Читать книгу As Time Goes By - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 7

THREE

‘Run!’

As a girl Sam had prided herself on being able to outrun her brother, but plainly that was not good enough for this man. Not content with issuing that command, he virtually yanked her to her feet, then grabbed hold of her hand, pulling her along with him as he ran down the street at breakneck speed.

‘Down… down…’ he yelled at her as soon as they rounded the corner into another street, pushing her down to the pavement and then following her, covering her body with his own.

Her heart was pounding – with exertion, not fear, she assured herself firmly. Her companion showed no awareness of the intimacy of his lying on top of her, and was instead studying his watch, whilst Sam held her breath, waiting for the bomb to explode.

‘Looks like the bugger isn’t going to blow after all.’

‘What?’ Sam stared up at him in disbelief. ‘You knew all along that nothing was going to happen, didn’t you?’ she accused him angrily. ‘I suppose you think it’s funny acting like that. Well, for your information I’ve got a good mind to report you,’ she told him wildly.

‘You report me? That’s a good one. You’re the one who ignored the warning signs and damn-near blew us and the whole street to bits. And if anyone is going to report anyone it will be me reporting you! That’s a two-thousand-pound bomb down there,’ he reminded her bluntly.

‘And you would know, of course,’ Sam snapped back smartly.

Instead of responding, he leaned slightly away from her and produced a torch from his pocket, which he shone up at his own shoulder. ‘See that?’

Something unpleasant and uncomfortable was gripping Sam’s stomach as she stared up at the unmistakable Bomb Disposal Unit insignia on his dust-streaked jacket. Numbly she nodded.

‘Know what it means?’

‘Bomb Disposal,’ Sam offered weakly.

‘That’s right, which by my reckoning makes it part of my job to be checking up on UXBs, and I’d just as soon be doing that without some bloody silly girl all but setting the ruddy thing off. Three days I’ve bin checking up on old Kurt there, waiting for the captain to give the order to move in and sort him out, and then you nearly go and blow us both to kingdom come when the ruddy street is closed off as plain as daylight.’

His torch was still on and whilst Sam listened to him with growing hostility she also registered that beneath the dirt he had the kind of raffish dark good looks that would send some members of her sex giddy with excitement. Some members of her sex, but not her. She was totally immune to dangerously handsome men with war-hardened bodies, who looked as though they knew far more about her sex than it was good for a girl to have them know. And besides, she could just bet that he was the kind who went for chocolate-box soft and pretty girls with curves and dimples.

‘So what are you going to do now that the bomb hasn’t gone off?’ she challenged him.

‘There’s only one thing I can do.’ His body moved on hers, and alarm shot through her. He wasn’t actually going to try to make an advance to her was he? Because if he was …

‘Bomb’s got to be defused, and that’s that.’

Sam felt a thrill of genuine horror ice through her. ‘You mean you’re going back to do that?’

When he started to laugh her horror turned to chagrined angry pride, her face burning hotly. She had never liked being made fun of.

‘It’s only commissioned officers that do that – you know, them as wear the posh hats and the egg yolk,’ he mocked her, using the current slang expression to describe the gold braiding on top-ranking officers’ uniforms. ‘Me and the lads only get to mess around in the muck, making sure they can get to the fuses. And that’s what we’ll be doing come daylight.’

He was moving off her now and getting to his feet. Quickly Sam followed suit, sucking in her breath when he suddenly turned his torch on her, exposing her face to his scrutiny. For some reason she felt self-conscious and uncomfortably aware of what to him would be her shortcomings, compared with the kind of girl he no doubt admired, and at the same time angry and resentful because something in the way he was studying her was forcing those thoughts on her. It was a relief when the beam of the torch moved downwards.

‘ATS. I thought you lot normally hunted in packs,’ he said derisively.

Sam was well aware of the low esteem in which some men held girls who had joined up. She had heard all the crude jokes about their supposed lack of morals and their man-chasing, and now her temper was well and truly up.

