Читать книгу Women on the Home Front: Family Saga 4-Book Collection - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 31

Chapter Twenty

Sally pushed her hair back off her face, shading her eyes from the June afternoon sun as she looked up from the row of lettuces she had just been weeding around, leaning on her hoe as she did so.

‘Looks easy hoeing, but it isn’t.’ The voice of Nancy’s husband, Arthur, reached her from the other side of the garden fence. Arthur was a kindly gentle man, the complete opposite of the image of him that Nancy held up to others with her frequent references to Arthur’s dislike of all those things that Nancy had decided were to be disliked. Now, as he filled and then lit his pipe, Sally laughed and agreed.

‘Much harder. I’ve never been in full charge of a veggie plot before, although I helped my father with his.’

‘Tea leaves is what you need. Soak them in vinegar overnight and then put them round your lettuces, and you won’t get no slugs coming after them.’

Nancy’s, ‘Arthur, come and get a cup of tea,’ over the hedge dividing the two gardens, had him giving Sally a farewell nod of his head before he dutifully headed for the back door where Sally could see Nancy standing with her apron on over her floral-patterned summer frock, her hands on her hips.

‘Poor Arthur,’ Olive commented, coming down the path with a tray of tea and two scones from the batch she had just baked, just in time to hear her neighbour calling out to her husband. ‘He is rather henpecked. No butter for the scones, I’m afraid, but luckily I’ve got plenty of jam left from the batch I made last year. I’m really glad now that we’ve got rationing that I decided to sort out a stock cupboard last summer.’

‘I’ve been thinking that perhaps we could get half a dozen hens,’ Sally began five minutes later when the two of them were settled under the shade of the apple tree, enjoying their tea and scones. ‘There’s room for them, and I noticed a sign in the hardware shop as I came past the other day, advertising hen coops.’

‘Well, I can certainly use the fresh eggs,’ Olive agreed, ‘but you can’t be expected to look after the gardens and some hens, Sally. I feel a bit guilty as it is, watching you working so hard.’

‘I enjoy it,’ Sally told her truthfully, ‘and you and Tilly and Agnes all give me a hand.’

‘Well, if you really want to take it on, I’m all for it,’ Olive approved. She looked up at the sky through the leaves on the apple tree.

‘I can’t imagine what it will be like to be invaded by the Germans, but that’s what everyone says Hitler will try to do now that he’s got France.’

‘It won’t be as easy to invade us as it was to invade France,’ Sally said stoutly.

Olive gave her a wan smile. ‘That’s what everyone said about the Maginot Line – that he’d never cross it – but he did. I keep thinking of all those people who tried to escape.’ She put her hand to her mouth and Sally knew that she was thinking of the women and children who had been killed by the Luftwaffe. She herself had heard the most graphic and awful stories from some of the injured soldiers they’d got at Barts, the words bursting from them as though they couldn’t contain the horror of what they’d witnessed.

‘If they do invade, they’re bound to march on London.’

‘We’ve got the RAF to hold them back, don’t forget,’ Sally tried to comfort her.

Olive gave her a troubled look. ‘I worry for Tilly and Agnes, and you too, Sally. You are young with your whole lives in front of you, and I can’t help thinking that if Hitler does invade you’d all be safer out of London.’

‘If he succeeds in invading,’ Sally told her gently. ‘I personally don’t think he will. If those of us who live and work here did desert London then what kind of message would that send out to him, and to our boys who are fighting for this country and for us? The BEF have taken a terrific blow to their pride. We need to show them, as well as Hitler, that we have faith in them.’

Olive looked at her lodger, taking in Sally’s determined expression. ‘You’re right,’ she agreed, adding, ‘You have such a wise head on your young shoulders, Sally.’

‘My mother’s head, or rather her teaching.’ Sally’s smile softened and then disappeared, to be replaced by a look of sadness. ‘I miss her so much. The trained nurse in me knew that she couldn’t survive and that she would die, but as her daughter I couldn’t bear to lose her.’

‘Your father is still alive,’ Olive began, but Sally shook her head.

‘Not for me. I have no father any more. My father ceased to exist for me the day he married Morag. The man I knew and loved as my father could not have performed such a betrayal. I must finish this weeding before I have to go in and get changed for work. Arthur has recommended that I put tea leaves soaked in vinegar round the lettuces to keep the slugs off. I’ve never heard of that remedy before.’

