Night, when it fell in London, was as dark as it had been in the years Annie spent as a child at her aunt’s farm in Suffolk, with only the stars and the moon to guide her home from the fields.
But there was no thrill in looking up at the twinkling blanket overhead these days, just the fear of what might be coming their way from Germany. Even the sound of footsteps approaching in the gloom of the terraced streets that she knew so well made her nervous. Then there were the lamp posts to contend with. Her stepdad, Bill, had got himself a proper shiner when he’d walked slap bang into one the other night on the way home from the pub.
He’d blamed Hitler, of course, but most folks managed to spot the white stripes that the Air Raid Precautions’ wardens had carefully painted on the posts at waist height to help guide people home in the blackout. You couldn’t blame him for having a drink or three; poor Bill, he was too old to fight, and he was scared out of his wits by the fear of invasion.
Mum joked that he’d wage a war of words fierce enough to defeat Jerry and he was keeping an old shillelagh under the bed ‘just in case’. They never spoke about the real reason he’d hit the bottle – he was worried sick about the strain of the war on Mum’s heart. She’d given them all a few scares and the doctors had warned her not to overdo it, but Mum soldiered on regardless.
Annie pulled the sides of her coat together against the chill of the night air. She couldn’t fasten it any more. She was seven months gone now and with every passing day she felt more like one of the floppy, grey barrage balloons bobbing about on wires above the depot at Acton station. The baby kicked, and she patted her belly and whispered, ‘We’ll be home soon, don’t you worry.’
She’d only popped out to take Mum some tea, but they’d spent ages in the scullery, nattering over a cuppa that was as weak as dishwater but warming nonetheless, so you couldn’t grumble, really. She didn’t like leaving Mum on her own too much while Bill was out down the boozer, and with her old man Harry out at the Air Raid Precautions’ station with all the other wardens, she was glad of the company, even if it meant a short walk home alone in the dark.
Besides, her youngest half-sister Elsie had clocked off at the cardboard-box factory and gone off dancing up in the West End again, which was giving Mum more grey hairs.
‘I don’t know what’s got into her lately,’ Mum had confided, as she fried a solitary egg on the range. ‘All she talks about is the dances these days. She used to be such a sensible girl. It’s like the world’s turned upside down with this fighting. At least Ivy’s already turned in. I don’t have to worry about her.’
Ivy was Elsie’s older sister and she was keen on her beauty sleep these days, having just accepted a proposal of engagement from Charlie, a local painter and decorator. Ivy was always more sensible than Elsie, planning carefully for the future, but when the pair of them got together they were still as thick as thieves and neither was averse to making a bit of mischief at Annie’s expense, just as they had done when she was helping to raise them. Annie was fifteen when Ivy was born, because Mum had remarried during the First World War, so both the girls treated Annie as more of a mother than a sister. Annie’s dad had died long before then, when she was just a baby, and it was no secret that she and Bill had never quite seen eye to eye. Bill doted on his daughters and it was as plain as the nose on his face that Annie was second best in his eyes, but he’d mellowed with age and Annie, well, she was kind and forgiving to a fault. She knew Bill worshipped the ground that Mum walked on and that was enough for her, even if he did like to pinch all the best bits of bacon for himself. Mum slid the egg onto one of her best blue and white china plates with great care, offering it to her daughter.
Annie looked up at her mother’s careworn face. ‘Bill will want this for his breakfast, won’t he?’
Eggs had been scarce since food rationing had started a few months ago but Mum always seemed to find some little extra morsel to feed her.
‘Well, what he don’t know about can’t hurt him,’ she said, tapping the side of her nose conspiratorially. ‘I hid it behind the cod liver oil in the larder because he can’t abide the stuff, so I knew it would be safe there. And anyway, you’re carrying my grandchild. Your need is greater than his.’
He’d been grumbling about anything and everything since war broke out and Annie got the impression he was getting on Mum’s nerves a lot. The house was a smart three-bedroomed terrace in Grove Road, just off Acton High Street, and the yard out the back had a strip of garden wide enough for Bill to dig down and install an Anderson shelter. Of course, he moaned he’d put his back out doing it.
Annie balanced the plate on her knees as Mum offered her a crust of bread to dip in the runny yolk, which was the best bit. She was constantly hungry with this baby growing inside her. She’d spent the first four months barely able to keep anything down but since the morning sickness had stopped, she’d been ravenous. She tried her best not to think about it when she went to bed hungry, because it seemed a bit unpatriotic to complain when there was a war on.
It wasn’t a case of starving on rations – she went along with her coupons to the butcher’s and the grocer’s like everyone else and she was allowed to go to the front of the queue because she was in the family way. Harry always made sure she had the biggest cuts of meat and the most potatoes, because he could get extra to eat down at the ARP centre on the night-shift.
Anyway, it seemed to make Mum feel better to feed her up a bit.
