The Victory Girls

by Joanna Toye

  ‘Oh! Right!’ Lily was rather thrown by this decisiveness, but Miss Frobisher was over thirty and Mr Simmonds must be nearly forty. No wonder they wanted to get on with it. ‘Of course I’ll be here. I don’t know that we’d be getting married that quickly anyway.’

  ‘Well, we won’t now,’ said Jim when she told him at dinnertime. They’d finally fended off the colleagues who’d besieged their table to offer congratulations and coo over the ring, to Jim’s embarrassment and Lily’s delight. ‘We can’t very well pre-empt them, what with seniority and everything. And then it’s the run-up to Christmas and then it’s the January sale … no chance of time off then.’

  Lily leant across the table and jabbed him lightly with her fork.

  ‘Thanks! The romance didn’t last long! Work comes first!’ But she’d thought the same herself. ‘So we’ll get married in the spring. That’ll be lovely.’

  Jim wrinkled his nose. His foot felt for hers under the table.

  ‘I’m not sure I can control myself till then.’

  Lily hooked both her feet round the backs of his calves.

  ‘It’ll be worth the wait, I promise,’ she told him.

  Chapter 15

  In truth it did feel a little disappointing not to be getting married in the next few months but there it was. Into every engagement a little rain must fall, and there was still plenty of excitement. Lily had her birthday, which was a double celebration now. A parcel had arrived from Sam in Canada, something soft and pliable. Lily tore it open – proper American stockings? Several pairs? A soft and luxurious scarf or jumper? No – a set of sheets for her bottom drawer!

  Lily had to laugh.

  ‘I’d better get used to it, I suppose,’ she smiled. ‘It’s all practical presents from now on, not pretty ones.’

  But Beryl, when she brought round a wedding dress for Dora to repair, was green with envy.

  ‘A ring and a set of sheets!’ She shook her head. ‘No sniff of any blinking ring for me yet, and I’m darning darns on ours!’

  The question of Beryl’s ring was becoming pressing. Jim had had an alarming conversation with Les in which he’d floated the idea of paying for it by snapping up some knock-off tins of peaches and selling them on the black market. Jim had sternly counselled against it, but he wasn’t sure Les had taken any notice.

  ‘What’s the use of a flashy diamond if it’s Exhibit One in court?’ he worried to Lily. ‘Les is a great bloke, but he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He’s bound to get ripped off, beaten up, or be the fall guy for some proper crooks!’

  ‘You’ve been reading those thrillers again,’ smiled Lily, but there was another ring – of truth – in what Jim said.

  The war news was worrying too. Paris and then Brussels hung out the flags when they were liberated one after the other, but as a result Hitler was directing all his venom at the British. At the beginning of September, another kind of bomb landed in London, even more terrifying and deadly than the doodlebug. The new ones arrived with no warning at all. When the first one hit, the Government, taken by surprise, had tried to pretend it was a gas explosion, but that didn’t wash. And as the doodlebugs were still falling as well, Londoners lived in double dread.

  ‘Can’t you get posted somewhere safer?’ Lily begged Sid in one of their pre-arranged phone calls. She called Sid at his digs from the phone box by the chip shop, but on the last two occasions, he hadn’t been there; he’d had to work through the night, he’d told her afterwards. But tonight her pennies hadn’t been wasted.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ mocked her brother. ‘How’s it going to look if the Admiralty and the War Office go all yellow-bellied?’ Then he softened. ‘Look, Sis, there’s no need to worry. We’ve got a reinforced bunker at work, and when we’re off duty, then like everyone else, it’s get to the shelter or under the stairs, or roll the dice and stay in bed.’

  ‘You can’t keep throwing double sixes, Sid,’ warned Lily. ‘Get yourself posted somewhere up north. Please? Back up to Scotland, maybe?’

  But she knew he wouldn’t. Sid had moved to London for a very specific reason. He was the looker of the family, for sure – he could have had his pick of any girl in the country – and when he’d lived in Hinton, he had. But Sid had confessed to Lily something she’d never suspected. He wasn’t attracted to girls. It was men he liked.

