directions, and Marie never saw them again.
At fifteen, Marie was discharged from the workhouse. She was considered to have worked off her debt of simply living. She had spent her years picking stitches and unbraiding rope. She hadn’t seen her mother since her fifth birthday, and the two sisters she remembered had gone missing with the rest. She walked out into the world orphaned in every way, but in the eyes of England, healed and rehabilitated from her birth into poverty.
August had never seen living conditions as bad as the tenement that Marie brought him to. But, August knew the cruel numbness of being alone in the world. He was orphaned when he was fifteen. His mother contracted consumption when he was little and as time wore on her inevitable passing became reality. She died in bed, next to August’s father. Following the loss of beloved wife, August’s father lost all will to keep going. Slowly, but surely, he became grey and icy. August had to watch both of his parents, the only two things he was connected with at all in life, slip away. A year or so after his mother passed, his father died of a cliché, but literal, broken heart.
Left with nothing and no one, August felt himself be pulled into the earth. Similarly, Marie had felt herself be pulled in to the ether.
August’s father was a cobbler. His family never had tons of money but they lived well enough and August had spent hours watching his father trace, cut, measure, and sell. So, August carried on making shoes as his father had, but questioned every turn of his hand.
After they married, London bloomed around them, becoming a thriving metropolis. They bought a lovely house with one bedroom, and promised they’d find something else if the family ever grew. But, Marie never had a child.
Marie became a wonderful set of watchful eyes to the children on the block when their mothers had their backs turned. Little ones often ran up to her with treats they collected or drawings they made and called her ‘Nanny Marie’. She gave joy to each child that crossed her way. She said that having August gave her more than she had ever known, so she was full, and satiated, and ready to give away her spare joy.
When the first world war spurred into existence, the couple joined the effort for England. Marie rolled bandages, and August mended boots. The war was tedious and long, and the couple often sipped their evening tea in silence with nothing to state. They felt the wholeness they achieved together torn apart by the pain and fear of the nation.
When Germany signed an armistice twenty-one years they felt the same sigh of relief that had felt over the murky tea and curdled milk on the first night she had snuck him into that women’s hostel. The sigh turned into brief gasps until the Treaty of Versailles was penned, and they promised each other there was in fact, hope, and there always would be.
For the next nineteen years, August and Marie had no need to hold their breath, and their tea times were filled with laughter, arguments, and a grand notion that there was nothing that could break them. When news of the second world war found its way to London, Marie fell to the ground with the news, knowing that she would again feel alone. August wouldn’t have it again. The strength he had found with her over the years, the wholeness she gave him, powered him through to protect her by staying by her side in every way. No matter the pain when they were together, they were safe from harm.
Blitzkrieg was a headline across the newsstands during the war. The nightly raids pecked at Marie’s soul. Together, they sat in tube stations and shelters, and ate rations that reminded Marie of her days within the walls of the workhouse she had fought hard to remove herself from.
On the night they held each other for the last time, they heard the patterned falling of steel and anger against earth and August reached for Marie’s hand. She held his wrinkly palm and shushed him. She smiled at him as weariness filled his face for the first time in those forty-four years. The planes were closer, the bombs seemed louder, and for once it seemed like the end was not a possibility but inevtiable.
There were freak tales of bombs striking inches away from life and humans escaping into the sunlight to find that they were safe. Yet, the luck and goodness of August and Marie’s life and marriage ended as they sat under a card table.
There was no protection that could’ve saved August and Marie from the direct hit they encountered. They died together, and for that it could only be assumed that they were deeply grateful.
