Frank stood before his commanding officer, wondering what the problem was this time. It was what he loved about his job and what he dreaded – never knowing what was going to come next. The pressures they were all under not to make a single mistake in their vital job of co-ordinating the defence of the Western Approaches were draining; it was their collective responsibility to ensure the supply routes from North America stayed open, and to outwit the many U-boats whose job it was to sink those all-important cargo ships. The strategic value of the North Atlantic could not be overestimated; Britain completely relied on it for important supplies. Although Frank did his utmost to maintain the necessary highest standards, he could never be completely sure that one tiny error hadn’t crept through. Was this what the summons was about?
He gazed steadily straight ahead, noticing the rudimentary comforts that Commander Stephens had introduced to the small underground office, where every inch of space was precious: a small tapestry cushion on the back of the desk chair, a slim photo frame on the desk – although he couldn’t tell what was in it from where he stood. He liked his commanding officer – he was a fair man, even when demanding the seemingly impossible. These little human touches reminded Frank that Commander Stephens had a home life too; something he was fighting for, something that kept him going as well as his patriotic duty. He forced his own thoughts not to go down that path.
‘Well, Warrant Officer Feeny, I dare say you are wondering why I’ve called you in here.’ The commander looked at him with interest but gave nothing away.
‘Yes, sir.’ Frank thought there was no point in saying anything more. If he was in for a dressing down, he wasn’t going to give away any ammunition.
‘Let me reassure you, it is nothing to worry about. You may stand at ease,’ the commander went on. ‘It has come to the notice of the higher authorities that you have been performing above and beyond your current remit, Feeny. Your work leading to the detection of the location of the Bismarck back in May was exceptional, and I don’t have to tell you how vital that was to the overall war effort, or what effect its sinking had on morale. Well done, Feeny.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Frank struggled not to breathe out heavily in relief. He’d only done what he was asked to do, and many personnel had been involved in the sinking of the vast German battleship, pride of the fleet, which had been deployed to disrupt the Atlantic shipping routes so important to Britain’s survival. But it was satisfying to hear that his careful plotting and detailed documentation of the results had been recognised. He’d stayed up through the night on more than one occasion, even when on day shift, his eyes itching and his temples throbbing as he’d pored over the reams of information to spot the relevant figures. On a few occasions he’d even been known to loosen his false leg, as it wasn’t designed to be used for twenty-four hours at a stretch. He’d been prepared for sharp glances or offended looks but none had come. People simply accepted it as part and parcel of a dedicated serviceman who would go the extra mile to perform his duty. Yet anyone else in his position would have done the same – and plenty had.
‘You’ve also helped us to recruit one of our most successful new members of staff,’ the commander continued. ‘As you are probably aware, opinion was divided as to whether we should take on personnel from outside the service and bring them into such a sensitive operation. It is fair to say that opinion was even further divided when it came to your suggestion of Mr Daniel Callaghan. But he has surpassed all our hopes, and his being here is entirely down to you, Feeny.’
‘He’s a good man, sir.’ What else could he say? If Frank thought about it, it was very strange to be talking about his childhood friend in this way. But Danny had proved himself, against a fair weight of opposition from above. That was typical Danny – when it came down to it, he didn’t really care what other people thought of him. If he was interested in something, he would throw himself into it. Now all his deep frustration at being unable to fight for his country was being channelled into puzzle solving and pattern detecting for the unit, and everyone was astonished at the results. He was a natural. It was a long way from being a wide boy down at the docks.
‘He is indeed, Feeny. You have demonstrated that you have an eye for spotting particular talent even in unconventional circumstances.’ The man nodded sagely. ‘Which is why I have called you here today. We feel that in addition to your current role, you should take on more training of new recruits. Your manner towards your juniors is calm and encouraging and I have seen the effect for myself. I am convinced you would be an asset in this area. You will therefore be promoted to acting sublieutenant for the time being, and then we shall see how far you can progress beyond that.’
