As Time Goes By

ANNIE GROVES

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2007

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2007

Copyright © Annie Groves 2007

Annie Groves asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007283682

Version: 2017-09-12

For my sternest critic, my mother

– who ‘was there’

Contents

Title Page Copyright Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Acknowledgements About the Author By The Same Author About the Publisher

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.

TWO

Betty the conductress might have thought she was doing Sam a favour by warning her not to try to walk through the worst of the bombed-out heart of the city, but the truth was that all she had done was increase Sam’s desire to see it. Not that she could see very much now that it was growing dark. A thin drizzle had started to fall, mixing with the fret of mist coming in off the sea and the dusk, so that when she peered down streets flattened to the ground apart from the odd half-destroyed building, the uninhabited emptiness took on an almost ghostly otherworldliness that shifted shape around her. Her footsteps echoed in the mist as she walked down cobbled streets, mentally reckoning the direction she was taking so that she wouldn’t get lost. So long as she kept the sea on her left she knew she must turn right to get back to Lime Street Station, which was the only real reference point she had, but when she decided she had had enough and that she might as well go back, the first street on the right she came to was closed off with sandbags and a sign that read ‘Danger Unexploded Bomb’.

Well, if it was still unexploded then it wasn’t that dangerous, was it, Sam decided, and to judge from the faded paint on the sign, the bomb had been around for a while. The main reason the authorities put up such signs was to deter children from playing where it was dangerous – everyone knew that. Besides, this was the only right-turning street she had come across in ages, and she needed to get back.

Determinedly Sam hopped over the sandbags, ignoring the sign.

This street seemed to have suffered less bomb damage than the street she had just been in, with only one large gap where houses had once been. There was just enough light left for her to see the wallpaper hanging from what must have been the bedroom walls of the boarded-up houses either side of the empty space, rubble from the bombed houses spewing out on the pavement and into the street. She had seen newsreel images of streets like this, which, in the secure environment of Aldershot, were as close as she had got to the reality of bomb damage, and naturally she was curious to take a closer look. The street was deserted, and there was no one to see her wriggling past the second ‘Danger Unexploded Bomb’ warning, to clamber over the mound of broken bricks and wooden beams. She had with her the small torch such as everyone carried around with them because of the blackout, and as soon as she was close enough she felt in her pocket for it, removing it and switching it on.

There below her, and much deeper than she had expected, was the bomb crater, a hole in the ground easily wide enough for a person to fall into.

And be buried alive there? Immediately Sam recoiled, sending some loose pebbles and soil falling noisily into the hole. Thanks to her brother, Russell, and his friends she had an intense and secret dread of being trapped underground, and sometimes still had nightmares about the original cause of that dread. Russell and his friends hadn’t meant any harm, of course, when they had persuaded her to crawl into a tunnel they had been digging, which had then collapsed on top of her. Fortunately a neighbour had realised what had happened and quickly dug her out, but it had left her with a terror of being trapped underground and dying there that she knew she would never ever lose.

‘Hey, you! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Can’t you read?’

The sound of an angry male voice from inside the crater startled her so much that she lost her footing, dropping her torch as she did so, and then realising to her dismay that the debris on which she was standing had started to move, the bricks slipping from under her feet, carrying her down into the crater. Her fear was engulfing her now, a feeling of sickness filling her stomach and her heart thudding.

‘Don’t move. Keep still unless you want to blow us both to kingdom come.’

Did he really think she had any choice in the matter, Sam wondered frantically as she tried to remain calm and to find a secure foothold in the gathering force of the sliding bricks. She must not panic. She must not. But she couldn’t stop herself from sliding closer and closer to the crater’s edge. Then suddenly the breath was jolted out of her body and she was thrown forward and knocked to the ground onto the rubble by the weight of a man hurling himself on top of her, somehow miraculously stopping her slide.

Relief, dismay, shock and a guilty awareness that she had brought what had happened on herself – Sam was experiencing them all.

It was just as well she was wearing her greatcoat otherwise her skin would have been cut to ribbons on the rubble, she decided almost light-headedly, but as she struggled to voice this fact to the man who was now lying on top of her, he shook his head and placed his hand over her mouth.

There was just enough light for her to see how disreputable he looked, even if he was in uniform. He needed a shave, and his dark hair looked in need of a cut, his face was streaked with dirt and the hand he had placed over her mouth smelled of dirt and oil.

He was looking at his watch with a fierce concentration that made Sam wonder if he was some kind of madman. If so, he was soon going to learn that she could look after herself. All she was waiting for was the right opportunity to raise her knee and use it in the way her elder brother had taught her would deter any overeager male. He was leaning intimately into her now, his hand still covering her mouth.