It was so cosy in the scullery at her mum’s with the wireless tuned in to the BBC, which was playing cheery songs from the varieties up North tonight. The front room had a couple of nice armchairs in it but they were covered with sheets unless they had company – and by that Mum meant the vicar – so that room was kept for best. Mum always had one ear out for any broadcasts about the forces and when the news was on, the world stood still and you could hear a pin drop.
Finishing up the last of her egg, Annie spotted Mum holding a letter between trembling fingers. ‘Is it another one from George?’
Mum nodded solemnly. Annie’s younger brother George had been among the first to volunteer for active service when war had been declared and was over in France, with the British Expeditionary Force. He was a despatch rider for Lord Gort, the head of the whole army.
George wrote home regular as clockwork, but of course he couldn’t say too much, other than that the French food wasn’t a patch on his mum’s cooking and so on. Mum had got quite a collection of letters together and they took pride of place on the mantelpiece over the range in the scullery during the day, next to a picture of him in his uniform, and then they were carried up to bed, with a candle, to be pored over once more before she went to sleep at night.
‘Well,’ said Annie brightly, ‘what’s the latest? I bet he’s having the time of his life with all the French girls! Ooh la la!’
It was a running joke between her and Mum that George would come swanning in one day in his khakis with a raven-haired mademoiselle on his arm and walk her up the aisle in Acton, which would really set tongues wagging. But Mum didn’t laugh at the joke like she normally did.
‘He says they’re on the move again but there’s something up,’ she said, her eyes flickering across the page. ‘I can feel it in my water. It’s as if he’s saying goodbye.’
Annie stood up, heaving herself out of the chair, and went to her mother’s side. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s right here, plain as the nose on your face,’ said Mum. ‘He’s signed off differently, look.’
Annie read her brother’s words: Take care, kiss Annie for me, and the baby when it comes. I will always be your George. I hope I can make you proud . . .
Annie reached over and untied the bundle of letters on the mantelpiece. ‘But he always says “take care” and mentions the baby!’ she said. ‘Don’t upset yourself over nothing.’
‘I just know he’s in danger,’ said Mum, clutching at her chest for an instant as the colour drained from her face. ‘You’ll understand when you’ve had the baby. It’s a mother’s instinct.’
‘But, Mum,’ said Annie, ‘all the newspapers have been full of stories about our boys going off to Belgium and being welcomed like heroes! People have been chucking flowers at them. We’ve got the Germans on the run.’
Mum just shook her head. It had taken another cup of tea and a slug of brandy from the cupboard under the stairs to calm her down after that and Annie couldn’t help noticing the tears in her mum’s eyes when she left.
Annie hurried on past the shops of Churchfield Road, their blinds drawn, sandbags piled high under the windowsills. It took a while for her eyes to get used to the dark, but the moon was out tonight and that helped light the way. Her younger half-sister Elsie had been hankering after a set of buttons for her coat which would glow in the dark and all the newspapers were telling people to wear white to make it easier to be spotted. That was all very well, but white clothes got dirty so quickly and what with cleaning and shopping and all the rest of it, that just wasn’t practical. And in any case, who had the money to buy a new white dress or a skirt? Only the posh folk, that was for sure.
It was just a brisk ten-minute walk to their flat on Allison Road but with every passing week, Annie couldn’t help noticing how out of breath she was by the time she got there. She’d married Harry just before the war broke out, but she still got butterflies every time she put the key in the lock and pushed open the front door; this was their home, a place to call their own. They had the two downstairs rooms in an Edwardian terraced house, a kitchen and a bedroom. They didn’t have to share it with anyone else in their family, which round these parts was quite something. An elderly couple had the flat upstairs and they shared the outside lavvy with them, and the copper on washdays, but Annie didn’t mind that. In fact, she’d help them out by running their sheets through the mangle in the back yard when she could because old Mrs Hill’s legs gave her trouble getting up and down the rickety back stairs which led from the upstairs flat directly into the yard. It was the same with shopping: Annie would take Mrs Hill’s coupons down to the butcher’s and the grocer’s for her, as she was headed there anyway.
Harry had a good job, as an engineer calibrating and testing the pumps for diesel engines down at Charles Anthony Vandervell and Co, which was known locally as C.A.V., one of the big factories about half a mile away, down Acton Vale. That’s how they’d met, when she was working there as a machine hand four years ago. Annie hadn’t taken to him at first, because he was a union rep, a serious, quiet, political sort and a good eight years older than her, not to mention the fact that she was a Londoner and he was from Newcastle upon Tyne.
But beneath his gritty exterior lay a man whose twinkling grey eyes made her heart flip and whose sense of humour was enough to give them both a fit of the giggles over the silliest of things. He’d won her heart when he’d come to lodge with them for a time at Mum and Bill’s in Grove Road and the next thing she knew, she was walking up the aisle, sewing curtains and expecting the patter of tiny feet.
All the factories in Acton were given over to the war effort now, and C.A.V. was no exception. Harry worked his shifts there but fitted in his ARP volunteering around them too.