Frank almost gasped aloud. It was less than a year since he’d been made a warrant officer. Now he was being offered the chance to rise further in the ranks, and it was down to his own hard work. He had thought at first when his leg was amputated that his career would be over, that he’d be thrown on the scrapheap and his participation in the war would be finished. He’d loved his life in active service and fighting in the boxing ring, and hadn’t been able to imagine being of any use once all that was closed to him. His heart swelled in pride.
‘Thank you, sir. I would love to train more new recruits. It’s one of the aspects of this post that I enjoy the most,’ he managed to say, when he wanted to dance with joy on the spot.
‘I’m glad to hear it, Feeny,’ said the commander, although they both knew that the decision had been made and – like it or not – that was what Frank would be doing from now on. He had no doubt that this young man would be a credit to him and flourish in the new position. What had happened to him would have broken a lesser man, but Feeny had overcome his physical limitations and never let his disability affect his work. He was just the sort of young officer who needed to be entrusted with such a task. ‘I shall inform my superiors and the process will commence as of tomorrow. Well done. You are dismissed.’
‘Sir.’
Frank saluted sharply and turned to leave. His thoughts were whirring as he made his way down the dim corridor. What would this new position bring? Would he be up to the job? No point in wondering, he told himself firmly; if they didn’t think he could do it, then they wouldn’t have asked. There were many others who would have given their eyeteeth for such a chance. All right, it was still a desk job, and some would say it was a soft option, but it was as good as he was going to get. He’d be a sublieutenant, and that would mean extra money coming in too. He was so lost in his reverie that he almost crashed into a figure emerging from a side door – and saw it was Danny Callaghan.
‘Frank!’ Danny grinned and then forced his face to be more solemn. ‘Sir!’ He saluted his old mate with a cheeky smile. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages. Do you have a minute, or are you on your way somewhere important?’
‘Midshipman Callaghan.’ Frank attempted to be formal, and knew he should go straight back to his desk, but couldn’t resist sharing his news. After all, if he couldn’t tell Danny, then who could he tell? And who else would be in a better position to appreciate it? He hurried to describe what had just happened.
‘Blimey! Sublieutenant Feeny!’ Danny teased. ‘Seriously, mate, that is good news. An officer from Empire Street – that’ll show ’em.’ He shook his friend’s hand. ‘It’s not a secret, is it? I can write and tell our Jack and our Kitty? They’ll be made up.’
‘No, it’s not a secret. It’ll be public any day now – certainly before any letters reach them.’ Frank’s heart beat painfully in his chest at the thought of Kitty getting the news. In different circumstances he would have loved to have rushed to tell her himself, to share the joy of well-earned promotion with such a special girl. But that was not to be. ‘How are they doing?’ he forced himself to ask.
If Danny noticed any awkwardness in the question, he didn’t acknowledge it. ‘Jack was back earlier in the summer, of course, but we don’t know where he is now, although from his last letter he seems to be fine. He’s hoping for a spot more leave soon. Kitty’s doing well, living it up in London.’
‘Is she still friends with that doctor?’ Frank asked, his cheeks flaming, certain that Danny would know he was forcing himself to sound casual.
Danny nodded. ‘Yes, it’s Elliott this and Elliott that these days. He goes down to see her whenever he can, apparently. She says she hopes to meet his parents soon, as they don’t live that far away from her billet.’
‘And she never comes home to visit?’ Frank asked. ‘Not even to see Dr Elliott?’ He tried not to sound too obviously jealous.
Danny gave his friend a careful look but didn’t ask any questions. It was none of his business. ‘No, not since she left in March,’ he said. ‘She never gets much leave and I reckon they are working them hard down there. You know how it is, it’s the same here, the women are doing men’s jobs and have to make sure they are as good as or better than the men they are replacing. From her letters I don’t think she has a lot of spare time, and I don’t blame her for spending it getting to know London. Good for her. Shall I say you were asking after her?’
Frank swallowed. ‘Yes, do give her my best.’ Inwardly he blanched. He knew that sounded stuffy and formal, but what could he say? Kitty was clearly getting on with her own life. ‘Well, I must be going, Danny – or should I say Midshipman Callaghan? See you around.’