  Lily had been shattered, and it had taken her a while to reconcile the brother she’d grown up with in an ordinary family in an ordinary street in an ordinary town with what he’d confided. She’d spent a long time going over things, looking for signs she could have spotted, but Sid had concealed it so well – he’d had to – that she’d never suspected a thing.

  Now she knew he’d lost one love already – Anthony, a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm who he’d met while training – but in London where, he said, men like him had more freedom to meet and mix in the anonymity of a big city, he’d met someone else: an American, Jerome.

  ‘Let’s change the subject, shall we?’ Sid said now. While she’d been thinking, she’d heard him light up a cigarette. ‘How’s the blushing bride-to-be?’

  ‘Nothing to blush about yet,’ Lily told him. ‘All we know is it’ll be sometime in the New Year. Spring, maybe. Beryl’s looking for a dress for me.’

  ‘Hinton in the spring, mm, mm, mm …’ trilled Sid, cannibalising the popular song about Paris in springtime. ‘Love is in the air, mm, mm, mm. Life’s a love affair—’

  ‘The pips are about to go and I’ve no more money!’ Lily cut him off mid-note. ‘You will give me away, won’t you, Sid? I know Reg is the elder, and it’s his right and all that, but he’s not here and you are!’

  ‘Thanks very much – how to make a fellow feel second-best!’ chaffed Sid. ‘Course I will. But you’ve got to fix a date first!’

  But Lily and Jim had other things to think about. At Marlows, Miss Frobisher and Mr Simmonds might have been there in body, but their minds were totally focussed on their wedding and after that, their romantic getaway to a cottage in the Lake District. This meant that all the planning for the store’s Christmas season had fallen on Jim’s shoulders – and then Beryl lobbed something else into the mix.

  ‘How about that, then?’ she carolled when she next called round, extending her left hand. Nestled next to her simple gold band was a huge five-stone diamond. Lily darted a look at Jim.

  ‘That’s, er, stunning, Beryl!’ she stuttered.

  ‘Mind it doesn’t catch in the lace!’ warned Dora, handing over the mended dress. ‘I don’t want to be mending another rip! And you’ll have to watch it in the shop!’

  ‘I put it on my bill spike when I’m doing a fitting,’ explained Beryl. ‘But I don’t let it out of my sight, I can tell you!’

  ‘What on earth can Les have got himself mixed up in to afford a ring like that?’ Lily despaired to Jim when Beryl had left. ‘Robbed a bank? Coshed an old lady?’

  Jim shook his head.

  But when he bumped into Les next day at work and asked him – tactfully – Les just tapped his nose and said, ‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,’ which was about as annoying as being told as a five-year-old that it was ‘wait-and-see’ pudding. But then Les volunteered something else.

  ‘Here, when Beryl was leaving yours last night, she saw something funny next door. At the Crosbies’ place. Funny peculiar, that is.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Jim’s interest in Jean Crosbie and her family – husband Walter and twelve-year-old son Trevor, was minimal at the best of times and certainly not when he was trying to decide if last year’s Christmas grotto would do as it was, or if it needed a repaint.

  ‘Yes,’ continued Les determinedly. ‘There was a young bloke, no more than twenty, twenty-two, letting himself in the front door with a key!’

  ‘So?’ Regretfully, Jim decided a touch-up would be needed. The grotto’s plywood walls had previously been part of an Easter display, and the Easter bunnies, quickly whitewashed over last year, had made a gh
ostly reappearance. Hardly seasonal.

  ‘It’s obvious!’ said Les. ‘Jean’s got herself a young feller on the side!’

  Obvious to Beryl, maybe, thought Jim.

  ‘Jean Crosbie? And right under Walter’s nose?’

  ‘He wasn’t there,’ declared Les in triumph. ‘He was on ARP; Beryl saw him on Union Street. And before you say it, it was after half nine – Trevor would have been in bed.’

  Jim turned from his examination of the grotto.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t buy it.’

  ‘No, neither do I, to be fair,’ Les acknowledged. ‘Not that boot-faced old crow. But how about this, one better. It’s her illegitimate son from years ago! She could have been a right looker for all we know, and a bit of a goer, too!’

