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Chapter Five

‘So you’re doing it then? You’re really going to go ahead and move out?’

Despite the fact that she could hear disbelief and censure in her brother’s voice, Dulcie tossed her head and demanded, ‘Yes I am, and so what?’

They were in the cramped shabby living room of their home, empty for once apart from the two of them.

‘So what?’ Rick repeated grimly. ‘Have you thought what this is going to do to Mum? We’re a family, Dulcie, and in case you’ve forgotten there just happens to be a war about to start. That’s a time when families should stick together.’

‘That’s easy for you to say when you’re leaving home to go and do six months’ military training. Have you thought about what that’s going to do to Mum?’ she challenged him, determined to fight her own corner.

‘I don’t have any choice. It’s the Government that’s said I’ve got to go,’ Rick pointed out.

‘And I don’t have any choice either, not with Edith treating my things like they belong to her and Mum backing her up.’ There was real bitterness in Dulcie’s voice now. ‘Mum always takes Edith’s side; she always has and she always will. All she wants me for is my wages.’

‘Aw, come on, Dulcie, that’s not true,’ Rick felt obliged to protest, but Dulcie could see that he was looking uncomfortable. Because he knew the truth!

‘Yes it is,’ Dulcie insisted. ‘Mum’s always favoured Edith, and you know it. It’s all very well for you to talk about families sticking together, but when has this family ever done anything for me? Mum hasn’t said a word to me about wanting me to stay. If you ask me she’s pleased to see me go. That way she can listen to Edith caterwauling all day long.’

There was just enough of a grain of truth – even though Dulcie had deliberately distorted and exaggerated it – in what she was saying for Rick to fall silent. During their childhood his sister had always been the one who seemed to get it in the neck and who had borne the brunt of their mother’s sometimes short temper, whilst Edith was indeed their mother’s favourite. Despite all that, though, he felt obliged, as the eldest of the family, to persist doggedly, ‘We’re family, Dulcie, and families like ours stick together.’

‘Fine, but they can stick together without me.’

‘You’ll regret leaving,’ Rick warned her, ‘and I’m only telling you that for your own good. Moving in with strangers – no good will come of it.’

‘Yes it will. I’ll not have a thieving sister helping herself to my clothes, nor a mother always having it in for me. Besides, it’s a really nice place I’m moving to, and you can see that for yourself ’cos I need you to give me a hand getting my stuff over there tonight.’

Rick sighed. He knew when he’d lost a fight, especially with Dulcie, who had her own ideas and opinions about everything, and who was as sharp as a tack when it came to making them plain.

‘All right, I will help you,’ he agreed, ‘provided you promise me that you’ll come home every Sunday to go to church with Mum.’

Dulcie was tempted to refuse, but she needed Rick’s help if she was to get her things to her new digs in one trip, and besides, something told her that her new landlady was the sort who thought things like families and going to church on Sunday were important. If she didn’t accept Rick’s terms she could end up finding herself dragged off to church by Olive. It would be worthwhile coming back once a week, if only to show off her new – unborrowable – clothes to Edith.

‘All right,’ she conceded.

‘Promise?’ Rick demanded.

‘Promise,’ Dulcie agreed.

Sally looked round her small Spartan room in the nurses’ home. The few possessions she had brought with her from Liverpool – apart from the photograph of her parents on their wedding day, in its silver frame – were packed in her case, ready for her to take to Article Row. As soon as she’d come off duty she’d changed out of her uniform, with its distinctive extra tall starched Barts’ cap, much taller than the caps worn by any nurses from any of the other London hospitals. Sisters’ caps were even taller, and even more stiffly starched, Sally guessed.

Workwise she’d fitted in quite well at Barts. She loved theatre work and had been welcomed by the other theatre staff, most of whom were down to be evacuated should Germany’s hostile advances into the territories of its neighbours continue and thus lead to a declaration of war by the British Government. Normally, of course, Sally would not have been allowed to ‘live out’ but these were not normal times.

Not normal times . . . Her life had ceased to be what she thought of as normal many months ago now.

She sat down on the edge of her narrow thin-mattressed bed, nowhere near as comfortable as the bed waiting for her in Article Row, and nowhere near as comfortable as the bed she had left behind her in Liverpool in the pretty semi-detached house that had always been her home. The house that she had refused to enter once she had known the truth, leaving Liverpool in the pale light of an early summer morning to catch the first train to London, with nothing but a recommendation to the matron at Barts from her own Hospital, and the trunk into which she had packed her belongings. Heavy though that trunk had been, it had been no heavier than the weight of her memories – both good and bad – on her heart.

She hadn’t told her father what she was planning to do. She’d known that he would plead with her and try to dissuade her, so instead she’d asked the taxi driver to take her first to her parents’ house, from her temporary room at the nurses’ home, where she’d put her letter to her father very quietly through the letter box, before going on to Lime Street station.

Her father would have read her letter over breakfast. She could picture him now, carefully pouring himself a cup of tea, sitting down at the blue-and-white-checked-oilcloth-covered table, with the paper propped up against the teapot, as he read the words that she had written telling him that she wanted nothing more to do with him.

