Christmas morning, and it wasn’t properly light yet but Katie could hear stifled giggles as her bedroom door was opened to admit Lou and Sasha, clutching their Christmas stockings.
‘Here’s yours,’ they told her, climbing onto her bed and settling down either side of her, silent for once as they focused their energy on the agreeable task of investigating their stockings.
This was the kind of Christmas fun that had previously passed Katie by and she soon found that she too was giggling every bit as excitedly and childishly as the twins as she delved into her own stocking to find a single peppermint cream wrapped in rustly paper, along with an apple and then another peppermint cream.
In their own bed, listening to the giggles, Jean told Sam quietly, ‘I’m ever so glad we didn’t get any bombs last night.’
‘You’re telling me,’ Sam agreed. ‘There’s nothing like sleeping in your own bed, and them rolls of bedding in the air-raid shelter are nothing like our own bed.’
‘I wasn’t just meaning that, Sam. I was meaning with it being Christmas and everything. I know we’re still at war, and there’s plenty that will be having a bad time on account of losing their loved ones and their homes, but it meant a lot to be standing in church last night singing carols, instead of being in a shelter.’
‘Aye, I know, love.’ Sam lifted his arm, pulling her close to him.
‘Sam, the girls might come in,’ Jean protested, but she still rested her head on his shoulder, enjoying the comforting warmth of his big strong body next to her own. Theirs wasn’t the kind of marriage in which either of them made a fuss or said very much, but it was a good marriage; a strong marriage, and a marriage rich in love.
‘When will this war be over, do you think, Sam?’ Jean asked.
She could feel his chest lift and then fall as he breathed in and then exhaled.
‘I don’t know, love. Churchill says we’re in it for the long haul, and I reckon he knows what he’s talking about.’
It was a cold morning, to judge from the thin film of ice on the inside of the bedroom window, but it was the puff of white caused by her own breathing that made Jean feel reluctant to leave the warmth of Sam’s arm and their bed, and rub her feet against his instead. She hated it when Sam had to work nights in the winter. Apart from the danger, she missed his warmth in bed. No hot-water bottle could take the place of a nice big cosy husband.
‘But we got our lads back from Dunkirk, and beat the Germans in the Battle of Britain,’ Jean reminded him.
At least the kitchen would be warm, and Sam had banked up the fire in the front room last night as well. There was something so special about Christmas morning.
‘Aye, we did that.’ Sam’s voice was fervent with emotion, but then their own son, along with his cousin Charlie, had been one of those soldiers who had been brought home safely from the beaches of Dunkirk.
‘But that doesn’t mean that Hitler’s anywhere near beaten yet,’ Sam warned her.
‘I just want it to be over and for everyone to be safe,’ Jean told him.
‘I know that, love.’
‘Luke may be on home duties now but that isn’t to say he won’t be sent abroad to fight later on,’ Jean told him worriedly.
‘If he is then we must just be strong for him, Jean, and for one another.’
‘We’ve been so lucky so far: Luke coming home safe from Dunkirk, Grace not being hurt when she and Seb were caught in the Technical School bombing, this house not being damaged; but I do worry, Sam.’
‘But not today, because today it’s Christmas,’ he told her with a smile.
Jean smiled back, and agreed softly, ‘No, not today.’
They lay in shared silence for a few minutes, and then Jean told Sam, ‘I’d better get up otherwise, if I know the twins, they’ll be downstairs eating the mince pies I made yesterday and then there won’t be a thing left if we get neighbours calling round.’
The rag rug at the side of the bed felt cold, and so did her slippers, Jean acknowledged, as she slid her feet into them and pulled on her dressing gown, before heading for the bathroom.
Eight o’clock, that meant that he’d probably missed breakfast, Luke thought hungrily as he increased his walking pace, his face glowing from the sharpness of the cold December air. There hadn’t been time to let his mother know that he was going to be home for Christmas Day after all because the sergeant had only given Luke the news just over an hour ago.
‘Word is that all them who can make it home and back to the barracks again before tomorrow morning can have unofficial leave.’
Luke hadn’t waited to hear any more, grabbing the presents he had bought for his family and stuffing them into his kitbag.
He could smell soot and the aftermath of burning wood; a dull pall of smoke and still air hung over the areas that had suffered the worst of the bombings. It didn’t do to dwell on the tragedies of the last few days, but no one who had witnessed them was going to forget them.
