Women on the Home Front

by Annie Groves

  ‘Well, Rick certainly isn’t that,’ Dulcie said smartly, ‘’cos if he was he’d have ended up married to Beatie Sinclair from Brewer Street, she’s been chasing after him that hard.’

  The other girls all laughed and the one sitting furthest away from Dulcie – Bettie Fields – asked her, ‘Still working at Selfridges, are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dulcie confirmed.

  ‘We’re all thinking of going working in munitions,’ Bettie told her. ‘They reckon the pay’s the best there is. Oooh, here’s that lad coming over that danced with you three times last week, Rita.’ She nudged her friend. ‘And he’s got a couple of pals with him.’

  When she saw the three young men swaggering over to join them, Dulcie deliberately moved her chair away from those of the other girls. The young men were of a type and class familiar to her from her own family life, and Dulcie immediately mentally and somewhat scathingly dismissed them as being men she wouldn’t want to dance with. For a start their suits were shiny and ill-fitting, they were wearing boots, not shoes, and their stridently cockney accents made her grateful for the fact that she had learned to speak in a much more refined way since going to work at Selfridges. Neither Olive nor Tilly, nor indeed anyone she had spoken to in Article Row, spoke with a cockney accent, and when Rita flashed her a look and apologised insincerely, ‘Oh, sorry, Dulcie that there isn’t anyone for you to dance with,’ Dulcie was relieved rather than displeased.

  Not that she wouldn’t have minded someone buying her a drink, mind. It came to something when a girl as good-looking as she was had to sit all alone at a Saturday night dance without so much as having a drink bought for her.

  The band was on form, playing all the popular numbers with a lively beat, the dance floor already a crush of couples – young women wearing their best frocks, the men – many of whom were in uniform, eager to take their partners onto the floor. A group of Italian-looking young men stood together at the edge of the dance floor, the dark-haired good looks catching Dulcie’s attention. Not that there was any point in encouraging their attentions. Italian men wanted only one thing from non-Italian girls and it wasn’t a discussion about ice cream, Dulcie thought witheringly. There’d been a couple of young Italians attending the same boxing club as her brother, and Rick had soon set her straight about them.

  ‘They’re only allowed to marry girls of their own sort,’ he’d told her when the son of an Italian couple who ran a little shop round the corner from their parents’ house had started waiting for her after school and offering to walk home with her. ‘So you make sure you don’t let them muck around with you, Dulcie.’

  There’d been no need for her to ask him what he meant by ‘muck around’, nor any resentment on her part at his warning. After all, it had been Rick who had seen what was going on when their uncle Joey had started lying in wait for her at family get-togethers so that he could try to feel her up, pushing her into the darkest corner of the passage and then putting his hand on her budding breasts, before squeezing one of them so hard that it had hurt. Nothing had ever been said between them after Rick had come into the passage and seen what was going on, but later that week she’d seen her uncle in the street and he’d had a whopper of a black eye.

  Ted looked round the packed dance floor of the Hammersmith Palais, the heat generated by the dancers bringing him out in a sweat that beaded his forehead. He shouldn’t be here really. His ma had played holy heck when he’d told her that he was going out, because she’d wanted him to sit in with the kids whilst she went to the pictures with her sister, Ted’s aunt Dottie. He’d stuck to his guns, though. He’d had to after what Agnes had told him. The poor kid had been in a real state over coming here tonight. Left to herself, Ted reckoned that she’d funk it, but from what she’d said about her, that Tilly was another matter and hellbent on defying her ma. In Ted’s experienced view there could be only one outcome to the whole sorry mess and that was an all-out row and a lot of tears. One thing he was decided on, though, was that his Agnes wasn’t going to get the blame, and if that landlady of hers tried to blame her – or worse still, turf her out – then Ted was going to have to set her straight.

  His Agnes. Quite how it had happened that keeping an eye out for Agnes because she was so obviously wet behind the ears and incapable of looking after herself had turned into him starting to look forward to their teatime chats together, and then outright missing her when he couldn’t see her, Ted didn’t quite know. But it had happened, and although nothing had been said between them, Ted had decided that when the time was right, when she’d found her feet properly, and if she was willing then, Agnes was going to be his girl.