Pain knifed through her. She had loved her parents so much. They had been such a happy family. Had been. Until the person she had thought of as her closest friend – close enough to be a sister – had destroyed everything.

A mixture of misery and anger tensed her throat muscles. The death of her mother had been hard enough to bear, but the betrayal of her closest friend; that had left a wound that was still too poisoned for her even to think of allowing it to close. As with all wounds, the poison must be removed before healing could take place, otherwise it would be driven deeper, to fester and cause more harm. Sally could not, though, see any way to remove that poison or to salve its wound with acceptance and forgiveness. She couldn’t. If she did she would be betraying her poor mother, who had suffered so dreadfully. She reached for her photograph and held it in both her hands as she looked into the faces of her youthful parents, her father so tall and dark and handsome, her fair-haired mother so petite and happy as she nestled within the protective curve of his arm.

Her mother had been such a happy, loving person, their home life in their comfortable semi so harmonious. Sally had grown up knowing that she wanted to be a nurse and her parents had encouraged her to follow her dream. Her father, a clerk working for the Town Hall, had helped her to enrol for their local St John Ambulance brigade as soon as she had been old enough. Those had been such happy days, free of the upsets that seemed to mar the childhoods of others. In the summer there had been picnics on the sands at Southport and Lytham St Annes; visits to Blackpool Tower and rides on the donkeys, trips across the Mersey, of course, in the ferry boats that plied between Liverpool and New Brighton, whilst in the winter there had been the excitement of Christmas and the pantomime.

And then when she had started her formal nurse’s training at Liverpool’s prestigious teaching hospital she had felt as though all her dreams had come true, especially when she had palled up with Morag, the pretty girl of Scots descent, whom Sally had liked from when they had first met up as new probationers.

Sally could still remember how awkward and excited at the same time she had felt when Morag had first introduced her to her elder brother, Callum, with his dark hair and piercing blue eyes. Callum, who looked as handsome as any film star and whose smile had made her insides quiver with delight.

Morag and Callum had become regular visitors at her parents’ home, welcomed there by her mother once she learned that they had lost their own parents, when the small rowboat they had taken out on Loch Lomond during a holiday there had sunk, drowning them both. That had been two years before she had met them, and before Callum’s job, as a newly qualified assistant teacher, had brought them both to Liverpool, where Morag had decided to train as a nurse.

They had all got on so well together, her father and Callum sharing an interest in natural history and often going off on long walks together, whilst Morag had shown Sally’s mother how to make the Scotch pancakes they all learned to love too much, small rounds of batter cooked on a flat skillet and then served warm with butter.

But then her mother had become ill, and had felt too sick to want to eat anything.

It had been Morag who had held her tightly after the doctor had broken the news to them that her mother had stomach cancer, Morag who had so willingly and, Sally had believed, lovingly helped her to nurse her mother through the long-drawn-out and heart-searingly hard to bear pain she had suffered in the last weeks and days of her life. Morag who had comforted Sally before, during and after the funeral, and not just Morag but Callum as well, both of them standing staunchly at her and her father’s sides to support them through the ordeal of her mother’s loss and burial.

In the weeks that had followed they had all become closer than ever, Callum calling regularly to spend time with her father, Morag too calling at the house to make hot meals for her father when she was off duty and Sally wasn’t.

Sally had been grateful to her then, loving her for her generosity in treating Sally’s father almost as though he were her own and helping to ease their grief.

Only it hadn’t been as another adopted ‘daughter’ that Morag had been comforting her father at all.

Sally closed her eyes and put the photograph face down inside her case before closing it, as though she couldn’t bear to have her mother ‘face’ the betrayal that still seared her own heart. It was time for her to go; her new life beckoned. It might not be what she had hoped for in those heady days when she had first felt the thrill of excitement that came from having her hand held in Callum’s, nor the warmth she had felt at believing that Morag was her best friend and as close to her as any sister, but it was her life and she had to live it, doing what she had been trained to do and remembering always what she owed to the mother she had loved so much and who had loved her. How her father could have done what he had she didn’t know, but she must not think of him. She must think instead of what lay ahead. There were those who had warned her that what she was doing was reckless when she had announced that she was leaving Liverpool to go to work in London, and right at its heart, the very place that would be most exposed and at risk if they did end up at war with the Germans. Sally had said nothing. What could she say, after all? That she didn’t care whether or not she lived or died, that part of her actually wished that she might die rather than go on living with the feelings that were now tearing her apart, the memories of her father’s voice, at first defensive and then angry when she had told him how shocked she was by his betrayal of her mother and the love they had shared? She had pleaded with him to change his mind and not to go ahead with his plans to marry Morag. How could her mother and she herself mean so little to him now when they had been everything to one another before? How could Morag actually expect her to ‘understand’, as she had pleaded with her to do? How could Callum – how dare Callum – have stood there and told her that she was being selfish and cruel and that her mother would have been ashamed of her?