Luke wasn’t looking forward to having to share this Christmas with someone outside the family. It was bad enough that Grace wouldn’t be there, without having to make polite conversation with a stranger when all he really wanted to do was be with those he loved, even though – having been good-heartedly warned by Grace, in the brief conversation they had shared when Luke had managed to go up to the hospital to check that his sister was unharmed after the bombing, that their mother had invited the billetee to stay over Christmas – he had included a small gift of some handkerchiefs, nicely boxed, for the billetee amongst his presents for his family.
The city devastated by the bombs, so many of its buildings destroyed and damaged, stood proud in all its grey shabbiness in defiance of the enemy. Striding through the empty streets, Luke felt a lump come into his throat, along with a surge of love and pride for the place of his birth.
It had been a long year. The things he had seen and learned during the retreat to Dunkirk were scorched on his heart and his soul for ever. Some of them were things that could only be shared with those who had been there, things that had turned him from a boy to a man and put him on a par with his father, man to man; things there was no going back from. War did that to a person. It changed them for ever, sometimes for the good, and sometimes not. He had seen comrades, friends, screaming in agony from the wounds they had suffered, and begging to be put out of their pain; he had seen friends as close as brothers fighting to the death with one another over a place in one of the queues for the boats; he had seen sickening, horrific things that the boy he had been would never have imagined possible, but which the man he had become knew were.
He seen acts of incredible heroism and self-sacrifice, and acts of terrible self-interest and cruelty, and Luke knew that before this war was over he’d see more of the same.
He’d turned into their own street now, his spirits rising with every step he took. His mother would be properly made up to see him home for Christmas Day and no mistake. He’d go round the back, he decided, and surprise her rather than going to the front door.
He started to whistle cheerfully to himself.
They’d had breakfast in the kitchen, all of them cosy and warm in their dressing gowns and slippers as they’d eaten their porridge and drunk their tea, Sam manfully lifting the heavy roasting tin containing the turkey out of the oven so that Jean could baste it and check anxiously that it was cooking properly, before returning to their bedrooms to get dressed and come back down, all of them dressed in their ‘nice’ clothes, ready to gather in the front room where presents were piled under the tree, waiting to be handed out by Jean, according to Campion family tradition.
Katie, like the twins, was wearing red, but whereas they were in tartan skirts and bright hand-knitted jumpers, Katie was wearing a plain grey wool skirt and a white blouse and a soft red cardigan that fastened with pretty red and cream buttons.
Jean had put on her second-best outfit, the brown skirt and camel-coloured twinset from Lewis’s, although she had covered them protectively with a clean white pinny embroidered with holly leaves and red berries, which Miss Higgins had given her the previous Christmas. Sam was wearing a knitted patterned pullover over a checked shirt with the cavalry-twill trousers Jean had bought him in Blackler’s the year before the war had broken out.
A fire was burning warmly in the grate, and every time the front-room door was opened, the smell of roasting turkey wafted enticingly in from the kitchen.
The sound of Christmas carols being played over the wireless mingled with the twins’ chatter, and the ringing of church bells. Although from the start of the war the ringing of church bells had been forbidden unless as a warning of invasion, this year the Government had given special permission for church bells to be rung on Christmas Day and they were now pealing loud and clearly the country’s message of defiance to its enemies.
‘You’ll be missing your parents,’ Jean told Katie gently, once they were all assembled in the front room.
‘Yes I am,’ Katie agreed truthfully. But she was still glad to be here.
‘Come on, Mum,’ Lou urged. ‘I’m dying to know now what Grace has bought us. Do you remember last year, Sasha, when we thought she had given us slippers and instead it was a record each that she’d put in those boxes to make them look like slippers?’
‘I certainly do,’ Sam told them both mock grimly. ‘How could I forget when the pair of you made that much racket playing them?’
‘Oh – I’ve just got to get something, if you’ll excuse me for a minute.’ Katie stood up, well aware that the twins were impatient to begin unwrapping their presents, but unable to explain that even though she’d managed to get enough wrapping paper to cover the dilapidated cardboard boxes containing the china tea set, she’d been reluctant to bring them downstairs earlier, knowing that their size was bound to arouse everyone’s curiosity.
Katie, having carried one of the boxes downstairs and placed it carefully on the kitchen table ready to take into the front room, had just reached the kitchen with the second box when the back door to the house suddenly opened and a man in army uniform came striding into the kitchen, only to come to an abrupt halt, the smile dying from his eyes as he saw her.