She could feel his breath against her ear, as he mouthed quietly, ‘I hope you know how to run.’

What did that mean? She looked up at him, intending to tell him what she thought of him but the look in his eyes made it clear that his words were not intended as some kind of chat-up line. Army rules and regulations must have been instilled in her more than she had known, she recognised as she nodded obediently.

‘Good,’ said the man in a soft whisper. ‘So when I say move, you get to your feet and you run and you do not stop. There’s a two-thousand-pound unexploded bomb in that crater, and all it could take to set it off is being hit by one of these bricks. Savvy?’

Knowing now not only that he was completely serious, but also the danger they were in, all thoughts of kneeing him in the groin faded as Sam nodded a second time.

‘We’ve got ten more seconds. If we survive those without it going off, then we’ve got two minutes to get clear.’

At three and nearly two years old respectively, Sally’s sons weren’t old enough to be aware of the dark times they were living through, and as usual when Doris let her in and then led the way to her cosy parlour, both Tommy and Harry hurled themselves at her, wrapping their small arms around her knees.

‘Have you two been good boys for Auntie Doris then?’ Sally asked them lovingly as she kneeled down to hug and kiss them.

‘Yeth,’ Harry lisped adorably, whilst Tommy nodded firmly.

‘It really is good of you to have them for me, Doris,’ Sally thanked Molly’s mother-in-law gratefully.

‘I wouldn’t have it any other way. As fond of your pair of young scamps as if they were me own grandchildren, I am,’ Doris Brookes assured Sally affectionately. ‘I’ve given them their tea. Now don’t you go saying anything,’ she warned Sally firmly. ‘I had a bit extra on account of me being on duty at the hospital these last few nights and eating there. I’ve given our Lillibet her tea as well,’ she added, nodding in the direction of Molly’s stepdaughter and niece.

‘I’m sorry I’m a bit later than I said. I managed to call in at the chemist’s, though, and I’ve collected all the kiddies’ orange juice and cod liver oil allowances. Here’s Molly’s.’ Sally handed over the bottles, along with the necessary stamped ration books.

‘Lillibet will really thank you for that,’ Doris laughed. ‘She hates that cod liver oil.’

‘Tommy’s the same,’ Sally agreed. ‘But I tell him he won’t grow up big and strong like his dad if he doesn’t have it.’

‘Well, Dr Ross that’s to replace old Dr Jennings would certainly agree with you there. He was up at the hospital yesterday and I heard him saying how important it was for kiddies to have it.’

‘What’s he like?’ Sally asked. ‘Only he’s going to have his work cut out if he’s to be as well thought of as Dr Jennings.’

‘You’re right there, Sally. A good man, was Dr Jennings. Thought a lot of him, folks round here did. This new doctor’s a lot younger than I expected. A Scot he is, an’ all, and a bit what they call “dour”, you know: doesn’t say much and looks a bit down in the mouth. He’s moving into Dr Jennings’s old house, of course, since he’s taking over the practice, but I don’t know if we’re going to see him looking after us like Dr Jennings did. I remember Dr Jennings telling me once when my Frank was little, and I’d bin crying me eyes out on account of him being poorly and me not being able to afford to have a doctor round, that I wasn’t to worry because he always charged them patients wot were a bit better off a little bit more so that he could do right by them as didn’t have enough to pay him to come out. Ever so good like that, he was. That’s why everyone loved him so much. There’s many a mother round here has a lot to thank him for, and I can’t help wishing that the old doctor had stayed on until after Molly has had her baby.’

‘I remember when Harry was a few months old how he had that terrible chest and I was worried sick. Came out to him straight away, Dr Jennings did, and wouldn’t take a penny,’ Sally agreed, looking lovingly at her two sons.

Like many boys, they were inclined to be a bit too adventurous at times, but they were loving little lads as well as stout-hearted. They were her pride and joy, and woe betide anyone who ever said a word against them. There was nothing she would not do to keep them safe and give them the very best that she could.

‘Don’t you go tempting fate now saying that,’ Doris warned her, breaking off as the back door opened and her daughter-in-law, Molly, called out a cheerful greeting.

‘My, Sally, you look glam,’ she announced.

Sally pulled a small face. ‘I’ve just bin down the Grafton, practising with the Waltonettes.’

‘You’ve got a lovely voice, Sally,’ Doris joined in. ‘If you was to ask me I’d say there’s not many about that can sing as sweet as you can. I was listening to you in church the other Sunday. Fair lifted me heart, it did, to hear you.’

