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Chapter Three

‘But, Mum, you can’t just up and leave London.’

As she spoke Dulcie couldn’t help looking at the firmly tied and bulging sacks of household goods in the middle of the floor of the main room of her family home, the bed linen tied up in a sheet. The family didn’t possess the luxury of proper suitcases. Very few of those living in Stepney did, unless they were the sort that, for one reason or another were constantly on the move. The sort her own parents had always kept clear of and thought were beneath them. The sort that couldn’t go to church unless they’d got enough money to get their good clothes out of hock at the pawnshop.

For Dulcie, seeing her parents’ possessions gathered together came far too close for comfort to the images from the newspapers she had inside her head: the dispossessed of the East End wandering helplessly and hopelessly through the streets of London clutching their sad bundles of whatever they had managed to rescue from their bombed homes.

The last thing Dulcie had expected when Sergeant Dawson had delivered her to the door of her parents’ home, before checking his watch and telling her that she’d got an hour before he came back for her, was that she would find her mother on the verge of leaving London. But her mother’s nerves were so shattered by the relentless bombing that her hands had been shaking too much for her to fill the kettle and make them a cup of tea.

Having taken over that task for her, Dulcie had waited for her mother to say something about her accident and to express maternal concern, but she might as well have not bothered because, despite the fact that Dulcie was on crutches with her ankle in plaster, her mother hadn’t said a word about her injury, merely greeting her with a blunt, ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’

‘You can’t just leave,’ Dulcie reiterated now.

‘Oh, can’t I? We’ll just see about that. It’s all right for you, Dulcie, living in Holborn. That hasn’t been touched. You’re safe. You should have tried living down here since Hitler started bombing us.’

Mary Simmonds’ hand shook so much that she had to put her teacup back in its saucer, spilling some of the tea as she did so.

‘I didn’t get this running for a bus,’ Dulcie felt justified in pointing out smartly as she held out her plastered leg, ‘and I’m going to have to keep this ruddy plaster on for longer than normal on account of me having such delicate ankles.’

When her mother still didn’t say anything Dulcie was unable to prevent herself from adding bitterly, ‘Not that you seem to care that much.’

‘Oh, that’s typical of you, Dulcie. You’ve always been selfish and thinking only of yourself. Not one word have you said about poor Edith. I can’t sleep at night for thinking about what might have happened to your sister, and how she might have suffered. I can’t stay here in London, knowing them Germans have taken her life.’

Tears filled Dulcie’s mother’s eyes, her hands now shaking so badly that she folded them together in her lap as she and Dulcie sat opposite one another on the two hard dining chairs either side of the battered oak table, which had to be pushed up against the wall to make space for people to walk past it. The fire that heated the room was, for once, unlit, the September sunshine cruelly bright on the faded striped wallpaper. The three plaster ducks, which had adorned the wall opposite the fireplace, and of which her mother had been so proud, had been removed, leaving brighter patches of paper. Even the curtains had been taken down, allowing the sunlight to highlight the shabbiness of the room.

It had been in here, on the rag rug in front of the fire, that Dulcie and Edith has squabbled and, indeed, fought, pulling one another’s hair and screaming over the possession of some toy; fights that Edith had always won, of course, because she had had their mother to take her side. Now any sisterly sense of loss was stamped out by Dulcie’s knowledge that her sister had always been their mother’s favourite.

‘You don’t know that she is dead yet,’ she reminded her mother.

Dulcie had never got on with her sister, but deep down, although she wasn’t willing to admit it, there was a small scratchy sore place, an unhappy feeling, because several bombs had fallen on the area where Edith had been.

‘There’s not been any official notice, or anything . . .’ A body, Dulcie meant; concrete evidence that Edith was in fact dead, but she couldn’t say that to her mother. ‘She might just be missing.’ But she offered these words more dismissively than comfortingly.

