The Light Over London

by Julia Kelly

  24 February 1941

  Two days until I see Paul again.

  I never thought I would be the type of girl to become all swoony over a man, but today at the shop I dropped a glass jar of boiled sweets. By some miracle it didn’t break, but Mrs. Bakeford scolded me for having my head in the clouds. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t my head but my heart.

  With a smile, Cara flipped forward to a random section midway through.

  25 September 1941

  I said goodbye to Paul this morning. He tried to talk me into staying in bed, but I told him that would be desertion.

  Cara paged through the rest of the diary, looking to see how far it went. The writing stopped abruptly with a single line.

  5 January 1942

  Everything is over. I thought I loved him.

  Guilt tugged at her as she closed the cover, but sitting with her hand still touching the journal full of another woman’s most intimate thoughts, she couldn’t deny that she was curious. Who was Paul and what had happened? Why was everything over, seemingly in less than a year? And whose diary was this in the first place?

  When she tipped the rest of the tin onto the floor, out tumbled a tiny compass with a bent edge, a locket, a photo, a few pieces of paper, and a scrap of cloth. The cloth was easy enough to identify: a man’s handkerchief, plain and serviceable, with a “P” stitched in one corner. One of the papers was bright coral and dry with age. She flipped it over. A cinema ticket to the Paramount Theatre in Newquay dated 20 February 1941, the day before one of the diary entries she’d read.

  She set the ticket aside and examined the other scraps of paper. A small flyer with a torn corner for some sort of Valentine’s dance at the generically named Village Hall on the fourteenth of February. An unused tube ticket for the Central line.

  She picked up the photo next. A woman wearing a uniform was looking over her shoulder, her hand raised to the cap that sat perched atop her swept-back, pageboy hairstyle. Her smile was bright and brilliant, as though the photographer had caught her in a moment of pure joy.

  But that wasn’t what made Cara pause. It was the uniform—she’d seen it before. Gran had been issued the same one when she’d joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1943, and Cara recognized it from the two photographs Gran kept in her sitting room. One was a formal portrait taken on Iris Warren’s first day of leave from the women’s auxiliary branch of the army. In the other, she was lined up with four other uniformed girls, all linking arms and smiling.

  “I met your granddad at a dance at the NAAFI,” Gran had explained to her once. “Every few months, something official would be put on in the canteens with as good a band as they could scrape together, but more often we’d dance to music played on a gramophone. The Americans had brought the jitterbug with them, and we were all mad for it.

  “Your granddad was an American GI, with his hair cut short and his sharp uniform. He did his best to woo me with chocolates and the promise of silk stockings.”

  But that was where Gran’s reminiscences ended. The last time Cara had tried to ask about the war when she was just sixteen, Gran had abruptly clammed up and gone to lie down, claiming to have a migraine. Mum had scolded her, saying, “There are some things your gran doesn’t want to talk about. Don’t push her, Cara.”

  She traced her finger over the strong sweep of the woman’s jaw before flipping the photograph over. On the back, in a different handwriting than the diary, someone had written “L.K. on the Embankment.”

  Setting the photo down, she picked up the simple gold heart locket and eased her thumbnail between the clasp to open it. One side was blank but the other held a tiny photograph of a dashing man in a fleece-collared bomber jacket with a pair of goggles perched on top of his head. A pilot.

  “Miss Hargraves!” she heard Jock shout from somewhere downstairs.

  Quickly, she gathered the things into the tin and rushed to find Jock in the study with Mrs. Leithbridge.

  “What have you there?” he asked with a raised brow.

  “I’m not entirely sure.” She set the tin down on a table. “Mrs. Leithbridge, did your great-aunt serve in the ATS during the Second World War?”

  The lady lifted her brows. “I don’t know what the ATS is.”

  “It was the women’s service that supported the army.” When Jock looked over the top of his glasses, she added, “My gran served.”

