My Sweet Valentine Read online

  In fact, if anything, the young naval officer, with his open delight in her company, was far better company than Wilder, who had been offhand all evening, complaining that London’s way of welcoming in the New Year was a poor drab thing compared with New York’s.

  ‘Well, New York isn’t being bombed by the Germans, is it?’ Dulcie had snapped at him at one point in the evening, turning her back on him to sit with her arms folded dismissively across her chest. That was when the young naval officer – Mike – had seen her and had given her a look of bashful hope.

  When the band had played a ladies excuse me, and Wilder had announced that he didn’t want to dance, she’d gone over and asked Mike to dance instead, encouraging him to come over to join their table, where she’d introduced him to the others, telling Wilder prettily that she’d felt it was her duty to take pity on ‘one of our brave servicemen, who hasn’t got a dance partner’.

  Wilder had responded with a grunt, and the unkind comment that Britain’s armed forces might be brave but they weren’t strong enough to defeat Hitler, and then he’d got up and walked off.

  That had been half an hour ago.

  Well, if Wilder thought that she was the sort of girl who got all anxious and upset about that kind of behaviour, he was going to find out that he was wrong, Dulcie decided, getting up to go and grab hold of her brother’s hand.

  ‘Come and dance with me, Rick …’

  Later, from the dizzyingly blissful delight of Drew’s arms as they swayed romantically together beneath the dimmed lights to an intimately slow dance number, Tilly murmured to him, ‘I think that Dulcie and Wilder have had a bit of a tiff.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Drew murmured back. ‘Have I told you that your hair smells of honey and roses, and that your lips taste of paradise?’

  Tilly closed her eyes and melted into him.

  They had been so close tonight, mentally, emotionally and physically. Being held this close to him, being able to feel all of him against all of her was dangerously exciting. There was an ache low down in her body that made her want to press even closer to him, an awareness within her that the kisses they shared, no matter how sweet they were, could not alone satisfy the need that ached inside her.

  Tilly knew what married intimacy entailed but she had never imagined until she had met Drew that she would hunger for that intimacy so strongly and passionately before marriage.

  They stayed on the floor until the notes of the last waltz of the evening had died away, returning to their table to find Rick and Dulcie waiting there for them but no sign of Wilder. He appeared a couple of minutes later, removing his handkerchief as he did so, Tilly’s heart hammering as the lights came up and she saw on it the telltale marks of bright orange lipstick. Bright orange when Dulcie was wearing deep pink.

  Anxious for her friend, Tilly deliberately leaned across to block Dulcie’s view of Wilder, asking Rick with forced nonchalance, ‘When did you say your leave finished, Rick?’

  He too leaned forward, and the look in his eyes suggested to Tilly that he too had seen those lipstick marks as he folded his arms on the table, forcing Wilder to sit back.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Tilly nodded, glad of his sensitivity to Dulcie’s feelings.

  It was later, after the taxi had dropped the four of them off at the top of Article Row – Wilder remaining in the taxi, having turned down Drew’s suggestion that he stay the night at Ian Simpson’s, insisting that he needed to get back to his base – that Tilly told Drew what had happened as they hung back behind Dulcie and Rick.

  ‘That’s one of the things I love about you,’ Tilly told him, cuddling up to him. ‘The fact that you’re so honest, Drew. I know you’d never deceive me about anything.’

  Drew swallowed hard, conscious that there was something he hadn’t been honest about with Tilly, and it was a very big something, a something that grew harder for him to bear with every fresh kiss they exchanged and every promise of shared love they made. What would happen when he did tell her? Would he lose her? He wouldn’t be able to bear that. He loved her so much, with her brave bright spirit, her fierce loyalty to those who mattered to her, her compassion for others, and her passionate nature.

  Tilly didn’t object when Drew suddenly turned to her in the middle of the dark street, took her in his arms and kiss her fiercely. Why should she, when she loved it when he kissed her like that? The only thing was that it was a bit out of character for him to do so in such a public place. But then it was New Year.

