The Grafton Girls

by Annie Groves

  She took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. On the other side of the road she could see and hear a group of girls giggling as they linked arms. Diane watched them, envying their happiness as they strolled out of sight.

  And then, just as she was about to cross the road and make her way back to her billet, out of nowhere – or so it seemed – an army Jeep filled with American soldiers came roaring down the road.

  ‘Hey, guys,’ Diane heard one of them, who was hanging out of the window, yell, ‘I see dames…’

  The girls Diane had been watching made their escape, breaking ranks to run off up an alleyway, laughing and squealing, whilst the Jeep skidded to a halt, then did an abrupt U-turn. Immediately Diane stepped back into the shadows. She had seen enough of the kind of high-spirited behaviour indulged in by young servicemen desperate for female company in their off-duty hours, and did not want to draw attention to herself. But it was too late: they had seen her and, deprived of their original prey, the driver of the Jeep pulled it up across the pavement, blocking off Diane’s exit.

  ‘Hey, pretty girl, how about we have some fun together?’ one of the men called out to her. ‘We got nylons, we got chocolate, we got gum…’

  ‘Yeah, and we got jackass hard ons like you’ve never seen…’

  Somehow Diane managed to stop herself from going bright red as she heard the explicit description yelled out by one of the other men.

  ‘Hey, Polanski, leave it out, will ya?’ another voice joined in, before its owner urged Diane, ‘Come on, blondie, we could have a good time together. What d’ya say?’

  Things were threatening to get out of hand, Diane recognised. She could smell the alcohol on their breath from where she was standing, and she was now alone in the street with them.

  She forced herself to remain calm as she said as firmly as she could, ‘I say that you boys are going to get in big trouble if your military police find you in this state.’

  ‘Hey, will ya listen to that?’ another of the men drawled admiringly. ‘A ballsy dame. I like that…’

  ‘But not as much as you’d like it if it was your balls she was playing with, eh, Dwight?’ another man laughed.

  Whilst it wasn’t true to say that she was scared, Diane knew she was feeling apprehensive. She was a sensible young woman who had no intention of reacting in the kind of silly way that would cause the situation to escalate but she was also aware that she was out of uniform and thus could not command the same kind of respect wearing it would have gained her. She decided she had to get away from these men.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me…’ she told them, stepping forward so that she could skirt past them.

  But they wouldn’t let her go, and to her shock one of them jumped down from the Jeep and started to walk towards her.

  Now she was scared, Diane admitted as another GI jumped down onto the road.

  ‘Come on, sweet stuff,’ the first one coaxed. ‘All we want is a bit of fun. We won’t hurt you, will we, guys?’ As he spoke he was reaching out to grab hold of her arm.

  It was foolish to panic, Diane knew, but she couldn’t help it. Backing off from them, her voice high-pitched with tension, she demanded, ‘Stop this and let me go.’

  ‘Sure we’ll let you go, honey, once we’ve had our fun…’

  She could hear them laughing as they started to crowd her, her fear giving them the power to be more insolent. Anger and shocked disbelief fought for supremacy inside her. This could not be happening. Not in broad daylight in the middle of the city.

  ‘Come on, blondie. You’ll enjoy it…’

  ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ The authoritative voice of the uniformed officer who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere acted on them like a physical barrage, making them fall back and suddenly look more like scared boys than young men.

  ‘Sorry, Major…’

  ‘Gee, Major…’

  Muttering apologies and excuses, the men piled back into the Jeep, leaving Diane facing the tall, broad-shouldered and obviously furious officer.

  ‘Now, I don’t know who you are, but if you’ll take my advice, you’ll think yourself lucky that I came by when I did, and maybe next time you’ll think twice about encouraging my men to—’

  Diane’s self-control snapped. ‘Encouraging them? I’ll have you know, Major, that I was doing no such thing. Your men were behaving in a way that would have got them court-martialled had they been British,’ Diane told him bitingly.

  ‘You must have encouraged them—’

  ‘I did no such thing! Their behaviour was inexcusable and it’s no wonder that parents are telling their daughters to keep away from Americans. Your men were behaving more like some kind of occupying force than allies.’ Diane had the bit between her teeth now and all the bitterness and misery of the last few weeks, as well as the fright she had had, were fuelling her fury.

  The major was equally incensed. He took a step towards her, and Diane had a momentary impression of reined-in temper and sheer male physical strength as he towered over her. His hair was thick and very dark, and his eyes, she noticed, were a brilliantly intense shade of blue.

  He could quite easily have been a film star, and the uniform he was wearing, so much smarter than the uniforms of the British forces, only served to add to that impression. For some reason that infuriated Diane almost as much as his accusations had done.

  ‘My men—’

  ‘Your men behaved like wild animals and you should be ashamed of them, not defending them. All I was doing was simply standing here.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Then you can’t blame them for thinking you were waiting for business, can you?’

  It took several seconds for his meaning to sink in through her anger, but once it had she drew herself up to her full height and told him icily, ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked in view of the behaviour of your men, but somehow I am. You see, in this country, Major, we expect our officers to know better. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to return to my billet. I’m on duty at eight, and by on duty,’ she told him pointedly, ‘I mean that I shall be serving my country – in uniform, just so there isn’t any misunderstanding.’

