‘What do you mean by that?’ Grace demanded uncertainly.
‘Well, when she’s bin in here wi’ her mother she’s been all hoity-toity and keen to let us know how much better than us she is, hasn’t she? I must say I was surprised when you first introduced her as your cousin, you being such a decent ordinary sort and her being so full of herself.’
Susan’s comment made Grace feel too uncomfortable to respond. It was true that there had been times, especially since they had grown up, when Bella had made her feel that she considered Grace’s side of the family to be inferior to her own, but Grace had always dismissed this as Bella simply not understanding how hurtful she was being and not really meaning any harm. In fact, it was because of this attitude on the part of her cousin that she had been so pleased when Bella had invited her to the dance. Family meant a lot to Grace and she wanted to get on with her cousins and be close to them.
It was St John Ambulance tonight and, as always, the thought of going to her first-aid class delighted her. As a little girl Grace had dreamed of becoming a nurse but the training to become a proper nurse, at a teaching hospital like Liverpool’s Mill Road or the Royal, rather than merely working at one of the infirmaries that took on girls to care for the long-term ill, was costly and lengthy, with the uniform costing twenty-one pounds up front and a probationer nurse’s wages only eighteen shillings a week for the first year. It would also have meant her having to live in at a nurses’ home, so she wouldn’t have been able to help out at home with her wages or an extra pair of hands, and so she had felt it her duty to take the job at Lewis’s, for which a kind neighbour whose cousin worked there had put her forward.
It was gone six o’clock before her work was finally over for the day and she was free to leave. The warmth of the still sunny August evening made her feel that she would rather walk home than sit on a bus, even though that would take her a good half-hour.
Their house was the end one of a terrace, which meant that there was a side passage that led to the gardens at the rear of the houses, and as Grace opened the gate into their own garden she heard her mother calling out from the kitchen.
‘Is that you, Grace, love?’
‘Yes, Mum.’ Grace went to join her.
‘Just look at these cups,’ her mother told her, gesturing towards the solid-looking plain pottery cups she was drying. ‘I know it’s daft but I felt that envious of Vi’s lovely china when we were there. Proper bone china it is too, and so pretty. It reminded me of a little doll’s tea set we used to play with when we were kiddies. It belonged to our nan’s sister, our great-aunt Florence. She kept in it a corner cupboard in her front parlour and she’d let us play with it when we went to visit her. I can’t tell you how badly I wanted that tea set, Grace.’
Jean laughed. ‘Of course, Vi wanted it as well and there were some fair words said between us as to who should have it. In the end it went to Great-aunt Florence’s own granddaughter. Of course, now Vi can afford to have proper china of her own.’
Grace frowned as her mother gave another small sigh. Personally she had thought her auntie Vi’s china nothing to get excited about but she could see that her mother felt differently.
‘I can’t see Dad and Luke being happy with them fiddly little handles,’ she pointed out.
Jean laughed again. ‘No. And that’s exactly what I told myself as well. I’m just being daft, like I said. Even if I had the money I wouldn’t go wasting it on summat that would only end up broken.
‘Run down to the allotment, will you, love,’ she told Grace, changing the conversation, ‘and tell your dad to bring up another lettuce, and some tomatoes? I want to use up the rest of this beef and we might as well have it cold with it being such a warm evening.’
The allotments weren’t very far away and, as Grace had expected, when she got there she found her father deep in conversation with several of the other men, all of them looking serious enough for her to hesitate about interrupting. But on the other hand Mum wouldn’t be too pleased either if they didn’t get back soon, and with the lettuce and tomatoes she had asked for.
Whilst she stood there undecided her father looked up and saw her. Saying something to the other men, he came over to her.
‘Mum sent me down to tell you that she wants a lettuce and some toms for tea, Dad. Is everything all right?’ she asked him as she walked with him towards his plot. ‘Only it looked like you were all talking about something serious.’
Grace knew she was lucky to be part of a family in which her parents encouraged their children to talk to them rather than one that observed the traditional ‘children should be seen and not heard and speak only when they were spoken to’ rule. Since all the talk of war had started, her mother and father had included her and Luke in their discussions about what was going on. But even so, there was something in her father’s expression now that made Grace wonder if she had perhaps overstepped the mark.
‘I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have asked,’ she began, only to see her father shake his head and put his arm around her shoulders in a rare gesture of fatherly affection.
‘It’s all right, lass, you’ve done nowt wrong. It’s just that there’s bin a bit of news that’s teken folk a bit aback, and we were just discussing it.’
‘What kind of news?’ Grace asked, assuming he was going to tell her about yet another new instruction from the Government.
‘Seemingly Russia has announced that it’s entering a non-aggression pact with Germany, and we all know what that means,’ he told her heavily.
For a minute Grace was too shocked to say anything. Her throat had gone dry and her heart was pounding.
‘That means war, doesn’t it?’ she managed to ask eventually.
Her father nodded sombrely. ‘It looks pretty much like it. Now, do you think your mum will want a few radishes as well?’
Grace recognised that her father did not want to continue to discuss the shocking news.
War! Was it her imagination or as they walked back home together was there really a brassy tinge to the evening sky and a brooding sulphurous prescience of what was to come?
‘My brother reckons that we’ll be at war before the month’s out, and he says that his unit have been put on standby alert ready,’ Lucy, one of the other first aiders, was telling everyone importantly when Grace arrived at the St John Ambulance Brigade station at the local church hall for their regular Tuesday evening meeting. Originally when Grace had joined the St John Ambulance Brigade, like all the other young cadet members, her ‘responsibilities’ had included running errands and doing other jobs for local elderly people, and generally making herself useful. Grace still called to see Miss Higgins, a spinster in her late seventies who lived in the next street, knowing that as well as liking having someone to run her errands, the elderly lady enjoyed the opportunity to talk about her youth and to gossip about her neighbours.
Now, as a fully qualified first aider, Grace got to wear a navy-blue drill overall and an armband printed with the words ‘First Aid’, in addition to being issued with a steel helmet, but tonight it was so warm that she had removed the helmet whilst she and the girl partnering her prepared their ‘patient’ for her ambulance journey to hospital, having been on hand when she was ‘rescued from a bombing incident’.
A splint secured the patient’s leg, and several bandages had been applied to her torso. Moving the deliberately unhelpfully inert body of their patient in the heat of the enclosed space of the church hall had left Grace’s face flushed and damp, and now she sat back a little anxiously on her heels, awaiting the inspection of her work by one of the senior nurses from Mill Road Hospital, who had volunteered to come to teach the volunteers all the basics