by Shirley Mann
If I am careful, I can sometimes get a sneaky fag at night – you do have to make sure the red glow of the tip doesn’t show, though – and last night I looked up at the stars and thought how beautiful the sky was and how messy the world below is. I’d love to bring you back here when the war’s over. It is a fascinating country and the people are so warm and friendly. You’d love the children. They have the biggest, brownest eyes you’ve ever seen.
So, a belated happy Christmas! Give my regards to your mum and dad and think of me looking up into the clear blue sky wishing for snow . . . fat chance!
Anyway, Lily, I’d better go, looks like we’re on the move. Remember the one rule of this war: never volunteer!
Love,
Danny
Danny looked at the letter he had just finished and smiled. It always cheered him up when he wrote to Lily. She appeared, disturbingly, in too many of his dreams. From the first moment he had seen her with her nose in the air at the office, he had fallen for her. She had tried to be so grown up and sophisticated but then she gave that delicious giggle and he knew there was only ever going to be one girl for him. ‘Bring back Liners,’ he thought, thinking back to those innocent days. He’d never expected to say that. He had wanted to be a doctor, but as the youngest of three children, there was just not enough money to put him through training. However, life as a salesman at the shipping company had come quite easily to him. He could organise his own time, he really liked the customers and found that his easy manner gained their trust and, therefore, their custom. He prided himself on giving them the best deals to get their goods around the world and he loved to think he was making a difference to British exports. He was ambitious too and had already told his father he was going to be a company director by the time he was forty. The war was just delaying his plans.
It had been the strangest Christmas Danny had ever spent as they fought their way across to the ultimate goal of Tripoli. He was part of the 7th Armoured Division that had become known as the ‘Desert Rats’, a nickname that had come to exemplify the last three years when they had scrabbled their way up and down the desert in victory and defeat. Travelling between eighteen and thirty miles a day, it was just after Christmas when they finally reached Tripoli and their dusty tanks and armoured cars rolled into the city, proud and triumphant to be witnessed by the guest of honour, Winston Churchill. Danny had felt tears welling up as the pipers of the 51st Highland Division led the parade past the old Roman amphitheatre, and glanced at his fellow soldiers, who were all blinking with emotion. He heard Churchill’s words as he addressed the troops that February morning: ‘When this war is over, it will be enough for a man to say, “I marched, and fought, with the Desert Army.” ’ All Danny could think of were the thousands of men who would remain forever in the silent war cemeteries of the Western Desert.
He tucked the letter into the envelope, knowing it would be opened and checked by his commanding officer before being sent.
His last memory of Lily was when he had called in at the office to say goodbye to everyone before being conscripted. A busy filing clerk in her first job, full of self-importance, she had barely looked up and any hope he had had of her rushing into his arms in tears at his parting were dashed by her casual, ‘Oh, bye then, good luck,’ as she pecked him on the cheek and headed towards the filing cabinet.
He had done everything, he constantly told himself. He had taken her out on as many fun dates as she would agree to. He had tried to think of things that were not just a boring and predictable drink at the pub, but bike rides, walks into the hills with picnics. He had got to know her parents quite well and knew that her mum liked him – she always gave him an extra piece of cake. He wasn’t sure about her dad. Danny knew he was very protective of his daughter and had caught Mr Mullins giving the young suitor a sideways glance when Danny was trying too hard to be the perfect date.
He had spent the last two years telling himself that if he just bided his time and kept writing to Lily, she would eventually have no choice but to fall in love with him and his plan A – the one before the Plan B of becoming a company director – would come to fruition and she would marry him.
Chapter 9
Blackpool was even colder than Gloucestershire had been and on leaving the station the girls were greeted by seagulls, heralding their arrival with disdainful squawks. Alice stuck her tongue out to taste the salty air while the rest scanned the horizon, which was tinted with that rose-pink light that only seaside towns have. Walking along the front towards their digs, the girls breathed deeply, with the guilty feeling of being on holiday.