Katie and Luke stared at one another in mutual shock and recognition. There was no need for any words: they both knew what the other was thinking and why. The silence between them, hostile on Luke’s part and heart-sinking on Katie’s, was only broken when Katie felt the box beginning to slip from her grasp and struggled valiantly to hold on to it.
Luke might be bitterly shocked and resentful that the young woman his mother had apparently taken to her heart should be none other than the stuck-up little madam from the Grafton, but he was still enough of Jean and Sam’s son to leap forward automatically to help her with the battle she was obviously losing with the cardboard box.
Katie, equally very much the daughter of two parents who by their own selfish self-absorption had taught her to value the help of others, reacted just as automatically, thanking Luke and explaining, ‘It’s for your mother, a tea set that Grace wants her to have as a special surprise. I was keeping it upstairs as I knew she’d wonder what it was if I put the boxes under the tree.’ Did she sound as breathless as she felt, Katie wondered, as she continued truthfully, ‘I’d never have forgiven myself if anything had happened to it.’
‘Katie, are you all right …? Oh.’
Jean’s face, as she told Sam later, must have been a picture when she walked into the kitchen to find her son and Katie in what looked like an embrace, until she realised that what they were actually holding so tightly was not one another but a large Christmas present.
‘I was just …’ That was Katie.
‘I was just …’ And that was Luke, both of them speaking at the same time in exactly the same tone and using exactly the same words. Katie’s face went bright red, Jean noticed, and Luke’s wasn’t much different, for all that he was hiding his self-consciousness that little bit better.
‘This is for you from Grace,’ Katie explained, starting again. ‘I got such a shock when the back door opened that I nearly dropped it. Luckily your son grabbed hold of it.’
‘And you with it, by the looks of the pair of you,’ Jean laughed. ‘You’d better take it into the front room before something does happen to it, whilst I put the kettle on,’ she told Luke.
‘There’s another one on the table,’ Katie indicated. Grace had been wrong about the kettle going on: Jean hadn’t even waited until she’d unwrapped her present. But then Grace hadn’t known that Luke would be coming home.
Katie had heard a great deal about Jean and Sam’s only son and she knew how proud of him his parents were. It had never occurred to her that the angry young man from the dance hall would be the much-loved son of her landlady, but then why should it have?
‘It’s just as well I got that bigger turkey, after all, Katie,’ Jean said happily. ‘Of course, Luke did say that he’d try to be here, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up too much. His dad will be that pleased. Poor Sam, it’s hard for him sometimes, Luke not being here and he having to live with four females.’
Katie felt the draught from the door into the hall opening and somehow she knew without turning round that it was Luke who had returned to the kitchen.
‘I’ll get my kitbag and get me coat off and then I’ll carry the other box through for you, Mum.’
‘Did you have anything to eat before you left the barracks? You’re looking a bit thinner.’
Katie turned round, expecting to see the same angry rejection in the blue eyes she had seen at the Grafton, but instead they were gleaming with good humour, and Luke was shaking his head and laughing as he hung his coat on one of the pegs behind the back door. Beneath the khaki shirt Katie could see the stretch of his muscles and the breadth of his shoulders, and a funny and disconcerting feeling squirmed through her stomach.
The tea had been made and drunk, and everyone apart from Jean had opened all their presents, Katie’s face glowing with pleasure when she had opened her present from Jean and Sam to find a pretty little powder compact with the initial K picked out on it in sparkling crystals.
‘I got it second-hand,’ Jean told her, ‘but me and Grace both said that it was perfect for you the minute we saw it.’
‘It’s lovely,’ Katie replied, and meant it. Now she understood why Grace’s gift had been a Max Factor powder refill. It would fit perfectly into her new compact.
‘Come on, Mum,’ Lou urged Jean, her eagerness to see what was in the cardboard boxes overcoming her impatience to try out the new dance record Katie had bought for them.
Whilst Jean hesitated and looked uncertainly at the boxes, Katie discreetly started to gather up the discarded wrapping paper, knowing it would possibly have to be used again next year. The firelight burnished the bright reds and golds, adding to the festive warmth of the homely parlour, whilst the lights on the tree illuminated the dark green branches and the carefully tied-on decorations. The smell of pine needles and mince pies filled the room; you could hardly see the top of the sideboard for all the cards, and happily the garlands had stayed up – thanks more to Seb than to her, Katie thought ruefully, as she, like everyone else, waited for Jean to open her present.