‘Missing?’ Mary retorted. ‘Of course she isn’t missing. Me and your dad have been to all the hospitals and all the rest centres. I know my Edith: the first thing she would have done once the air raid was over, if she’d been all right, was come home to let me know that she was safe.’ Her voice shook, tears filling her already swollen eyes. ‘No. She’s gone. Killed by Hitler when she was singing her heart out trying to do her best for other people. The theatre she was in took a direct hit, after all. She didn’t have a selfish bone in her body, Edith didn’t. Always thinking of others, she was.’

Always thinking of herself, more like, Dulcie thought, but she knew there was no point in saying that to her mother, who had thought that the sun shone out of Edith’s backside. It felt odd to think that Edith had gone, that they’d never quarrel with one another again, that she’d never see her sister again. Dulcie’s heart started to beat faster, a lump of emotion clogging her throat as unexpected feelings gripped her. There had been no love lost between her and Edith, after all, so there was no cause for her to go all soft about her now. It was a shock, though, to think of her being dead.

Unsettled by her own emotions, Dulcie reached for her mother’s hand but immediately her mother shrugged her off, saying despairingly, ‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to go on without Edith. She was the best daughter any mother could want.’

A far better daughter than she was, Dulcie knew her mother meant, the brief moment of sadness and loss she had been feeling overtaken by the bitterness their mother’s favouritism always aroused in her.

‘There’s nothing to keep me here now,’ her mother continued bleakly.

‘What about Dad?’

‘Your dad’s leaving as well. Dunham’s that he works for had their yard bombed and everything in it destroyed, and so Paul Dunham has decided to get out of London and go into business with a cousin he’s got who’s a builder down in Kent. He’s offered your dad a job with him, and there’s a couple of rooms we can have with a chap who’s already working for this cousin of his. We’re going down in Dunham’s lorry tomorrow morning.’

For once in her life Dulcie was silent, struggling to take in everything that her mother had told her and all that she hadn’t said as well.

‘And what about Rick and the Dunhams’ son, John?’ she finally demanded in a sharp voice. ‘What about them when they get leave from the army and find that they haven’t got a home to come to any more?’

‘Your dad wrote to Rick last night to tell him about Edith and what we’re doing.’

‘And I suppose you were going to send me a letter as well, were you?’ Dulcie asked sarcastically, causing a dull flush of colour to spread up under her mother’s previously pale face.

‘Don’t you take that tone with me, my girl. You were the one who chose to move out and go and live somewhere else.’

‘I only moved to Holborn, not Kent, and I came back every Sunday for church,’ Dulcie pointed out, using her anger to conceal the pain burning inside her.

‘Your dad was going to arrange to send a message round to Holborn to let you know that we’re leaving. ‘

‘But you weren’t going to take the trouble to come and see me,’ Dulcie accused her mother, ‘even though you knew I’d got a broken ankle.’

‘Trust you to make a fuss about yourself, Dulcie. Your dad and me knew that you were all right and, after all, a broken ankle’s nothing compared with what’s happened to your poor sister.’

Dulcie didn’t know what she might have said to her mother if there hadn’t been a knock on the door. She looked at her watch.

‘That will be Sergeant Dawson, come to help me get back to Holborn. Luckily for me at least some folk think enough of me to worry about me,’ was her parting accusation as she stood up and reached for her crutches, making her way along the narrow hallway to open the front door.

Despite the justification she felt for simply walking away with Sergeant Dawson and slamming the door behind her without another word, somehow Dulcie couldn’t stop herself turning back into the house and hobbling down the hall.

‘You’d better write and let me know where you’re staying,’ she told her mother in a curt voice, ‘just in case Rick doesn’t get his letter from you and turns up in Holborn, wanting to know where you are.’ She paused, whilst her mother wrote down their new address for her and then, against her will and awkwardly, Dulcie leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled of dust and tiredness mingled with despair.

If she had hoped to feel her mother’s arms coming round her in a maternal hug then Dulcie had hoped in vain because her mother sat rigidly, not kissing Dulcie back or even looking properly at her, staring straight ahead.

