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Chapter Three

‘The vicar’s wife has just told me that she thinks she knows someone who’d be exactly right for a lodger,’ Olive told Tilly as they walked home together arm in arm after the Sunday morning service. ‘I mentioned to her that I wanted to let a couple of rooms at our Women’s Voluntary Service meeting on Wednesday night, and now it seems she’s heard of a girl who’s looking for a room.’

Despite the warm sunshine Tilly shivered as she glanced down a side street to see a convoy of army lorries loaded with men in uniform rumbling along the Strand. The signs of preparation for a war that Mr Chamberlain had assured them would not happen were all around them, from the sandbags piled up around buildings, to the men in ARP uniforms, and the ongoing work on preparing public bomb shelters. In Hyde Park work was underway to dig trenches for shelters and war defences, and Tilly and her mother were doing their own bit ‘just in case’ it came to war. Tilly had joined her local St John Ambulance brigade, and her mother had joined the local Women’s Voluntary Service group – the WVS for short – run by Mrs Windle, the vicar’s wife.

There’d been a smattering of young men in uniform in church this morning, with their families, and Tilly had stopped to speak with one of them – a boy who had been ahead of her at school and who was home on leave from his obligatory six months’ military training.

The last time she’d seen Bob had been early in the summer, before he’d started his training, and the difference in him had really struck her. Gone was the soft-featured, faintly shy boy she remembered and in his place was a thinner, fitter, tougher-looking young man who spoke proudly of his determination to do his bit for the country, and his belief that Hitler would not stop merely at invading Czechoslovakia, no matter what the Prime Minister might want to think.

After church the talk had all been of the prospect of war.

Now, though, feeling her mother’s slight squeeze on her arm beneath the smart little white boxy jacket trimmed with navy blue she was wearing over her Sunday best frock, Tilly turned to her to listen.

‘The girl Mrs Windle has in mind is your own age, Tilly, and an orphan. Apparently she’s spent virtually all her life in an orphanage run by the Church, but now she’s too old to stay there any more. They’ve kept her on to help with the younger children but the Church has decided to evacuate the orphans to the country, they can’t take her with them. They’ve found her a job working on the ticket desk at Chancery Lane underground station and now she needs somewhere to live where she’ll feel comfortable and safe. She’ll be coming round to look at the room at four o’clock this afternoon, after the nurse you were telling me about. They both sound ideal lodgers for us. I’m looking forward to meeting them.’

‘Sally, the nurse, is a bit older than me, Mum, but I think you’ll like her.’

Like Tilly, in her navy-blue, white-spotted dress, Olive was wearing her Sunday best outfit, an oatmeal linen two-piece of neatly waisted jacket and simple straight skirt, made for her by a local dressmaker from the Greek Cypriot community. Both women were wearing hats, a girlish white straw boater with navy-blue ribbons in Tilly’s case, a neat plain oatmeal straw hat for Olive, which she was wearing tilted slightly to one side, in the prevailing fashion.

‘I feel sorry for the orphan girl, though. How awful never to have known her parents,’ Tilly sympathised, earning herself another maternal squeeze on her arm.

‘Yes, the poor little thing was left on the doorstep of the orphanage as a baby. According to Mrs Windle, she’s very shy and quiet,’ Olive approved. ‘She’ll be good company for you, darling. You’ll be able to go to church social events and dances together, I expect. Young people need to have fun, especially now, when there’s so much to worry about.’

Because it was such a warm day neither of them felt like a heavy traditional Sunday lunch, and so instead they were going to have a nice salad made from a tin of John West salmon Olive had splashed out on, and some lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes bought from Alan, the barrow boy from Covent Garden, whose pitch was just off the Strand. Eaten with some thin slices of buttered brown bread from the local bakery, it would be a feast fit for a queen, so Olive had pronounced before they had left for church. As an extra treat they were going to have a punnet of strawberries, again bought from Alan, with either some Carnation milk or possibly some ice cream from one of Italian ice-cream sellers who sold their wares from the tricycle-propelled mobile ice-cream ‘vans’ they drove round the streets.

The houses of Article Row didn’t have large back gardens, but at least there were gardens and not merely back yards, like those of the poorer quality houses in the area.

Olive and Tilly’s garden had a small narrow strip of lawn surrounded by equally narrow flowerbeds, with an old apple tree down at the bottom of the garden almost right up against the wall.

