by Annie Groves
‘It could be worse,’ Sally to her cheerfully. ‘We could be working on munitions.’
‘Aye, and if we was we’d be earning a fair bit more, an’ all.’
‘Oh, give over moaning, our Janet, will yer? You was saying only the other day as how you felt sorry for them as worked on munitions and that you’d never do it no matter what you was paid on account of the danger and ending up with yellow skin.’
‘Oh, that’s typical of you, Zena Harrison,’ Janet sniffed. ‘If you wasn’t me cousin I’d have a few sharp words for you, that I would, allus picking a person up on everything they say.’
‘’Ere, you lot, you’ll never guess what I just heard when I was coming past the medical room.’
‘Well, I’m telling you, Wanda, if it was some gossip about some daft lass going crying to the nurse of account of her having been doing what she shouldn’t with some chap …’ Zena started to warn, but the other woman shook her head and laughed.
‘No, it’s nowt like that. They had some new girls in there waiting to have their medicals and I heard this one saying as how she was scared she wouldn’t be able to give a urine sample like you have to, and blow me if the woman next to her in the queue doesn’t pipe up loud and clear, “Don’t worry about that, lass. You can have some of mine, ’cos I can piss for England.”’
Sally could just imagine the reaction of that stuck-up new doctor to their conversation. His wife wouldn’t have to work in anything so common as munitions; if she did war work it would be something refined and ladylike like being in charge of a group of WVS women. Just thinking about the way he had looked at her and the boys was like peeling a scab off an unhealed wound, her emotional reaction immediate and sharply painful.
The others were still laughing. The girl who had told them the story shook her head and asked them all, ‘Anyone going down the Grafton tomorrow night, only I fancy a bit of a night out?’
The other two girls shook their heads whilst Sally didn’t say anything about the fact that she would be singing. She didn’t want them to think she was trying to show off or that she was getting above herself. Not that she kept her singing a secret, she just didn’t want to be accused of boasting about it. But the thought banished her anger about the ill-tempered doctor. An evening spent singing with the Waltonettes was something to look forward to.
FIVE
Their work over for the day, the ATS girls crowded onto the bus that would take them back to the school.
‘So how did it go then?’ Hazel turned round in her seat to ask Sam and Mouse.
Immediately Mouse’s eyes filled with tears and she shook her head, unable to speak, leaving Sam to explain tiredly, ‘We thought we were going to be doing office work, Corp, but this Captain Elland who we’ve got to report to had us walking miles up and down the shelves, checking off what was on them against a list he gave us. He wouldn’t even let Mouse go to the lavatory until her break-time. Then this afternoon he had us unpacking boxes of Durex to make sure that none were missing.’ Sam’s expression betrayed her feelings.
‘Oh, one of those, is he?’ Hazel commented knowingly. ‘You do get them – the type that doesn’t approve of women in uniform, so they have to try to show us up. That kind, is he?’
‘That’s him to a T,’ Sam confirmed. ‘Luckily there was this decent sort there as well, a sergeant with the Royal Engineers.’
‘A decent sort, was he? I see, and good-looking as well, I’ll bet,’ Lynsey teased her archly.
But as their transport stopped outside their billet for the girls to get off, Sam wasn’t in the mood for banter. The captain had infuriated her and bullied poor Mouse all day, sharpening Sam’s temper to a fine edge because army rules meant that it was impossible for a mere private to ignore the commands of a captain, no matter how badly that captain was behaving.
‘He was just a decent sort, that’s all,’ she repeated tiredly as they walked towards the billet. ‘He told us that the captain was almost as bad with the men and that they all took bets on how difficult he’d make it for them to get stuff out of the stores. He said that the captain couldn’t stand women in uniform, and that he’d been brought out of retirement to fill in, on account of the chap that was there before being knocked down by a delivery lorry and ending up with a broken leg and arm. Pity they didn’t leave him retired, if you ask me, what with him getting Mouse here so worked up that she was in tears all day, and him keeping on about the ATS being only good for one thing. I don’t know how I kept myself from telling him what I thought of him.’
