Where Bluebells Chime

‘Mother, please? You know how I love dancing!’

Anna gazed down at her feet, knowing just how high feelings could run. Desperately in love with Elliot Sutton she had been at eighteen; besotted by him, desperate for his glance, his touch, his mouth on hers. But Elliot had been dead these many years and she had not shed a tear at his graveside. Nor since.

‘Very well. You may go, since Drew will be with you. But you must not stay out late, remember.’

‘We can’t, Mrs Sutton,’ Daisy was quick to point out. ‘Gracie has to be back in the hostel by eleven.’

‘And I won’t be creeping out of the dance, don’t worry. I wouldn’t even have thought of such a thing if you hadn’t put the idea into my head!’ Tatiana flung, angry to be so humiliated before Daisy and Drew.

‘Now listen to me, young lady!’ Anna was becoming angry. ‘If you continue to be impudent you’ll not only not go to the dance, but you’ll be gated for the remainder of Drew’s leave. I mean it!’

‘Mother, you couldn’t! You wouldn’t!’ Tatiana wailed, her eyes filling with tears.

‘I could, but I won’t. I said you might go and you shall. That you don’t do anything foolish is surely not too much to ask?’

‘It isn’t!’ Tatiana flung her arms around her mother. ‘And I will be good!’ She was smiling now, tears forgotten, because she could twist her mother round her little finger – had always been able to. She gave a skip of delight, then grasped Daisy’s hand, pulling her towards the stairs.

‘Let’s go through my wardrobe,’ she demanded when her bedroom door was firmly closed. ‘I just love those aircrew boys and I’ll die if no one asks me to dance!’

‘They will. You’re very pretty, Tatty. Just like Anne Rutherford. And I think,’ Daisy took an emerald-green dress from the rail, ‘that you should wear this one. Green really suits you. And I’d wear the gold dancing pumps with it.’

The green it would be and oh! Tatiana sighed inside her, she couldn’t wait for tomorrow night. Just her luck, she thought, suddenly sober, if most of the aircrews were flying. She crossed her fingers and wished for the thickest, heaviest pea-souper there was, because only fog could ground the bombers.

And wasn’t she the stupid one? Pea-soupers, in July?

The RAF transport, driven by a Waaf corporal, came to a stop at the entrance to the sergeants’ mess.

‘Okay, you lot! Out you get!’ She let down the tail-flap with a clatter. ‘And mind how you go.’

Drew jumped down first, glad to be out of the gloomy interior of the canvas-covered truck. He was the only man there and had been met with wolf-whistles from the land girls when he’d arrived with Tatiana and Daisy at the crossroads.

‘Shut up, you lot!’ Gracie had stepped out of the huddle of waiting women. ‘This is Drew Sutton and he’s on leave, so give over being so stupid. Anyone’d think you’d never seen a sailor before!’

‘Not as tall and fair and handsome as this one!’ someone quipped. ‘Where’ve you been hiding him, Gracie?’

‘Stop it, I told you, or you’ll get me the sack! Drew’s my boss – well, sort of …’

Drew’s embarrassment and Gracie’s protests had been cut short by the arrival of the transport from RAF Holdenby Moor, and they climbed aboard, laughing.

Over Brattocks Wood, a full moon was rising. It was round and white but tonight on the way home it would shine silver, help light their way, pick out shapes and ditches – even potholes in the narrow road.

‘Everybody okay?’ the driver asked. ‘Get yourselves settled. Just one more pick-up to make. Soon be there.’

She let out the clutch, and the truck lurched forward and on to Holdenby village, where more girls waited. Later, when darkness came, she would be thankful for the moonlight. It was the very devil, driving in the blackout with headlamps painted over black except for the smallest slit in the centre. Thank heaven for white-painted kerbstones, she sighed. The times she had run off the road were too many to count.

The guardroom lay ahead and she stopped with a squealing of brakes that brought shouts and giggles from the back of the truck.

