Buch lesen: «As Time Goes By»

ONE

September 1942

Samantha Grey, or Sam as those closest to her called her, put down her kitbag and wrinkled her nose. A school dormitory! Well, she had had worse billets, she admitted ruefully.

She had travelled to Liverpool by train, sharing a compartment with several other young women in uniform, all of whom had been going to different destinations. One of them knew Liverpool quite well, having once been posted there. She had told Sam that her new billet, in the Wavertree district of the city, had been a small private school occupying a large Victorian house, which the War Office had requisitioned because of its proximity to Liverpool’s famous Bluecoat School, which had also been requisitioned. Such requisitioning was a wartime necessity to provide accommodation for the country’s service personnel.

There was no sign of the girls Sam would be sharing her new quarters with, which meant that either they had not yet arrived, or they were already on duty.

Sam hadn’t been at all pleased when she had been told that she was being posted to Liverpool. She had hoped she might get a really exciting posting like some of the girls she had trained with – maybe even overseas – after all, she had won praise from her tutors on both the ATS courses she had completed, a standard one for typewriting and a second and far more enjoyable one for driving. The latter equipped her for one of the ATS’s more exciting jobs, such as being a staff driver to drive visiting ‘important’ personnel. She suspected that if it hadn’t been for the unfortunate set of circumstances that had led to her getting on the wrong side of a certain sense-of-humourless sergeant who hadn’t appreciated her pranks, she probably would have had such a posting. After all, she had passed the driving course with higher marks than anyone in her group.

But then she had had the wretched bad luck not just to injure her thumb, larking about demonstrating her skill at ‘wheel changing’ to the other girls, she had also been caught doing so by the car’s owner. Unfortunately she had not been authorised to do any such ‘wheel changing’, especially not on the duty sergeant’s chap’s precious MG sports car. It had been rotten bad luck that the duty sergeant and her chap had appeared just when Sam had the wheel completely off the car, and even worse bad luck that in the panic that had followed she had caught her thumb in the wheel spokes, and that the injury she had received had become infected. As a result, she had been hospitalised until the infection had cleared up and then sent to work as a clerk/stenographer in the quartermaster’s office at her Aldershot barracks, and denied the opportunity to drive anyone anywhere as punishment for her prank.

A clerk. How her elder brother, Russell, would have laughed at her for that, knowing how much the dullness of such duties would chafe against her exuberant adventure-loving nature. He would, though, have understood her disappointment.

Sam gave a small shake of her cropped golden-blonde hair, a new haircut that had caused her mother such distress.

‘Well, the sergeant said that our hair has to clear our collars,’ she had told her mother in answer to her bewildered, ‘What have you done to your lovely hair?’ ‘And besides, I like it,’ she had added truthfully, giving her mother a mischievous smile. ‘At least this way you won’t have to worry about men in uniform trying to take advantage of me. From the back now, if I’m wearing slacks I look more like a boy than a girl.’

‘Oh, Samantha,’ her mother had protested, but Sam had just laughed. It was true, after all. She had never yearned for soft rounded curves instead of her boyish slenderness. Even as a young girl she had preferred tagging along with Russell and scrambling up trees and damming streams rather than dressing up in frocks and playing with dolls.

Nothing could have appealed more to her tomboyish spirit than playing a really active role in defending her country. If there had to be a war, then she very definitely wanted to be a part of it. Having joined up at nineteen after badgering her parents to give their permission, she had hoped to be doing something exciting. But now here she was, being sent to work as a clerk. Some war she was going to have.

She could feel her eyes beginning to smart, so she blinked fiercely. There was no point in feeling sorry for herself, not even if only a month ago she had been here in Liverpool seeing off some of the girls who had joined up at the same time, on the troop ship that would ultimately take them to Cairo where they would have goodness knew what kind of exciting adventures.

Her orders had been to report first to her billet, for her new posting at Deysbrook Barracks, on Deysbrook Lane, which she had managed to find out, via the ATS grapevine, contained amongst other things a large Royal Engineers vehicle workshop and depot, an army stores depot, and some small regular army units of men posted to home duties.

Since officially she wouldn’t be on duty until the morning, and as there didn’t seem to be anyone around for her to report to, her irrepressible desire for action was rebelling against sitting in an empty dorm waiting for something to happen when she could be outside exploring her new surroundings.

She had no idea which bed was going to be hers, but she knew it must be one of the two that weren’t made up, their biscuit mattresses, as the three hard sections of the bed were called, exposed. That being the case, she might as well take the one closest to the door because it would give her the best chance of reaching the ablutions quickly if she overslept.