  ‘And she could have been a pioneering scientist who discovered uranium,’ said Jim mildly. ‘But she wasn’t. The nearest she ever got to it was selling liver pills at Boots before she got married. She’s lived in Hinton all her life. Dora’s lived next to her for the last twenty-odd years. I think she’d have known if Jean had a past.’

  ‘It’s always the quiet ones,’ said Les. If he taps his nose again, thought Jim … But Les didn’t. He clearly considered his points scored and the subject closed. ‘Want these carting away to the paint shop then?’ he asked.

  Jim nodded.

  ‘I’ll fetch my trolley,’ Les replied. But the subject wasn’t quite closed, because he added cheekily, ‘But talking of quiet ones, with all this love in the air, romance, rings, and what-not, has Dora heard from that Sam lately?’

  As it happened, as she walked back from Gladys’s next day with Buddy beside her on the lead, Dora was thinking about Sam, all those miles away in Canada. She never took the dog inside, but whenever Gladys put the pram out to give Joy and Victor some fresh air, he’d lie quietly beside it as if he knew exactly what a precious cargo it carried. He might be a bit of a scamp, but Sam’s parting gift had his sensitive side, just like his master.

  Dora missed Sam, and no mistake. He’d brought more than just variety and interest into her life – and she didn’t mean the ready supplies of tinned jam, ham, and Spam from the Canadian NAAFI. They were both too old for moons and Junes and hearts and flowers. Theirs had been a bond built on friendship, companionship, and mutual respect for the people they both were, or had become, through some hard knocks in life – the loss of her husband, the loss of his son, and his wife’s subsequent mental breakdown. But Sam was still married; he’d had to go home on a compassionate discharge, and he wasn’t coming back.

  She shook herself back to the present. Gladys needed some gripe water for the twins, if there was any to be had, though Dora’s main gripe was still with Florrie and her ways. Florrie had grumpily agreed to do a bit of cooking, as Gladys didn’t have the time, but she rarely washed up, and since she also squirreled away food in her own room she’d accumulated a stack of dirty crocks up there. Dora had only discovered them when they ran out of plates.

  But Gladys had had some good news which had blotted out every little niggle.

  ‘It’s Bill’s mate that he bunks in with!’ she’d begun in her usual rambling, convoluted way, which was even more rambling and convoluted these days because she was sleep-deprived with the babies. ‘The ship got caught in a storm and he got thrown against a bulkhead – or was it the bulkhead, I forget … anyway it doesn’t matter – this is about two weeks ago now. Anyhow, this feller broke his leg!’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Dora manged to insert.

  ‘Yes but anyway, it was a good thing because they airlifted him off on a stretcher to … I dunno, some place I’d never heard of, some island that’s neutral or something – and he’s coming home!’

  ‘Who? The fellow with the broken leg? I should hope so!’

  ‘No, Bill!’ cried Gladys, as if it was obvious. ‘He sneaked a letter under his mate’s blanket to post on to me—’

  ‘Wait a minute. Bill’s coming home? He’s not hurt as well, is he?’

  ‘No, he’s fine! It’s the ship! It’s coming to Portsmouth for a refit! Next month! And it could be in dry dock till next year!’

  ‘Oh Gladys! That’s wonderful! And they won’t post him away again while it is?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t think so. They’ll keep him down on the coast, he reckons, not near here, but he’ll be shore-based. So much safer! And he’ll get leave and at least he can be in touch!’

  A weight had dropped from Dora’s shoulders. Gladys was doing her best, but she depended on Dora’s daily visits.

  Almost home, Dora unclipped Buddy’s lead as they reached the entry and he trotted ahead to wait at the back gate. Over the fence, she could see Jean Crosbie with her hair in a turban and a pinny wrapped round her skinny frame beating the life out of a carpet in her back yard. Dora hoped she could get indoors without Jean seeing – she didn’t want to be on the end of one of her diatribes. But Buddy let her down. As she reached for the latch he let out a happy yelp. Jean raised her head.

  ‘Dora!’ she called out, her voice sharp.

  Inwardly groaning, Dora looked over.

  ‘Hello, Jean!’ she said brightly and was surprised by her neighbour’s anguished face. ‘Is everything all right?’

