The Victory Girls

by Joanna Toye

  THE VICTORY GIRLS

  Joanna Toye

  Copyright

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

  Copyright © Joanna Toye 2021

  Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

  Cover photographs © Laura Kate Ranftler/Arcangel Images (girl in red coat), Head Design (left and middle girls) and © Lee Avison/Trevillion Images (background)

  Joanna Toye asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008441999

  Ebook Edition © July 2021 ISBN: 9780008442002

  Version: 2021-07-06

  Dedication

  To all shop workers, past and present – you are much appreciated.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Author’s Note

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  Also by Joanna Toye

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  February 1944

  It seemed as if the whole world was on the move and had chosen this particular day and this particular time to do it. The platform was seething with people.

  ‘Mind your backs!’ bawled the porters. They were women doing a man’s job, thanks to the war, and they were good at it too, as they snaked through the crowd wheeling luggage.

  Khaki, navy, and Air Force blue mingled with tweed or cloth coats and the occasional fur; forage caps vied with Homburgs, trilbies, and the velvet, felt, and feathers of women’s headwear. Cigarettes and jutting elbows were a constant hazard as people craned their necks and waved at travelling companions.

  Lily Collins gasped as she tripped over a suitcase and fell against a middle-aged man.

  ‘Excuse me!’ he said sarcastically.

  Alongside Lily, Jim Goodridge gave him a glare and took her arm.

  ‘So much for the age of chivalry! Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ Lily righted her hat on her blonde curls. ‘Can you see them?’

  They were looking for their friends, Gladys and Bill. He was one of the many servicemen and women returning to duty, and in Bill’s case, who knew for how long, depending on where his ship was sent. He might even be away till the end of the war, whenever that might be.

  ‘No,’ said Jim, frustrated. ‘I thought they’d be easy to spot. I wasn’t expecting it to be so busy. We should have met them outside.’

  ‘Aye, aye!’

  He wheeled around to see Bill behind him, his kitbag over his shoulder, his ginger-blond hair peeking out from under his sailor’s cap.

  ‘There you are!’ cried Lily. ‘We thought we’d never find you!’

  ‘With Gladys the size she is?’ grinned Bill. Their first baby was due in June. ‘I’ve parked her on a couple of crates. With all this crush, she came over a bit funny.’

  He was putting a brave face on things; he had to. But Lily knew how concerned he was about Gladys having the baby without him around. On their wedding day last year he’d asked Lily, as her best friend, to look after Gladys when he wasn’t there – and if he never came back.

  Bill was a wireless operator on a cruiser, escorting convoys and under daily threat from U-boats and air attack, but he and Lily had never before spoken seriously about the danger he was in. Most serving men on leave didn’t talk about it; her own brothers didn’t. Bill’s words had brought Lily up short and made her feel slightly sick – and that was before there was a baby on the way.

  Bill had hardly got the words out when the empty train came clanking in under the blacked-out roof. It banged against the buffers with a screech of brakes and a theatrical puff of steam.

  ‘Funny isn’t it,’ said Bill. ‘When you start your leave, the train’s always at least an hour late. But when it comes to going back, it’s bang on time.’

  ‘Hello!’ Gladys joined them. She was trying to sound cheerful, but it was about as convincing as the bacon substitute ‘macon’ – made with mutton – that the Government had briefly tried to promote. Apart from two spots of rouge, her round face was pale, except around the eyes, which were already suspiciously pink.

  Bill put his arm round her protectively.

  ‘I’ll let everyone else pile on first,’ he said. ‘It’s not worth trying to get a seat.’

  Lily nodded and they stood there, the four of them, no one really having anything to say, buffeted by people pushing past and around them. Lily hated goodbyes – didn’t everyone? But Gladys would be in bits afterwards, and Lily didn’t want her having to walk home on her own. It was lucky that Bill’s departure was on their half-day from Marlow’s. The two of them had been friends since Lily’s very first day at the town’s big store. They’d seen each other through several ups and downs and Lily wasn’t about to fail Gladys in this one.

  The crowd gradually thinned and with the press of people dispersed, Lily could see the stained slabs, littered with cigarette ends, under her feet. The WVS tea bar, in which her mother, Dora, often served, was doing a brisk trade as people stocked up on something for the journey. The train already looked crammed.

  ‘Bill,’ said Lily tentatively, ‘hadn’t you better …?’

  Jim took the initiative, shaking him by the hand.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘And don’t worry about Gladys. We’ll take good care of her.’

  ‘Thanks, mate.’ The way Bill was gripping Jim’s hand spoke for the emotion he couldn’t express any other way. He leant and kissed Lily’s cheek. ‘You take care of yourself too, Lily, no getting into trouble. I know what you’re like!’

  ‘I’ll be good, promise!’

  ‘Right then. We’ll leave you to it.’

