Women on the Home Front: Family Saga 4-Book Collection. Annie Groves
discernible planes. Tilly’s heart thudded with pride at the sight of them even though her stomach was churning with anxiety.
July had heralded the beginning of Hitler’s attempt to destroy the RAF and thus leave the South Coast defenceless and ready for his invasion, and now, in mid-August, what was being called the Battle of Britain had begun in earnest, with aerial ‘dogfights’ taking place in the skies night and day, whilst the ground-based gun batteries did their bit to try to help the RAF.
The noise of heavy gunfire had now become almost as familiar to Londoners as the cries of its barrow boys and newspaper sellers.
There couldn’t be many people who wouldn’t now recognise the heart-thrilling shape of an RAF Spitfire – or the fear-inducing sight of an enemy German plane, so familiar was the almost daily battle in the skies over the South of England between the RAF and the Luftwaffe.
London, especially Drury Lane and Piccadilly, were filled with men and women in uniform, especially RAF uniforms from Fighter Command’s men based in the South of England, coming to the city to enjoy their leave by visiting the theatre and nightclubs.
British uniforms weren’t the only ones to be seen either. In addition to the Free French of General de Gaulle, there were also Polish and Czech fighter pilots. And now that official military support from the colonies had arrived, there were servicemen from Australia, wearing their uniform hats pinned up at one side, from New Zealand, from Canada and, most recently, a contingent of airmen from Southern Rhodesia.
The Aussies were the most friendly and cheerful, and Tilly had been stopped more than once in the street by a smiling Australian wanting to know if she would ‘show him where Buckingham Palace was’, or making some other excuse to flirt with her. Such men though always took her refusal in good part, and Tilly had danced with some of them when the four of them – herself, Agnes, Dulcie and Sally – had gone to the Hammersmith Palais to celebrate Agnes’s birthday in early July.
It was her own birthday on 7 September, a Saturday, and it had been agreed that since her mother would be on duty with the WVS that afternoon, her ‘birthday tea’ would be put off until the Sunday, and the four girls would have tea out together in London before going on to the Hammersmith Palais.
Tilly had felt quite envious of her mother earlier in the month when she had seen George Formby, who was filming Spare a Copper at the Ealing Studios, helping with the collection of scrap metal, something that Olive’s WVS group took very seriously indeed. So seriously in fact that each member of the group had given one of their pans to the collection.
Tilly and Agnes had a St John Ambulance meeting this evening. Christopher wouldn’t be going, though. He hadn’t attended the last couple of weeks’ meetings following the death of his father, feeling that his mother needed his presence at home. Poor Christopher. He had loved his father so much, and his death had increased his loathing of war.
As she left work for the day, Dulcie’s thoughts were occupied with whether or not she was going to allow the good-looking Canadian, who had danced with her at the Palais the previous Saturday, to take her to the cinema, and admiring the nice tan the summer sunshine was giving her legs, meaning that she didn’t have to wear stockings, so that she didn’t see the man waiting for her until she had walked past him. He had called her name in a low urgent voice that had her spinning round in a mixture of disbelief anger and excitement, unable to stop herself from exclaiming, ‘David!’
He was in uniform and it suited him, adding to the devil-may-care manner that secretly she found so attractive. Not that she would ever admit that to him or anyone else, of course, especially now that he was married.
‘Dulcie.’ His delight at seeing her was obvious as he laughed and caught hold of her round the waist, swinging her off her feet and into his arms.
The unexpectedly familiar smell of him enveloped her – after all, his cologne was one they sold in Selfridges – further weakening her resistance. David, with his air of danger and excitement, appealed to a part of herself she had to struggle to control. But she did have to control it, she reminded herself.
‘Put me down,’ she demanded. ‘Someone might see us, and tell your wife, and she certainly wouldn’t approve of you being here, would she?’
‘I don’t care whether Lydia approves or not. She has her life, and I have mine.’
‘The life of an RAF pilot who wants to do things that a married man isn’t supposed to do,’ Dulcie challenged him as he released her.
Her comment made him look deep into her eyes and tell her in a husky voice, ‘There are so many things I’d like to do with you, Dulcie. I’ve thought about you a lot. We could have had a lot of fun together . . . we still can.’
Things like skulking around at the back of Selfridges, as though it were a back alley. Well, she wasn’t the back alley type, and she wasn’t going to be sweet-talked by David into becoming one, no matter how many jerky little bumps her heart gave just because he was here with her.
‘Like I’ve already told you, I don’t go out with married men,’ Dulcie reminded him, before asking sharply, ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘I’m on leave and in London – where else would I be but here hoping to see you whilst I still can. We’ve lost four pilots from our squadron this week, and two the week before. We have to live as much as we can whilst we can, Dulcie, because who knows which of us will be the next? I know what you said but I had to come and see you.’
He had moved out of the shadows now and it gave Dulcie a shock to see how the sunlight revealed harsh new lines either side of his mouth and a grimness to his expression. It shocked her even more to see how his hand trembled as he removed his cigarettes from his pocket and lit them each one.
Unfamiliar feelings of fear and panic turned her own body weak and cold. David was the last person she would have expected to talk about death.
‘I’ve got only tonight here. Lydia’s arranged some ruddy party she wants me to attend tomorrow – I should have gone straight home. I’ve got only a forty-eight-hour pass, but I told her I needed to come to London on RAF business. I have just this evening, Dulcie. Spend it with me. We could go out for dinner and then on to a club,’ David urged her.
To her own shock, for a heartbeat of time she was almost tempted to agree, but David was a married man now even if he had claimed to her before his marriage that marrying Lydia would never be anything more than a duty he had been obliged to perform. David meant nothing to Lydia as a man, Dulcie suspected, it was his suitability and his connections she had married.
It wasn’t because she felt she had a moral responsibility to recognise and protect their marriage that Dulcie was hesitating, though. It was because her instincts urged her to protect her own reputation. Once a girl crossed that line of respectability there could be no going back. Especially not when the man concerned was married. To Dulcie her reputation and her respectability were just as valuable assets as her beauty – important bargaining counters when the day came when she did want to get married and she had selected the husband she wanted. Just as Lydia and David’s marriage was founded on her family’s wealth and his family’s country connections, she would be in a better position to get the kind of husband she wanted if she had something of value to trade with herself.
Dulcie knew all this by instinct, so that it only took a moment’s hesitation before she was shaking her head and saying, ‘I can’t.’
‘Yes you can. Oh, Dulcie, please,’ David begged her reaching for her hand.
On the other side of the road, unobserved by either of them, Raphael, who had given in to an impulse to call and say ‘hello’ to Dulcie whilst he was in the area, saw David take Dulcie’s hand.
He was in London on family business – Enrico Manelli, like his own grandfather and along with over seven hundred other Italians, had lost his life when the Arandora Star, the ship transporting many of the Italian ‘aliens’ from Liverpool to Canada for internment, had been sunk by a German U-boat.
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