Katie found that she was holding her breath as she watched Jean untying the red ribbon that Katie had seen on a market stall and immediately snapped up. It was as though somehow she had taken on an honorary role as Grace’s representative, she admitted. She was certainly mentally recording everything so that she could give Grace a detailed report on it later.
Even that heart-stopping feeling she had had when Luke had grabbed the box she was holding and had inadvertently held her as well?
That had been only because she was still angry about the way he had carried her over that glass against her wishes, and besides, it was private and had nothing at all to do with Grace’s gift to her mother.
‘Well, I don’t know, all this newspaper …’ Jean was looking puzzled and uncertain. ‘Are you sure that Grace said this was for me, Katie?’
‘Yes,’ Katie confirmed. She’d tucked the letter Grace had also given her to give to her mother inside the flap of the second box.
‘Do you want us to help you, Mum?’ Lou offered, but Jean wasn’t listening. She had removed the layers of newspaper to reveal what was inside it and the look on her face brought a huge lump to Katie’s throat.
‘Grace said to tell you that she bought it from Miss Higgins,’ Katie told Jean quietly. ‘She’s giving up her house to go and live with her cousin.’
‘Yes. Yes, I know,’ Jean agreed.
Her voice shook slightly and Katie could see the tears sheening her eyes.
‘I’ve always wanted a proper tea set, ever since me and our Vi used to play with one when we were girls.’
‘Grace said that Miss Higgins said that this one was Minton and that it had been a wedding present to her parents. There’s a letter for you from Grace in the other box with the teapot and the rest,’ Katie told her gently.
Luke frowned as he watched the two women, aware that somehow a bond was being formed between them that excluded everyone else, and he was both confused by it and resentful of it because of his dislike of Katie.
And yet, watching her now, there was none of that snooty, stuck-up, nose-in-the-air manner he’d been so sharply aware of at the Grafton. She wasn’t acting any different than if she had been his sister Grace, except that she didn’t look like Grace. Grace was a very pretty girl, but she was his sister; Katie wasn’t his sister and she was very, very pretty. Too pretty in fact, Luke decided angrily.
This was just about the best Christmas she could remember, Emily decided happily. She and Tommy were kneeling on the carpet in the spare room next to Tommy’s bedroom, home now to the Hornby train set, delivered at eight o’clock in the morning by a very unlikely Father Christmas in the form of the coal man, who had been bribed beforehand to dismember the large iron bedstead that had supported the room’s ‘spare bed’ to provide adequate accommodation for the new arrival.
Emily and Tommy had gone to church, where Emily had proudly showed off her second cousin’s boy and now, to all intents and purposes, her adoptive son. Neighbours who had scarcely bothered to exchange the time of day with her before had come over to wish her a ‘Merry Christmas’ above the sound of the church bells ringing out so strongly across the smitten city, causing all those who heard them, including Emily, to add a special plea that the prayers they had just said in church might be granted. Before too long Emily had found herself included in a group of mothers and grandmothers, and treated very much as an equal as they all bemoaned the effects of rationing and war on their lives and those of their children.
Now Emily watched as the train chugged round the tracks. Together, she and Tommy had connected railway lines and sidings, with proper points and signals, and the most up-to-date of all the Hornby engines was now running happily along its tracks, pulling its smart LMS-liveried coaches behind it.
Con, who hadn’t arrived home until the very early hours of Christmas Day morning, had slept through Christmas morning and Christmas dinner before going back to the theatre. Not that Emily cared one jot. She and Tommy had had the jolliest of times, pulling crackers, wearing silly hats and then reading out the jokes, or at least she had read out the jokes and Tommy had listened, and now they were having the best of fun together with the Hornby train set.
A nice warm fire burned in the grate, hot milk, with a touch of brandy in it for her, had been drunk, and mince pies consumed, and very soon Emily suspected both of them would be ready for their beds. And still to be enjoyed in the days to come were the brightly coloured annuals, and the Meccano set. Emily heaved a happy sigh of contentment.
All the presents had been unwrapped, they had eaten their dinner, listened to the King’s speech, all to one degree or another fighting back tears, the washing-up had been done, and although he had been watching her, waiting for her to show her true colours the whole way through, Luke had to admit that Katie hadn’t put a foot wrong. She had helped his mother discreetly without in any way claiming for herself a role in the household she did not have, she had kept the twins entertained and amused when they had started to get bored, she had even listened to their elderly neighbours’ rambling tales of their own youth with every evidence of genuine enjoyment, whilst somehow still managing to keep herself in the background. But despite all of that, far from being pleased that he had been unable to find fault with her, Luke was growing more antagonistic towards her by the minute.
