by Annie Groves
‘It will be an Easter engagement. Auntie Vi thinks that Easter is the perfect time to get engaged and June the perfect time to get married,’ Grace informed her brother.
Turning to her mother, Grace said, straight-faced, ‘I reckon it’s going to be difficult for Auntie Vi, Mum, having a daughter-in-law who’s had to give up a double-barrelled surname to become a plain ordinary single.’
‘Maybe she’ll just add Charlie’s name onto the others, to make hers triple-barrelled?’ Luke suggested, laughing.
‘Now that’s enough of that, you two,’ Jean scolded them. ‘I know your auntie Vi can be a bit of a snob, but she can’t help it. She’s always been like that. Here’s Katie, coming up to the back door. Why don’t you ask her now about the Grafton?’
Katie had been worrying about the letter all the way back to Ash Grove, and wondering if she had done the right thing, so much so that she was inside the kitchen before she even realised that Luke and Grace were there.
‘Sit down, Katie love,’ Jean instructed her. ‘I’m just putting the kettle on.’
‘I hope we don’t have any more bombers coming over tonight,’ Grace sighed. ‘We’ve got so many new patients in that we’ve got beds set up in the corridors as it is. They’ve had to bring in some of the injured from Wallasey, there’s been so many injured. Mum’s been telling me about you saving her tea cups, Katie.’ Grace smiled at Katie, who had reluctantly seated herself on the chair Luke had pulled out from the table for her.
‘I still can’t believe that anyone would be daft enough to risk their lives for some tea cups,’ Luke mock growled, shaking his head, but in such a way that Katie knew that he was not really criticising her.
‘You’re a man, Luke, you wouldn’t understand, would he, Katie?’ Grace teased her brother.
That warm feeling Katie had felt before was back, but this time it was a bit different, softer and gentler, springing from being here in this kitchen and with this family, Katie recognised, rather than just from being with Luke. It enabled her to relax a little and say truthfully, ‘Luke’s right. I shouldn’t have gone back, but I’m glad I did, and I’m even more glad that he came back with me because he saved the china and he saved me as well.’
‘Did he? Then you owe him a favour,’ Grace said immediately. ‘The three of us are going to the Grafton tomorrow night, and it would be much more fun if you’d make up a foursome with us, Katie. That way Seb and I won’t feel guilty about leaving Luke alone at the table whilst we’re dancing. Oh, and don’t worry, he can dance; me and the twins have made sure of that. You will come, won’t you?’
What was it about women that enabled them to perform that special female sleight of hand that somehow made it impossible for a person to refuse an invitation, Luke wondered wryly. Whatever it was, his mother had obviously passed it on to his sister, and in spades.
Katie was caught totally off guard by Grace’s suggestion. It was, of course, impossible for her to refuse without being rude, and so she had no alternative but to nod her head and say selfconsciously, ‘Yes, yes, of course.’
‘Good, that’s decided then. We can all meet up outside the Graffie.’
Luke shook his head. ‘I’ll come up here and collect you, Katie,’ he said firmly, causing Katie to struggle to control the self-conscious colour she could feel warming her face.
‘I don’t know why you want to keep that ruddy kid. He can’t do anything. Like I’ve said before, he can’t even speak.’
‘You leave him alone, and don’t go raising your voice to him either; you’re frightening the life out of him,’ Emily told Con sharply.
Con scowled. The recent bombing had meant a drop in people coming to the theatre and only this morning he’d had the lead female singer’s understudy flounce off in a huff after having exchanged words with the lead singer.
‘You promised me that I’d be on stage,’ she had screamed at Con when she had accosted him in his office. ‘You know you did, you rotten liar, so don’t you go saying that you didn’t.’
The lead singer, who had been walking past at the time, had put her head round the door to say tauntingly, ‘He tells them all that, love, when he wants to get into their drawers, don’t you, Con? More fool you if you were daft enough to believe it.’
