Only a Mother Knows (17 page)

‘I can hear the grass grow, Slippers,’ said the corporal with obvious pride in her achievement.

‘Blimey!’ Tilly whispered. ‘Good job I didn’t say anything wrong.’ She soon realised that the drill sergeant had been a mild-mannered pussy-cat compared to Corporal Tannaway and set about doing the best she could in the time she was given.

At breakfast, they all sat at long benches to eat their meal, which was comprised of porridge, fish or eggs and toast, much to the surprised delight of many new recruits who had never seen so much food since the beginning of the war. Later they were lined up outside the medical hut to wait their turn to be inoculated against smallpox, tetanus and cholera, little realising that they might be spending the next few days fighting a fever whilst under Drill Sergeant Bison’s beady-eyed observation.

Then it was on to the supply hut where, being a wing of the army, they were provided with everything khaki, from elasticated bloomers and lisle stockings to big heavy greatcoats, issued by a corporal, whose trained eye was not skilled in the weights and measures department, judging by the enormous uniform offered to a pint-sized girl from Birmingham who was lost in a sea of material, and quite reluctant to part with her new clothing even though she was told that she could swap with someone who had a uniform more her size.

‘You forgot your “hussif”, Soldier,’ called the drill sergeant to Tilly. ‘Don’t you intend to do any mending or have you already got somebody to do your chores for you?’

‘Hussif?’ Tilly looked puzzled, realising that she would have to try to stay on the right side of Drill Sergeant Bison who looked as if she took no prisoners, before going back to the long desk where the supplies were given out and being handed a white cotton wallet containing needles, thread, spare buttons and other necessities.

‘You might think of it as a “housewife”,’ said the sergeant sweetly, handing Tilly two shoe brushes, a brass strip for cleaning her buttons and finally, balancing on top of the whole lot, a military respirator.

‘Guard them with your life, they are the essentials, you will not be supplied with any more, lose them and you die,’ Bison said without looking up and then shouted without preamble: ‘Next!’

There was a scattering of laughing girls all gauging their sizes when she got back to the barracks, swapping skirts and jackets as the ones they had been given weren’t the right fit, and in the commotion Tilly finally managed to accrue a whole uniform that was as near to her size as possible.

‘If I roll the top over it will be the right length.’

‘Just put a belt around the skirt and nobody will notice.’

‘Three square meals a day and I’ll soon fill this jacket …’

For the very first time in her life Agnes had a room all of her own and she wasn’t sure she liked it. Even in the orphanage she had shared with the other children or, later, with the servants who were employed to care for the officers in control of the establishment.

Pulling the bedclothes up under her chin, Agnes’s thoughts turned to Ted, and she let her imagination roam to the future day when they would be man and wife. She wondered what it would be like being married to Ted, and then she pondered – and where the idea came from she could not imagine – whether his mother would ever allow him to wed whilst she had breath in her body to stop him.

Agnes suddenly pulled the bedclothes over her head as if hiding from the thought she had the audacity to conjure up, like she did when she was a child and had voiced the longing to have a family and a home of her own and been laughed at for it.

Living here with Olive and the other girls was the closest she had ever come to having a real ‘family’ to call her own, although since Tilly left for training in the ATS Agnes felt as if she had lost a sister.

Tears stung the back of her eyes now as she recalled the nights she and Tilly would lie awake and discuss what they would do when this awful war was over. Tilly would confirm her dearest wish to marry Drew and go and live in America, and she in turn would tell Tilly of her longing to live in a house in the countryside with geese and chickens being chased by laughing children.

It was a daft idea, she knew, but it was that dream which had kept her going all these years – and it didn’t look as if it would ever come to fruition, as Ted worked on the railway and there was no chance of having a house in the countryside when you had to drive trains around the underground stations, now was there? Nor a mother who would never contemplate leaving London, she supposed.

Sally was late home, as an unexploded bomb had been found near the hospital and they couldn’t leave until it was made safe, so she decided to make herself useful instead. If nothing else it would take her mind off worrying about George, whom she was missing dearly.

Closing the front door with her heel she took off her navy-blue nurse’s cloak and noticed a letter addressed to her on the highly polished hall table. It was from Callum.

