by Annie Groves
EIGHT
‘Good weekend at home?’
‘Yes thanks, June,’ Lou fibbed.
‘I love being in ATA and I always think that I don’t miss my family until I get some leave and I go home,’ June told her. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how we sort of have two separate lives – the one we have here and the one we have with our families? My ma would go spare if she knew a quarter of the things we get up to. I don’t even smoke at home, never mind tell her about the near misses I’ve had flying.’
Lou smiled. In truth she was glad to be back at the base. Because she didn’t want to have to think about Sasha and how much her twin had changed? Lou’s forehead crinkled into a worried frown. She had tried to talk to Sash, hadn’t she, and more than once, but her twin had rejected every attempt Lou had made to bridge the gap between them.
In desperation, before she had left, when they’d been alone in their shared bedroom, Lou had grabbed hold of her sister to stop her leaving and had told her firmly, ‘Look, I know that something’s wrong. We’re twins, remember. Twins, Sash. All I want is for you to be happy.’
‘I am happy,’ Sasha had insisted angrily. ‘Just because I don’t want to learn to fly aeroplanes and go round showing off my uniform and have everyone thinking I’m wonderful, that doesn’t mean that I’m not happy.’
‘Oh, Sash, don’t be like that, please,’ Lou had begged. ‘I wasn’t trying to suggest that what you are doing is any less worthwhile than what I’m doing. When I said you aren’t happy, I meant you, here, inside yourself.’ Lou had touched the spot over her twin’s heart to emphasise what she meant, but once again Sasha had chosen to misunderstand her.
‘Do you really think I don’t know what you really mean?’ she’d demanded. ‘You think that just because you’ve met up with Kieran Mallory again that I’m jealous, don’t you? Well, I’m not. I couldn’t care less about him.’
‘Neither could I,’ Lou had tried to reassure her twin. ‘And I wasn’t talking about Kieran Mallory anyway.’ She’d paused, not sure how much to say, but then deciding that she had to say something. ‘Sash, both nights whilst I’ve been home you’ve fallen asleep with your torch on…’
‘So what if I have? Can’t a person read in bed if she wants to without someone else making a fuss about it?’
Sasha had pulled away from her then, hurrying out of the bedroom before Lou could stop her.
Something was wrong with Sasha. Lou knew that instinctively, even if she couldn’t come up with a logical explanation of why she felt the way she did. On the face of it Sasha should be happy. She was engaged to Bobby, who loved her and who she said she loved in return. She was doing her bit for the war, working at the telephone exchange, and at the same time living at home with their parents just as she had wanted to do.
Was it because of Kieran Mallory that Sasha had been so upset and angry, refusing to make up the distance that now existed between them? Did her twin secretly have feelings for him, even though she insisted that she didn’t?
He had come between them once already and Lou did not want him to come between them again. If Sasha didn’t want to confide in her then perhaps she ought simply to respect her twin’s decision.
‘How was London?’ she asked June now, reluctantly putting her concern about Sasha to one side.
‘Crazy. For a start, it’s full of Americans. You can’t walk down any of the main streets without getting blocked in by Americans passing one another and having to salute. Mind you, I have to admit that they know how to have fun. There was a dance on at our hotel on Saturday night, and before we knew it the place was swarming with GIs. They certainly know how to treat a girl,’ June giggled. ‘We met up with them on Sunday. They picked us up in these Jeeps and then roared round London in them. We ended up at this club – the 400 Club. Members only, supposedly, but after they’d waved some five-pound notes under the doorman’s nose he let us in. There was a terrific band playing. The place was full. I saw one of the upper-crust ATA girls there, Diana Barnato, with a crowd that included several RAF high-ups. You should have been with us, though, Lou.’
‘Next time I will be,’ Lou promised.
‘I’m going to keep you to that promise,’ June warned her. ‘Let’s make a definite date for going down in November then, shall we?’