Whilst she didn’t want Barts or its patients, or indeed anyone, to suffer the horrors of war, if there was to be war then she might as well be in the thick of it, she might as well risk her life in the place of another nurse who might have more reason to want to survive than she did. The truth was that she no longer cared what happened to her. Barts, like the rest of London, had laid its contingency plans for war. What could not be moved to a place of safety must stand and bear the onslaught of that war, and she fully intended to stand with it and to play her part. Better if anyone were to die that it was someone like her, with nothing and no one to live for.

‘And then when I told Matron what had happened she actually hugged me and told me that she was proud of me.’

After rushing headlong into her story the moment she had seen Ted waiting for her outside the café, now that they were inside sitting at ‘their’ table, their tea and teacakes in front of them, Agnes finally paused for breath.

‘You were right to tell me to go and see Mrs Robbins. She’s ever so nice, Ted, and Tilly, her daughter, has offered to share her room with me. She’s lovely, and so pretty. It was awful at first, me thinking that I’d lost the chance to have the room, but then when Tilly came running down the road after me, well . . .’

Ted listened sympathetically whilst Agnes told him yet again of her astonishment and gratitude. When she was all sparked up like she was right now, Agnes was a pretty little thing, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining.

He’d told his mother about her over breakfast this morning when he’d finally got in from his late shift. She’d pursed her lips and said that she wasn’t sure she held with orphans, on account of it being odd that someone shouldn’t have any family at all, but Ted had insisted that Agnes was all right.

‘Look I’ve done this for you,’ he told her after taking a bite of his teacake and chewing on it, reaching into his pocket to remove some sheets of folded paper. Spreading them out on the table, he explained, ‘See, this is a map of the underground, and these different colours, well, they’re for the different lines.’

Impressed, Agnes studied the complex interlinked coloured lines, all drawn so carefully.

‘This here dark blue, that’s the line I was telling you the stations for last night. And see, I’ve written down all the station names in the same colour as the lines.’

‘You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble on my account,’ Agnes said.

‘It wasn’t any trouble,’ Ted fibbed. His mother had had a real go at him, telling him off for missing out on his sleep to sit up and ‘draw lines for a daft girl who could be anybody’. But Ted had wanted to do it, and the look of delighted gratitude on Agnes’s face was more than enough payment.

‘See here,’ he continued, producing another sheet of paper and putting it down on the table on top of the first one. ‘I’ve listed all the stations again and I’ve written them down in the same colour as I’ve drawn the different lines, so as you can remember them better.’

‘I’ll never be able to remember them all,’ Agnes told him, shaking her head. ‘I got two tickets wrong again today and Mr Smith wasn’t at all pleased.’

‘His knees were probably bothering him. Suffers something rotten with his knees, old Smithy does. It comes of playing football when he was a youngster, so he says. He was a likely-looking junior for Arsenal before he went and broke a bone in his foot.’

Mr Smith, as wide as he was tall, had been a football player? Agnes’s eyes widened in amazement. Ted knew so much. He knew almost everything there was to know about the underground and those who worked there, she felt sure.

‘And here,’ Ted produced a third sheet of paper, ‘see these squares I’ve drawn over the map of the underground? Well, they tell you the different charging areas and where they change. Red’s the cheapest ’cos them’s the stations nearest to us, and them blue’s the next and then green . . .’

‘Ted, I’m ever so grateful to you. I don’t know what I can do to thank you.’

She was so earnest and so innocent, Ted thought protectively, well able to imagine what another lad, a lad who wasn’t him, might have to say to an offer like that.

‘Well, the best thing you can do is get them stations learned,’ he told her, mock reprovingly, finishing his teacake and then draining his teacup with noisy enthusiasm before saying casually, ‘So I’ll see you here again tomorrow so that we can run through some of them stations, shall I?’

‘Oh, yes, please – that is, if you’ve got time?’

‘Course I’ve got time. I’ll make time, but mind you look at them drawings and lists I’ve done for you and get learning them.’

‘Oh, I will,’ Agnes promised him fervently.

Later, hurrying along High Holborn towards the orphanage, Agnes acknowledged that somehow seeing Ted made the knowledge that this evening would be the last she would ever spend at the orphanage easier to bear. Matron had said that she would walk with her herself to Article Row to see her settled in. Agnes’s heart swelled with pride as she remembered how Matron had praised her for her honesty and her courage when she had told her that after initially being too cowardly to go and see the room when she should have done she had then gone back and been rewarded with Tilly’s generosity.

‘I can see already that you and Tilly are going to become good friends, Agnes,’ Matron had said.

Agnes certainly hoped so. She had never had a close friend of her own before, just as she had never had anyone like Ted in her life before, or a room she would have to share with only one other person, and in a proper house.

She hoped the two other lodgers would like her. Tilly hadn’t said much about them other than that one of them was a nurse, who worked at Barts, as Tilly herself did, and the other – the one who had claimed the room that was to have been Agnes’s – worked at Selfridges and was, in Tilly’s own words, ‘very glamorous and exciting’.