Having dropped her kitbag on the bed, she went back the way she had come.

Whilst the dorm might be on the bleak side, the house itself was very handsome, even if the pale green distemper on the walls was flaking and the air smelled of chalk, boiled cabbage and damp mackintoshes, which reminded her of her own schooldays. The stairs she was walking down were quite grand, the banister rail smooth, broad, well polished and intricately carved. Had the house belonged originally to some rich Victorian ship owner or merchant, Sam wondered absently whilst she crossed the empty panelled hall with its black and white tiled floor.

Several doors opened off the hallway, all of them closed. The hallway itself, containing a wooden desk with a chair behind it, plainly intended to be occupied by someone in authority, was empty. Sam wasn’t going to waste time waiting for one of those closed doors to open now that she had made up her mind to go out and explore. Without looking back, she pulled open the front door and stepped outside.

The front garden consisted of dank-looking evergreen trees that screened the house from the road beyond, and a lawn into which were set pieces of limestone to form a tired-looking rockery. Sam didn’t waste time studying the garden in detail though. Perfectly well aware that she ought to have remained by the unmanned desk in the hallway, dutifully waiting for someone to appear to whom she could report, Sam hurried towards the road.

She suspected that at one time the house would have possessed elegant wrought-iron gates, but these would have been sacrificed for the war effort, melted down to provide much-needed metal for the manufacture of guns and tanks. As she stepped out onto the pavement she could see a bus trundling towards her and she ran to meet it, halting in the middle of the road so that the driver had to stop.

‘It’s against the rules for us to stop, miss, you know that. And you shouldn’t have stood out in the road like that. Could have caused a nasty accident, you could.’

‘I’m really sorry, Driver,’ Sam said. ‘Only I’m new here, and I was hoping you might be able to tell me the best way to get into the city.’

‘The city, is it? Well, there’s not much of that left, thanks to Hitler and his ruddy Luftwaffe. Bombed the guts out of it, they have.’

‘Yes, I heard about the terrible pounding Liverpool took in May last year,’ Sam sympathised.

‘Seven full days of it, we had, but they couldn’t bomb the guts out of us, I can tell you that. Missed most of the docks, even if they have flattened whole streets of houses and left families homeless. A bad time for Liverpool, that was. They got the Corn Exchange, Lewis’s store in Great Charlotte Street, and Blackler’s, an’ all. Broke my daughter’s heart, that did. She worked in Blackler’s, you see, and they’d just taken in a consignment of fully fashioned silk stockings that week. Worth ten thousand pounds, they was, and she’d promised herself a pair. I can tell you, she cursed them bombs every time she had to paint gravy browning down the back of her legs instead of having them silk stockings. A five-hundred-pound bomb fell on the William Brown Library. Every ruddy book on the shelves of the Central Library were burned, along wi’ everything in the Music Library. Mind you, it weren’t all bad news. In one way old Hitler did some of us a bit of a favour, since India House got set on fire, and all the Inland Revenue records got burned,’ he added with a big grin, but then his grin disappeared. ‘Seventeen hundred dead, we had, and well over a thousand seriously injured.’

Everything he had told her made Sam more determined to see for herself something of this city that had withstood so much and at such a cost.

As though he read the resolution in her eyes, the driver said abruptly, ‘By rights we shouldn’t be picking anyone up, seeing as we’re on our way back to the depot, but go on then, you might as well hop on. Tell Betty, the conductress, to let you off two stops before the bombed-out church.’

The final notes of the song died away, leaving Sally free to step down from the stage of the Grafton Ballroom. She had been standing in at rehearsal for one of the Waltonettes, the four girls who sang with Charlie Walton and his band. For a good few months now, poor Eileen just couldn’t seem to get rid of the cough that was plaguing her, so Sally was singing more regularly than Eileen. But a stand-in was still all she actually was, as Patti enjoyed making clear to her.

Patti, the most senior of the Waltonettes, had been a bit off with her right from the start. Sally knew that Patti looked down on her because she had been working as a lowly cloakroom assistant when Charlie had overheard her singing to herself and had insisted that she was good enough to fill in for Eileen. Patti had tossed her head and told Sally that the only reason Charlie had taken her on was because he was desperate. So Sally was determined to prove herself and to show Patti that she could sing every bit as well as the rest of them.

She could see Patti pulling a face as she announced sharply, ‘You was out of tune again, Shirley, in “Dover”, and you know how much the lads go mad for it.’ Ere, where do you think you’re off to?’ she demanded as she caught sight of Sally getting ready to leave.

