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‘I haven’t lost weight, Mum, far from it. I’ve toned up, put on muscle, that’s all.’
Dora sniffed disbelievingly.
‘Irish stew for dinner,’ was all she said. ‘I’d better have a look at it.’
She opened the door of the Belling and concentrated on extracting the promising-smelling pot of stew while Lily and Jim discreetly stowed Reg’s offerings in the pantry.
‘Thank you,’ Lily mouthed.
Reg grinned and gave her a thumbs-up.
Lily might not be as close to Reg as she was to Sid, but jam, ham, chocolate or not, she realised just how pleased she was to see him too.
‘All right, Mum, you win, hands down,’ Reg conceded as he laid down his knife and fork. ‘There might be plenty of it, Army food, but it’s not a patch on your cooking.’
‘Oh, get away with you! You’d eat horse manure if it was wrapped up in pretty paper!’
Lily bit back a smile. Their mum was no more capable of accepting a compliment than Lily had been of not shrieking her head off when she’d sensed Reg was at the gate.
‘There’s no more where that came from, you know!’ Dora added, in case she hadn’t dismissed the praise quite emphatically enough.
‘I couldn’t eat it anyway!’ Reg protested. ‘I’m stuffed!’
Dora’s eyebrows shot up.
‘That’s all they’ve taught you in the Army, is it, that sort of talk?’
Lily saw Jim and Reg exchange knowing, ‘man of the world’ looks.
‘I should think that’s the least of it, Mrs Collins.’ Jim gave one of his wry, twisty smiles. ‘Right, Reg?’
‘You don’t know the half of it! But don’t worry, Mum, I won’t be using any language while I’m home. Especially not now Lily’s gone all posh on us, working at Marlow’s. I didn’t see you crook your little finger drinking your tea, though, Lil. Tut, tut!’
Lily flapped her hand at him and Reg ducked out of the way, laughing. He was relaxing now; they all were, with the warmth of some food inside them and the fire nicely banked up.
‘So tell me, what’s new at the swankiest store in town? What’s the best-dressed baby wearing this winter, Lil? Had a run on cut-glass decanters for the folk with cut-glass accents, have you, Jim?’
This time Lily and Jim were the ones to exchange looks. So much had happened in Lily’s first few months at Marlow’s that the last few, apart from the flurry before Christmas and the January sales, had seemed quite tame in comparison.
She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could begin, they heard the latch on the back gate click, followed by footsteps across the yard and then by someone opening the back door itself.
Lily’s heart leapt. Surely not! It couldn’t be, could it? Not Sid? Though it would be just like him to take them all by surprise. And who else could it be, turning up right in the middle of Sunday dinner?
‘Only me!’ trilled a voice approaching though the scullery.
Of course! Beryl! That’s who.
Shy, tactful, reserved – not words you could ever use to describe Beryl. But what could she possibly want this time?
Chapter 2 (#u21c8cd86-824c-5fca-a4a2-cd52d07923b1)
As it turned out, on this occasion simply a free meal – or at least a pudding.
‘How does she do it?’ Lily demanded as she and Jim washed up. ‘She must be able to smell Mum’s cooking from right the other side of town!’
‘I know. The War Office should use her as a sniffer dog. Perhaps she could do the same with explosives.’
‘I always think that’s so hard on the poor things,’ fretted Lily. ‘Imagine being a little puppy, thinking life was all chasing your tail and gambolling about with your brothers and sisters, then going to some nice family as a pet – instead you’re crawling about on a battlefield or a bombsite.’
‘On the other hand you might grow up to be a rescue dog,’ offered Jim. ‘That’d give you a nice warm glow, finding people alive in the rubble.’
‘True,’ Lily conceded. ‘They ought to give them medals … but we’re getting away from Beryl! Inviting herself in like that and taking the bread out of our mouths!’
‘The rice pudding, you mean,’ lamented Jim. He’d been looking forward to seconds. ‘Not to mention the—’
‘Exactly! Mum even gave her the skin. The best bit!’
Lily finished his sentence for him: she often found they were thinking the same thing at the same time. It was one of the things which made Jim so easy to get along with, and they did get on, most of the time – except when he was teasing her about her attempts at knitting, or her deficiencies with the weeding, or when he used a long word she didn’t understand – he’d been able to stay on at school to take his School Certificate, lucky thing. Lily usually gave as good as she got, though – she’d had enough practice with her brothers. But this time she knew she and Jim were in total agreement.
‘Not a scrap left for you or me – or the hens!’ she grumbled.
‘Oh well. To be fair, she is eating for two.’