Danny saluted again with a broad grin. ‘See you then, Sublieutenant Feeny-to-be.’
Frank grinned back, and then ploughed on down the corridor, as always making the extra effort not to limp. He couldn’t bear anyone to glance at him with pity. Pulling back his shoulders, he told himself not to let the encounter ruin the enormity of what had happened in the commander’s office. He was to be promoted; his efforts had been recognised – he should be on top of the world. And yet, it would have been so much sweeter if he had had someone special to share it with – and in his heart that someone special was always Kitty. He recalled the way her hair curled, the spark in her bright eyes, the way she had always teased him as they grew up together, and then how he had realised his feelings for her were changing, growing into something more profound, more tender. That was before he’d lost his leg. Now she could not be expected to be interested in him – or not in that way, not romantically, not physically. He simply was not the man he used to be. He should feel glad she had found happiness with this doctor fellow. He should be man enough to wish them good luck and all the best, for heaven only knew it was tough going to find time for love in the middle of a devastating war. Nonetheless, he had to acknowledge that what he actually felt towards Elliott was bitter jealousy, for winning the heart of the woman he ached to confess that he loved.
‘So you see, Mrs Kerrigan, we always keep the urn topped up, and then you can fill the kettles from here.’ Mrs Delia Moyes, veteran of the WVS, demonstrated how the system worked, eyeing her latest recruit with some apprehension. Young Mrs Kerrigan didn’t somehow seem the type to be able to lift large amounts of boiling water around in a confined space. Still, she would be a tonic for the exhausted men in uniform, and that was a fact. Her hair was swept up in the latest style, she wore peep-toe sandals even though there was an autumnal chill in the air, and from her nipped-in waist it was scarcely believable that she was mother to a little boy. Her presence would brighten the utilitarian canteen, sandwiched as it was between bomb-damaged buildings right in the centre of Liverpool. Despite the salvage teams’ best efforts, the place often filled with dust. Nancy Kerrigan would help to ensure the hard-working servicemen’s rare moments of leisure were as pleasant as possible. What the equally exhausted servicewomen would make of her was another matter entirely, but Mrs Moyes reckoned you couldn’t please everyone at once, and it was best to concentrate on one thing at a time. ‘Do you think you have got the hang of it, Mrs Kerrigan?’
Nancy nodded vigorously, even though she was by no means sure. She hadn’t joined the volunteer staff here to heft around heavy equipment; she could have done that back in Bootle, but that would have meant working under the sharp eyes of her mother and sister-in-law. Pushing back a stray strand of her vivid Titian-red hair, she told herself that if she had dealt with tricky customers at George Henry Lee, the big department store where she’d worked before she’d had Georgie, then she could easily manage this.
Nancy had signed up to the WVS on a whim, partly to get out of her mother-in-law’s gloomy house, where it got more depressing by the day. Sid’s mother had never exactly been the life and soul of the party, but she’d taken to the role of suffering martyr with a vengeance. Never had sorrow been so loudly and consistently proclaimed. Nancy screwed up her eyes at the very thought of it. All right, so Sid had been a POW almost since the fighting had started, but he was still alive, he was receiving Red Cross parcels and was probably a damned sight safer than most of them were, she told herself crossly. He hadn’t had to endure the Liverpool Blitz for a start and, even though the raids had almost stopped for the time being, who knew when they might begin again? Hitler hadn’t managed to destroy the docks, though not for want of trying, and so they would still be a magnet for the Luftwaffe’s attentions. Sid might be in a cell somewhere – truly Nancy had little idea where he was or what the living conditions might be like – but he wasn’t forced to share a stinking, overcrowded cellar with a load of neighbours he couldn’t stand.
Nancy had retreated into her shell immediately after the hideous events in the Adelphi Hotel, when she’d ended up lying in a pool of blood on the elegant bathroom floor instead of living it up with Gloria. The shame and disappointment had been bad enough, but then she had been utterly drained after the miscarriage. She’d tried to tell herself it hadn’t happened, but her body told her otherwise, and she’d been weak and shaky for longer than she wanted to admit.
