My Sweet Valentine

by Annie Groves

  Having pegged out her washing before taking Mr Whittaker’s dinner down to him – even though she knew that later in the day she would be bringing it back in still damp and smelling of smoke, and then trying to get it aired in the kitchen – Olive was on her way back from the bread shop where she’d had to queue for well over half an hour before she’d been able to buy a couple of loaves.

  Walking briskly to ward off the cold, and refusing to look at the gaping empty spaces where, before the weekend, buildings had been, Olive paused briefly outside the vicarage. She could have done with a chat over a cup of tea with Audrey Windle – there was something about Audrey’s kind, calm manner that was wonderfully comforting – but she knew that her friend would be busy with her own household and parish duties.

  The ring of a bicycle bell behind her as she turned into Article Row had her turning round, to find Archie Dawson peddling swiftly towards her.

  ‘You didn’t see anything of Barney this morning did you, Olive?’ he asked, so brisk and obviously concerned that she didn’t have time to feel self-conscious.

  ‘As a matter of fact I did,’ she told him as he brought his cycle to a halt and placed one foot on the pavement. ‘I saw him at lunchtime when I took Mr Whittaker his dinner. He was with two older boys and a man who looked like their father and who was doing some repair work on number 49.’

  Archie Dawson sighed heavily and adopted a worried frown.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Tall and thickset, with sandy hair and a shifty look about them, were they, these lads?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Olive was forced to admit. Adding, ‘I did think that they seemed much older than Barney for them to be proper friends.’

  ‘They’re part of a gang he used to run around with before he came to us. Only took him up because he was small enough to get through scullery windows for them.’

  Olive’s shocked look had Archie Dawson reaching out to pat her on her arm.

  ‘It’s all right. Luckily Barney told me what they wanted from him before they could get him into trouble. He’s a good lad, Barney is, but you know what kids are like: always looking for an older kid to look up to and, boys being boys, they always seem to pick the ones that have got a bit of a swagger and that about them. The Farleys certainly have that. Full of it, they are, and a thoroughly bad lot to boot, the whole lot of them. They’ve got a reputation for being quick on the scene when a house gets bombed, picking over whatever there is to be picked over and helping themselves. The two lads you saw with Barney have an older brother who’s in prison at the moment and half a dozen cousins who probably should be, or have been at some time. And their father and his brothers are just as bad. It’s the old man, their grandfather, who runs the family. A real sharp card, he is, and not above doing a bit of blackmail if he thinks it will get him what he wants. Well known to us down at the station, all of them. Barney might be from a rough family but they weren’t thieves. What were they doing on Article Row, I’d like to know?’

  ‘Well, they said that they were working for Mr King, and that they’d come to repair the damage done by Saturday night’s bombs.’

  ‘That could be true. They’re slippery characters, and they run a bit of a salvage and general maintenance business that seems to be legitimate, but if you were to ask me I’d say it was just a cover for their real business of thieving. Proving that, though, is another matter. I’ve warned Barney about keeping away from them and I’ve explained why to him, because you can be sure that it won’t be one of them that ends up in trouble when there’s someone else they can put the blame on. Not that I think that Barney would deliberately do anything wrong, but he misses his dad. Talks about him all the time. Poor little tyke.’ Archie craned his neck and peered down the road through the smoke. ‘There’s no sign of anyone outside number 49, but I’d better get down there and check. Thanks, Olive.’

  As she watched him cycle off, Olive hoped that he would be able to save Barney from the influence of the boys she’d seen him with earlier.

  ‘Goodness, this place is busy,’ Sally pronounced as the four girls squeezed round their table in the packed Corner House teashop.

  ‘I expect everyone’s thinking like we are that they want to get back home early in case there’s an air raid,’ Agnes offered, giving Tilly an anxious look as she asked her, ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Tilly assured her. And she was, because sitting discreetly several tables away was Drew, who had met her from work and escorted her here, and who would be walking them all home afterwards.

  ‘Well, if you was to ask me I’d say that coming here was a daft idea, Agnes,’ Dulcie put in her two penny-worth, ‘especially when we could all have gone home to number 13 and had a proper decent tea there that would have cost us nothing.’

  ‘Agnes was right to suggest that we had a get-together, Dulcie,’ Sally stuck up for the other girl. ‘We’ve all become so busy in our own lives that we hardly get time to talk together any more, even though we live under the same roof.’

  ‘Talk? What is there to talk about? You make it sound as though we’re ruddy politicians or summat, Sally. Me, I’d rather spend me free time doing something that’s more fun than yacking. And where’s that nippy we gave our order?’

  ‘Nippy’ was the name given to the neatly dressed waitresses who worked in the Lyons Corner House teashops, women trained to deliver the most speedy service there was to be had. Lyons teashops were, after all, patronised by the working public of the country, people who wanted a decent meal served in double-quick time so that they could get back to the important business of serving their country. Of course, it was also patronised by plenty of people – friends, families, couples – who came in for one of its famous pots of tea and perhaps a piece of toast or, if they were lucky, a teacake, to be lingered over whilst they shared their special time together.