  To her astonishment, Jean burst into tears.

  ‘Oh Dora,’ she sniffed. ‘It’s dreadful … have you got a minute? Can I come over?’

  Surely Beryl hadn’t been right after all about the mystery man she’d seen letting himself in? Dora had been looking forward to a quiet sit-down, but she said at once, ‘Of course you can, Jean. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Chapter 16

  The whole story came out over a pot of tea, as stories usually did amongst neighbours in Brook Street.

  ‘His name’s Kenny,’ Jean explained, her handkerchief a damp ball in her hand. ‘He’s Walter’s nephew, his sister’s son.’

  That put the tin lid on Beryl’s wild speculations, thought Dora. She nodded encouragingly.

  ‘We hardly knew him growing up,’ Jean went on. ‘Or the family – there’s another two boys and a girl. Walter thought his sister had married beneath her, you see, a navvy her husband was, from Liverpool. Anyhow, all the boys went into the Army, from what Kenny’s told us, one’s out East and the other was in Crete, the last that was heard of either of them.’

  ‘I see. And Kenny?’

  Jean gave a heavy sigh.

  ‘Kenny was took prisoner at Dunkirk. He’s spent four years being shunted around different camps in Germany. But he’s managed to get himself back to England on the Prisoner Exchange.’

  Dora had heard of this. It had taken a while to set up, but certain categories of prisoner could qualify – often those with TB, which the Germans didn’t want to spread among their own population. Maybe Kenny was one of those.

  ‘But why’s he here?’ asked Dora. ‘If his home’s in Liverpool?’

  ‘He went there,’ Jean began, ‘but there’s nothing left. The whole street where they’d lived had gone. Turns out the three of them – mum, dad, and sister – got killed in the Blitz in ’41. We didn’t hear of course, ’cos Walter hadn’t spoken to his sister in years. I mean, we didn’t know them really, but to think of all of them killed, just like that …’

  Jean trailed off, pushing a strand of hair that had escaped her turban off her face.

  ‘And Kenny? He never knew?’

  ‘He thought he hadn’t heard from them because he kept being moved and the letters never caught up with him.’

  ‘Poor lad!’ Dora’s heart went out to him. ‘Three years and no letters at all?’ Reg – and Sid, when he’d been posted further away – had always said how much letters from home meant to them. ‘So you’ve taken him in, have you?’

  ‘What choice have we got?’ said Jean. ‘He’s got no one else. It’s took him weeks to find us from some dim memory of what his mum told him about growing up here and knowing her maiden name.’

  Dora nodded. It was a very sad, but not uncomm
on, story of the war.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ she persisted. ‘Has he got TB or something?’

  ‘If only!’ Jean burst out, then shook her head. ‘You know the Germans, whatever you say about them, they don’t put the prisoners to work – it’s some treaty or convention or something that they do at least stick to. But our boys can volunteer for work, and after four years of hanging about, Kenny did. Volunteer, that is. And he was put to farm work.’

  ‘Right …’

  ‘Well, he got hurt, didn’t he, gashed his arm real bad, and it got infected.’

  That explained how he’d qualified for Prisoner Exchange, though to Dora, the tale was getting more confusing, not less, the way Jean was telling it.

  ‘Well, that’s all right. He’ll build himself up again in time, and find something to do, either here or in Liverpool. He must still have some friends there at least. What job did he do before?’

  ‘That’s just it!’ wailed Jean, the handkerchief back in use again. ‘He was a joiner, but they’ve amputated his arm so he can’t go back to that, and he’s not right! He just sits about the house, smoking his head off, which sets off our Trevor’s adenoids, and then goes out drinking, or brings bottles in from the offie. Walter’s not happy and neither am I and … and …’

  ‘What?’

  Jean sniffed again. Her eyes were swollen and her nose red raw.

  ‘I know it’s awful of me, Dora, but the sight of his … his stump … it just turns me up! I never have been good with that sort of thing. When you see them amputees from the First War – I know it’s not their fault and God knows it’s terrible for them – but I can’t help it, it makes me feel sick. And Kenny will sit about and walk about the house in his vest. It’s like he’s doing it deliberately!’