by Annie Groves
Lucy Higgins appeared in the doorway, blocking her exit as she told her with contempt, ‘You want to watch it, you do, making friends with that coward. Otherwise people will begin to think that you’re just as bad as he is.’
‘Christopher is not a coward.’ Tilly immediately countered.
‘Course he is. He’s a conchie, and he’s refusing to fight.’
‘He objects to the war on moral grounds, not fears for his own safety.’
‘Oh ho, moral grounds, is it?’ Lucy mocked. ‘He’s a coward and a traitor, and he ought to be strung up. That’s what my dad says.’
Lucy’s unkindness and bullying manner towards Christopher left a bad taste in Tilly’s mouth.
She was still feeling sorry for him when the three of them walked home together later in the evening, both her and Agnes having to walk a bit faster than normal in order to keep up with him, his speed no doubt because he was anxious to get back to his father, Tilly guessed.
She, on the other hand, would have liked to linger. The long daylight hours and June sunshine were a relief after the winter nights of blackouts and absolute darkness.
It had been a severe winter, with the loss of many, many sailors and a great deal of shipping, due to the successful attacks of Hitler’s submarines on the navy-escorted convoys crossing the Atlantic and bringing much-needed supplies to the country. The convoys and the goods they carried were a vital lifeline for the country.
Despite the warmth of the June evening Tilly gave a small shiver. Everyone had been so confident when the war had first started, that they would have Hitler beaten within months, his army retreating back to Germany with its tail between its legs. The reality, though, was that it was the BEF that had been driven into retreat and now the whole counry was aware of how vulnerable Britain was. The fear of invasion was gripping everyone. Tilly knew that her mother was worrying about it, even though she wasn’t saying so, and Tilly knew too that her worry was for her.
She felt afraid herself sometimes listening to people talking about the horror stories the refugees who had made it safely to London had to tell, especially those from Poland. Another shiver gripped Tilly. There were two Polish refugee families sharing a house in Article Row, two women with children, and an older woman.
According to Nancy, who made it her business to know everything that went on in Article Row, the two women were sisters, and the elderly woman was their mother. Their husbands had been killed fighting against Hitler, whilst the eldest son of one of the women, a boy of fourteen, had been shot through the head by a German soldier for trying to protect the cousin the soldier had then gone on to rape, and who had shot herself with the soldier’s gun rather than bear the shame of what had happened to her.
Tilly had guessed from the look exchanged between her mother and Sally when Nancy had told them all this story that it was both true and not an isolated occurrence.
She didn’t dare let herself think about what might happen here in London if the Germans did invade and ended up marching on the city like they were now marching on Paris.
Sally wasn’t the only one concerned about the important matter of ‘going steady’. It was an issue that had been on Ted’s mind since Christmas, and now, his feelings heated by the June sunshine and the sight of couples walking and sweet-talking together in London’s streets and parks, he ached to tell Agnes how he felt about her and to ask her to be his girl.
There were problems, though. Ted was the sole breadwinner in his family, his earnings desperately needed to supplement the small income his mother received as a cleaner. The need for her services, and thus her income, had decreased since the start of the war with many well-to-do families leaving London for the safety of the country for the sake of their children.
There was no way Ted could move out of the family home, a tiny rented flat provided by the Guinness Trust, and no way either that he could move Agnes into it as his wife, as he suspected it would be against the rules, and besides, his bedroom was no bigger than a cupboard and had room for only a single bed, whilst his mother shared the single bedroom with his two young sisters.
Agnes was a lovely girl and a very special person, who had blossomed from the shy shabby girl he had first met to a confident happy young woman. Even old Smithy was now putty in her hands, mellowed by her smile and her genuine kindness. Ted was happy that Agnes had found her feet – of course he was – but at the same time he was also worried that some other chap with better prospects and more to offer her might win her heart and steal her from him. For that reason he longed to be able to declare himself but how could he when all he could offer her was the prospect of a long engagement?