From her mother’s bedroom window Tilly surveyed Article Row eagerly, looking to see if any of their lodgers were on their way, even though it was only ten past seven. She had come upstairs using the excuse of needing to use the bathroom, knowing that her mother would disapprove of her hanging out of the window, so to speak, just as though they lived in some common rundown area where the inhabitants did things like that. Of course, her mother was being very matter-of-fact and businesslike about the whole thing, and because of that Tilly was having to pretend that she wasn’t excited, especially when it came to Dulcie, whose imminent presence in their home her mother was regularly verbally regretting.

Disappointingly, though, the only people Tilly could see were Nancy from next door, who was standing by her front gate with her arms folded and a scarf tied round her head, talking to the coalman. He had sent a message earlier in the week via the young nephew who worked for him that he had received an extra delivery of coal and that if his customers had any sense they would take advantage of this, though it was summer, and fill their cellars ‘just in case’.

There had been no need for anyone to ask, ‘Just in case what?’ The prospect of war was on every-one’s mind. Now, watching as his horse, obviously bored with his master’s delay, moved on his own to the next house, Tilly gave in to one of the delicious shivers of excitement she had been feeling ever since Dulcie had marched into number 13 and staked her claim on the back bedroom, imagining how much fun Dulcie was going to bring into their previously quiet lives.

Further down the road, right at the end, Sergeant Dawson was opening his front gate and stepping out onto the pavement, the buttons on his police uniform shining brightly in the evening sunlight. The Dawsons went to the same church as Tilly and her mother, and tended to keep themselves to themselves. They didn’t have any children, their only son having been sickly from birth and having died in his early teens. Tilly could only vaguely remember him, a thin pale boy several years older than her, in a wheelchair she’d seen being pushed out by Mrs Dawson.

The Simpson family at number 3 had four young children, two girls and two boys, and Tilly could see the boys taking turns riding their shared bicycle whilst the girls played hopscotch. Not that the children would be around for much longer. Barbara and the children were evacuating to Essex to stay with Barbara’s cousin, whilst Ian Simpson, who worked on the printing presses of the Daily Express in Fleet Street, would continue to live in the Row during the week and spend the weekend with his family.

Even so, if Nancy saw that the children had drawn on the pavement in chalk they’d be for it, Tilly reckoned. Nancy didn’t approve of children making the Row look cluttered and untidy, not when they had back gardens to play in.

Most of the inhabitants of Article Row were around Nancy’s age, with children who had grown up here and moved on, and some of the houses, mainly those further down from them, were all owned by the same landlord who rented them out to people who came and went, people who, in the main, worked at one of the local hospitals, the nearby Inns of Court, or the government offices on and around the Strand.

Downstairs, Olive’s thoughts were occupied with their lodgers every bit as much as Tilly’s, although in a different way. She’d spent the day, making sure that the house was immaculate, wiping a damp cloth over the insides of drawers and wardrobes, then leaving them open to the warm summer air to dry, before replacing inside the small bags of lavender she’d carefully sewn and filled at the end of the previous summer. The previous week she’d taken the last of her late father-in-law’s clothes down to Mr Isaac just off the Strand, carefully paying the money he’d given her for them into her Post Office book.

This morning she’d been up early to give her windows an extra polish with crumpled-up pages of the Daily Express dabbed with a bit of vinegar, and then this afternoon, she’d made up the beds with freshly aired sheets. She and Tilly had made do with a scratch tea of freshly boiled eggs, brown bread and butter, and some summer pudding she’d made earlier in the week. Now, as she surveyed her sparkling clean kitchen and smoothed a hand over the front of her apron she just hoped that she was doing the right thing, and that Nancy wasn’t right to disapprove and warn her that no good would come of her actions.

In the event Sally was the first of the lodgers to arrive, bringing with her only one small suitcase, her calm organised manner soothing Olive’s anxieties. For a girl still only in her early twenties, Sally had a very mature manner about her, Olive recognised, deciding that this must come of her being a nurse.

‘Yes, I’d love a cup of tea, please,’ she replied to Olive’s offer, ‘but I’d like to take my case up to my room and unpack first, if that’s all right with you.’

‘Of course,’ Olive agreed.

Upstairs in what was to be her new home, Sally unpacked quickly and efficiently pausing only to linger over and touch her parents’ photograph before making her way back downstairs to the kitchen where Olive was waiting for her with the kettle on the boil.

‘I’ve had keys cut for you all,’ Olive informed Sally. ‘My neighbour seems to think I shouldn’t have done but in your case especially, with you doing shift work, it seemed to make sense and I felt I couldn’t offer you your own key and not do the same for the two other girls.

‘Two other?’ Sally queried, smiling approvingly at Tilly as Olive explained what had happened.

Once they had their cups of tea they gravitated out into the back garden, Sally explaining, ‘It seems a shame not to make the most of this warm weather, especially as we don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to enjoy it. It was noticeable how many young men in uniform there are in London, as I made my way here, and of course no one can avoid noticing the sandbags and other precautions.’