The Government had been urging people to think about growing their own salad and vegetables, but Olive wasn’t keen. She was city born and bred and didn’t know anything about gardening. The garden had been her father-in-law’s preserve before he had become too ill to work in it, and although she and Tilly kept the lawn mowed, pushing the small Wilkinson Sword lawn mower over the grass in the summer, and weeded the flowerbeds Olive didn’t fancy her chances of actually being able to grow anything edible.

‘We could take a walk over to Hyde Park this evening, if you fancy it,’ Olive suggested to Tilly as she unlocked their front door. ‘We might as well enjoy this good weather whilst we’ve got it.’

‘Yes, I’d like that,’ Tilly agreed immediately. ‘Bob was saying after church this morning that some of the men will be parading and drilling there – you know, being put through their paces a bit.’

‘We’ll go then. We have to support our young men in uniform.’

It was dead on three o’clock when Sally knocked on the well-maintained dark green front door of number 13. She had liked the look of Article Row the minute she had walked down it, after exploring a little of the area. Article Row might be different from the neat semi in Liverpool’s Wavertree area where she had grown up and lived with the parents, but she could see that here the householders were every bit as proud of their homes as her parents and their neighbours in Lilac Avenue had been of theirs.

Her keen nurse’s eye saw and immediately approved of Olive’s sparkling windows, immaculate front path and tidy little front garden. Sally liked too the way that the door was answered within seconds of her knocking on it.

She would have known that the woman stepping to one side to invite her into the clean fresh-smelling hallway was Tilly’s mother because of their shared looks, even if Olive hadn’t introduced herself with a warm but businesslike smile and a firm handshake.

The hall floor was covered in well-polished linoleum in a parquet flooring design, with a red and blue patterned carpet runner over it, the same carpet continuing up the stairs and held in place by shining brass stair rods.

‘I’ll show you the room first and then you can see the rest of the house afterwards,’ Olive suggested. ‘It’s this way.’

As she followed Olive up the two flights of stairs to the upper storey, Sally took note of the clean plain off-white-painted walls and the well-polished banister rail. On the first landing the doors to the bedrooms were closed, as were the doors on the upper floor, but she liked the fact that Olive opened both bedroom doors, telling her, ‘Both these rooms are more or less the same size. The front room was my late father-in-law’s until he died. It was his idea to install a bathroom up here. I must say, at the time I thought it was a lot of work for nothing, but now I’m glad that he did. Whoever takes the rooms will share the bathroom between them.’

‘Your notice said that you wanted respectable female lodgers,’ Sally checked as she stepped inside the front-facing bedroom. It was simply furnished with the unexpected luxury of a double bed, a shiny polished mahogany wardrobe and a matching dressing table, and a square of patterned beige carpet over brown patterned lino, the walls papered with a plain cream paper with a brown trellis design. A dark gold satin-covered bedspread and eiderdown covered the bed, and when Sally lifted them back she could see that the bed linen underneath was immaculately white and starched.

In addition to the bed, wardrobe and dressing table there was a comfortable-looking chair and a small bookcase.

‘That’s right,’ Olive confirmed. ‘We’ve got another girl coming to look at the rooms at four this afternoon, an orphan, recommended by the vicar’s wife. She’s just started working at Chancery Lane underground station.

Sally nodded.

‘And this is the back bedroom,’ Olive told her, stepping across the narrow landing, its floorboards stained dark oak.

This bedroom overlooked the garden and was rather more feminine in décor, with its pale lemon wallpaper decorated with white green-stemmed daisies. Its furniture was very similar to the furniture in the front room, though its coverlet and eiderdown were more of a lemon yellow than gold.

This time Sally paid her would-be landlady the compliment of not checking the bed linen.

The bathroom was as immaculately clean and fresh-looking as the bedrooms, half tiled in white, blue curtains hanging at the windows and a blue-patterned lino on the floor.

She liked it. She liked it very much, Sally acknowledged.

‘If you were to take the room you’d be expected to keep it neat and tidy, although of course I’d given it a good clean once a week,’ Olive told her.

‘And the rent?

‘Ten shillings a week. That includes an evening meal as well as breakfast, although I dare say, you being a nurse, you’ll be working shifts.’

‘Yes,’ Sally agreed as she followed Olive downstairs and into the kitchen, which she wasn’t surprised to see was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house.