Con had only just managed to dodge the heavy ashtray the understudy, a blonde with a redhead’s temper, had hurled at him.
With box office receipts down, and Emily still refusing to open her purse strings, Con was beginning to get desperate. He’d convinced himself that she’d grow tired of having that idiot boy around long before now, but if anything Emily seemed to have grown even more fiercely protective of the child she still insisted on claiming was related to her through some dead cousin or other.
In desperation Con had sent Kieran off to Blackpool to scout around and see, first, what the deal was with these dance contests, and secondly, if he could set up some kind of joint deal with one of the Blackpool theatres that would benefit them both, whilst of course benefiting Con himself more.
Emily wasn’t going to have Con, or anyone else for that matter, calling little Tommy an idiot because he wasn’t. He understood everything that was said to him perfectly. Emily was worried about him, though.
Lewis’s was just about to close for the day and the twins were tidying up the shelves of the haberdashery department, carefully refolding bolts of cloth, and then covering them before wiping down the tidied shelves.
‘But how are we going to get Mum to agree to us going in for a dance competition?’ Sasha asked Lou. ‘And don’t say that we won’t tell her because we’ll have to.’
‘I know that, silly. Of course we’ll have to tell her.’ Lou straightened up from dusting her shelf and looked across at her twin. ‘If we could perhaps persuade Grace to mention it to Mum, you know, saying that she’d heard there was a dance competition on and wouldn’t it be a good idea if we were to enter it?’
Sasha looked doubtful. ‘Do you think Grace would do that? She’s gone really stuffy since she started training as a nurse and got engaged to Seb.’
‘Mm … I know. Why don’t we get Katie to do it instead of Grace?’
‘Do you think she would?’
‘Well, we could sort of mention it to her in a roundabout sort of way and then mention it to Mum; you know, sort of saying that Katie had told us about it and suggested that we should enter.’
‘But what if Mum asks Katie and Katie says that we were the ones who told her about it?’
Lou dropped her duster onto the shelf and stood up on her ladders, her hands on her hips, demanding, ‘Look, do you want us to go in for this competition or don’t you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Well then, we’ll just have to find a way to make sure that we can enter it, won’t we? Look out, Mrs Gregg is coming over.’
Mrs Gregg was the senior assistant in the department and she had a keen eye for specks of dust and time wasting.
‘Come along, you two,’ she called out. ‘No dawdling. I want those shelves spick and span before you leave, and remember, it’s Saturday tomorrow so I want you in bright and early.’
‘Yes, Mrs Gregg,’ the twins chorused dutifully.
TWELVE
‘Two minutes, everyone, oh and, Fran, swap your last number for “Dover”, will you? We’ve been swamped for requests for it.’
‘I’m not Vera Lynn,’ Francine wryly reminded the stage manager, as she powdered her nose in the makeshift ‘dressing room’ that had been set up for the visiting ENSA entertainers. They were here to entertain the troops at the desert camp ‘somewhere close to Cairo in Egypt’, as the taciturn major, who was their military liaison officer, had answered Francine’s question as to their destination when they had left Cairo at daybreak in their military transport.
It had taken them four months to sail from England to Alexandria, with a stopoff in South Africa on the way, travelling the whole time as part of a convoy, for protection against the German Navy’s
submarines.
When they had left Southampton Francine hadn’t really cared if she lived or died in her grief for the loss of her son, her despair in sharp contrast to the excitement of other members of the troupe, most of whom had never travelled abroad before.
However, as she tried to remind herself she had a duty to the serving men that ENSA was sent abroad to entertain, and listening to the grim stories of some of the sailors and the serving men themselves – some of which had been so heartbreaking that initially she had been unable to understand how those telling them were able to go on – had made Francine feel that she had at least to try to match their bravery.
In South Africa they had put on a couple of shows for some injured men travelling home in a hospital ship that had put into port whilst they were there.