‘No,’ Olive agreed unhappily. ‘I’ve already got my blackout curtains done. Me and Tilly did them together a few weeks back.’ She nodded towards the bottom of the garden. ‘As you can see, we’ve got an Anderson shelter in place. Sergeant Dawson from number one, and my neighbour from next door’s husband, came round and put it up for me. Sergeant Dawson said that I’ll be able to grow some salad greens on the top of it, with all the earth we’ve covered it with, but I don’t know the first thing about gardening, as you can see.’

‘My parents loved gardening,’ Sally smiled, ‘and I don’t mind having a go at turning part of the garden into a veggie patch, if you want me to?’

‘Would you?’ Olive was delighted. ‘I must say that I’ve been feeling a bit guilty that I haven’t got a clue when all the neighbours seem to be doing their bit and growing all sorts. There’s a small shed on the other side of the Anderson, and a bit of a greenhouse, but you can’t see them right now for the apple tree.’

Gardening had been something Sally and her parents had always done as a family, and although it would be painful to take it up again because of the memories it would bring back it would also be something she would enjoy, Sally knew.

‘I’d be happy to do what I can, although I dare say with Covent Garden so close you aren’t short of fresh veggies.’

‘Not normally,’ Tilly joined in, ‘but I overheard Sergeant Dawson telling Mrs Black from number fourteen the other morning that if we do go to war then it mightn’t be so easy to get fresh food. Smithfield Market has already been moved, and . . .’ Tilly hesitated and then, because Sally was after all a nurse and working at Barts herself, she continued in a small rush, ‘. . . and they were saying in the Lady Almoner’s office this morning that they wouldn’t be surprised if the evacuation of the hospital didn’t start soon.’

‘That’s true,’ Sally agreed, finishing her tea, which had been strong and hot, just as she liked it.

* * *

‘Are you sure you really need all this stuff? After all, you’ll be coming home every week,’ Rick complained as he was forced to sit on the bulging suitcase that Dulcie had borrowed from one of their neighbours in order to transport her personal belongings to her new home.

‘Of course I need it, otherwise I wouldn’t be taking it, would I?’ Dulcie responded scornfully.

Her brother was wearing his new army uniform, collected only that morning prior to him going off for his six months’ military training in a few days’ time. The heavy khaki clothes and sturdy boots, which often looked uncomfortable and unwieldy on other men, seemed to fit Rick quite well, but Dulcie certainly wasn’t going to boost her brother’s ego by telling him how surprisingly good-looking and well set up he looked. Even with his new short back and sides haircut.

When they went downstairs, the family were all gathered in the kitchen, her mother’s pursed mouth making it plain what she thought of Dulcie’s decision and her behaviour, whilst, typically, her dad had hidden himself behind his evening paper as he sat at the kitchen table drinking his cup of tea, whilst Edith, smugly virtuous as always, was doing the washing up.

‘That’s it, then, I’m off,’ Dulcie announced from the open kitchen door.

Her mother’s look of disapproval deepened, but then, at the last minute, just as she was about to turn away, her mother came over, telling her with maternal concern, ‘You just look out for yourself, Dulcie. You like to think you know all there is to know. It’s all right thinking that when you’ve got the support of a family behind you but it’s a very different matter when you’re all on your own. You just remember as well that we are your family, and if you aren’t back here on Sunday morning to go to church with us then I’ll have something to say about it, I can tell you, and so will your dad.’

It was the longest speech her mother had made to her in a good while, and to her own astonishment Dulcie discovered that there was an unfamiliar lump in the back of her throat as she tossed her head and pretended not to be affected by this unexpected display of affection.

It might not be a long distance as the crow flew from Stepney to Article Row, but just given that they were not crows or able to fly, and given, too, the bulging weight of Dulcie’s borrowed suitcase, Rick quickly discovered, as he manhandled the suitcase onto the bus, that he had been right to suspect that it would not be an easy journey. Dulcie, of course, had jumped on the bus ahead of him and was right now slipping into what looked like the last vacant seat, leaving him to strap hang and keep an eye on her case. Mind, there was one advantage to helping his sister, since the four girls squashed into the long seat at the back of the bus meant for only three people were now all looking approvingly at him.

Rick winked at them and joked, ‘How about making room for a little ’un, girls? One of you could always sit on my knee.’

The girls giggled whilst pretending to disapprove, and Rick was just on the point of taking things a bit further when Dulcie turned round in her seat to call out, ‘You can pay for me, Ricky, and make sure you keep an eye on that suitcase.’

Having realised that he was ‘with’ Dulcie, the four girls looked disapproving at him, obviously jumping to the conclusion that they were a couple, and were now studiously ignoring him.

‘Trust you to flirt with the likes of them,’ Dulcie told him scornfully, once they had got off the bus in High Holborn, Rick having to tussle with the case to get it past the queue of people pressing forward to get on the bus. ‘Common as anything, they were, and if you carry on like that you’ll end up having your name written against the name of a kid that might not be yours, on its birth certificate.’