  Jim put his hand under Lily’s elbow and they moved a few feet off, through other couples spinning out the time till the last possible moment – husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, sisters and brothers, f
riends, parents, daughters and sons. A lot of eyes were being dabbed, a lot of last-minute instructions issued about not forgetting to write, and there was a lot of desperate clinging.

  At the newsstand, Jim looked at the small selection of paperbacks on offer, but Lily watched as Bill took Gladys in his arms – he could just about get them round her – and rocked her gently in a hug. Gladys had hidden her face in his naval greatcoat and Bill was cradling her head and saying something – ‘You know I love you,’ if Lily’s amateur lip-reading was anything to go by. Gladys was nodding her head against his shoulder, but Lily could see her whole body shaking.

  Her friend’s parents had been killed in the Coventry Blitz. She only had her gran, and Bill, who’d been brought up in an orphanage, had had no one till he’d met Gladys; they were everything to each other. Lily looked away, blinking back a tear of her own. When she looked back, Gladys’s face was visible again and Bill was tucking a strand of her shoulder-length hair behind her ear. As he gently untangled himself, Lily touched Jim’s arm and they moved forward again.

  The guard was coming down the train closing the doors. Bill grabbed his kitbag, gave Gladys a final kiss and with a thumbs-up to Jim and Lily, squeezed aboard. He’d barely closed the door before the signal changed and the train, with a painful jolt and deafening clanks, chugged slowly out.

  Bill leant out of the window.

  ‘Be good!’ he called, jovial to the last – or pretending to be.

  Others ran down the platform, clutching outstretched hands through lowered windows. That was beyond Gladys, but she waved her hanky, tears rolling down her face. At least she could let herself cry, thought Lily. Bill obviously felt just as torn but couldn’t show it.

  She stood on one side of her friend, Jim on the other, waving frantically like everyone else left behind. And as the train curved away down the track, every single turn of the wheels chanted their desperate, silent prayer: ‘stay safe, stay well … stay alive.’

  Having walked Gladys back home, it was almost dark by the time Lily and Jim felt they could leave her. She lived with her gran, so she wasn’t totally on her own, but Florrie Jessop wasn’t exactly the twinkly grandma of storybooks. She’d been too long a widow and had had things her own way for too many years before Gladys had come to live with her. As they left, Mrs Jessop was eyeing up the quarter of peppermint creams that Bill had left for Gladys – they helped with her pregnancy indigestion. There was no doubt who’d be scoffing the lion’s share of those.

  For once, Lily and Jim didn’t have much to say to each other as they walked home themselves. Or rather, they did, but neither wanted to broach it. Lily knew Jim would have been affected by the sight of all those servicemen and women; he constantly cursed his poor eyesight for keeping him out of the Army. He made up for it as an air-raid warden and with fire-watching duties, but Lily knew he never felt he was doing enough, and she’d started to feel that way herself. She’d looked sidelong at the Wrens and WAAFs and ATS girls as they boarded the train. Where were they going? What were their jobs? Did she owe the fact that she was here at all to their skill as cypher clerks and plotters and searchlight operators?

  At Christmas, Jim had given her a joke engagement ring and promised she’d have the real thing when he’d saved up enough, but he knew she was considering joining up. She’d be old enough this year. He’d promised he’d never hold her back and he meant it, but Lily was torn. She loved him and she loved her job. Joining up would take her away from both, and they might not be the same – her job might not even be there – when she came back. And then there was Gladys. How could she desert her in her hour of need?

  Her sigh was audible and Jim squeezed her hand. He knew what she was thinking. He wouldn’t try to influence her; this was something only Lily could decide. And that, thought Lily, was the trouble. She didn’t have the answer.

  As she and Jim rounded the corner on their way to work next day, the vicious wind that blew down the High Street at this time of year nearly lifted Lily off her feet. But when she raised her eyes, there was the sight that always lifted her heart: the curved façade of Marlow’s on its corner position at the top of the hill. But today there was something different. Jim stopped dead and Lily stopped too. The store’s painters were setting ladders against the frontage.

  ‘It’s happening!’ said Jim exultantly. ‘At last!’

  At Christmas, the owner, Cedric Marlow, had announced that changes were afoot and the first was to drop the apostrophe from the store’s name. ‘So it is no longer my family’s personal fiefdom’ had been his actual words, not that many of the staff understood what ‘fiefdom’ meant. But Marlow’s – with an apostrophe – would in future be Marlows – no apostrophe, like Selfridges and Harrods in London. Hinton might only be a small Midland town, but you had to set your sights high, didn’t you?

