London Pride (66 page)

‘Oh honey!' he said. ‘You're my girl. I knew you would be from that first moment.'

I suppose we're courting, she thought, as he kissed her again. And it pleased her that she didn't mind and that she felt safe with him.

In fact as the days passed and they continued to go out with each other and there was no alarm and no unpleasantness, it pleased her more and more to think that there was a man in her life now, especially when Joan was writing one of her interminable letters to Sid or when Jim came home on a thirty-six and Peggy spent every minute of it with him.

The kids were still absorbed with the war in Italy. During July they stuck little flags all round the coast of Sicily to mark the progress of the British and American troops, and in the middle of August, when the island surrendered, they painted it red from one end to the other and stuck a Union Jack in the middle of it. Percy's father sent letters home nearly every week, so as it was the holidays he came in every day either to show them a letter or to see what they were doing.

It annoyed them that things got even more exciting once they were back at school in September, because they had to wait until the end of the day to adorn their map. But Aunty Peggy suggested that they should pin bits of newspaper up beside it with the latest headlines, and offered to collect good ones for them, and that restored their good humour.

Soon the entire wall was hung with information. ‘Palermo falls', ‘Mussolini resigns', ‘Badoglio Prime Minister'. Uncle Jim said it looked like an Ops Room when he came home on one of his long leaves in the middle of the month.
And what was lovely about it was that the news was always good. ‘Invasion of Italy' the headlines said on 4 September, and five days later, ‘Italy surrenders – official.'

‘One down and two to go,' Mrs Geary said cheerfully as they pinned the paper to the wall.

But it wasn't quite as easy as that.

The next headlines were all about the Germans moving into northern Italy and taking Rome, and as the weather got colder the campaign was bogged down in mud and mountains, and days went by without any news of a victory.

‘Why ain't we advancing no more?' Yvonne asked her mother.

‘Don't ask me,' Joan said. ‘I'm not a general.'

Aunty Baby said she didn't know either, but that was no surprise to either of them because Aunty Baby never knew anything and anyway she was always out with that funny-looking American of hers.

‘We'll ask Aunty Peggy,' Norman decided, when November began and the armies still didn't seem to be getting anywhere.

But for once Aunty Peggy's answer was no help to them. ‘Poor devils,' she said. ‘Wars are awful. I shall be jolly glad when this one's over.'

‘There ain't any victories no more,' Yvonne said.

‘No,' Peggy agreed. ‘They have to fight ever such a long time for a victory. You just think of them fighting out there in the rain, and all them Russians at Kiev all this time, and the Americans fighting the Japanese. It's going on all over the world. There's never any end to it.'

She looked so woebegone and worried that Yvonne took action at once to cheer her up. ‘Go and put the kettle on,' she said to her brother. ‘Aunty Peggy wants a cup a' tea.'

And a very good cup it was. But it couldn't soothe Peggy's worries although, naturally, she pretended it had.

The trouble was that the ARP News, the paper that brought all the latest information to ARP personnel, had just reported something so alarming that she didn't want to believe it. The Germans, they said, were threatening reprisals against Great Britain by means of a secret
weapon more deadly and destructive than the most powerful high-explosive bomb. ‘There is the possibility,' they warned, ‘that we shall soon have to face a period not unlike that encountered in the heaviest blitzes. We would do well to prepare ourselves.'

Not long after this initial warning other snippets of news about a German secret weapon began to appear in the national newspapers. The
Daily Express
carried a report from Stockholm that hundreds of ‘pilotless planes' were being built, and the
Daily Telegraph
spoke of ‘evidence of a secret weapon, crewless, radio-controlled and loaded with explosives' and added that the building sites of these new robot planes were currently being bombed.

‘What do you think?' Peggy asked Jim when he came home on one of his short leaves at the beginning of December.

‘All very likely,' he said. ‘But not to worry. We shall be invading in the spring, bound to be, and if they have got robot planes the launching sites will be one of the first places we shall liberate.'

‘Well I hope so,' she said. ‘We've had enough without robots.'

