My Sweet Valentine

‘Quick, switch the wireless on, someone, otherwise we’re going to miss the six o’clock news,’ Olive instructed, as she filled the kettle for a fresh pot of tea. They’d eaten at five o’clock after their return from St Paul’s and, like everyone in the land, Olive wouldn’t have wanted to miss the regular early evening news bulletin from the BBC, even if that meant she’d be all in a rush afterwards to get washed and changed for her WVS meeting.

It was Dulcie who responded to her request. Dulcie had proved surprisingly adept at tuning in the wireless, even though she complained that if she wasn’t careful the mesh on the front, close to the tuning dial, scratched her nail polish.

Olive loved her wireless. She often listened to it when she was alone in the kitchen after the girls had gone to work, humming along to popular songs as she did her housework, listening carefully when Elsie and Doris Waters were in charge of the popular Kitchen Front programme with its tips for housewives anxious to make their rations stretch as far as they could. Both Olive and Audrey Windle agreed that they hated missing Mr J.B. Priestley’s Postscript broadcasts. Nancy, being Nancy, said that listening to music made housewives lazy and that she wouldn’t have a wireless in her house at all if it hadn’t been for her husband insisting.

The kettle was boiling. Tilly and Agnes had got the teacups.

‘You sit down here, Mrs Robbins, then you can hear the news properly. Tilly and I will sort out the tea,’ offered Drew.

He really was everything that any mother could want in a prospective son-in-law – should she be wanting to see her daughter married – but the problem was that Olive did not want to see Tilly married, not for a long time yet.

Right now, though, Olive wanted to concentrate on listening to the news.

Accompanied by various ‘shushings’ and, ‘It was you wot spoke, not me,’ from the girls, the newsreader, Alvar Lidell tonight, began his broadcast in a very hushed tone as he reassured the country that, despite Hitler’s attempts to destroy the spirit of Londoners, the city was standing firm, and with it St Paul’s. Olive suspected that this wasn’t the only home in which a small cheer went up at this announcement. There was also an announcement confirming the news that a full corps of Canadians would be stationed in Britain.

‘So many people from the Commonwealth coming to help – Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, and Canadians – it’s wonderful, isn’t it?’ Olive murmured, ‘especially when many of them have never even been to this country before.’

‘What’s not wonderful is the way in which America is holding back,’ said Drew grimly.

‘That’s not your fault,’ Tilly assured him loyally. ‘You’ve been sending articles back to Chicago, that tell what it is really like here, Drew.’

There was also a brief mention of the Greeks’ offensive against the Italians in Albania, plus an even more carefully worded announcement about the ongoing situation in the Middle East, before the news bulletin came to an end.

War! No wonder they all crowded round the wireless to listen to the news. Those dry, dusty facts translated for so many of them into events affecting the lives of loved ones both at home and abroad, Olive thought sombrely as she went upstairs to wash and change into her smart WVS uniform ahead of her meeting.

Two

‘Who on earth can that be knocking on the front door at this time of night?’ Olive complained, as she was hanging up her coat in the hallway. She had only just got in from her WVS meeting and was looking forward to what she hoped would be an uninterrupted night’s sleep in her own bed without any air-raid sirens going off. She’d made the air-raid shelter, at the bottom of the garden, as comfortable as possible but there was nowhere like your own bed, even though Olive made sure that the shelter beds had immaculately washed and ironed linen and cosy blankets.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll go,’ she called into the kitchen where the girls were making cocoa and toast, the smell of this homely but appetising fare making her empty stomach rumble.

Automatically she switched off the hall light as she reached the front door to make sure that the house didn’t contravene the blackout regulations.

The sight of a man in army uniform standing on the doorstep, his face shadowed by his cap, had her asking uncertainly who he was, recognition only dawning when the visitor announced cheerfully, ‘It’s me, Rick, Dulcie’s brother, Mrs Robbins. I’ve come to see Dulcie.’

‘Rick!’ Dulcie exclaimed excitedly from the dark hallway, obviously having recognised her elder brother’s voice, rushing past Olive to throw herself into his arms. ‘I know you said you’d got leave and you’d come and see me, but I thought that you wouldn’t be able to get here, with London being out of bounds to servicemen on leave because of the bombing.’

‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ her brother told her, tapping the side of his nose in a knowing way. ‘I’d have been up in London before now, but Mum was a bit pulled down so I stayed on there longer than I’d planned.’

‘Dulcie, let Rick get inside so that we can shut the door and put the light on,’ Olive protested.

It was Rick himself who took charge in a nicely masculine way, smiling at her and then bundling his sister inside before calmly closing the door, at the same time managing politely to remove his cap.

The conversation in the hall could be heard through the open kitchen door, and Tilly felt her stomach muscles tense. She’d had a huge crush on Rick when she’d first met him. He’d made it clear, though, that he wasn’t interested in her, and he’d hurt her by doing so.

But things were different now. She’d been a girl then; she was a woman now, and more importantly, since then she’d met and fallen in love with Drew. But she’d never said anything to Drew about Rick or her silly crush on him.

Drew. She pressed closer into the curve of his arm, whilst the five of them, Drew and herself, and Agnes and Ted and Sally, looked towards the hall door.

Once he was in the kitchen and the introductions had been made Rick allowed himself a second look at Tilly. She’d been a pretty girl and now she was an even prettier young woman, and one who’d got herself a steady bloke, by the look of things. Pity that; he’d been looking forward to seeing her and dancing with her on New Year’s Eve. In fact, he recognised, he’d thought rather a lot about Tilly recently, imagining and anticipating that pretty giveaway blush of hers when she saw him. Only she wasn’t blushing and she wasn’t interested in him at all. Rick was an easygoing good-natured young man with a philosophical outlook on life. There were plenty of other pretty girls. But Tilly had been that little bit special, even if his sister had warned him off her, telling him that she didn’t want him flirting with the daughter of her landlady, who was a very protective mother.