Number 110, Palatine Road was a terraced three-storey house with a white front door and matching bay windows. There were red flagstones on the short path from the wooden gate but to one side the tiles had been lifted and there were neat rows of cabbages echoing many of the other houses in the street. They were keen to make a show of their solidarity with Dig for Victory, as well as wanting to put fresh vegetables on their tables.
Marion strode up the steps to the front door and knocked firmly. The door opened to reveal a formidable figure. With her arms folded over her checked pinny, her tightly rolled hair, and a huge pair of cloth slippers, Mrs Porter fitted the Lancashire landlady description to a T. She herded the girls upstairs, reciting a terrifyingly long list of rules and regulations. There were five other WAAFs in the house, she told them, as she marched them past a room full of chatter on the first floor next to a tiny bathroom and up two flights of stairs to the attic. The once-whitewashed room had five beds crammed against the eaves. There was hardly room to put their bags down.
‘Hello, you lot,’ a girl with a cockney accent and bleached hair greeted them from the end of the best bed in the room. Tucked in the corner, it had space at the side for a small bedside table.
‘I’m Viv,’ the girl announced. ‘Sorry, but as I got here first, I bagsied this bed. Hope you don’t mind.’ Viv carried on unpacking her bag and placed a picture of her family on the Formica table next to her. It was a family group in front of a block of tenement flats with the gaunt face of a woman in a turban and pinny, a man in blue overalls and three small boys with scuffed knees. A younger Viv was standing between them. In front of them all was an elderly lady in black, sitting on an upright chair, with one gnarled hand clutching a wooden stick in front of her.
Marion sniffed and put her bag down on the bed under the window and Amy hung back until Alice and Lily had chosen their beds. Mrs Porter warned that they were only allowed to fill the bathroom wash basin with cold water to the red line as they would be taken to Derby Baths for their weekly ablutions. Then she prodded her watch as she told them tea was at six sharp and left the girls to sort themselves out. The experienced WAAFs automatically all laid out their clothes in the same order, pushing their gas masks and tin hats under the beds. Alice, Lily and Viv kept up a constant chatter, swapping stories about their training so far. Viv had been at Morecambe so knew the best Blackpool haunts, she told them with pride. Amy sat, listening with a vague expression on her face and Marion unceremoniously moved Viv’s dressing gown from the peg on the back of the door to make room for her own handmade uniform.
‘Is she always like that?’ Viv whispered to Lily on their way down the thin, red floral carpeted stairs to tea.
‘Yes,’ Lily replied with a sigh. ‘She seems to think she’s above us and so superior because her family’s got money. If I hear once more that her uncle is a Wing Commander, I’ll scream.’
Alice butted in from the stair behind, ‘I can’t believe she’s ended up in Blackpool with us. On the way here, she asked for a porter at the station! I could have died. There were service people all over the place struggling with kit bags and Princess Marion demanded help with her bag . . . and what’s worse, a porter came and helped her! She made a great show of giving him a shilling. A whole shilling! I’d have moved her bag for that.’
‘It just shows, if you behave like royalty, you’ll get treated like
it,’ Lily said.
‘Well, she isn’t bloomin’ royalty here,’ Alice replied, pushing the door open into the dining room.
The room sported an alarming display of swirling wallpaper that was so old it had probably been put up before the Great War. The fireplace was blocked up with newspaper and the nicotine-stained yellow curtains were hanging off the pelmet on one side. The faded carpet had been trodden by guests for decades and in the middle was a long wooden table with small, red plastic salt and pepper holders at each end. The other WAAFs were already tucking into their Woolton pie, vegetable pie recommended to all rationed households by the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton. Marion was sitting at the long table, helping herself to the limited amount of reconstituted dried milk for her tea. The other five WAAFs smiled, nodded hello to the new group and passed the remaining food down to the new arrivals.
