Some Sunny Day

by Annie Groves

  ‘Not that we aren’t pleased for you, Rosie,’ Mary assured her. ‘I’ll tell you someone who isn’t, though, and that’s that foreman. Just look at the way he’s watching us. Just because we’re having a bit of a chat.’

  The foreman was watching them, and even though he was standing several yards away, Rosie could feel his anger.

  ‘Pity we haven’t bin moved on somewhere else. I hate the way that Duncan looks at us,’ Sheila grumbled later on in the day.

  ‘Ian was saying as how His Grace is expected back on leave any day,’ Mary informed them, adding teasingly, ‘so you’ll be able to go and complain to him if you want to, Sheila.’

  They all laughed but Rosie didn’t feel at all like laughing at the end of the day when the Italians had been driven back to their camp and she and the other girls were still waiting for their own transport. They were in the farmyard, and she had been talking to Mary about the upcoming dance in Nantwich when some sixth sense caused her to turn round to find that the foreman was making his way towards them.

  ‘I want a word wi’ you,’ he announced sharply. ‘What do you think you’re up to, encouraging that ruddy Italian? If it’s a man you want then there’s plenty of English lads around. You don’t have to go giving it to some bloody Eyetie. Or are you one of them that likes giving it to the enemy? Is that what it is?’

  He was standing so close to her that Rosie could smell the sour stink of his sweat. She wanted to step back from him but there was nowhere for her to go. He had moved so close to her that he had virtually trapped her up against the wall, so that he was standing between her and Mary. Fear spiked through her when she saw in his eyes the lust that was the real reason for his hostility towards her. ‘They want teaching a lesson that would mek sure they don’t go sniffin’ round the likes of you, them bloody Eyeties do – aye, and I know a few handy lads an’ all who would be happy to do it.’

  To Rosie’s relief, Mary pushed her way past the foreman, planting herself right in front of him.

  ‘The Italians are prisoners of war here and have to be treated proper, just like our lads do when they’re taken prisoner. That’s what we were told before we came here, and Mr Churchill himself has said as how we should treat the POWs with respect.’

  The sound of someone clapping their hands and a deep, cultured voice calling out, ‘Bravo, my dear. Well said,’ had then all turning to look across the yard to where a tall, handsome man in RAF uniform was standing watching them.

  It was the foreman who reacted first, his face draining of blood to leave his skin a sickly putty colour as he stammered, ‘Your Grace. I didn’t know as how you was back.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. I can see that, Duncan. Oh, and by the way, the young lady is quite correct. And even if Mr Churchill had not urged us to treat the POWs as we would want to be treated ourselves, I certainly won’t stand for them being treated badly whilst they’re working on my land. I’ll speak to you later.’

  With that, the newcomer turned on his heel and left the yard, while Rosie and Mary exchanged awed looks.

  ‘The duke himself!’ Mary exhaled excitedly.

  ‘Of course it was, and if you’d not been telling George Duncan what for, you’d have seen him drive up in his posh sports car like the rest of us just did,’ said Sheila loftily.

  ‘Truck’s here,’ Sheila called out excitedly. ‘Hurry up, you lot.’

  Ian and Charlie had offered to pick up the girls in a truck they were ‘borrowing’ to save the girls having to ride their bikes into the nearby town, and it was a jolly laughing band of girls that crowded onto the lorry in their finery in the warmth of the summer evening, giggling good-naturedly when they discovered that it was already half full of young men ready and eager to offer them laps to sit on so as not to soil their frocks.

  ‘You never said anything about this lot, Ian,’ Mary chided her boyfriend.

  ‘I hadn’t planned on them being here, but someone spilled the beans,’ he answered ruefully.

  Rosie watched as Ian squeezed Mary’s hand and the two of them exchanged tender looks. Now she was a member of that magical world that belonged only to two people, and yet to all those who knew what it was to love.

