Authors: Annie Groves
Sally had known real shame along with her shock and her fear. But she was a young woman with a lot of common sense and courage, and so she had gone to see the moneylender from whom Ronnie had borrowed the money, and they had come to an arrangement whereby she would call on him weekly with their payments instead of him sending round a ‘tallyman’ to collect it from the house. That way at least she had hoped to keep up a front of respectability.
It had made her feel physically sick to see written down the amount they now owed, so very much more than she had thought. She had told Mr Wade proudly that she wanted to increase their repayments so that they could reduce the money owing faster, swallowing back her longing to beg him not to lend Ronnie any more. She could not go behind her husband’s back in such a way, and humiliate him.
She admitted now, as she hurried back to the door and handed over the money to the waiting man, that maybe she should have gone back to see Mr Wade and asked him to let her reduce the payments once she realised what a struggle she was going to have meeting the increased amount she had volunteered to pay, but she was desperate to get the loan cleared as quickly as she could, and she had her pride just like everyone else.
It seemed to take for ever for the man to count slowly through the amount she had handed him before he finally gave a grunt of satisfaction and stashed it in his pocket.
He was about to turn away when Sally reminded him firmly, ‘Mr Wade always writes the amount down and signs it.’
‘Mebbe he did, but that’s not the way the new owners do business.’
He had gone before Sally could object, melting into the darkness, leaving her feeling relieved that none of her neighbours had seen him but at the same time highly anxious. This wasn’t like worrying about rationing or being bombed; it wasn’t an anxiety she could share with anyone else and find comfort in the fact that they were in things together.
It was far later than Sam had planned when the bus finally set her down at the stop closest to her billet. The earlier sea mist had now become a steady downpour, the rain trickling down inside the upturned collar of her greatcoat. Quickly she
hurried towards the entrance to the school, dismayed to find that the door now seemed to be locked. Now what was she to do? To her relief, before she had to decide the door was suddenly opened from the inside, allowing her to step inside and quickly close the door behind her to observe the blackout rules about not allowing any light to escape into the night darkness and so potentially provide a target for German bombers.
In the dim light from the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling she could see that the chair behind the desk was now occupied by a very stern-looking warrant officer.
‘Private Grey reporting for duty, ma’am,’ Sam offered hurriedly, suddenly very conscious of the rubble and brick dust on her greatcoat.
‘Strange,’ the warrant office marvelled nastily. She was well into her thirties, Sam guessed, with an unusually broad, somehow flattened face and slightly bulbous protruding eyes, ‘only we seem to have someone of that name here already, at least according to her kitbag. Got a double, have we, Private?’
‘I … no … that is … There wasn’t anyone here to report to when I arrived, ma’am,’ Sam told her desperately, ‘and so I thought I’d just get some fresh air and familiarise myself with the city …’
One thin grey eyebrow rose as the warrant officer looked Sam up and down. ‘Acquainting yourself with the city, was it? It looks to me more like you’ve been acquainting yourself with something very different indeed, Private.’ She pushed
back her chair and stood up. ‘Let me explain something to you, Private. Here in this billet and this unit we do not waltz in and dump our kitbags and then waltz out again like we was out of uniform.’
Sam had come across a wide variety of authority figures since she had joined the ATS but never one like this. Instinctively she knew that the woman confronting her now was someone who relished the power her authority gave her. She wouldn’t hesitate to bully and terrorise those under her, Sam guessed, and she also deduced that the warrant officer had already made up her mind that Sam was someone she didn’t very much like.
Well, that was fine, Sam decided, determinedly ignoring the sickly little feeling in her stomach that said she was upset by the hostility she could sense. She could feel herself starting to shake a bit inside and she was longing for the calming effect of a cigarette.
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ she apologised dutifully, fixing her gaze on a point to the left of the warrant officer’s shoulder rather than risk engaging in eye contact with her. ‘It won’t happen again.’
Sam could almost sense the warrant officer’s disappointment that she wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to tear another strip off her. Sam was surprised herself. It wasn’t like her to allow herself to be intimated, or to pass up an opportunity to have a bit of fun by coming up with some far-fetched explanation for what she had done.
