When Tilly made a small sound of anguish Sally looked at her and apologised. ‘I’m sorry, Tilly, I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
‘It’s best that we all know and face the truth,’ Olive answered for Tilly.
‘Our Government can’t ignore what has happened.’
‘Does that mean that we’re going to be at war with Germany?’
‘I’m afraid so, Tilly,’ Olive answered quietly, brushing her hand over her daughter’s head. A sad smile touched her mouth when Tilly put her head on her shoulder, plainly overcome by her own emotions.
There was no need for Sally to get on her high horse and start lecturing her, Dulcie thought crossly. And besides, lipsticks were just as important as Hitler and his blitzkrieg. At least they were to her.
‘When do you think we’ll hear – officially, I mean?’ Olive asked Sally.
Somehow she had fallen into the habit of treating Sally as though they were closer in age than they actually were, finding it comforting to have Sally in the house to talk to. Secretly, in her heart, Olive was beginning to think of all of them here in her small all-female household as a sort of family. Already she felt protective of the girls – except of course Dulcie, who did not need anyone to protect her. Quite the opposite, in fact. In Olive’s opinion it was others who needed protecting from Dulcie.
‘I don’t know, but it’s bound to be soon,’ Sally answered.
There had been so much talk about war in all the newspapers, so much preparation for it, what with the Government producing so many leaflets about the dangers they would all be facing, that Tilly thought she had grown used to the fear that stalked them, but now, in her mother’s warm comfortable kitchen, with the sun still shining outside, she realised that she had not and that she had not known what fear was at all really until she thought about the fate of the poor Polish people and faced for the first time the true enormity of war.
Standing outside their church on Sunday morning, with everyone going on about the war, no one in her family would even have noticed if she hadn’t turned up this morning, Dulcie thought grumpily as she watched the worshippers leaving, all the young men in uniform grouping themselves together, passing round their cigarettes, not joking and indulging in horseplay as they had on previous Sundays, like children let out of school, but instead exchanging brusque words, spoken from the sides of their mouths, frowns replacing smiles. Even her own brother, Rick’s, normal smile was replaced by a look of determination. She hadn’t bothered going to the Palais last night after all. She hadn’t felt like it somehow.
Moving a little away from everyone else – in part because her mother was still going on about Edith’s singing and how she’d been clapped through three encores at a local working men’s club the previous night, and in part because she liked standing out from the crowd – Dulcie caught the now familiar words being spoken grimly into the warm September air, words like ‘devastation’, ‘POWs’, and ‘blitzkrieg’, mingling with phrases like ‘it will be us next’, ‘thousands left for dead’, ‘poor bloody bastards’. . .
Then one of the boy messengers that worked with the ARP men came cycling up full pelt, yelling out as loud as he could, ‘It’s happened. We’re at war. Mr Chamberlain has just said.’
Of course, uproar followed, with the ARP lot grabbing hold of the boy and hauling him off to question him, whilst the lads in uniform followed after them. Wives and mothers, sisters and sweethearts, clung together, whilst the older men, including her father, looked smaller and shrunken somehow.
‘Well, that’s all I need, isn’t it?’ Dulcie could hear Edith complaining. ‘A war, just when my singing career is looking like taking off.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry too much. Perhaps you’ll be able to sing to Hitler. Course, you’ll have to learn German first,’ Dulcie taunted her.
‘Dulcie, that’s enough of that,’ her mother stopped her, giving her an angry look. ‘There’s no need to go upsetting people more than they need to be upset.’ She looked across to where Rick was standing with a now much larger group of men.
A shiver of foreboding went through Dulcie. Thousands the soldiers had killed in Poland, thousands of young men just like her brother. For the first time since all the talk of war had started Dulcie felt its ice-cold fingers clutch at her heart and grip it painfully hard. She might argue with her brother, she might mock him and taunt him, but of all her family it was Rick to whom she was the closest, Rick who she secretly thought was the best brother that any girl could have, with his handsome looks and his easy-going charm, his way of somehow always being there to calm things down when she felt hard done by. Rick might look so tall and manly and indestructible in his army uniform, but he wasn’t indestructible, he was human flesh and blood, and vulnerable. A huge lump blocked her throat, feelings and thoughts she had never had to worry about before swarming through her head like wasps provoked by someone deliberately stirring up their nest.
‘The next thing we know, the ruddy Germans will be bombing us out of our houses and gassing us all to death,’ one elderly woman was screeching. ‘I can remember what it was like the last time, our lads coming back from the trenches with their lungs rotting from the Germans gassing them.’
Dulcie looked down at her own side. She’d tossed her gas mask to the back of her wardrobe, but of course Edith had hers and was now clutching the strap of its box tightly.
Rick came over. ‘Forget about dinner for me, Ma. Me and some of the other lads are going to see what we can find out. Sid Winters – you know, him whose cousin is a regular in the army – reckons that those who’ve already done their training will be shipped out to France pdq, and that our training will be rushed through now.’
Her brother seemed excited now that the initial shock of the announcement had faded, Dulcie recognised, her earlier concern changing to resentment that he could look so pleased when she was worrying herself sick about him. Her mother’s pinched expression became even more strained but she didn’t say anything, simply nodding and then turning to put her arm round Edith and draw her close to her in a manner similar to which Olive had drawn Tilly close the previous evening.
Mothers fussing over their favourites – well, let them, Dulcie thought acidly; she didn’t care.
‘I’ll have my dinner at Article Row,’ she told her mother tersely, turning on her heel without waiting for her to respond.
‘So it’s happened then?’ Olive found that she was automatically speaking in a lower voice as she asked the vicar’s wife the question to which she already knew the answer.
‘Yes. The Prime Minister has already made a formal announcement. I expect we’ll be able to hear what he said on the news at twelve o’clock.’ The two women exchanged tense white-faced looks.
The news that Britain was now formally at war with Germany hadn’t come out of the blue but it was still shocking, making the heart race and the stomach tense.
‘So many of our young men are already in uniform,’ Mrs Windle continued with a nod in the direction of the young men standing together outside the church in their khaki, their Royal Navy dark blue and their RAF blue serge. ‘And now thousands more will be joining them.’
Their small, well-attended church had been built at the same time as Article Row, by the same philanthropist, and stood on the