London Belles (12 page)

A shiver of foreboding went through Dulcie. Thousands the soldiers had killed in Poland, thousands of young men just like her brother. For the first time since all the talk of war had started Dulcie felt its ice-cold fingers clutch at her heart and grip it painfully hard. She might argue with her brother, she might mock him and taunt him, but of all her family it was Rick to whom she was the closest, Rick who she secretly thought was the best brother that any girl could have, with his handsome looks and his easy-going charm, his way of somehow always being there to calm things down when she felt hard done by. Rick might look so tall and manly and indestructible in his army uniform, but he wasn’t indestructible, he was human flesh and blood, and vulnerable. A huge lump blocked her throat, feelings and thoughts she had never had to worry about before swarming through her head like wasps provoked by someone deliberately stirring up their nest.

‘The next thing we know, the ruddy Germans will be bombing us out of our houses and gassing us all to death,’ one elderly woman was screeching. ‘I can remember what it was like the last time, our lads coming back from the trenches with their lungs rotting from the Germans gassing them.’

Dulcie looked down at her own side. She’d tossed her gas mask to the back of her wardrobe, but of course Edith had hers and was now clutching the strap of its box tightly.

Rick came over. ‘Forget about dinner for me, Ma. Me and some of the other lads are going to see what we can find out. Sid Winters – you know, him whose cousin is a regular in the army – reckons that those who’ve already done their training will be shipped out to France pdq, and that our training will be rushed through now.’

Her brother seemed excited now that the initial shock of the announcement had faded, Dulcie recognised, her earlier concern changing to resentment that he could look so pleased when she was worrying herself sick about him. Her mother’s pinched expression became even more strained but she didn’t say anything, simply nodding and then turning to put her arm round Edith and draw her close to her in a manner similar to which Olive had drawn Tilly close the previous evening.

Mothers fussing over their favourites – well, let them, Dulcie thought acidly; she didn’t care.

‘I’ll have my dinner at Article Row,’ she told her mother tersely, turning on her heel without waiting for her to respond.

‘So it’s happened then?’ Olive found that she was automatically speaking in a lower voice as she asked the vicar’s wife the question to which she already knew the answer.

‘Yes. The Prime Minister has already made a formal announcement. I expect we’ll be able to hear what he said on the news at twelve o’clock.’ The two women exchanged tense white-faced looks.

The news that Britain was now formally at war with Germany hadn’t come out of the blue but it was still shocking, making the heart race and the stomach tense.

‘So many of our young men are already in uniform,’ Mrs Windle continued with a nod in the direction of the young men standing together outside the church in their khaki, their Royal Navy dark blue and their RAF blue serge. ‘And now thousands more will be joining them.’

Their small, well-attended church had been built at the same time as Article Row, by the same philanthropist, and stood on the site of a much older church, along with a neat little rectory, a church hall, and the orphanage, the congregation coming from Article Row and the surrounding area. Olive’s husband and in-laws were buried in its graveyard, and on the anniversaries of their deaths and at Christmas, Olive always made a special point of placing fresh flowers on their graves. She could see the graveyard from where she was standing, sunlight dappling through the shade of the yew trees standing sentinel over the dead. Her heart lurched, a shiver striking through her as she looked from the graveyard to the eager young men in their uniforms.

‘We lost so many in the last war, I can’t believe there’s to be another,’ she said sadly. ‘Look at them. They’re all standing so tall and proud, so determined to do their bit, but they’re so young.’

And so many of them would die, was what Olive was thinking but could not say, especially when one of those young men in air-force blue was Mrs Windle’s own nephew.

At her mother’s side, Tilly held on tightly to her gas mask in its smart box, which she and her mother had covered with some scraps of lace to make it look more attractive, a fashion that many young women in the country were adopting, according to
Woman’s Weekly
.

‘Everywhere is so quiet without the children,’ Tilly commented as they walked home together.

‘Their poor mothers were besides themselves with grief last week when they sent them away, but I dare say now that they will be feeling that they have done the right thing. Hitler is bound to target London.’

‘If you’re going to say that you wish that I’d been young enough to be evacuated, then please don’t,’ Tilly begged her mother. ‘I want to be here with you, Mum.’

