The Victory Girls

by Joanna Toye

  ‘Knew I was coming!’ thought Jim and pushed open the door. A bell jangled prettily and he blinked, adjusting his eyes to the dark interior after the sunshine outside. Once he had, he could see there was another customer in the gloom at the back, bending over the pad of rings. The jeweller, an old chap alone behind the counter, stepped to one side.

  ‘Would you mind waiting, sir,’ he said with an old-fashioned deference. ‘I’ll attend to you as soon as I’ve finished with this gentleman.’

  It was a nuisance, but Jim was there now. It had taken him long enough, so what was another few minutes?

  ‘No problem,’ he replied.

  The other man wheeled round.

  ‘Jim!’

  It was Peter Simmonds.

  Chapter 11

  When the children had drunk and eaten their fill, Dora, Lily, and the other WVS volunteers marched them to the Drill Hall. There, the council’s billeting officer, Mr Parfitt, would be waiting alongside the women Mrs Russell had rounded up the day before who’d expressed a willingness to take a child.

  On the way, Lily and Dora had counted and recounted every few minutes, terrified one of the children might make a run for it. Amazingly, numbers were intact on arrival, but once in the hall, the children rapidly scattered. Energised by their refreshments, they re-formed the gangs and groupings they knew from home with high-pitched squeals and shouts.

  Mr Parfitt wasn’t immediately impressive – receding hair, receding chin, receding manner. It was left to poor Mrs Russell to try to restore order, but it was a hopeless task and the would-be foster mothers didn’t help. There was a positive scrum as they scrambled towards the children. Girls were everyone’s first choice – they were more biddable and ate less – and the smallest and best-dressed, cleanest and prettiest, were the first to be claimed. Off they were hauled to be ticked off on Mr Parfitt’s list.

  Appalled by the chaos, Lily was comforting a little scrap with a grubby teddy bear who hadn’t yet been chosen when there was a ruckus nearby. A woman had swooped on a boy of about ten and a girl of about five and was trying to prise them apart. The boy yanked the little girl towards him.

  ‘No! Get your hands off! Our mum said we was to stay together!’ he shouted. ‘She made me swear to look after Barb! Me and my sister’s going together or we’re not going at all!’

  ‘I don’t think you have much say in the matter, young man!’ the woman shot back.

  Mrs Russell scurried over to see what was going on, and the boy – Joe, according to the label round his neck – repeated what he’d said, several times over and at increasing volume. It turned out the woman in the dispute was a friend of Mrs Russell’s.

  ‘I can promise you,’ Mrs Russell said kindly, ‘that your sister will be going to a very good home. I know this lady and she’s had evacuees before, earlier in the war. Barbara would be very lucky to be there.’

  ‘Only if I go as well!’ insisted Joe.

  Mrs Russell turned in mute appeal to her friend, who shook her head.

  ‘You know how it is, Irene,’ she said firmly. ‘I have my husband to consider. He works hard all day. A little girl who I can keep tidy and who’ll be in bed by seven is one thing. A great big growing lad thumping about the place is a very different matter. I’m sorry, but no.’

  Joe held a wide-eyed Barbara’s hand even tighter. In desperation, hoping he’d exert a bit of authority, Mrs Russell appealed to Mr Parfitt, but he, as Les would have said, was as much use as an inflatable dartboard. Eventually, force had to be used. Little Barbara, by now almost hysterical, was prised off her brother and led away, being told ‘not to be so silly now’ and to ‘wait till she saw the pretty room that was waiting for her.’

  All the remaining children were staring. Barbara’s wails had set off some of the other younger ones and Lily saw Joe turn away, biting the inside of his cheek and dragging the ragged sleeve of his jumper across his eyes.

  She went over and put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘I know that woman didn’t go about it very well, but she didn’t look a bad sort.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he muttered.

  ‘You did your best,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘I hate this bloody war!’ he said. ‘I hate it, I hate it here and I hate all of you! Got it?’

  ‘Cheers!’ Peter Simmonds raised his glass and chinked it against Jim’s. They’d just caught dinnertime last orders, a happy state of affairs as Peter was in a celebratory mood, and no wonder. In his pocket, in a small leather box, was the engagement ring he’d bought for Eileen Frobisher.

