‘Insult my Irene again, you bitch, and I’ll wipe the floor with yer.’
Rosie spun about to see that Peg Price had sprinted down her front path to yell and jab a finger at her. The woman must have been loitering behind the curtains, waiting for her to return, Rosie realised. On the walk home her surprise meeting with Gertie, and everything they’d talked about, had been occupying her mind and she’d not given her run-in with her rotten neighbours another thought.
Rosie contemptuously flicked two fingers at the woman’s pinched expression before pushing the pram over the threshold and closing the door behind her.
A savoury aroma was wafting down the hall from the kitchen, making Rosie’s stomach grumble.
‘That you, Rosie?’
‘Yeah. Sorry I’m late.’ Rosie carried on unfastening Hope’s reins, thinking her father had sounded odd. But she gave his mood little thought; she was too wrapped up in counting her blessings. And she was determined to work for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service. If she got turned down, as Gertie had, she’d try again and again until she was accepted.
Rosie cast her mind back to the time when the female ambulance auxiliary had entered their bombed-out house and with a simple joke made her laugh, then tended to her father with brisk professionalism. Rosie had been impressed by the service, and the people in it. But her baby daughter had taken up all her time and energy then. Now Hope was older, toddling and talking, and Rosie had the time to be useful. She wanted her daughter to grow up in peacetime with plentiful food to eat and a bright future in front of her. Wishing for victory wasn’t enough; she needed to pitch in and help bring it about, as other mothers had throughout the long years of the conflict.
From the moment Gertie had recounted how the ambulance crew had battled to save her baby’s life, Rosie knew that’s what she wanted to do … just in case at some time the baby dug from beneath bomb rubble was her own.
John appeared in the parlour doorway wiping his floury hands on a tea towel.
Lifting her daughter out of the pram, Rosie set Hope on her feet. The child toddled a few steps to be swept up into her granddad’s arms.
‘How’s my princess?’ John planted a kiss on the infant’s soft warm cheek.
In answer Hope thrust her lower lip and nodded her fair head.
‘See what Granddad’s got in the biscuit tin, shall we, darlin’?’
Again Hope nodded solemnly.
‘Don’t feed her up or she won’t eat her tea,’ Rosie mildly protested, straightening the pram cover. She watched her father slowly hobbling away from her with Hope in his arms. Lots of times she’d been tempted to tell him not to carry her daughter in case he overbalanced and dropped her. But she never did. Hope was her father’s pride and joy, and his salvation.
In the aftermath of the bombing raid, it had seemed that John’s badly injured leg might have to be amputated. Sunk in self-pity, he’d talked of wanting to end it all, until his little granddaughter had been taken to see him in hospital and had given him a gummy smile. At the time, Rosie had felt pity and exasperation for her father. In one breath she’d comforted him and in the next she’d reminded him he was luckier than those young servicemen who would never return home.
John carefully set Hope down by her toy box and started stacking washing-up in the bowl.
‘You stewing on something, Dad?’ Rosie asked. Her father was frowning into the sink and he would usually have made more of a fuss of Hope than that.
‘Nah, just me leg giving me gyp, love.’ John turned round, smiling. ‘Talking of stew, that’s what we’ve got. Not a lot in it other than some boiled bacon scraps and veg from the garden but I’ve made a few dumplings to fill us up.’
‘Smells good, Dad,’ Rosie praised. ‘Sorry I didn’t get home in time to give you a hand. We had a nice walk, though.’
‘’S’all right, love. Enjoy yerself?’ John enquired, running a spoon, sticky with suet, under the tap. ‘Anyhow, you can help now you’re back. There’s a few spuds in the colander under the sink. Peel ’em, will you?’
Having filled a pot with water, Rosie sat down at the scrubbed parlour table and began preparing potatoes while filling her dad in on where she’d been. ‘First I went to the chemist and got your Beecham’s Powders.’ She pulled a small box from the pocket of her cardigan and put it on the table. Her dad relied on them for every ailment. ‘Then I took a walk to Cheapside and bumped into an old friend from the Windmill Theatre—’
‘You’re not going back there to work!’ John interrupted. ‘If you want a job you can get yourself a respectable one now you’re a mother.’ He had spun round at the sink and cantankerously crossed his wet forearms over his chest.
‘I don’t even want to go back there to work, Dad,’ Rosie protested. ‘Gertie doesn’t work there now either. She’s got a little girl a bit older than Hope. The two kids had a go at having a chat.’ Rosie smiled fondly at her daughter. ‘Made a friend, didn’t you, darling?’
‘Gertie? Don’t recall that name,’ John muttered, and turned back to the washing-up.
Rosie frowned at his back, wondering what had got his goat while she’d been out. But she decided not to ask because she’d yet to break the news to him about the employment she was after and she wasn’t sure how he’d take it.
‘Gertie was one of the theatre’s cleaners. She left the Windmill months before me.’
‘Mmm … well, that’s all right then,’ John mumbled, flicking suds from his hands. He felt rather ashamed that Popeye’s visit had left him on edge, making him snappy.
‘I am getting a job, though, Dad.’
‘Ain’t the work I’m objecting to, just the nature of it,’ John muttered.
‘You didn’t mind the money I earned at the Windmill Theatre, though, did you?’ Rosie reminded him drily, dropping potatoes in the pot.
‘If you’d not been working at that place you’d never have got in with a bad crowd and got yourself in trouble,’ John bawled. He pursed his lips in regret; the last thing he wanted to do was overreact and arouse his daughter’s suspicions that something was wrong.
‘I got into trouble because of the company you kept, not the company I kept,’ Rosie stormed before she could stop herself. It was infuriating that her father still tried to ease his conscience by finding scapegoats. In Rosie’s opinion it was time to leave the horrible episode behind now. They both adored Hope so something good had come out of bad in the end.
The slamming of the front door had John turning, tight-lipped, back to the sink and Rosie lighting the gas under the potatoes.
‘What’s going on?’ Sensing an atmosphere, Doris looked suspiciously from father to daughter.
‘I was just telling Dad that I saw an old friend from the Windmill Theatre. The poor woman has had dreadful bad luck. A couple of years ago their house got hit and she lost three of her young sons.’
Doris crossed herself, muttering a prayer beneath her breath. ‘She was lucky to get out herself then.’
‘She was very lucky, and so was her husband and eldest boy,’ Rosie said after a pause. She knew Doris could act pious, so she wasn’t going to mention that the three children had died alone. Her stepmother would have something to say about neglect despite the fact that her own daughter-in-law and grandson rarely came to visit her because they were never invited.