  It didn’t take them long to get to the town, where, as they discovered, the dance was already in full swing. They were all made very welcome, though, and Rosie was thrilled to see that Ricardo and some of the other Italians were already there. She was almost as thrilled when she saw that George Duncan wasn’t, exhaling in relief when she had carefully looked round the dance hall and reassured herself that he was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Rosie.’

  A blush warmed her skin when she looked up and saw that Ricardo was standing beside her.

  ‘Will you dance with me?’ he asked.

  Unable to speak, Rosie nodded and stood up.

  The crowded, dimly lit dance floor was an invitation for couples to make use of the intimacy it offered, and as Ricardo drew her close, Rosie closed her eyes and gave in to her own emotions.

  The band were playing ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. Dancing with Ricardo was as easy as breathing; they seemed to fit together so perfectly.

  ‘I feel as though I don’t want this evening ever to end,’ Rosie whispered an hour later, when they were still on the floor, swaying to the music, lost in their own private world.

  ‘I am hoping that I might soon have some good news for you,’ Ricardo told her.

  ‘What? Tell me now,’ Rosie begged.

  ‘The duke has said that he would like to have some of us permanently attached to his estate. He will provide us with accommodation and take personal responsibility for our status as internees. He has asked for volunteers, and I have put myself forward.’

  Rosie could hear both the excitement and the tension in his voice.

  ‘It will not mean total freedom, of course, but it is a step in the right direction. I want you as my wife, Rosie. I know that at the moment that is not possible. Nor can I even ask you to become engaged to me because I have nothing to offer you as things stand at the moment. But I do love you and the very first moment I can I intend to ask you to be my wife. Will you wait for me, Rosie?’

  He sounded so humble that she wanted both to cry and to fling her arms protectively around him and tell him that she would marry him tomorrow. But what he had said was true. She didn’t even know if it was possible for an internee to marry. But she did know that it was possible for her to wait. For ever, if need be.

  ‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Yes, I will. Ricardo, what are you doing?’ she protested when the moment the music stopped he took hold of her hand and hurried her off the dance floor and out through the door into the darkness of the evening.

  Moonlight illuminated the town square, but it could not reach into the narrow cobbled alleyways that led off it, and it was in one of those, in the shadow of the ancient church, that Ricardo took her into his arms and kissed her as a man kisses the woman to whom he has given the whole of his heart.

  How different it felt when Ricardo kissed her rather than Rob. How different she felt. A shiver of sweet awareness tingled through her. This was why she hadn’t been able to give her love to Rob, because somehow, deep down inside, her heart had known that she should save her love for Ricardo.

  It was the happiest evening of her whole life. Rosie felt as though she was walking on air, having Ricardo at her side, his arm around her waist as he kept her close.

  Towards the end of the evening, Ian called for silence and then announced that he had asked Mary to marry him and that she had accepted. When everyone had finished toasting them, Charlie stood up and said bashfully that he and Peggy were also going to be married. How lucky they were, Rosie couldn’t help thinking, a little sadly, even whilst she was so very happy for them. Hers was in some ways a bittersweet happiness. There was her joy in having found love with Ricardo, but there was also her awareness that the road ahead of them was not an easy one. Ricardo was an internee, even if it was not
his fault that circumstances had meant that he had not been able to take British nationality before the war. They were at war with Italy, and Ricardo must be anxious about those members of his extended family who still lived there just as she would have been were their situations reversed.

  But still, they were here together now, and they knew how they felt about one another. Whilst everyone was shouting and cheering their congratulations to the two newly engaged couples, Rosie and Ricardo exchanged special looks that spoke of their private promises to one another and their hopes for their shared future.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘And then Charlie said as how he wants to ask me dad for me hand in marriage proper, like, so I said, and exactly how are you going to do that when me family live in Birmingham and we’re up here in Cheshire and you’re on duty, you know like you would. And then blow me if Charlie doesn’t go and get permission to go home wi’ me to see me mum and dad, so that’s what we’re doing this very next weekend,’ Peggy told them all triumphantly, having come to the end of her breathlessly excited revelation.