He was in the South Atlantic fighting through blizzards as well as the blasted enemy. Sally shuddered. She could only imagine how difficult blizzards in the Atlantic must be. He was polite, as usual, asking how everybody was and letting her know that he missed little Alice and to tell his little niece he would bring her something nice when he got home. Whenever that might be.

A small pang of … what? Pity? Regret? Sally couldn’t make up her mind; but she had come to terms with her father’s relationship with Callum’s sister, her one-time best friend when they were both trainee nurses, and had reconciled herself to the knowledge she had treated Callum very badly when he brought little Alice to her last December.

Sally could not imagine life without her little half-sister now and with that realisation she knew she had to make amends with Callum too. A former teacher, he had initially stolen her heart when they first met and he even told her, on that Boxing Day back at her mother’s house, he shouldn’t have kissed her like that, calling himself the worst kind of cad because he didn’t then have anything to offer her. But that was then.

Things had changed now. She had changed and she had George. No doubt Callum had changed too. She should never have treated him the way she did, she thought, as her eyes skimmed the page of Callum’s perfect copperplate handwriting. They had both lost so much, it was about time they became friends again.

Little Alice needed a stable, united family and it was Sally’s aim to put that right today. She decided to write to Callum before she went to bed.

As her eyelids grew heavy Agnes’s thoughts drifted to the journey home that evening. She missed Ted walking her home from Chancery Lane for two reasons. The first was because that was virtually the only time they had to themselves now, as his mother didn’t like him leaving her and his sisters alone in case there was an air raid, and the other was because, silly fool that she was, Agnes thought she was being followed by a man in a gabardine mackintosh and a wide-brimmed hat.

Every time she turned around he stopped and looked in a shop window or turned off down an alleyway, only to emerge from a turning a little further on. A few times she told herself not to be so silly. For what reason would anybody want to follow an underground railway worker? Then, hurrying home, her mind conjured up all sorts of horrors as he drew closer. Agnes had been so scared she went into a shop just to ask what time it was until he had disappeared out of view. Maybe she was imagining it? He might have been going home from work in the same direction and never even noticed her. But she still couldn’t shake the fear from her mind. She wouldn’t tell Ted though; he’d think she was being silly.

‘Speak up, love, I can’t hear you very well.’ Tilly felt a lump in her throat as she strained to hear Olive’s voice over the crackling telephone wires. Her mother had arranged to use the phone in the Simpsons’ house, where Drew and George used to lodge before Drew … She tried not to think of him now, knowing it wouldn’t take much to bring her to tears after such gruelling weeks of training. Having never been away from home before, the sound of Olive suddenly made her realise how things were quickly changing.

‘Are there any letters for me?’ Tilly asked, eager to know if Drew had written yet; it would be lovely if her mother could forward them on to her. It would make this basic training so much easier to bear if she had Drew’s letters to look forward to at the end of an exhausting day, or to have them next to her heart when she was on night duty guarding the camp whilst the others slept.

‘No, love,’ her mother said, ‘but never mind, you’ll have a lot to keep your mind occupied, I’m sure.’ Although her mother’s voice was welcome, the advice irritated Tilly and she only just stopped herself from telling her that she and the twenty-nine other girls, in all shapes and sizes and from all walks of life, who were accommodated in the single-storey barracks were becoming quite adept at Drill: marching back and forth across the yard to the loud instructions of a drill sergeant who would put Nancy Black to shame. Indeed it seemed to be the only thing they did all day apart from clean their uniform and barracks.

‘I said,’ Tilly shouted down the Bakelite receiver, swallowing her disappointment, ‘we got here safely and the girls are all wonderful!’ She turned to a long line of girls waiting for the telephone who whooped and clapped behind her. She laughed suddenly, the lump in her throat forgotten, waving them away. This was the first chance any of them had of ringing home, if they had a telephone at home, that is. Some of the girls didn’t even have a front door any more.

‘Come on, hurry up, Anyone,’ called a voice from along the line, reminding Tilly of the nickname she had been given on the train, ‘we’ve all got mothers to reassure, you know!’

