‘And what time of day do you call this, young lady?’
Bill stood in the hallway at Grove Road, his shaving mug in his hand and his braces dangling over his trousers, as he caught his youngest daughter Elsie trying to creep in through the front door.
He raised his hand to slap her, his salt and pepper hair flopping forward over his face, which was puce with anger. ‘I’ve a good mind to knock you into the middle of next week. You can’t be stopping out all night like some common . . .’
Annie came out of the kitchen, where she’d been sitting up with Mum half the night, and moved towards him, to stop him doing something he’d regret.
Bill halted in front of Elsie, at the foot of the stairs, with the words he wanted to say lodged in his throat. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, not to his favourite. All the years he’d raised her, taught her manners, set her on the right path. And then the war had come along and filled her head with silly ideas and she wasn’t his sweet-natured good girl any more. She was going off with the other factory workers, the brazen lot, putting on rouge and powder, curling her hair in rollers and dancing till dawn with God knows who. Well, he was going to put a stop to it.
‘You can’t treat us like this, me and your mother . . .’
Elsie reached out to him. ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I just got carried away and I missed the last bus back, so I stayed around at Joan’s place in Notting Hill. I didn’t mean to worry you and I promise I wasn’t doing anything to make you ashamed of me.’
He recoiled from her touch, turning away to shuffle back off down the hallway as Elsie stood there, shame-faced.
Annie went to her side. ‘What on earth were you thinking? You should have come home. Mum has been scared sick about you and so have I, on top of all the worry about George. You could have been lying dead in the gutter, knocked down by a car in the blackout . . . Anything could have happened to you.’
Elsie rolled her eyes and started to climb the stairs. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with everybody. I’m fine, aren’t I? I wasn’t in any kind of danger, I just stayed out overnight. Lots of the factory girls do it. I’m nearly twenty-one! I’m not a child.’
Annie followed her, slowly, because she was finding stairs so difficult now, and went into Elsie’s room. Elsie started unbuttoning her blouse, revealing her curvaceous shape. She was a much bigger build than either Annie or her mum, just the sort of fresh-faced, rounded girl that soldiers liked to press against as they did a foxtrot around the dance floor, that was for sure.
As she was standing there in her brassiere and skirt, Annie spotted a red mark just above her sister’s collarbone.
‘Oh Lord,’ said Annie, peering at her. ‘Is that a love bite?’
Elsie’s hand flew up to cover her chest and then she sat down on the bed, all the wind knocked out of her sails.
‘You’d better find a way of covering that up or your dad will go crackers,’ said Annie, making her way over to the chest of drawers where Elsie kept her make-up. She pulled out some powder and handed it to her. Elsie dabbed a bit on and then looked up at Annie. ‘It’s useless! You can still see it, can’t you? Oh God, what was I thinking?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Annie, sitting down next to her sister. ‘Who is he, then? I hope he is worth all the trouble he’s causing.’
Elsie bit her lip and looked at the floor. ‘Just a fella I’ve seen at the dances a few times.’
Annie’s face darkened. ‘Tell me you didn’t . . .’
‘No!’ cried Elsie. ‘What do you take me for? I just had a bit of a cuddle in the back alley behind the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, that’s all, and I think I let him go a bit further than I wanted because he’s just joined the navy.’
‘He’s going away to sea, so you let him take a bite out of you?’ said Annie, nudging her sister in the ribs to make her laugh.
Elsie shook her head. ‘Oh, Annie. I know I shouldn’t have let him, but it felt, well, it felt nice. And all the blokes seem to want to do more with us girls now, because they’re going away to the war and they don’t know if they are ever coming back. It doesn’t seem fair to say no to them.’
Annie looked into her sister’s eyes. She’d held her as a baby and helped raise her, so in some ways they were more like mother and daughter than sisters. ‘I understand. You want to have some fun, but you need to be careful about letting them go too far. You don’t want to get yourself into trouble or you’ll find yourself with a bad reputation.’ In her mind’s eye, Annie saw Vera tottering off out of the cinema with a soldier on her arm. ‘Did you really stay at Joan’s place?’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Elsie. ‘Cross my heart, I did.’
‘Look, Elsie, you are a grown woman, but you are living at home still, so you’ve got to think about Mum and Bill and their feelings and their rules because you are under their roof. You can’t stay out like that. I had to come down here because Mum was up all night worrying about George and she had a bit of a funny turn when you didn’t come home. We’ve hardly had any sleep.’
Annie rubbed her eyes. She was dog-tired but with the baby kicking her half the night, she could barely get any kip at the moment, no matter what Elsie had been up to. But she wasn’t going to let on about that.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Elsie, staring at the floor.