‘Yes,’ Mouse sniffed as they crossed the hallway and made their way to their dormitory, prior to having their supper. ‘And he told Sam that she’d better watch her step otherwise he’d put her on a charge. I never thought it was going to be like this in the ATS.’ Fresh tears filled her eyes, causing Sam to stifle a small sigh, and battle with her reluctant sense of responsibility towards the other girl.
‘Well, I know what will cheer you up,’ Lynsey announced robustly, as soon as they were all in the dormitory with the door closed. ‘We’re all off duty tomorrow night, I’ve checked, so why don’t we go down to the Grafton and have a bit of fun, seeing as it’s a Saturday? It will do us all good, especially you two, and you as well, Corp, what with that chap of yours being down in Dartmouth on that course.’
‘What’s the Grafton?’ Sam asked.
‘It’s only Liverpool’s best dance hall, that’s what,’ Lynsey informed her enthusiastically. ‘We’ll have to go early, mind, otherwise we won’t get in. All the services boys go there, don’t they, Corp?’ she appealed to Hazel.
A dance hall! Sam’s heart sank. As skilled as she was at sports, and as fleet of foot as she had been at racing her brother, somehow she had never managed to get to grips properly with dancing.
‘It’s because you want to lead like a man,’ Russell had laughed at her. ‘Girls don’t do that, Sam.’
She would have preferred it if Lynsey had suggested going to the pictures rather than going out dancing, and she was just about to say as much when Mouse burst out, horrified, ‘A dance hall! Oh, I couldn’t possibly go to one of those. The minister of our church warned me about them when I joined up.’
Behind Mouse’s stiffly outraged back Hazel pulled a rueful face at Sam and muttered under her breath, ‘Poor bloody kid, she’s so scared of living she might as well be dead. It’s a crying shame, and we’ll have to do something about it.’
‘There’s no harm in having a bit of fun,’ Lynsey was telling Mouse determinedly. ‘Not if you ask me, and not when you remember that there’s a war on and wot that Hitler is going to do to us if he has his way.’
Her comment caught Sam like a blow. No matter how much they tried to put it out of their minds, or hide it behind a cheerful mask of banter and determination, for the whole country the fear they shared was never really very far away.
‘Lynsey’s right, there’s nothing wrong in going to a dance, Mouse,’ Hazel smiled.
‘In fact,’ Lynsey added, ‘I reckon that it’s our duty to think about those poor boys of ours, fighting to save this country and risking their lives for us. It wouldn’t be right to deny them the opportunity to have a bit of fun in their off-duty time, and it certainly wouldn’t be Christian,’ she told Mouse mock piously, adding, ‘Anyway, me and others are going, and Sam’s coming along too, aren’t you, Sam?’
Sam was now caught out fair and square. And there was certainly no way she wanted to be lumped with Mouse and the pair of them turned into a couple of killjoy miseries, avoided by the other girls.
‘Yes, of course I am,’ she agreed, forcing a hearty enthusiasm she couldn’t feel. ‘And you’re coming as well, Mouse. You don’t have to dance,’ she told her, shrewdly devising a way out of her own fear of making a complete fool of herself on the dance floor. ‘Not if you don’t want to, but you can’t stay here on your own.’
‘No … I wouldn’t want to do that,’ Mouse agreed ‘Do you think there really is a ghost here, l
ike May said last night?’
Sam laughed. ‘Of course there isn’t.’
‘Well, that’s not what I’ve heard,’ May defended her story stoutly. ‘Like I said, I’ve bin told they was thinking of closing it down as a school on account of the number of girls wot had been taken bad after seeing it and having to be sent home.’
‘And the moon’s made of green cheese. I’ll bet they were making it up just so they could get out of lessons,’ Hazel scoffed, adding, ‘I’m going down for my supper. Fair starved, I am. I heard one of the other girls saying that it was toad-in-the-hole tonight, and that’s one of the few things that Cook serves up that’s halfway decent.’
‘So come on, Sam, and tell us all about this sergeant you’ve taken a shine to then,’ Lynsey demanded.
They were sitting together at the supper table, and Sam’s could feel her face burning with self-consciousness.