  Lily pressed Jim’s arm. Marlows (as it would be from today) had been good to them. It had brought them together, for a start, and seen them both rise through the ranks – Lily to second sales on Childrenswear, and Jim to first sales on Furniture – and, in addition, deputy supervisor on the first floor. That didn’t mean they could be late, though, and they set off again, Jim pulling Lily up the hill behind him, puffing and blowing and making out she was a ton weight. Lily went along with it; she loved looking from behind at the shape of his head and the way his dark hair went into a little duck’s tail in the nape of his neck.

  As they reached the top of the slope, Beryl was unlocking her door. Another friend, she had a bridal hire business in one of the store’s former window spaces. After a bomb had landed in the town’s main shopping street, damaging several shops and blowing their plate glass to smithereens, Marlows had cleverly turned its damaged windows into four small shop units.

  ‘Morning!’ carolled Beryl. With a wink and a toss of her head at the painters, she added, ‘While they’re here, I might ask them to give me a touch-up.’

  Lily smiled. You could count on Beryl for a bit of innuendo – and the brass neck to try and wheedle a free paint job. She’d probably get it, as well – the Americans would have called her ‘sassy’. Beryl had recently dyed her hair a striking mahogany colour, but the paintwork on ‘Beryl’s Brides’ was looking a little tired.

  Someone else looking tired lumbered slowly towards them. Gladys was still working, of course – she was a sales assistant on Toys.

  ‘She’s a size, isn’t she? And the baby’s not due till June. How was she when Bill left?’

  ‘Take a guess.’ Lily watched Gladys make her weary way. She probably hadn’t slept without Bill beside her. ‘She’s going to need a lot of support.’

  ‘Literally,’ added Jim, as he moved away to offer Gladys his arm.

  ‘Such a gent,’ nodded Beryl approvingly. ‘You’ve got a gem there, Lily. Even if he hasn’t come good with a proper ring yet!’

  ‘Mr Goodridge? May I have a word?’

  Jim was poring over the weekly sales targets, which might have been achievable if they’d had the goods to sell. Instead, the store mostly relied on unreliable supplies of Utility furniture and people who’d fallen on hard times offering their genuine Sheraton sideboards, which turned out to be repro, and not very good repro at that. He straightened up to see Miss Frobisher, the Childrenswear buyer and first-floor supervisor. Like him, she had a dual role – another wartime economy.

  ‘Of course. What can I do for you?’

  Tall, blonde, thirtyish, and trim in a bird’s-eye checked suit, Eileen Frobisher was Lily’s boss and her role model in everything, though Lily had a long way to go to achieve Miss Frobisher’s poise – and thank goodness, thought Jim. They’d never have got together if Lily had seemed as remote and unattainable as Miss Frobisher, though he knew very well that her appearance was deceptive and she had her very human side. Spotting potential – or perhaps seeing something of herself in Lily – she’d always taken a special interest in her.

  ‘Miss Collins. Lily.’ She never wasted words. ‘Once she r
eaches her birthday, what are her intentions?’ Jim frowned, waiting. ‘I’m not planning a party,’ Miss Frobisher continued with a wry smile. ‘I leave that to you. But she’ll be eighteen. I mean her intentions about joining up.’

  This was awkward. Jim craned his neck to look over her shoulder for Lily. She was absorbed in writing out price tickets for a pile of tiny trousers.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be better asking her?’

  ‘If she knew what she was doing,’ Miss Frobisher replied crisply, ‘she’d have told me by now, I know. So I take it there’s an element of doubt.’

  Jim sighed. As usual, Field Marshal Frobisher had got the situation taped.

  ‘She’s not sure,’ he said slowly. ‘She wants to do her bit for the war. But you also know how she loves what she’s doing here. She’s afraid that if she joins up, she won’t have a job to come back to.’

  Miss Frobisher nodded.

  ‘As I thought,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  She swept away, leaving Jim staring after her, as wise to what she was thinking as he was convinced that his department could meet its sales target. She discussed the other staff quite freely with him, but it was different with Lily because she and Jim were a couple. And Lily was different anyway. She always had been. That was the attraction for Jim.

  On the ground floor, Miss Frobisher sought out Mr Simmonds, the senior supervisor. He was deep in discussion with Gloria, one of the Cosmetics salesgirls, but extricated himself when he saw her and came over.

  The staff knew, but no customer who saw them together would have suspected, that they too were a couple. Cedric Marlow didn’t encourage liaisons between staff but with the time everyone spent at work, he’d had to accept that they were inevitable. Even so, discretion was his watchword; it might as well have been carved on tablets of stone.

  Jim and Lily understood but it didn’t stop them snatching a quick kiss if they met on the back stairs. Older and wiser, Peter Simmonds and Eileen Frobisher didn’t break the rules quite so blatantly. Instead, he steered her away to a quiet corner where he could smile more openly and where they could speak more freely. They made a striking couple – she tall and fair, he tall, dark, and angular. He’d been a regular Army man who’d had to quit after a trivial, but nagging, shoulder injury.