Annie stood up and pulled open a drawer, rummaging about for another blouse for her sister. She picked the one with the highest neck she could find and told her to put it on.
Right on cue, Elsie’s older sister Ivy appeared in the doorway.
She wagged her finger. ‘Who’s been a dirty stop-out then? Come on, tell me, who is he?’
Elsie quickly buttoned her blouse up before Ivy could spot the love bite.
‘Do you think he’s going to put a ring on your finger?’ said Ivy, brandishing the sapphire engagement ring that Charlie had bought her. She was proud of being a fiancée and you couldn’t blame her, but Annie wished she’d picked another moment to flaunt it. The last thing the family needed was for Elsie to start charging up the aisle with some bloke she’d snogged around the back of the Shepherd’s Bush Empire.
The scullery was more like a funeral parlour than the cheery, bustling heart of their Grove Road home for the rest of the morning. Mum managed to say two words to Elsie by lunchtime, but only after she’d promised never to stay out like that again. Mum’s face was grey with worry and she’d barely eaten, not even after Bill made her favourite bread and dripping to try to tempt her.
It had only been a few days since the first reports about Dunkirk in the papers and Mum sat there in her rocking chair, poring over every last detail in the Evening News and the Daily Mirror, while keeping her ears pricked for further updates from the BBC Home Service.
Bill did his best to cheer everyone up, practically standing to attention every time the announcer mentioned Lord Gort, the head of the British Expeditionary Force, who George reported to directly. ‘Impressive man, very impressive. He stands over six feet tall, you know? Man’s a bleeding giant. He’ll squash that Hitler like a little cockroach.’
Elsie rolled her eyes and said, ‘Yes, Dad, we know. You’ve only told us about fifty times already!’
But Annie indulged him. ‘Don’t be like that, Elsie. Lord Gort is such a great leader and to think George reports directly to him! It’s something we should all be very proud of.’
A few neighbours had popped around to see how they were getting on, knowing that George was involved in all the drama in France. No one could make it better, of course, but just knowing that people cared was enough to lift Mum’s spirits a bit.
Around tea time, there was another knock at the door and Elsie said, ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll get it.’
The shriek she let out brought the whole family running, even Annie, who almost got wedged sideways in the door as both she and Bill tried to squish through it at the same time.
There, dishevelled, filthy, thin as a rake, wearing ragged trousers and a woollen jumper three sizes too big with a maple leaf on the front of it, with a gaggle of schoolkids cheering in his wake, was George.
‘Hello, Mum,’ he said.
‘My boy!’
Mum was like a woman possessed, grabbing hold of George, kissing his face, hugging him, laughing and crying all at the same time, as half the street gathered outside the front door, celebrating his safe return from the beaches of France.
‘But how did you get here? Won’t you be in trouble with Lord Gort?’ said Bill, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. ‘You’re supposed to be with him, aren’t you?’
George shrugged his shoulders. ‘I jumped off the train at Acton station ’cos I knew you’d want to know I was safe. The rest of my regiment – what’s left of it – are on the way back to barracks. Expect I’ll get a couple of days in chokey for it but after what I’ve been through, that’s nothing. I’ll take the punishment. I just wanted to see you all.’
He leaned down and kissed Mum on the cheek. ‘I missed your cooking, just like I said.’
Her eyes filled with tears as they hugged for what seemed like an eternity.
Eventually, she stepped back and had a good look at him. ‘Oh, good Lord, what on earth have you been doing?’ cried Mum, as George started to scratch at his head and his armpits. To her, he was just a grubby little schoolboy again, rather than a soldier who had fought his way through enemy lines to get back to Blighty. ‘You’re crawling with lice. We’d better get you cleaned up. Elsie! Ivy! Get the copper filled up. Go on out the back, George, and get those filthy clothes off.’
He was manhandled down the hallway by all three of his sisters. As he squeezed past Annie, he quipped, ‘You look like you’ve got a whole loaf in the oven there, my girl, never mind a bun,’ which made everyone collapse in gales of laughter.
‘Feels like it too,’ said Annie, giving him a big hug and wiping her eyes. ‘It’s a proper little wriggler this baby, I expect it will be trouble. Just like you. Now, I’d better get some fresh things for you to put on.’
‘I expect the sergeant major will have me peeling spuds for a month but it’s worth it just to see you all,’ said George.
By the time the water had heated for George to have a bath in the tin tub and he had scrubbed himself clean, Mum had used up the entire week’s ration of bacon in a fry-up; even Bill couldn’t begrudge him that.
George wolfed it down, followed by two strong cups of tea, and then began to tell them of his miraculous escape from the hell that was Dunkirk.