Once again Sally went to fill the kettle. Now it was Dulcie’s turn to perch on a male knee as she sat close to her brother.

‘Desert was it, mate?’ Ted asked with a nod in the direction of Rick’s well-tanned face.

‘North Africa,’ Rick confirmed, adopting the same brisk economical way of speaking.

‘Sidi Barrani?’ Drew guessed, removing his cigarettes from his pocket to offer them around.

Rick nodded as he lit one and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs, the kitchen light illuminating the angles of his battle-hardened desert-tanned profile before he blew it out again.

‘Which reminds me,’ he told Dulcie, ‘I met up with a friend of yours in the desert – that Italian guy from Liverpool. Good chap. It can’t have been easy for him, seeing as it was the Italians we were fighting, but he never hesitated for a minute. He’s on leave as well. He’s gone home to see his parents in Liverpool.’

Dulcie tossed her head. It was a pity that Wilder hadn’t been here to listen to Rick’s comment. She’d have to get her brother to repeat it in front of him. The good-looking Italian she’d flirted with at the Hammersmith Palais in an attempt to make some of the other Selfridges girls jealous didn’t mean anything to her, but it wouldn’t have done Wilder any harm to hear that another attractive man was keen on her.

Olive, who had been watching Tilly closely, knowing how she had once felt about Rick, wasn’t as relieved as she once would have been to see how uninterested in him Tilly was. Olive wasn’t at all happy about the way Tilly had been behaving tonight. She had sensed a new, almost reckless determination in her strong-willed daughter, and she was relieved that Tilly lived at home under her own watchful maternal eye.

‘How are your parents, Rick?’ Olive asked politely ‘Have they settled down all right in Kent?’

After the death of Dulcie’s younger sister, Edith, Dulcie and Rick’s parents had moved to Kent to get away from the bombs.

‘I suppose Mum is still going on about Edith, is she?’ Dulcie asked before Rick could answer Olive. ‘She always was Mum’s favourite. I expect she thinks she’s up there in heaven caterwauling along with the angels now.’

‘Dulcie,’ Olive protested, but Dulcie simply tossed her head. ‘Well, it’s true. She was Mum’s favourite and that is what she will think.’

Everyone at number 13 knew about the rivalry that had existed between Dulcie and Edith when they had both been living at home before the war. Edith had been their mother’s favourite and favoured child, a fact about which Dulcie had vigorously complained for as long as they had all known her. Initially Olive had believed that Dulcie must be exaggerating. It seemed impossible to her, as the parent of a much-loved only child, that any mother could favour one child to the extent that Dulcie had claimed. However, after Dulcie had damaged her ankle during an air raid, Olive had visited Dulcie’s mother to alert her to the fact that Dulcie was in hospital. She had discovered then that Dulcie’s mother did indeed favour her younger daughter above her elder, and the compassion that Olive now felt for Dulcie, despite her often brash manner, dated from that visit. Not, of course, that she would ever hurt Dulcie’s keen pride by letting her know that. Hence her chiding comment.

Dulcie ignored Olive’s gentle rebuke. She wouldn’t want anyone else to know it for the world, but deep down inside her there was still a small, scratchy, sore place that hurt every time she thought about the way her mother had favoured – and loved – Edith more than she had done her.

Edith had been their mother’s pride and joy right from the minute she had been born, and that pride and joy had only grown once Edith had developed a singing voice that, according to the agent who’d taken her under his wing, would give her a career that would rival that of Vera Lynn.

Their mother had been devastated when Edith hadn’t returned home from a singing engagement when the Blitz had been at its worst. Her body, like so many others, had never been recovered, and they had been told by local officials that they must assume that Edith had been killed. The horribleness of there being no body and everything that implied – there were the most awful stories about absolutely nothing being left of people apart from what looked like a patch of sticky toffee on the ground – meant that their mother had been unable to bear to continue to live in London. Edith had been everything to her, whilst she …

Seeing his sister’s expression and guessing what she was thinking, Rick swiftly changed the subject.

‘John’s home on leave as well,’ referring to the son of the builder for whom their father worked. ‘I left him down in Kent with his mum and dad. He said to give you his best.’

Making a speedy recovery, Dulcie preened herself. John had always been sweet on her, right from their shared schooldays.

‘Dad’s settled in Kent really well. John’s dad and uncle have got a nice little business going down there and Dad reckons they did the right thing moving out of London. You should go down and see them if you get the chance.’

‘What, and have Mum going on about how much better than me Edith was?’ Dulcie scoffed. ‘No, thanks. You are coming to the New Year’s Eve dance, aren’t you?’ she demanded.

‘Of course I am. There’s no way I’m going to miss out on the chance to dance with all those pretty girls,’ Rick laughed.

‘Deserve a medal, you lot do, for showing them what’s what in the desert,’ Ted chipped in, giving Rick an approving look. ‘Read about it in the papers, I did,’ he continued in his quiet way.

‘We had the RAF to give us a hand,’ Rick told him. ‘Mind you, for once I think I’d rather have been up in the air than down on the ground. Gets everywhere, that sand does, and I mean everywhere,’ he emphasised feelingly, causing the other two young men to respond with broad man-to-man grins whilst the girls affected not to understand.