Recognising that Sally had changed the subject because she did not want to talk about her father, Olive began to gather up their empty cups and plates. She couldn’t really, after all, expect someone who had been as close to her mother as Sally had obviously been to understand the ache of emptiness and the fear of aloneless that came with the loss of a husband or wife, or to accept that sometimes the widowed partner felt driven by a need to fill that empty gap in their lives, especially when it was a man who had been widowed. Women were expected by their own sex to wear their widow-hood as a form of respectability; men, on the other hand, were seen by that sex as poor creatures in need of the comfort that only a new wife could give. A widow’s respectability was a fragile garment, easily tarnished and damaged, her behaviour constantly under the eagle-eyed inspection of other women. Olive could still remember the lectures she had been given by her mother-in-law in the months following her own widowhood, about the need to preserve her ‘respectability’ and that of her late husband’s family. She had had no desire to marry again, though, Olive admitted. All she had wanted to do then was pour her love into her precious daughter. Then? What she meant was that all she had ever wanted to do was pour her love into Tilly, Olive told herself firmly.

‘Well, I don’t know why you’ve wasted your money on giving me this stuff, Dulcie, I really don’t. Mind you, Edith can probably make use of it.’

Dulcie stared at her mother in outrage, opening her mouth to tell her that if she didn’t want her present then Dulcie would take it back because there was no way that Edith was going to have it, her angry words converted to a yell of pain when Rick very deliberately nipped her arm.

‘I’ll have a bruise on my arm now,’ she complained to him half an hour later as they left the house together, Dulcie to return to Article Row and Rick heading for the local lads’ boxing club to meet up with his friends, ‘What did you have to go and pinch me like that for anyway?’

‘You know why,’ Rick told her.

‘Mum had no right saying she was going to give my present to her to Edith,’ Dulcie objected. ‘Why does ruddy Edith have to have everything? Mum said that she was going to give her that scent you gave her as well.’

‘That’s Mum’s way, and making a song and dance about it won’t change anything,’ Rick advised as they set off down the street. ‘Edith’s always been her favourite.’

‘Well, I don’t know why,’ Dulcie complained, still aggrieved.

‘Ma’s proud of Edith, Dulcie, because of her singing. Remember how when we were kids Ma used to tell us about how she’d won a prize for singing herself when she was at school?’

Dulcie nodded.

‘Well, I reckon Ma favours Edith because of that. She wants Edith to have what she never did.’

‘A greasy-hands-all-over-you agent, you mean?’ Dulcie asked cynically.

Rick sighed and gave her a rueful look. ‘You know the trouble with you, Dulcie, is that you can’t just let things be. You’ve got to make your point, and have the last word, even if it means getting folks’ backs up.’

They’d crossed the road and turned into another street whilst they’d been talking, any attempt Dulcie might have made to respond to Rick’s accusation made impossible by the growing volume of noise.

‘What’s that?’ Dulcie protested, raising her voice.

‘Sounds like someone’s having a bit of a set-to,’ Rick told her unnecessarily as they both heard the sound of breaking glass joining the chants and jeers of angry raised voices.

Street fights weren’t an uncommon occurrence in their neighbourhood, so Dulcie shrugged. Then they turned the corner and she could see the gang of youths up ahead.

‘That’s Mr Manelli’s ice-cream shop they’re throwing bricks at.’ Dulcie stopped walking. ‘They’ve got no right doing that. Ever so nice to us when we were kids, Mr Manelli always was, giving us an extra scoop of ice cream when we took Ma’s baking bowl round on a Saturday to get it filled up for tea.’

As several more bricks were thrown into the broken window they heard a woman’s screams from inside the shop.

‘Come on, Rick. We’ve got to stop them.’

The sight of Dulcie, of all people, advancing on the jeering violent crowd of boys held Rick motionless for a second. But then he set off after her, calling out to the attacking mob, ‘Come on, lads, what’s going on?’ The firm sound of his voice and the fact that he was in uniform were enough to bring a momentary halt to the attack. The youths turned to look at him, whilst Dulcie, to his bemusement, marched in between them and the shop front, her hands on her hips.

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, doing summat like this to Mr Manelli,’ she told them. ‘What’s he ever done to you?’

‘He’s an Eyetie and a traitor, that’s what,’ the largest of the youths told Dulcie glowering at her. ‘A ruddy Fascist, and him and his family want running out of the street and putting in prison like all the rest of his kind.’

‘Give over, lads,’ Rick counselled. ‘We all know Mr Manelli – he’s no traitor.’

‘Well, if that’s the case then how come the police have took him and the other Eyeties off to prison?’ one of the other youths demanded, giving Rick a challenging look. ‘My dad heard it from the police themselves. They’ve had orders to round up all the Eyeties and shove them in goal on account of them being Fascists and spies. ’Oo knows what’s bin going on inside there?’

The mood of the mob was turning ugly, Rick recognised. If they chose to go on the attack again he certainly couldn’t stop them by himself, and anyway, his first duty was to protect his sister, who was still standing in front of the smashed shop window.

Mentally Rick cursed Dulcie for getting them involved. He had no quarrel with the Manellis, but he couldn’t hold the mob off by himself if they chose to turn their anger against him and Dulcie. Out of the corner of his eye he saw their local policeman crossing the top of the street. Quickly he hailed him, relieved to see him stop in mid-stride.