‘No it won’t,’ the warrant officer agreed meaningfully, ‘because—’
The sudden opening of a door behind the desk and the appearance of a tall, slim, grey-haired woman wearing a captain’s uniform had the warrant officer along with Sam springing to attention and saluting.
Whatever the warrant officer had been about to say remained unsaid as the captain looked at Sam with surprisingly kind hazel eyes and said calmly, ‘Ah, our wanderer has returned has she, Warrant Officer?’ The hazel gaze skimmed Sam from head to foot and then paused thoughtfully on her face.
‘Took a wrong turning in the blackout, ma’am, and fell over some sandbags,’ Sam offered by way of explanation of her appearance.
The captain nodded, then told Sam calmly, ‘Warrant Officer Sands will no doubt have informed you of the routine here. First thing after breakfast, transport arrives to take you all to your designated areas of work. You have been assigned to Deysbrook Barracks.’
No supper! And she was very hungry, Sam realised, but of course she didn’t say anything.
She stood stiffly at attention until the captain said briskly, ‘Dismissed.’
At least she had escaped whatever punishment the warrant officer had no doubt been planning for her, Sam acknowledged, recovering some of her normal insouciance as she made her way to the dormitory where she had left her kitbag.
Not wanting to disturb the other girls, she tried to be as quiet as possible but the discovery that
the shape she could feel on the bed closest to the door wasn’t her kitbag but the sleeping body of another girl caused both her and the girl in the bed to yelp in protest, and within seconds torches were being switched on all over the dormitory as the noise woke the other girls.
‘Sorry, sorry …’ Sam apologised ruefully, ‘only I left my kitbag here …’
‘The Toad moved it,’ a girl in a bed halfway down the room informed her sleepily.
‘She means Warrant Officer Sands,’ another girl explained unnecessarily, since Sam had quick-wittedly recognised how appropriate the warrant officer’s nickname was. ‘Lord,’ the girl continued, ‘when she found your kitbag there without any sign of you, she swelled up so much with fury we thought she was going to burst.’
‘Pity she didn’t,’ someone else announced fervently. ‘Gave me jankers for a whole week, she did, just because I hadn’t got me cap on straight. Me poor hands were red raw with all that scrubbing and potato peeling in freezing cold water. You want to watch out for her: if she takes a dislike to you you’ll know all about it and no mistake.’
‘Go on with you, May. Give her a chance to get herself settled in before you start scaring her half to death about old Toad face,’ the girl whose bed was next to Sam’s spoke up firmly, before warning Sam, ‘I don’t want to tell you what to do, but if I was you I’d get myself into bed before Toadie comes up here checking up on you. She’s got a real mean streak to her and there’s nothing
she likes better than an excuse to come down heavy on one of us. I’m Corporal Hazel Gibson, by the way.’
‘Sam Grey,’ Sam reciprocated. ‘And thanks for the warning, Hazel, I mean, Corp.’ She stifled a sudden yawn. It had been a long day, and she was more than ready for her bed.
‘Mind you, at least Toadie’s a real live human being, not like that ghost wot’s supposed to go walking all over the place at night,’ the girl the corporal had addressed as May announced with ghoulish relish.
‘A ghost?’ a nervously quavering little voice from the bed closest to the door protested shakily.
‘Yes. Comes looking for the girl wot got him killed on account of her taking up with someone else and her new lover murdering him,’ May told them. ‘At least that’s what I’ve bin told.’
‘Go on with you, May. You don’t half talk a load of rubbish,’ the corporal squashed the almost palpable air of nervous tension creeping through the room, leaving Sam free to follow the corporal’s advice and make haste to get herself into the only spare bed.
Her new dorm mates seemed a decent crowd, she reflected, especially Hazel Gibson, unlike the warrant officer, and that bossy Bomb Disposal chap. She certainly didn’t want to run into him again.
‘I’m sorry that the warrant officer gave me your bed.’
