Where the Heart Is

To her relief, Ruby, who was standing next to her, suddenly gasped and put her hand on her tummy as it rumbled loudly, distracting their corporal’s attention, although Lou didn’t relax properly until the corporal commanded them to ‘Fall out’ and they were all free to go for their breakfast.

Without anything being said, the five new arrivals kept together, waiting until some of the other girls were ready to leave the hut and then tagging along behind them, Ruby complaining that she was ‘starving’.

‘Yes, we all heard,’ Ellen pointed out.

‘Ablutions block is over there, just in case no one told you that when you arrived,’ one of the girls ahead turned round to tell them. Sturdily built, with a mop of chestnut hair and bright blue eyes, she nodded in the direction of another brick building. ‘I’m Hawkins – Jessie Hawkins – by the way, and these two here are Lawson and Marsh.’

Taking her lead, Lou and the others quickly introduced themselves, all using their surnames.

‘You’ll find that Halton takes a bit of getting used to if you did your square bashing somewhere small,’ Jessie Hawkins informed them. ‘We’re pretty close to Chequers here, of course, so we get an awful lot of top brass coming in. You’ll find that the officers and NCOs are pretty hot on discipline. Do you remember that girl who got court-martialled for jumping into a Lancaster?’ she appealed to the other two.

They nodded silently.

‘For a Waaf to fly is, of course, a court-martialling offence,’ she continued, ‘and whilst we all know there are some places where you can get away with it, you can’t here. One wrong move and you’re out.’

Lou felt a shiver of apprehension run down her spine at the thought of that happening to her and her having to return home in disgrace to face her parents. When she had broken her news to them after Grace’s wedding her father had been not just angry with her for enlisting without their permission but also scathing in his opinion that she wouldn’t be able to ‘stick it out’ since she had spent her life finding ways to get round the parental rules he and her mother had put in place to protect all their children.

‘In fact,’ Jessie continued warningly, ‘there’s a bit of competition between the huts to get good reports, and the best pass-out rate from the courses. Our hut came second last year and this year we’re hoping to be first. I’m just telling you so that you know what’s what and to make sure that there’s no letting the side down.’

Behind Jessie’s back Betty pulled a face at Lou as they were forced to quick march behind the others to keep up, and whispered, ‘I thought it was the corporals who were supposed to tell us what to do, not one of our own. I reckon she’s going to be on our backs all the time, bossing us and spoiling our fun. Part of the reason I joined up was so that I could have a bit of fun.’

Although it wasn’t daylight yet, the length of their march toward the mess indicated how big their new base was, the more practical-looking buildings dominated by the big house to the rear of them.

‘So what’s that posh-looking place then?’ Ruby asked cheekily, gesturing towards it.

‘Top brass and high-ranking RAF officers’ mess,’ Jessie told her promptly. ‘And strictly off limits to you lot.’

Under cover of Jessie’s answer Betty dug Lou in the ribs and giggled, ‘If some handsome officer tried it on with Jessie, I reckon the first thing she’d say to him would be, “No, it’s strictly off limits.”’

Betty was fun, Lou acknowledged, as she struggled to keep her own face straight.

‘I suppose the officers still get a plimsoll line painted round their baths?’ was Ellen’s comment, referring to the new practice of painting a line to mark the five-inch depth of water one could have in one’s bath.

‘You can forget about baths here,’ Jessie told her. ‘It’s showers for us and if you aren’t quick enough it will be a cold shower.’

Although Lou hadn’t seen much of the base yet, what she had seen of it seemed to be immaculately spruce and smart, a regular showplace compared with her brother’s old army barracks at Seacombe and the small base in Wilmslow where she had trained. Halton was smarter and prouder of itself, somehow. The Buckinghamshire countryside around them looked far less war weary than Liverpool. There was no doubting the pride of the girls here. Backs were ramrod straight, shoes were highly polished, and the girls themselves all seemed so neat and confident. Would she fit in here, with her renowned untidiness? Lou hoped so.

The mess was huge, or so it seemed to Lou, and filled with girls either already eating or queuing up for their breakfast, whilst the smell of frying bacon and toast filled the air.