  “Great-Aunt Lenora used to drone on about being a volunteer ambulance driver in London during the Blitz.” Mrs. Leithbridge rose and click-clacked over to a desk near a pair of tall sash windows. Her hand wove through the air before plucking up one of the photographs that lined its edge. “Here.”

  There was no way the woman who stared out at Cara was the one in the ATS uniform. Even in black-and-white it was easy to see that Lenora Robinson, all sharp angles with high cheekbones and a thin, small nose, bore no resemblance to L.K. on the Embankment’s youthful features and strong jaw.

  Still, Mrs. Leithbridge’s great-aunt shared a first initial with the inscription on the back of the photograph.

  Cara opened the tin and pulled it out. “Are you sure this wasn’t her? The back reads ‘L.K.’ Maybe it was taken before she was married. What was her maiden name?”

  Mrs. Leithbridge barely glanced at the photo. “Great-Aunt Lenora never took her husband’s name. Quite modern, really.”

  “Oh.” Cara glanced at Jock. “There was a diary too.”

  “There’s a market for World War Two paraphernalia and diaries, but since it doesn’t appear that Mrs. Robinson wrote it, we’d have to authenticate it and identify the writer,” said Jock.

  “I have a broker coming to look at the house in two weeks. Everything that can’t be sold will be cleared out by a junk-removal company,” said Mrs. Leithbridge.

  “But shouldn’t we do something with it?” Cara asked, holding up the diary. “Perhaps return it to the woman who wrote it?”

  “Where did you find it?” Jock asked.

  “In an armoire in a small room off the back stairs.”

  “The box room?” Mrs. Leithbridge laughed. “No one’s been in there for years. Throw it out.”

  “No!” Heat crept up Cara’s neck as two pairs of eyes bored into her, but she refused to look away. She felt strangely protective of the diary, drawn in by the happiness and heartbreak she’d read, and was now more determined than ever to get the answers she needed from Gran about her history.

  “I’d like to keep it and try to figure out who it belonged to.” Cara paused. “If that’s okay with you.”

  “I don’t care,” said Mrs. Leithbridge. “I’ll be in the drawing room if you need me.”

  When they were alone, Jock pinned Cara with a stern glare. “Miss Hargraves, we do not argue with clients.”

  “She wanted to throw it away,” Cara protested.

  “And that’s her right. Mrs. Leithbridge can haul all of this to the back garden and set fire to it if she likes, but I’d rather persuade her to sell it and earn my commission. It would be helpful if my assistant didn’t scold her.”

  “Aren’t you the least bit curious as to who wrote it?”

  “Given that I’m working and using up my client’s valuable time, I’m far more interested in this writing box,” he said, gesturing to a Victorian lady’s lap desk that lay open on a table. “Or any other number of things that will actually turn a profit. F-S-P, Miss Hargraves.”

  She squared her shoulders, but before she could say anything, Jock sighed, took off his glasses, and rubbed them on a handkerchief from his pocket. “If it’ll stop you from looking at me like I’m a philistine trying to destroy history, you can take the diary home. Go put it away, but hurry back. This is proving to be a larger job than I expected.”

  Cara kept her head down as she rushed to her car, but she couldn’t help the little smile that touched her lips. She and Gran would have quite a bit to talk about after work.

  2

  LOUISE

  Haybourn
e, Cornwall, February 1941

  The bell above the shop door jangled, and Louise looked up to see a dripping umbrella fill Bakeford’s Grocery & Fine Foods. It came down with a snap to reveal Mrs. Moss, who shook droplets of water all over the floor Louise had mopped an hour ago in a desperate bid for something to do.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Moss,” Louise said, pushing aside the account book she’d been working on.

  “What a storm, dear. I was just telling Mr. Moss it’ll be a wonder if we’re not washed away one day,” said the village solicitor’s wife, touching her small purple hat that sat on a cloud of tight brown curls Louise knew she had washed and set at the beauty parlor in Newquay once a week.

  “It’s certainly keeping most of our customers away today,” said Louise. “What can I help you with?”

  “A pound of sugar and a pound of bacon, please,” Mrs. Moss said.