  Lying awake in bed waiting for Tilly and Dulcie to come in – Ted had brought Agnes home shortly after Olive had returned to number 13 herself, and Sally wouldn’t be off duty until the morning – Olive reflected on her own evening out. She was a sociable person by nature and naturally sympathetic to others, which often meant that people brought their troubles to her knowing they could confide in her and trust her not to repeat what they had told her to others. Normally Olive enjoyed and valued that role, but the trouble, as she was now discovering, was that there was no one for her to turn to when she herself needed to confide.

  The evening had been very pleasant, a few hours of relief from the constant anxiety of the war, even if the recent bombing had been a major topic of conversation. And an incident had happened that had left her feeling wretched and guilty.

  It had been about half-past eleven when Sergeant Dawson – Archie – had announced that he was taking his leave of them so that he could call round at the ARP post to wish his colleagues there all the best for the New Year and still make it home in time to welcome in 1941 with his wife.

  Obviously he’d shaken hands with all those close to him, and naturally Olive had held out her hand to shake his; not to have done so would have been unthinkably rude. But then instead of shaking it he had simply held her hand between his own and …

  Olive closed her eyes against the sharp knife of emotion that turned inside her, as she remembered the feelings that had swept her, the memories and the longing she had had no right to feel. How could she have allowed that to happen? How could she have felt, standing there with Sergeant Dawson clasping her hand in the warmth of his own, that shocking agonising need for the warmth of a man’s arms around her, combined with that awful surge of jealousy against those women who were lucky to have what she did not: the presence of loving husbands in their lives and in their beds.

  Even now, remembering how she had felt, Olive could feel the small beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead. She was thirty-seven years old. She had been a widow for nearly eighteen years. Never once during those years had she felt the way she had felt tonight, watching Sergeant Dawson walk away from her, then turning to look at her friends with their husbands. Marriage could be hard work. All women knew that, once they were married. Decent respectable women – the kind of woman she had always believed herself to be – did not lie in their beds at night with their bodies aching because they were on their own.

  What she had felt meant nothing, Olive assured herself. It was just because it was New Year. Because of the war. It certainly wasn’t Sergeant Dawson’s fault. He had simply been kind, she knew that. Her heart thudded anew, and then thankfully she heard the front door open, Tilly and Dulcie’s voices reaching her from the hallway. She was a mother and a landlady, she had responsibilities and duties, and instead of dwelling on certain things she would be far better off ignoring them – and making sure she didn’t experience them again.

  Dulcie wasn’t the only person to be concerned about the Home Secretary, Mr Herbert Morrison’s, January announcement that he intended to make it compulsory for London’s residents and businesses to form their own fire-watching group from amongst their inhabitants and employees, as Olive discovered when she attended one of her twice-weekly WVS meetings at the vicarage. Audrey Windle told them that she felt they should extend the length of their normal meeting to make time to discuss ‘Mr Morrison’s request for people to form fire-watching groups.’

  ‘Well, as to that,’ Nancy sniff
ed, immediately bridling, ‘I hope that you aren’t going to suggest that any of us take up such dangerous work, Mrs Windle. That’s men’s work, that is, and besides, what are our ARP wardens being paid for if it isn’t to sort out that kind of thing?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course,’ the vicar’s wife agreed quickly in a placatory tone, ‘but the thing is that, as Mr Morrison has said, and as we all saw with the dreadful bombing raid on the 29th of December, with the best will in the world neither our Home Guard nor the fire brigade can be on hand everywhere they are needed. No one’s suggesting that anyone should put themselves in danger. It’s simply a matter of making sure that those of us who feel that we do want to be involved can be as safely as possible.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to be,’ Nancy informed the vicar’s wife flatly. ‘Like I said, it isn’t women’s work. We’re all doing enough as it is, if you ask me.’

  ‘I don’t know, Nancy,’ Olive felt obliged to speak up, as much in defence of poor Audrey Windle, who was looking rather desperate, as anything else. ‘We’ve been very luck in Article Row so far, but we’ve all seen and heard about the damage that those incendiary bombs can do if they aren’t spotted and dealt with quickly. The Government must think that it is safe for women to deal with them because they’ve sent out those leaflets to every household telling people what to do, and it’s normally women who are home most of the time, not men.’