As they passed the ARP station on the corner, Sergeant Dawson was standing outside it smoking a cigarette.

‘You’ll have heard the news, I expect?’ he asked.

‘That we’re at war? Yes.’ Olive shivered a little despite the warmth of the sun flooding between the buildings at the entrance to Article Row.

‘I never thought I’d say this, but right now I’m sort of glad that our lad’s already been taken,’ the sergeant told Olive quietly. ‘There’s many a young lad I’ve seen this morning proud to wear his uniform and do his bit for this country. It’s different for those of us who saw something of the last war. I was only in it for the last few weeks, but that was enough.’

‘Yes,’ Olive agreed, thinking of her own husband, his bravery and his death.

On Article Row, the leaves on the clipped privet hedges standing sentry between the low walls at the boundary of each front garden were beginning to look dusty and tired after a summer of exposure to London’s sooty air. Soon it would be autumn and the leaves would die and fall, just like so many of the young men who today were full of vigour and life. Tears blurred Olive’s vision.

A troop from the local Boys’ Brigade marched past the end of the road, their young faces shining with excitement and anticipation. For them war was something to excite them, whilst for those who had lived through the last war, it was something to fear.

‘Come on,’ she told Tilly firmly, increasing her pace as they headed down Article Row after saying goodbye to Sergeant Dawson. ‘I’ve got that joint in the oven that will need seeing to, and —’ Olive stopped speaking to stare up in horrified disbelief at the clear blue sky in response to the wave of sound that was rising to a deafening warning wail.

For a second neither she nor Tilly could move, simply standing staring at one another until Tilly broke their stillness by grabbing hold of Olive’s arm and yelling, ‘Mum, it’s the air-raid siren. Come on we need to get in the shelter.’

They were four doors away from number 13. Holding on to her mother’s arm and almost pulling her along, Tilly started to run, her heart thudding with dread, the wail of the air-raid alarm sending its warning to every part of her terrified body.

Dulcie heard the air-raid siren when she was walking along High Holborn and got caught up in the frantic rush of people reacting to its sound, the panic of the growing crowd as some ran one way and others another, squeezing her up against the sandbags protecting the walls of one of the buildings. The rasp of the sandbags against her legs made her feel grateful for the fact that she wasn’t wearing her precious stockings, but that relief gave way to fear as the crowd swelled and she was pushed again, this time half losing her balance in her high heels. She would have fallen if it hadn’t been for the male hand reaching out to grasp her arm, its owner hauling her to her feet and insisting, ‘The shelter’s this way.’ He was running so fast, his hand still holding her arm, that she was lifted off her feet.

‘Stop, I’m losing my shoes!’

‘Better that than losing your life,’ was his response, as he slowed his pace just enough for her to get her feet back in her shoes, before tugging her along again to where a crowd of people were trying to push their way into the concrete air-raid shelter she had walked past so often, deriding its presence and its ugliness, but which now had never been a more welcome sight. Not that she was going to admit it. Even as she edged inside, Dulcie was sniffing disdainfully as the scent of stale concrete, male sweat and female anxiety filled the air, ignoring the ARP warden’s instruction to, ‘Move down inside, miss. We don’t want people blocking up the entrance.’

‘Hitler hasn’t wasted much time, has he?’ a woman standing close to her observed in a cockney accent, causing several others to give way to the relief of shaky laughter.

Now that they were inside the shelter and safe, Dulcie had an opportunity to look at her rescuer properly for the first time. Around her brother’s age, and of middle height and square muscular build, and wearing an army uniform, he had mid-brown curly hair, hazel eyes and a plain but kind face. Not the kind of male looks to set a girl’s heart beating with excitement, Dulcie decided ungratefully, not like David James-Thompson. Now there was someone she would much rather have been rescued by.

In their Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden, Olive and Tilly sat opposite one another on the garden chairs they’d put in there, along with an old card table, a pack of cards in its drawer, which stuck now because of the damp. Olive had lit the paraffin lamp, which had been on the list of ‘essentials’
Woman’s Weekly
had advised all well-prepared housewives to have inside their Anderson. Spare bedding, warm clothes and food were things that should be kept close to hand in the home, ready to be carried into the shelter when needed, but the paraffin stove, matches, wrapped in a piece of waterproof material, and a waterproof box containing games, a couple of favourite books and some candles could be safely left in the shelter.