‘There are no gentleman visitors to be taken up to your room, but I do not rule out the possibility of you inviting a male friend into the front room to wait for you,’ Olive continued.

Sally didn’t have any problem with that.

‘And the kitchen?’ she asked. ‘As I work shifts I’d want to be able to make myself a hot drink and have something to eat when I get back from my shift.’

Olive pursed her lips. She didn’t like the thought of anyone else making free with her kitchen but she could see that Sally, as Tilly had said, was the sort who could be trusted and who had the right kind of standards.

‘Yes, I’d be happy to allow that,’ she agreed.

‘Good, then in that case I’ll take the room.’ Sally informed her, specifying, ‘The front room, please. I like to see what’s going on.’ What she really meant was that she didn’t want to be surprised by any unexpected visitors from Liverpool coming in search of her.

‘It will be one week’s rent in advance,’ Olive told her. Although she was striving to sound business like, inwardly she was delighted to have found such an ideal lodger, and so quickly. If the little orphan turned out to be as good then Nancy was going to have to admit that she had been wrong complaining about the prospect of lodgers bringing down the neighbourhood.

‘I’m living in the nurses’ home at Barts at the moment. I’d like to move in as soon as possible, if that’s all right with you? Say, Tuesday? I’ll pay you then.’

‘That will suit me nicely,’ Olive confirmed.

‘I’ll aim to be with you at ten in the evening, if that suits you?’ Sally offered, as she extended her hand to shake on their agreement.

‘You mean she’s taken the room already? That means that if the orphan girl says she wants the other room when she comes then you’ll have let them both straight away,’ Tilly praised her mother, after Sally had gone.

‘Yes, and I must say that it’s a relief. I was anxious whether we’d actually get anyone interested, never mind exactly the right type of person. I like your nurse, Tilly.’

‘She’s not my nurse, but I liked her too.’

Dulcie pushed off her forehead a stray curl that had escaped from her smooth Veronica Lake hair-style to curl damply against her skin. In her right hand she was holding her best handbag: white leather, bought off a market trader, probably, she imagined, having been ‘acquired’ by dubious means. Or at least that had been her interpretation of the way in which the stall holder had looked warily up and down the street before producing the bag from a sack tucked away out of sight, when she’d asked to see ‘something good quality’. Dulcie didn’t mind where it had come from. What mattered to her was that it looked exactly like the classy and expensive bags on sale in Selfridges, at prices way beyond her slender means. Dulcie didn’t consider what she had done to be dishonest. It was part and parcel of the way of life for many of those who had the same hand-to-mouth existence of her own family. The fact that her dad and her brother both worked as plumbers in the building trade meant that they both suffered periods when they weren’t working, and Dulcie had grown up knowing that one penny often had to do the work of two. Dulcie had ambitions for herself, though: nice clothes, which, along with her good looks, attracted the attention of men and the envy of other girls, and having a good time.

She wasn’t having a good time right now, though. She was already beginning to regret having said that she would find somewhere else to live. Initially, when she’d looked in the newspaper there had been so many rooms advertised that she thought it would be easy. But now, having spent over two hours of her precious Sunday – the only day she had off work – crisscrossing the streets between her parents’ home in Stepney and Selfridges where she worked, she decided she really wanted something a bit closer to Selfridges than Stepney. But one look down some of the streets in the advertisements had been enough for her to dismiss them as not the kind of places she wanted to live at all, and that was without even asking to see the rooms. She wasn’t going to give up, though; slink home with her tail between her legs, so to speak, and have Edith get one up on her because she’d failed.

Two young men on the opposite side of the road – Italian, by the looks of them – were watching her as they smoked their cigarettes. The trouble with Edith was that she was an out-and-out show off, who always wanted to be the centre of attention, Dulcie decided crossly, as she stopped walking, as though she was unaware of the men’s presence as she pretended to check the seam of her stockings. The result was a gratifying increase in their focus on her. They were good-looking lads, no doubt about that, with their olive complexions, crisp dark wavy hair, and their dark brown gazes, which were paying her such flattering attention.

Reluctantly she straightened up and continued down the street. All she’d heard ever since Edith’s audition was how impressed they’d been at the Empire by her singing, and how Mr Kunz had said that he’d be a fool not to give her a chance. Dulcie would certainly be glad to get away from that – and from her sister.