‘Don’t talk such rot. Sergeant Brookes is—’
‘Oh ho, so it’s Sergeant Brookes, is it? Bet that’s not what you call him when you’re on your own with him, is it, girls?’ Lynsey teased Sam, winking across the table at the other girls.
Sam knew that it was silly to feel so self-conscious and defensive about her good-natured teasing but she couldn’t help it. Whilst there had been kindness in the tall fair-haired Royal Engineer’s eyes and voice, there had been none of the male appreciation she had seen men exhibiting towards girls they found attractive – nothing improper in any way, in fact. The truth was that she just wasn’t the sort that got those kinds of looks from men, and she was sensitively aware of that fact even if the girls ribbing her weren’t.
‘You’ll have to drop a hint to him that you’ll be at the Grafton on Saturday,’ Lynsey told her knowledgeably. ‘If he’s got anything about him he’ll be there looking out for you. Nothing like a slow smoochy dance to help you to get to know someone.’
‘Not eating that, are you, Mouse?’ May asked cheerfully, eyeing Mouse’s barely touched food. ‘’Cos if you aren’t you can pass your plate over here.’
Sam frowned as she saw the relief in Mouse’s expression as she handed over her supper. She had noticed that Mouse had only had a few bites out of the sandwiches they’d been given for their midday meal, and now she wasn’t eating her supper.
‘You’ve got to eat something,’ she told her, ‘especially if Captain Elland is going to keep us working the way he did today.’
Just the mention of the captain’s name was enough to have Mouse trembling and blinking back tears, and Sam cursed herself inwardly. She had never come across anyone like Mouse before and her pity for her warred with her own far more robust temperament.
Later in the evening, when the girls were enjoying an hour’s relaxation in their shared common room, Hazel confirmed Sam’s own opinion of Mouse by commenting to her quietly, ‘That poor kid, she should never have been allowed to join up. Pity that no one’s seen that and sent her home. She’s far too nervy to be in uniform. We’ll need to keep an eye on her.’
‘I thought she was going to break down in tears and run off when Captain Elland refused to let her go to the lavatory,’ Sam confided. ‘Mind you, it was a rotten thing to do to the poor kid.’
‘It sounds to me as though you’re going to have to watch out with him, Sam,’ Hazel warned her, looking serious. ‘You do get that sort sometimes, worse luck, and sadistic bastards they are too. Toadie’s another of the same breed. Wants bringing down a peg or two, she does. Pity we can’t give her a dose of her own medicine, not that I should be saying so. I think we’d better talk about something else.’ She looked pointedly at her corporal’s stripes and then took a deep breath and told Sam lightly, ‘I hope you’ve brought a decent dance frock with you. I dare say I should warn you that there’s a strong bit of competition between the services here in Liverpool to see whose girls can look the best. All the more so because we’ve got a fair contingent of Wrens based here, working at Derby House.’ A small shadow sobered her expression. ‘They are the Senior Service, of course, and don’t they know it. Their uniforms make ours look very poor, especially their stockings.’ She gave Sam a rueful smile. ‘Of course, we should be thinking about far higher-minded things than stockings. There is a war on, after all, but sometimes … If you are keen on this sergeant I’d advise you to keep him away from them.’
‘I’m not keen on him, not at all,’ Sam denied quickly, ‘and as for the dance,’ she gave a small shrug and tried not to look as uncomfortable as she felt, ‘to be honest I’m not really one for frocks.’
‘So what are you going to wear?’ Hazel asked her bluntly. ‘A siren suit?’
Sam forced herself to laugh, knowing that was the response Hazel was expecting, but the truth was that she would have felt far more comfortable in a siren suit, as people had nicknamed the all-in-one padded suits people wore at night to keep them warm in the air-raid shelters, than she ever could in a pretty dance frock.
She could remember the disappointment creasing her mother’s face when she had refused to wear the pretty dresses she had made for her, especially when she was older and of an age to go to dances. She hadn’t been able to explain to her how awkward and ugly they made her feel, like a fish out of water, as she struggled with the restrictions they forced on her.
‘I’ll probably wear my uniform,’ she told Hazel carelessly.