‘Well, I can forgive Mrs P anything,’ Viv said, sitting down next to Marion and giving her a meaningful glance as she quickly took the milk jug from her, ‘as long as she keeps finding enough veg to make a boring pie taste like this.’ At home, in the east end of London, she explained, there were hardly any shops left where they could buy food and they had been close to starvation. Her dad was in the Far East and her mum worked long shifts at the local factory. Viv would do night shifts so that between them, they could look after her three young brothers as well as her elderly nan, who was quite a taskmaster and constantly complained about the paltry food available. Viv had had to travel miles across the city and queue for hours just to get a stale loaf of bread. Alice and Lily caught each other’s eye, realising the deprivations they had experienced so far were nothing compared to what Viv and her family had suffered.
*
There was not much time to enjoy the delights of the seaside town. Their days were filled with lectures about the King’s Regulations and how to conduct themselves off camp, the RAF, information about the different ranks and Morse lessons in the huge hall of Olympia. They were slowly learning to make sense of the noises that came out of the wireless sets, ignoring the marching that was going on outside their window. The girls had giggled at first, as the troops outside had broken step and tiptoed past to try to avoid disturbing them, but gradually Lily managed to sift out all outside noise and concentrate. She was surprised to find the Morse made complete sense to her and she soon mastered the alphabet. The Morse signals got quicker and quicker and sometimes gradually reduced in volume, but Lily found a peace in the reassuring noises coming out of her headphones. It was as if the war was blocked out by the rhythmic tones.
Unlike many of her schoolmates, Lily had not left school at fourteen but had continued her education until she was seventeen, though she had struggled with lessons that did not interest her. History, French and English were her favourite subjects, but Mother Philomena despaired of her Geography and science. She muddled along, envious of those who found lessons and exams easy. Her personality had grown as her academic application dwindled and she had found it easier to entertain people by making them laugh rather than getting an A grade. It had become a bit of a mask to be the class clown rather than compete with the brainier girls, but finding she was good at Morse was a bit of a shock and she still wasn’t sure how to deal with it.
Alice, with her farming background, seemed to be unphased by it all and took every day in a calm, matter of fact manner. She just shrugged her shoulders and dealt with the crisis of the day in her down to earth Lancashire tones.
One evening, when the bedroom was a seething mass of premenstrual tension, Alice took charge.
‘I have three squabbling brothers,’ she told Lily and Viv, who were rebelling against Marion’s insistence that her range of expensive cosmetics merited Viv’s bedside table, ‘and even they’re not as bad as you lot.’ She turned to Marion.‘That table is Viv’s, Marion. She was here first. Deal with it.’
Marion knew she was beaten and, with a pout, put her treasured bits of makeup under the bed.
Each item of their kit was identical and in the confined space of the top floor room, there were constant arguments about who owned what. Marion was particularly pernickety about her worldly goods and she would attack the whole room if she thought one of the girls had been using her things.
One day, when Alice and Lily were off duty, the two of them spent a very pleasant couple of hours at the funfair on the front. In a gaudy gift shop, they found some children’s stickers that proclaimed ‘This belongs to . . .’ with a space for a name. They inserted Marion’s name and when she was out of the room, they placed one on each and every one of her things, including her pillow, her shoes and even her hair clips. The following morning, she was furious, but her anger was undermined by the fact that a stray sticker had come off her pillow and stuck to her forehead. It wrinkled as she berated the group of girls who were holding onto each other in fits of giggles, completely unabashed. Marion stormed out of the room, determined to take her revenge by getting to the jampot on the breakfast table first, unaware she still had the sticker on her head. She had no idea why the other WAAFs in the dining room were laughing at her and even Mrs Porter slyly passed her the toast with a knowing grin. In a fury, she made sure she took nearly all the milk that was in the small jug next to the teapot.
