Women on the Home Front Page 28

  In the boxing club, Rick let the conversation going on all around him wash over him, as he stood at the bar. The club was busy tonight with young men in shorts and singlets working on the club’s three punch bags, or lifting weights whilst the club’s hopeful bantam weight contender for a local title was sparring in the ring under the stern eye of one of the ex-professional boxers who trained the young talent.

  The building was run down, with chunks of plaster missing from the walls here and there, left like that, so the story went, by a pro from before the Great War, who’d had a habit of punching the wall if one of his sparring bouts hadn’t gone well. Worn dark brown linoleum covered the stone floor, and in the winter the club got damp from the leak in the roof, which had been repaired with a sheet of corrugated iron.

  It was here that deals were done that weren’t always strictly on the right side of the law, from matches that were fixed to the selling of black market cigarettes. There was a small room off the bar that everyone knew not to go into when the door was closed because that meant that there was a ‘meeting’ going on that involved ‘business’.

  Rick still came to the club because he had boxed there for a while as a boy, and it was where his friends gathered, but his membership was merely a social one now. Tonight, though, Tom, his comrade in arms who had joined up with him and who had also gone through the hell of Dunkirk, wasn’t in, and Rick wasn’t in the mood to join in the speculation and talk of the possibility of Hitler invading England. Unlike him the other lads here hadn’t tasted the reality of war as yet, some of them still raw recruits who had only just finished their basic training, others still waiting for their call-up papers and several in reserved occupations. How could they know how it felt to have been driven back by the Germans – to have to retreat as the BEF had done, abandoning its weapons and its artillery as it did so.

  Rick knew he would never forget the silence that had greeted them when they had finally been put ashore in England, or the way that those dealing with the practicalities of their repatriation had avoided looking directly at them, as though ashamed of them. A shame they had all shared.

  And if the shame of the retreat was hard to bear then the memories of what that retreat had involved were even harder to endure.

  Rick was just about to leave when Raphael walked into the club, heading straight for the bar where he asked after Rick.

  ‘Rick Simmonds?’ the barman repeated. ‘He’s over there, heading for the door,’ nodding his head in Rick’s direction, and then adding warningly, ‘If you’ve come here looking for trouble, mate, you’ve chosen the wrong place and the wrong man. Well thought of hereabouts, Rick is.’

  ‘It’s nothing like that – quite the opposite,’ Raphael assured him, the sound of his Liverpool accent causing a couple of the regulars who were in the Merchant Navy to glance across at him in recognition of a voice from a well-known port.

  Rick was outside before Raphael caught up with him, turning round when Raphael called out, ‘Wait up, mate.’

  Like the merchant seamen, Rick recognised Raphael’s Liverpool accent. A quick glance at Raphael revealed a tall dark-haired broad-shouldered man with a soldier’s bearing and stride, wearing army uniform and the badge of the Royal Engineers. Rick wasn’t really in the mood for company but something about the other man’s determined stride made him wait.

  ‘Rick, Rick Simmonds?’ Raphael asked. When Rick nodded, Raphael extended his hand to shake Rick’s.

  ‘Raphael Androtti. I just heard down at the local Italian club about what you did tonight for Caterina Manelli, and I wanted to thank you. She’s family – a distant cousin.’

  ‘It isn’t me you should really be thanking,’ Rick told him. ‘It’s my sister Dulcie. She was the one that got in between the mob and the shop.’ Rick shook his head, betraying his continuing disbelief that Dulcie of all people should have done such a thing and taken such a risk.

  So Dulcie was related to Rick. Now there was a coincidence.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw what she’d done,’ Rick admitted. ‘She’s not exactly the type to put herself at risk for someone else, isn’t Dulcie.’ He spoke openly, somehow finding the sight of Raphael’s uniform making it easy for him to do so. Raphael might be Italian but he was a soldier, like Rick himself, and right now that formed a bond between them that meant Rick could speak frankly to the other man.

  ‘Of course, once she’d got herself involved I’d no option other than to do the same. She is my sister, after all.’ Rick shook his head. ‘Women. I’ll never understand them, doing something as risky and daft as that, just because old Mr Manelli used to put an extra dollop of ice cream in our bowl when we were kids.’