It was her mother’s lookout if she was too wrapped up in ruddy Edith to remember that she had another daughter, Dulcie told herself fiercely as she rejoined Sergeant Dawson, pulling the door, with its peeling paint, sharply closed behind her, then carefully negotiating the front step. She certainly didn’t care!

Wearing her London Transport uniform of grey worsted fabric piped in blue, and trying to look as official as she possibly could, Agnes stood at the top of the stairs leading down into Chancery Lane underground station where she worked, watching the crowd of people making their way down to take refuge in the underground in case the night brought yet another attack from the German Luftwaffe.

When Mr Smith, who managed the ticket office, had asked for volunteers to help organise and keep an eye on things in anticipation of the number of people who would want to use the underground to shelter in, Agnes had been the first to shoot up her hand, but not just because she wanted to do her bit. Ted, the young underground train driver with whom she was walking out, and to whom she was going to become officially engaged at Christmas, had told her that he intended to bring his widowed mother and his two young sisters down to Chancery Lane for protection. This would be Agnes’s first opportunity to meet them. Ted had hoped to arrange for them all to meet up at the small café close to the station where Ted and Agnes often went, as Ted had explained to her that his mother was reluctant to invite Agnes round to their home. They lived in a tiny two-roomed flat owned by the Guinness Trust, which provided rented accommodation to respectable but poor working-class families in London.

‘The truth is that there isn’t room for the four of us to sit down together at the table all at the same time, never mind five of us,’ Ted had explained to her, and Agnes had understood. She might have been abandoned at birth by her mother and raised in the orphanage attached to the Row’s local church, but Agnes had seen how proud Olive, her landlady, was of her home and she had quickly grasped what Ted was not saying, which was that his mother felt embarrassed about inviting her to their small home. Or at least that was what Agnes hoped Ted had meant. She couldn’t quite stop worrying that Ted’s mother might think an orphaned girl who didn’t know where she came from was not be the kind she wanted her son to get involved with. Agnes didn’t like thinking about the circumstances of her birth and subsequent abandonment. Doing so made her feel all prickly and upset inside.

Now that the children and staff from the orphanage had been evacuated to the country, the building was used as a drill hall, and potential rest centre, should the unthinkable happen and the area be bombed, making people homeless.

Of course there was no question of her and Ted getting married any time soon. Not with Ted being the only breadwinner in the family and having his mother and two sisters to support. Ted had been honest with her about that, and Agnes fully understood what he had said to her. He wouldn’t have been her good kind Ted if he hadn’t looked after his family.

Ted was off duty at the moment and he’d told her that he would bring his family down early in the evening to make sure they got settled in a good spot before he went back to work, but the stream of people approaching the station was getting heavier now, and Agnes was worried that she might somehow miss them in the crush.

Predictably, of course, Mr Smith had initially thoroughly disapproved of and objected to the public more or less ‘taking it upon themselves’, as he had put it, to have the right to sleep in the underground. But once Winston Churchill himself, of whom Mr Smith was a great admirer, had sanctioned this, his objections had slowed to muttered grumbles about the mess people were making, especially those who had no homes to go to any more, and who brought with them what belongings they had been able to salvage.

Agnes, on the other hand, felt sorry for them. She was so lucky to have her lovely room at number 13 Article Row, her kind landlady Mrs Robbins, and her wonderful friends there, especially Tilly. She didn’t want to think of how it would make her feel if she were to lose any of that.

She scanned the growing crowd of people approaching the steps to the underground, searching for Ted’s familiar face, feeling both excited and nervous at the prospect of meeting his family – and especially his mother – at last.

However, when they did arrive Agnes almost missed them. An elderly woman was so laden with the weight of her possessions that her slow progress was holding other people up. Some were losing patience and starting to mutter complaints so Agnes stepped in to help her.