Soon the five newcomers were tucking in to a very welcome meal.

‘At least the grub’s good,’ Ruby announced with relish when she had polished off her own breakfast. She looked at Lou’s plate. ‘Are you going to eat that toast?’ Then, without waiting for Lou’s response, she removed it from Lou’s plate to her own, with a cheeky grin.

It was left to Betty to say what Lou suspected they were all thinking. ‘I think we’ve all done very well getting posted here. Halton’s got everything anyone could want to have a good time, and that’s what we’re going to do, isn’t it, girls?’ she demanded, lifting her cup in a toast.

Half an hour later, marching on the parade ground flanked by the RAF regiment, led by its sergeant major with its mascot – a goat with a dangerous-looking set of horns – Lou knew that she dare not look at Betty to see if she was sharing her own desire to break into nervous giggles. There had certainly not been anything like this at Wilmslow. Halton quite obviously took its square bashing very seriously indeed.

Those Waafs already on courses were marched to their classrooms until only thirty or so girls were left, to be marched over to the medical facility ready for their medicals.

‘I don’t know why we have to have another medical and more inoculations,’ Betty grumbled.

‘They’re probably testing our pain threshold,’ Lou grinned, quickly standing to attention when a medical orderly appeared and shouted out her name.

‘Bye, Mum. I’m off to work now.’

‘Well, you take care, Sasha, love,’ Jean Campion told her daughter as they hugged briefly, ‘and no dawdling home tonight, mind, because your dad’s got an ARP meeting and he’ll be wanting his tea on time.’

Jean shook her head ruefully as the door closed behind Sasha. Automatically wiping the already pristine sink, she tried desperately not to think about the unexpected and unwelcome changes the last few weeks had brought to the family, and the grief and upset they had caused. There was still a war on, after all, and, as Sam had said, life had to go on, no matter how they all felt. It was their duty to put a brave face on things. But to suffer two such blows, and over Christmas as well. Her hand stilled and then trembled.

It had been bad enough – a shock, even – to learn that Lou had volunteered for the WAAF and not said a word about it to anyone, including her own twin sister, without getting that letter from Luke, saying that he and Katie were no longer engaged.

Jean looked over to the dresser, where the polite little letter Katie had sent them was sitting, her engagement ring still wrapped up inside it, to be returned to Luke. Jean’s caring eyes had seen how the ink was ever so slightly blurred here and there, as though poor Katie had been crying when she wrote it.

Jean had done as Katie had asked in her letter, and had parcelled up her things and sent them on to her, obeying Sam’s command that she must not try to interfere in what had happened, but it hadn’t been easy.

‘It’s their business and it’s up to them what they do,’ Sam had told her when she had said that there must be something they could do to put things right between the young couple.

‘But Katie’s like another daughter to me, Sam,’ Jean had protested. ‘I took to her the minute she came here as our billetee.’

Sam, though, had remained adamant: Jean was not to interfere. ‘No good will come of forcing them to be together because you want Katie as a daughter-in-law, if that isn’t what they want,’ he had told her, and Jean had had to acknowledge that he was right.

She did miss Katie, though. The house seemed so empty without her, for all that she had been so gentle and quiet.

Jean had her address; she could write to her. But Sam wouldn’t approve of her doing that, Jean knew.

She couldn’t help wishing that Grace, her eldest daughter, was still living in Liverpool, and popping home for a quick cup of tea as she had done when she’d been working at Mill Street Hospital. She could have talked things over with Grace in a way that she couldn’t with Sam. But Grace was married, and she and Seb were living in Whitchurch in Shropshire, where Seb had been posted by the RAF.

The house felt so empty with only the three of them in it now, she and Sam and Sasha.

Jean wiped her hands on her apron and looked at the clock. It was just gone eight o’clock and she had a WVS meeting to attend at ten, otherwise, she could have gone over to Wallasey on the ferry to see her own twin sister, Vi.

Although they were twins, Jean and Vi weren’t exactly close. Vi liked to let Jean know how much better she thought she had done than Jean by moving out to Wallasey when her husband, Edwin’s, business had expanded.