Rick downed his pint of beer. It had been a mistake coming here to the working men’s club where his father’s friends wanted to talk about the war and ask him questions. He still felt too raw for that. Dunkirk had left him feeling as though a layer of skin had been ripped from his body, leaving him sensitive to the lightest touch.
He had seen and experienced too much that his mind and body wanted to forget and couldn’t. Men – his comrades, his friends – left dead and dying during their retreat; good brave men, far braver and better than he. And then Dunkirk itself.
The dead and dying everywhere, like the tension that gripped them all as they stood in line waiting . . . waiting. He’d given up his chance of being the last onto one boat to allow an injured comrade to take his place. Rick reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. That act of generosity had saved his life, because the boat had been attacked by the Luftwaffe. He had seen it hit as he stood on the beach. He had heard the screams of the men dying in the hail of fire, or burned alive in the fuel it discharged as it caught fire. He should have been on that boat . . . His hands started to shake, making it impossible for him to light his cigarette.
He ordered another pint, drinking it quickly, trying to drown out his memories, but they refused to leave him in peace. The heat of the packed club brought him out in a sweat, the stale beer and cigarette smells filling his lungs and making him long for fresh air. Finishing his drink, he left the club, taking a deep breath of the mild late evening air as he headed homewards, his stomach heaving as he drew level with the chip shop and breathed in the smell of the cooked food.
Someone hailed him from inside the shop – Rita Sands, a local good-time girl. She had a reputation in the neighbourhood for being the girl that most of the local lads had had their first sexual experience with. Rick didn’t stop.
Making his way home through the warren of backstreets of the East End, he was just about to cut down a narrow alleyway that was a bit of a shortcut, when he heard someone running after him, and Rita’s voice calling, ‘Hey, Ricky, hang on a minute, will you?’
Grimly Rick turned round, demanding, ‘Leave me alone, will you, Rita? I’m not in the mood for company.’
Unabashed she told him, ‘Bet I could get you in the mood.’ She moved closer to him, putting her hand on his arm. Her hair smelled of grease and fish and chips. Rick wanted to recoil from her. Just as he had recoiled from the sight of his dead comrades? Bile filled his throat as he fought to stand where he was, just as he had done in France.
‘Oooh, them’s ever such strong muscles you’ve got there, Ricky,’ Rita cooed. ‘I’ll bet it isn’t only there that you’ve got them neither, is it? There’s something about a man in uniform that makes a girl go weak at the knees, if you know what I mean.’
Rick knew what Rita meant all right. It was still light enough for him to see the way her breasts strained against her too-tight top.
He started to turn away from her, repelled by her sexual obviousness, but instead of letting him go Rita moved closer, flinging her arm round his neck and kissing him wetly on his mouth, her free hand moving to his groin.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘you know you want me really.’
Filled with revulsion, Rick shrugged her off, ignoring her outburst of insults and anger as he pushed past her, intent on putting as much distance between t
hem as he could.
‘Coward,’ she called after him, jeeringly. ‘Running away from me just like you ran away from the Germans.’
Rick stopped dead in his tracks. A red mist of rage descended on him, a desire to turn round and shake Rita until she took back her insulting words, not for his sake but for the sake of the men who would never come home, men who knew more about bravery and courage than someone like Rita could ever grasp.
His anger left him as abruptly as it had seized him. All the anger in the world wouldn’t bring those men back, but he would damn well make sure that when he was eventually facing the Germans it would be those fallen men he would be fighting for.
Chapter Nineteen
Dulcie eyed the neat row of lipsticks on the counter in front of her impatiently. It was Monday. They were always quiet on Mondays, her working day seeming to drag, not that there was anything interesting to look forward to for the evening at number 13, not with Olive trying to get them all to give Sally a hand with her vegetable plot. She’d rather go home and listen to her mother praising Edith than do that. And tomorrow night that was what she would be doing, she reminded herself, since tomorrow was her mother’s birthday. She’d got her mother a lipstick for her birthday present, a pretty soft pink, and some powder as well. Her mother never took the trouble to make the best of herself, and having some decent cosmetics was bound to cheer her up. Her present was bound to be more expensive than whatever Edith bought her, Dulcie decided with some triumph. That should show her mother how wrong she was to favour Edith all the time. At least with Rick still at home on his post-Dunkirk leave, there’d be someone there to have a bit of a joke with.