Once she got her down the stairs, though, the woman refused to let go of her, and Agnes tried not to react to the musty smell of stale sweat and bad breath coming off her as she dragged the girl closer with one grimy hand to insist, ‘I ain’t done with you yet, missie. I want you to find me somewhere comfy to put me bed. I’ve got it rolled up in here.’ She patted the bundle Agnes had taken from her. ‘Sleep in ’yde Park normally, I do.’ She tapped the side of her nose. ‘I knows all the ways of avoiding the park keepers, an’ all. They won’t catch me, they won’t, and neither will ruddy Hitler.’

As Agnes guided the woman along the platform one small boy protested to his mother, ‘I don’t want her near me, Ma. She stinks.’

It was true, and Agnes was glad to escape from her. She was almost at the top of the steps, struggling to pick her way through the mass of people coming down, when she heard Ted’s voice calling her name. He stood at the top, beaming her a smile.

To other people Ted might be a relatively ordinary-looking young man of middling height, with a wiry frame, mouse-brown hair and ears that stuck out, but to Agnes he was a hero and his bright blue eyes were the kindest she had ever seen.

Immediately she made her way towards him, until he could reach out, grab her hand and haul her onto the top step where he was standing,

‘I was getting worried that I must have missed you,’ Agnes said breathlessly.

‘As if I’d let that happen,’ Ted replied with a grin, giving her that special look that made her heart do a somersault.

‘Come on, you two,’ he called out, reaching into the shadows behind him. ‘Come and say hello to Agnes.’

The two small girls who emerged to stand beside him had Ted’s brown hair and blue eyes. Their hair was neatly plaited and their eyes filled with apprehension as they pressed closer to their brother, whilst staring saucer-eyed at the crowd which was now pouring down the stairs in front of them.

‘Marie, Sonia, you hold tight to your brother’s hand. Ted, you just make sure you don’t let go of them.’

The small thin woman, who had now materialised on Ted’s other side, and who it was obvious from her looks was Ted’s mother, hadn’t looked at Agnes yet, but Agnes could understand that her first concern must be for her younger children, just as she understood the bashful shyness that kept the two girls themselves silent as they looked swiftly at her, then away again.

‘Don’t fret, Mum, I’ve got them both safe.’

The sound of the calm loving reassurance in Ted’s voice made Agnes’s heart swell with pride. He was so very much the man of the family, the one they all relied on, just as she had known he must be.

‘This is Agnes, Mum,’ Ted was saying, putting an arm protectively round his sisters’ shoulders as he reached for Agnes’s hand to pull her gently closer.

But although Ted had drawn them altogether like a proper family, and although he was saying with pride in his voice, ‘Come on, girls, give Agnes a smile. After all, she’s going to be your sister,’ neither of the girls would look at her, and Ted’s mother didn’t speak to her at all.

Agnes had been used to dealing with girls younger than she was at the orphanage, and she guessed that the girls’ reluctance to look at her sprang mainly from shyness, but Ted’s mother’s refusal to smile or extend her hand to her was another matter.

Instead of responding welcomingly to her, there was coldness and disapproval in Ted’s mother’s eyes when she looked at her, and hostility too, Agnes feared. But now wasn’t the time to do anything about that because suddenly the air was filled with the shrieking rise and fall of the air-raid siren, causing panic to descend on those still at the top of the steps.

‘Come on,’ Ted instructed his sisters, grabbing each of them by the hand. ‘Mum, you take Sonia’s hand, and, Agnes, you take Marie’s. Don’t let go, either of you,’ he warned his sisters as he hurried them down the steps. ‘Stay close to me, all of you.’

The crowd pressed in on them from all sides, and Agnes felt it was more by good luck than anything else that she managed to keep her feet on the steps. She was sure that she would have panicked herself, worried that she’d fall and be trampled underfoot, if she hadn’t had the role of looking after the elder of Ted’s two sisters. But she kept hold of the little girl’s hand and tried to protect her by keeping as close to her as she could.

