by Pam Weaver
CHAPTER 10
Lillian had a problem. She had arranged to meet Woody at the assembly rooms on Saturday night, but she knew her mother wouldn’t approve. She could just imagine the furore if she told Dorcas the truth, which was why she had to dream up a really good excuse as to why she needed to go out in the evening. She decided to ask someone else to babysit. She finished work in the afternoon, and then had a driving lesson planned with Stella before she met Woody. The problem was, who was going to look after Flora?
‘I wonder if you could do me a favour?’ she asked Pip.
‘If I can,’ said Pip.
‘I have to meet someone,’ Lillian went on, ‘Well, it’s Stella, actually. We arranged for me to practise driving in the dark. With winter coming on, I shall have to know how to do it because it gets dark by four o’clock.’
‘Sounds like a sensible idea,’ said Pip. She was on her hands and knees putting the finishing touches to her stair carpet. She’d noticed the thread was a bit worn in places but had no money for a replacement; she did, however, have half a stair length on the landing, so she had decided to move the whole thing. It had been a long job. Once the stair rods were off and the carpet was lifted, it was obvious that it was full of dust. A good beating on the washing line created enough dust to challenge a sandstorm, but at last she was satisfied that it was clean. Then the stairs had to be washed, and the stair rods were given a polish before she was happy to put everything back in place. It only remained to spray it in situ with a good insecticide to prevent moth damage, which was what she was doing right now.
Lillian explained that her shift didn’t finish until late evening and Dorcas had to be up on High Salvington at four to begin her own shift, so she had no one to look after Flora while she took her lesson.
‘The thing is,’ Lillian went on, ‘I was wondering—’
‘No problem,’ said Pip, getting to her feet. She smiled to herself. It looked good, and the carpet had a whole new lease of life.
‘I may be late home,’ Lillian cautioned.
‘She can sleep on the sofa until you get back,’ said Pip, packing everything up to put in the broom cupboard. ‘I’ll pop round to get her from your mum in the afternoon while you’re at work.’
Lillian smiled. ‘Thanks, Pip. You’re a pal.’
With that problem solved, Lillian had one other. She couldn’t go to the assembly rooms in her railway uniform, so where could she change into her dancing clothes? It was clear that she couldn’t go home first and then leave all dressed up: if Pip saw her done up to the nines, it would be only too obvious that she wasn’t working late and then going for a driving lesson.
The idea didn’t come to her until Saturday afternoon as she finished her lesson with Stella. As luck would have it, Stella was busting for the loo. Having carefully parked the car in the garage, Lillian turned to her with a smile. ‘You run on in. I’ll lock the garage door for you.’
Stella jumped out and went indoors. Lillian locked the car and pulled the garage door shut, but she didn’t actually turn the key in the lock until she had changed into her dancing things. Pulling her raincoat around her to hide her dance clothes she dropped the garage key through the letterbox.
The plan worked like clockwork, and by twenty past eight (the dance began at eight o’clock), she was in the crowd outside the assembly rooms.
Woody was nowhere to be seen. In fact, there were hardly any service personnel around, and certainly no Canadians.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ a girl replied when Lillian remarked on it. ‘They all went over to Dieppe on some sort of operation.’
Now that the girl had mentioned it, Lillian did remember hearing on the news that a combined operation of British, American, Fighting French and Canadian troops had spent nine hours on French soil as part of a commando raid. They had set out at night and destroyed a gun battery and an ammunition dump. The attack was deemed a great success, but it was not without its casualties. Many men had been killed or injured, and fifteen hundred Allied troops had been taken prisoner.
‘Those that got back safely,’ another girl chipped in, ‘are confined to barracks.’
Lillian hesitated. She had been looking forward to the dance, but because Woody wasn’t around, it had suddenly lost its appeal. Just before she reached the ticket booth, she turned on her heel.
‘Hey,’ the girl called after her, ‘where are you going?’
‘Home,’ said Lillian.
‘Bet you haven’t seen anything like this,’ said Billy.