  ‘You realise you’re in on a secret,’ he said when they’d both wiped the froth from their lips.

  ‘Wild horses,’ Jim reassured him.

  He was still coming to terms with what the ring – an oval sapphire in a frill of diamonds – had cost. Not that Miss Frobisher wasn’t worth it, but it put a screaming brake on his ambitions. Jim had been eyeing a sapphire for Lily; she wore a lot of blue. Perhaps not as big a ring as the one Peter had chosen, admittedly, but now he knew that anything of that order was far beyond his pocket.

  It was a bitter blow, but in a way he was grateful. Peter had looked at six or seven rings of all shapes and sizes before he’d settled on his chosen one, and Jim had noted the prices as the jeweller reeled them off. It had saved him the humiliation of asking to see any rings himself, then having to creep away saying he’d ‘think about it’. He’d spent long enough serving customers at Marlows to know that that was code for ‘way out of my league’ or even ‘you won’t catch me setting foot in here again!’.

  ‘So what were you there for, really?’ Peter asked, looking at him sidelong. Jim had blathered some story about needing a watch mended, saying he’d bring it in another day, and Peter had obviously seen right through it. ‘If I had to take a guess, I’d say you were ring shopping too.’

  Jim pulled a splinter off the leg of his chair. He did it automatically now; he’d heard enough complaints from Lily about ripping her precious stockings on them.

  ‘OK, you got me,’ he admitted. ‘But I’m not as far along in the process as you.’

  ‘But you and Lily are unofficially engaged already, aren’t you? You’re much further along than me!’ Peter exclaimed. ‘I haven’t even broached the subject yet. And’—he fiddled with his glass—‘it’s difficult.’

  ‘How?’

  Peter Simmonds opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘There’s the question of young John. I’d like to surprise Eileen with the ring, but I can’t. I can’t drop it on the poor kid out of nowhere.’

  Miss Frobisher’s background was complicated. She had a five-year-old son whose father had long since disappeared, never to return.

  ‘You get on with John well enough,’ objected Jim. ‘I’ve seen you with him at the cricket. He surely won’t mind; he seems to idolise you.’

  Jim and Lily sometimes went to see the store’s football and cricket teams in action; Peter Simmonds managed the football team and captained the cricket side. He also wrote up the matches for the Messenger, but Jim liked to do the odd spot-check. Peter had been known to get carried away in his reports, accusing the cricketers from Timothy White’s of exaggerating a broken finger and gloating that the ARP footballers had ‘played like girls’. Jim didn’t like to think of the treatment he’d have received on his next ARP shift if that claim hadn’t been edited out.

  ‘It’s kind of you to say so,’ Peter acknowledged. ‘But a few hours a week isn’t quite the same as asking him to share his mother with me full time. She’s been on her own with him since he was a baby. They have a very special bond.’

  Jim nodded.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘I need to think about how to approach it. So don’t say anything to anyone about today, please. Not even to Lily.’

  Jim picked up his glass and tipped it towards Peter.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘W
hat happened today? I really can’t remember – this beer must be stronger than it tastes.’

  ***

  In the end, with the evacuees, it was just as Dora had predicted. When the initial fuss had died down, the remaining children were allocated to their new homes. Off the luckier ones went, child-sized gas masks bumping against their little bodies, their pathetic bundles of possessions in their arms. Left behind were the poorest, the shabbiest, and the least attractive – a rabble of boys and a few of the older, more lumpen girls, the ones who looked as if they wouldn’t be cheap to feed.

  ‘Look at them!’ Jean Crosbie, another WVS volunteer, crimped her lips in her usual way. ‘We’ll be traipsing round town with this lot till midnight!’

  There were thirteen of the thirty left, but Mrs Russell, to her credit, had come prepared. Every volunteer was allocated a few of the remaining children. Lily and Dora had three – a boss-eyed twelve-year-old girl, a pasty boy of about seven, and a sullen Joe. Mrs Russell then gave them a street plan of the part of town where they were to try to house them. Lily wasn’t over-hopeful. It was one of the poorer districts of Hinton, most of the houses already crowded, but as Dora pointed out, rather cynically for her, that might work to their advantage.