They could already hear the planes and they weren’t even down at the bottom of the stairs. The dull menacing thrum of their engines became louder with every breath Agnes took, and she tried to ignore the sounds of panic behind her from those who had yet to make it inside, and the angry protests from those already safely installed, objecting to having to make room for more people.

‘Come on, this way,’ Ted urged his family and Agnes, hurrying them towards a doorway in the wall that led, Agnes knew, to a small storeroom.

‘It will be locked,’ Agnes told him, breathless with anxiety.

‘I’ve got the key,’ Ted responded with a grin. ‘Got it off Smithy this morning, only you’d better not let on to anyone else, otherwise we’ll be crammed in here like sardines in a tin. Do you fancy that, girls,’ he teased his sisters, keeping them in front of him as he let go of their hands to remove the key from his pocket, ‘being squashed like sardines?’

Agnes was very conscious of the fact that right now she was squashed up very close to Ted. It made her feel warm and safe and somehow very grown up to be this close to him in this kind of situation. The intimacy between their bodies was that of a couple bonded together by their need to protect the young lives of Ted’s sisters, just as one day they would protect their own children.

‘In you go, all of you,’ Ted told them once he’d got the door open just enough for them to slip in.

‘It’s dark inside, and I don’t like the dark,’ little Sonia piped up unhappily.

‘There’s a light inside, love, but I don’t want to switch it on until you’re all safely in there,’ Ted tried to reassure her.

Agnes guessed that he didn’t want to put the light on straight away and alert others to the existence of the small hideaway, so she smiled at the little girl and told her, ‘I’ve got my torch, look . . .’ She flashed it briefly ahead of her so that she could see inside what was little more than a large cupboard. About six feet square, with a washbasin inside, it had some hooks on the wall and three battered-looking bentwood chairs.

‘Come on, you two.’ Taking charge, Ted’s mother went into the storeroom, dragging her daughters with her, but still ignoring Agnes.

‘I’d better get back to the office,’ Agnes told Ted. ‘They’ll be expecting me there, seeing as I’m supposed to be volunteering to help out.’

‘I’ll walk you back there,’ Ted told her.

But as he reached for her hand his mother said sharply, ‘Ted, the girls are getting upset. You’d better get in here and help me calm them down.’

Agnes could see how torn he was, so she touched his arm and smiled reassuringly. ‘I’ll be all right You stay here.’

She could tell that he didn’t like letting her go on her own, so she added firmly, ‘When people see that I’m in uniform they’ll let me through.’

‘Ted, your sisters need you,’ Mrs Jackson announced in an even sharper tone.

‘Mum’s a bit on edge and not herself with all this bombing going on,’ Ted whispered apologetically to Agnes, giving her hand a little squeeze.

Agnes nodded. She hoped so much that he was right, she thought, as she made her way slowly and with great difficulty through the mass of people filling the platform and back towards the ticket office. She hoped so much that it was only because Ted’s mother was worried for her children that she had been so off with her, and not because she didn’t like her.

Sergeant Dawson and Dulcie were four houses away from number 13 when they heard the air-raid siren. Without a word the policeman took Dulcie’s crutches from her and, wrapping one strong arm around her waist half carried and half dragged her as he ran with her in the direction of her landlady’s front door.

Dulcie wasn’t the sort to show fear – of anything or anyone – not even to herself. It was a matter of pride, something she had set out to teach herself from the very first minute she had seen her mother gazing into the basket that contained her new baby sister, Edith, with a look of such love in her eyes. So she told herself now that the hammering of her heart was caused by her exertion and not by anything else.

‘I hope that they aren’t in their Anderson already,’ Sergeant Dawson muttered half under his breath as he made to knock on the door, but Dulcie shook her head.

‘It’s all right, I’ve got a key.’

However, the door was already being opened by Olive, who exclaimed, ‘Thank heavens! I was beginning to worry that you’d be caught out in the open somewhere.’