  ‘I obviously owe your sister my thanks as well then,’ Raphael told Rick. ‘It’s a bit late for me to call round at your home now, but—’

  ‘You wouldn’t find her there anyway,’ Rick stopped him. ‘Dulcie doesn’t live at home. She’s got digs in Holborn and a landlady who doesn’t take too kindly to men she doesn’t know turning up on her doorstep asking for her lodgers. Your best bet would be to go to Selfridges. Dulcie works there in the cosmetics department.’

  Now was the time for him to come clean and tell her brother that he already knew Dulcie and where she worked, Raphael knew. That would be the right and honest thing to do. He battled with his conscience. He liked what he’d seen of Rick, and as a man honesty was important to him. However, he knew that Rick wouldn’t like hearing about how he had come to know his sister – as her brother he was bound to be protective of her; that was only natural. In the circumstances it was best that he didn’t say anything, Raphael decided, but that didn’t stop him feeling guilty.

  ‘I’ll go and see her at Selfridges, as you suggest.’

  ‘Will Mr Manelli be all right?’ Rick asked him.

  ‘I hope so.’ Raphael reached into his tunic pocket to remove a packet of service-issue cigarettes, offering the pack first to Rick, who took one, and then lighting Rick’s cigarette for him before lighting one for himself.

  ‘Been in the army long?’ he asked Rick.

  ‘Joined up just in time to be sent out to France with the BEF. And you?’

  ‘Same. We were working on an airfield down near Nantes when the order came to pull out. We were lucky. We got taken off the beach at St-Nazaire by a Finnish vessel and taken to Falmouth. Not that we thought we were going to be lucky at first, not when we’d seen all the RAF lot being given preference to get on board this warship they’d got at St-Nazaire, packed with women and children as well as the RAF. Poor sods. There wasn’t any room for us.

  Raphael narrowed his eyes and looked into the distance before telling Rick, ‘The warship got bombed by the Luftwaffe – those on board didn’t stand a chance.’

  Both men drew heavily on their cigarettes in shared silence, each knowing why the other didn’t speak.

  Olive was in the kitchen when Dulcie came in. The girls had already gone up to bed taking their cocoa with them, but Olive had hung on downstairs. Not because she was concerned about the fact that Dulcie was still out, like she would have been had she been Tilly or Agnes. It was no business of hers what time Dulcie came in or where she’d been, only she had said that she was going over to her parents’ because it was her mother’s birthday, and the look on her face had said that it wasn’t a visit she was particularly looking forward to.

  Her walk back to Article Row took Dulcie around forty-five minutes and had given her time to think about what she had done, and once the euphoria of feeling that she’d triumphed over all those who thought they could look down on her by doing something brave had worn off, Dulcie had started to recognise the risk she had taken and to feel a bit shaky. The last thing she wanted as she walked into the kitchen, intent on making herself a spirit-strengthening cup of tea, was Olive, and the sight of her sitting in a chair as though waiting for her return brought Dulcie to an abrupt halt. No one had ever waited up for her. It was Edith her own mother worried about and sa
t up anxiously for, refusing to go to bed until she knew she was safely home. When Dulcie had pointed out that she had never waited up for her, her mother had simply said that there wasn’t any need for her to do that because she knew that Dulcie was perfectly capable of looking after herself. Not that Olive would be waiting up for her to get in, of course. It would be Tilly and Agnes she was sitting there for.

  ‘Tilly and Agnes not in yet?’ she asked Olive, as she headed for the kettle. Her mouth felt dry and her head ached painfully.

  ‘Yes. They’ve gone up,’ Olive told her, adding without intending to, ‘You’re later back than I expected.’

  Dulcie had turned towards her, the kettle she had just filled in her hand, the light falling sharply onto her, causing Olive to gasp in shock when she saw the dried blood on Dulcie’s cheek where a sharp-edged pebble – one of a handful thrown by one of the mob – had caught her and cut her skin. There were other marks on her clothes, dusty marks, and another cut on her leg.