‘That’s only if we think there’s anything around worth pursuing,’ she returned smartly, ‘which there isn’t right now.’

A bus rumbling past further down the road broke the silence stretching between them. What was she doing standing here trading insults with this stranger? She had been out far longer than she had intended and she still had to find her way back to the billet. The bus was slowing to a stop. Making up her mind, Sam hurried towards it, refusing to give in to the temptation to turn round to see what he was doing and if he was watching her.

*

‘I’m afraid I’m rather lost and I need to get back to my billet,’ she told the conductress slightly breathlessly, giving her the address.

‘You’ll need the number sixty-seven. Nearest stop is three streets away.’

Sam’s face fell.

‘Look, we’re on our way back to the depot – if you want to stay on board you’ll be able to pick one up there,’ the conductress offered.

Thanking her, Sam subsided into a seat, allowing herself to look down the sandbagged street only once they were almost past it, but there was nothing to be seen, and no one to be seen either.

Sally opened the door just enough to allow her to peer out, her heart sinking as her worse fears were confirmed.

‘About time. I was just beginning to lose me patience.’

The man standing on her front step was small and squat, with powerful shoulders, the look in his eyes as hard as his voice, but Sally refused to let herself be intimidated.

‘You’ve got no business coming here. I made arrangements with Mr Wade—’

‘I don’t care what arrangements you made with the old man. Things have changed now, and in future I’ll be calling round every week on the dot to collect what’s due, and let me warn you, missus, there’s new management in charge now and they don’t intend to put up with any soft-soaping or sob stories, so if you’ll tek my advice you’ll have your money ready and waiting when I call round for it, otherwise it will be the worse for you.’

Sally felt sick with a mixture of anger, helplessness and dismay. ‘How do I know that you’re from Mr Wade?’ she challenged him. ‘We’ve all heard about bogus debt collectors setting themselves up and claiming to be working for moneylenders when they’re doing no such thing. Mr Wade never said anything to me about there being any changes.’

‘Aye, well, mebbe he didn’t know there was going to be any hisself.’

‘What do you mean?’ Sally asked sharply.

‘There’s some as thought the old man was losing his grip and that folk weren’t paying up when they should, so there’s bin some changes made. If you don’t believe me that’s up to you but I ain’t leaving here wi’out your payment.’

Sally hesitated. She had half been expecting something like this when she had called round at the anonymous terraced house the moneylender rented to pay her week’s money and had found it locked and empty. All manner of rumours abounded about the network of moneylenders, who traditionally had supplied small loans at extortionate rates to the city’s poor, being forced to hand over their businesses to those who ran the gangs of the black market spivs. One of the most notorious of all of these gangs was run by ‘the Boss’, Bertha Harris, and her five sons. It was said that the Harris family thought nothing of administering beatings and breaking limbs when debts went unpaid.

Whilst she worried about what to do, suddenly from upstairs her maternal ear caught the sound of baby Harry waking up.

‘Wait here,’ she told the man, flushing when he put his foot inside the door before she could close it, wrapping his huge meaty hand round the door edge.

By the time she reached the back parlour her hands were trembling so much she could hardly count out the money from her purse. Not that she needed to count it. After all, she knew to the penny just how many extra hours she had to work every week to pay for the pitifully small sum of money Ronnie had originally borrowed when they had first got married.

She had known nothing about this loan until before the end of Ronnie’s last leave. He had been on edge and distant with her, alternating between moody silences and outbursts of angry temper the whole time. Then when she had begged him to tell her what was wrong it had all come pouring out. Tears had filled his eyes as he had admitted how he had borrowed money from a moneylender just before their wedding, primarily to pay off some betting debts he had run up. He had, he said, got in with a crowd of other young soldiers who all wanted to have a good time. The moneylender had persuaded him to borrow a bit extra to help out with the wedding expenses, and to pay for the honeymoon. Everything had been all right at first, he had told her, until he had increased the loan when Tommy had been born, and now he had fallen behind with the payments and Mr Wade’s debt collectors were pressing him to make good the deficit.