Not just his mother but both his parents had sung her praises to him, the twins were hanging on her every word, yet none of that could shift the lump of angry dislike Luke could feel burning inside him.
She was a fraudster who was deceiving his whole family, and he was sorely tempted to drop into the conversation, sort of accidentally, the kind of comment that would alert them to her real nature and expose her for what she was.
Small wonder that she had kept her distance from him all day, even preferring to pull crackers with old Mr Gilchrist from five doors down, rather than with him, and leaving him to pull his with his mother.
Oh, yes, she had been as tireless about keeping away from him as she had been in helping his mother. Not that he could blame his family for being taken in by her. Luke had to admit that, having watched the tactful way she went about ensuring that his mother was given the chance to enjoy Christmas Day herself by taking over many of the dull chores of the day. She was certainly very good at portraying herself as a ‘good sort’.
Luke looked moodily down at his beer. A knocking at the front door signalled the arrival of the neighbours his mother had invited round for a Christmas drink and a bit of a singsong. Like her sister Francine, his mother had a good singing voice and musical ear, which all her children had inherited, and it was a bit of a family tradition that on Christmas Night everyone got up and did a bit of something, either a song or, in the twins’ case, both a song and a dance. Everyone that was except for their dad, Luke acknowledged, since Sam claimed that he couldn’t sing a note.
* * *
Luke was just pouring a beer for one of their neighbours when Lou came up to him and announced importantly, ‘Me and Sasha have learned a new routine specially for tonight.’
Luke grunted. He was used to his younger sisters’ dedication to their dancing and singing, and shared his parents’ feelings about the girls’ desire to make a career for themselves on stage.
‘Just wait until you see it. Katie says it’s the best, and she should know, what with her dad being a band leader and her mother having been on the stage. Imagine having parents like that!’ Lou exclaimed enviously.
‘No, thank you. I’m perfectly happy with the parents we’ve got, and so you should be and all,’ Luke rebuked her sharply.
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Lou defended herself, ‘did I, Sasha?’
‘No,’ Sasha immediately supported her twin.
‘I’ll bet, though, that if Katie had wanted to go on the stage her parents wouldn’t have said she’d be better off working in Lewis’s.’
Luke wasn’t really listening to the twins’ grievances. He was looking at Katie, who was listening to something his mother was saying. Of course it would be easy for her to pretend to be something she wasn’t, with her background. No wonder she was after a well-to-do chap; that sort – her sort – always were.
‘Well, you don’t have to do a turn if you don’t want to, Katie, love,’ Jean assured Katie as the two of them organised the chairs the neighbours had brought with them, all the way round the outside of the carpet to leave plenty of space free in the middle for the ‘turns’. ‘The twins will be disappointed, though. I think they were hoping you’d sing with them.’
‘I’d love to,’ Katie told her, ‘but the truth is that I can’t sing a note.’
Jean looked unconvinced.
‘It’s true,’ Katie assured her. ‘My father banned me from even trying, I’m so bad.’
‘You’ve got ever such a good sense of rhythm, though; I’ve watched you dancing with the twins.’
‘Oh, that. Well, yes, I can dance,’ Katie agreed, ‘but that’s not a real talent like singing or playing an instrument.’
‘Well, never mind, although I must admit I like a bit of a singsong meself. Goes back to when me and our Vi were young. Our mother had a good voice – that’s where Fran gets it from, of course, and my lot too. The kids have always enjoyed putting on a bit of a show for the neighbours over Christmas. I remember one year Luke and Grace did a bit of a mime and a dance. The older ones like to get up and do a bit as well. There’s a couple of the men got good strong voices and can hold a note well, and Dan Simmonds from number twelve plays the accordion.’
It was going on for midnight, and everyone who wanted to had done a bit of a turn, with the twins receiving the most applause for their song-and-dance routine, and now, to Katie’s dismay, the twins, having had an illicit glass of sherry apiece, were insisting that Katie got up and sang with them.
‘No, honestly, I can’t,’ Katie protested, but they weren’t in any mood to listen, taking hold of her hand and trying to drag her up out of her seat. Everyone was laughing and joining the fun, egging them on, and she looked despairingly round the room for help, but Jean, who could have saved her, was out of the room, having taken an elderly neighbour who couldn’t walk very well to the bathroom.
