by Annie Groves
London, especially Drury Lane and Piccadilly, were filled with men and women in uniform, especially RAF uniforms from Fighter Command’s men based in the South of England, coming to the city to enjoy their leave by visiting the theatre and nightclubs.
British uniforms weren’t the only ones to be seen either. In addition to the Free French of General de Gaulle, there were also Polish and Czech fighter pilots. And now that official military support from the colonies had arrived, there were servicemen from Australia, wearing their uniform hats pinned up at one side, from New Zealand, from Canada and, most recently, a contingent of airmen from Southern Rhodesia.
The Aussies were the most friendly and cheerful, and Tilly had been stopped more than once in the street by a smiling Australian wanting to know if she would ‘show him where Buckingham Palace was’, or making some other excuse to flirt with her. Such men though always took her refusal in good part, and Tilly had danced with some of them when the four of them – herself, Agnes, Dulcie and Sally – had gone to the Hammersmith Palais to celebrate Agnes’s birthday in early July.
It was her own birthday on 7 September, a Saturday, and it had been agreed that since her mother would be on duty with the WVS that afternoon, her ‘birthday tea’ would be put off until the Sunday, and the four girls would have tea out together in London before going on to the Hammersmith Palais.
Tilly had felt quite envious of her mother earlier in the month when she had seen George Formby, who was filming Spare a Copper at the Ealing Studios, helping with the collection of scrap metal, something that Olive’s WVS group took very seriously indeed. So seriously in fact that each member of the group had given one of their pans to the collection.
Tilly and Agnes had a St John Ambulance meeting this evening. Christopher wouldn’t be going, though. He hadn’t attended the last couple of weeks’ meetings following the death of his father, feeling that his mother needed his presence at home. Poor Christopher. He had loved his father so much, and his death had increased his loathing of war.
As she left work for the day, Dulcie’s thoughts were occupied with whether or not she was going to allow the good-looking Canadian, who had danced with her at the Palais the previous Saturday, to take her to the cinema, and admiring the nice tan the summer sunshine was giving her legs, meaning that she didn’t have to wear stockings, so that she didn’t see the man waiting for her until she had walked past him. He had called her name in a low urgent voice that had her spinning round in a mixture of disbelief anger and excitement, unable to stop herself from exclaiming, ‘David!’
He was in uniform and it suited him, adding to the devil-may-care manner that secretly she found so attractive. Not that she would ever admit that to him or anyone else, of course, especially now that he was married.
‘Dulcie.’ His delight at seeing her was obvious as he laughed and caught hold of her round the waist, swinging her off her feet and into his arms.
The unexpectedly familiar smell of him enveloped her – after all, his cologne was one they sold in Selfridges – further weakening her resistance. David, with his air of danger and excitement, appealed to a part of herself she had to struggle to control. But she did have to control it, she reminded herself.
‘Put me down,’ she demanded. ‘Someone might see us, and tell your wife, and she certainly wouldn’t approve of you being here, would she?’
‘I don’t care whether Lydia approves or not. She has her life, and I have mine.’
‘The life of an RAF pilot who wants to do things that a married man isn’t supposed to do,’ Dulcie challenged him as he released her.
Her comment made him look deep into her eyes and tell her in a husky voice, ‘There are so many things I’d like to do with you, Dulcie. I’ve thought about you a lot. We could have had a lot of fun together . . . we still can.’
Things like skulking around at the back of Selfridges, as though it were a back alley. Well, she wasn’t the back alley type, and she wasn’t going to be sweet-talked by David into becoming one, no matter how many jerky little bumps her heart gave just because he was here with her.
‘Like I’ve already told you, I don’t go out with married men,’ Dulcie reminded him, before asking sharply, ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘I’m on leave and in London – where else would I be but here hoping to see you whilst I still can. We’ve lost four pilots from our squadron this week, and two the week before. We have to live as much as we can whilst we can, Dulcie, because who knows which of us will be the next? I know what you said but I had to come and see you.’
He had moved out of the shadows now and it gave Dulcie a shock to see how the sunlight revealed harsh new lines either side of his mouth and a grimness to his expression. It shocked her even more to see how his hand trembled as he removed his cigarettes from his pocket and lit them each one.
Unfamiliar feelings of fear and panic turned her own body weak and cold. David was the last person she would have expected to talk about death.
‘I’ve got only tonight here. Lydia’s arranged some ruddy party she wants me to attend tomorrow – I should have gone straight home. I’ve got only a forty-eight-hour pass, but I told her I needed to come to London on RAF business. I have just this evening, Dulcie. Spend it with me. We could go out for dinner and then on to a club,’ David urged her.
To her own shock, for a heartbeat of time she was almost tempted to agree, but David was a married man now even if he had claimed to her before his marriage that marrying Lydia would never be anything more than a duty he had been obliged to perform. David meant nothing to Lydia as a man, Dulcie suspected, it was his suitability and his connections she had married.
