CHAPTER EIGHT

7 May 1945: London, England

Evelyn’s heart was alight with joy as her feet flew over the broken pavement, her blisters and the heel that kept coming off her Utility Oxfords forgotten. She’d lost her hat somewhere behind her and her hair had slipped from its pins, streaming behind her in a walnut streak against the fog-coloured sky. She didn’t even think about how Cynthia would disapprove of her bare-headedness. Unknown hands slipped into hers, squeezing them, stranger celebrating with stranger for a moment before letting go only to be replaced by others.

She reached Piccadilly Circus and could go no further. She could have kept running for a year if she had the room, but not even the double-decker buses were able to get through the crowd.

She looked at the people around her. Tears streamed down the weary cheeks of grandmothers with crepe skin, and wives who thought they’d lost their smiles on the battlefield. A man nearby, his right trouser leg empty below the knee, nodded at her, his torso racked with sobs he wasn’t ashamed to show. Evelyn curled her gloved fingers, wanting to pump ecstatic fists in the air. No one would have minded if she did. Even children were swept up in the mania, experienced enough by now to understand.

It was over. The war was actually over.

A thought came to her, as unbidden as the bombs that had scattered London’s buildings like a game of spillikins. This wasn’t just the end of the war. It was the end of her. Evelyn’s grin slipped.

A woman, also hatless, grabbed Evelyn’s right hand in both of hers and shook it emphatically. Evelyn’s lips twisted upwards again, murmuring some appropriate response, but she wasn’t sure what it was. The sounds of cheers and thousands of Union Jacks snapping as they were energetically waved faded into the background as she was faced with a new fear; one that hadn’t occurred to her before. Why would it? They’d learned to stop thinking of the future, knowing it might never come. Yet now it stretched before her, and took her by surprise with how it snatched away her breath.

She would be demobbed. The end of the war would also be the end of her independence. Sweat would come from beating carpets or scrubbing floors, not lugging the searchlight onto the back of a lorry. There would be no quiet chatting in the middle of the night while on guard duty; no wearing trousers without shame. Evelyn thought of the women she had shared this strange new life with over the past four years, and the male camaraderie that had existed between them. It wasn’t only that they’d behaved like men; they’d begun to act as though they had the right to live that way.

A hand snatched at Evelyn’s arm—an American soldier in unbuttoned uniform twirling her into an unexpected jitterbug. The noise of the crowd rushed back in, and Evelyn flushed, mortified. Her vague dissatisfaction didn’t count in the face of thousands of lives that had been ripped away in the pursuit of peace—which had now, finally, thankfully, arrived.

Evelyn looked at the soldier dancing with her—was there music playing? She couldn’t tell, but it hardly seemed to matter. The soldier’s face practically poured out sunshine.

Unable to bear it, she looked beyond him, to the swirling mass of celebration. No one else appeared to be having such traitorous, selfish thoughts. But now she’d had that split-second image of the life victory consigned her to, she couldn’t stop herself following it through. If she was ‘lucky’ she’d get married, followed by children. If she was unlucky, it would be spinsterhood in the care of her sisters, looking after any children Cynthia and Maureen might have between them. Cooking three meals a day, lining up at the grocery store, washing linens, cleaning fireplace soot off the walls, darning clothes. Each day only distinguishable from the one before by whether it was allocated to beating the carpets or turning the mattresses.

All around her was mad joy—the kind that could only come from knowing years of sorrow beforehand. Hot tears of self-disgust filled Evelyn’s eyes, and her stomach was sick with shame as coloured streamers landed on her shoulders. She should be grateful. She tried to tell herself she could always try for a job as a secretary somewhere. But she knew it wouldn’t be the same as before. Women would disappear from behind the wheels of buses and trucks, from the radio airwaves; they’d return from working on farms to don aprons and heels once more. The weight of such certainty was heavier than any of the lights she’d manned.

Evelyn knew the question wasn’t what would happen to her now. The question was: how could she change it?