On a Wing and a Prayer

‘Yes, Francesca, I’m still delighted,’ answered Rose, and all the young women in the Nissen hut laughed. ‘I’m Rose and, believe it or not, I even like that coffee.’

‘Real coffee’s fearfully expensive, but the bottled mixture does make a pleasant change from the terrible tea,’ said Francesca.

Gladys, who confessed to a headache after all the travelling, glared at the pretty young woman. ‘What would an Italian know about tea?’

‘I know all about tea,’ Rose said hurriedly as she saw what appeared to be the beginning of an unpleasant scene, ‘and quite a lot about coffee.’

Francesca smiled her beautiful smile. ‘I can answer Gladys, Rose,’ she said. ‘I am sure her bark is, as you might say, worse than her bite. Firstly, Gladys, I am not Italian. My grandparents were Italians who were happy and grateful to come to England many years ago. My father, Giuseppe, was born in England and was a British citizen and that made him very proud. He fought for his country – this country – in the Great War and was gassed. His lungs were so badly injured that he lived only until 1921. I was born three weeks after his death and so I too am British, but of English and Italian descent. And yes, we have an ice-cream shop…’

‘Best ice cream in the whole of Yorkshire,’ another girl put in.

Francesca laughed. ‘Yes, it is, thank you, and in the café Nonno makes the best lunches.’

‘Sold,’ said Rose. ‘When are we free to go? And what does Nonno mean?’

‘Italy is still on Jerry’s side.’ Gladys seemed not to want to let go.

‘Grampa,’ Francesca answered the second question. ‘But very soon Italy will join the Allies because most Italians are unhappy with Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. Unfortunately some people here are very angry with Italians, even those whose families have lived in this country for many years. This is unfair. We are loyal British citizens whose ancestors came from Italy and, even after what happened to Nonno, we pray for the day when Italy and England will be allies.’

‘Can’t come soon enough,’ Gladys conceded, sitting down on an empty chair.

Rose looked at Francesca and saw her lovely dark Italian eyes were sparkling with tears she was trying hard not to shed. ‘Francesca, can you tell us what happened to your grandfather?’

‘Everything is well now, Rose, but we will never forget it. We prefer not to speak of it, but the very day that Italy declared war against Britain, Nonno was arrested and interned. All the years he has lived and worked here and they called him “of hostile origin”…For him, thankfully, imprisonment lasted only a few months.’

Both Rose and Gladys gasped. ‘How awful for you, Fran,’ said Gladys. ‘I’m sorry I was grumpy.’

Francesca seemed determined to remain calm and friendly. ‘I have been in this camp several months, and I’m very happy – with everything,’ she added, looking over mischievously at Gladys. ‘And, Rose, you will be happy with the appalling engine the transport officer will find for you to work on, no?’

She means yes, thought Rose, but she smiled. Apart from the fact that Francesca was very friendly and determined to remain polite, even when others were being rather churlish, she was an Italian – no, she was British of Italian descent.

‘No, Francesca, I was looking forward to actually driving a truck or a car or even a Jeep; instead you say I’ll be in overalls, as usual, and covered in oil and gunge.’

‘The driving will come, Rose. The maintenance is as important, if not even more important, than being able to drive whatever one is asked to drive. What if you are taking a politician or a general to an important meeting and the car goes phut two miles from the venue? What do you do?’

‘Fix it, I hope.’ Rose smiled at Francesca. ‘I see your point, but everything seems to take so long.’

Francesca offered her a box of biscuits. ‘Have some. They’re Italian.’

‘And quite delicious,’ said Gladys, determined to show her better nature. ‘Forgive my bad mood.’

‘I think everyone in the world has a bad mood sometimes, Gladys, and, believe me, you’re an amateur. An Italian, like Nonno, in a bad mood is a force of nature. Maybe we can all go to my nonno’s café for lunch when we next have time off. I’ll tell him, cook as for Italians: that way, we don’t get chicken and chips.’

‘But what about his bad mood?’

‘You’ll see a good mood – a beautiful sight. Maybe he’ll sing. A force of nature, remember? You’ll tremble and say, “What does he do with all this energy when he’s angry?”’

‘He uses as much energy being angry as he does when he’s happy?’ Gladys was laughing.

‘Exactly. Now who has an afternoon off soon?’