  ‘Dulcie, what on earth’s happened to you?’ Olive demanded, getting up to go and take the kettle from her.

  Immediately Olive got close to her Dulcie recoiled, telling her abruptly and dismissively, ‘There’s no need to make a fuss. It’s nothing. Just some lads who’d had too much to drink.’

  When Olive’s eyes widened in shock, Dulcie realised that her landlady was jumping to the wrong conclusion and she told her fiercely, ‘It wasn’t anything like that. I’m not daft enough to let any lads try doing something they shouldn’t with me. It was all this fuss about the Italians being Fascists and being taken away. A group of lads were throwing stones at the Manellis’ shop window. Me and Rick told them to leave it out. Mr Manelli wasn’t even there. The police had already taken him away.’

  Olive had heard about the mobs going round attacking the premises of Italian businesses whilst she’d been at her WVS meeting and had been horrified by their behaviour, but somehow she hadn’t expected to hear that Dulcie had stepped in to prevent one of those attacks.

  Dulcie’s mouth thinned when she saw Olive’s expression and guessed what she was thinking.

  ‘That’s the trouble with people like you,’ she told her sharply. ‘You think that unless a person goes running around wearing something like a St John Ambulance uniform they’re nothing, and you can look down on them.’

  ‘Dulcie, that’s not true,’ Olive denied, but even as she spoke she recognised that there was a grain of truth in what Dulcie was saying.

  ‘Yes it is,’ Dulcie told her flatly.

  ‘The doctor’s been again this morning to number forty-nine,’ Nancy announced over the hedge.

  Olive paused on the steps to her back door, balancing the weight of the washing she had just been to collect from the local Chinese laundry more securely on her raised knee.

  ‘It can’t be long now, not with the doctor coming nearly every day. I said to my Arthur when they moved in that I didn’t reckon the husband would last very long.’

  Olive felt that sometimes Nancy took too keen an interest in such morbid subjects, almost relishing it when one of her dire warnings became true.

  ‘Mr Long is very poorly at the moment,’ she felt obliged to agree, whilst pointing out, ‘But his son, Christopher, has told Tilly that they have every hope that he will rally and make some recovery. Apparently this has proved to be the case on more than one occasion in the past.’

  Nancy merely shook her head, adding darkly, ‘And that’s another thing. If I was you I wouldn’t let your Tilly get too involved with that boy of theirs, not with him being one of the conscientious objects. There’s no saying where it might lead. Folk like them like putting the wrong ideas into other folk’s heads, and you don’t want your Tilly getting them kind of wrong ideas.’

  ‘I don’t think for one minute that anything like that is going to happen, Nancy. Tilly and Agnes have simply taken Christopher under their wing a bit because they are being good neighbours.’

  ‘Well, you can say that, but—’ Nancy began.

  Her neighbour was like a dog relishing a particularly juicy bone it did not want to give up, Olive thought ruefully as she determinedly changed the subject.

  ‘Has Linda settled in with her in-laws in Sussex now?’

  Linda, Nancy’s daughter, and her son-in-law, Henry, had evacuated themselves and their seven-year-old son to Sussex to live with her in-laws shortly after war had been announced.

  ‘Oh, yes. Ever so glad to have her there, Henry’s mother is, and Henry’s got a job working in partnership with an electrician that’s already set up there. Mind you, Linda says that it’s Henry that’s bringing in most of the work, not this other chap, and she reckons that it’s Henry who should be the senior partner. Henry’s mother’s lucky to have them living with her. There’s nothing Linda doesn’t know about running a house like it should be run. Of course, she’s got me to thank for that. I have to say that Henry’s mother doesn’t have the same standards I’ve taught Linda. When we went and stayed with them the Christmas before last, there was that much dust on the picture rail in her hallway that she couldn’t have dusted up there all year.’

  Olive nodded. She knew from experience that there was nothing Nancy liked more than boasting about her daughter, but the weight of the laundry was beginning to make her arms ache so she excused herself and unlocked her back door.

  Once inside she made her way straight upstairs so that she could put the clean linen in the airing cupboard, ready to change the beds on Monday.