‘Frank’s mam’s right, Sally, you have got a lovely voice,’ Molly reiterated ten minutes later as they walked down the Close together at a pace slow enough to accommodate Molly’s advancing pregnancy. Sally was pushing Harry in the pushchair she had swapped her pram for, and Tommy walking sturdily alongside them, restrained by the reins Sally was keeping a firm hold of. ‘You could be one of them girl singers wi’ them bands that tour the munitions factories and go on the wireless, and no mistake.’

‘No, I couldn’t, Molly, because that’d mean travelling around a bit and I couldn’t leave my two little ’uns. It’s bad enough as it is, but I can’t afford not to work, and I’d have to anyway just as soon as Tommy reaches five, and he’s three now.’ Sally knew she sounded defensive, but she couldn’t even tell Molly, her closest friend, about the shameful secret that woke her up in the night and set her heart pounding with sick dread.

‘Five – that’s another two years away yet, Sally. I hope this war’s over before then.’

‘Don’t we all, but it doesn’t much look like being, does it?’ Sally was relieved the conversation had moved away from the subject of her work. ‘I reckon if it was about to be over then we wouldn’t be having all them Americans pouring into the country, would we?’

‘No, you’re right,’ Molly agreed. ‘My Frank was saying that there’s bin a fair bit of trouble in some of the pubs between the Americans and the British servicemen, fights and that.’

Sally bent her head ostensibly to check on Tommy’s reins but in reality to conceal her expression from her friend. However, as though she had guessed what she was feeling, Molly apologised immediately.

‘Oh, Sally, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Me and my big mouth, going on about my Frank when you still haven’t heard anything from your Ronnie.’

She’d always had a soft heart, had Molly, and always been ready to put others first, Sally knew. ‘It’s all right, Molly. After all, it’s not your Frank’s fault that he’s on home duties whilst my Ronnie got posted overseas.’ Sides, your Frank’s got that bad hand of his and there’s many that would have just sat back and let others get on wi’ doing their duty for them, not like your Frank, who practically begged the barracks to find him some work. Your Frank’s a good man – Ronnie always said so. Do you remember when Frank and Johnny Everton first joined up and they was asking my Ronnie what it was like to be in the army on account of him already being there?’

Molly nodded.

‘That reminds me,’ Sally went on. ‘I heard the other day that Johnny’s back in Liverpool. Seemingly he’s with the bomb disposal lot.’

When Molly didn’t say anything Sally didn’t pursue the subject. After all, Molly had been engaged to Johnny at one time, even if the engagement hadn’t lasted very long. Then after Dunkirk, when Johnny’s unit had been posted to home duties, Johnny had somehow or other ended up working with one of the army rescue teams at the same time as Molly was with the WVS.

They had reached the gate to the neat small house Sally had been renting since the beginning of the war, and which she now thought of, like the Close itself, as her home far more than she had ever done the noisy terrace in Manchester where she had grown up.

‘We’ll be back to dark evenings come the end of next month when we lose double summer time. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it,’ Molly commented.

‘Me neither,’ Sally agreed. She had more reason than most to dislike the dark nights. You always got some nosy ARP warden asking you who you were and where you were going, just when you didn’t want those kind of questions. ‘Harry will be two the first week in October, and the last time my Ronnie was home was just after Dunkirk. Tommy was only a baby then and Harry not even born.’

When Molly reached out and squeezed her arm sympathetically, Sally shook her head.

‘Don’t pay any attention to me, Molly. I’m just having a bit of a bad day, that’s all. It’s this war. It gets to us all at times, and don’t we know it? I reckon that having a bit of a party for Tommy and Harry, like I said the other week, will cheer us all up. What with Tommy being born the day war broke out I can’t bring meself to have a party for him, somehow, and that don’t seem fair, so I thought I’d mek it up to him by having one for both of them together. Besides, it meks sense to have one party for them both, especially with all this rationing. You could bring your two round and I’ll have the other kiddies from the Close in as well. I’ll ask Daisy Cartwright if she wants to come with her lads, and since Harry isn’t that keen on eating up all his egg allowance every week, I reckon he won’t mind me using a couple of them to make a bit of a cake. I’ve got some sugar put by, and I dare say Edith will let me have some of her homemade jam. Bless ’em, the little ’uns deserve all the fun we can give them.’

Molly agreed. With three years of war behind them, and increasingly stringent rationing giving her children a bit of fun was something that every mother wanted to do.