  In one corner a pianist was playing a cheerful polka although there was no room for anyone to dance. Dulcie tapped her foot in time to it until she spied something that had her half standing up in outrage.

  ‘Just look at that. I knew it,’ she declared to the other girls. ‘That ruddy nippy who took our order is serving them two Free French men in uniform before us even though we gave our order first. ’Ere, you …’ she called out loudly.

  Agnes cringed back in her seat whilst Sally gave a firm tug on Dulcie’s arm.

  ‘What is it?’ an older waitress demanded, suddenly appearing at their table.

  ‘That nippy,’ Dulcie began, but Sally shushed her and spoke over her to say calmly, ‘We seem to have been waiting a long time for our order.’

  ‘Well, what did you order?’ the waitress demanded.

  ‘Three of us ordered egg on toast and one of us ordered sardines.’

  ‘Well, that’s it then,’ the waitress sniffed. ‘It’s the sardines. Run out of them, we have.’

  ‘But I’ve just seen our nippy taking two plates of them to those soldiers,’ Dulcie began angrily.

  ‘Well, that will be on account of them having come in earlier to order them. Regular customers, they’ll be. So now, miss, if you’d like to choose something else from the menu …?’

  ‘I’ll have the eggs, like everyone else,’ Dulcie told her, her glower deepening when one of the French soldiers, who had obviously overheard the row, raised his teacup to her and gave her a wicked smile.

  ‘Bloody French,’ Dulcie swore. ‘Just look at them. You’d never think that they’d given in to Hitler, would you, the way they strut around London?’

  ‘Not all of them, Dulcie,’ Tilly protested.

  There were plenty of men in uniform in the teashop: navy, RAF, army, Polish airmen who had joined the RAF, as well as the Free French and a good smattering of uniforms from the Dominions, especially Canada. Tilly tried to distract Dulcie from her anger by pointing this out.

  ‘Well, yes, there’s plenty that are standing by us, even them as don’t have to, like Wilder
and the American Eagles.’

  Tilly smiled and nodded, relieved when the waitress arrived with their tea and eggs on toast.

  From his corner table tucked back against the wall, Drew was well placed to keep an eye on Tilly, even if she did have her back to him and even if the other girls were mostly out of view. He had heard the row, though, and he had smiled to himself. Trust Dulcie to say things as she saw them. He glanced down at his newspaper, the Evening Standard, which was carrying yet more grainy photographs of the appalling desolation inflicted by the weekend’s bombs. Inside the paper were heart-rendingly graphic interviews with survivors of the Café de Paris bomb, but no more heart-rending and graphic than the interviews he himself had conducted. He had telegraphed some of them back to Chigaco for his father’s paper, but had received a curt wire back telling him that the American people did not want to read about such unpleasant things over their breakfasts and that in future Drew was to stick to heart-warming stories about the Brits in desperate need of the food parcels they were receiving from generous Americans to keep them from starving, and how grateful they were to America for that. If necessary he could send in articles about the incredible bravery of young American fly boys, but his father had warned him that his paper’s stance on the war was that it did not have and could not have anything to do with encouraging them. Too many good American lives had been sacrificed in the Great War for that.

  Thinking of his father’s wire now, Drew swallowed back the acid taste of his own angry bile. He and his father thought so differently about so many things. There was no real closeness between them, no real father-and-son relationship. He looked again at Tilly. She was lucky to have the mother she had, and Drew was determined never to do anything that would damage that relationship or give Tilly cause to do anything impetuous that she might regret later on in her life. Love wasn’t just about the couple who loved, it was about the past and the future – and the family they would create together.

  He looked again at Tilly. The tension he had seen in her shoulders when he had first sat down had gone and he heard her laugh. A smile curled his own mouth. This get-together with the other girls would do her good.

  ‘Oh, Dulcie, do stop it,’ Tilly protested. ‘You’re making me laugh so much that my tummy hurts.’

  All of them were in fact laughing at Dulcie’s clever imitation of a customer, who had come in to protest that her box of face powder had ‘leaked’ because the cardboard was of inferior quality and that because of that she wanted Selfridges to replace it with a new one.

  ‘The things they try on! Honestly, you’d have to see it to believe it. One of the other girls was telling me that they had one woman in with six pairs of nylons, all of them laddered, complaining that she’d bought them in ’39, and that now when she’d come to open the packets she’d found that they were all faulty. Rose, the salesgirl, told me that she recognised right off that they were American nylons, her having worked on the nylons counter for going on for ten years – and cheap ones at that – the kind that some of the merchant seamen bring back and that get sold on the market. Just imagine the cheek of the woman coming into Selfridges and trying to claim they was ours.’ A toss of Dulcie’s head accompanied her words.

  They had all eaten every scrap of their eggs on toast, and their spotted dick, with its somewhat watery custard, as well as emptied two full pots of tea, and now it was time for them to leave; Sally for the hospital, where she was on night duty, and the other three for number 13, Tilly deliberately slowing her walking pace so that she and Drew could trail slightly behind Agnes and Dulcie, so that she could have him to herself.