It was Sunday afternoon and the boys had invited Georgie into the den. He knew he couldn’t stay long. Mummy would be cross with him if she knew he was here, but an invitation from the DD Gang was too hard to resist.
The boys had lined up their trophies on a piece of board. Georgie looked over them admiringly. Large chunks of shrapnel, a piece of material from a uniform, half an army-issue belt buckle, though it was unclear whose uniform it might be – English, Canadian or German – a battered mug and more shrapnel.
‘I’ve got something too,’ said Georgie.
‘We’re not interested in kids’ stuff,’ said a boy at the back. ‘This is big stuff. Grown-up stuff.’
‘What yer got, then?’ asked Derek Fox. ‘Go on, let’s have a dekko.’
Georgie put his hand in his pocket and drew it out.
‘Cor,’ Gideon gasped. ‘Where did you find that?’
‘Blimey, that’s the biggest bullet I’ve ever seen,’ cried the boy at the back. He came up to the plank and made to take it, but Georgie got there first. ‘It’s mine,’ he said, standing his ground. He snatched the bullet off the plank and rubbed it on his trouser leg. ‘Nobody touches it but me,’ he said, putting it back.
The boys were lavish in their praise.
‘It’s very big.’
‘It’s bigger than any of the others.’
‘That’s ’cos it’s a machine-gun bullet,’ said Georgie.
‘How do you know that?’ asked Billy.
‘Because I heard a man say, “Bloody ’ell, Alf. This place is littered with machine-gun bullets,” and that’s when I picked it up,’ Georgie said innocently.
‘Whatever it is,’ said Billy, his eyes wide with admiration, ‘compared to the others, it’s a Goliath.’
‘You’d better not let your mum hear you swearing Georgie,’ Norman Peabody cautioned.
Billy nudged him in the ribs. ‘Anyway, we’ve got to find a new hiding place.’
‘So we want you to keep some of our stuff,’ said Gideon.
Georgie frowned. ‘But Mummy doesn’t like me keeping things like this.’
Although he was glad to be included, Georgie was a little afraid of the big boys. He turned Goliath and a couple of pieces of shrapnel over in his hands. It was all very well hiding stuff, but if he got caught, he was sure his mother would tan his bottom. ‘I can’t,’ he began.
‘Then I guess we’ll have to tell Abdul,’ said Gideon with a sigh.
‘Who is Abdul?’ said Georgie.
‘Abdul Abulbul Amir,’ said Gideon, narrowing his eyes. ‘He comes from a place called Turkey, and he’s a warrior.’ He waved his arms as if he had a sword and was cutting his enemy to ribbons.
‘He can’t be beaten,’ said the boy at the back. ‘Not even Hitler can beat him.’
‘And he’ll cut your tongue out just like that,’ someone else called as he clicked his fingers.
Georgie shivered.
‘If you won’t do it,’ said Billy, ‘we won’t be able to let you be part of our gang.’
Georgie hesitated. He wanted to be part of the gang more than anything in the whole wide world.
‘And of course,’ Gideon added as his pièce de résistance, ‘we wouldn’t be able to stop Abdul if he wanted to cut your tongue out.’
Georgie paled. ‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll do it, but when you want them back, don’t tell my mummy.’
They loaded him up, stuffing his pockets and givi
ng him an old canvas bag as well. As they watched him go, the boy at the back said, ‘Are you really going to make him a member?’
‘Nah,’ said Billy. ‘He’s far too young.’
On the following Friday, it was Stella’s birthday. The school holidays were long gone, and although she had enjoyed the three-week break from lessons, Stella was glad to be back at school. She had been back a week already, but there remained something rather special about walking into the classroom after having been away for a while. Perhaps it was the smell of the ink, or the chalk for the blackboard, or maybe it was the faint aroma of lavender polish on her desk. Everything seemed new and fresh. Of course, she hadn’t been idle during the holidays. On her first day back, her arms had been full of new wall charts and plans for what she hoped would be exciting lessons for her pupils.