‘I’ve got to go,’ Sally told her, ‘otherwise I’m going to be late for picking up my two boys from me neighbour.’ When Patti went thin-lipped she reminded her firmly, ‘I did tell Charlie when he first asked me to do this that I’d got other obligations. And I’m not a permanent member of the band, after all; I’m only standing in for Eileen.’

‘Go on then. But mek sure you’re here on time tomorrow for the rehearsal for Saturday night,’ Patti warned her.

Nodding, Sally picked up her bag and hurried towards the exit.

Stan Culcheth, the ex-sergeant major who had been invalided out of the army after losing an eye in the action in the desert, and who the owner of the Grafton had taken on to deal with any unwanted rowdiness amongst the large number of service personnel who came to the dance hall every week, gave her a cheery smile as he opened the back door for her.

‘Heard from that husband of yours yet?’ he asked kindly.

Sally shook her head, pulling up the collar of her coat against the evening air. ‘He’s probably gone AWOL with some pretty girl he’s found,’ she joked. But she knew from the look he was giving her that Stan wasn’t deceived. The truth was that she was worried. How could she not be? There hadn’t been a single day not filled with anxiety in the long months since she had received that telegram with the news that Ronnie – her Ronnie, whom she had thought was serving in Africa, but who had in fact been in Singapore with the rest of his unit when the island fell – was now a Japanese prisoner of war.

Unlike the women whose men were German POWs, Sally had not had the comfort of letters from Ronnie, passed on by the Red Cross, who had taken on the task of monitoring the treatment of all POWs and ensuring that it complied with the terms of the Geneva Convention.

‘Aye, well, it’s early days yet,’ Stan offered her comfortingly. ‘It takes time for the Red Cross to sort out who’s who and where they are. Like as not you’ll be hearing from him any day now.’

His voice was too hearty and he couldn’t look her in the eye, and of course Sally knew why. Other women almost shrank from her when they knew that Ronnie was a Japanese POW, not knowing what to say, what kind of commiserations or sympathy to offer to her. There were some horrors that even the most stalwart heart could not reasonably contemplate, unthinkably sickening horrific things that had to be kept locked away and not spoken of. Sally tried not to think about them either; that was one of the reasons why she liked to sing. When she was singing, she could pretend that everything was all right, just like it was in the songs.

‘Oh, I know that. My Ronnie’s not some raw recruit, after all,’ Sally answered the doorman stoutly. ‘He’s seen plenty of action. With the BEF at Nantes, he was, at the time of Dunkirk, and he came through that. Then he got shipped off to Italy, and then the desert supposedly, although seemingly he wasn’t going there at all but to Singapore.’

‘He’d be proud of you if he could see the way you’re coping, lass. When a chap’s bin taken prisoner he needs to know that all’s well at home. Means the world to him, that does. It’s what keeps him going sometimes,’ Stan told her, so obviously wanting to sound optimistic that Sally felt obliged to respond in a similar cheery vein, as she said goodbye to him.

After all, she wasn’t on her own, she reminded herself, as she made her way home. There was hardly a household in the country in which the women were not worrying about their menfolk, and that included her neighbours on Chestnut Close, in Liverpool’s Edge Hill area, as well as the girls she worked with both here at the Grafton and at Littlewoods, where they were making parachutes and barrage balloons for the war effort. It was a matter of everyone at home pulling together to support one another and to give their fighting men the comfort of knowing that those they had left behind were being looked after by their community. A matter of getting on with things as best they could without making a song and dance about it.

But Sally was feeling far from as chirpy as she tried to pretend, and not just because word was creeping back that the Japanese treatment of POWs was so cruel. She also had problems at home. Trying to bring up two exuberant and sometimes mischievous boys wasn’t always easy without their father there. It was not even as though the boys had an uncle around who could have shown them a firm hand when things got a bit unruly. Like the other teatime, when three-year-old Tommy, born the day war was announced, had started a scrap with his younger brother, Harry, which had led to them both yelling blue murder.

And then there was that other matter that kept her awake at night, and that seemed to get worse, no matter how hard she tried to get on top of it. She did some anxious mental arithmetic. She knew there were those who disapproved of the fact that she was singing at the Grafton on her night off from her late shift at Littlewoods. After all, with her children under five, and rationing making sure that everyone in the country got their fair share even though it was barely enough to fill people’s stomachs, she could have stayed at home with her boys, never mind have taken on two jobs. But they didn’t know what she did, and they didn’t have to worry about it either. She needed every penny she could earn and somehow it still wasn’t enough.