  When Nancy had first found out that Olive was sending her sheets and pillowcases to the Chinese laundry instead of washing them herself, she had affected to be shocked, but Olive didn’t care. With five beds to change it would have been impossible for her to get all the bedding washed, dried and ironed every week, on top of everything else she had to do, including her WVS work.

  Once she’d put the clean laundry away, Olive glanced at her watch and, seeing that it was almost half-past ten, she hurried back downstairs so that she could make herself a cup of tea and then sit down and enjoy it whilst she listened to Music While You Work on the wireless.

  It was whilst she was listening to that that Olive found her thoughts wandering to the Longs. She wondered if she should call and ask Mrs Long if there was anything she could do to help, such as fetching her shopping for her. She didn’t want her to think that she was being nosy, though, especially when Mr Long was so obviously poorly. Olive had no fears that Tilly might be getting too involved with Christopher in the way that Nancy had tried to imply. She knew her daughter and it was perfectly plain to her that Tilly thought of Christopher only as a friend. She certainly wasn’t attracted to him in the way that she had been to Dulcie’s handsome brother. Thinking of that reminded Olive of her exchange with Dulcie. She hadn’t intended to get Dulcie’s back up, and in fact she had actually, to her own surprise, felt concerned for her when she’d seen her cuts and bruises, but Dulcie wasn’t someone who made it easy for others to be sympathetic towards her, Olive thought wryly. Quite the opposite.

  She would go and see Mrs Long after she had had her dinner, she decided. It wouldn’t be neigh-bourly not to do so. Olive could still remember how she had felt during the final weeks of her own husband’s life. Of course, she had been younger than Mrs Long, and they had been living here with her in-laws, but you never forgot the awfulness of knowing someone you loved was going to die. She would certainly never forget the hours she had lain awake at night listening to his racking cough, and then the silences that had followed it, hardly daring to breathe herself as she listened desperately in the darkness for the sound of his breathing and only relaxing when she heard it.

  Olive had decided to do a ham salad for every-one’s evening meal, seeing as it was so warm, so she opened the tin of ham she intended to use, taking a thin sliver off the ham to make herself a sandwich for her lunch. The thin scraping of margarine she put on the bread didn’t look very appealing, but Olive knew that with a bit of mustard and some let
tuce her sandwich would be nice and tasty.

  Once she’d eaten she checked the larder to make sure that there were enough boiled potatoes left over from the previous evening’s meal for her to make some potato salad to go with the ham.

  After removing her apron, Olive went upstairs to comb her hair and make sure that she looked tidy, setting her neat off-white straw hat on top of her newly brushed curls, and then opening her dressing table drawer to remove a clean pair of white gloves.

  As she opened her front door, the Misses Barker from next door were walking up the Row, and naturally Olive stopped to speak to them. Spinster sisters and retired teachers, they always looked spick and span. Physically the sisters were very different. Miss Jane Barker, the elder of the two, was tall and thin, with a long bony face, whilst Miss Mary Barker was smaller and plump. Olive’s late husband, who had been taught by them at the local church school before they had retired, had often said that whilst Miss Jane favoured the stick, Miss Mary favoured the carrot, and that between them they had ensured that even the most unruly of boys along with the shyest of girls learned their ABC and their times tables.

  Once ‘good afternoons’ had been exchanged, it was Miss Mary who told Olive excitedly, ‘We’ve just seen the vicar and he’s asked us if we’d like to think about helping out at the junior school. It seems that with so many families bringing their children back from evacuation, the Government is having to open some of the schools they closed at the beginning of the war.’

  After they had parted company Olive reflected that the thought of going back to teaching had brought a definite spring to the sisters’ steps.

  When she reached number 49 she could see that the curtains were half drawn across the windows of the front room. Rather hesitantly she knocked on the front door, wondering if she had done the right thing when Mrs Long opened it and Olive saw how tired and distressed she looked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Olive apologised. ‘Perhaps I’ve called at a bad time. I won’t stay. I heard that Mr Long isn’t very well and I just wanted you to know that if there’s anything I can do to help – collect your shopping for you, that kind of thing.’