Out of the forty-seven names on her books, twenty-eight filed into the classroom and sat at their desks. When she’d called the register on Monday, she’d discovered that Rachel Becket had mumps, Annie MacGreggor was in hospital recovering from having her tonsils removed, Ivy Cookson had to stay at home to help look after her three smaller siblings because her mother had just given birth to her fifth child, and the Porter boys were helping to bring in the harvest on the farm. There had also been a note in her desk drawer informing her that Mrs James, the teacher who had arrived with twelve child evacuees, had taken her pupils back to London during the holidays. Two of her absent students, however, remained unaccounted for: twins Samuel and Susan Dennison weren’t in class and hadn’t been all week.
‘Does anyone know where Sam and Susan are?’ she’d asked her class each day, but her query had been met with blank stares and a few shrugs.
On Friday, during the afternoon, she asked her pupils to write or draw something they had done on their holidays. She felt it would be a good topic to draw out conversation and a useful exercise to encourage memory and communication. Everyone knuckled down, some with their tongues between their teeth as they concentrated, others leaning right over the page as they wrote and a few spending a little time gazing upwards for inspiration. As she sat at her desk in front of them, Stella wondered what she would have written had she been their age.
She might have drawn a picture of the terrible events of three weeks ago: the plane crash and poor Flora’s injuries were still fresh in her mind. Thankfully, the child looked a lot better now. Although her hair still looked a mess, the burns were healing nicely. If she hadn’t drawn a picture of the crash, perhaps she would have written about her new-found friendship with Pip. She was a quiet, unassuming girl who had probably never strayed from the straight and narrow. Kind and honest as the day was long, she always seemed to be looking after others, particularly her children, to whom she was devoted. On her own, one might say she was perhaps a little too predictable and possibly dull, but maybe that was being unkind. One thing was for sure: she was the type of girl who would be a loyal friend for life.
Or perhaps she would write something about Lillian, someone who lived life at ninety miles an hour. How could Stella ever forget giving her those driving lessons, or all the laughs they’d had along the way? Right now, Lillian was at the end of her first week in the railway goods van. Would it be her first and last, or the first of many? Stella admired Lillian’s determination and single-mindedness, but she couldn’t help feeling a little anxious for her.
At the beginning of her quest for that job, she had been a hopeless danger on the road. A couple of times when they were doing three-point turns, they had ended up with the back wheels of the car dangerously close to the steep sides of a ditch. On another memorable occasion, Lillian had been trying to turn right onto a main road. Halfway across, when both lanes were blocked, she’d stalled the engine. A lorry driver had honked his horn noisily and mouthed obscenities. In order to keep Lillian’s level of panic to a minimum, Stella had deliberately glared at him through the windscreen as she waited for Lillian to move off. Under pressure from the impatient lorry driver, the gears crunched and groaned. The engine revved a couple of times, only to die when the car bunny-hopped and stopped. Lillian swore and cursed, but after a few gut-wrenching minutes, it all went quiet. The lorry driver whose horn-blowing had only added to Lillian’s fluster threw himself over the wheel and began to laugh. Stella turned her head, only to find the driver’s door wide open and Lillian standing on the other side of the road waiting for her to complete the manoeuvre.
As the days sped by, through sheer guts and determination Lillian had managed to master her driving technique, and although Stella wouldn’t have said she was brilliant (far from it), she honestly believed that with perseverance she would soon be a competent driver.
Stella glanced up at the school clock. At this moment, Lillian would be heading back in the railway goods van with the old driver. With no driving tests available for the duration, it would be up to him to say if Lillian was fit to spend her hard-earned seven shillings and sixpence to buy a licence. Stella mentally crossed everything that she’d come through with flying colours.
Because it was her birthday, Stella had invited her two new friends and their children to her small party. She would use the opportunity to celebrate or commiserate with Lillian. Even if she failed, Stella knew she wouldn’t stay down for long. She had a feeling that nothing would stop Lillian from getting what she wanted.