Dulcie frowned as she looked down and noticed a small wrinkle in one of her stockings. Automatically she bent to smooth it away.
As she did so, from the other side of the counter she heard a male voice asking, ‘So what exactly is it you’d want this boyfriend who isn’t a real boyfriend to do?’
The voice and its amused tone were immediately recognisable. They had Dulcie standing up so quickly that she felt dizzy, which was no doubt why her face felt flushed, she decided as she stared up into Raphael Androtti’s brown eyes.
Normally quick off the mark with a retaliatory comment, Dulcie for once was lost for words, finally managing only a defensive. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’
‘A joke? I thought we were supposed to be acting as lovebirds, not clowns. Of course, if you’ve changed your mind, and you’ve found someone else to play the role of doting boyfriend . . .’
He was turning to walk away. Caught off guard, Dulcie reached across the counter to stop him, protesting, ‘No. I mean . . .’
‘I’ve missed you.’
The smile and the not-so-softly spoken words were good enough to have come from the lips of any matinée idol worth his salt, as was the way in which he lifted his hand, about to touch her face, and then dropped it again as though realising where they were.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Dulcie demanded.
‘You said you wanted me to.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ she hissed, ‘but . . .’
‘But what?’ His voice became slightly louder as he demanded urgently, ‘Have you changed your mind about me? About us? Please tell me that it isn’t true and that you haven’t.’
Somehow or other he had taken possession of her hand and was clasping it between his own.
He was enjoying this, Dulcie could see. ‘You’re overdoing it,’ she told him. A quick look round the cosmetics floor showed her that the other girls were goggling at them from behind their counters, and that Arlene was looking astounded – astounded and envious!
Oddly, though, Dulcie felt less triumphant than she should have. That was because she liked being in control. She did not like someone else grasping the upper hand and directing the things she had planned to direct herself. It made her feel . . . Dulcie didn’t want to think about how it made her feel or about being taken over by someone else, controlled by someone else. Didn’t he realise that he was going too far? All she’d wanted was for him to come in and give the impression that he was keen on her, not act like they were already an item. Now she’d end up having to come up with a reason for them breaking up.
‘The shop will be closing in couple of minutes,’ she told him, wanting to get rid of him so that she could manage the impression he was giving when the other girls asked her the questions she knew they would ask.
His warm, ‘I’ll be waiting for you outside,’ wasn’t the response she’d wanted, but she couldn’t say anything, not with Lizzie standing within hearing distance.
Now he was giving her an openly languishing look, before turning on his heel and heading for the exit, just as the warning bell to customers to leave the store started to ring.
‘Well!’ Lizzie announced as soon as the bell had stopped. ‘Who is he and why haven’t you said anything about him?’
But before Dulcie could answer her, half a dozen of the girls were clustering round her, demanding, ‘Where did you meet him, Dulcie?’ ‘Has he got any brothers?’ ‘Cousins?’
Then Arlene came and joined in, her nose in the air, malice in the look she gave her, before she said, with what Dulcie knew was mock concern, ‘I don’t want to spoil things for you, Dulcie, but your young man looks awfully foreign.’
‘He’s Italian,’ Dulcie responded with a small shrug of her shoulders, as though she herself had never for a moment shared the thoughts she suspected were going through their heads. ‘So what?’
‘An Italian!’ Arlene pretended to marvel, before adding mockingly, ‘I suppose you met him when he sold you an ice cream.’
One of the other girls began to laugh.
‘And the way he speaks . . .’ Arlene rolled her eyes.