The sight of a burly policeman coming towards them at the run was enough to frighten off the mob, who quickly dispersed, leaving Rick to explain to Constable Green what had happened.

‘That’s the trouble when feelings start running high. Folks start taking the law into their own hands,’ was his verdict on Rick’s explanation of the mob’s attack on the ice-cream shop.

Over an hour later, when Rick and Dulcie were finally on their own again, a still visibly terrified and sobbing Mrs Manelli having been handed over by Constable Green into the care of her neighbours and fellow Italians, Rick was finally free to ask his sister, ‘What was that all about?’

‘What do you mean?’ Dulcie affected not to understand him.

Rick heaved a patient sigh and pointed out, ‘We could have had those young idiots turning on us. Why take that risk?’

‘Because I felt like it,’ was the only answer Dulcie would give him.

Women and sisters – especially this particular sister, Rick thought in bewilderment – he would never understand them.

As she made her way back to Article Row, Dulcie was no more inclined to answer Rick’s question to herself than she had been to him, other than to think that it had been high time she proved to a few people who thought they were so much better than her that they weren’t. People like Edith, and Olive, and some of the girls at work, who thought they could look down on her and get away with it. And him too, that Raphael, who had tried to make out he was so much better than she was. Well, they weren’t ’cos it was her that had had the guts to stand her ground and helped old Mrs Manelli, and not them!

Rick was just about to leave the boxing club and make his way home, when Raphael found him, having heard the story of Mrs Manelli’s rescue whilst he’d been at the headquarters of the Italian Fascist Organisation.

He’d gone there in the hope of picking up some information about what had happened to the men who had been arrested in the early hours on 10 June, taken from their homes without warning under suspicion of being active Fascists. One of those men had been his grandfather, and naturally Raphael was concerned for him, an old man of eighty-one who was stubborn enough and foolish enough to cling to Fascism out of sheer cussedness.

The Italian communities, in Britain’s main cities were all in shock over the night-time raids on their homes, their men being removed by the police, taken from their homes in the clothes they’d pulled on after being woken from their sleep, with no information being given about what was going to happen to them except that they were to be interned as enemy aliens.

Raphael had telephoned his father in Liverpool to discover that the situation there was even worse than it was in London. In London it was only those who were believed to be active Fascists who had been arrested. In Liverpool there had been a wholesale taking into custody of a huge swathe of the entire Italian adult male population. Only those, like his father, who had naturalised and become British citizens legally had escaped arrest.

Naturally the Italian community had flocked to their Fascist clubs, both for information and for comfort, especially those women whose husbands or fathers or sons had been taken.

In the heightened atmosphere within the club, the tale of Rick’s heroic bravery spread like wild-fire, causing Raphael to ask where he might find him. Since the Manellis were distant relatives and had no son of their own, it fell to him to thank Mrs Manelli’s rescuer for his timely intervention.

Armed with the information, from a couple of young Italians who knew him, that he would more than likely find Rick Simmonds at his boxing club, and instructions about which bus he would need to catch to get there, Raphael headed for the bus stop, recognising only after he had left the club that Mrs Manelli’s rescuer had the same surname as Dulcie. Raphael shrugged. Perhaps Simmonds was as common a surname to the East End as his own was to the Italian community. He had no intention of wasting time allowing someone like Dulcie to take up residence in his thoughts.

The warmth of the light June nights had brought people out into the city to stroll in its parks and see its shows, perhaps, Raphael suspected, aware of what was happening to France and thinking that they might as well enjoy their freedom whilst they could, although it was obvious that the people’s mood was sombre. Everyone you talked to spoke in hushed or anxious voices about their belief that Hitler would try to invade Britain, often without admitting to their unspoken fear that he might succeed.

Like all those who had been rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk, Raphael had been granted two weeks’ leave. That leave was already half over and in another few days he would be rejoining his unit of the Royal Engineers. He just hoped that before that happened they would know what had happened to his grandfather, not only for his grandfather’s sake but, more importantly, for his father’s. Raphael knew how desperately worried his father would be and how guilty he would feel, even though in Raphael’s opinion his father had no reason to feel any guilt. He had, after all, over the years made endless attempts to be reconciled with his father, and it was the older man who had stubbornly refused all Raphael’s father’s attempts to make peace.

In the boxing club, Rick let the conversation going on all around him wash over him, as he stood at the bar. The club was busy tonight with young men in shorts and singlets working on the club’s three punch bags, or lifting weights whilst the club’s hopeful bantam weight contender for a local title was sparring in the ring under the stern eye of one of the ex-professional boxers who trained the young talent.

The building was run down, with chunks of plaster missing from the walls here and there, left like that, so the story went, by a pro from before the Great War, who’d had a habit of punching the wall if one of his sparring bouts hadn’t gone well. Worn dark brown linoleum covered the stone floor, and in the winter the club got damp from the leak in the roof, which had been repaired with a sheet of corrugated iron.