Rose smiled. She would miss her friends from Preston, just as she had missed the friends she had made at Guildford, but she knew she would like most of these hard-working, dedicated women just as much.

‘There’s a very pretty girl here called Francesca,’ she wrote to Stan later.

She’s about twenty-one, I think. And then there’s a woman, Gladys, who must be about thirty; she can be touchy but maybe that’s because she’s a lance corporal in a billet with several privates. Bit of a shame we have to move around so much. We say we’re going to keep up but it’s almost impossible to find time to write home, never mind write letters to all the lovely people I’ve met. I remember Grace Paterson telling us she’d made a really good friend at her training farm, but when she did get around to writing the friend had moved. Maybe Grace’s letter is travelling all over England looking for her. Who knows?

She was going to add that Grace had Sam to write to now but that seemed a little insensitive. After all, Grace and Sam were in love. Stan and Rose were not. We’re best friends, she decided, and always will be.

‘I’m off duty on Sunday afternoon, Francesca,’ she said later that evening when she met Francesca in the washroom, a place where the girls seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time. Many of them liked washing small items of clothing every night and hanging them up to dry in the warm, damp atmosphere rather than sending them to the efficient but often time-consuming laundry service.

‘Lovely.’ Francesca smiled broadly. ‘I am too. We’ll sweet-talk someone at the stables to take us in. Maybe Gladys will come too.’ She looked at Rose who had the strangest expression on her face. ‘Is there is a problem, Rose?’

‘Stables? I didn’t know we had stables and, even if I did, I think my riding skills aren’t up to riding a horse all the way to York. And what on earth would we do with them once we got to your granddad’s café?’

To Rose’s surprise Francesca burst out laughing. The fact that even her laughter was attractive and highly contagious did not, in that moment, actually endear her new friend to Rose.

‘My riding is limited to hanging onto the mane of a great carthorse; lovely animal, but I prefer car seats.’

Francesca patted her gently as if she was a small child. ‘We’re not going to ride in, Rose, although I must admit it would be quite lovely. No, no horses. The only mode of transport in our stables is on four or more wheels – well, there could be a bicycle or two…’

‘Before I pick you up and—’ began Rose.

‘Cavalry officers refer to “the stables” when they are talking about vehicle storage. I have a chum in the Blues and Royals. One picks up their jargon.’

‘Does one indeed?’ asked Rose.

‘There’s the loveliest MTWO,’ began Francesca with a worried look at her new friend.

‘I understand our own jargon, thank you: motorised transport warrant officer.’

‘He’s become rather a close family friend, Rose. Indeed, after a slice or two of Nonno’s lasagne, he is putty in my hands. I’m sure if anyone is going into York on Sunday, we’ll be offered a lift.’

And so it proved. Warrant Officer Starling himself had to visit the town and would be pleased to drop the girls off at the café and pick them up later.

Immediately after the all-ranks church service on Sunday, the three young women hurried to change out of their uniforms. The prospect of a few hours with no heavy stockings, no shirt and tie was delightful. Rose and Francesca, who were slender, laughed to see that they were both wearing almost identical dresses. The dresses had been fashioned taking into account the new austerity. They were A-line and reached just below the knee; material was in short supply and so there was very little swing to the skirts. Francesca, with her dark colouring, had chosen the shirtwaist in red and white, whereas Rose, a blonde, was wearing a very similar dress in light green, but with white cuffs on the short sleeves, and a white collar. The buttons on her bodice were dark green while those on Francesca’s were white. Gladys, slightly more mature in age and figure, had chosen to wear a floral skirt and a simple white blouse with a blue cardigan thrown around her shoulders.

‘Wish I was a bit skinnier, like you two,’ she grumbled.

‘Well, they do say Bile Beans are the answer, Gladys. At least, according to an advertisement in one of Dad’s catalogues, they’re all you need “for radiant health and a lovely figure”,’ Rose said mock-seriously. Gladys looked at her questioningly. ‘Is a word of that true? Bile Beans?’

‘She’s teasing, Gladys. You don’t need to be thinner; you look very nice.’

The opinion of the warrant officer was the same. ‘And very nice too,’ he said as he looked at his passengers. He himself was in uniform as he really did have a delivery to make in York.