‘Hang on till the spring,' he advised, carefully lowering his cap onto the hair he'd just been combing. ‘Now are we going to the flicks or not?'

‘Never trouble trouble,' she said, smiling at him. He was quite right. It might never happen.

Preparations for the invasion of France went ahead all through that winter. A new Allied Expeditionary Air Force was formed specifically for the invasion and the RAF 2nd Tactical Air Force took over the bulk of Fighter Command and became part of the new force. There was constant activity in the south of England as convoys of army vehicles all brightly marked with the circle and star of the new Liberation Army, clogged the roads. And military manoeuvres took place on every acre of open heathland.

Froggy's squadron was equipped with Typhoons whose job was to be shooting up enemy vehicles and tanks and Jim's was sent on sweeps of the Channel. And in December Bomber Command, urged to it by Air Marshall ‘Bomber' Harris, began a series of raids on Berlin.

Nonnie Brown and Cyril were delighted and spent most of the Christmas ding-dong lauding Bomber Harris to the skies. But Peggy felt they were making a mistake.

‘If we bomb their capital city and they really have got a secret weapon,' she said to Joan, ‘don't you think they'll be more likely to use it?'

‘I hope to God they don't,' Joan said. ‘There's no way a' knowing though is there?'

‘Not till they drop the things,' Mrs Geary said cheerfully. ‘Is anyone going out for more stout?'

But although no one in Paradise Row knew it at the time, the secret weapons weren't ready, so it wasn't a robot plane that attacked London at the end of that January. Retaliation was by more conventional means. On the night of 22 January the sirens went at eleven o'clock and the bombers stayed overhead until five in the morning. On 29 January, they returned again, this time when Peggy was on duty. And then during the first two weeks of February London was raided every night. It was, as people were soon saying, a regular ‘little blitz', and although it wasn't as devastating as the blitz itself had been, because the raids were shorter and the bombers fewer in number, it came as a nasty shock just the same because the Germans were using a new type of bomb. It was called a firepot and consisted of a canister containing over two hundred incendiary bombs that were released a layer at a time during its fall, so as to produce a cascade of bombs that would cover a very wide area.

For the first week Peggy was on night duty and so she saw the descending shower of fire bombs at uncomfortably close quarters. It took as many stirrup pumps as they could muster to deal with so many potential fires in the two minutes it took them all to land and explode and their descent was noisy and very frightening.

But at least there were more searchlights now, panning across the sky with their huge white beams, and the antiaircraft units put up such a barrage that the sky was full of colour like a firework display, with flares hanging in lurid clusters and tracer shells scrawling high red parabolas across the darkness. And for all their fury the raids were soon over.

At six Paradise Row the children slept in the shelter, the windows were boarded up as soon as the sirens went, and Joan and Baby and Peggy brought their mattresses downstairs again.

‘Just like old times, eh?' Joan said as she made cocoa for the three of them, standing in the kitchen with one ear cocked for the squeal of a falling bomb.

‘Damn Germans,' Baby said. She was sitting on her mattress putting her hair in curlers. Her face was greased with night cream and she was concentrating furiously, scowling so hard that little gobbets of cream were squeezed between her eyebrows.

‘Oh my giddy aunt, look at you,' Joan said, coming back into the room with three mugs on a tray. ‘If your Yank could see you now.'

‘Well he can't,' Baby said, taking a mug. ‘Ta.'

‘Just as well,' Joan said. ‘What's on the wireless, Peg?'

Peggy was consulting the
Radio Times
. A broadcast was a good idea. It would take their minds off the raid. She was still on stand-by and quite likely to be called out again so she couldn't go to bed for several hours yet.

‘No don't let's,' Baby said.

‘Why not?' Joan asked her, putting out her hand for the magazine.

‘Well…' Baby said, looking at them thoughtfully. ‘The thing is … The thing is I've got something to tell you. Well not exactly tell you, I mean. The thing is …'

‘Spit it out,' Joan said. ‘It's that Yank, ain't it?'

‘Well yes,' Baby admitted. ‘He's asked me to marry him.'