‘You can’t do that. Not with the Wrens there showing off theirs,’ Hazel told her firmly. ‘Look, if you haven’t brought a frock with you then I’ve got a spare and we’re much the same size. I don’t mind lending it to you.’
‘Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly …’ Sam protested.
‘Don’t be silly, of course you can,’ Hazel contradicted her. ‘And that’s an order, Private,’ she added with a grin.
Sam tried to look enthusiastic and grateful, knowing there was nothing else she could do, but knowing too that a pretty dress was all too likely to do more to underline her lack of femininity rather than enhance it.
It had been a long day, and after a cheerful game of cards she was more than ready for her bed. Mouse, who had been sitting in a corner knitting, had already gone up to the dormitory and when Sam got there she found her lying on her bed fully dressed, sobbing her heart out, surrounded by some of the other girls.
‘It’s her teddy,’ Hazel whispered to Sam, with a small grimace, pulling her away from the bed whilst one of the other girls comforted Mouse. ‘Toadie, the beast, came in and saw it and took it off her. The poor kid’s beside herself.’
Whilst Sam might feel that Mouse was too old to need a teddy bear, she was still outraged by the warrant officer’s behaviour.
‘She had no right to do that. It’s Mouse’s private property.’
Hazel gave a tired shrug, ‘You’ll soon learn that when it comes to what’s right, Toadie makes up her own rules. She really is a beast. Fancy picking on poor little Mouse.’
‘What will she have done with the teddy?’ Sam asked her, thinking quickly. If the warrant officer was not officially entitled to remove it then she was certainly prepared to mount a daring raid to get it back! It was just the kind of challenge she most enjoyed.
‘She’ll probably have taken it down to that office of hers she likes to lurk in, by the front door, waiting to catch one of us out like she did you last night,’ Hazel informed her.
Sam mentally pictured the spot. So far she had seen only the door to the broom cupboard-like space, standing open.
‘Does she lock it when she isn’t there, do you know?’ she asked.
Hazel gave her a searching look. ‘You’re not really planning to do what I think you’re planning to do, are you, because if you are …?’
Sam tried to look innocent but she couldn’t keep the mischief from sparkling in her eyes. ‘I’ve no idea what you could possibly mean, Corp,’ she stated unconvincingly.
‘Sam, I know you mean well, but Toadie isn’t someone you’d want to get on the wrong side of,’ Hazel warned her. ‘There w
as a girl here before you she had a real down on, and she really broke her.’
‘Well, she won’t break me,’ Sam assured her.
What Hazel had just said had strengthened her determination to get Mouse’s teddy back rather than weakened it.
‘She guards that cubbyhole of hers like it was the War Office itself,’ Hazel said, ‘and I have heard that she’s got a couple of girls from another group so much under her thumb that they keep her informed of everything that goes on. Probably bullied them into it, of course, and I’m thankful that they aren’t here in my dorm.’
‘Well, they won’t be able to inform her about anything I’m doing because I don’t plan to do anything,’ Sam told her.
Hazel sighed. ‘I wish I could believe that. You do know, don’t you, that it’s my duty as your corporal to warn you not to go getting yourself into trouble?’
‘I won’t do that,’ Sam assured her, but she was already making her plans. It shouldn’t be so very difficult to sneak into the warrant officer’s cubbyhole and retrieve the bear. After all, it was no more than a grown-up version of the games she had played with Russell, when they would take it in turns to outdo one another by surreptitiously ‘removing’ items from each other’s bedroom. She had ended up with a much larger collection of his Dinky toys than he had of her precious treasure-trove of interesting stones and fossils. All she needed to do was to find out when the warrant officer was most likely to be away from her cubbyhole for long enough for her to get Mouse’s teddy back.
A thoughtful look darkened her eyes. The warrant officer was heavily built and Sam had seen for herself how much she enjoyed her food. If she could somehow manage to slip away during breakfast … She ran a few options quickly through her head, discarding most of them and then happily settling on the one she thought would work best. It would mean her sacrificing her own breakfast, but it would be worth it to put one over on the warrant officer, and of course to get poor Mouse’s bear back for her.
