‘Oh, Samantha,’ her mother had protested, but Sam had just laughed. It was true, after all. She had never yearned for soft rounded curves instead of her boyish slenderness. Even as a young girl she had preferred tagging along with Russell and scrambling up trees and damming streams rather than dressing up in frocks and playing with dolls.
Nothing could have appealed more to her tomboyish spirit than playing a really active role in defending her country. If there had to be a war, then she very definitely wanted to be a part of it. Having joined up at nineteen after badgering her parents to give their permission, she had hoped to be doing something exciting. But now here she was, being sent to work as a clerk. Some war she was going to have.
She could feel her eyes beginning to smart, so she blinked fiercely. There was no point in feeling sorry for herself, not even if only a month ago she had been here in Liverpool seeing off some of the girls who had joined up at the same time, on the troop ship that would ultimately take them to Cairo where they would have goodness knew what kind of exciting adventures.
Her orders had been to report first to her billet, for her new posting at Deysbrook Barracks, on Deysbrook Lane, which she had managed to find out, via the ATS grapevine, contained amongst other things a large Royal Engineers vehicle workshop and depot, an army stores depot, and some small regular army units of men posted to home duties.
Since officially she wouldn’t be on duty until the morning, and as there didn’t seem to be anyone around for her to report to, her irrepressible desire for action was rebelling against sitting in an empty dorm waiting for something to happen when she could be outside exploring her new surroundings.
She had no idea which bed was going to be hers, but she knew it must be one of the two that weren’t made up, their biscuit mattresses, as the three hard sections of the bed were called, exposed. That being the case, she might as well take the one closest to the door because it would give her the best chance of reaching the ablutions quickly if she overslept.
Having dropped her kitbag on the bed, she went back the way she had come.
Whilst the dorm might be on the bleak side, the house itself was very handsome, even if the pale green distemper on the walls was flaking and the air smelled of chalk, boiled cabbage and damp mackintoshes, which reminded her of her own schooldays. The stairs she was walking down were quite grand, the banister rail smooth, broad, well polished and intricately carved. Had the house belonged originally to some rich Victorian ship owner or merchant, Sam wondered absently whilst she crossed the empty panelled hall with its black and white tiled floor.
Several doors opened off the hallway, all of them closed. The hallway itself, containing a wooden desk with a chair behind it, plainly intended to be occupied by someone in authority, was empty. Sam wasn’t going to waste time waiting for one of those closed doors to open now that she had made up her mind to go out and explore. Without looking back, she pulled open the front door and stepped outside.
The front garden consisted of dank-looking evergreen trees that screened the house from the road beyond, and a lawn into which were set pieces of limestone to form a tired-looking rockery. Sam didn’t waste time studying the garden in detail though. Perfectly well aware that she ought to have remained by the unmanned desk in the hallway, dutifully waiting for someone to appear to whom she could report, Sam hurried towards the road.
She suspected that at one time the house would have possessed elegant wrought-iron gates, but these would have been sacrificed for the war effort, melted down to provide much-needed metal for the manufacture of guns and tanks. As she stepped out onto the pavement she could see a bus trundling towards her and she ran to meet it, halting in the middle of the road so that the driver had to stop.
‘It’s against the rules for us to stop, miss, you know that. And you shouldn’t have stood out in the road like that. Could have caused a nasty accident, you could.’
‘I’m really sorry, Driver,’ Sam said. ‘Only I’m new here, and I was hoping you might be able to tell me the best way to get into the city.’
‘The city, is it? Well, there’s not much of that left, thanks to Hitler and his ruddy Luftwaffe. Bombed the guts out of it, they have.’
‘Yes, I heard about the terrible pounding Liverpool took in May last year,’ Sam sympathised.
‘Seven full days of it, we had, but they couldn’t bomb the guts out of us, I can tell you that. Missed most of the docks, even if they have flattened whole streets of houses and left families homeless. A bad time for Liverpool, that was. They got the Corn Exchange, Lewis’s store in Great Charlotte Street, and Blackler’s, an’ all. Broke my daughter’s heart, that did. She worked in Blackler’s, you see, and they’d just taken in a consignment of fully fashioned silk stockings that week. Worth ten thousand pounds, they was, and she’d promised herself a pair. I can tell you, she cursed them bombs every time she had to paint gravy browning down the back of her legs instead of having them silk stockings. A five-hundred-pound bomb fell on the William Brown Library. Every ruddy book on the shelves of the Central Library were burned, along wi’ everything in the Music Library. Mind you, it weren’t all bad news. In one way old Hitler did some of us a bit of a favour, since India House got set on fire, and all the Inland Revenue records got burned,’ he added with a big grin, but then his grin disappeared. ‘Seventeen hundred dead, we had, and well over a thousand seriously injured.’
Everything he had told her made Sam more determined to see for herself something of this city that had withstood so much and at such a cost.
As though he read the resolution in her eyes, the driver said abruptly, ‘By rights we shouldn’t be picking anyone up, seeing as we’re on our way back to the depot, but go on then, you might as well hop on. Tell Betty, the conductress, to let you off two stops before the bombed-out church.’
The final notes of the song died away, leaving Sally free to step down from the stage of the Grafton Ballroom. She had been standing in at rehearsal for one of the Waltonettes, the four girls who sang with Charlie Walton and his band. For a good few months now, poor Eileen just couldn’t seem to get rid of the cough that was plaguing her, so Sally was singing more regularly than Eileen. But a stand-in was still all she actually was, as Patti enjoyed making clear to her.
Patti, the most senior of the Waltonettes, had been a bit off with her right from the start. Sally knew that Patti looked down on her because she had been working as a lowly cloakroom assistant when Charlie had overheard her singing to herself and had insisted that she was good enough to fill in for Eileen. Patti had tossed her head and told Sally that the only reason Charlie had taken her on was because he was desperate. So Sally was determined to prove herself and to show Patti that she could sing every bit as well as the rest of them.
She could see Patti pulling a face as she announced sharply, ‘You was out of tune again, Shirley, in “Dover”, and you know how much the lads go mad for it.’ Ere, where do you think you’re off to?’ she demanded as she caught sight of Sally getting ready to leave.
‘I’ve got to go,’ Sally told her, ‘otherwise I’m going to be late for picking up my two boys from me neighbour.’ When Patti went thin-lipped she reminded her firmly, ‘I did tell Charlie when he first asked me to do this that I’d got other obligations. And I’m not a permanent member of the band, after all; I’m only standing in for Eileen.’
‘Go on then. But mek sure you’re here on time tomorrow for the rehearsal for Saturday night,’ Patti warned her.
Nodding, Sally picked up her bag and hurried towards the exit.
Stan Culcheth, the ex-sergeant major who had been invalided out of the army after losing an eye in the action in the desert, and who the owner of the Grafton had taken on to deal with any unwanted rowdiness amongst the large number of service personnel who came to the dance hall every week, gave her a cheery smile as he opened the back door for her.
‘Heard from that husband of yours yet?’ he asked kindly.
Sally