‘I’ll have to go, Mum, I’ll write to you tonight and let you know how things are.’ Tilly only just caught her mother’s fading goodbye before the pips could be heard. Putting the Bakelite receiver back on its cradle, she turned, gave a small curtsey, laughing.

Only a Mother Knows

‘Young Barney’s been a good pal to little Freddy whilst he’s been staying with Nancy,’ Olive told Dulcie who was sitting quietly at the kitchen table drinking a much-needed cup of tea after her shift at the munitions factory. ‘Apparently, Barney had heard Agnes telling Nancy about the subterranean shelters below the underground and when they were chased by the bigger boys, Barney hid Freddy in there for safekeeping before taking a terrible beating from the scoundrels … Dulcie, are you all right?’

‘I’m just tired, that’s all.’ Dulcie gave a weak smile and took another sip of her tea. She certainly couldn’t tell Olive the true reason.

‘You’re looking a bit peaky, I must say. Maybe you should go and see Dr Shaw.’

‘Oh, don’t fuss, Olive,’ Dulcie said impatiently. All she wanted to do was take her cup of tea upstairs, crawl into bed and fall into a deep carefree sleep. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound so rude, I’ve had a difficult night and I am so tired and longing for my bed.’

‘Go on, you go up, I’ll make sure you are not disturbed.’

‘I wish I could,’ said Dulcie, rubbing her eyes with the pad of her hand, and grimacing when she realised she had smudged her heavily mascaraed eyes, ‘but I promised I would meet my mother in the Lyons tea rooms at eleven.’ Dulcie was dreading the meeting. She had written to her mother a week ago telling her that she needed to see her and explained that she couldn’t visit the house, asking her to meet her in Peter Jones in the King’s Road before they went on to have something to eat at Lyons Corner House, which had been fixed up after the bombings.

‘I’m sure she would understand if you couldn’t make it,’ Olive offered sympathetically.

‘As she’s not on the telephone there’s no way of getting a message to her at this late notice,’ sighed Dulcie. ‘I’ll just go and have a wash and get changed out of these working clothes.’ She scowled at her navy-blue bib and braces.

Olive nodded. Dulcie, irrepressible girl that she usually was, seemed to have an aura of defeat about her lately, and she wondered if it had anything to do with her American friend who had been killed a while ago or was it something more than that. Had he left her with something to remember him by? Olive wondered. Dulcie was a girl who enjoyed herself. She knew what was what. She was nobody’s fool; surely she wouldn’t be so foolish as to get herself …? No, Olive thought, Dulcie wouldn’t fall for that kind of caper and she had no intention of asking. It didn’t do to pry and if Dulcie wanted her to know what was on her mind she would tell her soon enough.

But for now she would say nothing and wait until the poor girl wanted to tell her. After all, it must be something quite serious if she needed to see her own mother, who by all accounts had never had much time for her.

‘I’m fine, honestly,’ Dulcie said, suddenly bringing Olive out of her deep thoughts. ‘I haven’t seen Mum for a few weeks and I thought I’d be off work, so I promised her a day out in town. I’m off tonight, so I can catch up on my beauty sleep tomorrow.’ Her face brightened but Olive could tell there was still something wrong. Maybe she was worrying about her brother, Rick, Olive thought and, satisfying herself that was the problem, she said no more.

‘What d’you wanna come all this way for, we could be bombed as we drink our tea,’ Dulcie’s mother moaned whilst they waited for the waitress, in her black dress and white apron, to come and take their order.

‘There haven’t been any air raids for ages, Mum,’ Dulcie said impatiently, wanting to get straight to the point before her courage failed her.

‘Have you seen anything of your sister lately?’ her mother asked, giving a little sniff of disgust. ‘She ain’t even been to see me or your father since … well, I suppose she’s been busy on the stage – it must be hard for her to get away when she’s got so little time between shows.’

‘I don’t know where she is, I’m sure.’ Dulcie bridled, realising that even though she had asked her mother here for a pleasant day out her mother still had to bring Edith into it. Dulcie hardly dared think about the trouble that little minx had caused.

‘Mum, can I tell you something?’ If she didn’t say it now … ‘I’m pregnant.’ The words were blurted out in a sudden rush and her mother’s face turned a pale shade of grey and for the first time in her life Dulcie watched as she crumbled.