‘Ladies for the sergeants’ mess, plus one matelot,’ she called as the red and white pole that barred the road was raised.

Tatiana shivered with delight as she jumped down into Drew’s waiting arms because even though the door and all the windows of the Nissen hut that served as a mess were closed, she could hear the faint sound of music and the vibrating thunk and tap of bass and drums. She loved to dance and closed her eyes and fervently begged for her fair share of partners. It would be too awful, too degrading, if she sat out every dance when she had taken such trouble to look her best.

She need not have worried. Lady partners were thin on the ground and a cheer went up as they pushed aside the curtain that hung over the door.

Already the air was stuffy and thick with cigarette smoke. It wasn’t time for the blackouts to be put into place, but the windows had been nailed up during the winter and no one had bothered trying to open them since.

They laid their coats over a table at the end of the hut and Tatiana shook her head and ran her fingers through her long dark hair. Then she turned to look into eyes almost as blue as Daisy’s and smiled a breathless, ‘Yes, please,’ when a tall, fair sergeant asked if she would like to dance with him. He held her gently and not too closely and she matched her steps to his as they moved into a waltz.

‘You haven’t been here before.’ It was more a statement than a question. ‘I’d have seen you, if you had.’

‘No. This is my first time. I was only allowed to come because my cousin is home. That’s him,’ she nodded. ‘The sailor, dancing with the land girl. Maybe I won’t be able to come again,’ she sighed, wide-eyed.

‘Then we’ll have to make the most of tonight, won’t we?’ he smiled. ‘I want every dance – okay? Name’s Timothy Thomson – the Scottish Thomson, without the P. Tim.’

‘I’m Tatiana Sutton,’ she breathed, wondering why her voice wobbled and her lips were so stiff. ‘Tatty – and I’m very pleased to meet you.’ The words came out all in a rush.

‘Tatty’s a silly name. Where I come from, a tattie-bogle is a scarecrow and you’re no’ that. I’m very pleased to meet you, too.’ His eyes challenged hers, daring her to look away, claiming her, almost. ‘Tell me where you live. I want to know all about you.’

So she told him, and that her father was dead, but that very soon her grandfather would be coming to live with them when the military moved into the house they were going to take away from him.

‘Is that the old castle? I’ve often seen it when we fly over.’

‘It isn’t old and it isn’t a castle. It only thinks it is. It’s awful, really – sort of pushy. I think Grandfather’s glad to be leaving it for the duration.’

‘You must be rich.’

‘We aren’t, actually. We might have been if Father hadn’t been killed. He’d have inherited, you see. But I suppose, in the end, Bas will be stuck with it and he hates it.’

‘Bas?’ he frowned.

‘Sebastian Sutton. He’s my cousin – lives in Kentucky.’

‘And why, Tatiana Sutton, do you have a Russian name?’ The dance ended and he took her arm and guided her to chairs in the far corner of the floor.

‘My mother is Russian. Her family left because of the Communists. She’s called Aleksandrina Anastasia – Anastasia for the grand duchess. They were born on the same day, just a few hours apart.’ And because all at once she felt so easy with him, she told him about her Grandmother Petrovska, who was very sniffy and always wore black, and how she was very poor because most of what they owned had been left behind in St Petersburg, which Grandmother refused to call Leningrad.

‘You don’t know what poor is,’ he said bluntly. ‘Take me, for instance. I come from a Greenock tenement. I’m bright, though. Got a free place at the local academy. Should’ve been at university if the war hadn’t happened.’

‘But you’ll get there in the end,’ she comforted, ‘when the war is over.’

‘When this war’s over I’ll be long dead,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘The survival rate for aircrews is pretty grim, and it’s grimmer for tail-gunners like me.’

‘Then why did you volunteer? Did you have to?’ she demanded angrily, because she had only just found him and she didn’t want, ever, to lose him.

‘Not really. But on the first Clydeside raid I lost family and friends and I went out in a rage and signed up.’

‘How old are you, Tim?’

‘Twenty. And you …?’