It gave Sally a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach just thinking about that afternoon even now. At first she had been disbelieving. Ronnie was a serving soldier, earning as much as any other man, and she certainly wasn’t an extravagant housewife – far from it; she budgeted carefully and was proud of herself for doing so. Now Ronnie had revealed to her a side of his life she had never dreamed existed: betting, borrowing money and getting into debt. These weren’t things that belonged to the kind of life she had believed they had had; the decent respectable safe kind of life that had made her feel so secure and which had deepened her love for Ronnie for being the good provider she had believed he was. Then suddenly she had felt as though a trap door had opened beneath her feet, plunging her into a frightening place. As the reality of what Ronnie was saying to her had sunk in, her shock had given way to anger against him for being so irresponsible. That in turn had given way to compassionate pity when she had seen how sorry and ashamed he was. They were a married couple sharing the good and the bad times together, she had told him firmly as she held him as tightly and protectively as though he were their young son’s age. Somehow they would find a way to pay off the money that was owing.

That had been when she had first started working at the Grafton.

But somehow the loan just never seemed to get repaid, and then Ronnie had admitted to her that he had got involved with a betting syndicate during his leave and that he had had to increase their loan to cover his share of its losses. They had had a horrible verbal fight, which had ended up with Ronnie clinging to her and begging her to forgive him whilst promising that it wouldn’t happen again. What could she do? He was a soldier about to be sent on overseas duties – how could she let him go without giving him the comfort of her love and her trust, no matter what her inner fears? And so she had hugged him back and held him tightly and told him that he mustn’t worry. She had even managed to laugh and say lightly that what with the extra work the Government wanted women to take on for the war effort, she would have the debt repaid by the time he was next home on leave. He had been so grateful for her understanding and so lovingly tender and filled with regret that she had told herself that she had done the right thing. But then when he had gone she had discovered that the amount he had borrowed was far more than he had told her, and she had been filled with angry despair and even resentment.

She had never imagined when she had first met him that Ronnie would turn out to be a betting man. He had seemed far too respectable and decent. She had thought they were the kind of young couple who could keep their heads held up high, and she had even felt sorry for the poor of the city who lived down by the docks, living constantly with the shame of having to borrow against tomorrow to pay for today, opening her purse freely to slip a few pennies to the children she saw begging.

Now the pride she had originally felt in Ronnie and their marriage had given way to fear – and that fear had more than one face. Initially her fear had been because she had discovered that Ronnie wasn’t the sensible worldly-wise husband and provider she had believed him to be; the rock she and their children could depend on. But then later had come the fear of the shame she would suffer if their debt became public knowledge, and most of all, fear of how they were going to repay the money and what would happen if they fell behind with their repayments.

When Ronnie had broken down and admitted to her that not only had he foolishly borrowed from a moneylender once but that he had also gone back to him and borrowed again, Sally had struggled to understand how the strong capable Ronnie she loved and depended on so much could have turned into this man who was weak and vulnerable and afraid, and who was admitting to her that he didn’t know what to do.

One of the things Sally had loved so much about Ronnie was his dependability. As a child she had grown up in a chaotic family environment with her father often out of work, but well paid when he was in work, and so life had seemed filled with the giddy highs of her mother’s excitement when they had money and the frightening lows of her despair when they didn’t. Sally had yearned for a life in which those highs and lows were exchanged for the calm of a decent steady man with a nice steady job, and part of the reason she had fallen in love with Ronnie was because he had seemed to embody those virtues. To discover that he had done something that even her own parents had steadfastly refused to do, and gone to a moneylender, had left her feeling as though her whole world had been turned upside down. Only the very poorest of the poor, or the feckless and weak, went to moneylenders, and certainly not people who lived on Chestnut Close.