A lot of folk moaned about the blackout and the precautions and got a bit shirty with the wardens hammering on their front doors with orders to ‘put that light out!’ Some called it a ‘Phoney War’ because there was no sign of Herr Hitler trying to set foot in the country and they were getting sick and tired of lugging gas masks everywhere, bumbling around in the pitch black, going without and queuing for one of the grocer’s carefully measured twists of sugar in a little paper bag, a pat of butter or a sliver of meat from the butcher.
But Harry insisted it wasn’t a waste of time. ‘The Nazis won’t rest until we’re all speaking German, you mark my words,’ he’d bark at people who failed to observe the blackout. ‘Don’t make it easy for them by lighting the way to your home so they can drop bombs on it, you blethering idiots.’
Once she was inside the front door, Annie fumbled in the dark for the candle and the box of matches she left on the table in the hallway and lit it. It threw shadows up the stairwell, which was dingy at the best of times, painted a grim shade of mustard brown. She wandered down the passageway into the scullery at the back, checking the blackout curtain was still pinned firmly in place before lighting the gas lamp on the wall. There was enough milk for her to have some Ovaltine, which was a bit of a treat before bed. Easing off her shoes – which were pinching something terrible these days, with her feet swelling so much – she sat down at the table and rubbed some life back into her toes.
The wireless sat on a cabinet next to the stove. George had made the cabinet for her and Harry, as a wedding gift, before the nightmare had started, when people still hoped against hope that another generation of young men wouldn’t have to take up arms, as their fathers had done before them, in the Great War. The wireless had been his parting gift to her, his green eyes alive with the excitement of going off to serve his country, like so many other eager recruits around town.
He’d shown her how to work the radio, tinkering about with the dial as Harry sat in his favourite armchair rolling a smoke and smiling at them both.
‘You’ll be able to hear everything I get up to on this, Annie,’ he said, as she saw him, for the first time, not as her little brother, but a grown man; how very handsome he looked, with his new short back and sides, his uniform pressed to perfection by Mum and his shoes polished so you could almost see your face in them. Annie was proud but nervous too, because George had been so sick with TB when he was little, it had given them all a fright. She’d always be his big sister, she couldn’t help feeling that way, but she tried to push her protective instincts to one side now.
‘Well, you’d better behave yourself over in France, then, or the BBC will be putting out a special announcement and we will hear it all, right here in Acton!’ said Annie, poking him in the ribs.
It all seemed such a long time ago, but he’d only been gone a few months.
She heard a voice saying, ‘Oh, George . . .’ and then realized it was her own. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry. Not tonight. It wasn’t good for the baby, all this sadness, was it?
Annie stood up and put her hands on the small of her back, which had started to ache again. She’d made another promise, to Harry, that she wouldn’t listen to the news broadcast before bed, but as her fingers flicked the switch and she twisted the dial, hearing the familiar crackle of the airwaves, she knew she was powerless to resist.
There was something comforting about it, even though Harry said it was probably the worry keeping her awake at night rather than the baby, who had the sharpest elbows and a kick so strong, it was surely going to be a boy, and a footballer at that.
The announcer’s voice enveloped her with a kind of warmth as she shuffled over to the stove and lit the gas ring to heat the milk in the pan. She dried her eyes.
‘This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the midnight news and this is Alvar Lidell reading it . . .’
Harry was a lump in the bed beside her, snoring softly as dawn broke.
Annie felt the chill of the lino under her feet as she padded across the bedroom and down the hallway to the scullery to make herself a cuppa. She switched on the wireless again, just to pass the time until she could pop out to the shops and get something for Harry to eat. He was on a late shift at the factory today.
The kettle was just coming to the boil, the steam working itself up into a high-pitched whistle, when the pips went to mark the top of the hour. Annie stopped in her tracks.
‘Good morning, this is the BBC Home Service. German forces have invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg by air and land. The invasion began at dawn with large numbers of aeroplanes attacking the main aerodromes and landing troops,’ the presenter announced. ‘British and French troops have moved across the Belgian frontier in response to appeals for reinforcements.
‘In London, it has been announced that Winston Churchill will lead a coalition government after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said he was stepping aside . . .’
Annie opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out. She clutched her stomach and sat down, the screech of the kettle filling the kitchen. Harry blundered in, half asleep, grumbling, ‘You could wake the dead with that racket, our Annie. I was trying to get some kip.’
She didn’t budge.
In an instant, he read the fear in her eyes and sat down beside her, putting his arm protectively around her shoulders. ‘What’s wrong, pet?’
‘The news,’ she said. ‘The Germans have invaded Belgium and Holland.’ She burst into tears. ‘What if we’re next?’
‘Well,’ said Harry, giving her a little squeeze, his brow furrowing as he spoke. ‘You know, it happened before in the last war, when the Hun broke through our lines in one area, but we beat them back in the end. They will never win.’
They sat in silence for a moment.
Annie nodded as if she was calmed by his answer, but a niggling doubt was gnawing away at her. She didn’t want to say it out loud, but what if Mum had been right last night? What about her brother, George?