‘It had all started so well. We had such a success of it in Belgium, with people welcoming us like heroes. We couldn’t believe it when Jerry broke through with tanks and the Belgian army just bloody well rolled over and surrendered, the useless sods,’ said George, catching his mother’s eye. ‘Pardon my French, Mum.
‘Everyone was ordered to retreat to the coast. Our boys were hiding in ditches and barns, taking out the enemy where they could, but, oh my God, the poor Belgian people . . .’ He put his head in his hands. ‘They were blown to bits on the road, the German swines showed no mercy. They were just trying to get away from the fighting.’
A shiver ran down Annie’s spine at the horror of it all.
‘But what about Lord Gort?’ said Bill, who was on the edge of his seat, absorbing every word of the despatches from the frontline so that it could all be repeated, at length, to his mates down the boozer later on. ‘Surely he had a plan?’
‘Yes,’ said George, ‘he did, but there was so much confusion with everything that was going on with the French generals and the Belgians and the higher-ups over here. Boulogne and Calais had fallen and the German Panzer tanks were smashing their way across the countryside from the north so we were caught in a pincer movement and the game was up. It’s all very well for people in London to make plans but when you are caught up in it, it’s chaos. We had no way out but those beaches in the end.
‘I got separated from my regiment but I had orders to burn my motorbike and despatch bag in case any of the papers fell into enemy hands if I was captured, so I did, and then I had to get to Dunkirk. I had to hide out in a pigsty for a day and there was a boy there, can’t have been more than twelve years old. I did the only thing I could think of and I gave him my army greatcoat and some rations. In the next village, I borrowed a bicycle from a Frenchman. I don’t think he minded, he couldn’t stand the smell of me.’
Bill gave a hollow laugh as he caught George giving him a little wink.
‘But when I got there, Dunkirk was on fire and there were thousands and thousands of men just hiding in the dunes or waiting on the beaches. I didn’t know it then, but we’d be there for days. We had no water, we were so thirsty, we were looking at the sea with nothing to drink, and then the bombing started.’ George’s hands started to shake.
‘Don’t upset yourself, George,’ said Mum, putting her arms around him. ‘It’s over now.’
‘Oh God, Mum, the cheers when there was a dogfight overhead and our boys took down the Krauts. I think you could have heard it in Dover,’ he laughed, pouring himself yet another cup of tea.
Then his voice fell to a whisper. ‘I saw men go mad. Fellas just stripped off and walked into the sea and swam out and they were like little blobs on the horizon and then I lost sight of them and I didn’t think about them any more. I just thought about getting home to you, so I knew I wasn’t going to go doolally.’
Elsie and Ivy were listening, open-mouthed.
‘So,’ said Bill, shifting in his chair. ‘How did you get back? Was it on one of those big navy ships? Annie said she saw some on the newsreel at the cinema the other day and they were jam-packed.’
‘I saw so many of them on fire,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t always a good thing to be on one of the big ships . . .’
‘But you made it out all right,’ said Bill, patting him on the knee, waiting for him to continue.
‘Yes,’ said George. ‘We boarded a boat off a jetty that some of the lads had built on top of burned-out trucks. They put these duckboards over the top of them so that when the tide came in, we could clamber out along them.
‘The first boat wasn’t very big, and it was so crowded it was a wonder we were even floating. It didn’t matter because we’d only been on it about half an hour when we got fired on by a Stuka and half of us ended up overboard. I suppose we were the lucky ones because some of the lads didn’t even make it over the side.’
His eyes filled with tears. ‘I spent hours in the Channel, just trying to keep my head above the water. I lost track of the time. It was getting dark then, which was a mercy because at least the Germans couldn’t see to strafe us with their machine guns. We were shouting to each other, to keep our spirits up, but some of the voices went quiet as the night went on; there were boys from all over the place, a few of us from London, and we tried to talk about where we grew up, people we knew, anything really, just to stay awake.
‘I kicked off my boots and just sort of floated for some of it. There was no point struggling and the sea was calm as a millpond. The next thing I knew, dawn was breaking and I saw the most beautiful sight. It was the Maid of Orleans, a blooming great steamship. We waved and shouted and she came alongside us and the squaddies lowered lifeboats over the side and we clambered in. As I climbed aboard the boat, I heard a voice saying, “All right, son, we’ve got you.” This big Canadian geezer, he must have been six foot four, whipped off his sweater and gave it to me.
‘He didn’t even hesitate, Mum. He took it off his own back and handed me a good shot of whisky too, the finest thing I ever tasted.’
The room was eerily silent as he finished his story.
George had survived but Annie had a feeling that for the rest of them, the war was just beginning.