It was Dulcie who responded to her request. Dulcie had proved surprisingly adept at tuning in the wireless, even though she complained that if she wasn’t careful the mesh on the front, close to the tuning dial, scratched her nail polish.
Olive loved her wireless. She often listened to it when she was alone in the kitchen after the girls had gone to work, humming along to popular songs as she did her housework, listening carefully when Elsie and Doris Waters were in charge of the popular Kitchen Front programme with its tips for housewives anxious to make their rations stretch as far as they could. Both Olive and Audrey Windle agreed that they hated missing Mr J.B. Priestley’s Postscript broadcasts. Nancy, being Nancy, said that listening to music made housewives lazy and that she wouldn’t have a wireless in her house at all if it hadn’t been for her husband insisting.
The kettle was boiling. Tilly and Agnes had got the teacups.
‘You sit down here, Mrs Robbins, then you can hear the news properly. Tilly and I will sort out the tea,’ offered Drew.
He really was everything that any mother could want in a prospective son-in-law – should she be wanting to see her daughter married – but the problem was that Olive did not want to see Tilly married, not for a long time yet.
Right now, though, Olive wanted to concentrate on listening to the news.
Accompanied by various ‘shushings’ and, ‘It was you wot spoke, not me,’ from the girls, the newsreader, Alvar Lidell tonight, began his broadcast in a very hushed tone as he reassured the country that, despite Hitler’s attempts to destroy the spirit of Londoners, the city was standing firm, and with it St Paul’s. Olive suspected that this wasn’t the only home in which a small cheer went up at this announcement. There was also an announcement confirming the news that a full corps of Canadians would be stationed in Britain.
‘So many people from the Commonwealth coming to help – Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, and Canadians – it’s wonderful, isn’t it?’ Olive murmured, ‘especially when many of them have never even been to this country before.’
‘What’s not wonderful is the way in which America is holding back,’ said Drew grimly.
‘That’s not your fault,’ Tilly assured him loyally. ‘You’ve been sending articles back to Chicago, that tell what it is really like here, Drew.’
There was also a brief mention of the Greeks’ offensive against the Italians in Albania, plus an even more carefully worded announcement about the ongoing situation in the Middle East, before the news bulletin came to an end.
War! No wonder they all crowded round the wireless to listen to the news. Those dry, dusty facts translated for so many of them into events affecting the lives of loved ones both at home and abroad, Olive thought sombrely as she went upstairs to wash and change into her smart WVS uniform ahead of her meeting.
Two
‘Who on earth can that be knocking on the front door at this time of night?’ Olive complained, as she was hanging up her coat in the hallway. She had only just got in from her WVS meeting and was looking forward to what she hoped would be an uninterrupted night’s sleep in her own bed without any air-raid sirens going off. She’d made the air-raid shelter, at the bottom of the garden, as comfortable as possible but there was nowhere like your own bed, even though Olive made sure that the shelter beds had immaculately washed and ironed linen and cosy blankets.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll go,’ she called into the kitchen where the girls were making cocoa and toast, the smell of this homely but appetising fare making her empty stomach rumble.
Automatically she switched off the hall light as she reached the front door to make sure that the house didn’t contravene the blackout regulations.
The sight of a man in army uniform standing on the doorstep, his face shadowed by his cap, had her asking uncertainly who he was, recognition only dawning when the visitor announced cheerfully, ‘It’s me, Rick, Dulcie’s brother, Mrs Robbins. I’ve come to see Dulcie.’
‘Rick!’ Dulcie exclaimed excitedly from the dark hallway, obviously having recognised her elder brother’s voice, rushing past Olive to throw herself into his arms. ‘I know you said you’d got leave and you’d come and see me, but I thought that you wouldn’t be able to get here, with London being out of bounds to servicemen on leave because of the bombing.’
‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ her brother told her, tapping the side of his nose in a knowing way. ‘I’d have been up in London before now, but Mum was a bit pulled down so I stayed on there longer than I’d planned.’
‘Dulcie, let Rick get inside so that we can shut the door and put the light on,’ Olive protested.
It was Rick himself who took charge in a nicely masculine way, smiling at her and then bundling his sister inside before calmly closing the door, at the same time managing politely to remove his cap.
The conversation in the hall could be heard through the open kitchen door, and Tilly felt her stomach muscles tense. She’d had a huge crush on Rick when she’d first met him. He’d made it clear, though, that he wasn’t interested in her, and he’d hurt her by doing so.
But things were different now. She’d been a girl then; she was a woman now, and more importantly, since then she’d met and fallen in love with Drew. But she’d never said anything to Drew about Rick or her silly crush on him.
Drew. She pressed closer into the curve of his arm, whilst the five of them, Drew and herself, and Agnes and Ted and Sally, looked towards the hall door.
Once he was in the kitchen and the introductions had been made Rick allowed himself a second look at Tilly. She’d been a pretty girl and now she was an even prettier young woman, and one who’d got herself a steady bloke, by the look of things. Pity that; he’d been looking forward to seeing her and dancing with her on New Year’s Eve. In fact, he recognised, he’d thought rather a lot about Tilly recently, imagining and anticipating that pretty giveaway blush of hers when she saw him. Only she wasn’t blushing and she wasn’t interested in him at all. Rick was an easygoing good-natured young man with a philosophical outlook on life. There were plenty of other pretty girls. But Tilly had been that little bit special, even if his sister had warned him off her, telling him that she didn’t want him flirting with the daughter of her landlady, who was a very protective mother.
Once again Sally went to fill the kettle. Now it was Dulcie’s turn to perch on a male knee as she sat close to her brother.
‘Desert was it, mate?’ Ted asked with a nod in the direction of Rick’s well-tanned face.
‘North Africa,’ Rick confirmed, adopting the same brisk economical way of speaking.
‘Sidi Barrani?’ Drew guessed, removing his cigarettes from his pocket to offer them around.
Rick nodded as he lit one and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs, the kitchen light illuminating the angles of his battle-hardened desert-tanned profile before he blew it out again.
‘Which reminds me,’ he told Dulcie, ‘I met up with a friend of yours in the desert – that Italian guy from Liverpool. Good chap. It can’t have been easy for him, seeing as it was the Italians we were fighting, but he never hesitated for a minute. He’s on leave as well. He’s gone home to see his parents in Liverpool.’
Dulcie tossed her head. It was a pity that Wilder hadn’t been here to listen to Rick’s comment. She’d have to get her brother to repeat it in front of him. The good-looking Italian she’d flirted with at the Hammersmith Palais in an attempt to make some of the other Selfridges girls jealous didn’t mean anything to her, but it wouldn’t have done Wilder any harm to hear that another attractive man was keen on her.
Olive, who had been watching Tilly closely, knowing how she had once felt about Rick, wasn’t as relieved as she once would have been to see how uninterested in him Tilly was. Olive wasn’t at all happy about the way Tilly had been