A chance eddy brought him near to her, nearer—
‘Ann!’
There was terror in his voice, desperation in his face. His hand stretched out to her. He was three yards away, two. The events of her life seemed to whirl before her. She was six years old again, was cowering before him as he grasped her arm, his heavy hand beating her again and again. She was eleven. Her teacher said that if she worked hard, she could pass the exam for the grammar school. But her father sneered at the very idea. Grammar school was not for the likes of her. She was needed on the farm.
‘Please, Ann—!’
He was her father. He couldn’t swim.
‘Dad?’ she croaked.
She had only to let go of the tree with one hand and reach out to him.
She saw Bobby cowering, Bobby terrified at having failed to do some task way beyond his years and strength, Bobby called nothing but ‘that boy’ and forced to call his own grandfather ‘Mr Cross’.
‘Ann, for God’s sake—’
He was close enough for her to touch his fingertips. But she did not. And a moment later he was gone, swallowed up into the black water.
‘Dad!’ she screamed.
She let go with one arm and strained after him. The hungry current got her in its grip, tugged and sucked at her.
‘Dad!’
Frantically, she flailed about, trying to find him, to catch hold of him.
But it was too late.
July 1940
‘No MORE school, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks!’ Annie’s friend Gwen chanted as she danced along the road.
Annie followed with a heavy heart. This was her last day of freedom, the last day she would walk towards home with Gwen, the last day of laughing and chatting to her friends at break time, the last—
‘Let’s go and look at the beach!’ Gwen called over her shoulder. Her freckled face was pink with excitement, her girlish plaits and her white ankle socks contrasting oddly with the woman’s figure beneath her cotton frock.
Annie glanced down at her own woefully small breasts. That was something else that Gwen had more of than her. It wasn’t fair.
‘All right,’ she agreed.
Anything to put off going home.
Gwen waited for her to catch up and threaded an arm through hers.
‘I’m never going to open another book again,’ she vowed.
Annie sighed. ‘I probably won’t be allowed to.’
‘Oh, you—’ Gwen pushed her away and pulled her in again. ‘You’re such an old swot. Mr Clifton’s favourite! Teacher’s pet! What did he say to you, when he called you up to his desk?’
‘He wished me luck and told me to keep going to the public library,’ Annie admitted.
She was going to miss Mr Clifton, Annie decided. He had stuck up for her when her dad had refused to let her take up her scholarship to the grammar school. He’d offered to go and speak to her dad about it. Not that it had done any good, but at least he had tried. And he’d always been kind to her and encouraged her reading, getting her to try new authors and discuss what she had read.
‘No need to tell you that,’ Gwen said. ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely? We’re grown-ups now. We’re not kids any more.’
‘It’s all right for you; you’re going out to work. You’ll have money of your own. I’ll just be stuck on the farm, day in, day out,’ Annie said.
School had been her escape. Her father didn’t see the point of her going, but it was the law that children had to attend until they were fourteen, and even he had to obey that. He flouted it as much as he could, keeping her back when they were busy on the farm, but still Annie had been able to get away most of the time. But from now on, she was going to be tied. It was like a prison sentence, stretching away ahead of her, with no let-off for good behaviour. Already, her father had given notice to the elderly man who had worked for them for the last ten years. She was cheaper, and available seven days a week.
‘But you’ll get time off, surely?’ Gwen said. ‘He won’t have you working in the evenings. We can go to the pictures together.’
‘Yes—’ Annie tried to be optimistic. ‘He can’t keep me in all the time, can he? We’ll go to the pictures Friday nights.’
‘Cary Grant …’ Gwen sighed. ‘Humphrey Bogart …’
‘Clark Gable …’ Annie responded.
‘Who would you like to be, if you was a film star?’ Gwen asked.
‘Judy Garland.’
How wonderful to be Dorothy and meet the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion … how wonderful to escape from your farm and land in Oz. But of course you had to live in Kansas for that to happen to you. Whirlwinds didn’t tear across Essex.
‘Judy Garland? Oh, no. I want to be glamorous. I want to be Vivien Leigh.’
And meet Rhett Butler.
‘Oh, yes …’ Annie sighed.
Both happy now in their fantasy world, the girls marched arm in arm along the dusty summer streets of Wittlesham-on-Sea. The neat terraces of guest houses leading to the sea front still had ‘Vacancies’ notices hopefully displayed in their front windows, but many of the gardens had their roses and geraniums replaced by lettuces and peas as people answered the call to dig for victory.
When they reached the sea front, they stopped automatically and looked towards the pier.
‘Quiet, isn’t it?’ Gwen said. ‘My mum says it’s hardly worth keeping open.’
Gwen’s mum ran The Singing Kettle, a tearoom fifty yards from the pier entrance. The previous summer, the last summer of peace, it had been a little gold-mine, and Gwen had been kept as busy as Annie, running from kitchen to table with trays of teas and cakes and sandwiches, and back again with piles of dirty crockery. This year the visitors were few and far between. People were reluctant to go on holiday when invasion forces were threatening just across the Channel.
‘Blooming Hitler,’ Gwen grumbled as they surveyed the sprinkling of holiday-makers and the barbed wire entanglements running the length of the beach. ‘Gone and ruined everything, he has. That’s what my mum says.’
‘Yes,’ Annie agreed. ‘We’ve had to plough up the fields by the road because of him.’
Digging for Victory had meant that her father had had to change some of his farming practices. He hadn’t liked that at all, and she and her mother had been the ones to bear the brunt of it.
The girls turned away from the pier and strolled along together towards the southern end of the promenade. Even fewer businesses were open here, and the locked doors and boarded-up windows gave the prom a forlorn air.
‘D’you really want to go and work at Sutton’s Bakelite?’ Annie asked.
Gwen shrugged. ‘It’s good money, and it’s all year round,’ she pointed out.
Year-round jobs were at a premium in Wittlesham, where seasonal work was the norm.
‘Yes,