  Nancy was giving her an extremely baleful look but Olive wasn’t going to back down. As she’d been speaking she’d realised that although she hadn’t given it much thought before, she did actually believe that it was important for householders to do everything they could to protect their homes from the incendiary bombs being dropped by the Germans. Unlike other bombs, the incendiaries were not designed to explode and kill people, but rather to cause serious fires. The initially long, large bombs each contained many small incendiaries. As it fell it opened, showering the ground with these smaller incendiaries, which burst into flames as they landed. If discovered quickly, it was a relatively simple matter to dowse the flames, either with a stirrup pump, which used water, or by raking the burning matter into sand and smothering the flames with it. But the effectiveness of these courses of action depended on the incendiaries being spotted and dealt with quickly, and it was to this end that the Government had announced to the country via the BBC news that they must form themselves into fire-watching groups.

  Giving Olive a grateful look Audrey Windle pressed on hopefully, ‘We’ve all read the leaflets. They explain very clearly how we set about organising local fire-watch teams and make out a rota for fire-watching.’

  ‘I’ve heard that you have to go up on the roof and stay there all night when it’s your turn,’ one of the other woman broke in. A large person, her ample chins shook with anxiety as she continued, ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘No, of course not, Mrs Bell,’ the vicar’s wife agreed, ‘but as Sergeant Dawson explained to me, in many cases husbands and wives are working together, so that, for instance, the husband will be the one to do the active watching but then he will call down to his wife, who will be perhaps waiting at an open bedroom window – with the lights out, of course – to tell her where the bombs have fallen. Then she will get ready the stirrup pump, which the Government is making available to households, and together they’ll go out and tackle the incendiaries with the help of their neighbours, who they will alert about the bombs.’

  ‘It’s taking advantage of our good nature, that’s what it is,’ Nancy sniffed, folding her arms in front of her bosom in a way that said that she wanted no truck whatsoever with Mr Morrison’s scheme.

  Olive’s assessment of her neighbour’s frame of mind was confirmed when Nancy turned to her and said, ‘There’s no one to do it in Article Row anyway, is there? Mr Whittaker at number 50 is too old; you couldn’t expect the Misses Barker at number 12 to get involved, nor Mrs Edwards at number 5, since her husband’s already working as an auxiliary fireman.’

  ‘There’s Mr Ryder at number 18,’ Olive pointed out. ‘I’m sure he’d want to be involved, he being retired from the Civil Service.’

  ‘Mr Ryder? With that bad leg of his?’ Nancy shook her head, adding triumphantly, ‘And it’s not as if you could do anything, is it, with you being a household full of women.’

  ‘Why should us being female stop us from getting involved?’ Nancy’s attitude reminded Olive of how she had felt when she and Mrs Morrison had been rejected by the ARP – and they had been rejected she felt sure, no matter how tactful Sergeant Dawson had tried to be.

  Mrs Morrison clapped her hands and said approvingly, ‘Oh, well done, Olive. I’m certainly going to have a word with Mr Morrison and see if we can’t get something set up.’

  Audrey Windle was smiling at her with relief, whilst Nancy was giving her a very angry look indeed.

  ‘I hope you aren’t thinking of setting yourself up in charge of some kind of fire-watch, Olive,’ Nancy told her grimly. ‘Because if you are I’m afraid that me and my Arthur will definitely have a view.’

  What was Nancy trying to say? That she wasn’t up to the job of organising a small team of neighbours to keep a watch for falling incendiaries and to deal with them when they did fall? Olive very much resented Nancy’s attitude, and instead of putting her off the idea it actually made her feel very determined to carry it through.

  ‘Well, if Arthur wants to join in he’ll be very welcome,’ was all Olive allowed herself to say.

  ‘Arthur? He’s far too busy at it is, and I’m not having him going and risking getting a cold in this bad weather with that chest of his.’