  A little awkwardly he looked over his shoulder. Ted felt a bit iffy about Hammersmith. Not the Palais itself – that had a good enough reputation, and the management were certainly keen on checking who they let in. They’d given him the once-over with a bit of a sharp eye. No, it was the reputation that Hammersmith itself had that had made him feel wary. The East End of the west end of the city, some called it. Ted didn’t know about that but he did know that to those who knew the city, who really knew it and had grown up knowing it at street level, Hammersmith was a hotbed of radical talkers, always wanting to stir up trouble. They’d had the IRA trying to bomb the bridge earlier in the year, and the only reason they hadn’t got away with it was because someone had seen the bomb and chucked it into the river. Then there was the river itself, or rather the pathway along it. Got a real reputation, that had, for all sorts of goings-on and was a favourite haunt for the cheapest types of prostitutes. The Palais itself, though, was removed from all of that. People came from all over the city to dance there. It had one of the best in-house orchestras in the country – the famous Joe Loss Orchestra.

  Ted had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that he didn’t stick out like a sore thumb when he got here. He’d been down to the public baths after work and had a really good soak, and then he’d gone home and dressed in his Sunday shirt and the tie that matched his one and only suit – his suit, like his tie, brown with a bit of a stripe in it. He’d Brylcreemed down his mousy hair and polished his shoes until he could see his face in them.

  It took him an hour to crisscross the whole of the interior of the Palais, and then, and only then, when he had decided to his own satisfaction that Agnes wasn’t there, did he make his way to the exit.

  If she wasn’t here then that meant that either Tilly had lost her nerve and changed her mind or something had gone wrong, by which Ted meant that Tilly’s ma had rumbled Tilly’s plot to deceive her.

  Standing on the pavement outside the Palais, Ted reflected on what to do. There was no point in him going home. His ma had missed her weekly trip to the pictures now, and besides, if Tilly and Agnes were in trouble then he wanted to know about it, for Agnes’s sake. Removing his flat cap from the pocket of the overcoat he had retrieved from the cloakroom, turning up his collar and pulling on his cap, Ted then shoved his hands into his pockets, hunching his shoulders against the dank fog-laden November air, as he set out for the underground.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Olive was alone in the kitchen when she heard the knock on the front door, Sally having gone out to meet her friends, and Tilly and Agnes still upstairs and very quiet.

  Blowing her nose on the handkerchief she retrieved from her sleeve, Olive guessed that her visitor would be Nancy, who sometimes came round on Saturday evening for a chat whilst her husband went down to the pub on the next street. The last thing she wanted was to have Nancy, who was such a gossip, guessing that something was wrong and asking her a lot of questions.

  Only it wasn’t Nancy she could see standing outside her front door, when she switched off the hall light to keep the blackout, and then opened the door. It was a man.

  Unable to make out his face in the darkness, Olive was wary about opening the door any wider, but whilst she hesitated a slightly nervous and young male voice told her, ‘I’ve come to see if Agnes is all right. She was suppos
ed to be going to the Hammersmith Palais. Agnes and me work together,’ he ploughed on desperately into the silence.

  Immediately Olive guessed, ‘You must be Ted then?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Ted was relieved to get a response.

  ‘And Agnes told you, did she, that you would find her at the Palais tonight?’ Olive’s voice hardened.

  ‘Oh, no, nothing like that,’ Ted denied. ‘Agnes isn’t the sort to go saying anything like that.’

  Softened by this response, Olive opened the door properly. ‘You’d better come in.’

  Taking off his cap, Ted stepped into the hall, glad of its warmth. Olive closed the front door and then switched on the light.

  ‘Agnes is all right, isn’t she? Only, she was a bit upset when she was telling me about what . . .’

  ‘About what my daughter was planning to do,’ Olive finished for him as she led the way to the kitchen.

  ‘Well, I didn’t want to say nothing about that,’ Ted told her, ‘’cos it’s none of my business, but I wouldn’t want to think of Agnes getting into trouble, and there not being anyone to stick up for her.’

  ‘Agnes is upstairs with my daughter,’ Olive told him, going automatically to fill the kettle and then light the gas beneath it, waving Ted into a chair as she did so.

  He looked a decent enough sort, and Sergeant Dawson had spoken well of him. Olive liked the fact that he was concerned about Agnes.