  Diane had the satisfaction of seeing the slow burn of colour creeping up under his skin.

  ‘OK, my boys may have made a mistake—’ he began grudgingly.

  ‘There was no “may” about it, Major. Perhaps you should invite them to tell you about the group of girls they were pursuing and lost when they charged down here in their Jeep – or maybe that’s acceptable behaviour for American servicemen?’

  Without giving him the opportunity to respond, Diane stepped past him, keeping her head held high as she virtually marched up the street, away from him. Outwardly she might look fully in control but inwardly she was quaking in her shoes, she admitted, as she refused to give in to the temptation to turn round and see if he was watching her. It made her feel physically sick to think of what could have happened to her if he hadn’t turned up when he had, and it made her feel even more nauseous to recognise what he had thought of her and how he had condemned her without bothering to check his facts. She knew that there was already a lot of antagonism in some quarters towards the American soldiers who had arrived in the country, but until now she had felt that they were being treated a bit unfairly. Feeling superior because they had better uniforms and equipment was one thing, but behaving as they had towards her was something else again, Diane decided angrily. Did they really think they were so important that they could get away with treating decent British women like that? By the time she had reached Edge Hill Road, she had walked off some of her temper and was feeling calmer, but it wasn’t until she had closed the door of her bedroom behind her and dropped down onto her narrow bed that she realised how shaky the incident had left her feeling.

  ‘Oh, Kit,’ she whispered, wishing he could take her in his arms and comfort her. But it was no use crying for her ex-fiancé. He had made it plain that she meant nothing to him any more.

&nbs
p; THREE

  ‘Come on, girls, we’d better get back to work. We’ve overrun our break by five minutes as it is.’

  ‘Another few minutes won’t do anyone any harm, Janet,’ Myra protested. ‘I haven’t finished my ciggy yet.’

  ‘Huh, you’re lucky to have any ciggies to finish,’ sniffed the third Waaf gathered round the canteen table in the Navy, Army, and Air Force Institute – or the Naafi as all the canteen facilities provided for the armed forces were affectionately nicknamed. ‘I suppose you’ve been cadging some off them Yanks again, have you? I saw you talking to that handsome corporal earlier on.’

  ‘He’s only a bit of a kid and he looked half scared to death,’ Janet Warner, the most senior member of their small group, said drily, adding under her breath, ‘Watch out – here comes Sergeant Riley.’

  ‘What’s this then, a mothers’ meeting? Haven’t you lot got any work to do?’

  There was a sudden clatter and the scrape of chairs being pushed back as all the girls apart from Myra reacted to the sharp voice and hurried to the exit.

  ‘We’re just on our way, Sarge,’ Janet assured the thickset, sharp-eyed RAF sergeant who was surveying them before turning away to head for the counter.

  ‘Come on, Myra,’ Janet urged in a hissed whisper from the doorway as Myra took her time crushing out her cigarette before starting to stroll insolently towards her friends. ‘Sometimes I think you go out of your way to wind up Sergeant Riley I really do,’ Janet muttered crossly.

  ‘It gets on my nerves the way he throws his weight around and thinks he can tell us what to do.’

  ‘He’s a sergeant, Myra; he doesn’t “think” he can tell us what to do, he knows he can.’

  ‘Stone, over here.’

  Myra hesitated just long enough to make the anxiety sharpen further in Janet’s eyes and to have the satisfaction of seeing the red tide of anger starting to burn up the sergeant’s face, before obeying his summons.

  ‘It’s your kind that give women in the services a bad name,’ he told her when she eventually reached him. ‘And if I had my way—’

  ‘But you don’t, do you, Sarge?’ Myra taunted him. ‘Have your way, I mean. We all heard about that little Wren turning you down. Shame. She’s dating an American now, I hear. And who can blame her? Good-looking lot, they are, and generous.’

  ‘You’ve got a husband who’s away fighting for his country.’

  ‘So I have.’

  ‘It hasn’t gone unnoticed that you’ve been carrying on like you are single.’

  ‘Hasn’t it?’ Myra gave a shrug. ‘So what?’

  ‘You ought to be ruddy well ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘Jealous, are you, Sarge, ’cos other people are having a good time and you aren’t? Well, I’ll tell you something, shall I? I don’t blame your little Wren for turning you down in favour of her Yank, not one little bit. In her shoes, I’d have done the same.’

  ‘Sarge, your tea’s going cold,’ the Naafi manageress called out.

  The sergeant turned his head, giving Myra the opportunity to escape.

  She and the sergeant had clashed from the moment they had set eyes on one another. He reminded her in many ways of her father. A small shadow darkened Myra’s eyes. How her mother had stuck him for so many years Myra didn’t know. Part of the reason she had married so quickly had been to escape her home. She hadn’t known then, of course, that her father would have a seizure in the middle of one of his furious outbursts of temper and die three months after the wedding.