Someone had seen her discomfort, though, and was coming to her rescue – and a very unlikely someone indeed, Katie acknowledged, as Luke, who had been sitting talking quietly with his father, got up and came over, telling his sisters firmly, ‘Leave her be, you two.’ Katie was just about to thank him when he continued coldly, ‘If she wants to be stuck up and too posh to join in then that’s up to her. Tell you what,’ he added, turning his back on Katie, ‘how about I sing with you?’
There was no one to see the hot tears burning Katie’s eyes as painfully as the embarrassed colour burned her face as she slipped out of the room and went into the kitchen, where she busied herself with some washing-up.
Or at least Katie had thought there was no one to see, until she felt a hand on her arm and heard Sam Campion saying quietly, ‘I’m sorry about that, lass. I’ll have a word with our Luke. His mum told me earlier that you can’t sing.’
To Katie’s embarrassment fresh tears welled in her eyes. She wanted to rub them away but her hands were wet and soapy from the washing-up water.
‘Don’t think too badly of the lad. The thing is that he was made a bit of a fool of a while back by a girl he was keen on, when she told him that he wasn’t good enough for her.’
Katie had to fight against an urge to point out that since she wasn’t that girl it was hardly fair of Luke to tar her with the same brush.
‘There’s no need to say anything, Mr Campion,’ she said. ‘I feel daft enough as it is, not being able to sing, without having to tell everyone about it.’
‘Aye, well, there’s more important things in life than singing, and if you ask me sometimes it can cause more trouble than it’s worth when folk go putting the wrong ideas in other folks’ heads.’
Katie knew that he was referring to the twins and their belief that they were destined to follow in their aunt’s footsteps.
‘We all have our dreams,’ she told him, ‘especially when we’re young, but as I’ve told the twins, working in entertainment is nowhere near as glamorous or exciting as it looks. Even my father says that if he had a son he would prefer him to have a trade rather than be a conductor. It can be such an unkind life, even for those who are very talented.’
She could hear Luke’s good baritone enriching the sweetness of the twins’ voices as they sang together, and she felt a small pang of envy, knowing how her father would have loved and praised her had she had one half of the talent of the Campion offspring.
‘Jean’s right, you’re a good lass. I admit that I wasn’t keen when she said that we’d have to take someone in, but I reckon we’ve dropped lucky in getting you.’
Praise indeed from the normally reticent head of the Campion household. But not even knowing that Sam had come to her rescue and liked her could take away the hurt Luke’s words had caused.
It was all very well for his father to explain that he was suffering from a broken heart on account of some girl who had made a fool of him, but that was no reason for him to be so antagonistic and unkind to her, was it?
The twins, accompanied by Katie, had gone up to bed, and if he hadn’t known better Luke admitted that it would have been easy for anyone to think that the gentle but determined way in which Katie had insisted that she was tired and ready for her bed but that she’d love to hear the twins’ new gramophone records first, was a kind and thoughtful way of giving him some time alone with his parents, but of course that was impossible, given what he knew about her.
Still, no matter what the reasoning behind her disappearance upstairs with the twins in tow, virtually the minute the last of the washing-up and the last of the guests had been dealt with, it was well timed from his point of view.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had had both his parents to himself.
‘You’ll have to be getting back to the barracks,’ Sam warned him. ‘You don’t want to be late and get put on a charge.’
‘I won’t be, Dad,’ Luke assured him, nodding his head in acceptance of his mother’s offer of a cup of cocoa before he left.
‘I just hope the Luftwaffe doesn’t decide to attack us again tonight,’ said Jean worriedly. ‘They’ve held off so far over Christmas.’
‘I don’t reckon we’ll be seeing them tonight,’ Sam reassured her, exchanging a rueful look with Luke behind Jean’s back as she headed for the kitchen.
‘The city can’t take much more,’ Sam told Luke in a low voice once Jean had disappeared. ‘We’ve had to call in reinforcements to deal with what we’ve already been dealt, and we’re a long way from getting everything back to normal. Half the services are running on a make-do-and-mend shoestring, and it wouldn’t take much to knock them out. The City Council’s done its best, but you can’t clean up after the kind of bombing raids we’ve suffered, on thin air. We’ve lost equipment we can’t replace, and the lads reckon that a lot of it can’t be repaired easily either.’
‘The Germans are bound to go for us, Dad, on account of the docks,’ Luke warned his father. ‘They know the country needs to keep the west coast ports open for the convoys.’
‘Aye, it really gets my goat to think of them brave lads risking their lives on them ships, and paid nothing for the days they aren’t at sea, just to have their cargo slipped sideways to some ruddy black marketeer who’s getting rich off their backs.’