Lou agreed. They normally worked ten days on and then had two days’ leave with a fortnight’s holiday a year, so Lou knew that there wouldn’t be too much of a problem in planning their London trip for November.
She’d been lucky, she reflected. Much as she’d loved being in the WAAF, the freedom from military rules and regulations that being in ATA gave her was a definite bonus. The fact that ATA had needed more pilots had made it easy for her to be transferred out of the WAAF and into ATA. However, whilst she enjoyed her new freedom, Lou firmly believed that she had benefited from the discipline of the WAAF, and all that that had taught her about herself and her own capabilities.
She’d got another of her cross-country flights in the morning – solo this time. She just hoped she was up to it, Lou reflected as she prepared for bed. That was the trouble about having a weekend off: you lost that surge of excited energy that pushed you to prove that you could do everything and more that your superior demanded of you.
They’d taken on some new girls at the telephone exchange, and Sasha had been asked to keep a helping eye on one of them, Alice White, a confident, pretty blonde, through her first few weeks as an operator.
They were having their lunch in the canteen, sitting with several other senior girls like Sasha, who were watching over the new recruits, everyone exchanging tales of how they had spent the weekend, when Alice gave a theatrical shudder and announced, ‘Well, I saw the most awful thing on Saturday. I’d been round to my nan’s with Mum, and we were on the way back when we heard this explosion. Near deafened us, it did, and it was like all you-know-what had broken loose. A fire engine came racing past, and an ambulance, and we could see all this smoke, and then when we got round the corner we had to turn back ‘cos the army had got the whole road cordoned off because there’d been a bomb found and it went off whilst they were trying to defuse it. Blown to bits, them that was defusing it were, so I heard,’ Alice finished.
Somehow Sasha had managed to sit through Alice’s excited description of what had taken place, but now she was shaking from head to foot.
‘Sash, are you all right?’
The anxious words came from Sasha’s closest friend at the exchange, Mary Talbot, an older quiet girl, who was married to a submariner.
‘Yes…yes…I’m fine,’ Sasha lied.
‘Sasha’s fiancé is with the bomb disposal lot, Alice,’ she heard Mary explaining.
Immediately Alice was contrite. ‘Oooh, Sasha, I’m ever so sorry,’ and then she tactlessly went on, ‘You don’t think that your fiancé was one of them that was there, do you? I could never be engaged to a lad doing something so dangerous. I’d be on pins all the time, worrying about him. Give me a lad that works in a reserved occupation any day of the week over one that’s in uniform.’
Sasha had stopped listening. Hearing Alice tell her story hadn’t just filled her with sick fear for Bobby, it had also brought back her own experience of being trapped: pinned down virtually by an unexploded bomb. It was two years now since that dreadful night, and she had been saved, rescued by Bobby, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. In fact she thought about it more now than she had done after it had first happened. When was it going to end? When was the memory of that night going to stop tormenting her? What if it never did? A horrible cold and then hot panicky feeling filled her. Her chest was tightening up and her throat closing as though she wasn’t going to be able to breathe.
‘Sash, what is it? What’s wrong?’ Mary’s anxious demand snapped her back to normal. Her hair felt damp with sweat, and her heart was pounding as though she had been running. She was a coward; a silly scared coward who didn’t deserve to have someone like Bobby to love her.
Thank goodness she didn’t need to worry that Bobby was one of those who had died in the explosion Alice had described. Sasha knew that he was safe because he’d gone to church with her family on Sunday and come back with them for Sunday lunch.
It was Monday afternoon when it happened: the sound of glass breaking and splintering filling the whole house, and reminding Emily of Liverpool and the blitz. Emily had been holding the washing basket she’d just brought in with the dry washing off the line, but she abandoned it on the kitchen floor as she rushed through the hall and into the front room to find glass everywhere, from the broken panes in the pretty Georgian window, and right in the middle of the floor the cause of their destruction in the form of a large brick.