Now, though, things had changed. Just before Christmas Vi’s daughter, Bella, had told Jean that her father had left her mother, and that she was worried about her mother’s health because Vi had started drinking.

It was hard for Jean to imagine her very proper twin behaving in such a way – a real shock – but beneath her concern at what Bella had had to tell her, Jean felt a very real sympathy and anxiety for her sister, despite the fact that they had grown apart.

She had tried to imagine how she would have felt if her Sam had come home one day and announced that he was leaving her to go off with some girl half her age – not that Sam would ever do something so terrible, but if he did then Jean knew how hard to bear it would be. She knew that the shame alone would crucify her twin, with her determination not just to keep up appearances but always to go one better than her neighbours.

For all her Edwin’s money, there was no way that Jean would have wanted to swap places with Vi. Edwin could never measure up to her own reliable, hard-working Sam, who had always been such a good husband and father. And for all that she was so disappointed about Luke and Katie splitting up, at least her son hadn’t gone and got some poor girl pregnant and then abandoned her to marry someone else, like Vi’s Charlie had.

Then there was Bella. She was doing well now, running that nursery she was in charge of, and Jean freely admitted that she was proud to have her as her niece, but there had been a time when Bella had been a very spoiled and selfish girl indeed.

Sam had made it plain over the years that the less the Campions had to do with Vi and her family the better, but things were different now, and Jean felt that it was her duty to to try to help her sister.

Tomorrow morning she’d walk down to the ferry terminal and go over to see her twin, Jean decided.

She looked at the dresser again. They’d had a letter from Lou this morning telling them that now that her WAAF induction period was over, she’d been selected to go on a training course to be flight mechanic.

Sam had merely grunted when Jean had read the letter to him, but then Sam was a bit old-fashioned about what was and was not women’s work, and he would much rather that Lou had stayed at home working at the telephone exchange with Sasha. Jean would have preferred to have had both twins at home as well, but what was done was done, and she didn’t want any of her children ever to feel that they weren’t loved or wanted every bit as much as their siblings. Sasha had always been the calmer, more biddable twin, and Lou the impatient rebel. It was hard sometimes to think of the twins as being the age they were. It didn’t seem two minutes since they’d been little girls. Jean sighed to herself, remembering the time Sam had been giving the pretty yellow kitchen walls their biannual fresh coat of distemper, and somehow or other Lou had hold of the paintbrush when Sam had put it down, wanting to ‘help’ with the work. The result had been yellow distemper on everything, including the twins. The memory made Jean smile, but her smile was tinged with sadness. Keeping her children safe had been hard enough when they had been small and under her wing; she had never dreamed how much harder it would be when they were grown. But then, like all who were old enough to remember the First World War, she had not believed that such dreadful times would ever come again.

How wrong they had all been.

THREE

It was strange now to recall how nervous she had been the first morning she had turned up for work at the Postal Censorship Office in Liverpool, Katie thought tiredly as she got off the train at Holborn tube station, hurried along with the flow of passengers along the tunnel and then up into the daylight and cold of the February morning, carrying her suitcase, so that she could go straight from work to the billet that her new employers had found for her. Her parents’ friends had been willing to allow her to stay in their attic room but she had been told that there was a billet going in a house in Cadogan Place, off Sloane Street, which had been requisitioned by the War Office, and that it would make much more sense for her to move in there. Of course she had agreed.

Like Liverpool, London had been badly blitzed by German bombers, the evidence of the damage the city had suffered inescapable, that same air of weary greyness evident in people’s faces here, just as it had been in Liverpool.

Of course the new rationing of soap wouldn’t help, Katie acknowledged. A lot of Londoners were up in arms, declaring that their allowance should be increased because of London’s hard water and the soap’s reluctance to lather. Katie had felt rather guilty about the small hoard of Pears she had acquired over Christmas and had immediately offered both her parents and their friends a bar each.

The Postal Censorship Office was situated in High Holborn, and Katie huddled deeper into her coat, glad of her scarf and gloves, knitted for her by Jean and lovingly given to her before she had left Liverpool for London just before Christmas.