Rose and Gladys enjoyed their second glimpse of the famous city. They saw the spires of the fabled minster rising up into the skyline, long before they reached the outskirts.

‘Will we have time to see it, Fran?’ asked Gladys. ‘I’d love to get a postcard for my mum.’

‘Great idea,’ echoed Rose. Propaganda was already reminding the populace to keep in mind members of the Forces in their Christmas mailings and, although Rose felt it too early to even think of Christmas, she knew her family would love postcards. ‘My sister was here, before the bombing.’

‘Then she is one of the lucky ones,’ said Francesca with a heavy sigh. ‘For some reason they didn’t bomb the minster and fires never reached it, but thousands of houses were destroyed. It will take years to replace them or repair the damage.’

Rose felt cold. ‘All those homes. It’s ghastly. There must have been so much loss of life.’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The raiders came at night when most people were sound asleep in bed. We were. But somehow, can you believe it, only about three hundred people died. Have you ever been bombed?’ Francesca looked at her two friends.

Gladys had never experienced an air raid in her home town, but Rose, of course, had lived through many, as Dartford lay directly in the path of enemy aircraft heading for London from Berlin. ‘Dartford’s had some bad times, hospital wards destroyed, some houses, but apart from in London, I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s frightening.’

‘’Course, I’m not telling you anything you shouldn’t know,’ Warrant Officer Starling piped up suddenly, ‘but they say as some Luftwaffe general thought it was a good idea to destroy all the cities in England that featured in a German guidebook: Bath, York, Norwich, Canterbury and others. They made a right mess of Canterbury, missed the cathedral but destroyed the medieval centre. We can build new houses but we can’t rebuild our past, our history.’ He stopped, as if suddenly embarrassed by his own eloquence.

‘You’re so right, sir,’ said Rose, ‘but we can make certain that we remember it.’

‘Come on. We’ve gone all doomy and gloomy,’ complained Gladys. ‘We’re off base, we’re going out to a delicious lunch and every girl in the unit will be jealous when we report back. Where are you dropping us, Officer?’

‘Right here,’ said Warrant Officer Starling as he drew up close to a shining café window over which hung a very pretty blue-and-white awning.

‘We used to have the Italian colours,’ said Francesca sadly, ‘but after…Nonno decided it was better to change.’

‘It looks lovely,’ the girls agreed and, after thanking their driver, walked with Francesca into the little café.

Mrs Rossi, Francesca’s mother, hurried out to meet them. Rose had assumed that middle-aged Italian matrons were usually of average height and rather round, but Francesca’s mother was an older edition of her daughter, slender and very beautiful, with dark sparkling eyes and the longest eyelashes Rose had ever seen.

‘Welcome, welcome,’ she called out, her accent not Italian but Yorkshire. ‘Papa has the lasagne ready and he has saved a little of his own wine for you.’ She waved at Warrant Officer Starling, who was returning to his lorry, and Rose was surprised to see how different, even tender, he looked as he waved back. ‘We are saving lunch for you, Enrico, whenever you come.’

Once again he raised his hand in farewell as he returned to his vehicle.

‘Enrico?’ said Gladys.

‘Italian for Henry. It’s very nice,’ said Francesca, with a slight note of pride or concern in her voice. ‘Mamma has been alone for too many years. Come and meet Nonno.’

‘Very nice indeed,’ Gladys whispered to Rose as they followed mother and daughter towards the exquisite, mouth-watering smells that were coming from the back of the building.

Francesca’s grandfather was tall and broad-shouldered, but very thin – as if, perhaps, he did not eat his own cooking, or perhaps as a result of his imprisonment. He welcomed them as warmly as any Italian Rose had ever seen in the Hollywood films she had enjoyed as she grew up. In no time at all, it was as if they had known one another always. They sat at a large round table and ate lasagne, but only after they had eaten all the other delicious dishes he had prepared for them. When they told him how incredibly wonderful it all was, he sighed deeply.

‘Ah, before the war, before the war I could make such dishes and I will again. This is very humble food,’ he shrugged, dismissing the feast he had just served, ‘but I am glad you like it. Only the best is good enough for friends of our little Francesca.’

‘Ice cream, Nonno, please. Many on the base say your ice cream is the best anywhere, don’t they, Rose, Gladys – and the café too?’