Emily had felt so sick and shocked that all she’d wanted to do was sit down and have a good cry, and that’s what she would have done too, she suspected, if her neighbour, Ivy, hadn’t come hurrying round, having heard the noise herself.
‘Well, what a thing to happen. Someone’s done this on purpose, if you ask me,’ she pronounced, having been shown the front room by Emily. ‘After all, bricks don’t throw themselves through windows, do they?’
Taking charge, she shepherded a still-shocked Emily back into the kitchen, filled the kettle and then put it on the Aga.
‘Alf Simms will have to be told.’
Alf was their local police sergeant.
‘I’ll give the police station a ring now. Mark my words, it will be evacuees that have done it. There’s a few of them caused nothing but trouble since they arrived here. Now you just sit here, whilst I telephone. It’s lucky that no one was in the room when it happened.’
Emily listened gratefully to her neighbour. She was shocked, she admitted. Whitchurch was such a quiet place, not the kind of place at all where people threw bricks through windows.
Within half an hour of her neighbour telephoning the police station, Alf Simms was propping his bicycle up on the back wall of Emily’s cottage and accepting a cup of tea from Ivy, having removed his helmet and placed it down on Emily’s well-scrubbed kitchen table.
‘I’ve told Emily that it’s bound to be evacuees that have done it,’ Ivy told him. ‘Given her ever such a shock, it has, though, hasn’t it, Emily? I could hear the noise from my own kitchen. Terrible, it was. Made me think at first that a bomb had dropped. It oughtn’t to be allowed, evacuees going round scaring the living daylights out of decent people.’
Alf drank his tea, sucking on his teeth as he put down his empty cup next to his helmet.
‘I’ll go and take a look at the scene of the offence, if you don’t mind.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Emily agreed.
‘Best that you ladies stay in here. We don’t want any accidents with that broken glass. You’ll have to get Bob Walker in to fix it for you. I’ll call in and tell him for you, if you like. I’ve got to cycle past his place on my way back to the station.’
‘Oh, yes, thank you. I hadn’t got as far as thinking about repairing it,’ Emily admitted.
‘You’ll still have to put up your blackout curtains, of course,’ Alf warned.
It seemed an age before he returned to the kitchen, carrying the brick.
‘Looks to me like this is a Manchester brick,’ Alf informed Emily and Ivy. ‘Hard and heavy, they are, so I reckon that whoever threw it knew what he was doing.’
‘Well, some of those evacuees—’ Ivy began.
But Alf cut her short, explaining portentously, ‘When I examined the scene I found this piece of paper underneath the brick.’ From his pocket he removed a small folded piece of lined paper. ‘Upon further examination of it, I discovered that it contained a message.’ Unfolding the paper, he continued, ‘That message reads: “Traitor. German Lover.”’
Emily covered her mouth with her hand, too shocked and upset to say anything.
She was still feeling shocked and upset when Tommy came home from school. Of course he wanted to know why the window was being repaired and what had happened. Emily would have preferred to let him think that the panes had fallen out by themselves but she knew that in such a small town details of the incident would have spread and that Tommy was bound to hear about it from his school friends.
Naturally she played things down when she told him, omitting to say anything about the note, as Alf had already charged both her and her neighbour not to discuss it with anyone ‘whilst investigations are in progress’.
Ivy, though, didn’t include Emily in that ban and was very vocal in her views on the situation.
‘It’s like I said,’ she repeated to Emily later in the evening, her desire to discuss the situation making Emily glad that she had just sent Tommy upstairs to get ready for bed. ‘It stands to reason that it’s them evacuees. After all, no decent right-thinking person would do something like that. I mean, look at all the good work the German POWs have done round here, working on the land. They might be on the other side, but like the vicar said when they first came here, the war’s over for them now and we’ve got a duty to treat them in a Christian way. Besides,’ she added practically, ‘there’s many a local farmer would be hard put to do his bit for the country without having POWs to lend a hand. Look at all the hard work Wilhelm has put in your garden. Growing nearly everything of your own now, you are. That fruit you and me have just bottled and the chutney we made will see us both very nicely through the winter and into next summer.’