‘Not twice in less than seven days I’m not going to be,’ Dulcie grimaced as she took her crutches from Sergeant Dawson, thanked him and hobbled inside. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard over the sound of the sirens, yelling as though in warning to the oncoming bombers: ‘You aren’t getting a second chance to get me.’

‘Come on. I’ll help you both down to the Anderson,’ Sergeant Dawson told them, also raising his voice, as the noise of the planes’ engines vied for dominance with that of the siren.

‘You should be getting yourself to safety,’ Olive, who had her arm around Dulcie and was guiding her down the hall, protested as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

‘I’m on ARP duty. I’ll have to check the street and make sure that everyone’s left their houses, so I may as well start here.’

‘Where’s Tilly?’ Dulcie demanded when they reached the empty kitchen; the anxiety sharpening her voice touched Olive’s heart and reminded her of just how much her opinion of this young woman had changed in a year.

‘I sent her to the Anderson the minute we heard the siren,’ Olive told her.

Meaning that Olive had waited for her, Dulcie recognised. The tears she hadn’t allowed herself to cry with her mother now filled her eyes and made her blink determinedly to hide her emotion. Dulcie didn’t believe in having emotions, never mind giving in to them. Or at least she hadn’t done until the other girls living at number 13 had risked their lives to save hers when they had been caught in the open in the city’s first big bombing raid.

That night had bonded them together for ever and had completely changed how Dulcie felt about them and about living at number 13. But most especially it had changed how Dulcie felt about Olive.

Olive was glad of the carefully shielded beam of Sergeant Dawson’s torch after they had left the blacked-out house behind and were making their way down the unlit garden path to the Anderson, where, against all the rules, Tilly had the door open, the lit oil lamp glowing out from inside.

There was just time for her to thank Sergeant Dawson yet again before the sound of their voices was drowned out by the incoming bombers, so close now, surely, that Olive didn’t dare risk glancing up at the sky as she shooed Dulcie into the shelter ahead of her and then pulled the door closed behind herself.

‘Mum said that you’d make it back,’ Tilly greeted their lodger. ‘She’s made you some sandwiches in case you didn’t get round to having your tea, and there’s a flask here as well.’ She held up the flask to show Dulcie, who nodded her head.

It was not in Dulcie’s nature to thank others effusively for anything, but there was something in the smile she gave Olive that sent its own special message of all that she now felt for her landlady and her kindness.

‘How was your mother, Dulcie?’ Olive asked as they all settled themselves on the three bottom bunk beds that formed a U shape at the far end of the shelter. ‘Has there been any news about your sister?’

‘No. Mum’s convinced that Edith’s dead, though, and I suppose she must be. She and Dad have been round all the hospitals and the rest centres, and Mum reckons that as Edith would have let her know if she’s all right, she must be dead. She says she doesn’t want to stay in London any longer. Her and Dad are off to Kent in the morning. Dad’s got the promise of a job and somewhere to stay from Paul Dunham. He’s the builder Dad already works for, and he’s got contacts in Kent. We all used to go to Kent hop picking when I was a kid. Hard work it was as well.’

There was a wealth of bitterness in Dulcie’s voice when she talked about her mother that gave away her real feelings, but Olive felt it tactful not to say anything.

The increasing noise of the incoming bombers was now making conversation all but impossible. Tilly covered her ears, and they all looked upwards at the dark roof of the shelter.

‘It will be the docks they’ll be after again, not us,’ Dulcie mouthed.

‘At least we’ve got the ack-ack guns defending us now,’ Tilly mouthed back against the fierce pounding noise from the British gun batteries.

Of course, it was impossible for them to see what was happening as they daren’t risk breaking the blackout by opening the door, but they could hear a second wave of bombers directly overhead, whilst the shrill whistle of bombs falling from the first wave could be heard mingled with the dull heavy ‘whoomf’ sound of the explosions.

‘They were saying at work this morning that the docks were burning so fiercely the other night, the wood was reigniting even though the firemen had soaked it and put the fire out once,’ Tilly said. ‘I never thought before of fire being so dangerous. A fire used to be something I’d look forward to coming home to on a cold winter’s day, something that warmed you, not killed you, but now . . .’