It wasn’t because she felt she had a moral responsibility to recognise and protect their marriage that Dulcie was hesitating, though. It was because her instincts urged her to protect her own reputation. Once a girl crossed that line of respectability there could be no going back. Especially not when the man concerned was married. To Dulcie her reputation and her respectability were just as valuable assets as her beauty – important bargaining counters when the day came when she did want to get married and she had selected the husband she wanted. Just as Lydia and David’s marriage was founded on her family’s wealth and his family’s country connections, she would be in a better position to get the kind of husband she wanted if she had something of value to trade with herself.
Dulcie knew all this by instinct, so that it only took a moment’s hesitation before she was shaking her head and saying, ‘I can’t.’
‘Yes you can. Oh, Dulcie, please,’ David begged her reaching for her hand.
On the other side of the road, unobserved by either of them, Raphael, who had given in to an impulse to call and say ‘hello’ to Dulcie whilst he was in the area, saw David take Dulcie’s hand.
He was in London on family business – Enrico Manelli, like his own grandfather and along with over seven hundred other Italians, had lost his life when the Arandora Star, the ship transporting many of the Italian ‘aliens’ from Liverpool to Canada for internment, had been sunk by a German U-boat.
Some families had lost whole generations of male relatives, since, during their incarceration at Warth Mills near Bury in Lancashire, fearing that they would be separated, families had privately swapped papers so that family groups could stay together.
The trauma of so many deaths had affected everyone in the Italian community. Raphael’s own father had been consumed with guilt about Raphael’s grandfather and the fact that he had died without them being reconciled. Raphael had come to London during his leave to see Caterina Manelli to offer her his condolences. He didn’t know where the sudden impulse to come here to Selfridges to see Dulcie had come from, and had excused his behaviour to himself by telling himself that Dulcie might want to know what had happened to the Manellis.
Watching her now, though, he could see that his presence was hardly likely to be welcomed. So he turned and walked away.
Tuggin
g her hand free from David’s, Dulcie repeated, ‘I can’t,’ adding, ‘I’m already seeing someone this evening.’ It wasn’t a complete lie, because she was anticipating seeing the Canadian. ‘I must go.’ She didn’t want to stay in case David tried to persuade her to change her mind.
‘Dulcie, please.’
There was real anguish in his voice but she refused to listen to it, walking away from him so quickly that she was almost running, the flared skirt of her summer dress swirling round her legs in the speed of her retreat.
Agnes had been lingering so long outside the steps to Chancery Lane underground, that she was beginning to feel sick with anxiety and the fear of disappointment. She was waiting here after work in the hope of seeing Ted, whom she knew would be coming on duty. Agnes knew that what she was doing was ‘wrong’, and that it wasn’t acceptable for a girl to lie in wait for a man, especially when that man had already made it plain that he didn’t want anything more to do with her, but not knowing what it was she had done wrong and why Ted was ignoring her was making her feel so miserable that she had to see him.
It was a busy time of the evening, with people going home from work and others starting evening shifts, in addition to all the people in uniform, so many more of them now than there had been at the start of the war. Even Mr Smith had joined the Home Guard, as the Local Defence Volunteers were now called.
Agnes stiffened as she caught sight of Ted. He hadn’t seen her – yet. Determined not to lose the opportunity to speak with him she screwed up all her courage and plunged into the mêlée of people, her heart pounding so heavily she thought it would burst through her skin. She reached the door to the café at the same time as Ted, the colour leaving his face when he saw her.
Already he was turning away from her. Desperately, Agnes grabbed hold of his arm, pleading with him, ‘Ted, please, what’s wrong? Why don’t you want to be friends with me any more?’
The sight of Agnes’s pale pleading face made Ted want to take her in his arms and hold her tightly, not something he would normally have even considered doing in public and in full daylight, but such was the effect of seeing her after all the weeks of avoiding her that his emotions threatened to get the better of him. But he couldn’t and must not let them, he reminded himself. Things weren’t good at home. His younger sister had been poorly all summer, coughing and wheezing so badly that they’d had to have the doctor, and that had cost money, even though they were in a hospital savings plan. The doctor had said that it was the dry dusty air in London that was affecting little Sonia’s lungs and that she’d be better off living in the country, but there was no way Ted’s mother would allow her two young daughters to be evacuated without her, and they were over the age at which she could have been evacuated with them, so all they’d been able to do was to buy the medicine the doctor had recommended and keep Sonia inside as much as possible. Ted’s sister’s illness meant that his mother needed his wages even more. Only the previous night, lying awake in bed listening to Sonia coughing, Ted had known that the door had finally closed on any chance he might have had of courting Agnes.
Now, manfully, Ted put his own feelings to one side.
‘The thing is, Agnes,’ he began carefully, ‘when you and me used to get together you was still finding your feet at work, so to speak. It was like, well, a sort of business relationship. I couldn’t stand back and see you get yourself in a mess and perhaps leave the underground. I reckoned it was my duty to help you out a bit.’ He could see Agnes’s face crumpling, and he had to harden his heart and deny his own feelings, telling himself that it was better this way and that he was doing it for her. There was no sense in him starting something between them that could never go anywhere. Better to be cruel now to be kind to her for the future.