It was here that deals were done that weren’t always strictly on the right side of the law, from matches that were fixed to the selling of black market cigarettes. There was a small room off the bar that everyone knew not to go into when the door was closed because that meant that there was a ‘meeting’ going on that involved ‘business’.

Rick still came to the club because he had boxed there for a while as a boy, and it was where his friends gathered, but his membership was merely a social one now. Tonight, though, Tom, his comrade in arms who had joined up with him and who had also gone through the hell of Dunkirk, wasn’t in, and Rick wasn’t in the mood to join in the speculation and talk of the possibility of Hitler invading England. Unlike him the other lads here hadn’t tasted the reality of war as yet, some of them still raw recruits who had only just finished their basic training, others still waiting for their call-up papers and several in reserved occupations. How could they know how it felt to have been driven back by the Germans – to have to retreat as the BEF had done, abandoning its weapons and its artillery as it did so.

Rick knew he would never forget the silence that had greeted them when they had finally been put ashore in England, or the way that those dealing with the practicalities of their repatriation had avoided looking directly at them, as though ashamed of them. A shame they had all shared.

And if the shame of the retreat was hard to bear then the memories of what that retreat had involved were even harder to endure.

Rick was just about to leave when Raphael walked into the club, heading straight for the bar where he asked after Rick.

‘Rick Simmonds?’ the barman repeated. ‘He’s over there, heading for the door,’ nodding his head in Rick’s direction, and then adding warningly, ‘If you’ve come here looking for trouble, mate, you’ve chosen the wrong place and the wrong man. Well thought of hereabouts, Rick is.’

‘It’s nothing like that – quite the opposite,’ Raphael assured him, the sound of his Liverpool accent causing a couple of the regulars who were in the Merchant Navy to glance across at him in recognition of a voice from a well-known port.

Rick was outside before Raphael caught up with him, turning round when Raphael called out, ‘Wait up, mate.’

Like the merchant seamen, Rick recognised Raphael’s Liverpool accent. A quick glance at Raphael revealed a tall dark-haired broad-shouldered man with a soldier’s bearing and stride, wearing army uniform and the badge of the Royal Engineers. Rick wasn’t really in the mood for company but something about the other man’s determined stride made him wait.

‘Rick, Rick Simmonds?’ Raphael asked. When Rick nodded, Raphael extended his hand to shake Rick’s.

‘Raphael Androtti. I just heard down at the local Italian club about what you did tonight for Caterina Manelli, and I wanted to thank you. She’s family – a distant cousin.’

‘It isn’t me you should really be thanking,’ Rick told him. ‘It’s my sister Dulcie. She was the one that got in between the mob and the shop.’ Rick shook his head, betraying his continuing disbelief that Dulcie of all people should have done such a thing and taken such a risk.

So Dulcie was related to Rick. Now there was a coincidence.

‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw what she’d done,’ Rick admitted. ‘She’s not exactly the type to put herself at risk for someone else, isn’t Dulcie.’ He spoke openly, somehow finding the sight of Raphael’s uniform making it easy for him to do so. Raphael might be Italian but he was a soldier, like Rick himself, and right now that formed a bond between them that meant Rick could speak frankly to the other man.

‘Of course, once she’d got herself involved I’d no option other than to do the same. She is my sister, after all.’ Rick shook his head. ‘Women. I’ll never understand them, doing something as risky and daft as that, just because old Mr Manelli used to put an extra dollop of ice cream in our bowl when we were kids.’

‘I obviously owe your sister my thanks as well then,’ Raphael told Rick. ‘It’s a bit late for me to call round at your home now, but—’

‘You wouldn’t find her there anyway,’ Rick stopped him. ‘Dulcie doesn’t live at home. She’s got digs in Holborn and a landlady who doesn’t take too kindly to men she doesn’t know turning up on her doorstep asking for her lodgers. Your best bet would be to go to Selfridges. Dulcie works there in the cosmetics department.’

Now was the time for him to come clean and tell her brother that he already knew Dulcie and where she worked, Raphael knew. That would be the right and honest thing to do. He battled with his conscience. He liked what he’d seen of Rick, and as a man honesty was important to him. However, he knew that Rick wouldn’t like hearing about how he had come to know his sister – as her brother he was bound to be protective of her; that was only natural. In the circumstances it was best that he didn’t say anything, Raphael decided, but that didn’t stop him feeling guilty.

‘I’ll go and see her at Selfridges, as you suggest.’

‘Will Mr Manelli be all right?’ Rick asked him.

‘I hope so.’ Raphael reached into his tunic pocket to remove a packet of service-issue cigarettes, offering the pack first to Rick, who took one, and then lighting Rick’s cigarette for him before lighting one for himself.

‘Been in the army long?’ he asked Rick.

‘Joined up just in time to be sent out to France with the BEF. And you?’