They were all having to learn lessons about how to cope with deprivation and compromise, and that included Marion, but Lily’s years of dealing with conflict using a smile and a joke failed dismally when confronted with the impassive face of Sergeant Horrocks. The sergeant was a woman in her late twenties, her once-pretty face soured by a scowl she wore most of the time. Small in stature, with endless clips to hold back her greasy brown hair, she seemed to revel in any discomfort that the girls were facing and her mouth would twist into a smile when she saw their misery at the cold, the food or the conditions. Lily, in particular, could do nothing right and any infraction was jumped upon, leading to a charge or a penalty. As soon as Lily had arrived, the sergeant’s eyes fixed on the young WAAF, making Lily squirm in discomfort. It was almost as if she recognised her. Being the victim of a vendetta was a new experience for Lily, who needed to be popular, and she was struggling to know how to deal with being so disliked. Unable to break through the icy barrier with the sergeant, she concentrated on making the other girls laugh, often at the expense of her superiors, and Sergeant Horrocks was perfect material for a merciless mimic.
One day, coming out of the Winter Gardens, Lily was at her wits’ end. The sergeant, in a bid to humiliate her, had picked her out for a particularly gruelling inspection and had measured her hemline, her sleeve line and the distance between her collar and her hair. Lily re-enacted the scene for her friends.
‘This is me,’ she pronounced to them all, pointing at a lamp-post outside the entrance to Olympia. ‘Notice how slim I am? Now guess who this is.’ Warming to her audience, Lily clicked her heels into place, held back her hair with one hand and ‘inspected’ every aspect of the lamp-post, prodding it with her finger as she tutted and snarled. The girls had to hold onto each other as they succumbed to the giggles. Lily strutted through the middle of them. She was very good and so absorbed in her role-play that she failed to see her victim emerge from the doorway. Sergeant Horrocks was on her way to her own billet in the next street to the girls but when she spotted the little group, she doubled back around the corner so she could spy on them from a distance. Her eyes narrowed as she watched the little scene being played out in front of her. Lily carried on in blissful ignorance, prodding the lamp-post with renewed enthusiasm and flicking off imaginary strands of hair from its ‘collar’. Sergeant Horrocks slowly reversed back down the street behind her, nodding to herself. Alice looked up and frowned, unsure who the disappearing figure was but, in any case, elbowed Lily and motioned with her head that they needed to move off the pavement. The sergeant strode away with small, angry steps. Her stomach was in a whirl. From the first moment she had spotted the golden-haired girl, the sergeant had experienced a fury she thought she h
ad left behind a few years before when her brittle heart had been broken. How dare that slip of a girl have this effect on her? She had tried to reason with herself that it was only Lily Mullins’s appearance that recalled such painful memories, but now she had a reason to hate the girl herself. It felt good.
Lily Mullins thought she could get the better of her, Agatha Horrocks, did she?
‘Well, we’ll see about that,’ the sergeant muttered, twisting her mouth sideways.
*
There was also one other person in their group who was impervious to Lily’s mischievous sense of humour and that was Amy.
Amy was speaking less and less, barely noticing what was going on around her. She went around like an automaton, hardly saying a word and staring into space as the girls chattered and giggled whilst getting ready for bed.
‘We have to do something,’ Alice confided to Lily and Viv in the hallway one tea-time. ‘I’ve asked to see the welfare officer and she said she will come over tomorrow.’
‘I think we have to give Amy warning,’ Lily said.
‘OK, let’s confess and see what she says,’ Alice agreed.
The confrontation did not go well. Alice and Lily sat on either side of Amy with Viv opposite in their room after blackout that night. Marion lay on her bed, pretending to read a magazine. Amy sat in silence as they gently tried to tell her how worried they were about her. Her eyes were blank as they gradually introduced her to the idea that they had been so concerned, they had asked for help from the welfare officer.
Amy shrugged and her hand lay limp in Alice’s.
‘OK,’ she said finally.
There was nothing else the girls could do. Alice patted her hand and they stood up to get their pyjamas on.
*
The next morning, the gong was sounded from downstairs as usual.