‘There’s bin a lot of unofficial talk down at the barracks about putting the army in to sort out the docks to stop the black market,’ Luke told him, ‘but at the end of the day we’re soldiers, not dockers, and then there’s the unions.’
They broke off their conversation when Jean returned with three steaming hot cups of cocoa.
‘Katie, bless her, made some for herself and the girls and took it up with them.’
‘I’m surprised they’re daft enough to want to bother with her after the way she made out she was too good for them when she refused to sing with them,’ Luke announced curtly. He didn’t want to tell tales – that would be beneath him – but he certainly didn’t want to see his family taken in either.
‘Luke,’ Jean protested. ‘Whatever gave you that idea? Katie’s not a bit like that.’
Luke could see that his mother was upset, and that made him dislike Katie even more.
‘Aye, I meant to have a word with you about what you said to her, Luke,’ Sam pitched in. ‘Proper upset, she was.’
Now his father was sticking up for her as well.
Luke stiffened.
‘Thing is,’ Sam continued as though he hadn’t noticed Luke’s angry withdrawal, ‘the lass can’t so much as sing a note. Proper self-conscious she is about it as well, what with her father being a professional musician, at least that’s what your mother says.’
‘Yes, that’s right, Luke,’ Jean agreed. ‘Katie came to me and told me earlier when I told her about our singsong. She’s not the sort to say too much, but I could tell that she’d been upset by what her dad had said to her when he’d banned her from trying to sing, though she made a bit of a joke about it, in that gentle way she has. Mind you, I reckon those parents of hers don’t deserve a good daughter like her, telling her not to come home for Christmas because they’re going to some friends. She’s been ever so good with the twins, telling them that going on the stage isn’t a bit like they think it is, and she’s a real homebody as well. She’s even asked me about joining the WVS so that she help out a bit. It’s hard for a young girl like her to come to live amongst strangers.’
‘Well, it was her choice and she isn’t the only one,’ Luke pointed out, unwilling to relinquish his animosity but at the same time suffering that defensiveness that always accompanies the discovery that one might be guilty of misjudging someone. He wasn’t going to vindicate himself, though, by telling his parents what he had overheard Katie saying at the Grafton. He wasn’t like that.
He’d finished his cocoa and it was time for him to leave.
‘Grace said to tell you that she and Seb are going to the Grafton’s New Year’s Eve dance, if you can get leave and fancy going,’ Jean told him as she and Sam accompanied him to the back door.
Pulling on his army greatcoat, Luke laughed. ‘What, me go out with that pair of lovebirds?’
‘They’re an engaged couple now,’ Jean reprimanded him firmly.
But Luke grinned at her and said teasingly, ‘That’s what I mean. Besides I won’t be getting any leave over the New Year, seeing as I’ve got some now.’
Relieved to see Luke restored to good spirits, Jean hugged him, trying not to let him see how much she worried that every time she saw him it could be the last, given the fact that he was in the army and they were a country at war. There were those who said that the men posted to home duties had an easy time of it compared with those posted overseas, but living in Liverpool was no picnic, with Hitler’s bombs raining down on them night after night, and soldiers like her Luke having to go out and risk their lives sorting out the mess those bombs had left behind.
‘It’s a shame that Luke seems to have taken against Katie,’ said Jean to Sam as she picked up their cocoa cups to take through to the kitchen to wash them whilst Sam stoked up the fire.
‘The lad took a hard knock over that good-for-nothing piece that dropped him to take up with someone else, and besides, wartime is no time for a soldier to think of starting courting,’ Sam warned her, ‘or for his mother to get ideas about matchmaking.’
‘Sam Campion, what a thing to suggest,’ Jean protested. ‘I hope I’m not the kind of mother who goes about trying to choose her own daughter-in-law.’
Sam said nothing.
The horrid narrow single bed in the small boxroom that had originally been her youngest brother, Jack’s, was every bit as uncomfortable as Bella had known it would be. Of course Jack’s things had all been packed away after the tragedy of his death. Naturally her mother had not been able to bear to have them there to remind her of what had happened. Bella admitted that she sometimes forgot that Jack had even existed. There had been a big age gap between her and Charlie and Jack, and Jack had been one of those difficult children who always seemed to be doing the wrong thing and causing a lot of trouble.