‘Same. We were working on an airfield down near Nantes when the order came to pull out. We were lucky. We got taken off the beach at St-Nazaire by a Finnish vessel and taken to Falmouth. Not that we thought we were going to be lucky at first, not when we’d seen all the RAF lot being given preference to get on board this warship they’d got at St-Nazaire, packed with women and children as well as the RAF. Poor sods. There wasn’t any room for us.

Raphael narrowed his eyes and looked into the distance before telling Rick, ‘The warship got bombed by the Luftwaffe – those on board didn’t stand a chance.’

Both men drew heavily on their cigarettes in shared silence, each knowing why the other didn’t speak.

Olive was in the kitchen when Dulcie came in. The girls had already gone up to bed taking their cocoa with them, but Olive had hung on downstairs. Not because she was concerned about the fact that Dulcie was still out, like she would have been had she been Tilly or Agnes. It was no business of hers what time Dulcie came in or where she’d been, only she had said that she was going over to her parents’ because it was her mother’s birthday, and the look on her face had said that it wasn’t a visit she was particularly looking forward to.

Her walk back to Article Row took Dulcie around forty-five minutes and had given her time to think about what she had done, and once the euphoria of feeling that she’d triumphed over all those who thought they could look down on her by doing something brave had worn off, Dulcie had started to recognise the risk she had taken and to feel a bit shaky. The last thing she wanted as she walked into the kitchen, intent on making herself a spirit-strengthening cup of tea, was Olive, and the sight of her sitting in a chair as though waiting for her return brought Dulcie to an abrupt halt. No one had ever waited up for her. It was Edith her own mother worried about and sat up anxiously for, refusing to go to bed until she knew she was safely home. When Dulcie had pointed out that she had never waited up for her, her mother had simply said that there wasn’t any need for her to do that because she knew that Dulcie was perfectly capable of looking after herself. Not that Olive would be waiting up for her to get in, of course. It would be Tilly and Agnes she was sitting there for.

‘Tilly and Agnes not in yet?’ she asked Olive, as she headed for the kettle. Her mouth felt dry and her head ached painfully.

‘Yes. They’ve gone up,’ Olive told her, adding without intending to, ‘You’re later back than I expected.’

Dulcie had turned towards her, the kettle she had just filled in her hand, the light falling sharply onto her, causing Olive to gasp in shock when she saw the dried blood on Dulcie’s cheek where a sharp-edged pebble – one of a handful thrown by one of the mob – had caught her and cut her skin. There were other marks on her clothes, dusty marks, and another cut on her leg.

‘Dulcie, what on earth’s happened to you?’ Olive demanded, getting up to go and take the kettle from her.

Immediately Olive got close to her Dulcie recoiled, telling her abruptly and dismissively, ‘There’s no need to make a fuss. It’s nothing. Just some lads who’d had too much to drink.’

When Olive’s eyes widened in shock, Dulcie realised that her landlady was jumping to the wrong conclusion and she told her fiercely, ‘It wasn’t anything like that. I’m not daft enough to let any lads try doing something they shouldn’t with me. It was all this fuss about the Italians being Fascists and being taken away. A group of lads were throwing stones at the Manellis’ shop window. Me and Rick told them to leave it out. Mr Manelli wasn’t even there. The police had already taken him away.’

Olive had heard about the mobs going round attacking the premises of Italian businesses whilst she’d been at her WVS meeting and had been horrified by their behaviour, but somehow she hadn’t expected to hear that Dulcie had stepped in to prevent one of those attacks.

Dulcie’s mouth thinned when she saw Olive’s expression and guessed what she was thinking.

‘That’s the trouble with people like you,’ she told her sharply. ‘You think that unless a person goes running around wearing something like a St John Ambulance uniform they’re nothing, and you can look down on them.’

‘Dulcie, that’s not true,’ Olive denied, but even as she spoke she recognised that there was a grain of truth in what Dulcie was saying.

‘Yes it is,’ Dulcie told her flatly.

‘The doctor’s been again this morning to number forty-nine,’ Nancy announced over the hedge.

Olive paused on the steps to her back door, balancing the weight of the washing she had just been to collect from the local Chinese laundry more securely on her raised knee.

‘It can’t be long now, not with the doctor coming nearly every day. I said to my Arthur when they moved in that I didn’t reckon the husband would last very long.’

Olive felt that sometimes Nancy took too keen an interest in such morbid subjects, almost relishing it when one of her dire warnings became true.

‘Mr Long is very poorly at the moment,’ she felt obliged to agree, whilst pointing out, ‘But his son, Christopher, has told Tilly that they have every hope that he will rally and make some recovery. Apparently this has proved to be the case on more than one occasion in the past.’

Nancy merely shook her head, adding darkly, ‘And that’s another thing. If I was you I wouldn’t let your Tilly get too involved with that boy of theirs, not with him being one of the conscientious objects. There’s no saying where it might lead. Folk like them like putting the wrong ideas into other folk’s heads, and you don’t want your Tilly getting them kind of wrong ideas.’