Sam smiled at the other new girl to join the group, as they emerged from the showers at the same time. She didn’t look old enough to have joined up, Sam thought, with her huge hazel eyes and her patent shyness. Sam hadn’t missed the nearly bald teddy bear hastily stuffed out of sight before she had got out of bed.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Sam assured her with a smile.
The other girl looked relieved. ‘I’m Mouse,’ she introduced herself. ‘At least that’s what everyone calls me although I was christened Marianne. I didn’t think that they’d be sending me to work in a barracks, I really didn’t. I mean, I only joined up because I had to. I didn’t want to at all really. It was my aunt’s idea … She said that with me being on my own … I thought I’d be staying close to home, and doing a bit of office work.’
Sam could see that she was close to tears.
Mouse’s naïvety, combined with her air of helplessness made Sam wonder how on earth she had managed to survive the ATS long enough to get through the training weeks. The Government must indeed be desperate for young women to fill the mundane jobs left empty by the men who had been sent on active service.
‘Well, that’s where you went wrong,’ she told her wryly. ‘You should have told them you wanted to drive trucks and be posted as far away from home as possible and then you’d have probably ended up being a stenographer.’
‘Drive trucks?’ Mouse shuddered. ‘Oh, no … I couldn’t possibly do anything like that.’
She was as green as grass and apparently completely devoid of a sense of humour, Sam reflected pityingly. The kind of girl who
should
have been allowed to stay at home with her mother.
‘Come on, you two, buck up,’ Hazel, who Sam thought would be much more her cup of tea with her jolly no-nonsense manner, called out, warning, as she fastened her own uniform blouse and tucked it into her shirt, ‘You’re not dressed yet and if you don’t get a move on you’ll miss breakfast.’
Miss breakfast. Sam’s stomach gave a worried growl. She was just about to hurry over to her own bed, when she realised that somehow or other Mouse had already managed to get into the disgusting pink foundation garments that were part of their official uniform whilst in the shower and that she was now trying to keep the towel wrapped protectively around herself as she continued to get dressed.
Shaking her head over such time-consuming and unnecessary primness, Sam reached her bed and grabbed her own clothes.
‘You’ll never get away with wearing that,’ Hazel warned her when she saw the non-uniform white brassiere Sam was fastening. ‘Not if Toadie sees it. She likes the thought of us being trussed up in our passionkillers, doesn’t she, girls?’
The chorus of assents that greeted Hazel’s comment made Sam laugh. With her slim almost boyish figure, the last thing she needed was the one-size-fits-all proportions of the regulation underwear and corsetry supplied to the ATS. In addition to two uniforms, and four pairs of lisle stockings, everyone was also issued with three pairs of khaki lock-knit knickers, two pairs of blue and white striped pyjamas, eight starched collars and two studs, and the bane of Sam’s life, three pink brassieres and two pink boned corsets. The corsets Sam was determined never to wear, but the bras had to be worn for the sake of decency, if nothing else, and she had been very grateful when her mother had managed to find a local tailoress who had enough experience of the corset industry to be able to alter the firmly structured cone-shaped cups designed to control to military standard any potentially overexuberant female breasts, to something more appropriate for Sam’s much less voluptuous shape. She still felt trussed up and uncomfortable, though. They chafed her skin as well as her desire for freedom, and she would wear her own non-regulation underclothes as long as she could get away with it.
‘It was such a pity that my corsets got lost in the laundry at my last posting,’ she grinned, her eyes dancing with devilment as she told them mock innocently, ‘I was ever so upset about it, but what can you do? They’d just disappeared.’
‘Come on,’ the sturdily built girl keeping watch by the door hissed down the dorm. ‘Toadie’s on her way up.’
All around her Sam could see girls moving like lightning, fastening ties, doing up blouses, reaching for shoes and jackets, and at the same time straightening up their beds, the girls who were already dressed quickly leaving their own made-up beds to deal with those of the girls who weren’t, so that by the time the warrant officer had reached the doorway, every young woman in the room was fully dressed, and every bed was neatly made.
Sam could have sworn that her glance lingered longer on her than it did on anyone else as they filed past her and headed for the stairs, but she refused to give in to the temptation to look directly at her in order to check.