She would rather have died than tell her mother-in-law what had happened, knowing the reaction she would have faced if Mrs Kerrigan had known that the young woman living under her roof had been having a sneaky affair. It would have been even worse to have confessed to her own mother what had been going on, as Dolly had very strict views on the sanctity of marriage, even if one half of that marriage wasn’t around. Rita wouldn’t have been much better. Reluctantly, Nancy had had to admit that the Adelphi had been the best place for it to have happened. There would have been no chance of her passing off the baby as legitimate, and she had to convince herself that everything had worked out all right in the end – even if in her quieter moments she wondered what the child would have been like. There was no point in thinking about that, though – what had happened had happened.
At least it was all but impossible to shock Gloria. How she missed her best friend and wished she were still around. But Gloria had gone back down south after the rest of her highly successful singing tour, and her latest letter had said she’d been approached by ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association, which had been set up to entertain the troops. Nancy sighed with envy. How she would have loved to see the world, doing nothing more than wearing beautiful dresses and singing every night, before being taken to dinner in the most glamorous hotels. She blithely ignored the less exciting parts of the job which Gloria had told her about: the weariness that came from living out of a suitcase, always having to smile and maintain the professional front, shaking hands with the most odious and pompous officials, living in fear of the voice giving out.
Now Nancy felt fully recovered and ready to try something new. She knew very well what her family thought of her choice and why they suspected she’d picked this particular canteen, but she didn’t care. Of course it would be lovely to be back in the centre of the city, even if much of it had been blown to smithereens by Hitler’s bombs. It was important to show that the people of Liverpool weren’t afraid, for a start. She didn’t intend to be cowed. It would take more than a few nights of utter destruction to stop her going shopping, searching out where was still open and what bargains were to be had. It wasn’t impossible, just much more difficult than before, but that made the hunt all the more satisfying. Besides, she reasoned, none of her family would turn down the offer of a bolt of new fabric, even if it was a little fire-damaged. That was exactly the sort of thing she’d be best placed to find.
She also felt starved of male company. She was only twenty-one; she didn’t want to be cooped up indoors, missing out on the best days of her life. She liked dressing up and the admiring glances she got when she did so. Stan Hathaway didn’t know when he was on to a good thing, she thought grimly, tossing her head a little at the memory of him, his warm hands, his intimate suggestions. He’d proved to be a faithless heartbreaker, but at least she’d had fun. While she wasn’t going to rush to make that sort of mistake again, it wouldn’t do any harm to meet a few men her own age. They needed cheering up: everyone said so.
‘If you’re sure you know what we’ll be doing, I’ll open up,’ Mrs Moyes said now, wiping her hands on her sensible print overall. She handed her latest recruit a pinafore to tie around her slim waist. ‘Take this, Mrs Kerrigan. We don’t want to ruin your pretty dress, now do we?’
‘Thank you, Mrs Moyes,’ said Nancy dutifully, knotting the pinafore’s fabric at the back, mindful that she wouldn’t easily replace her frock if it did get damaged. It was from 1939, but she’d carefully mended it and sewn on new buttons at the neck to bring it as up to date as she could, and she didn’t want that effort to be for nothing. Now that clothes rationing had come in, it was all the more important to make the most of what she already had.
Mrs Moyes was ushering a group of young men across the room to the counter where Nancy stood waiting. ‘Now here are some gentlemen just arrived from America,’ she beamed. ‘I expect they’re thirsty, aren’t you, boys?’ Her tone was motherly and comforting.
Nancy perked up at once. America was officially neutral but, thanks to the Lend Lease Agreement, under which the United States had promised to supply the Allies with equipment and other help, more and more service personnel were arriving in Britain. Some people complained about them, saying they were too loud and brash, but Nancy intended to give them the benefit of the doubt.
‘Hello,’ she said, her eyes gleaming. ‘Now, how exactly can I help you?’ She peeped up at them from under her hair in its victory roll and her voice was anything but motherly. From the reactions she could observe, she immediately knew she’d made the right decision in coming here.