Sally thought she was lucky to have her job at the Grafton, especially with Stan Culcheth there. Stan had a heart of gold, and all the girls who worked there knew that they could turn to him if they ever needed help dealing with the sometimes over-keen admiration of the men who flocked to the ballroom to enjoy themselves. Not that keeping the peace amongst these young men was an easy job at the moment, what with more and more American servicemen arriving at the huge Burtonwood American base near Warrington, all determined to enjoy themselves after their journey across the Atlantic and before they were sent off to join units in other parts of the country.

There had already been several scuffles, and on a handful of occasions more serious fights, between British and American servicemen, sparked off by what the Brits saw as the unfair advantages the Yanks had when it came to getting the prettiest girls.

The American Military Police were very quick to step in and restore order amongst their own men, though – Sally had to give them that.

Personally she did not feel any animosity towards the Yanks. After all, they were the allies and here to help win the war.

‘Oh, well, you would be in sympathy wi’ them Yanks, Sally,’ Shirley, one of the Waltonettes, had sniffed deprecatingly when Sally had said as much. ‘What with your Ronnie being a Jap POW and all them Yanks being took prisoner by the Japs as well, wi’ Pearl Harbor and all that.’

When Sally had related this conversation later to her best friend, Molly Brookes, Molly had immediately sympathised and tried to comfort her.

Yes, Molly was a good friend to her, and yet it had been June, her elder sister, whom Sally had palled up with first, when they had been young wives and then young mothers together. But then poor June had been killed during a bombing raid. Molly had gone through her own fair share of heartache, what with one engagement being broken off, and then losing her handsome young Merchant Navy fiancé when his ship had been torpedoed, before June was killed. June and Molly had been particularly close on account of them losing their mother very young, so perhaps it was no wonder that Molly had ended up marrying her sister’s husband, in January, and was now mothering June’s little girl, Lillibet, just as if she were she own, while waiting for the birth of her and Frank’s own baby.

They were already into September and the home front was destined to became harder. At the end of the October the double daylight saving time, introduced so that the country could make the most of the long summer daylight hours, would come to an end and they would be plunged back into the misery of the blackout. Then they would have the winter to live through with only a meagre amout of fuel allowed for fires, and the dreariness of thin soups made from whatever bones and scraps of meat could be had, thickened with whatever winter vegetables were available.

They were fortunate on Chestnut Close, Sally recognised, in that one side of the Close backed on to a row of allotments, maintained in the main by the Close’s residents.

Albert Dearden, Molly’s dad, had always been kind enough to help out Sally with veggies and the like from his own allotment, treating her almost as though she were another daughter, and her two boys his grandsons.

Yes, the residents of Chestnut Close had pulled together right from the start of the war, when they had set to to erect their communal air-raid shelter, Sally acknowledged half an hour after leaving the Grafton, as she got off the bus and crossed Edge Hill Road to turn into the Close. Not that it had always been plain sailing or happy families. There had been a fair few fall-outs since the war had begun in September 1939, none more spectacular perhaps than those between June Dearden, as she had been then, and her widowed future mother-in-law, Doris Brookes.

Poor June, she had never really taken to Doris, nor Doris to her, and yet really you couldn’t have wished to meet two more decent sorts.

It had been Doris, a retired midwife, who had delivered Sally’s own first baby, commandeering Molly to help her when Sally had gone into early labour. Doris had refused to seek shelter for herself, despite the warning wail of the air-raid alarm, which had everyone else rushing for the protection of the newly erected shelter. Instead she had bustled Sally upstairs to her spare room, where she had given birth. On that occasion the air-raid warning had simply been a practice drill, but they had all had plenty of opportunity to make use of the air-raid shelters in the second half of 1940, especially in December, and in the May of 1941, when Liverpool had been well and truly blitzed in a week of nonstop bombing, and poor June had been killed.

Sally was on her way to Doris’s now to pick up her sons. Littlewoods provided nursery facilities for its workers but the number of places was limited, and whilst Sally had been offered a place for Tommy she had not been able to get one for Harry as well. She wasn’t going to have her boys separated, so she had to rely on the kindness of Doris, who luckily worked a day shift at the hospital, and who had offered to have the boys sleeping in her spare room whilst Sally was at work.

What a long day it had been – the factory, the Grafton, now the boys to see to and, always at the back of her mind, worry about Ronnie.