Jim shook the washing-up water from his hands and wiped them on his trousers: woe betide anyone who needlessly ’wore out’ Dora’s towels. She’d sworn by that thrifty dictum for years, and tea towels too, and since the latest Government advice had instructed people to leave crockery to drain to avoid that very thing, she could congratulate herself on having been right all along. When the handy tip had been broadcast on the wireless, she’d permitted herself a smile that could almost have been described as smug. Lily had only dried off the cutlery and the saucepans – being in the kitchen was more about letting off steam over Beryl than being much practical use.
‘We’d better go back through,’ she said reluctantly. ‘It’s not fair to inflict Beryl on poor Reg.’
When they did, though, Beryl seemed well ensconced. Dora was knitting yet another balaclava – her hands were never idle – and Beryl, whose were, and were folded over her pregnant stomach, was holding forth to a glazed-looking Reg.
‘I wonder if you and my Les’ll ever meet up?’ she mused, raising a hand to twirl a strand of her shoulder-length blonde hair with a painted fingernail. Beryl might have been getting on for the size of a tank, but she was a glamorous tank, camouflaged with powder and peroxide.
It was a pretty dim question, given that there were two million men in the Army now, and it wasn’t as if recruitment was organised in the same way as in the First War, with towns raising Pals’ Battalions.
Reg, who’d been a mechanic before the war, had been quickly snapped up by the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, while Les, he’d already learnt, had joined the local regiment. Reg tried gently to point this out, but Beryl seemed convinced his path and her husband’s would cross, because Les, she informed them, had been transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps and was now officially an Army driver.
‘How did he manage to swing that?’ quipped Jim, hauling over a couple of dining chairs for himself and Lily. ‘If they’d seen the way he used to take corners in our delivery vans …’
Till he’d been called up, Les Bulpitt had been a driver at Marlow’s. Beryl had worked there too – it was how they’d all met.
Beryl pregnant … that had been just one of the many things that had happened since Lily had started at Marlow’s. Lily thought back to that terrifying first day, standing frozen with fear outside the Staff Entrance, and Beryl sweeping by, all scent and smart remarks, even though she was only a junior herself, (a more senior junior maybe, but still a junior). But when Beryl had found herself in trouble, she’d had to throw herself on Lily and Dora’s mercy, the start of the most unlikely friendship since Fay Wray and King Kong.
If Les and Beryl’s wedding had had the whiff of the shotgun about it, everyone had rallied round to disperse the cordite and make the day the best they could. They’d been a merry party – Les and Beryl, Lily as bridesmaid, Jim as best man and official photographer. Dora had made the dress, Sid had made it home to walk Beryl down the aisle – well, into the Register Office – and Les’s mum, Ivy, had tapped up no one liked to think what black-market contacts to help lay on a magnificent spread.
Now, with Les’s dad in the Merchant Navy, and Les away at training camp, Beryl was left living with Ivy and Les’s younger sister, Susan. Susan, bless her, was a bit backward – quite a lot backward in fact – more like age two than twelve. From the time she’d spent over at Ivy’s since the wedding, Lily had to admit that watching Susan laboriously try to do a simple jigsaw could make a Sunday afternoon pass very slowly indeed. No wonder Beryl needed to escape.
‘Gor blimey!’ said Reg when she’d gone, complete with the matinee jacket Dora had knitted for the baby, and which had been Beryl’s transparent excuse for ‘just dropping by’ at dinnertime. Dora pursed her lips and unwound some more navy wool. It was an expletive too far for her, but that was war for you. ‘She can’t half talk, that one!’
It was true. Beryl had always had plenty to say for herself.
‘You’d told me a bit about her,’ Reg went on, ‘but in the flesh … I should think “my Les” is glad to get away! I daresay you will be too, Jim, surrounded by all these women. You’re next for call-up, aren’t you?’
Lily swatted at her brother again, and caught him this time, on the arm.
‘Cheek! You tell him, Jim! You like it here!’
Jim gave a half-smile and shrugged.
Lily thought nothing of it at the time. But afterwards, she’d remember that.
It might have been cold and dank and generally horrible outside, but the hens still had to be seen to and locked up before dark.
Reg declared he was ‘gasping for a fag’ so the three of them wrapped up and went out into the yard in the last of the feeble daylight. Jim didn’t think Reg’s cigarette and the henhouse straw would be a terrifically good mix, so he volunteered for the hens’ bedtime lock-up, leaving Lily stamping her feet and swinging her arms as Reg lit up. He still couldn’t get over the fact that Beryl was convinced he and Les were bound to meet.
He drew on his cigarette and chucked his spent match over the fence.
‘Anyway, if he’s just been called up, he’ll get a home posting for the first few months, if not years – how old is he?’
‘That’s the thing,’ Lily said. ‘Les is twenty, the same as you.’
‘What? How come he hasn’t been called up till now?’ Reg sounded outraged. ‘Or volunteered? You mean he’s sat on his backside when he could have been—’
Reg had volunteered the minute he was eligible, at eighteen – and Sid the same.