Her feet, in her white sandals, were beginning to swell up, her toes feeling pinched, the August sunshine hot on her back. As a concession to the fact that it was Sunday – and she’d felt obliged to accompany her family to church after her father had started laying down the law about the importance of still being a family even if she was planning to move out, and that her elder brother could end up having to go to war, thanks to the Government telling Hitler that he wasn’t to invade Poland, and that if he did the British Army would go to its aid – she was wearing a very smart white hat with a deep raised flat brim, trimmed with a bow made from the same fabric as her favourite silk frock. She’d been lucky with that piece of silk, and no mistake, snapping it up when she’d seen it on sale as the last couple of yards on the roll in Selfridges’ haberdashery department. It hadn’t been her fault that the Saturday girl had thought that it was one shilling and sixpence a yard instead of the four shillings and sixpence it should have been because the price written on the inside of the roll had been rubbed away a bit. Dulcie hadn’t rubbed it away.

She was hot and beginning to feel tired and hungry. She looked at the paper again. Only three ringed notices left, the next one advertising a room to let somewhere called Article Row, Holborn.

Well, she was in Holborn. She saw a couple of children playing hopscotch out in the street and called out to them, ‘Article Row, where is it?’

‘Right behind you, miss,’ one of them answered her, pointing to the narrow entrance almost hidden by the shadows thrown by the surrounding buildings.

Cautiously Dulcie approached it, stepping into the shadows and then out of them again as Article Row opened out ahead of her, her spirits lifting as she realised how much better the houses were here than in the other streets she had visited. Number 13, the paper said. Determinedly she started to walk down the narrow street of uniformly neat tall houses, with their shining windows and painted front doors. Here and there she noticed a lace curtain move slightly.

‘The orphan girl is very late – it’s gone five o’clock now – do you think that she’s changed her mind or found somewhere else?’ Tilly asked her mother as they sat together in the kitchen, listening for the sound of anyone knocking on the front door. The kitchen door was open to the warm summer air, and Tilly’s faint sigh as she looked towards it had Olive saying lovingly, ‘You go out and enjoy the sunshine, Tilly love, I’ll hang on here a bit longer just in case she does turn up. Oh!’ They both looked towards the door into the hall as they heard the knock on the front door.

‘That must be her. Now you stay here because I want you to meet her. From what Mrs Windle said, she’s a bit on the shy side and I think she’ll probably welcome seeing someone of her own age.’

‘Yes, Mum,’ Tilly agreed. Pulling open the front door, Olive stared in bemusement at the appearance of the young woman who was standing on her doorstep. A quiet shy orphan was how the vicar’s wife had described Olive’s prospective lodger, but this young woman looked anything but quiet or shy, and she was dolled up to the nines, wearing clothes that were just a bit too stylish and attention-attracting for Olive’s taste.

‘I’ve come about the room you’ve got to let,’ Dulcie announced without preamble, stepping forward so that Olive was forced to move back and admit her into the hall.

‘Well, yes . . .’ Olive began, taken aback by both her prospective lodger’s appearance and her manner.

‘It’s this way, I suppose?’ Dulcie continued, heading for the stairs without waiting for Olive to invite her to do so.

From the kitchen Tilly goggled at the passing vision, taking in the close fit of Dulcie’s silk dress and the stylish brim of her hat with a tinge of envy laced with excitement. Tilly was a dutiful daughter and she understood that her mother’s protective attitude towards her was for her own benefit, but sometimes she did yearn for a bit more excitement in her life. The girl whose heels she could now hear on the stairs was, Tilly knew immediately, someone who knew how to have fun, the kind of girl that secretly she half envied and would like to have as a friend even though she suspected that her mother would not be too keen on their friendship.

‘These rooms are on the top floor, are they?’ Dulcie demanded on the first landing. ‘That will play hell with my feet, especially with me standing on them all day.’

Standing on them all day and wearing such high heels, Olive thought wryly, but all she said was, ‘Actually, there is only one room now; the other has been taken.’

It had, had it? Well, Dulcie thought that was probably a good sign, although she certainly wasn’t going to be fobbed off with the second-best room. She’d insist on seeing them both, she decided as they reached the top landing.

‘This is the room that’s left,’ Olive told her.