‘I don’t think for one minute that anything like that is going to happen, Nancy. Tilly and Agnes have simply taken Christopher under their wing a bit because they are being good neighbours.’

‘Well, you can say that, but—’ Nancy began.

Her neighbour was like a dog relishing a particularly juicy bone it did not want to give up, Olive thought ruefully as she determinedly changed the subject.

‘Has Linda settled in with her in-laws in Sussex now?’

Linda, Nancy’s daughter, and her son-in-law, Henry, had evacuated themselves and their seven-year-old son to Sussex to live with her in-laws shortly after war had been announced.

‘Oh, yes. Ever so glad to have her there, Henry’s mother is, and Henry’s got a job working in partnership with an electrician that’s already set up there. Mind you, Linda says that it’s Henry that’s bringing in most of the work, not this other chap, and she reckons that it’s Henry who should be the senior partner. Henry’s mother’s lucky to have them living with her. There’s nothing Linda doesn’t know about running a house like it should be run. Of course, she’s got me to thank for that. I have to say that Henry’s mother doesn’t have the same standards I’ve taught Linda. When we went and stayed with them the Christmas before last, there was that much dust on the picture rail in her hallway that she couldn’t have dusted up there all year.’

Olive nodded. She knew from experience that there was nothing Nancy liked more than boasting about her daughter, but the weight of the laundry was beginning to make her arms ache so she excused herself and unlocked her back door.

Once inside she made her way straight upstairs so that she could put the clean linen in the airing cupboard, ready to change the beds on Monday.

When Nancy had first found out that Olive was sending her sheets and pillowcases to the Chinese laundry instead of washing them herself, she had affected to be shocked, but Olive didn’t care. With five beds to change it would have been impossible for her to get all the bedding washed, dried and ironed every week, on top of everything else she had to do, including her WVS work.

Once she’d put the clean laundry away, Olive glanced at her watch and, seeing that it was almost half-past ten, she hurried back downstairs so that she could make herself a cup of tea and then sit down and enjoy it whilst she listened to Music While You Work on the wireless.

It was whilst she was listening to that that Olive found her thoughts wandering to the Longs. She wondered if she should call and ask Mrs Long if there was anything she could do to help, such as fetching her shopping for her. She didn’t want her to think that she was being nosy, though, especially when Mr Long was so obviously poorly. Olive had no fears that Tilly might be getting too involved with Christopher in the way that Nancy had tried to imply. She knew her daughter and it was perfectly plain to her that Tilly thought of Christopher only as a friend. She certainly wasn’t attracted to him in the way that she had been to Dulcie’s handsome brother. Thinking of that reminded Olive of her exchange with Dulcie. She hadn’t intended to get Dulcie’s back up, and in fact she had actually, to her own surprise, felt concerned for her when she’d seen her cuts and bruises, but Dulcie wasn’t someone who made it easy for others to be sympathetic towards her, Olive thought wryly. Quite the opposite.

She would go and see Mrs Long after she had had her dinner, she decided. It wouldn’t be neigh-bourly not to do so. Olive could still remember how she had felt during the final weeks of her own husband’s life. Of course, she had been younger than Mrs Long, and they had been living here with her in-laws, but you never forgot the awfulness of knowing someone you loved was going to die. She would certainly never forget the hours she had lain awake at night listening to his racking cough, and then the silences that had followed it, hardly daring to breathe herself as she listened desperately in the darkness for the sound of his breathing and only relaxing when she heard it.

Olive had decided to do a ham salad for every-one’s evening meal, seeing as it was so warm, so she opened the tin of ham she intended to use, taking a thin sliver off the ham to make herself a sandwich for her lunch. The thin scraping of margarine she put on the bread didn’t look very appealing, but Olive knew that with a bit of mustard and some lettuce her sandwich would be nice and tasty.

Once she’d eaten she checked the larder to make sure that there were enough boiled potatoes left over from the previous evening’s meal for her to make some potato salad to go with the ham.

After removing her apron, Olive went upstairs to comb her hair and make sure that she looked tidy, setting her neat off-white straw hat on top of her newly brushed curls, and then opening her dressing table drawer to remove a clean pair of white gloves.

As she opened her front door, the Misses Barker from next door were walking up the Row, and naturally Olive stopped to speak to them. Spinster sisters and retired teachers, they always looked spick and span. Physically the sisters were very different. Miss Jane Barker, the elder of the two, was tall and thin, with a long bony face, whilst Miss Mary Barker was smaller and plump. Olive’s late husband, who had been taught by them at the local church school before they had retired, had often said that whilst Miss Jane favoured the stick, Miss Mary favoured the carrot, and that between them they had ensured that even the most unruly of boys along with the shyest of girls learned their ABC and their times tables.