Unabashed by this sisterly warning, Rick shook his head. ‘No way would I fall for anything like that. When I do write my name on a kid’s birth certificate, it will be my kid and its mother will be my wife. But I’m not up for that yet, not with this war, and plenty of girls fancying a good-looking lad in uniform. Fun’s the name of the game for me.’

Dulcie couldn’t object or argue since she felt very much the same, although in her case there was no way she was letting any chap think she was going to take the kind of risks that got a girl into trouble. Being tied down in marriage with an unwanted baby on her hip wasn’t what Dulcie wanted for her future at all.

Everywhere you went London’s buildings were now protected by sandbags, the windowpanes covered in crisscrosses of sticky brown tape, which the Government had said would hold the glass together in a bomb blast and prevent people from being cut by flying fragments.

Outside one of the public shelters a woman was haranguing an ARP warden, demanding to know whether or not Hitler was coming and when, whilst a gaggle of girls in WRNS uniform hurried past in the opposite direction, carrying their gas masks in smart boxes.

‘Cor, look at those legs,’ Rick commented appreciatively, taking a break from carrying the case, to flex his aching arm muscles as he turned to admire the girls’ legs in their regulation black stockings. Out of all the services, only the WRNS were issued with such elegant stockings, but Dulcie eyed them disparagingly.

‘You can get better than that in Selfridges’ hosiery department,’ she sneered.

‘Maybe so, but I’ll bet they cost a pretty penny.’

Dulcie nodded, feeling smug that she’d had the good sense to snap up half a dozen pairs from a consignment in which the boxes had been damaged, rendering them unfit for sale in Mr Selfridge’s opinion and so sold to his staff at a discount price.

Dulcie had heard that it wasn’t entirely unusual for some consignments of luxury goods to end up being ‘damaged’ thanks to an arrangement between the delivery drivers and the men who unloaded them, and that most of the damaged stock was then sold in one or other of the East End markets.

‘This way,’ she instructed Rick, indicating the turning that would eventually lead to Article Row.

She hadn’t said much at home about Article Row and so she had the satisfaction of seeing her normally unimpressable elder brother come to a halt and stare around himself to take in the well-tended line of houses.

‘Bit posh, isn’t it?’ was all he allowed himself to say, but Dulcie knew him and she knew that he was impressed.

Sergeant Dawson, leaning on his front gate and watching the world go by, spotted them and straightened up. He’d heard initially on the Row’s grapevine via its best gossip, Nancy, that Olive from number 13 was taking in lodgers; he’d seen Sally arrive, and then the thin little waif accompanied by the larger older woman, guessing that the girl must be the orphan recommended for a room by the vicar’s wife, but this young woman walking toward him confidently now, well, Nancy and the other old biddies would have something to say about her, the sergeant reflected, not altogether unappreciative of the slim length of Dulcie’s legs in her nylon stockings, or the way in which the skirt of her fitted poppy-red dress, with its white collar, just reached to her knee, its white belt showing off her narrow waist. He didn’t think, however, that Mrs Dawson would be equally appreciative, and he felt sorry for Olive, whom he knew and liked, having to deal with the kind of lodger this one looked as though she could turn out to be, and accompanied by a lad as well. The Row would not approve of that! Respectable single ladies was what Olive had advertised for, not too-pretty young girls of a type that would attract men like honey attracted bees.

He nodded a brief welcome in their direction though, causing Rick to respond with a smile, and gesture toward Dulcie’s case.

‘You’d think she’d got enough clothes in here to fit out the whole street.’

‘Row, lad,’ Archie Dawson corrected him. ‘You won’t be very popular round here if you call Article Row a street.’

‘See, I told you it was posh,’ Rick told Dulcie as she gave him a warning look and determinedly marched past the policeman.

It was Tilly who saw them first. The orphanage matron had left, her mother was showing Sally the garden, so she’d come upstairs to help Agnes unpack, feeling sorry for her when she saw how little she had, and all of it looking second-hand. Poor girl, Tilly thought as she watched Agnes hang her uniform and her other small collection of clothes in the half of the wardrobe Tilly had cleared for her. The dull brown dress Agnes was wearing didn’t do anything for her, making her look thinner than ever because it was too big for her, and turning her skin slightly sallow.

‘I’ll be downstairs, when you’re ready,’ Tilly had told her, thinking that Agnes might want to use the bathroom or perhaps unpack a few personal treasures in privacy, but then with her foot on the top stair, she’d turned back to go into her mother’s room and look down the Row again.

And that was when she saw Dulcie, in her smart red dress and her white high-heeled peep-toed shoes, followed by the best-looking young man Tilly had ever seen carrying a large suitcase.

As though he sensed that he was being studied, the young man looked up at the window, causing Tilly to step back, clasping her hands over her chest to calm her excited heartbeat as she did so.

Was he Dulcie’s young man? He must be, Tilly decided, racing downstairs and out into the garden to warn her mother breathlessly, ‘Dulcie’s nearly here.’