As she stepped into number 13’s back bedroom, for once Dulcie had nothing sharp to say. The room was easily half as big again as the one she shared with her sister. It had a double bed that she would have all to herself, a large wardrobe for her clothes, a dressing table, the glass top of which was shiny and clean and empty of the clutter that Edith spread all over their own small chest with a mirror stuck on the wall above it. There was even a chair, and a sort of shelf thing.

Dulcie walked over to the window, barely glancing into the garden below, her mind racing, calculating. If this was the room the other lodger hadn’t chosen then what must that room be like?

‘I’d like to see the other room before I make up my mind,’ she told Olive firmly.

‘That room’s already been taken,’ Olive repeated.

‘I’d still like to see it,’ Dulcie insisted, pushing past her to go and open the other bedroom door, and then frown as she looked inside and saw that whilst it was the same size as the back bedroom, its décor was nothing like as good. Fancy anyone deliberately choosing all that dull beige and brown over the lemon and daisy-patterned wallpaper of ‘her’ room. Her room and she was determined to have it, but Dulcie wasn’t going to let anyone know that and give them the upper hand.

‘Somewhere a bit better than what’s normally on offer is what I’m looking for,’ she announced. ‘I work at Selfridges, see, and Mr Selfridge, he likes them as works for him to keep up their standards,’ she told Olive, stepping back onto the landing.

The mention of the well-known and very smart Oxford Street store and the information that Dulcie worked there would normally have pleased Olive and been a point in Dulcie’s favour, but on this occasion Olive felt dismayed, and not just because she didn’t think that Dulcie was the kind of young woman she wanted under her roof.

‘You are Agnes Wilson, aren’t you?’ she asked her. ‘Only the vicar’s wife told me that you were going to be working at Chancery Lane underground station, when she said that you were looking for a room.’

Someone else was after ‘her room’? Dulcie wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

‘No, I’m not Agnes Wilson. My name’s Dulcie Simmonds,’ she told Olive. ‘I saw the advertisement for this room in the paper.’

‘Oh!’ Olive felt both relieved and uncomfortable. ‘In that case, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t let the room to you. I’ve as good as promised it to Agnes. In fact, I was expecting her to come round this afternoon, that’s why I thought you were her.’

The very thought that she might lose the room to someone else was enough to make Dulcie, used to having to compete with her younger sibling, all the more determined to have it.

‘Well, you might have been expecting her but she hasn’t turned up, has she? And even if she did, there’s no saying that she would want the room,’ Dulcie pointed out, adding acutely, ‘I can’t see a landlady wanting to let out a room to someone who isn’t reliable. It’s all very well her not turning up to view the room when she was supposed to, but what if her rent started not turning up when it was due?’

Dulcie had a point, Olive was forced to admit. Even so, she wasn’t keen on letting the room to someone she suspected could be a disruptive influence on the household.

‘It should be first come, first served,’ Dulcie insisted. ‘I am here first, and I’ve got the money to pay my rent.’

As she reached down to open her bag, Olive recognised that Dulcie wasn’t going to be dissuaded and that she was going to have to give in.

‘Very well,’ she agreed, against her better judgement. ‘It will be a week’s rent of ten shillings, including breakfast and an evening meal, in advance, payable the day you move in. I don’t allow gentleman callers to visit my lodgers in their rooms, so if that’s a problem . . . ?’

She was half hoping that Dulcie would say that it was, but Dulcie merely shrugged her shoulders and told her, ‘That suits me. If a lad wants to see me then he can prove it by taking me out somewhere. I’m not courting anyone and I don’t intend to start courting either. Not if there’s to be a war. You never know what might happen.’

Somehow Olive didn’t think that Dulcie was referring so much to the potential loss of a young man’s life as the potential opportunity for her to amuse herself with the variety of young men a war could bring into her life.

As they went back downstairs it was hard for Olive not to feel rather unhappy about the prospect of having Dulcie as a lodger. So much for her belief earlier that everything had worked out really well.

‘Before you go I should introduce you to my daughter, Tilly,’ Olive told Dulcie. ‘She works at Barts in the Lady Almoner’s office, and my other lodger is a nurse from the hospital. A very respectable young woman indeed,’ she emphasised, causing Dulcie to grimace inwardly, imagining what a dull pair her landlady’s daughter and the nurse sounded, as she responded to Tilly’s shy smile with a brief handshake.