  “Do you have your ration books?” Louise asked.

  “Oh yes.” The lady opened her handbag and pulled out three of the little booklets. “Here you are.”

  Moving methodically, Louise flipped to the sugar coupons and set about detaching them.

  “The rationing really has become ridiculous,” said Mrs. Moss, tsking her tongue as her eyes darted around the shop. “As though it wasn’t enough after the Great War. What will it be next?”

  Louise knew Mrs. Moss would be just as happy without her response as with it, so she focused on measuring out the sugar on the heavy iron scale with an exacting precision that had become second nature since the Ministry of Food had instituted rationing the previous year.

  “And to think they called this the Phony War. Well, it wasn’t so phony after Dunkirk.” Mrs. Moss crossed her arms over her purse and nodded to herself. “We had another letter from Gary. He mentioned you.”

  “Did he?” she asked, keeping her eyes down as she folded the sugar into a brown paper package.

  “He doesn’t know when his next leave will be. I told him he should’ve joined up with the navy, but the army was all he wanted.

  “Have you been doing the accounts for the shop for long then?” Mrs. Moss asked, taking one of her abrupt changes of conversational tack.

  Louise looked up and saw the lady eyeing the abandoned account book. “Yes, when Mrs. Bakeford hired me, I mentioned I was good at maths in school. She’s had me look over the books every week.”

  Mrs. Moss nodded approvingly. “That’ll do well for you when you’re married. Household accounts are at the heart of good housekeeping, I always say.”

  Louise winced and prayed the lady wouldn’t begin her unsubtle campaign of nudging and prodding Louise about Gary. Neighbors separated by just a few streets, the two had grown up playing together, and while he was a kind man, he was also Gary. He had no greater ambition than to return from the war, read law, and go to work for his father just as he’d been told to do since birth. Gary would live in Haybourne for the rest of his life, a dull, predictable man well suited for a dull, predictable village. It was not the life Louise longed for—not that she knew exactly what it was she wanted.

  Hoping to rush Mrs. Moss and her implications out of the shop as quickly as possible, she began to count out the bacon coupons. The first two ration books were fine, but when she flipped to the page where the bacon coupons should have been in the third, there were none.

  “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Moss, but how much bacon did you want?”

  Mrs. Moss toyed with a bit of string hanging off the cuff of her blouse that peeked out from under her coat. “A pound, please.”

  “Mrs. Moss,” Louise said slowly, “I’m afraid you don’t have the right number of coupons. I can only give you half a pound with these.”

  Something flickered in the lady’s eyes as she looked down at the coupons, but just as quickly Mrs. Moss flashed a brilliant smile that showed off the cracks around her mouth where her lipstick had settled. “You can overlook things this one time.”

  Louise closed the ration books and slid them back toward Mrs. Moss. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The bite in Mrs. Moss’s voice straightened Louise’s spine even as she pressed her hands flat on the counter to keep them from shaking. “Mrs. Bakeford is very strict because the fines are so high.”

  “Louise Keene, your mother—”

  The door crashed open and a figure wrapped in a bright yellow rain slicker and a matching bucket hat stomped in. “Lovely day for a stroll, darling!”

  Kate. Louise could’ve run up and kissed her cousin, wet clothes and all.

  “Oh!” Kate started when she whipped off her hat. “I didn’t realize you had a customer. How do you do, Mrs. Moss?”

  “Very well.” Mrs. Moss sniffed. “My sugar, please, Louise.”

  “Would you like the half pound of bacon as well?” Louise asked.

  “Just the sugar.”

  Biting her lip, she wrapped the sugar in a second sheet of waxed paper to help protect it from the rain and handed it over. Mrs. Moss slipped it into her shopping bag, half opened her umbrella, and threw the door open to the storm.

  A gust of wind swept in and banged the door hard enough that the shopwindow rattled. Kate sprinted over and slammed it shut. Pushing her hair back from her face, she laughed. “What was it that put that sour look on Mrs. Moss’s face?”