‘At least the RAF are giving the Germans a taste of their own medicine,’ Dulcie replied, trying to lift Tilly’s spirits by reminding her of what they’d heard on the wireless of a night time raid Bomber Command had made on German cities earlier in the week in retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s attack on London.

‘Time we had those sandwiches, I think,’ Olive decided when a fresh crescendo of explosions had both girls looking noticeably pale-faced in the glow of the oil lamp. Olive couldn’t forget the danger they had already faced and from which, miraculously, they had escaped safely. They had made light of the experience since, but Olive wouldn’t have blamed them if they had shown far more fear now than they were doing.

‘Some East Enders we’ve had at the hospital have been saying that Hitler is only bombing the East End because he wants to get rid of it before he sets himself up in London,’ Tilly told her mother. ‘He doesn’t care how many people he kills and hurts.’

‘It’s the docks the Germans have been aiming for,’ Olive pointed out, ‘because they know how important they are for bringing in supplies to keep the country running.’

‘They’re bombing more than just the docks and the East End now,’ said Dulcie ‘although it’s true that the East End has been the worst hit. There’s whole streets gone; nothing left at all except half a house here and there. I saw one when I went to see my mother, where the whole side of the house had been taken off and you could see right into every room. Of course, the downstairs rooms had been cleared. There’s looters everywhere, Sergeant Dawson said, nabbing everything they can. But upstairs you could see the bed and all the furniture with a rag rug half hanging off the floor where the wall had gone. I’m glad it wasn’t my bedroom. Horrible, it was, with a really nasty green bedspread on the bed. I’d have been ashamed to call it mine.’

Olive reached for the sandwiches, carefully wrapped in a piece of precious greaseproof paper – precious because it was virtually impossible to buy it any more, thanks to the war – and then almost dropped them when the sound of a bomb exploding somewhere close at hand was so loud that both girls immediately clapped their hands over their ears. Putting the sandwiches aside, Olive opened her arms and immediately the girls came to sit one on either side of her so that she could hold them both close. The warmth of them nestling close to her reminded her of something she needed to say to Dulcie.

Olive placed her lips close to Dulcie’s ear and told her, ‘Dulcie, I’ve decided that whilst you’re off work with your ankle, you don’t have to pay me any rent.’

Dulcie opened her mouth and then closed it again. She had been worrying about paying her rent whilst she was off sick and on short wages, but she was a thrifty young woman and she’d worked out that if she was careful she’d got enough in her Post Office book to pay her rent for the six weeks she’d be in plaster. To have Olive tell her that she didn’t need to pay her anything for those six weeks wasn’t just kind, it was generosity the like of which Dulcie had never previously known.

For a few seconds she was too surprised to say anything, able only to stare at Olive with wide disbelieving eyes, before replying, ‘That’s ever so good of you, but I’d like to pay half of my rent. I can afford to, and it doesn’t seem right you letting me stay for nothing.’

Her offer touched Olive’s heart. She knew how difficult it was for Dulcie to be gracious and grateful to anyone, but especially to her own sex, so she gave her an extra hug and shook her head.

‘No, Dulcie. I’ve made up my mind.’

To Dulcie’s horror her eyes had filled with tears and now one rolled down her cheek to splash on Olive’s hand.

‘I’ve never known anyone as kind as you . . .’ Dulcie began, but what she wanted to say was silenced by the sound of more planes overhead.

There was no need for any of them to speak. They all knew what they were feeling. There were bombs dropping all around them, even though the docks, and not Holborn, were the bombers’ targets. Everyone knew that the planes dropped whatever they had left before turning homewards, and if you just happened to be underneath that bomb then too bad.

The night stretched ahead of them, filled with danger and the prospect of death. There was nothing they could do, certainly nowhere for them to run to. They could only sit it out together, wait and pray.