After their first show some of the artists, including Francine, had volunteered to tour the ship’s makeshift wards at the request of the doctors in charge.
Francine had stopped by the bed of one young man, who had called out eagerly to her when he had heard her talking to someone else. Blinded in both eyes by shrapnel, and horribly wounded, he had told Francine how much hearing her singing had meant to him.
‘Took me right back to when our mam used to sing to us when we was kiddies, you did, and no mistake,’ he told her in a soft Northeast accent. ‘Bin feeling that I wasn’t going to make it home, I was, but then I heard you and it was like I was home already. By, but it means a lot to a lad, that, something from home close by him when he needs it. Fettled me up good and proper, it has.’
Francine had reached automatically for his hand as he spoke to her, and that night when she had been told that the young soldier was dying and had been put in a side ward, she asked if she could go and sit with him.
The major had demurred at first, but Francine had been resolute, and in the end permission had been given.
She had sat with the young soldier, holding his hand, as she sang the only Northeast song she knew, and whilst she was singing it the young lad’s ‘boat came in’, as the words of the song said, and bore him away with it on its tide from life to death.
After that Francine had tried to put her own grief to one side and focus on her determination to give every bit of support she could to those they were travelling to entertain.
Ordinarily Fran would have been the second singer in the troupe, but Lily, the lead, had gone down with a huge sulk and a ‘gippy tummy’, leaving Fran as the sole singer, and two shows a night to get through for the next week.
The huge sulk was the result of the failure of Lily’s four-month-long campaign to tease the major into a flirtation with her, whilst the gippy tummy was the result of the full bottle of gin the singer had drunk as a result of that failure. Lily wasn’t used to men turning her down, but then neither was Lily used to war-hardened, taciturn soldiers. None of them was, including herself, Fran admitted. She’d watched Lily’s overtures initially with resignation and some disdain, and had felt slightly sorry for the major, assuming that, given the relentless nature of Lily’s campaign, allied to her determination, the major would ultimately have to give in. After all, Lily was a woman – attractive, available and extremely willing. The major was a man – heterosexual, alone and being tempted. But to her astonishment and Lily’s obvious disbelief, the major had not given in. So now Lily had changed tactics and was loudly proclaiming that he was ‘an odd sort’ and a ‘kill joy’, and that if she had her way they’d have had a very different kind of officer escorting them.
Francine wasn’t totally convinced that Lily had given up, though; it wasn’t in her nature. Not that she cared one way or the other.
When she’d signed up for ENSA she hadn’t really cared about anything; when she was feeling particularly ‘low’, as she was now, she still didn’t. She knew she would never stop grieving for Jack. How could she? She still went to bed at night thinking of him, unfolding from her memory those precious days she had spent with him.
Not that there hadn’t been some compensations for the long weeks of travel.
The sight of Cape Town, with Table Mountain in the background, was a memory that would stay with her for ever. And now, as for Cairo, Fran felt almost as though the richness of its sights and smells, combined with its history and the intensity with which those men posted to the area threw themselves into enjoying their leave, had overloaded her own senses.
Cairo was a hot, exotic, erotic, fiercely intense mix of colour and excitement. Louche news reporters and photographers lined the bars of the city’s most famous hotels – and so did some of the most beautiful women Fran had ever seen – some of whom, she had discreetly been informed by one of the comedians travelling with them, were not women at all, but rather young men who, having been castrated, had opted to ‘become women’.
Fran was no stranger to ‘different’ forms of sexuality – she had lived in Hollywood, after all – but she admitted that she had been perhaps naïvely shocked at the way in which so many of the men on leave in the city seemed able to forget that they had wives and girlfriends at home.
It was as though in some way Cairo itself seemed to act as a hothouse for all those things that were such a visible part of its exotic nightlife. Life there seemed luxurious indeed compared with at home in England, and predictably Lily had thrown herself into that luxury with a vengeance.