She must not cry, she would not cry, Katie told herself fiercely, but she was still forced to blink away the moisture blurring her vision.

A newspaper vendor standing on the street, stamping his feet, caught her eye. The papers were full of the dreadful news of the fall of Singapore. What had she got to cry about compared with what those poor people had to endure, Katie rebuked herself.

The war was wearing everyone down. There seemed no end to the bad news and the losses amongst the British fighting men. The spirit that had got them through the blitz was beginning to wear thin under the burden of worry loss and deprivation. You could see it in people’s faces – and no doubt in her own, Katie realised.

When she finally reached the building she was looking for Katie hesitated for a moment before going in. It was impossible not to contrast how she was feeling now with what she had felt that first morning at the Postal Censorship Office in Liverpool; hard too not to think of Carole, who had been so kind to her then, and who she had thought of as her friend. She must just tell herself that in causing Luke to end their engagement Carole had done her a favour, Katie warned herself determinedly. How could she ever have been truly happy with Luke, no matter how much she loved him, when he refused to trust her?

Once she was inside the building the well-built uniformed guard on duty directed Katie towards the reception desk, where she produced the letter confirming her position. She didn’t have to wait long before someone came to collect her, a calm-looking older girl, as different from Carole as it was possible to be, Katie thought gratefully as the other girl introduced herself as Marcy Dunne.

‘You’ll be on my section,’ Marcy explained. ‘I’m the most senior of us, although not a supervisor. We deal with the mail coming in from and going out to our POWs, and I must warn you that it can sometimes be difficult – we get to read an awful lot of Dear John letters. It looks like you’re moving to a new billet?’ she commented, eyeing Katie’s suitcase.

‘Yes,’ Katie confirmed. ‘I’ve been staying with some friends of my parents, but I’ve been offered a billet within easier reach of here.’

When Marcy said, ‘Good show,’ Katie wasn’t sure whether her approval was because of the billet or because Katie had been careful not to give any details of where or what her billet was.

‘You’ll need to go to Admin first to get yourself sorted out with a pass, and a number to write on the correspondence you deal with.’

Katie nodded. It was the rule that everyone who checked a letter had to write their Postal Censorship number on it.

An hour later, when Katie had been given her pass and her number, Marcy reappeared to take her to where she would be working.

The room they eventually entered was set up very much the same as that in Liverpool, although here the desks were individual, like school desks, rather than long tables. Marcy showed Katie to what would be hers, and then introduced her to the half-dozen or so girls who were already at work – naturally, with it being her first day, Katie had been keen to arrive early – including one named Gina Vincent, who gave Katie a warm friendly smile that made her feel that she was genuinely welcome.

‘You’ll soon settle in, I’m sure,’ Marcy assured Katie. ‘There’s a Joe Lyons not far away, and a decent British Restaurant, although you’ll find that it gets pretty busy, what with so many government departments around.

‘As you’ve done this kind of work before you’ll know the ropes. If anything strikes you as suspect, inform your supervisor. We’ve got fairly senior representatives from all the services here, as well. Any questions?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘I’ve put you next to Caroline for today so that you can work together until you get the hang of the way we do things here,’ Marcy added.

‘No doubt Mrs Harper, the supervisor for our group, will have a word with you when she arrives.’

At least she had been able to get a transfer from Liverpool to High Holborn, Katie comforted herself as she diplomatically allowed Caroline to show her how to open the envelopes from the side, so that the letter inside wasn’t in any way damaged, although of course she already knew the procedure. She couldn’t have borne to have had to go back to her old desk, with all its memories, and she certainly couldn’t have gone back to her billet with Luke’s parents. The head of her department at Liverpool’s Postal Censorship Office had told her that her request for a transfer to London would make the London Office very happy indeed as they were short of staff, whilst the return to Ireland, of the young Irishmen who had caused Katie so much heart-searching had also meant that there was no longer an ongoing covert operation to keep a check on any mail they might have sent or received whilst living in Liverpool. She must forget about Liverpool and all the memories it held, she told herself, and try to focus on the present instead. She had a job to do, after all, and worthwhile one.