Thinking of people who caused a lot of trouble made Bella feel even more hard done by. It had come as an unpleasant shock to have her mother virtually ignoring her to fuss all over Charlie’s new girlfriend, who wasn’t even particularly pretty, never mind as pretty as Bella herself.
Vi had been openly impressed when Charlie had told them all about Daphne’s parents’ detached house, immediately quizzing Daphne about her mother and how many committees she sat on, and other stupid things like that, and then practically fawning on the wretched girl as though she were Princess Elizabeth or something.
Their father had been impressed as well. He must have been to have given Charlie the one hundred pounds Charlie has boasted to her he had been given. Now Daphne was no doubt sleeping comfortably in Bella’s old room and in her bed, whilst she was relegated to the boxroom as though she was of no account at all, her, a widow whose husband had been killed. All Daphne had lost was a brother.
Bella turned over, hunching her shoulder petulantly. It seemed pointless to her, everyone calling Charlie a hero, when in the end Daphne’s brother had gone and drowned anyway. There had been tears in Daphne’s eyes when she had told them all how grateful her parents were to Charlie for what he had done.
‘My parents look upon Charles almost as an adopted son,’ Daphne had told Vi emotionally. ‘My father especially has become tremendously attached to him. Charles has been so very kind to Daddy, coming to see him when he can, and talking to him about Eustace. People don’t, you see. They think it’s better not to.’
Now, of course, her mother was dying to show off Daphne at the Hartwells’ Boxing Day party, Bella acknowledged bitterly, whilst she no doubt would be pushed into the background. Daphne was so dull and boring, and her clothes, stuffy and not the kind of thing at all that Bella would ever wear. A horrid tartan skirt with a dreadful mustard-coloured jumper, just because they had Scottish connections, whatever that was supposed to mean.
‘We think it must have been because of his dreadful injuries that Eustace did what he did and—’ Daphne had said when she’d been going on about her wretched brother.
‘I just wish that I’d seen what he was doing and been able to stop him,’ Charlie had interrupted her, ‘but I was helping to get one of the other lads onto the boat. They’d pushed him off the one he was on, said it was overloaded.’
‘Oh, no, it wasn’t your fault. You must never think that, and at least you saved him from that dreadful beach and being taken by the Germans. Daddy couldn’t have borne that.’ Daphne had reached for Charlie’s hand as she spoke, adding emotionally, ‘You are such a hero, Charles, and so very brave.’
And Bella had known immediately what her mother was thinking and planning.
And then her father had joined in, saying, ‘Well, you can tell your dad that Charlie, er, I mean Charles here has got a good job waiting for him in a good business when he comes out of the army. I shouldn’t wonder that I’ll be making him up to a full partner by the time he’s thirty. What line of business is your father in, if I may ask, Daphne?’
‘Oh Daddy’s a member of Lloyd’s,’ had been Daphne’s answer, which had plainly left her mother as confused as it had done Bella herself, although her father had looked both impressed and delighted. So whatever Lloyd’s was, it obviously meant that Daphne’s father had plenty of money.
It was plain that Daphne was sweet on Charlie.
Bella thumped her pillow again. It wasn’t possible, of course, that she could ever be supplanted in her mother’s affections, and especially not by someone like Daphne, with her big wide eyes and silly way of looking so adoringly at Charlie. Charlie, of all people. And now she had to put up with Charlie preening himself and boasting that their father was going to be like putty in his hands.
‘He still hasn’t forgiven you for joining up,’ Bella had reminded her brother.
‘Huh, that’s all you know, Miss Clever,’ Charlie had retorted. ‘Dad took me to one side after dinner and told me that he thought it could be the best thing I’ve ever done.’
‘That’s just because of Daphne,’ Bella had told him. ‘And once she’s not around—’
‘And who says she isn’t going to be around? Dad reckons that Daphne would be the right girl for me to marry, and I reckon he’s right,’ Charlie had announced, adding, ‘Of course I told Dad that I’ll have to give her a decent engagement ring, her family being what they are, and Dad agrees.’
Bella’s chest heaved with indignation and outrage as she thought of the machinations she had had to go through to get her ring off Alan.
Still, at least she hadn’t had to marry down, she thought cattily, which if Daphne’s parents were as posh as her parents seemed to think, was what Daphne would be doing if she married Charlie.
Her mother certainly seemed to think she would. When she had forced Bella into the kitchen to help her with the supper ‘so that Charles and Daphne can have a bit of time together on their own’, all she had been able to talk about was weddings.
Bella thumped her pillow again glowering into the darkness.