Goodnight Sweetheart. Annie Groves

      ‘That’s different,’ Molly protested. ‘Me and Johnny have only just got engaged, and his mam’s not living on her own.’

      ‘It seems to me that you aren’t that bothered about poor Johnny. You hardly ever talk about him,’ June sniffed disparagingly.

      ‘I write to him every day,’ Molly defended herself. It was true, after all, even if Johnny’s letters back to her didn’t arrive with the fatness and frequency of Frank’s to June. She wondered, though, if her regular letter-writing was more down to guilt than anything else. She certainly didn’t look forward to receiving Johnny’s letters, not like June did her Frank’s.

      And not like she would have done if it had been Eddie who was writing to her.

      ‘And you don’t wear Johnny’s ring,’ June pointed out critically.

      ‘It made my finger go green and you said that that was because it wasn’t proper gold,’ Molly reminded her, trying to subdue her guilty feelings over how much time she now spent thinking about Eddie. Eddie’s warm but gentle kiss had not left her feeling worried and wary like Johnny’s fiercer kiss had done. Eddie was familiar and his return to her life welcome, whereas she felt she hardly knew Johnny at all.

      ‘Well, that’s as maybe, but from the way you were kissing Eddie Saturday night, no one would ever have guessed you were engaged to someone else.’

      Molly could feel her face starting to burn, betraying her guilt.

      ‘It was you who wanted me and Johnny to be engaged, not me. I don’t want to be engaged to him – I never have,’ she burst out, angry tears filling her eyes. Her heart was thudding and she felt sick, but relieved as well, now that she had finally said how she felt.

      She could see how much her outburst had shocked her sister, who was simply standing staring at her.

      ‘Well, you can’t break your engagement to him now, Molly,’ June said finally. ‘Not with ’im definitely about to go to war. A shocking thing that would be!’ she pronounced fiercely. ‘It would bring shame down on all of us, me and our dad included.’

      Molly tried to blink away her tears. A hard lump of misery lay like a heavy weight inside her chest. She knew that what June had said was right, but she still wished desperately that she was not engaged to Johnny.

      Because of Eddie?

      Something about his gentleness reminded her of Frank. Eddie made her laugh and she felt safe with him. He didn’t possess Johnny’s brash self-confidence, and he didn’t share Johnny’s desire to take things further than she wanted to go. From listening to the conversation of the other machinists, Molly was well aware that not all girls felt as she did. Some of them, like May, actually not only welcomed the advances of men like Johnny, but also actively encouraged them. But May was nearly twenty-two and Molly was only seventeen.

      She wasn’t too young, though, to know that the kiss Eddie had given her had been more than that of a childhood friend, and she wasn’t too young either to know that she had liked being kissed by him. They had been children together, she and June playing hopscotch in the street, whilst Eddie and the other boys played football, all of them sitting down together on Elsie’s back steps to eat meat paste sandwiches and drink their milk. It had always been Eddie who had taken Molly’s side and defended her from the others, and Eddie, too, who had comforted her when she had accidentally allowed Jim’s best marble to roll down the street grid. Luckily he and Jim had been able to rescue it. Eddie who had carried her safely piggyback, in the mock fights the close’s children had staged, telling her to ‘hang on’ whilst she had screamed and giggled with nervous excitement. In the winter, when it was too cold to play outside, they had done jigsaws together on Elsie’s parlour table, and then later, when they were more grown up, had scared themselves silly with ghost stories. But then Jim and Eddie had left school and moved into the grown-up world of work, Jim joining his father at the gridiron and Eddie getting work on a fishing boat out of Morecambe Bay so that his visits became infrequent and then fell off altogether.

      Molly couldn’t say honestly that she had missed him. She had been busy growing up herself, anxious to follow in June’s footsteps, and leave school and get a job. But now that he’d been back she discovered how much she enjoyed his company, and how their relationship was all the sweeter for the years they had been apart and the growing up they had both done.

      But now June’s accusation forced Molly to confront a truth she hadn’t wanted to recognise. It had been bad enough being engaged to Johnny before, but now when the first person she thought of when she woke up in the morning was Eddie, just as he was the last person she thought of when she went to bed at night; when every time she did think about him her heart lifted and bounced so hard against her chest wall that it made her feel dizzy, her engagement to Johnny was an unbearable burden.

      ‘Where’s our dad?’ Molly asked June. She felt unable to look at her sister, but somehow she had managed to stem her tears.

      ‘Gone down the allotment to have one of them committee meetings. Uncle Joe came round for him half an hour back.’ June’s voice was terse. ‘Seemingly Uncle Joe has been asked to take charge, and make sure that them as has allotments looks after them proper, like. I heard him telling Dad that he wants to set up some sort of plan so that they can grow enough stuff for everyone in the close. Mind you, it will take a bit more than him telling a few jokes to get some of that lot from the allotments to listen to him. Even Dad admits that some of them are that cussed they won’t listen to anyone.’