  ‘There’s ten and six a week in it for anyone who takes an evacuee,’ she said in a low voice as they set off, trying to keep the children together. ‘Plus the rations they’re given to start them off, plus their ration book … It might be a temptation for some.’

  ‘That’s hardly the motivation we want, is it?’ queried Lily. ‘Filling the larder for free!’

  ‘The milk of human kindness doesn’t put milk in the jug,’ was Dora’s pithy reply.

  They had no luck at all in the first street they tried, but that came as no surprise to Lily. Jim was always swotting up on anything to do with sales and he’d told her that whether you were selling lucky heather or ladies’ underwear, the success rate in cold-calling was a maximum of three out of every hundred doors you knocked. Lily counted eighty-eight houses in that first street, but when in the second street another twenty doors were virtually slammed in their faces, her hopes really began to fade. Then came a breakthrough, and in the space of ten houses they managed to allocate two children almost one after the other. The girl was taken in by a voluble widow who said she’d like the company, someone to talk to – or perhaps at, thought Lily. The seven-year-old was taken in by a harassed-looking woman with two children roughly the same age, who said one more couldn’t make much difference, though by the shabbiness of what Lily could see of the house, ten and six a week perhaps would.

  That left them with Joe. Lily wished she could tell him to cheer up – it might make him more appealing – but she knew it would do no good.

  ‘We’re going to end up taking him home with us, damp or no damp,’ she whispered to Dora.

  But her mother was firm.

  ‘Lily, I’m sorry, I can’t take on any more waifs and strays! First Jim, then the dog … I’m over with Gladys and the twins every day, then my WVS and Red Cross in the afternoons. Are you trying to send me to an early grave? We’ve got to find him a home somehow.’

  It was mid-afternoon now, and as they passed the Fox and Goose, the landlord’s wife was ejecting the last drinkers. Dora knew her slightly – as girls, they’d worked together at Hinton’s corset factory.

  ‘Afternoon, Ethel,’ she said.

  ‘Dora. What are you doing round this part of town?’ Then, noting Dora’s WVS uniform, she added, ‘Oh, evacuees, is it? I heard they’d sent a load.’

  ‘This is Joe,’ said Lily, pushing the boy forward. ‘He’s looking for somewhere to stay.’

  Ethel Pearson eyed him.

  ‘Big lad, isn’t he? Eats his own weight in bread and scrape every day, I’ll bet.’

  To Lily’s surprise, Joe thrust the brown paper bag he was carrying towards her.

  ‘There’s corned beef in here,’ he said. ‘Two tins. And condensed milk the same. And before you ask, I’ve ate the chocolate.’

  ‘He speaks, then!’ But Ethel’s mind was obviously working. ‘Well, I suppose I might be able to help you out. No harm in doing my bit.’

  ‘Would you?’ asked Dora. ‘If you’re sure …’

  ‘Go on then.’ Ethel addressed Joe. ‘Get inside. Go through the back. My daughter’s in there. Tell her who you are, get her to give you a cup of tea and a slice.’

  To Lily’s further amazement, Joe went – without a backward glance or a goodbye to Lily or Dora, and without a thank you to Ethel, but he went. As Dora went through the paperwork with his new foster mother, Lily peered into the pub. The bar was basic but looked clean. Maybe Joe would be no worse off here than anywhere else.

  As they walked away, though, it seemed Dora had doubts.

  ‘I’ll make sure Mr Parfitt keeps an eye on him,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Ethel might seem hard, but she has to be, running that place, and she’s not bad really. Her husband’s another matter. I didn’t come in on the last coal barge. Joe’ll be put to heaving crates and washing glasses if I’m not mistaken.’

  Lily knew that working them was definitely not part of the arrangement for evacuees, and Joe’s sudden acceptance of his fate was bothering her too. She couldn’t help feeling that the problem of Joe and his sister was not entirely resolved.

