‘But what about your weekends at the Railway Café?’
Rita worked there every Saturday morning, clearing tables and helping with the washing up. The owners Salvatore and Liliana Semadini, Italians, had taken over in 1945. Before then it had always been a rather dingy place and not very clean but with Salvatore’s cheerfully optimistic outlook, it had completely changed. Liliana was a brilliant cook who could make a little go a very long way.
‘I’m sure they’ll understand,’ said Rita doggedly.
Her mother wasn’t about to give up so easily. ‘And then there’s secretarial college? We had such plans …’
‘Mum, they were your plans, not mine. Oh please let me go. This is an opportunity too good to miss. I like being around people. You know me, I like talking. If I was in a typing pool, I wouldn’t be allowed to say a word to a soul all day.’
‘But being able to type opens up all sorts of possibilities,’ Grace insisted.
‘Miss Bridewell said if I suit, I can start as a full-time shop assistant in January. January 5th. It’s a Monday.’
Grace couldn’t think straight. This was a disappointment because from the moment they were born, she had such plans for her girls. The war had changed everything. There were such good opportunities for women in the jobs market now. She knew Bonnie had wanted to be a nursery nurse, and Grace had been happy with that, but now that the girl had gone, would she get her training? She couldn’t do anything about Bonnie but she could do something about Rita. Grace knew that if Rita could get a secretarial post, she would never have the kind of worries about money that she had endured. Shop work was all well and good but it didn’t pay very well.
Rita was pressing for an answer. ‘So what do you say, Mum?’
There was no doubt that having Rita at work would be a godsend. Her money would make up the shortfall without Bonnie’s wage. Grace was already behind on the coal money and if they had another winter like last year and had to cut down any more, they’d both freeze to death long before the spring came.
‘Mum?’
‘I still want you to learn to type,’ Grace insisted.
‘I can go to night classes.’
Grace made a big thing of giving in, but in truth she was relieved. She agreed to let Rita become a Saturday girl for the whole of December and to begin in the fashion department on January 5th.
Bonnie was as content as she could be under the circumstances but she missed her home in Worthing and she missed her mother and Rita terribly. As she walked around the shops in Oxford Street on her afternoon off, she was missing her friend Dinah as well. How they would have loved trying on the dresses and taking tea in Lyons Corner House together.
Up until now, the full extent of bomb damage in the capital had eluded her. There had been several bombing incidents in Worthing but nothing on the scale she saw in London. Large areas were screened off but the obvious gap in the buildings told her straight away where a house or a shop was missing. Although it was strictly forbidden, the bombsites were swarming with boys playing war games and cowboys and Indians. In some areas, whole streets had been reduced to rubble. Shortages of building materials meant that rebuilding the nation’s capital was a slow business.
Shortages of other commodities were acute as well. Women still found it necessary to queue for hours outside a butcher’s or a grocer’s and Bonnie was surprised to see that large areas of public parks were still given over to allotments. There were few cars on the streets either. Petrol rationing kept their numbers down to a bare minimum.
Bonnie was lonely and friendless but the money in her post office account was mounting up. She was careful not to spend a shilling more than she had to. Once her waistline started to expand it wouldn’t be long before she’d have to dip into her savings in order to live. Soon she’d have to find a place where she could go to have the baby and then there was the thorny problem of what she would do after that. Where would she live? More importantly how could she take care of the baby and support them both?
When these things weren’t swirling around in her head, Bonnie struggled with a terrible ache in her heart. Why, oh why hadn’t her romance with George worked out? What had she done wrong? She couldn’t … wouldn’t believe he was a rotter. Hadn’t he told her time and again how much she meant to him? He’d made plans for his son from the moment she’d told him she was pregnant. She smiled fondly. He’d been so sure the baby was a boy.
‘Of course it’s a boy,’ he’d said with a mixture of indignation and pride when she’d challenged his assumptions. ‘That’s my boy. In my family, the first one is always a boy.’ And when she’d laughed, he’d kissed her until she was breathless.
It was quite ridiculous but the thing she worried about most of all was the locket George had given her. It was her first real present and when he had given it to her, George had declared his undying love. It wasn’t new. The catch looked a bit insecure but she was sure that if it did come off it would only fall into her bra. She must have dropped it in the factory because she remembered fingering it just outside the door.
When she’d arrived at the old factory on that last day in Worthing, it was deserted but the door leading to the street was open. She’d heard someone moving about in a room somewhere inside and had gone to see if it was George but she was met by a man in a brown overalls she presumed was the caretaker. He had his back to her and didn’t know she was there but she’d panicked and made a bolt for the entrance, tripped and dropped her bag. She was just by the door when he spotted her and shouted. She’d been so anxious to get away she’d just stuffed everything in her bag and run. The locket must have been lost then. If only she had stopped and turned around for a minute, she might have seen it on the ground. She missed it very much. Apart from the baby, it was the only thing she had to remember George by.
To ease her anguish, Bonnie began to write letters to the address in Pavilion Road. She didn’t post all of them, but every chance she got she told George about her day. Of the three or four that she did post, she wrote her address at the top of the page and begged him to let her know how he was. Through her tears, she promised not to make any demands on him. She only needed to know that he was alive and well. She did her best to make the letters upbeat. He mustn’t know how miserable she was. Once the envelope was sealed, she put her name and address on the back so that Mrs Kerr could get in touch with her and tell her if George was ill or something. Sometimes Bonnie was so miserable she thought she was losing her mind with grief but there was something within her that wanted the whole world to know how much she cared for him.
She did make contact with someone – Miss Reeves. Bonnie had remembered seeing an advertisement in the local paper with a box number for replies. That gave her the idea of going to the post office and asking about it. Bonnie discovered that, for a small rental fee, she could have her own box number with a key in the local branch. It was an ideal way of keeping in touch without anyone knowing where she lived. She reasoned that she had upset her mother enough so she would not worry her again but she was desperate for news of her and her sister. Miss Reeves was the obvious choice. At Sunday school she had made much of honesty and being trustworthy, so Bonnie wrote to her, asking for information about her family. In her letter, she explained that she could not, for very personal reasons, contact them herself, and asked Miss Reeves to send her news of her mother and sister.
Bonnie did her level best to stop thinking about George all the time but the bittersweet memories kept slipping through the crevices of her mind. She was careful not to let Richard or Lady Brayfield see her upset, but night after night her pillow was wet with tears.
Richard turned out to be a boy with a real thirst for knowledge. After a cautious beginning, he and Bonnie quickly became friends. She did her best to keep him occupied whenever he was in the house. After a while, even she could see that Lady Brayfield