Although she smiled and turned to make her way back to the house, Olive wasn’t happy about her daughter’s obvious excitement. This was just what she had feared. Tilly was at an impressionable age. Because there weren’t any other young people in the Row of her age, and because her mother had been so busy nursing Tilly’s late grandfather, Tilly hadn’t had the opportunity to go out and have fun as much as other girls might. Olive was aware of that, just as she was aware of the increasing restlessness she had seen in her daughter over the summer months. There was fun and fun, though, and Olive did not want her quite naïve daughter getting involved in the kind of ‘fun’ she suspected someone like Dulcie enjoyed.

When Olive opened the door to Dulcie’s firm knock, though, it wasn’t the sight of Dulcie that set maternal alarm bells ringing inside her so much as the sight of the far too handsome young man standing behind her, one arm draped loosely around Dulcie’s shoulders. Her mouth firmed, her expression cooled, but before she could say anything Dulcie forestalled her.

‘It’s all right. Rick here is only my brother. He’s come to help me move in on account of my case being heavy. Rick, this is Mrs Robbins.’

Her brother and not a boyfriend. Olive allowed herself to relax a little. Rick’s smile was open and warm, his handshake firm and his uniform indicating that it was unlikely that he was going to be around very much, to Olive’s relief, as she recognised the effect having such a very good-looking and friendly young man in and out of the house could have on her daughter. Rick had the kind of smile, looks, and easy charm that would melt any girl’s heart.

‘I’ll show them up, shall I?’ Tilly suggested happily from the hallway, having just learned that the handsome young man was Dulcie’s brother and not her boyfriend.

But to her disappointment her mother told her, ‘I’m sure that Dulcie can remember which is her room and you’d only be in the way of her brother getting her suitcase up the stairs. Go and put on the kettle instead, please, Tilly, so that Dulcie and Rick can come down and have a cup of tea when they’re ready.’

‘Well, I have to admit that you’ve fallen on your feet here,’ Rick pronounced after he had dragged the heavy case up to Dulcie’s room and thoroughly inspected her new living quarters.

‘Told you,’ Dulcie reminded him. ‘I’ve got a whole room to myself and my own wardrobe, and there’s a bathroom on this floor that I only have to share with this nurse that’s taken the other room.’

‘All right, but don’t you forget that promise you made me,’ Rick warned her as he picked up the now empty case.

Olive was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs, ushering them into the kitchen, ruefully aware of just how pleasant and charming Dulcie’s brother was in contrast to Dulcie herself. Pleasant and charming and far, far too good-looking for the peace of mind of the mother of an impressionable girl, especially when that impressionable girl was currently gazing at him with the kind of dazed expression girls her age normally reserved for matinée idols, Olive thought with a small sigh. She directed Tilly to fetch some milk from the larder, and then to go and bring Agnes and Sally in from the garden so that they too could have a cup of tea.

When the three young women returned Dulcie’s eyes widened at the sight of Agnes in her dull ill-fitting brown dress, and then narrowed with hostility when Olive told her pointedly, ‘This is Agnes, who should have had your room. Luckily she doesn’t mind sharing with Tilly. Come on and sit down, Agnes,’ Olive coaxed the hesitant-looking girl, her voice and expression warming as she welcomed her.

Her new landlady’s obvious approval of the shabbily dressed orphan and her equally obvious disapproval of her raised Dulcie’s hackles and brought out the same fighting instinct that her mother’s favouritism of Edith always aroused. The orphan was nothing compared with her so why should Olive make such a fuss of her? Deliberately and very disdainfully Dulcie brushed off the skirt of her own dress as Agnes’s shabby frock touched it, the pearl-pink nail polish she was wearing catching the light as she did so.

Little madam, Olive thought grimly, treating poor Agnes like that, although fortunately the other girl hadn’t noticed Dulcie’s deliberate slight. Dulcie, though, noticed Olive’s reaction and immediately her dislike of Agnes for her shabbiness hardened into dislike of the girl herself, because Olive obviously favoured her. Agnes was another Edith, ‘a favourite’ to be fussed over whilst she was pushed to one side and ignored.

‘Just been called up?’ Sally asked Rick, whilst Tilly looked on, envious of the older girl’s calm ability actually to speak to Rick whilst she could only stare at him in speechless awe.

‘Yes,’ Rick acknowledged. ‘I leave in a few days to start my training, and I reckon that we’ll be at war before I finish it, from what they’ve been saying in the papers.’

‘I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,’ Sally agreed.

‘The sooner we get Hitler sorted out and put in his place, the sooner life can get back to normal. I reckon we’ll give him the roundabout and boot him back to Germany in no time at all,’ Rick assured her confidently. ‘He’ll never get past the Maginot Line, even if he does dare to try and invade Belgium.’

‘That’s what the Government is saying,’ Sally confirmed.

Olive hugged her arms around her body. ‘I hate all this talk of war, after what our men went through the last time,’ she said, ‘but if it has to come then it has to come. Turn on the wireless, will you, Tilly? It’s almost time for the news.’