  ‘Me and Ian won’t be able to go and see my family or his on account of him being on duty, but he has written to me dad,’ Mary offered when the girls looked expectantly at her.

  They were all in the common room, relaxing after a long tiring week helping to harvest corn.

  Both Peggy and Mary were proudly wearing their engagement rings, bought from a jewellers in Nantwich where the two young couples had gone just as soon as they could. Peggy’s ring had three small diamonds set into a gold band whilst Mary’s was a larger single solitaire. It had given Rosie a small pang to see the way their faces were illuminated by the joy of looking at them and showing them off to everyone, but being the generous-hearted girl she was, she had quickly put aside her own longing to be wearing Ricardo’s ring, to admire theirs.

  Ricardo had told her during the week that he had been summoned to see the officer in charge of the camp and told that his name had been put forward to the duke with a good recommendation that he be accepted to work and live on the estate. Rosie hardly dared to let herself hope that the duke would take him, because if he didn’t she didn’t think she would be able to bear the disappointment. It would make such a difference to them and their future together if Ricardo were taken on to work on the estate. They would be able to plan a future together, a future that would be as secure and happy as the futures Peggy and Mary were looking forward to.

  ‘Shouldn’t Peggy have bin back by now?’ Jean asked. ‘She told me she’d only got the weekend off and it’s Tuesday now.’

  ‘Perhaps she and Charlie decided to sneak away somewhere private like and not come straight back,’ Sheila giggled.

  But there was no place for giggles later on that day when a white-faced Mary passed on to them the news she had received from Ian.

  ‘The house took a direct hit, and according to Ian they haven’t found anything, only exceptin’ Charlie’s cap. He must have took it off and left it in the hallway or summat.’

  The girls looked at one another in stunned silence.

  ‘She can’t be dead,’ Sheila burst out eventually. ‘They’ve only just got engaged, her and Charlie. They was going to get married.’

  Remembering what Mary had told her about Sheila losing her parents, and sympathising from her own experience, Rosie reached for Sheila’s hand and squeezed it comfortingly. She couldn’t bear to think of Peggy – timid, gentle Peggy, who had been so ecstatic at getting engaged – now cold and for ever still.

  As though the dreadful news was some kind of turning point, within a matter of days of them receiving it, Brenda had decided to leave the Land Army and return home, along with several other girls from one of the other groups. The stark reality of war and death couldn’t be ignored.

  Rosie found that she was clinging tightly to Ricardo the next time she saw him, her fear for them both and their future bringing a sharp edge of uncertainty and urgency to her love for him.

  ‘I still can’t take it in,’ she had told him sadly. ‘Poor little Peggy. She was so happy, Ricardo, and she had so much to look forward to.’ Thinking of Peggy brought back memories of her mother’s death, but that wasn’t something Rosie could bring herself to discuss with Ricardo. Her shame over her mother’s behaviour was still with her, and so tied up with her feelings about her father, and the guilt she still sometimes felt at loving Ricardo, that, like the skin over a newly healed wound, Rosie felt it was safer not to disturb it.

  Her love for Ricardo was opening her eyes to so much, including the unexpected strength of her own physical longing for them to be together in every single way.

  Even so, she was still shocked when Mary took her on one side when they were alone in the dormitory.

  ‘There’s a favour I want to ask you to do for me, Rosie,’ she began. ‘Me and Ian are going away together for the weekend. I’m not going to tell anyone, especially our Sheila, because of all the fuss, but just in case anything should happen, I wanted someone to know.’

  ‘But why don’t you want anyone to know?’ Rosie began naïvely and then blushed when she saw the look on Mary’s face. ‘Oh, Mary.’ She took hold of her friend’s hand. ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? I mean, if Ian is pressing you to do this…’

  ‘It isn’t Ian wot’s doing the pressing, it’s me,’ Mary told her flatly, ignoring Rosie’s small gasp of shock. ‘See, the way I see it, Rosie, is that after what’s happened to Peggy and Charlie, and with me and Ian not being able to get wed for a good few weeks yet, I don’t want to wait. We could be dead tomorrow, either of us, and if that’s going to happen then I want at least to know what’s it’s like, you know, being with a man. My man. I love him, see, Rosie, and I want him to know that. I want to hold him close and I want him to hold me in the same way, and…’

  ‘But, Mary, what if something should go wrong and you were to—’

  ‘Ian says that it won’t, and if it did, well, then we wouldn’t be the first couple to be registering their first kiddie’s birth less than nine months after the wedding.’