  ‘I found out what Tilly was planning and I refused to let them go. I’m sorry if you are disappointed at not being able to see Agnes there,’ Olive told Ted as she made the tea.

  ‘No. I mean, I only went there ’cos I was a bit worried about her. I told her it was a daft idea and that they were bound to get found out,’ Ted announced with male scorn for an ill-thought-out female plan. ‘Told her too she should say summat to you about it and get it knocked on the head, but she said she couldn’t on account of her and your Tilly being friends. Ta,’ he added gratefully when Olive poured him a mug of tea and handed it to him.

  Wrapping his cold hands round the mug, he told Olive, ‘Once I’d seen that they weren’t at the Palais I remembered how Agnes had said that she was feared that you might send her packing, her being only a lodger here, so I thought I’d come round just to make sure that you knew what was what.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that Agnes isn’t the sort of girl to break the rules, Ted,’ Olive assured him, touched by his obviously genuine concern for her lodger. ‘I’ve made my feelings about what she’s done very plain to Tilly and there’s no doubt in my mind about where the blame lies.’

  ‘Well, I dare say it’s natural that she wants to go, it being the best place in London for dancing and everyone going there. I was a bit iffy about it meself until I got inside, Hammersmith being what it is, but the management there know what’s what and there wasn’t any trouble going on inside, that I could see.’

  ‘That’s very reassuring to know, Ted,’ Olive thanked him gravely, hiding a small smile. Sergeant Dawson had said that Ted helped to look after his younger siblings and she could see that sense of responsibility in him when he talked about the Palais.

  Ted drained the last of his tea and stood up.

  ‘I’ll be on my way then now that I know that Agnes is all right. Thanks for the tea.’

  Dulcie tapped her foot irritably on the floor as she watched the three other girls dance off yet again with their partners. Not that she’d have wanted to dance with any of them, not for one minute. She could have been up there on the floor dancing. She’d been asked but she certainly wasn’t going to waste her blue silk frock or herself on any of the no-hopers who’d come up asking her for a dance.

  It wasn’t in Dulcie’s nature to question her own actions, never mind find fault with them. It was other people’s fault that she wasn’t dancing, not her own – because there was no one there good enough for her to dance with.

  She felt a tap on her shoulder and braced herself, turning round impatiently, the words of sarcastic rejection dying on her lips, her eyes rounding as she looked up into a familiar face, her heart thudding so hard it took her several seconds to vocalise her recognition in an uncharacteristically stunned voice. She stared at the handsome man wearing an RAF uniform, and said in disbelief, ‘You!’

  It was David James-Thompson. For a minute she was as shocked as a naïve girl who knew nothing might have been. But, of course, she wasn’t a naïve girl and she had always known that Lydia’s beau was the sort to break the rules, just as she had always known that eventually he would seek her out, she assured herself.

  Suddenly the evening was full of promise and excitement, the glitter from the mirror ball twirling over the dance floor and the spotlights reflected in the sparkle of her eyes.

  All she allowed herself to say was, ‘You’re in uniform.’

  ‘You noticed then,’ he teased her. ‘I signed up for the RAF a week ago. Decided I couldn’t bear to stand on the sidelines any longer. Pilot training begins next week.’

  The RAF. Far more exciting than if he had joined the army, Dulcie thought approvingly.

  ‘Thought I’d come on the off chance that you’d be here so we could celebrate together.’

  Dulcie was over her shock now, and that fast beating heart had been firmly restored to its normal beat. There was no way she was going to allow him to know how thrilled she’d been to see him.

  ‘Shouldn’t that be something you’re doing with your fiancée?’ she taunted him instead.

  ‘Possibly,’ he agreed, unabashed, as he came to sit down beside her, taking the seat that had been Rita’s and turning it round so that he was sitting facing her, his knees brushing against her thigh. ‘Although at the moment she isn’t very pleased with me for joining up. She and my parents think I should have arranged things so that I claimed exemption from military duty. Awfully boring doing that, though, especially when so many other chaps seem to be having so much fun. We like having fun, don’t we, Dulcie?’ he asked her with a knowing smile, reaching for her hand as he did so and then sliding his fingers through hers so that their hands were laced together with an expertise that told her that this wasn’t the first time he had done something so intimate. The very fact that he knew what he was doing made David all the more of a prize and all the more exciting.