Sally had known real shame along with her shock and her fear. But she was a young woman with a lot of common sense and courage, and so she had gone to see the moneylender from whom Ronnie had borrowed the money, and they had come to an arrangement whereby she would call on him weekly with their payments instead of him sending round a ‘tallyman’ to collect it from the house. That way at least she had hoped to keep up a front of respectability.

It had made her feel physically sick to see written down the amount they now owed, so very much more than she had thought. She had told Mr Wade proudly that she wanted to increase their repayments so that they could reduce the money owing faster, swallowing back her longing to beg him not to lend Ronnie any more. She could not go behind her husband’s back in such a way, and humiliate him.

She admitted now, as she hurried back to the door and handed over the money to the waiting man, that maybe she should have gone back to see Mr Wade and asked him to let her reduce the payments once she realised what a struggle she was going to have meeting the increased amount she had volunteered to pay, but she was desperate to get the loan cleared as quickly as she could, and she had her pride just like everyone else.

It seemed to take for ever for the man to count slowly through the amount she had handed him before he finally gave a grunt of satisfaction and stashed it in his pocket.

He was about to turn away when Sally reminded him firmly, ‘Mr Wade always writes the amount down and signs it.’

‘Mebbe he did, but that’s not the way the new owners do business.’

He had gone before Sally could object, melting into the darkness, leaving her feeling relieved that none of her neighbours had seen him but at the same time highly anxious. This wasn’t like worrying about rationing or being bombed; it wasn’t an anxiety she could share with anyone else and find comfort in the fact that they were in things together.

It was far later than Sam had planned when the bus finally set her down at the stop closest to her billet. The earlier sea mist had now become a steady downpour, the rain trickling down inside the upturned collar of her greatcoat. Quickly she hurried towards the entrance to the school, dismayed to find that the door now seemed to be locked. Now what was she to do? To her relief, before she had to decide the door was suddenly opened from the inside, allowing her to step inside and quickly close the door behind her to observe the blackout rules about not allowing any light to escape into the night darkness and so potentially provide a target for German bombers.

In the dim light from the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling she could see that the chair behind the desk was now occupied by a very stern-looking warrant officer.

‘Private Grey reporting for duty, ma’am,’ Sam offered hurriedly, suddenly very conscious of the rubble and brick dust on her greatcoat.

‘Strange,’ the warrant office marvelled nastily. She was well into her thirties, Sam guessed, with an unusually broad, somehow flattened face and slightly bulbous protruding eyes, ‘only we seem to have someone of that name here already, at least according to her kitbag. Got a double, have we, Private?’

‘I … no … that is … There wasn’t anyone here to report to when I arrived, ma’am,’ Sam told her desperately, ‘and so I thought I’d just get some fresh air and familiarise myself with the city …’

One thin grey eyebrow rose as the warrant officer looked Sam up and down. ‘Acquainting yourself with the city, was it? It looks to me more like you’ve been acquainting yourself with something very different indeed, Private.’ She pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘Let me explain something to you, Private. Here in this billet and this unit we do not waltz in and dump our kitbags and then waltz out again like we was out of uniform.’

Sam had come across a wide variety of authority figures since she had joined the ATS but never one like this. Instinctively she knew that the woman confronting her now was someone who relished the power her authority gave her. She wouldn’t hesitate to bully and terrorise those under her, Sam guessed, and she also deduced that the warrant officer had already made up her mind that Sam was someone she didn’t very much like.

Well, that was fine, Sam decided, determinedly ignoring the sickly little feeling in her stomach that said she was upset by the hostility she could sense. She could feel herself starting to shake a bit inside and she was longing for the calming effect of a cigarette.

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ she apologised dutifully, fixing her gaze on a point to the left of the warrant officer’s shoulder rather than risk engaging in eye contact with her. ‘It won’t happen again.’

Sam could almost sense the warrant officer’s disappointment that she wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to tear another strip off her. Sam was surprised herself. It wasn’t like her to allow herself to be intimated, or to pass up an opportunity to have a bit of fun by coming up with some far-fetched explanation for what she had done.