Obediently Tilly went to switch on the wireless, feeling all fingers and thumbs and very self-conscious as she did so, because Rick was sitting closest to it.

The announcer’s voice, when it did come through, was slightly fuzzy, and immediately Rick turned in his chair, leaning over to Tilly. ‘It needs a bit of tuning – want me to do it for you?’

Before she could answer, he was reaching out towards the control knob, so that his fingers brushed against hers as she moved away.

Scarlet colour dyed her skin, her heart flipping over like an acrobat whilst her pulses raced with excitement and delight, mixed with even more self-consciousness.

‘There, that’s it,’ Rick told her as his small adjustment brought the sound back in balance, his smile for Tilly warm and friendly. She was a very pretty girl, but very young, not much more than a school girl. Had she been a couple of years older he might have been tempted to tease her a little and really make her blush, before he asked her out and kissed her – had she not been Dulcie’s landlady’s daughter and had he not been about to leave London. Right now, as far as Rick was concerned, Tilly was just a nice kid.

All of them fell silent whilst they listened to the news, even Dulcie. Not that there was much to learn unless you were interested in the fact that Poland had mobilised all its reservists and France had called up all of hers which Dulcie wasn’t, not really She was more interested in wondering when she was next going to see David James-Thompson. When she was going to see him, not if, because she knew that she would. She really could do with getting hold of a decent bit of material and having a new dress made, Dulcie decided, because when David James-Thompson took her to the Hammersmith Palais de Danse she wanted to look her best, so that he’d know that every other man there was looking at him and envying him because he was with her. Dulcie loved that kind of admiration; that feeling of knowing that she was the best.

The newsreader was talking about Britain’s plans for evacuating children from the cities, and whilst Olive and Sally sighed and said how awful that was going to be for their mothers, Tilly sat with her chin in her hands pretending to listen intently, whilst in reality what she was looking at was Rick.

It had been such a busy evening she hadn’t had any time at all to study Ted’s lists, Agnes acknowledged, but she could start reciting them to herself in the morning whilst she walked to work. She’d expected her new surroundings to feel alien and a little bit frightening but Tilly and her mother had made her feel so welcome. It felt funny not to be in the large orphanage kitchen, washing up or helping cook. Tilly’s mother had stopped her when she had gone to wash their teacups earlier, saying that there would be time enough for that another day and that anyway, she was a paying lodger and not here to work.

Olive nodded as she listened to Sally whilst inwardly thinking that she would have a word with Tilly and see what she thought about passing on a couple of the dresses she was growing out of on to Agnes. Matron had more or less admitted to Olive before she had left that it was difficult getting second-hand clothes for Agnes because she was so much older than the other girls, and the clothes that people passed on to the orphanage were for younger children. Olive had decided there and then that she would do her utmost to make sure that poor Agnes had a few better things. She would see if she could get a decent bit of material from one of the markets, Petticoat Lane perhaps, to have something new made up for both Tilly and Agnes. She could afford it now that she was getting three lots of rent money in, even if she had reduced what Agnes had to pay because she was having to share with Tilly.

The news had finished. Rick got to his feet, having assured himself that his sister had indeed found somewhere comfortable. It had been daft of him secretly to worry about her. Trust Dulcie to fall on her feet. Not that he liked what she had done. Families should stay together – that was how people like them lived – but Dulcie had always been awkward, wanting to make things difficult for herself and for others.

Dulcie saw Rick to the front door.

‘And don’t you forget about going home on Sunday to go to church?’ he reiterated yet again.

‘Will you stop going on about that?’ she complained. ‘I’ve said I’ll come, haven’t I?’

‘Well, you just make sure you do,’ Rick warned her, as he set off in the direction of Stepney with the now empty case.

It was gone eleven o’clock, she could see from the tiny illuminated hands of her alarm clock, but Sally still couldn’t sleep. Being back in a proper bedroom in a proper house had brought back too many memories.

Memories of before the betrayal, when Morag had been invited home by her mother and had stayed overnight with them; memories of the laughter and happiness that had filled the kitchen as Morag easily and naturally fell into the household routine, helping with the chores; memories of the Christmas before her mother had fallen ill that they had all spent together, Morag, Callum, her parents and her. She could see herself now pulling a cracker with Callum and then wearing the silly hat he had put on her head before reading out the equally silly riddle that had been inside the cracker along with a plastic heart charm, which he had given to her with the words, ‘Here’s my heart, Sally. I want you to look after it for me.’ Silly words, and yet to her at the time they had had such meaning. It was pointless thinking about that now, she told herself, rolling over and punching her pillow as she reminded herself that she was on duty in the morning at eight o’clock, and that the ENT surgeon had a full list of tonsil-lectomies to get through, the final batch before the majority of the operating staff were evacuated. These urgent operations were now to be carried out in the basement theatres the hospital had organised, the top-floor theatres closed down because of the threat of war.

Liverpool . . . She would always miss her home city, Sally knew, but she would not miss the pain she hoped she had left behind there. A pain she was determined should not follow her into her new life.