  ‘You look a lot more like my Tilly now than you did this morning,’ Drew told her.

  ‘I still can’t forget what happened on Saturday,’ Tilly admitted, smiling up at him as she added, ‘but somehow you can’t not laugh when Dulcie starts telling one of her tales.’

  TWELVE

  ‘And now they’re saying that women over the age of twenty who aren’t married will have to register for munitions work before long, and that once you do you can be sent anywhere, and that you have to go. It was on the news, and then Drew brought us the papers to show us that it was in there as well. He reckons that after a while they’ll make it that more women have to do it by adding in more ages. Not that Sally or Tilly or Agnes will have to do it on account of them all being in protected jobs. Well, I don’t care what anyone in the Government says, I’m not leaving London. I’m just not,’ Dulcie told David determinedly.

  It was Easter weekend and she’d arrived at the hospital half an hour ago, having travelled down from London early Saturday morning, and now, as she made herself comfortable on the chair at David’s bedside, she was eager to air her grievances about the proposed new law to be brought in by the Minister of Labour, Mr Ernest Bevin, which called for all young women between the ages of twenty and thirty to register for essential wartime work in munitions.

  ‘It was bad enough having to do that ruddy fire-watching, without this,’ Dulcie continued. ‘I was talking to one girl and she’s got a sister who’s in munitions, and she says that it turns your skin yellow working with all that stuff, and that you have to wear a scarf round your head. Mind you, the money’s good. Not that I’m going to let anyone tell me what to do, and I’m certainly not going to let anyone send me away from London.’

  ‘Well, in that case, Dulcie, I suggest that you find out where your nearest munitions factory is and then go round there and have a word with someone on the quiet to make sure you can get in there before you have to register. That way you’ll be able to choose where you work rather than waiting to be sent somewhere,’ David responded.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Dulcie agreed. ‘There’s a place at Woolwich I could try. ’Cos if they was to send me out of London then I probably wouldn’t be able to come and see you. And if you was to ask me then I’d say that me coming to see you is just as much doing my bit as working in some munitions factory. Because like Sister was saying to me when I arrived, she doesn’t know how you’d go on now without having my visits to look forward to. Bin a tonic for you, I have.’

  ‘Yes, you have,’ David agreed gravely, after he had recovered from the small spluttering sound he’d had to choke back behind his hand.

  That was the thing about a man like David, who was a proper gentleman: he knew how to treat a girl right. Not like Wilder, who she hadn’t seen hair nor hide of for over a week, although he had sent her a brief scribbled note telling her that the RAF had said that the Eagle Squadron, manned by American volunteer pilots, was now officially operational.

  Not that a scribbled letter was anything much. You’d have thought after the way he’d just gone off and left them, and then all those bombs falling, that he’d have come up to London to see how she was. Not that Dulcie was going to tell David that she felt that Wilder was neglecting her. She didn’t want David to think that Wilder was anything other than totally besotted with her.

  ‘Yes, I’ll do as you suggest and take meself along to Woolwich and have a word with them there,’ she told him instead. ‘I dare say they’ll be only too pleased to have someone like me offering to work for them.’

  ‘I’m sure they will,’ David agreed, somehow managing to keep his expression deadpan.

  Against all the odds he was discovering that he was actually looking forward to Dulcie’s visits and enjoying her company. There was something about Dulcie that always lifted his spirits without him being able to say what exactly it was. It certainly wasn’t her interest in him or her concern for his health.

  David smiled to himself. He reckoned he must be the only patient in the entire hospital whose visitor did not, upon arrival, ask how he was but instead started to talk about herself. That, though, was one of the things that made him look forward to Dulcie’s visits. With Dulcie there was no false emotion, no faked sympathy, no embarrassment or discomfort. His injuries might simply not have existed, because Dulcie was far too wrapped up in herself to be
concerned with them. It meant that with Dulcie he could be himself. His real self, not the injured, helpless, dependent, pitiful David that Lydia and his mother saw when they looked at him, but the David who still existed inside his damaged body. In short, Dulcie treated him as though there was nothing wrong with him at all. Not out of compassion or because she was deliberately avoiding a difficult subject but because, being Dulcie, she was totally oblivious to everything and anything that did not concern her directly. Other people, other men in his position, might have found her selfish and self-centred, David knew, but he much preferred what others would have called selfishness in her to the sickly patronising concern of those who were fortunate enough to be sound in body and mind. Acknowledging that reminded him of something he still had to tell her, once he could break into her monologue about her own life.

  In order to get Dulcie’s attention David had already learned that one needed to focus with determination on one’s target, and once one had spotted a potential gap in the conversation one had to take aim with all guns blazing. ‘My mother came to see me last week,’ he broke into Dulcie’s diatribe against Mr Ernest Bevin, and his Ministry for Labour.

  ‘I thought you said she never came to see you?’ Dulcie challenged him. It wasn’t in her makeup to question why she should feel so antagonistic towards the idea of a mother visiting her son. If she had done she would have told herself that her anger was on David’s behalf because his mother had previously ignored him, and had nothing whatsoever to do with her own relationship with her mother or the fact that she felt let down by it.