‘He’s from Liverpool,’ Dulcie defended Raphael.
‘An Italian from Liverpool.’ Arlene dissolved into fits of laughter. ‘Poor Dulcie, but then I suppose you won’t mind. Sometimes I do wish that my own standards weren’t quite so high.’
‘Don’t pay any attention to Arlene, Dulcie,’ Lizzie said stoutly after she and the others had gone. ‘I thought your young man looked lovely.’
‘He isn’t my young man. He’s just someone I know,’ Dulcie told her crossly. Her plan seemed to have backfired on her, and that was his fault, not hers. If she did find him waiting for her outside then she’d give him a piece of her mind.
Only when she did find him waiting for her outside the staff entrance to the building, Dulcie discovered to her own surprise that her curiosity about why he had turned up in the first place was stronger than her desire to blame him for Arlene’s mockery of her.
However, when he told her in response to her question, ‘I was at a bit of a loose end, so I thought I might as well do you a favour,’ Dulcie was more incensed than grateful.
‘You overdid things,’ she said, ‘and now I’ve had to put up with the Miss Snotty Nose looking down on me even more because of you being Italian.’
They had been walking away from the building as she delivered this attack but now he had stopped walking so that Dulcie was forced to do the same, and the look in his eyes was far from warm as he demanded, ‘Why should the fact that I’m Italian make her look down on you?’
‘Because you aren’t British,’ Dulcie replied irritably. Surely it was obvious to him that him being Italian and foreign, an immigrant, meant that he could never be considered as good as someone who was really British. After all, everyone knew that was how things were.
‘Actually I am British,’ he informed her. ‘I was born in this country, to parents who were also born here, and who, whilst being part of Liverpool’s Italian community, have taken British nationality.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Dulcie said dismissively. ‘You look Italian, and you were with Italians when I saw you.’
‘So I can’t look Italian but be British is that what you are saying?’
Dulcie gave an exasperated sigh. ‘This is borin
g and I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘It isn’t boring to me,’ he told her grimly. ‘This is my country, a country I have enlisted to fight for and to die for, if necessary, but according to you because of my Italian ancestry I am not good enough for Britain – or for you? My grandfather would enjoy listening to you. It would validate and vindicate everything he believes.’
They had to stop walking for a minute to allow the crowd of people coming the other way to surge past them, giving Dulcie the chance to demand, ‘Your grandfather?’
‘Yes. It is to see him that I am here in London, to see if I can mend a family feud. You see, he abhors the thought of me being British just as much as you abhor the thought of me being Italian.’
‘I don’t abhor it,’ Dulcie defended herself. She’d never heard the word ‘abhor’ before, but she could guess what it meant and she certainly wasn’t going to let him know that it was new to her, she decided. She had to hurry to catch up with him as he strode off. ‘But everyone knows that a girl who isn’t Italian would be plain daft to get involved with an Italian chap when they always marry their own kind. Why doesn’t your grandfather want you to be British?’
A shaft of sunlight beaming down as they crossed a road, highlighted the warm olive tint of Raphael’s skin, catching Dulcie’s attention. Here in the city, its buildings shutting out the sunlight, its dust filling her nose and its war-ready grimness all around her to be seen, that sudden glimpse of healthy vitally alive male flesh brought her an emotion she didn’t understand. And because she didn’t understand it, Dulcie refused to countenance it.
‘Because he believes, as so many of his generation do, that our presence here in Britain is temporary,’ Raphael told her. ‘When he came here it was to work and send money home, to save up so that one day he too could return home. That was his belief and his dream. He and his contempararies do not consider Britain to be their home and their country because in their hearts Italy is that. They are fiercely proud of being Italian and they cling together in their communities because they are afraid if they do not, that they might forget and lose their traditions and their way of life. To Italians, family is all important, and family means not just husband and wife and children, but their whole community, to which they owe their loyalty along with their loyalty to Italy itself.’