Despite it being only September, recent heavy rain meant that the house felt chilly and slightly damp, making Sally dread the coming winter, and think longingly of the days when coal had been plentiful and she would have been able to leave a decent fire banked down against their return home on a cold evening.

This winter, like last winter, she would no doubt have to leave both boys wrapped in their outdoor clothes whilst she got the fire lit, and she knew that she would be blessing Albert Dearden, Molly’s father, for his kindness in discreetly tipping into her cellar a good-sized bagful of the coal he would have painstakingly collected whilst he was at work up at the grid iron, as Edge Lane’s large goods yard was known locally. The heavily laden wagons passing through the sidings, taking coal to factories, often spilled a bit of coal and the men working the yard had an unofficial ‘right’ to pick it up for their own use.

When the winter cold really started to bite Molly and Sally took it in turns to have a fire, both families sharing its warmth.

Winter. Sally shivered. No, she didn’t want to start thinking about that yet.

She looked at her sons. Tommy was a real live wire and had been early both to walk and talk. Harry had been crawling until he was nearly eighteen months and then had stood up and walked like he had been doing it for months. He still wasn’t saying much, though, and when he tried Tommy butted in and spoke for him.

‘Come on, you two, let’s get you out of your coats.’

She took Harry’s off first, because she knew that once Tommy had his off he’d be racing around and then she’d have a job trying to keep Harry from wanting to join him.

The coats were good sturdy Harris tweed, real bargains that Doris Brookes had heard about from someone at the hospital, who had heard that when one of the posh Liverpool boys’ private schools had evacuated its pupils it had left behind three trunks filled with only slightly worn second-hand clothes, and they were going to be sold off.

Doris hadn’t wasted any time; she had gone straight down to the school and had come back with two bags bursting with good-quality clothes. That had been early on in the war, and Sally acknowledged that both she and Molly had good reason to be grateful to Frank’s mother for her foresight. Tommy might complain that his long woollen socks made him itch, but what mattered more to Sally was that they had kept his legs warm all through two winters, and that with two pairs of them she was able to dry one out without him having to go without or wear damp socks.

At least Harry was nearly out of nappies now, she thought thankfully as she removed her younger son’s coat, and checked his well-padded behind. It had been a real blessing for her that she had fallen pregnant before war had been declared and that she had had the sense to buy in a really good supply of terrys from that stall on the market that used to sell off factory seconds. That stall, like all the others selling essentials at bargain prices, had long since vanished. Terry nappies were a rationed luxury these days.

Having removed the boys’ outdoor clothes, Sally left her sons playing on the floor, Tommy with a set of tin soldiers Frank had given him, and Harry with the wooden train that Ronnie had bought just after Tommy had been born. Toys, like everything else, were hard to come by and cherished by those fortunate enough to have them. The once bright paintwork of the wooden train had faded and was missing completely in places, but that didn’t seem to interfere with Harry’s enjoyment of it, Sally reflected, listening to him making choo choo noises as she made them their supper. Since Doris had given them their tea, they wouldn’t need much tonight, nor a bath either. Doris was a true good Samaritan and the best neighbour a young mother could have, and Sally just wished there was something she could do to show her appreciation.

‘Seeing these young ’uns grow up is all the thanks I want or need,’ Doris told her whenever Sally tried to thank her. ‘Your two are like my own to me, Sally, especially since I delivered both of them.’

As she stirred the soup she was heating, Sally heard an outraged roar. Harry! She turned round just in time to see Tommy trying to prise out of his fat baby hand the soldier he was clutching determinedly.

‘Let him have it, Tommy. He’s not doing any harm,’ she told her elder son tiredly.

‘It’s mine,’ Tommy glowered, still trying to retrieve it, then releasing his brother when Harry threw the solder inexpertly across the room.

Boys! Molly was so lucky. Lillibet was such a little doll and so good, but then little girls were so much easier, so people said, although Doris said that little boys were more loving. Every time she worried about her own two not having their dad around, Sally reminded herself of what a good job Doris had done bringing up her Frank single-handedly as a young widow. Frank was a lovely man. A good son and an even better husband and father. If Molly wasn’t so nice it would have been easy to envy her, what with her husband at home, and her family around her.

Sally’s own family had urged her to return to Manchester but she had her own reasons for staying where she was, and they weren’t reasons she could explain to them. Or to anyone. Her Ronnie had it bad enough being a POW without having to carry the burden of her betraying him and letting everyone know what was going on.

She stiffened as she heard a determined knock on the door. She knew who that would be! She had told him not to come round here, and he had agreed that he wouldn’t. But it was him, she just knew it.

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