A business relationship? Did Ted mean that they had never really been friends at all? He must do.
‘It’s different now. You’ve settled in, and there’s no call for you and me to get together any more. I reckon you’re a real credit to what I’ve taught you and to yourself,’ he added, trying to soften the blow. He was hurting her, he knew, but it was surely better to hurt her now?
So now she knew. Ted hadn’t fallen out of friends with her, because he had never thought of them as friends in the first place. Agnes felt mortified. She wanted to run away and hide, but of course she couldn’t. She could only nod her head and accept what Ted was saying to her, and then let him go.
She cried all the way home. In fact she cried so much that she could hardly see where she was going, only managing to stop just before she reached Article Row, extracting her handkerchief from her pocket and doing her best to rub away the signs of her misery.
Olive wasn’t deceived, though. She was alone in the kitchen when Agnes came in, her head down and her shoulders bowed in defeat.
Down at the bottom of the garden the greenhouse door was open and she could see Tilly inside it, picking the tomatoes Olive had told her they needed for tea. Knowing that she would be several minutes, Olive seized her chance, going over to Agnes, taking hold of her hands and telling her gently, ‘I know that something’s upsetting you, Agnes. You haven’t been yourself for weeks now. Why don’t you tell me what it is?’
Olive’s sympathy was too much for Agnes’s fragile composure. Fresh tears started to fall as the story of her feelings for Ted and his lack of them for her came flooding out in fits and starts.
Once Olive had discreetly established that nothing that shouldn’t have happened between them had happened, and that Ted had not taken advantage of Agnes in any kind of way, Olive led Agnes to a chair and pushed her gently into it.
Young love could hurt so much. She could still remember the pain she had felt when she had discovered that the boy she had secretly admired for weeks had sent another girl a Valentine card.
‘I know what’s happened hurts dreadfully, Agnes, but it will get better, I promise you. Why, I shouldn’t be surprised if this time next year there’ll be another boy in your life who makes you forget Ted completely.’
‘No one could ever make me forget Ted,’ Agnes sobbed, crumpling her already damp handkerchief into a wet ball.
‘Oh, Agnes . . .’ Olive kneeled down in front of her and took her in her arms, rocking her as though she were a small child. There was nothing she could say or do to make things better, Olive knew. Compassionately, she stroked Agnes’s head.
Poor child. She was so young and so vulnerable. Somehow Olive couldn’t see her own Tilly being so overwhelmed and cast down with misery in the same situation, but then Tilly hadn’t experienced the same loss and childhood that Agnes had. She’d have to have a word with Tilly, and Sally too, to warn them not to mention Ted to Agnes.
‘Tilly will be coming in, in a minute,’ she told Agnes, releasing her and getting up. ‘Why don’t you go up upstairs and bathe your eyes with some cold water, Agnes, and then when you come down again I’ll have a nice hot cup of tea waiting for you?’
The day did bring some good news, though. Well, sort of good news, Olive thought as they all listened to Winston Churchill’s wireless broadcast to the nation that evening, silence between them as they concentrated whilst he spoke, Olive’s eyes filling with tears as he thundered the words.
‘The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All our hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day . . .’
When the speech finally came to an end, all of them exchanged looks, the emotional silence between them, as they digested what Mr Churchill had said, broken by Olive saying firmly, ‘I think we should have a cup of tea.’
Sally was still thinking about Winston Churchill’s speech the follow
ing day at work. His words stiffened one’s spine and lifted one’s spirits.
All the serving men on men’s surgical were talking about it and Sister had had to issue a ban on them discussing it for an hour to calm things down in the ward before the consultants’ morning rounds.
Privately all the nurses knew from the evacuated staff that one harsh reality of the RAF’s fierce defence of the country was the number of young men in military and other hospitals with the most dreadful kinds of wounds, not just missing limbs but terrible burns and disfiguring facial injuries. She herself this morning, when Matron had called for volunteers willing to go down to help out when needed on the now busy wards of the evacuated main hospital, had added her name to the list.
She told George about this later in the day as they left the British Museum together, George having asked Sally if she’d like to attend one of Myra Hess’s lunchtime concerts there.
‘I’ll be on duty down there as well,’ George told her.
Sally wouldn’t be leaving London permanently, of course; relief staff would only be called upon for short periods of a couple of days or so when necessary, and Sally hoped it wasn’t too selfish of her to feel glad about that. She had settled in so well at number 13 that it felt like home to her now and she would have been reluctant to leave.
The music had been uplifting and, combined with her existing feelings, had Sally surreptitiously wiping the betraying signs of emotion from her eyes as she and George stepped out into the afternoon sunshine.
She saw that George had noticed, though, and as they became part of the crowd walking away from the British Museum he reached into his pocket and produced an immaculately clean handkerchief, which he handed to her with such an understanding smile that Sally warmed even more to him, that feeling growing when he confessed, ‘I’ve never been able to listen to Beethoven without being in danger of disgracing myself and being overcome with my feelings, and Myra Hess does play so very well.’