Once ‘good afternoons’ had been exchanged, it was Miss Mary who told Olive excitedly, ‘We’ve just seen the vicar and he’s asked us if we’d like to think about helping out at the junior school. It seems that with so many families bringing their children back from evacuation, the Government is having to open some of the schools they closed at the beginning of the war.’

After they had parted company Olive reflected that the thought of going back to teaching had brought a definite spring to the sisters’ steps.

When she reached number 49 she could see that the curtains were half drawn across the windows of the front room. Rather hesitantly she knocked on the front door, wondering if she had done the right thing when Mrs Long opened it and Olive saw how tired and distressed she looked.

‘I’m sorry,’ Olive apologised. ‘Perhaps I’ve called at a bad time. I won’t stay. I heard that Mr Long isn’t very well and I just wanted you to know that if there’s anything I can do to help – collect your shopping for you, that kind of thing.’

‘Please do come in,’ Mrs Long urged her, holding the door open wide, so that Olive felt obliged to step inside.

The immaculately clean hallway possessed a smell that Olive instantly recognised: the smell of carbolic and sickness and a certain fetid lack of air that came from trying to keep an invalid warm and a house clean.

Olive followed Mrs Long to the back parlour, in shape and size the same as her own but, because this house was tenanted, slightly shabby and down at heel. Dark curtains hung at the window, making the room dim and depressing. The small leather settee under the window had shiny patches on its arms where the fabric had worn thin, and the cupboards either side of the fireplace were painted dark brown, like the skirtings and doors. A table covered in a chenille cloth was pushed up against the wall adjoining the two rooms, three chairs tucked into it so that there was just enough room for the old-fashioned winged armchair with a leather footstool in front of it drawn up close to the fire: Mr Long’s chair, Olive guessed.

‘I’d offer you a cup of tea, but I’m expecting the doctor any minute,’ Mrs Long told her. ‘It’s kind of you to offer to help but Christopher, our son, is very good and he calls and gets the shopping for me on his way home from work.’ An expression of sadness shadowed her face as she spoke.

Poor woman, she was no doubt as anxious about her son as she was about her husband, albeit in a different way, Olive thought compassionately. Christopher’s views on the war were bound to make life difficult for him, and what mother wouldn’t wish for a happy easy path through life for her child? Olive felt so sorry for Mrs Long. Thin and careworn, with an anxious expression and grey hair pulled back into a bun, she was looking into the hallway through the door she’d left open the whole time she was talking to Olive, her voice barely raised above a whisper. Olive, who had once been in her position herself, knew exactly what she was going through but was reluctant to say anything about her own experience. Mr Long was, after all, still alive, and Olive knew how desperately one clung to that and how desperately one hoped for a recovery. Telling her that she had lost her own husband might not be a tactful thing to do.

‘Yes, this is the very latest colour,’ Dulcie assured the customer who had spent the last half an hour hesitating over which lipstick to choose.

‘And you can assure me that this lipstick was made here in England and not America? Only my husband wouldn’t approve at all if I’d bought a lipstick that had taken up space in one of our convoys that could have been used for something much more essential to the war effort. He has a cousin in the navy, you see, and he’s very conscious of the dangers to our brave sailors in crossing the Atlantic.’

‘Our buyer would never countenance buying stock that risked sailors’ lives,’ Dulcie assured her customer without having a clue as to whether or not what she was saying was true, and privately thinking that her husband must be mean if he hadn’t ever bought a bit of something to carry in his pocket and bring home for his wife.

Her reassurance seemed to convince her customer, who told her, ‘Very well then, I’ll take the lipstick.’

Last night’s attack on the Manellis’ shop had left Dulcie with several bruises and the angry cut on her face, which she’d done her best to disguise with some powder. Of course, the other girls had been curious about it, so she’d lied and said that she’d been scratched by a cat.

What had happened to the Italians was all over the papers, and at dinner time there’d been some snide comments from Arlene about the likelihood of ‘Dulcie’s Italian’ being picked up by the police and imprisoned as an enemy alien.

For her own part, Dulcie had pretended not to notice, whilst talking to Lizzie in a very firm voice about how Raphael was in the Royal Engineers and how he was only at home because he’d been at Dunkirk. Not that she had done that for Raphael’s sake, of course; she had done it for her own. She certainly wasn’t going to have Arlene making out that she was romantically connected to an enemy alien.

The staff entrance to Selfridges was a dark shadowy place that seemed always to smell of oil and exhaust fumes, from the delivery vans and cigarette smoke from the workmen who hung around the entrance, snatching quick fags, and the late afternoon heat of the city emphasised those odours.

London’s air as a whole smelled and tasted dry and dusty to Raphael. For him it lacked the bracing salt tang of Liverpool’s air, blown in over the Liverpool bar on winds from the Atlantic.