‘Before you get on your high horse, Reg, Les was called up before.’
Lily had only learnt this herself when Les’s call-up papers had come just before Christmas.
‘Don’t tell me,’ exclaimed Reg. ‘Tried to pass himself off as a conchie! Or unfit!’
‘He was unfit the first time. Susan, his sister, because she’s like she is, she’s not strong. She gets all sorts of infections and things,’ Lily explained. ‘Les had tonsillitis that he’d caught off her, so he failed the medical.’
Reg snorted and took another disdainful draw on his cigarette. Lily could see she wasn’t convincing him.
‘Les isn’t a shirker, Reg, honestly,’ she insisted. ‘I mean, he’d hardly have planned it this way. It’s not the best timing, is it, for him to be called up now, when Beryl’s due in a couple of months?’
‘It’s how it is, Lil,’ said Reg plainly. ‘There’s plenty of blokes fighting this war that have never seen their kids.’
‘I know, I know.’
The tip of Reg’s cigarette glowed in the dusk. Lily wondered if he was going to tell her, or if she’d have to ask. That was the trouble with Reg. He was such an oyster. You had to prise things out of him.
‘Reg …’
But for once, Reg saved her the trouble.
‘I know what you’re going to say, Sis. And yes, it’s why I’m home. This leave isn’t just in place of Christmas.’
‘Oh, Reg! You’ve got your posting! Where? Tell me! Where are they sending you?’
Jim had finished his henhouse duties now, and he joined them, cradling two brown eggs in his hand. He could tell from Lily’s face that something was up.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Am I interrupting?’
Though they’d been putting him up for six months now – or putting up with him, as he joked – Jim was always sensitive about not intruding into family matters.
‘He’s got his posting,’ Lily said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it, Reg?’
Red took a final long drag on his cigarette and pinched it out between his thumb and first finger. His hands were so worn and calloused after years of grappling with the insides of engines he could crush a wasp the same way and not feel the pain, he’d told them.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Jim.
The Army didn’t send you abroad till you were twenty – or tried not to; Reg’s last birthday had been a turning point, they all knew.
‘I’ll tell you two,’ said Reg slowly. ‘And I’ve told Sid. But not a word to Mum, not yet. I’ll tell her tomorrow – and in good time, not just before I leave, so she’s got the chance to take it in. But I don’t want her brooding on it longer than she has to.’
‘For goodness’ sake Reg, tell us!’ Lily had trouble keeping her voice down. ‘Where?’
‘They haven’t told us officially,’ said Reg. ‘We’re not allowed to know – and nor are you. But we all do know.’
Jim and Lily looked at him, waiting.
‘Africa,’ said Reg quietly. Walls, even those between their house and their next-door neighbours, were reputed to have ears, after all. ‘North Africa. This bit of leave’s my pre-embarkation. We sail next week.’
Chapter 3 (#u21c8cd86-824c-5fca-a4a2-cd52d07923b1)
Africa! In the wintry dusk of a Midlands’ backyard, Lily closed her eyes and she was there.
Africa! Heat, dust, the spice smell of the bazaars; snowy-robed Arabs haggling over brass coffee pots; captive cobras swaying to snake charmers’ fluting; tall, half-naked Nubians in marble halls, waving ostrich-feather fans over doe-eyed women reclining on cushions …
But before her fantasy could get any more, well, fantastic, Lily pulled herself up. Stupid! Africa, North Africa at least, was nothing like that. Her dimly-remembered geography lessons had taught her that. Most of it was desert, unpopulated because it was uninhabitable, and the vast sand dunes and midnight oases she might have gone on to imagine were only a tiny part of that. The rest was stony desert scrub, more like the surface of the moon than the setting for a romantic encounter with a real-life Rudolph Valentino. And now, the desert meant other things too. It was The Western Desert – those capital letters said it all – it was—
‘The Desert War, then?’
Thank goodness Jim was there. The words had formed in her mind, but she hadn’t seemed able to organise her lips, tongue and teeth to get them out. Maybe it was the cold. Or maybe it was because she couldn’t bear to hear herself say them out loud.
Reg pulled a face.
‘Sounds romantic put like that, doesn’t it? Well, I’m about to find out.’
Lily swallowed hard.
‘But Reg, you’re a mechanic, you’re not a … a sapper or a gunner or anything. You said yourself the drivers can do most of their own maintenance. You’re going to be well back behind the lines. Aren’t you?’
She saw Reg and Jim exchange another of those looks. But it wasn’t the same man-of-the-world look they’d exchanged before, a look that Lily had felt was to shut her out. This was a look of recognition, and of resignation. She needed to know.
‘What do you want me to say, Lil?’ said Reg. ‘Tell you we should all believe in the Tooth Fairy, and Father Christmas is real?’
‘You mean he isn’t?’