‘Good God!' Joan said.

‘Well you needn't sound so surprised,' Baby objected, pouting. ‘I ain't that bad a catch. He says I'm beautiful. The cutest girl he's ever seen, he says.'

‘He ain't seen you in curlers,' Joan pointed out.

They'll fight in a minute, Peggy thought, and she intervened at once to prevent it. ‘Do you want to marry him?' she asked.

‘Yes,' Baby said. ‘I do. It's about time I was married. Everybody else is.'

‘Everybody else ain't,' Peggy said, rather tetchily,
because she was tired and it was such a silly reason to get married.

‘Well you and Joan are,' Baby said, unabashed. ‘So why not me?'

‘You don't love him though, do you?' Joan said.

‘I don't know,' Baby said, carelessly. ‘I like him. He's not like all the others, always grabbing at you and trying to touch you where they shouldn't and getting all hot and sticky and everything. Anyway I think all this love business is overrated. How do people know when they're in love? Tell me that. I think they're making it all up half the time.'

‘You know when you love someone,' Peggy said, ‘because you put them first without thinking about it. You ought to know that, Baby. It's what Dad done with us.'

‘Quite right,' Joan said. ‘That's what I do with my kids. It's just what I do.' How wise Peggy was sometimes. ‘I must've been following Dad without knowing it.'

‘You wouldn't get very far going on like that these days,' Baby said, rolling up her next lock of hair. ‘Not with men anyway.'

‘Like what?' Peggy said.

‘Not thinking. Doing things without thinking.'

‘You don't have to think,' Joan explained. ‘You just act natural. It's an instinct.'

‘I always think about things first,' Baby said. ‘Always. I couldn't just do things without thinking about it first.
That
wouldn't be natural to me. Besides, what if I was to end up pregnant?'

‘You'll end up pregnant if you get married,' Joan reminded her. ‘Most of us do.'

‘It's all right if you're married though, ain't it?' Baby said, bitingly. ‘It's when you ain't there's trouble. And that's what comes a' doing things without thinking. Asking for trouble.'

‘Don't you dare start on about that,' Joan said. ‘I've had enough to put up with on that score without you starting.'

‘Let bygones,' Peggy intervened quickly. ‘Are you going to marry this Gary of yours?'

‘What do you think, our Peggy?' Baby asked. ‘Should I?'

For the first time in her life Peggy gave advice that wasn't entirely unselfish. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘I think you should, all things considered. I think he'd make a very good husband for you.' And inside her head she was happily planning. With Baby off my hands I could leave Joan and the kids more often and go off and stay with Jim. I might even run to a hotel somewhere. That would be a real treat. ‘When does he want it to be?'

‘Well we ain't fixed a date,' Baby admitted. ‘We was just talking about it.'

‘I'd fix a date pretty quick if I was you,' Joan advised. ‘There's ever so many weddings these days. If you don't get organized you won't find a church to take you.'

‘Oh there's no rush,' Baby said lightly. ‘We'll think about it come the spring I expect. Anyway we couldn't have a wedding with all this bombing going on, could we?'

The all-clear began to growl up into the reassurance of its long steady note.

‘Well it's not going on now, thank heavens,' Peggy said. ‘I'm for some shut-eye. You can tell us what you decide when you've decided.'

The little blitz was over by the middle of February. And at the end of the month when Jim came home on a thirty-six hour pass before being posted to Tangmere, Baby and Gary appeared at number six late one Saturday evening, hand in hand like children, to announce that they were going to get married in May.

‘We've been to church,' Baby said. ‘An' we've seen the vicar. It's the first Saturday in May.' She was glowing with excitement, clinging to Gary's blunt hand. ‘Just the family. And everyone at Dodds of course.' It would do them good to see her triumph. ‘You'll come won't you, Jim?'

‘If I can get leave,' Jim said. ‘There's quite a lot going on these days you know.'

Gary gave him a conspiratorial smile. ‘You can say that again, Bud,' he said.

‘He's going on manoeuvres in April,' Baby explained. ‘That's why we've chosen May.'