‘Thanks for making up my bed,’ she told the pretty fair-haired girl whose bed was next to her own, as she caught up with her on the stairs, five minutes later when they had been dismissed.
‘We all help one another out in this unit,’ came the smiling response. ‘I dare say you’ll be repaying the favour.’
‘Yeah, by keeping a window open so that you can get back in when you haven’t got a late-night
pass, Lynsey,’ Hazel commented, overhearing their conversation. ‘Lynsey here has a raft of men queuing up to take her out and she believes in doing her bit for our boys, don’t you, Lynsey?’ she teased.
Sam held her breath, half expecting the blonde girl to take offence, but instead she laughed and winked at Sam. ‘I certainly do.’
‘You want to get her to show you her collection of engagement rings, Sam,’ Hazel grinned. ‘How many was it at the last count, Lynsey?’
‘Eight. It would have been nine, but Pat, that Canadian I was seeing, changed his mind and said that he thought we should just be unofficially engaged. Huh, as if I hadn’t worked out what his game was. You could see as plain as anything the white mark on his finger where he’d taken off his wedding ring. The cheek of it, thinking that I wouldn’t guess what he was up to.’ She gave a disapproving sniff. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a married man pretending that he isn’t. You’ll get a lot of that here in Liverpool, Sam,’ she warned. ‘There’s troop ships arriving every week filled with men who haven’t seen a girl in months. Have you got a steady?’
Sam gave a brief shake of her head. Her lack of a young man had recently become a bit of a sore subject, mainly because her elder brother had given her a bit of a lecture on his last leave, warning her that she should start behaving in a more feminine manner and that she frightened off his friends with her tomboy ways. She had shrugged off his
criticism, affecting not to care when the following evening, at the dance he had taken her to, she had been left to sit on her own whilst other girls – girls with curls and soft curves and giggling voices – were surrounded by uniformed young men eager to dance with them. That night, lying in bed unable to sleep, she had been forced to recognise that her youthful daydreams in which she had outshot and outdared Robin Hood, outrode and outrobbed Dick Turpin, to win their admiration and the friendship – daydreams that as she had matured had grown into an unacknowledged belief that one day she would fall in love with a real-life hero whose heart she would win with her prowess and her ability to compete with him – were never going to be recognised and that heroes did not fall in love with girls who matched them skill for skill but instead preferred girls dressed in pretty clothes who stood on the sidelines, watching them admiringly.
Sam had told herself that she didn’t care, and she wasn’t going to change, not even though Rory Blake, the ringleader of her brother’s gang, whom she had secretly admired for years, hadn’t once asked her to dance, and had laughed at her short hair.
Why should she care? She had more important things to do and think about. There was a war to be fought and won, and that surely was far more exciting than having a steady, she assured herself as the welcome smells of breakfast filled the air of the large panelled room they were all filing into.
*
Sally sighed but gave in when she felt Tommy’s eager tug on her arm the minute they drew level with the large furniture van parked outside old Dr Jennings’s house. The back of the van was open and, as they watched, two men lifted out a heavy mahogany sideboard and started to carry it towards the house. If furniture was being moved in instead of out – and very good quality furniture too, by the look to it – then that surely meant that the new doctor was moving in as well.
Virtually anything with four wheels enthralled Sally’s sons, and Harry, restrained in his pushchair, yelled out excitedly, ‘Big car.’
‘No, it’s not a big car, it’s a van, Harry,’ Tommy corrected his brother sternly.
Sally hid a small smile.
‘Come on now,’ she urged her elder son, not wanting anyone who might be in the house to think she was being nosy.
The removal men were carrying a packing case out of the van, and as they crossed the pavement a photograph frame fell out of it, the glass shattering as it lay face up on the pavement.
‘No, Tommy, be careful.’ Sally hurried over to him with the pushchair, warning, ‘You’ll cut yourself.’ Beneath the shattered glass she could see the photograph quite clearly: a pretty fair-haired young woman smiled towards the camera, a chubby blond baby on her knee whilst her free arm drew an equally fair-haired little boy closer to her. Sally had a similarly posed photograph of herself with her own sons, although the young woman in the
photograph was wearing far more expensive clothes than she could ever have afforded, she acknowledged ruefully.