  ‘I’m sure that Ian Simpson will want to be involved, and Drew, of course,’ Olive continued, ignoring Nancy’s mean-spiritedness.

  ‘Well, yes, your Tilly would love that,’ Nancy agreed cattily. ‘Every time I see her these days she’s linked up to that American. In my days girls waited until they’d got an engagement ring on their finger before being so familiar with a young man.’

  ‘You and me are the same age, Nancy,’ Mrs Morrison cut in and then laughed, saying, ‘and I remember me and my hubby walking down the Strand with our arms wrapped around one another on his first leave home from the front and we’d only been walking out a few weeks before he joined up. We weren’t the only ones, either. That’s what happens during wartime.’

  Mrs Morrison had definitely taken the wind out of Nancy’s sails, Olive could see, but knowing her neighbour as she did, Olive suspected that sooner or later Nancy would find a way of getting her own back. Olive didn’t know why she was finding it so difficult to get along with her neighbour these days. They’d always managed to rub along well enough before. But that had been when she had merely been a daughter-in-law in her in-laws’ home. Since number 13 had become hers, Nancy had been noticeably more critical of her. Olive tried to be charitable and to put Nancy’s almost constant carping about her young lodgers and Tilly down to the natural reaction of a mother parted by the war from her own daughter and her grandchildren, but there was no doubt that Nancy could be hard work.

  ‘I’m so glad you’ve decided to organise a fire-watching team for Article Row, Olive,’ Audrey told her later as they said their good nights.

  Olive had deliberately held back on the pretext of wanting to ask the vicar’s wife more about Government’s provision of stirrup pumps so that she wouldn’t have to walk home with Nancy, who had gone off in a very bad mood indeed.

  ‘Nancy isn’t very happy about it,’ Olive felt bound to admit.

  ‘I’m afraid Nancy makes it her job not to be happy about a great many things,’ Audrey sighed ruefully. ‘Now, I’m going to ask the vicar to have another word with the warden to arrange for someone to come along and give everyone who’s interested a proper demonstration of a stirrup pump. Everyone who signs up for fire-watch duties will be given a hard hat as well as the stirrup pump, and every local council has been asked to provide supplies of sand for people to use. You might want t
o think about having some moved to Article Row so that your team can access it easily if need be.’

  ‘Yes, we could put it in one of the gardens. I’d say mine, but Nancy is bound to think I’m giving myself preferential treatment if I do that. Maybe Mr King will let us put it in the back gardens of one of his houses, since they’re unoccupied at the moment,’ said Olive.

  Mr King was a local landlord who owned several now empty properties at the other end of Article Row from Olive.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ Audrey approved.

  ‘We’ve got a couple of rakes in the garden shed. My father-in-law used to be a keen gardener and Agnes’s fiancé, Ted, came over and cleaned and sharpened everything in he autumn for Sally. She’s very kindly taken charge of the garden and its veggies for us.’

  A little later, making her solitary way home, Olive discovered that although initially she had worried about what she might be getting herself into, now she actually felt rather proud of herself for making that decision. For all that Nancy had been so unpleasant about it, surely it was far better to get involved and do something to protect the homes of which they were all so proud rather than risk an incendiary starting a fire that no one spotted until it was too late, and it had taken hold, possibly threatening the whole Row.

  FOUR

  ‘I expect that you and your young man have got something special planned for the evening of Valentine’s Day on Friday – that’s if Hitler doesn’t come calling with more bombs,’ Clara Smith, the girl who worked with Tilly in the Lady Almoner’s office at Barts Hospital, asked as they sat side by side in front of their typewriters, shivering in the room’s icy February chill. The two girls were working through yet another batch of new patients’ details for their files, and trying to keep warm with extra layers of clothing because the radiator in their office had been turned off to conserve precious fuel.

  Tilly loved her job and felt very proud of the fact that her head mistress had recommended her for the post. She’d worked hard not to let her or the Lady Almoner down, even though the war had brought an increase to her workload that had felt daunting at times.