  Chapter 12

  Across town, another Lily-related problem wasn’t entirely resolved either, but Jim, emboldened by Peter Simmonds – or more likely the whisky chaser Peter had insisted on – was determined not to let it linger. When he and Peter had parted, he hot-footed it straight back to the jewellers.

  The old fellow was on his own in the shop, polishing up a tray of lockets.

  ‘Good afternoon again,’ he said. ‘You’ve brought the watch?’

  ‘No,’ Jim confessed. ‘I’m sorry, there is no watch. I’m after a ring myself, but I didn’t want to say so in front of my colleague.’

  The old chap nodded.

  ‘I understand. I think. So what can I show you?’

  Jim laid his Post Office book on the counter.

  ‘I may as well be honest,’ he said. ‘My girl means just as much to me, but I’m not in the market for something as pricey as he could afford.’

  The old man picked up Jim’s book and looked at it. He laid it down again.

  ‘I’m sure we can find something to suit,’ he said kindly. ‘Have you anything in mind? A particular stone? A specific design?’

  Jim sighed.

  ‘I was thinking of a sapphire,’ he admitted. ‘Lily wears a lot of blue – it brings out the colour of her eyes. But I know even a small one’s out of my league.’

  The old man pursed his lips.

  ‘And what sort of person is your Lily?’ he asked. ‘Is she the traditional type? Or—’

  Jim almost snorted with laughter.

  ‘Anything but! She’s … she’s special. Not just to me.’ The jeweller waited, his head on one side. He seemed to want more, so Jim went on. ‘She stands up for what she believes in – she’ll fight for it. She’s not hard or ruthless, but she hates injustice, or unfairness, or seeing people suffer. Sometimes she jumps in with both feet – though she’s got a bit better at that lately – but it’s only because she cares. She’d go to the ends of the earth to help someone out; she’s got the biggest heart of anyone I know. Oh, she can be annoying at times with what she takes on herself but it’s impossible not to like her! And I love her for it.’ It was only when he took a breath that Jim realised he’d almost been giving a speech, and a passionate one at that. ‘Funny,’ he said, slightly embarrassed. ‘I don’t often put it into words. But there it is.’

  The old fellow smiled.

  ‘Maybe you should put it into words more often. Blue eyes, you say. One moment.’

  He disappeared into the back of the shop and came back holding a ring between his fingers. He held it out to Jim.

  ‘This is an aquamarine,’ he said. ‘For my money, even
prettier than a sapphire, and perhaps more suitable for a young girl, as I take it your Lily is. As you see, the stone’s not large, but it’s clear, which is important, and it’s a pretty shape, I think, with the two small diamonds each side?’

  Jim took the ring. Even in the austerity lighting, the diamonds winked back at him.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he murmured. ‘I can just see it on Lily. And I can afford it?’

  The old man waggled his head from side to side like a tortoise.

  ‘I made a good sale to your colleague. It’s more a case of I can afford for you to afford it.’

  ‘Oh, thank you! Thank you.’

  ‘My wife will kill me,’ said the old fellow. ‘Says I’m too soft-hearted. But young love … who can resist?’

  The deal was sealed.

  ***

  Jim was thrilled with how the afternoon had worked out, but it was a good job he had no thoughts of presenting the ring to Lily immediately – when and how was another thing he had to consider – because when he got in, she was full of her afternoon with the evacuees.

  ‘Oh Jim,’ she said when they went for their customary walk after tea. ‘The things those children have seen! There was one lad boasting about the bottles of gin he’d pinched when the front of a pub was blown off. Another who told me in rather too much detail about a man with a huge shard of glass sticking out of his shoulder. The bloke reached round and pulled it out himself and the blood ran all down his arm.’

  Jim winced. Then she told him about Joe and Barbara.

  ‘They’ve been sent here for safety but what’s the point of that if it makes them so unhappy?’

  ‘After what you’ve just told me about things in London? Come on, Lily, they’ll settle down. They’ll have to.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. And Mum’s not very sure about where we had to leave Joe anyway.’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ groaned Jim. ‘Here we go. Good Cause number ninety-three – or should that be ninety-four? – since I’ve known you.’