Her neighbour’s comments were meant to comfort and reassure her, Emily knew, but it wasn’t just herself she was concerned for. She was concerned for Tommy as well, and for Wilhelm himself. A lovely man, he was; she’d thought that right from the start, and there wasn’t a day went by when she didn’t find something more to like about him.
There’d been articles in the papers recently about an exchange of POWs between Britain and Germany, and Emily just hoped that it was this that had fomented the attack on her windows and not Wilhelm himself.
‘You should perhaps think of getting a dog,’ her neighbour continued. ‘I’m not keen on them meself, what with them muddy paws and that, but like as not if you had one its barking would give you a bit of warning if those evacuees were to try any more funny business.’
Emily pondered what Ivy was saying. She’d never had a dog herself, and if the truth were known she was a bit nervous around them. She knew, though, that Tommy would be thrilled at the prospect, and anything that staved off another event like this afternoon’s was something she could only welcome right now.
True to her nature, though, Emily said cautiously to her neighbour, ‘I’ll have a word with Alf and see what he thinks about me getting a dog. I wouldn’t want to have people complaining about a barking dog keeping them awake at night.’
‘Well, of course not, but it could be trained just to bark at strangers. Your Tommy could do that. Boys and dogs – well, they go together like apple pie and custard,’ Ivy assured her, taking pity on Emily’s townee ignorance.
‘I’ll speak to Alf tomorrow,’ Emily told her.
‘Katie, can I have a word?’
Katie looked up in some surprise when she saw Gerry standing hesitantly at the half-open door to her room. She was meeting Gina for lunch, seeing as they both had a day off, and she’d come upstairs to get her coat.
‘Of course you can,’ she assured Gerry. ‘Come in.’
‘Thanks. Only I didn’t want to say anything downstairs in front of the others.’ Gerry pulled a small face, as she took a packet of cigarettes – service issue, Katie noticed – out of the pocket of her slacks and offered Katie one.
Katie shook her head and waited whilst Gerry lit her own cigarette and inhaled deeply before expelling the smoke. Gerry certainly looked much better than she had done the night she had come back in such a state and broken down, Katie acknowledged, although she was still burning the candle at both ends, as the saying went.
‘I just wanted to thank you for what you did…you know, that night.’ Gerry’s voice was slightly sti
lted and quiet.
‘You don’t have anything to thank me for, Gerry,’ Katie responded gently. ‘I didn’t do anything special, or that anyone else wouldn’t have done.’
Gerry stubbed out her unfinished cigarette with an awkward movement.
‘Yes, you did. You listened to me and you understood. You didn’t tell me to…to pull myself together, or say that I was in danger of disgracing everyone else.’ Gerry sighed. ‘Oh, I know that Peggy means well and that she’s probably right.’
‘She was concerned about you, Gerry; we all were.’
Gerry nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said, about my parents and everything. You were right, Katie. I really wish that I could be like Peggy and, well, find the right one, but…Have you ever been in love, Katie?’
‘Yes,’ Katie admitted. She desperately wished that Gerry hadn’t asked her that particular question.
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing really. We just decided that we weren’t suited.’ Katie forced herself to sound natural. It wouldn’t help Gerry, after all, to learn the truth and might even put her off trying to settle down.
Gerry stood there uncertainly for a moment longer.
‘Well, I just wanted to say thanks for everything.’
She had gone before Katie could say anything, leaving Katie feeling relieved that she hadn’t asked her any more about Luke.
Poor Gerry. She was just as much a casualty of the war as her brothers had been, although in a different way.
A knock on the front door right when she was in the middle of her weekly bake wasn’t something that Emily really welcomed. Wiping her floury hands, then dragging off her pinafore, she hurried to answer the impatient knock, surprised to discover Alf Simms, the police sergeant, standing on her front door step, his bicycle propped up against the wall below her repaired front window.