  Rosie knew that there was nothing she could say that would change her friend’s mind. And a part of her actually envied Mary the chance and the freedom to do what she was doing. She tried to imagine herself in Mary’s shoes and knew with a sharp pang that if she were to be offered the chance of being with Ricardo as his wife and then losing him before they could be married, or losing him but keeping her virginity, she would, like Mary, have opted for the former.

  But she wasn’t going to lose him. As an internee, Ricardo was relatively safe, since he would not be called upon to fight, and neither would he be sent back to Italy in a POW exchange.

  ‘Now, think on,’ Mary urged her. ‘Not a word to anyone else about this, especially not our Sheila. She’s that gobby she’d be spilling it all out back home before she realised what she was doing.’

  ‘I won’t say anything,’ Rosie assured her.

  ‘Rosie, the warden wants a word with you,’ Sheila announced breathlessly, bursting into the common room where Rosie was mending a tear in her dungarees.

  Putting down her mending, Rosie got up and smoothed off her clothes. The warden was kind but stern, and had no qualms about fining those girls who broke the rules about smoking in the dormitories, or giving those who came in after curfew a sound telling off, but it was so unusual for her to actually send for a girl that Rosie couldn’t help but worry that she might somehow have broken some rule without realising.

  Mrs Johnson’s office was tucked away off the main entrance, and Rosie knocked on the door and waited to be told to enter.

  ‘Ah, Rosie, you got my message. Good. Come in and sit down.’

  The warden was smiling so she could not have done anything too dreadful, Rosie comforted herself, doing as she had been instructed.

  ‘I don’t want to alarm you, my dear, but I’m afraid it’s bad news.’

  Rosie gripped the sides of her chair. Something had happened t
o Ricardo. She could feel the sick fear clogging the back of her throat.

  ‘We’ve received a message to say that your aunt has been taken ill and that she needs you to return to Liverpool to look after her.’

  Rosie stared at the warden. ‘No,’ she protested. In her agitation she had risen to her feet without knowing she was doing so. ‘No. I can’t…I don’t…’ she began, and then stopped when she saw the way the warden’s smile was giving way to a frown.

  ‘Mrs Leatherhall is your auntie, isn’t she, Rosie?’ the warden questioned Rosie sternly.

  ‘Yes, yes, she is,’ Rosie admitted. ‘But—’

  ‘Well, that’s all right then. For a minute I had begun to worry. The poor lady’s been very poorly, you see, and she’d put you down as her next of kin. And of course you must go to her. You do understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Rosie felt as though the admission was being wrung out of her. She couldn’t go back to Liverpool. She couldn’t leave Ricardo, not now that they had found one another and resolved all the problems between them, and especially not because of her aunt, who hated her and who did not even accept that they were related.

  ‘You’ll be given a travel warrant to get home and as much compassionate leave as you need. It seems that your auntie is not going to get better, my dear. I’m so very sorry. You can leave first thing tomorrow morning.’

  First thing in the morning. But that meant that she wouldn’t be able to tell Ricardo what was happening. Rosie could feel all her old anger and resentment for her aunt boiling up inside her.

  ‘I don’t want—’ she began, but then stopped when the warden fixed her with a stern look.

  ‘You don’t want to cause anyone any problems; I know that, Rosie. But we all understand that it is your duty to go to your aunt, don’t we?’

  There was to be no escape for her, Rosie could see that, and yet she still looked despairingly towards the window as though somehow, if she wished for him hard enough she would see Ricardo there and she could run to him, and beg him to hold her and keep her safe so that she would not have to go to Liverpool.