Lily had made her hostility towards Fran clear the minute they were introduced on board the troop ship at Southampton, along with her determination to make sure that Fran knew that she, Lily, was the star of the show.
Fran had taken it all in her stride. She had been in the business long enough to know what its insecurities could do to people, and Lily was typical of many other lead singers Fran had met over the years, in her jealous determination to guard her own position.
So far as Lily was concerned, being the lead singer meant getting the best of everything that was going, whether that was a hotel room, a stage outfit, or a man, and she was an expert at manipulating the situation to make sure she got what she thought of as her due.
Sometimes Francine thought that, ridiculously, her own lack of any desire to compete with Lily seemed to exacerbate Lily’s antagonism towards her rather than pacify her.
Lily had made it plain that she wasn’t happy about the fact that she and Francine were billeted in the same hotel, and had equally luxurious rooms, both with en-suite bathrooms – true luxury indeed, and a very welcome one. Francine, knowing how cramped the rooms of some of the chorus girls were, had made a point of letting them know that she was more than happy to ‘lend out her bathroom’ when the occasion arose.
They’d been made very welcome in Cairo. Lily and Fran had arrived to rooms filled with flowers and invitations.
So far they had been taken to the famous Shepheard’s Hotel, photographed for the English papers at home, and entertained at the British Embassy. The dancers had soon been complaining that they were too tired to dance in the show because of all the partying and dancing they did ‘off duty’. Cairo, as Fran had been told by one of the newspaper reporters who propped up the bar in Shepheard’s Hotel, was a hotbed of political and sexual intrigue and scandal, where gossip was fanned by the heat of the desert wind.
Not that Cairo and its environs didn’t have other attractions. On their rest days between the shows, Fran and some of the ENSA members had been driven out to see the pyramids in transport organised for them by the major: tough desert-ready Jeeps driven by equally tough and desert-hardened men. She had also explored the bazaars, accompanied by a small barefoot dark-haired and dark-eyed ‘guide’ – one of several boys who had attached themselves to the group. Fran didn’t think she would ever get used to the sight of so many children begging, although the major had told her that for them it was a way of life and that many of them would have caused Dickens’ Fagin to marvel at their pocket-picking skills.
She had ridden a camel and managed to quell the nausea she had felt at its rolling gait – but then they had travel
led halfway around the world on a troop transport ship – but now that they had actually been transported out into the western desert to entertain the men in their camps Fran felt that she was finally doing what she had joined ENSA to do: her bit for the war effort by helping to raise the spirits of the country’s fighting men.
They were performing several shows at the desert camp, with men coming in from more outflung, smaller camps to see it. Lily had complained nonstop about the sand, which got into everything, blown in on a hot wind that at night became a very cold wind.
The sand lay against the skin like a layer of sandpaper, coating both food and tongue when one ate, so that within a few hours of their arriving at the camp, it had become an intimate and unwanted part of their lives. But where Lily complained, Fran tried not to, reminding herself instead that the men they had come out here to entertain had to endure these desert conditions month in and month out, and fight as well.
In contrast to the army, they were being treated like royalty. Fran and Lily had their own private showers in a specially erected tent. They had a full military escort to drive them and protect them. Every single aspect of their tour – the accommodation; the stage when they performed; the way they travelled – was under the expert control of their liaison officer, and whilst he might be taciturn and withdrawn, there was no denying the expertise and skill with which the major did his job.
They had all been told when they signed on for ENSA in London that they could be appearing anywhere, from a tent in the desert to a palace in Cairo, and to be prepared to go on in the clothes they’d travelled in, if necessary, but to take some stage outfits in case they got the chance to change into them.
‘It’s good for the men’s morale when they see a pretty girl all dressed up for them,’ was a now familiar comment from commanding officers, and one that Fran had taken to heart.
Tonight, for instance, Fran was wearing a full-length emerald satin gown that was in reality more style than substance, but which, like her paste jewellery, looked good on stage.