Not that that bothered her. Dulcie wasn’t one for girl friends unless for some reason it suited her to have one, like when she wanted to go dancing and neither Rick nor Edith would go with her, and she certainly wasn’t looking for a bosom pal. That kind of thing was for soft schoolgirls.

‘So that’s that then,’ Tilly announced after Dulcie had gone, with a final, ‘Right then. I’ll be round Tuesday evening then, about eight o’clock, if that suits?’

‘Now we’ve got two lodgers.’

‘Yes,’ Olive agreed. ‘Although I’m not sure that Dulcie will fit in as well as Sally.’

Working in the orphanage kitchen buttering bread for the orphans’ tea, Agnes hoped desperately that Matron would not take it into her head to come in. Because if she did, she was bound to ask her how she had got on this afternoon going to look at that room she had been supposed to go and see.

She had intended to go. She’d got the directions to it from Cook, whose husband worked on the London trams and knew everywhere, and she’d told herself that it was silly for her to feel so alone and afraid. After all, she was seventeen, and most of the orphans had to leave the orphanage at fourteen. She’d been lucky that Matron had taken pity on her and allowed her to stay on and work to earn her keep.

To Agnes the orphanage wasn’t just her home, it was her whole life. The orphanage had taken her in when she had been left on its doorstep as an almost newly born baby, left in a shopping basket wrapped in a shabby pink blanket, which she still had, and wearing a flannelette nightdress and a nappy.

All of the other orphans knew something of their parentage and many of them had family, even if that family could not afford to house and feed them. Agnes was unique in the fact that she had no one. There’d been articles in the papers about her, Cook had once told her, attempts made to find the mother who had abandoned her. Sometimes even now Agnes looked at her reflection in the mirror and had wondered if she bore any resemblance to that mother, if her mother also had pale skin that flushed too easily, a pointed chin, pale blue eyes and light brown hair that sometimes refused to curl and at others curled where she didn’t want it to. Had she been thin, like Agnes herself was? However much she thought and wondered, even ached privately about her mother, Agnes never thought about her father. Cook had, after all, come right out with what no one else would lower themselves to say, especially Matron, who was so good and who had been a missionary in Africa in her youth, and that was that a baby who had been abandoned on an orphanage doorstep probably did not have a father, at least not a respectable married-to-her-mother kind of father, a father who would want to acknowledge that Agnes was his daughter.

Agnes didn’t really mind being an orphan. Not like some of the other children, who came into the orphanage when they were older and who could remember their parents. Those children had been Agnes’s special little ones before she had been told that she had to leave. She had comforted them and assured them that they would come to like being at the orphanage and feel safe there, like she did. Agnes feared the outside world. She feared being judged by it because of her birth. She rarely left the orphanage other than to go to church and to walk with a crocodile of children escorting them on some improving visit to a museum or a walk in Hyde Park. At fourteen, when other orphans her age were boasting about the fun they would have when they were free of the orphanage’s rules and restrictions, she had cried under her bedclothes for weeks, she had been so miserable at the thought of leaving.

That had been when Matron had said that she could stay on and work to earn her keep. She had been so grateful, feeling that her prayers had been answered and that she would be safe for ever. But now this war they might be having meant that the orphanage was being evacuated to another church orphanage in the country and that there wouldn’t be room for Agnes, or for some of the other staff either.

Matron had explained it all to her and had told her that they had found her a job working at Chancery Lane underground station, selling tickets, and a room in a house owned by a friend of a vicar’s wife.

‘You’ll like it at the station, Agnes,’ she had said. ‘And you know it well, from taking the little ones there on the underground. As for the landlady, she has a daughter your own age, and I am sure that the two of you will quickly become good friends.’ Matron had told her this in that jolly kind of voice that people used when they didn’t want you to be upset and cry.

Agnes had nodded her head, but inside she had felt sick with misery and fear. She still did, but now those feelings were even worse because this afternoon, instead of going to see Mrs Robbins at 13 Article Row, she had gone and sat on a bench in Hyde Park, where she had wished desperately that she didn’t have to leave the orphanage and that the orphanage didn’t have to be evacuated to the country. Agnes had never hated anyone in her life, but right now she felt that she could hate Adolf Hitler. She would have to go and see Mrs Robbins eventually, she knew that. And tomorrow morning she would have to present herself at Chancery Lane underground station, ready to start her new job. She wouldn’t be able to escape doing that, because Matron was going to take her there herself.