A Christmas Story: Molly and the Lion

4 DECEMBER 2013 – 875 WORDS.


CHARACTERS:
Molly – Daughter.
Dad – Molly's father.
Ted – Molly's boyfriend.

A Christmas story:
Molly and the Lion

It’s a little known fact, but that doesn’t make it any less true, that on Christmas Day 1943, the right-hand lion outside Nottingham Council House roared and a legend was born.

For six months previously Nottingham city centre had been off limits to American servicemen camped in Wollaton Park and nearby towns. The girls were a little too friendly and, one way or another, GIs were overwhelmed with VD and other intimate infections.

Whole units were unfit for duty, but it didn’t stop the men or deter the girls (and older women), who became expert at breaking into camps.

Records in Washington show that a Sargent Riley of the 85th Airborne told his superiors in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1943 that the men could not be confined to their camps without a serious risk of rebellion.

After a meeting between the military and civic leaders, the decision was made to arm the servicemen with condoms and, as one wag said at the time, ‘On the home front at least, they would be combat ready’. 

Condoms were also made freely available in female public toilets, factories and offices and Nottingham doctors were treating so many women with sexual diseases that London wanted to know why so much precious penicillin was being used in the city.

In some households the problem was inter-generational and a few fathers, especially the over-protective ones imagined the  worst. Pubs and works’ canteens were hotbeds of gossip.

Molly Chambers was a young woman of twenty-three, working as a trainee chemist, and wise beyond her years. Molly knew that as handsome and fit as GIs were, and with money to boot, they were just passing through.

Molly’s father, like so many working-class men had only the lowest expectations of his daughter, remembering how her mother had ensnared him before he was out of his teens — and, in his eyes, Molly was very much like her mother.

At half-past-midnight he exploded into her room, kicking at the door and splintering the surrounding frame. Molly woke with a start.

‘What the hell are you doing Dad, why not just open the door?...and in the silence which followed added ‘Any roads, what’s this all about?’

‘Tell me you’re not having it off with a Yank — because if you’re not, you must be the only woman in Nottingham who isn’t’.

‘Dad, this sounds like pub talk. Am I right?’

Molly’s soothing voice was enough to quieten her dad down. He just sat on the end of the bed, looking at the floor’.

‘I wish your Mam was here’.

‘So do I Dad’.

For a few moments, both were lost in their own thoughts of the day, three years before, when they were called home to find their house no more than a pile of rubble thanks to a gas explosion. The next day the first German air raid on Nottingham did for the rest of the street, but Doris Chambers, wife and mother, was already dead.

‘They all think you’re at it Molly… Joe’s got a black eye to prove it and I kicked George in the balls before they threw me out’.

What? From The White Lion?’

All Molly got in reply was a grunt. She took her Dad’s hand and led him to his bedroom, pulled back the cover and removed the luke warm hot water bottle. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow. 
The last thing she did was to remove his boots.

The next morning was Christmas Day, a Saturday, but there wasn’t much to celebrate. Molly and her Dad caught the number 4 bus from Beeston, where the City Council had re-housed them, to the Old Market Square. Nothing was said about the night before.

Walking across the Square between bus stops there was a roar of sorts, which caught the attention of everyone. Then it came again, from the direction of The Council House.

‘If I didn’t know any different, I’d says it was one of ‘em lions’ said Molly’s Dad.

‘Perhaps it was’ said Molly’.

‘Why would it do that?’

‘They say lions roar when they have found a mate and want to see off any rivals’.

‘I didn’t know that’.

Molly tugged at her Dad’s arm and pulled him towards the right-hand lion, where a man was standing. She waved and he waved back. Her dad looked between the two of them.

‘Dad, meet Ted. He’s coming to Auntie May’s with us. We’re getting engaged today and this is my Christmas present to you’.

Ted held out his hand and Molly’s Dad took it. By the end of the day they would know one another better.

Molly linked arms with both of them, then shrieked as a brown West Bridgford Urban District number 14 bus came into view from Poultry. ‘Quick, we don’t want to miss our bus. There won’t be another one for an hour on Christmas Day’ 

*  *  *  *

No one else who heard the lion roar in Old Market Square that Christmas Day in 1943 thought much more about it, but like so many good stories, it got changed with every telling and, somehow, ‘mate’ became ‘virgin’. 

©Robert Howard

No comments:

Post a Comment

Tottle Brook

Casper lamented the fact that his great-grand-daughter Alice could not walk the full length of Tottle Brook, as he had done 60 years before,...