‘You can have them all. I’m not interested,’ she told Carole in a cool voice, adding a smart toss of her head for good measure. She wasn’t having any chap thinking that she was the sort that would go chasing after him.
‘Just like I said before,’ Carole laughed, good-naturedly, ‘you’re after someone rich who isn’t in uniform.’
Katie didn’t say anything. She liked Carole but she suspected that the other girl wanted to egg her on so that she would join her in flirting with the army boys, and Katie didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t that flirting was beneath her, exactly – Katie hoped she wasn’t the sort that thought herself ‘above’ other girls in any kind of way – but at the same time she didn’t feel comfortable with the kind of giggly eyelash-fluttering behaviour to attract male interest that Carole plainly enjoyed.
The queue was moving forward and the army boys were slotting into it almost directly behind the girls. Katie could see that the tall good-looking corporal was giving her a contemptuous look. Well, let him. She didn’t care.
Luke’s mouth compressed as Katie turned away from him. So she was after a rich man, was she? Well, he might have guessed that just from the way she looked. She was outstandingly pretty, and she had that air about her when she stuck her nose up that somehow said she thought she was a cut above chaps like him. Not that Luke cared for one minute. Certainly not. If he was interested in getting himself a girl, which he wasn’t, it would be one who was more like her friend, with her ready smile and her bubbly personality.
Luke hadn’t wanted to come to the Grafton tonight; he’d much rather have gone down to Hatton Gardens and had a chat with his father, to find out just how much damage had been done last night by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. However, his men had begged him to come with them and seeing as some of them were still pretty wet behind the ears, in a strange city, and desperate for a bit of female company, Luke had decided that it was his duty to keep an eye on them. The Grafton was a respectable dance hall, Liverpool’s best – his own sister came here – but still he didn’t want to see his men getting themselves into any kind of trouble by drinking too much and flirting with the wrong girls. There had already been reports of fights breaking out between local men and lads in uniform when there’d been a bit of a misunderstanding over a girl.
Girls! Luke was glad that he’d decided not to get involved with one. Falling in love with Lillian and then discovering that she’d just been making a fool of him had done him a favour. He wasn’t the green fool now that he’d been when he had first met her. Take now, for instance; he’d seen straight off what that uppity-looking girl was like, and he wasn’t wrong either. She was another Lillian; the sort for whom a decent ordinary chap wasn’t good enough. The sort that wanted a chap with money and prospects, not one who was proud to put on a uniform and fight for his country.
‘The quiet one’s a smart piece,’ Andy Lawrence, the fair-haired private who had so cheekily called out to the girls, told Luke admiringly in a low voice, as they stood in the queue behind Katie and Carole.
‘Stuck-up piece, more like,’ Luke answered him. ‘You heard what she said: she’s after a chap with money.’
Unlike Andy, Luke had not made any attempt to keep his voice down, and Katie, overhearing Luke’s comment, could feel her ears burning.
Well, let him think what he liked, she decided defensively. She didn’t care, and she didn’t have to explain herself to him either.
It was a cold night, and those girls lucky enough to be queuing with a partner were snuggling up close, whilst several groups of girls were shivering and complaining that their feet would be so numb they wouldn’t be able to dance. Sensibly Katie was wearing her stout work shoes and carrying her borrowed dance shoes in a drawstring canvas bag. She was still conscious of feeling cold, though, and hoped that her nose had not gone too obviously pink.
‘I’m freezing,’ Carole complained.
‘You can have a borrow of my coat, love,’ the cheeky soldier behind them announced, overhearing Carole’s complaint, ‘but you’ll have to share it with me.’
‘Ooohhh.’ Carole pretended to complain, but Katie could see that her eyes were shining and she was smiling.
The army boys were, of course, trying to look as though the cold wasn’t affecting them and that they were far too tough and manly to be affected by a bit of winter weather. Actually, their corporal looked as though he wasn’t affected by it, Katie admitted, watching him hunch one shoulder and turn out of the wind as he lit himself a cigarette.
It had just gone twenty past six when Katie and Carole finally got inside, and handed over their coats to the cloakroom attendant.
‘Here, can you keep my ticket with yours?’ Carole asked her. ‘Only your bag is bigger than mine.’ Her eyes widened as she gazed at Katie’s frock. ‘Oh, you look ever so nice, Katie. Proper smart and stylish.’
‘It isn’t mine,’ Katie felt obliged to admit, sensing that Carole was just a little bit put out by the elegance of Katie’s outfit. ‘All I had was the black frock I wear when I go out with my dad, so my landlady very kindly let me borrow this. It belongs to her sister, but she’s with ENSA – you know, the Entertainments National Service Association, whereby entertainers join up and go out to entertain the troops – and she’s touring somewhere at the moment.’
To Katie’s relief her explanation had obviously mollified Carole because she told her generously, ‘Well, it looks ever so glamorous, it really does. It makes you look proper posh and no mistake.’
People were just starting to make their way into the ballroom, and out of habit Katie looked towards the band in their alcove next to the dance floor. She had already seen from the programme pinned up in the foyer that the band leader was a Mrs Wilf Hamer. Katie didn’t think she’d met her; for one thing she suspected that her father, who was inclined to be old-fashioned about such matters, would not have approved of a female band leader. She had forgotten all about the army boys in the queue now and the hostility of the tall dark handsome one, as she focused on the band, or so she told herself.
* * *
It was a pity the boy was so weak. Emily would have liked him to walk a bit faster so that they could get away from the theatre, just in case they were seen.
They’d almost reached the end of the alley when the boy stopped walking and went rigid.
Now what was wrong with him? Emily wondered what on earth she could do to get him to move and then looked back over her shoulder, keen to get away before anyone came out of the theatre and saw them.
Had those bullies hurt him worse than she had thought? Was he in some kind of pain?
‘What is it, what’s wrong?’ she began, only to stop when he suddenly looked up at the sky in terror.
Then Emily heard it: the low droning sound of approaching bombers, quickly followed by the shrill anxious scream of the air-raid warning.
A thrill of fear went through her, rooting her to the spot, followed by a sense of urgency as she cast a frantic look around herself for an air-raid shelter. The only one she could remember was two streets away on the far side of Roe Street.
‘Come on, we need to get ourselves into a shelter,’ she told the boy, her head down as she broke into a lumbering run towards Roe Street, dragging the boy with her.
Already the night sky was alight with the first crop of incendiary bombs, exploding into the darkness and, as they did so, illuminating the destruction they were causing. Emily froze in horror as one landed on the roof of a building in the next street, and then exploded, sending up a shower of bricks. Woven into the hellish noise of the devastation were the sounds of running feet, cries of warning, and screams of fear and pain as people fled the building and tried to escape the bombs.
Breaking free of the horror transfixing her, Emily started to run for