  Men! Once you let them get the upper hand they thought they could treat you how they liked. That was why she was determined that no man would ever control her life the way her father had controlled her mother’s and had tried to control hers. She wished passionately now that she had not been stupid enough to get married and land herself with a husband hanging around her neck and thinking he could tell her what to do. Well, he could write as many letters as he liked telling her he did not want her going out whilst he was away. They weren’t going to stop her doing a single thing that she wanted to do.

  FOUR

  Ruthie tensed as she opened the front door, her shoes gripped tightly in her free hand as she glanced fearfully over her shoulder into the blackout-shrouded darkness of the silent house, terrified of making the slightest sound that might wake her sleeping mother. If that happened…but no, she mustn’t think about that.

  Once she was safely outside in the cold dawn air she slipped on her pair of Mary Jane shoes, polished over and over again to make them last as long as they could. It was summer now, but in the winter, wet shoes had to be stuffed with paper and left to dry out, not always successfully. Mothers did their best, warming their children’s thick hand-knitted socks on fire guards in an attempt to send them to school with warm dry feet, whilst young women submitted to the sensible habit of wearing thick lisle stockings, even though they itched dreadfully…

  All Ruthie had to do now was make sure she reached the appointed place in time.

  Her mother would never forgive her for this; she would tell her truthfully how shocked and upset her father would have been.

  Her father! Ruthie paused outside the gate of the neat red-brick semi, not daring to risk putting the gate on the latch just in case the noise might alert her mother to her departure. It hurt so much to think about the way Dad had died, crushed beneath the masonry blown apart by the German bomb that had devastated the Durning Road Technical College in the autumn of 1940. He had been on duty there as an air-raid warden. Her mother, Ruthie knew, would never recover from his loss; it hung over the small house like the pall of smoke and dust that had hung over the destroyed college. When the news had come her mother had insisted on them going down there, even though she had been advised not to do so. The rescue work had still been going on when they had arrived – what could be salvaged of once living, breathing human beings, tenderly and respectfully brought out of the carnage. Ruthie knew she would never forget what she had seen that night: a human hand and wrist – thankfully not her father’s – the watch on it still going, a baby’s rattle, a woman’s torso, images too horrible for her to want to recall.

  Ruthie had reached the Edge Hill Road now and she continued down into the area of terraced streets that lay below it, once filled with people’s homes but now ravaged by Hitler’s bombers’ assault on the city during the first week of May 1941, when Liverpool had endured a week-long blitz that had destroyed hundreds of buildings and killed so many people.

  Had she come to the right place? She wasn’t sure and she started to fret, her hazel eyes darkening with anxiety as she pushed a nervous hand into her soft mousy brown hair. How long would she have to wait? She stared into the half-light, her heart thudding. She still couldn’t believe she was actually doing this. Her mother would be so shocked and so unforgiving. She could almost see the sad, gentle look her father would have given her if he knew.

  She could hear the sound of a bus coming up the road towards her. Automatically she stiffened. She flagged down the driver and it pulled to a halt.

  ‘Is this the bus for the munitions factory?’ she asked anxiously as she stepped onto it.

  The interior of the bus was packed with women, and one of them called up sarcastically, ‘Course it bloody is. What does it look like – a ruddy chara trip to Blackpool?’

  Ruthie blushed bright red as the women burst out laughing. A pretty redhead with a mass of curls and smiling eyes looked Ruthie over and then said determinedly, ‘Give over, Mel. The poor kid looks half scared to death. Just starting, are you, love?’ she asked Ruthie, making room for her on the seat next to her.

  Ruthie nodded, feeling tongue-tied and uncomfortable.

  A lot of people said that it was only the poorer sort of women who signed on to work at the munitions factory at Kirby, and Ruthie suspected from the coarse language and dress of those on the bus that it was probably true. But she needed a job, and not just because now that she was nineteen it was compulsory for her to
do war work. She and her mother needed the money, and she had heard that the munitions factory paid good wages, even to unskilled, untrained workers like her.

  ‘I must be daft in me head tekin’ on a ruddy job like this,’ the woman who had mocked Ruthie grumbled. ‘Up at four and working ruddy long shifts, and tekin’ me life into my hands every day.’

  ‘Come on, Mel, it isn’t as bad as that,’ the redhead that had offered Ruthie a seat objected. ‘The wages are good, and then there’s them concerts that the management put on for us, and these buses…’

  ‘Oh, trust you to say that, Jess Hunt. A right little ray of ruddy sunshine, you are. What about the danger then? There was that girl last week had all of her fingers blown off, she did. You could hear her screaming three sheds away,’ Mel announced with relish, whilst Ruthie sucked in her breath and fought back the nausea cramping her stomach.

  It had been three days before they had found her father in all the rubble. Her mother had been too distraught to identify his body so Ruthie had had to do it. There hadn’t been a mark on his face – he looked like he was asleep – but where his feet should have been there had been nothing. Ruthie’s had been a innocent childhood, her parents loving and protective, but that single act of identifying her father’s body had stripped that innocence from her.

  ‘So what’s your name then,’ the redhead asked.