She was so engrossed in the photograph that she didn’t see the grim-faced man watching her from the bay window of the house until his shadow darkened the photograph.
‘Daddy,’ Harry announced proudly with a beaming smile for the stranger, oblivious to his glower, as he showed off his newly learned words.
‘That’s not Daddy, it’s a man,’ Tommy corrected him scornfully.
In an attempt to hide her embarrassment, Sally shushed her sons, gasping in protest as Tommy ignored her earlier warning to bend down to pick up the photograph.
‘No. Leave it. Don’t touch it!’
If the Scots accent was unfamiliar, the harsh anger in the male voice was easily recognisable, causing Tommy to draw back his hand too quickly and then whimper as a piece of broken glass pierced his skin.
‘Can’t you control your children?’ he demanded tightly as he bent down to retrieve the broken photograph.
So this was the new doctor Molly’s mother-in-law had told her about. Sally eyed him warily. There was a white line of fury round his mouth; his whole body was rigid with it, Sally saw. He obviously had a nasty temper on him, she thought critically. After all it was only a photograph.
Gathering her now sobbing son into her arms,
she retaliated protectively, ‘If you hadn’t scared him half to death by shouting at him like that he wouldn’t have touched it. He’s only a little boy. He didn’t mean any harm. You should know what they’re like. After all, it looks like you’ve got two of your own.’ She looked meaningfully at the photograph.
The expression of bitterness and loathing he gave both her and the boys shocked Sally as much as though he had physically struck her. He was a doctor, a father, and yet he was looking at her and her boys as though he hated them.
It took one of the removal men’s brisk, ‘Where do you want this, guv?’ to break the tension that that sprung up between them, allowing Sally to turn on her heel and hurry away.
What a dreadful man he was, not fit to step into the old doctor’s shoes at all, and the way he had looked at the two poor innocent boys … like he hated them, Sally thought indignantly, relieved to see that Tommy’s cut had stopped bleeding. And just because little Tommy had touched his precious photograph. She knew his sort, the sort who looked down on her sort. Well, he could look down on her all he liked but she was not having him frighten her little boy like that, she decided, her maternal ire aroused.
She had almost reached the end of the street and some compulsion she couldn’t resist made her turn to look back the way she had come, her heart jolting against her ribs when she saw that he was still standing there motionless, watching them.
‘S’pose he thinks we aren’t good enough to touch his precious kids, not even in a ruddy photograph,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Stuck up, that’s what he is, and no mistake. All that posh furniture, and them kids dressed up like little Lord Fauntleroys!’ She had been able to tell just from that one brief glimpse at the photograph and the contents of the van that that been on view that Dr Jennings’s replacement could provide his wife and children with a far better standard of living than that that his patients were able to enjoy.
‘You’re late.’
‘Sorry, Patti,’ Sally apologised breathlessly as she hurried onto the stage. ‘My Tommy cut his finger, and then …’ She stopped when Patti raised her eyebrows and tutted sharply, ‘Yes, we can all see that, there’s blood all over your sleeve.’
Sally sighed. None of the other Waltonettes had children so how could she expect them to understand? She sensed that Charlie was beginning to think that he would have preferred to take on a stand-in singer without children had he had the choice. She was lucky to have this well-paid source of extra income, she reminded herself, even if the money wasn’t regular, and she certainly couldn’t afford to lose it by offending Patti, no matter how much she resented the other girl’s high-handed and unsympathetic attitude.
‘Come on, let’s get on with it,’ Sybil demanded impatiently. ‘My new chap’s taking me out later.’
‘If by your new chap you mean that fella wot
was buying you drinks the other night, Syl, I’ve got news for you,’ Shirley chipped in. ‘He lives two streets away from me and he’s got a wife who’ll be down here telling you wot’s wot if you don’t watch out.’
‘He never said owt to me about any wife,’ Sybil bridled.
‘No, well, they never do, do they?’ Shirley countered drily, ‘but you’ve bin told now. Three kiddies, he’s got, and another on the way.’