‘Yes, and some were surprised that you’re open on a Sunday afternoon,’ said Rose, who had been wondering if she had enough money in her purse to pay for such a lovely meal.

Signor Rossi laughed, a laugh as hearty as his lasagne. ‘Open? The café is not open; this is the house kitchen. I cook today only for family,’ he gestured towards his daughter-in-law and his granddaughter, ‘and welcome friends.’

Rose blushed to the roots of her hair. She was feeling quite stupid. As far as she could remember, she had not been invited to join the Rossis for lunch. They had talked about visiting the café but surely only as customers. She could just imagine her mother’s reaction if she thought her daughter had gone to lunch with friends and had not taken flowers, chocolates, or even a packet of special tea.

‘You are hot, Rose. I fetch the gelato and that will cool you down.’

Francesca and her grandfather got up from the table, collected the plates, cutlery and serving dishes and turned to go into the scullery behind them, flashing breathtaking smiles as they did so. Rose looked at Gladys, who did not seem to be worrying as she was. She was surprised when Mrs Rossi reached over and patted her hand gently. ‘They’re Italian, Rose, and everything is perfect. Now, I’m almost pure Yorkshire and know you’re squirming with embarrassment. But that’s my Francesca and I wouldn’t have her any other way. Since she could walk she has been bringing people home. “Come,” she would say, holding out her little hand to reassure them. “Come.” Nonno has always encouraged her; she is the light of his life.’

‘You’re very kind, Mrs Rossi.’

Before Francesca’s mother could reply, there was a knock on the door of the café. ‘That will be Enrico. Excuse me.’

‘Let’s walk around York while the WO eats,’ suggested Francesca, and Rose and Gladys were absolutely delighted to leave Mrs Rossi and the warrant officer alone.

Francesca took them to York Minster and they enjoyed visiting the glorious building. Then they wandered among the surrounding streets, gazing in awe as Francesca pointed out one interesting site after another, and buying postcards. ‘They say that house has been there for hundreds of years,’ she said, pointing. ‘And there’s a room dedicated to each period during which it’s been standing. So there’s a Jacobean room and an Elizabethan, and a Georgian and a Victorian and whatever else. You must come back when we have more time. And we should explore the Shambles, the street where all the butchers had their shops in the Middle Ages, and Parliament Street and Fossgate…’ Francesca spoke at length about her home town and Rose wondered what there was in Dartford that she could show off with such pride.

The ancient Holy Trinity Church, of course.

Gladys was not, by inclination, a sightseer and was glad to return to the Rossi café where they found Warrant Officer Starling waiting for them.

‘Almost had to leave you three. Come on, Fran, shout cheerio and get in the lorry; you two, an’ all.’

*

Rose thought wistfully of that pleasant family-centred afternoon quite often in the week that followed. Prior to joining the ATS she had believed that she knew almost everything there was to know about driving and the care and maintenance of smaller engines. She soon realised that this was very far from the case. Her initial feeling on first seeing the engine of a thirty-hundredweight lorry – small by military standards – was one of excitement.

‘Magnificent,’ she breathed.

The more she gazed in awe, the more terrified she became. This monster wasn’t remotely like the shop’s van. That engine she could take apart and put together again. Would she ever master this great beast and its bigger relatives? Simply changing a wheel would be a problem. She remembered struggling to lift the motorcycle from the dispatch rider. That had taken time and the cycle weighed a lot less than this lorry.

But I was extra careful because I was afraid of injuring him. That made a difference.

‘Come on, Rose,’ she instructed herself, ‘this is just another step on the road you want to take. So get cracking.’

She determined to think positively. She had stripped the engine of her dad’s van before she was twelve. Surely, not ten years later, she could learn how to get the best out of this one and others like it.

It was with renewed vigour that she attended to instructions and demonstrations.

She received a quick note from Daisy telling her how, initially, Daisy had found some of the planes she was asked to fly rather frightening.

And just with a little notebook full of instructions, Rose. I like to think that our generation is smoothing a path for women in the future. The outlook for women is changing for the better. Just such a pity that it’s taking a world war to do it. I look forward to seeing you cruising down the high street in a three-tonner – unless you prefer to show off in an armoured Daimler with Mr Churchill. Pity you won’t ever be asked to drive the King. Nearest I’ve ever got to him is a signed picture in an office.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.