‘It weren’t. Ta.’ Johnny gave back the flask top.
‘Still, you’ll be all right, here,’ Tom directed his attention to the corporal, ‘though I wouldn’t fancy Pendenys as a billet. Great barn of a place.’
‘A billet? We don’t get nowhere near the place. Us lot are quartered in the stable block and the officers have been given the estate houses to kip down in. It’s them that live in the big house.’
‘Civilians.’ Johnny lit another cigarette.
‘You’re guarding civvies?’
‘We-e-ll, there’s a few military amongst them, but what they are nobody knows. Not even our CO gets inside Pendenys.’
‘There’s women, too.’ Johnny grunted derisively.
‘’S right. Fannies.’
‘There were Fannies in France in my war,’ Tom offered. First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Brave lasses, they’d been. ‘They drove ambulances. Went right up to the front line.’
‘These lot don’t drive nothin’. They throw a nasty hand grenade, though.’
‘Fannies?’ Tom frowned. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Johnny’s seen ’em,’ nodded the corporal. ‘He’d nipped into the bushes for a Jimmy Riddle and a grenade landed not a hundred yards away. Live, it was. He got the hell out of it pretty sharpish. Could have done him a mischief.’
‘Folk around these parts,’ Tom said, ‘reckon they’re getting Pendenys Place ready for high-ups from London – when the bombing starts.’
‘Nah.’ The corporal said it was nothing like that. The King and Queen, in his opinion, would go to Balmoral if ever they left London.
‘Then it’s a rum do,’ Tom frowned.
‘Rum? It’s bloody peculiar. Some of the civvies are foreigners – leastways one of our lads heard them talking foreign. And the military in the big house don’t have any badges.’
‘No regimental insignia?’
‘Nothing at all to show which lot they belong to. But keep it shut, mate, or it’s me for the glasshouse, and ta-ta to me stripes!’
‘Not a word,’ Tom assured him gravely. ‘And if you’d like to give me a call one day – I live at Keeper’s Cottage on the Rowangarth estate – I’ll show you Brock Covert.’
‘Ar. Thanks.’ It would suit the corporal to be able to point out a breach in security where any old Tom, Dick or German could slip in. ‘Might just do that. An’ keep away from here, eh? Can’t always guarantee that us two’ll be on guard duty.’
‘I will, and thanks. Good night, lads.’
Frowning, Tom made for Brock Covert. The Green Howards, a crack regiment, guarding civilians? And soldiers who wore no regimental badges? Fannies, an’ all, who’d forsaken ambulances for grenade throwing. It was a rum do, all right.
In early August, the Luftwaffe flew over the south of England dropping not bombs, but leaflets. They fell in thick scatters and were eagerly gathered up. They detailed Adolf Hitler’s proposals for peace between Great Britain and the Third Reich and were read with amazement.
Make peace with that one? Surrender – because that’s what it would amount to – to an ex-corporal? Mad as a hatter, that’s what he was and his leaflets a waste of good paper into the bargain.
On that day, too, Telegraphist Sutton was summoned to the Regulating Office and drafted to his first ship, and an envelope bearing the words ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ dropped through the letterbox of Keeper’s Cottage. With it was a pale blue air-mail letter, its American stamp franked clearly with a Washington postmark.
So it had come. Alice gazed at the manila envelope. The WRNS had not forgotten her daughter nor lost the application she filled in in a fit of pique almost seven weeks ago.
She swallowed hard and noisily, then placed the envelopes on the mantelpiece between the clock and the tea caddy. Oh, damn this war and damn Hitler! She gazed about her helplessly, then hurried into the passage to pick up the telephone.
‘Hullo, Winnie,’ she said to the operator. ‘Give me Rowangarth, will you?’ She stood, eyes closed, breathing deeply to fight the panic inside her. ‘It’s arrived, I think,’ she said without preamble when her call was answered. ‘An OHMS letter for Daisy. It’ll be about her medical …’
‘Put the kettle on,’ said Julia Sutton. ‘I’m coming over!’
‘Where have you been, dear?’ Helen Sutton laid aside the glove she was knitting in navy-blue wool.
‘Popped over to Keeper’s. Daisy’s heard from the Wrens about her medical, Alice thinks. She and Tom were hoping they’d forgotten her.’
‘I don’t know why she had to volunteer. It’s bad enough Drew having to go.’
‘Dearest, don’t worry. She might not pass the medical.’
‘Of course she will!’
‘Yes, she will. But they mightn’t send for her for ages. And we’ve got to face it, women will all have to do war work before so very much longer and the young ones could well be sent into the Forces.’
‘But they couldn’t do that! Not to young girls. Is nothing sacred?’
‘The way things are going, Mother, it seems not. I sometimes think I should be doing more.’
‘But you and Alice go nights to the church canteen and you helped with the evacuees.’
‘The evacuees have all gone home and serving cups of tea to soldiers and airmen isn’t doing a lot for the war effort.’
‘You’re the vicar’s wife, Julia. Surely that’s work of national importance?’
‘Well I’m not so sure a vicar’s wife would be exempt from war work. If push comes to shove – and it will, before so very much longer – they could have me emptying middens if they thought it would help with the war!’
‘You can’t mean it!’ Helen picked up her needles and began knitting furiously.
‘Of course not.’ How could she be so stupid and her mother getting more frail and more afraid as each day passed? They were all afraid, but that was no excuse for upsetting her mother, who worried all the time about Drew. ‘And if they did direct women into the Forces, it would only be as clerks and typists, or cooks. They wouldn’t be in any danger, truly they wouldn’t.’
‘So when Daisy goes we shouldn’t worry too much …?’
‘Daisy will be fine, and she hasn’t gone yet.’ Her mother adored Daisy; looked on her as an extension of Drew, which in reality she was. ‘Now stop your worrying, dearest. I haven’t seen the paper yet. Anything in it worth reading?’
‘Nothing! They’ve shelled Dover – from across the Channel, Julia. Those poor people! And they’ve been bombing fighter stations on the south coast.’
‘Don’t believe all you read in the papers.’ Julia wished she hadn’t asked. ‘Tune in to the BBC. They aren’t scaremongers.’
‘I did, and their news was just as bad, so it must be true. Our fighters were waiting for the German bombers, though. They were in the air before the Luftwaffe crossed our coastline. I wonder how we know they are coming, Julia?’
‘Beats me. Probably we’ve got spies on the French coast – or something …’
Julia