Fran was in London now, having volunteered for ENSA, the group of performers who entertained the troops. She had written to Jean to tell her that she would be working over Christmas but that she wasn’t allowed to say where.
That must mean she’s overseas, Jean guessed.
Much as she loved her younger sister and felt sorry for her, in some ways Jean was relieved that Fran wouldn’t be able to spend Christmas with them.
Her own twin daughters were going through a phase when all they wanted was to go on the stage themselves, and having their glamorous Auntie Fran around, talking about the shows she was going to be in, wasn’t really what Jean wanted them to hear at the moment, especially not when Fran herself had already said that she thought their dancing was good enough to get them on stage.
Sam, who could be protectively strict with his children if he thought it necessary, would never entertain the idea of them going on stage, especially not with there being a war on, and all sorts of men likely to be ogling every girl they saw dancing around in a skimpy costume.
Thinking of the twins made Jean hope that their billetee wouldn’t be too put out by the noise the pair of them made with their gramophone records and their dancing. The nice young woman who had come to see her about her spare room had told her that her boss – ‘Mac,’ she had called him, explaining that his real title was ‘Officer Commanding Beds’– would be thrilled to have such a clean bedroom in what was obviously a very well-run home, to add to his list of billets.
‘Flannelling you, she was,’ Sam had laughed when Jean had reported this comment to him later.
‘No such thing,’ Jean had insisted firmly. ‘She was telling me that some of the rooms she’d been to see weren’t fit to house an animal, never mind a decent young woman.’
Vi had, of course, sniffed disparagingly on being told that Jean was to have someone billeted on her, announcing that she would never be able to let some stranger sleep in one of her own beds. By rights Vi, with her three empty bedrooms now that her son and daughter had left home, should have put her name down for billetees but with Edwin on the local council she had boasted to Jean that she had managed to avoid doing so.
‘Just look at the situation at Bella’s,’ Vi had told Jean crossly, at the service for those who had lost their lives in the same bomb that had killed Bella’s husband and his parents. ‘Newly widowed and still having to have living with her those Polish refugees she was forced to take in. Not just one of them either, Jean,’ Vi had complained bitterly. ‘There’s the mother and the daughter, both of them adults and eating their heads off, and the mother’s got that son of hers expecting to stay at Bella’s whenever he comes to visit.’
Privately Jean’s sympathies lay with her niece’s billetees, who, from what she had learned of them on the single occasion she had met them, had seemed very pleasant, especially the son, Jan, who was in the air force and had taken part in the Battle of Britain.
There was no denying that her sister was a snob and a social climber, Jean admitted now, as she went back to her cleaning, rubbing fiercely at the kitchen sink taps. The war meant it was getting harder now to buy proper cleaning things. Not that Jean would ever waste her money on fancy cleaning stuff when a bit of a wipe with vinegar could do the job just as well.
Vi’s snobbery didn’t seem to have brought her any happiness so far as Jean could see. Even as a child Vi had been one of those people who was never satisfied or happy, unless she was sure that she had the best of things, and could look down on others, and she was just the same now.
* * *
‘Have we got time to walk home past the Royal Court Theatre, do you think?’ Lou asked her twin sister, Sasha.
Sasha shook her head. ‘Better not. Mum will only start asking us why we’re late and where we’ve bin, you know what she’s like. It’s a pity that Auntie Fran has gone to London. If she was still here she’d have bin able to work on Mum for us and help us to get some stage work, p’haps in one of the Christmas pantos. After all, she said we were good enough.’
The twins exchanged disappointed looks. They were, as Jean herself often said, as alike as two peas in a pod with no one really able to tell the difference between them unless they themselves allowed that to be seen.
At fifteen they were in many ways young for their age, still very much ‘schoolgirls’, with their plaits and freckles and their giggles. But that outward youthfulness hid a shared fierce determination to follow their auntie Fran onto the stage, along with an awareness of how strongly their parents would oppose that ambition.
The jobs they would be going into in Lewis’s department store after Christmas – proper jobs with proper wages, not just the bits of work they had been doing running errands for Mrs Lucas, the elderly owner of the old-fashioned dress shop in the city centre, which was closing down after Christmas – showed what their parents wanted for them: safe steady jobs that would keep them at home until the time came for them to marry. But the twins had other ideas and dreams, which had become all the more compelling with the onset of war and their auntie Fran’s recent visit.
On the top floor of their parents’ three-storey house in their shared attic bedroom, the twins regularly practised all the new dance steps they had seen in films, or begged their school friend, whose sister was a dance teacher, to show them, adapting them to a private shared routine they could dance in time to the new songs coming out of America, ready for the breaks they just knew they were going to get. Somehow or other …
Walking home past one of the most famous of Liverpool’s theatres, the Royal Court was part of their secret plan. A plan that involved them being seen and offered the opportunity to audition for a show, in which they would so impress the right people that they would be whisked off to Broadway to become overnight stars.
The train had slowed down preparatory to pulling into Liverpool’s Lime Street Station. Katie Needham wriggled a little apprehensively to the end of her seat. It had been a long stop-and-start journey from London to Liverpool, and the train was full with a mix of young men in uniform and other non-services travellers like herself. Naturally, the precautions necessitated by being at war meant that there were no lights on inside the train to illuminate the December late afternoon gloom, but Katie was too nervous to want to read, even if there had been enough light to enable her to do so.
She smoothed the fabric of her navy-blue skirt, glad of the warmth of the cherry-red jumper she was wearing. She had taken off her navy-blue woollen coat along with her matching wool beret, and her cherry-red hand-knitted scarf and gloves, a present from an elderly neighbour, when she had got onto the train, folding up her coat and her scarf and rolling her beret and her gloves to stow them carefully in the pocket of her coat before putting them on the luggage rack above her head along with her small case.
‘Soon be there.’ The pleasant woman in her thirties, who had chatted to her during the journey, informing her that she was travelling to Liverpool to see her husband, who was on leave from the navy, gave her a brief smile but Katie guessed that her travelling companion’s thoughts would be on her husband and the happy reunion that lay head. No one asked too many questions or gave away much information in these security-conscious times, and Katie had been relieved when the navy wife had accepted her own vague but proud statement that she was going to Liverpool to do ‘war work’.
Now, though, Katie’s thoughts were more apprehensive than happy. Had she done the right thing? As the train rattled over the points and into the station, Katie admitted that she didn’t know whether to feel pleased with herself or downright scared. She knew what her parents would want her to feel, she acknowledged, as, along with the other occupants of the compartment, she stood up and started to put on her outdoor clothes. The looseness of the wedding ring on the finger of the woman seated next