Looking around the classroom once more, Stella wondered about Samuel and Susan again. There had been no word from them all week, which was unusual. Their mother was a conscientious woman, keen for her children to do well at school. It wasn’t like her not to send a note of some sort. Stella decided that if the twins weren’t back on Monday, she would go round to their house and see what was wrong. It wasn’t her job, of course, but if the Dennisons were in trouble, she preferred to offer a hand before she reported the children to the authorities as absentees.
Her mind drifted back to her husband and her heart lurched. Poor Johnny. What was he doing? Were the Italians treating him well? Please God that they were. The news bulletins had said little about North Africa since the fall of Tobruk. There were more pressing flare-ups in other places. A battle had been raging in the Arctic between a Russian convoy and German planes and U-boats. The losses on both sides were horrendous, and of course this was all being played out against the backdrop of another Allied attempt to defeat Rommel in the North African desert.
Stella looked up and saw a few upturned faces. It was three-thirty. School finished at four. ‘Five more minutes,’ she said, ‘then put your hand up if you want to read your work out first.’
Pip arrived before the others. Her children were squashed together in the pram, with some goodies underneath. ‘Happy birthday,’ she said as Stella opened the door.
Stella had cleared the table in the sitting room and pushed it against the wall. Every chair she had was arranged round the room, and the cover on the piano was pulled back.
‘Ooh,’ said Pip, putting a plate of fresh blackberries on the table next to the grated carrot and white cabbage sandwiches, ‘does that mean we’ll be having a sing-song?’
‘Why not?’ Stella smiled.
Pip put another dish on the table.
‘Is that cream?!’ cried Stella.
Pip allowed herself a small grin of pleasure. It wasn’t real, of course, but she knew from experience that it was a pretty good imitation. She’d actually made it herself by putting four ounces of margarine and four ounces of milk through her cream-maker.
The doorbell rang again and a few more friends and their children turned up, which meant Georgie and Hazel had someone to play with. The adults packed them off into the garden. There were no toys, but with an archway of roses and some sparse rhododendrons at the end of the garden, it wasn’t long before the boys had initiated a game of Robin Hood, and the girls were happy to tag along until they were ‘killed’.
In no time at all, the sitting room began to fill up, and so did the table. Thanks to her lodgers, Stella’s mother came
with a real birthday cake just like the ones they remembered from before the war. She’d even managed to find some old cake candles, though sadly only four of them. The rest of the spread included Spam sandwiches, cheese swirls, carrot sticks, potato drop scones and gypsy creams . . . There was no limit to people’s ingenuity. The land girls Brenda and Vera arrived home and ran upstairs to quickly change into their smart dresses. By the time Dorcas and Flora were on the doorstep, Pip had started serving teas and the room was buzzing with conversation.
Lillian was late, but they had expected her to be. Stella opened the door to her wondering what sort of mood she would be in. Her face was so serious Stella’s heart sank. As Lillian walked into the room, every eye turned in her direction. There was a pregnant pause, and then Dorcas came towards her daughter. ‘Never mind, love,’ she said quietly. ‘Another time, eh?’
Lillian’s face broke into a wide smile. ‘I got the job, Mum,’ she cried. ‘I got it!’
Everyone crowded round congratulating her and giving her a kiss on the cheek or a pat on the back.
‘Happy birthday, Stella,’ she said happily as she pushed a small box into Stella’s hand. ‘And thanks for everything.’
‘Oh, you shouldn’t have,’ Stella said shyly. Inside the box, she found a small necklace with an imitation drop pearl on the chain. ‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ she cried.
‘It’s only Woolworths,’ Lillian confessed.
‘It’s lovely,’ Stella said more firmly. She looked around with a smile. She was a quarter of a century old and she’d had some wonderful presents: talc, a box of three handkerchiefs, some chocolate, a headscarf from her mother and much more. She almost felt like a kid again. Only one person was missing . . .
‘Come on,’ said Lillian. ‘Let’s get this party under way.’
The children were given a plate full of food and some raspberry tea, which was simply a spoonful of jam in a cup of warm water, but the kids loved it. The adults talked, ate and drank tea until Dorcas produced two bottles of parsnip wine and then the glasses came out.