  ‘We’re two of a kind, you and I,’ he told her, his eyes brimming with amusement and appreciation as though he knew what she was thinking.

  David watched the battle going on inside Dulcie’s thoughts and reflected in her gaze as caution fought with triumph. He hadn’t intended to come here, after the row with Lydia about him joining up. He’d planned to have dinner with a couple of other chaps who’d enlisted at the same time, and then go on to a nightclub with them, but then suddenly he’d thought of Dulcie and before he’d really known what he was doing he was on his way over here.

  She was a looker all right, and classy too, nothing cheap or common about the way she looked. David toyed with the idea of persuading her to leave the dancehall with him. He could take her to one of the quieter and more discreetly managed clubs he knew, somewhere where they could sit in the darkness together, but before he could say anything Dulcie was standing up and tugging impatiently on his hand as she demanded, ‘Well, now that you’re here we’d better dance, hadn’t we?’

  At the other end of the dance floor, on the elevated stage with its red curtains, the Joe Loss Orchestra swung into a waltz, and the lights were dipped.

  The floor was packed with dancers, giving them no option but to hold each other close. He was a good dancer, leading her confidently, but then he would be, him being posh, Dulcie thought. Really, the two of them looked so good together that they could have had their photographs in one of those gossip columns in the newspapers, which showed you photographs of lords and ladies and the like. She looked far better with him than Lydia would, with her sallow skin and her bad-tempered face with its thin mouth. She wasn’t surprised that David wanted to esc
ape from his fiancée to be with her.

  His fiancée. Dancing with another girl’s fiancé was one thing, especially when she disliked that girl as much as she disliked Lydia, but once David was married to Lydia then things would be different. Girls who went out with married men were putting themselves on the wrong side of the respectability line and Dulcie had no intention of ever doing that.

  Tilly couldn’t sleep. She knew her mother had come up to bed. She’d heard her familiar footsteps on the stairs and then the opening and closing of her door, followed by the further equally familiar sounds of her mother going to the bathroom and then returning to her room. She’d also heard Sally coming in, humming some tune under her breath, her firm nurse’s tread on the stairs. Only Dulcie was still out, but it wasn’t because of that that Tilly couldn’t sleep. Unlike Agnes, who was now making the small whuffling sounds she always made in her sleep.

  Had those really been tears she had seen in her mother’s eyes earlier? Tears caused by her? The weight of Tilly’s guilt oppressed her. Being grown up wasn’t just about doing what you wanted to do, she was beginning to recognise; it wasn’t all about good things, it was about the consequences of those things as well. She had made her mother cry, and now that mattered far more to her than the fact that they had been found out and prevented from going dancing. There was a tight miserable pain inside Tilly’s chest, and with it a fear. Previously she had believed that whatever happened in her life to upset her – like when the Benson sisters at school had started lying in wait for her and making fun of her – her mother could and would make everything all right again. But that had been before she had seen her mother’s tears, before she had known that her mother was vulnerable.

  The pain and guilt was too much for her. Throwing back the bedclothes, and trying not to shiver in the room’s chill, Tilly felt in the darkness with her feet for her slippers, burrowing her toes into their warmth in relief. She didn’t want to turn on the lamp in case she woke Agnes, but she was still able to retrieve her dressing gown from the post at the foot of the bed, quickly pulling it on and wrapping its cord round her. Her mother had been talking about making her and Agnes proper siren suits with hoods on them, to protect them from the cold should the air-raid siren go off and they had to spend the night in the Anderson shelter. Tilly had seen one of the suits in the window of Swan and Edgar. Bright red, its hood trimmed with swansdown, it had looked very warm and Christmassy, the pretty cosy image it portrayed very different from the reality of war rationing looming, and the increasing shortages of everything. All the best shops had their Christmas displays in their windows now: hampers with their lids thrown back to show what was inside in Fortnum and Mason; toys, of course, in Hamley’s; women’s clothes in the expensive dress shops in muted shades to tone with men’s uniforms. Christmas had always been such a special time at number 13. Her mother had made sure of that. Quietly and quickly Tilly made her way from her own bedroom to her mother’s.