Because of her experience working in Liverpool and the excellent report she had been given, she had now been upgraded to work on more sensitive mail and cablegrams here in London and, modest as always, Katie hoped that they weren’t thinking she was better at her job than she actually was.

‘I’m sure you’ll like it working here,’ Caroline assured her, having given Katie’s dexterous opening of the small pile of envelopes she had handed to her an approving smile. ‘Our first office was in a converted prison, but this is much better. And conveniently central too. Not that we didn’t have a bit of a time with it during the blitz, mind you.’

Katie nodded, but Caroline’s reference to the blitz reminded her of Luke and his kindness to her when Liverpool had been bombed, and she had to blink away her tears. She was trying desperately hard not to think about Luke or Liverpool, or anything connected with her poor broken heart, but it wasn’t easy. The last thing she wanted to do, though, was to break down completely and make a fool of herself.

Perhaps another kind of girl would have written right back to Luke and firmly put him right by explaining just what had really happened, but Katie just hadn’t had the heart to do that. Not when Luke had made it so obvious that he didn’t trust her. She wasn’t the sort to cling on to a man when she felt in her heart that he had fallen out of love with her and that he was glad of an excuse to break things off.

FOUR

Emily decided that it was a good job that Tommy, the boy she had found half starved and freezing, living off scraps at the back of the theatre in Liverpool where her good-for-nothing husband was the manager, wasn’t here to see her peering anxiously out of the kitchen window like this. He’d be bound to ask questions. He was a bright boy, was Tommy, and no mistake, and all the brighter too since they had left Liverpool and come to live here in Whitchurch. Happy as larks, she and Tommy were, with their tacit agreement that neither would reveal to anyone else his or her past or the fact that they were not even related, never mind aunt and adopted nephew, as everyone now believed them to be.

Or at least Emily had been happy. Until last week when she had gone and spoiled everything, like the silly fool she was, by going and giving Wilhelm, the German POW who kept her vegetable garden so productive for her, a pair of thick woollen socks she had knitted for him.

Of course he wouldn’t want to come here any more now that she had gone and made a fool of herself – yes, and probably made him feel like a fool as well, embarrassing him with her gift; her, a plain woman who had never been what you might call pretty even in her youth, and who no man, especially a handsome, well-set-up man like Wilhelm, would want to think admired him. A daft lonely married woman, who had no right to be knitting socks for any man other than her husband. Not that he would have welcomed hand-knitted socks. A bit of a dandy Con had always considered himself.

Poor Wilhelm had probably had his fellow POWs laughing their heads off at him on account of her gift. Why hadn’t she just left things as they were instead of behaving so daft and losing Wilhelm’s company into the bargain?

It was over a week now since she had given him the socks and she hadn’t seen him since. Normally he appeared most days, not spending as much time here as he had done in the summer, of course, since it was winter and there was plenty to keep him busy at Whiteside Farm where he and some of the other POWs worked, but he’d been here most days, tidying the vegetable garden and even insisting on doing other little jobs for her, like fixing that loose handle on the back door and sorting out the gutter blocked with autumn leaves.

She’d enjoyed the few minutes they’d usually shared together when she took him his cup of tea and a bit of something to eat – looked forward to them, in fact – and now it was all spoiled thanks to her own stupidity. What on earth had possessed her? Hadn’t she learned anything from the misery of her marriage to Con? Her husband had been unfaithful to her from the day they had married, and the truth was that she’d been glad to leave him behind in Liverpool.

The trouble was that she hadn’t really thought through just how her knitting Wilhelm those socks might look. All she’d thought of was his poor cold feet in those thin Wellington boots he always wore. It hadn’t been until she mentioned after church on Sunday about knitting the socks, and Biddy Evans, who was related to old Mrs Evans and her daughter, Brenda, who ran the local post office, had given a little tinkling laugh and said so loudly that everyone around them must have heard her, ‘Knitting socks for a POW! Well, I never. You’ll have him thinking you’re sweet on him next,’ that Emily had realised just what kind of interpretation others, including Wilhelm himself, might put on her gift.