  “Kate . . .” Louise knew the censure in her voice would fall flat. It always did when it came to her cousin. Vivacious, bubbly, and just a touch glamorous, Kate was impossible to be angry with. For as long as Louise could remember, Kate had had a circle of friends orbiting her. In the spring of 1937, when both of them turned sixteen and Kate had transformed from pretty to beautiful, the ranks of her little group had opened to include most of the boys in Haybourne and some from the neighboring village of St. Mawgan.

  “If Mrs. Moss doesn’t want anyone to gossip about her, she shouldn’t be such a busybody.” Kate pointed at Louise. “And I won’t hear a word of you defending her.”

  Louise pursed her lips and gave her cousin a small smile.

  “Good. Now then,” Kate said, spreading her hands wide on the shop counter, “what are you doing Friday evening?”

  Louise blinked a couple of times at the improbable question. “What I do every Friday—closing the shop down.”

  Kate sighed. “And after Bakeford’s closes at five?”

  “The accounts.”

  Kate flipped the account book around to face her and skimmed her finger down a column of numbers. “Looks as though you’re a bit ahead of yourself this week.”

  “You’re going to get it wet.” Louise snatched the book out from under her cousin’s fingers, snapped it closed, and shoved it under the counter.

  “Come now, darling,” said Kate.

  “Do stop calling everyone ‘darling,’ Kate. You sound ridiculous.”

  “It’s what all the film stars do.”

  “American film stars. Not girls who’ve never set foot out of Cornwall.”

  Kate twisted, draping herself over the counter so that her blond hair fell in thick waves over the polished wood. “Lord, what I wouldn’t give to be in Hollywood.” She flipped around again and leveled a look at Louise. “You never answered my question.”

  “What was that?”

  “What are you doing after you finish the accounts, which you clearly have already started?”

  “I suppose I’ll go home and have dinner with my parents,” said Louise with a shrug. It sounded just as uninspired as it felt.

  Kate flashed her a grin. “Come to the dance with me.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” said Louise immediately.

  “You don’t even know where I want us to go.”

  Louise didn’t have to know. Wherever it was, she could be absolutely certain that Kate would swan in, head held high, and immediately find herself swarmed by men. One would want to light her cigarette, two would push and shove to fetch her a drink, and four would fight each other for the
first turn around the floor, showing off with a mock fox-trot danced with an imaginary girl in their arms. And through it all Louise would stand, hands clasped behind her back, too shy to initiate a conversation and feeling ridiculous for longing to be brought into their fold.

  Louise probably should’ve resented her cousin for her ease with men, but that was impossible. Generous to a fault, Kate would be bursting with happiness if one of her admirers took a shine to Louise. But her cousin couldn’t begin to understand what it was like to go through life without every door falling open. If Kate wanted, her feet would never touch the ground.

  Louise, on the other hand, was decidedly earthbound. She’d been told all her life that she was quiet, reserved, small, until one day it became impossible to imagine how all of those things couldn’t be true.

  “I don’t need to know where you want to go,” said Louise, sweeping imaginary grains of sugar off the scale with a cloth. “I just know that I’ll find it a bore.”

  Kate scowled. “Don’t be such a spoilsport. It’s just a dance. A Valentine’s dance.”

  “I don’t dance,” said Louise.

  Kate laughed. “I know for a fact that isn’t true. I’ve seen you waltz before. You were quite good at it.”

  “With your brother. It was hardly thrilling.”

  “That’s only because you haven’t had the chance to dance it with the right partner,” said Kate with a grin. “Come with me.”

  Louise shook her head, her hand shooting up to push back in one of her plastic tortoiseshell combs that was threatening to slip out of her hair.

  “Please?”

  Louise narrowed her eyes. “Why are you being so insistent?”

  “Because you deserve a bit of fun, darling.” Kate dropped her gaze. “And Mum said I could only go if I was with you.”

  “Why?” Louise asked warily.

  Kate sighed. “Oh, who knows for certain.”

  “Kate . . .”