‘No it won’t,’ the warrant officer agreed meaningfully, ‘because—’

The sudden opening of a door behind the desk and the appearance of a tall, slim, grey-haired woman wearing a captain’s uniform had the warrant officer along with Sam springing to attention and saluting.

Whatever the warrant officer had been about to say remained unsaid as the captain looked at Sam with surprisingly kind hazel eyes and said calmly, ‘Ah, our wanderer has returned has she, Warrant Officer?’ The hazel gaze skimmed Sam from head to foot and then paused thoughtfully on her face.

‘Took a wrong turning in the blackout, ma’am, and fell over some sandbags,’ Sam offered by way of explanation of her appearance.

The captain nodded, then told Sam calmly, ‘Warrant Officer Sands will no doubt have informed you of the routine here. First thing after breakfast, transport arrives to take you all to your designated areas of work. You have been assigned to Deysbrook Barracks.’

No supper! And she was very hungry, Sam realised, but of course she didn’t say anything.

She stood stiffly at attention until the captain said briskly, ‘Dismissed.’

At least she had escaped whatever punishment the warrant officer had no doubt been planning for her, Sam acknowledged, recovering some of her normal insouciance as she made her way to the dormitory where she had left her kitbag.

Not wanting to disturb the other girls, she tried to be as quiet as possible but the discovery that the shape she could feel on the bed closest to the door wasn’t her kitbag but the sleeping body of another girl caused both her and the girl in the bed to yelp in protest, and within seconds torches were being switched on all over the dormitory as the noise woke the other girls.

‘Sorry, sorry …’ Sam apologised ruefully, ‘only I left my kitbag here …’

‘The Toad moved it,’ a girl in a bed halfway down the room informed her sleepily.

‘She means Warrant Officer Sands,’ another girl explained unnecessarily, since Sam had quick-wittedly recognised how appropriate the warrant officer’s nickname was. ‘Lord,’ the girl continued, ‘when she found your kitbag there without any sign of you, she swelled up so much with fury we thought she was going to burst.’

‘Pity she didn’t,’ someone else announced fervently. ‘Gave me jankers for a whole week, she did, just because I hadn’t got me cap on straight. Me poor hands were red raw with all that scrubbing and potato peeling in freezing cold water. You want to watch out for her: if she takes a dislike to you you’ll know all about it and no mistake.’

‘Go on with you, May. Give her a chance to get herself settled in before you start scaring her half to death about old Toad face,’ the girl whose bed was next to Sam’s spoke up firmly, before warning Sam, ‘I don’t want to tell you what to do, but if I was you I’d get myself into bed before Toadie comes up here checking up on you. She’s got a real mean streak to her and there’s nothing she likes better than an excuse to come down heavy on one of us. I’m Corporal Hazel Gibson, by the way.’

‘Sam Grey,’ Sam reciprocated. ‘And thanks for the warning, Hazel, I mean, Corp.’ She stifled a sudden yawn. It had been a long day, and she was more than ready for her bed.

‘Mind you, at least Toadie’s a real live human being, not like that ghost wot’s supposed to go walking all over the place at night,’ the girl the corporal had addressed as May announced with ghoulish relish.

‘A ghost?’ a nervously quavering little voice from the bed closest to the door protested shakily.

‘Yes. Comes looking for the girl wot got him killed on account of her taking up with someone else and her new lover murdering him,’ May told them. ‘At least that’s what I’ve bin told.’

‘Go on with you, May. You don’t half talk a load of rubbish,’ the corporal squashed the almost palpable air of nervous tension creeping through the room, leaving Sam free to follow the corporal’s advice and make haste to get herself into the only spare bed.

Her new dorm mates seemed a decent crowd, she reflected, especially Hazel Gibson, unlike the warrant officer, and that bossy Bomb Disposal chap. She certainly didn’t want to run into him again.