He’d arrived here well before six, determined not to miss Dulcie, knowing this was his last chance to see her and that he had a train to catch this evening to Liverpool, where his parents were waiting for news of his grandfather. Now he was leaning against a wall in the shadows opposite the store, waiting for her. He had managed to telephone his parents to discuss the dawn raids and they in turn had told him what had been happening in Liverpool. Not to them – Raphael’s father was a British citizen, after all. He worked as warehouse manager down on the docks, a good job and one he had wanted Raphael to follow him into until he had realised how determined Raphael was to train as an engineer. That was how he had come to be in the Royal Engineers instead of the regular army.

Raphael saw Dulcie emerging from the building. He pushed himself off the wall, straightening up as he strode purposefully towards her.

Dulcie saw him and stopped walking, a surge of triumph and vindication reinforcing what she told herself she had already known: that although he had pretended not to find her attractive, he had been drawn to her all along. Irresistible, that was what she was, Dulcie decided smugly. Well, if he thought that all he had to do was turn up here to persuade her to grant him the favour of a date, he was quickly going to learn that it wasn’t.

She waited for him to approach her, smiling a triumphant smile when he reached her, but instead of pleading with her to go out with him, he told her instead, ‘I haven’t got much time. I’m leaving for Liverpool this evening, but before I go I just wanted to thank you for what you did for Mrs Manelli. She’s my father’s second cousin, and since she doesn’t have anyone of her own to thank you I’m doing it on her behalf.’

Raphael looked down at his feet in their polished army boots. Coming here like this was a duty he would rather not have had. Dulcie wasn’t the type of girl he admired, and yet last night she had done something he admired very much indeed. He could see his own face in the gloss he worked into his boots.

He exhaled and raised his head, telling Dulcie, ‘I’m not going to pretend that you weren’t one of the last people I’d thought would do something like that, and I’m not going to apologise for thinking it either, but I am grateful to you.’

He hadn’t come here to ask her out, and far from finding her irresistible he was practically insulting her. Dulcie glared at him.

‘Grateful is it?’ she challenged him. ‘Well, you don’t sound very grateful, and as for not apologising for thinking I was one of the last people you’d thought would do what I did, that just goes to show that you shouldn’t go judging people and thinking things about them that aren’t true. Just because I don’t go round acting all holy and soft, that doesn’t mean I don’t know right from wrong. Those lads had no call to go acting like they did. Always kind to us when we were kids, Mr Manelli was, even if he was an Eyetie.’

Raphael inclined his head in acknowledgement of her comment and then pushed back the cuff of his tunic to look at his watch.

Dulcie watched him. He was impatient to leave and she certainly didn’t want to prevent him from leaving, so why, as he started to turn away from her, did she have to stop him by asking, ‘Did you get to see your granddad?’

His, ‘No,’ was terse, and a signal that he didn’t want to waste any more time talking to her, Dulcie suspected.

Well, that was all right by her; she didn’t want to waste her time talking to him. She hadn’t asked him to come here. He’d chosen to do that himself. She turned away in angry indignation.

‘He refused to see me, and then yesterday morning he was rounded up with the others. They’re keeping them at Brompton Oratory School for now.’ Raphael paused and then said bitterly, ‘He’s eighty-one and for all his fiery Fascist talk, he’s about as much danger to this country as a day-old child. They took them all before it was light; most of them were bundled off so fast they weren’t even allowed to get dressed. I took some clothes down to the police station where they were holding my grandfather but they refused to let me see him.’

‘What will happen to them?’ She wasn’t really interested, Dulcie assured herself. She wasn’t so soft that she cared what happened to them, and yet deep down she knew that she did feel something that was more than mere curiosity.

He had no idea why he was talking to Dulcie in so much detail, Raphael acknowledged, unless it was simply because he needed to get what he was feeling off his chest to someone whose own emotions wouldn’t be lacerated by what had happened.

‘We don’t know officially as yet. Although we have heard that the London detainees will be transferred to a camp at Lingfield racecourse in Surrey, prior to being interned. I must go otherwise I shall miss my train. Thank you again for what you did.’

‘I don’t want your thanks. I didn’t do it for you.’ The words were out before Dulcie could stop herself from saying them, causing her to hold her breath in case Raphael challenged her.

But to her relief he simply said, ‘You may not want my thanks and my gratitude but you have them anyway.’

And then he was gone, striding away from her, tall and broad-shouldered in his military uniform, quickly caught up in the bustle and the crowds of Oxford Street.

She’d definitely go to the Palais this coming Saturday, Dulcie decided. She hadn’t gone last Saturday – for one thing her mother’s birthday present had left her a bit short of money, and for another she hadn’t really felt like it. Not because Tilly and Agnes had shaken their heads when she’d asked them if they wanted to go with her – she’d been doing them the favour, not the other way around and if they chose not to accept it then that was their loss, not hers. Personally she’d thought them daft for going on duty with that St John Ambulance lot they’d got so involved with. In their shoes she’d have come up with an excuse rather than miss out on a good night’s dancing.