Olive had made sure that hers was kept swept and tidy, its door opened on sunny days to make sure it was aired, and the vexed question of ‘needing to go’ sorted out via a discreet curtain with a bucket and a wooden seat behind it.

‘Will we hear the German planes?’ Tilly asked Olive nervously.

‘I should think so, but they won’t get as far as London, Tilly, I’m sure, not with all the defences the Government has put in place.

‘I’m glad I thought to dash into the kitchen and turn down the gas, otherwise that nice piece of beef I’ve got in the oven will be ruined.’

It was easier to talk about mundane, everyday things than to let one’s mind be filled with the horror and fear of what was happening.

‘Oh, don’t talk about food, Mum,’ Tilly groaned. ‘I’m scared, but I’m still hungry. Do you think the others will be all right – Agnes and Sally and Dulcie?’

‘They’ll be fine, love,’ Olive reassured her. ‘Sally will be at the hospital and they’ve got a big shelter there, I’m sure.’

‘She’d probably have to go down into the basement,’ Tilly told her.

‘Agnes is helping tidy up the orphanage before they hand it over to the council to use for extra billeting for refugees and that, so she’ll be able to go into the cellar there,’ Olive continued, ‘and as for Dulcie, well, I’m sure she’ll find somewhere.’ Olive’s voice hardened slightly, the thought in her mind that Dulcie would be safe because she was that sort, the sort that always fell on their feet.

‘You don’t like Dulcie very much, do you, Mum?’ Tilly asked.

For a moment Olive was tempted to fib and say that she didn’t know what Tilly meant, but her daughter was growing up. She herself had been married at eighteen and a mother not long after, and although the last thing she wanted was for Tilly to grow up too fast, Olive knew that it wouldn’t be fair to lie to her and treat her as a child. So she admitted quietly, ‘No I don’t. She isn’t the sort of person I was thinking of when I thought of us having lodgers.’

‘You mean because she’s pretty and likes makeup and goes out dancing a lot?’

Olive could hear not just the questioning in Tilly’s voice, but also, more worrying, a hint of rebuke.

‘No, not because of those things,’ she defended herself. ‘After all, you are pretty and although young skin like yours doesn’t need anything more than a dash of lipstick and a brush of mascara on those lovely long eyelashes of yours, you too wear makeup and I dare say you would go out dancing a lot yourself if I let you. No, Tilly, it isn’t because of any of those things that I feel the way I do about Dulcie.’

‘What is it then?’

Moving closer to her daughter, Olive put her arm round her, smiling, filled with maternal love, when Tilly put her head on her shoulder just as she had done as a child.

‘It’s the way Dulcie speaks to Agnes, the way the things she says and does show that she doesn’t have the kind of . . . of consideration and compassion for others that I hope I have always encouraged you to have. There’s a . . . a selfishness about Dulcie that makes it hard for me to warm to her. Tilly, I know you find her exciting and glamorous – of course you do, and at your age I dare say I would have done as well – but think of this, sweetheart. Her own family live within walking distance of here and yet she’s chosen to turn her back on them.’

‘Because there isn’t enough room, and her sister borrows her clothes.’

Olive’s heart sank a little. Plainly Dulcie had had more of an effect on Tilly than she had realised if Tilly was already willing to take Dulcie’s side and defend her.

‘I do know what you mean though, Mum,’ Tilly acknowledged. ‘But don’t you think that Dulcie might be the way she is because people haven’t always been, well, kind and considerate to her?’

Hard on the heels of Olive’s jolt of surprise that Tilly could be so acutely perceptive in pointing out something she hadn’t yet recognised herself, Olive felt a surge of love and gratitude that she had been lucky enough to have such a special daughter.

‘I don’t know, Tilly, you might be right. We shall have to see,’ she answered.

‘Cigarette?’ Dulcie’s rescuer offered her, from the safety of the air-raid shelter, its dark interior illuminated by the lamps that had been lit by one of the three ARP wardens who had taken charge of the place. The lamps gave off a strong smell of paraffin, making Dulcie wrinkle her nose before she shook her head and started to turn away from her rescuer, but he refused to take her hint.