As Time Goes By. Annie Groves
out of retirement to fill in, on account of the chap that was there before being knocked down by a delivery lorry and ending up with a broken leg and arm. Pity they didn’t leave him retired, if you ask me, what with him getting Mouse here so worked up that she was in tears all day, and him keeping on about the ATS being only good for one thing. I don’t know how I kept myself from telling him what I thought of him.’
‘Yes,’ Mouse sniffed as they crossed the hallway and made their way to their dormitory, prior to having their supper. ‘And he told Sam that she’d better watch her step otherwise he’d put her on a charge. I never thought it was going to be like this in the ATS.’ Fresh tears filled her eyes, causing Sam to stifle a small sigh, and battle with her reluctant sense of responsibility towards the other girl.
‘Well, I know what will cheer you up,’ Lynsey announced robustly, as soon as they were all in the dormitory with the door closed. ‘We’re all off duty tomorrow night, I’ve checked, so why don’t we go down to the Grafton and have a bit of fun, seeing as it’s a Saturday? It will do us all good, especially you two, and you as well, Corp, what with that chap of yours being down in Dartmouth on that course.’
‘What’s the Grafton?’ Sam asked.
‘It’s only Liverpool’s best dance hall, that’s what,’ Lynsey informed her enthusiastically. ‘We’ll have to go early, mind, otherwise we won’t get in. All the services boys go there, don’t they, Corp?’ she appealed to Hazel.
A dance hall! Sam’s heart sank. As skilled as she was at sports, and as fleet of foot as she had been at racing her brother, somehow she had never managed to get to grips properly with dancing.
‘It’s because you want to lead like a man,’ Russell had laughed at her. ‘Girls don’t do that, Sam.’
She would have preferred it if Lynsey had suggested going to the pictures rather than going out dancing, and she was just about to say as much when Mouse burst out, horrified, ‘A dance hall! Oh, I couldn’t possibly go to one of those. The minister of our church warned me about them when I joined up.’
Behind Mouse’s stiffly outraged back Hazel pulled a rueful face at Sam and muttered under her breath, ‘Poor bloody kid, she’s so scared of living she might as well be dead. It’s a crying shame, and we’ll have to do something about it.’
‘There’s no harm in having a bit of fun,’ Lynsey was telling Mouse determinedly. ‘Not if you ask me, and not when you remember that there’s a war on and wot that Hitler is going to do to us if he has his way.’
Her comment caught Sam like a blow. No matter how much they tried to put it out of their minds, or hide it behind a cheerful mask of banter and determination, for the whole country the fear they shared was never really very far away.
‘Lynsey’s right, there’s nothing wrong in going to a dance, Mouse,’ Hazel smiled.
‘In fact,’ Lynsey added, ‘I reckon that it’s our duty to think about those poor boys of ours, fighting to save this country and risking their lives for us. It wouldn’t be right to deny them the opportunity to have a bit of fun in their off-duty time, and it certainly wouldn’t be Christian,’ she told Mouse mock piously, adding, ‘Anyway, me and others are going, and Sam’s coming along too, aren’t you, Sam?’
Sam was now caught out fair and square. And there was certainly no way she wanted to be lumped with Mouse and the pair of them turned into a couple of killjoy miseries, avoided by the other girls.
‘Yes, of course I am,’ she agreed, forcing a hearty enthusiasm she couldn’t feel. ‘And you’re coming as well, Mouse. You don’t have to dance,’ she told her, shrewdly devising a way out of her own fear of making a complete fool of herself on the dance floor. ‘Not if you don’t want to, but you can’t stay here on your own.’
‘No … I wouldn’t want to do that,’ Mouse agreed ‘Do you think there really is a ghost here, like May said last night?’
Sam laughed. ‘Of course there isn’t.’
‘Well, that’s not what I’ve heard,’ May defended her story stoutly. ‘Like I said, I’ve bin told they was thinking of closing it down as a school on account of the number of girls wot had been taken bad after seeing it and having to be sent home.’
‘And the moon’s made of green cheese. I’ll bet they were making it up just so they could get out of lessons,’ Hazel scoffed, adding, ‘I’m going down for my supper. Fair starved, I am. I heard one of the other girls saying that it was toad-in-the-hole tonight, and that’s one of the few things that Cook serves up that’s halfway decent.’
‘So come on, Sam, and tell us all about this sergeant you’ve taken a shine to then,’ Lynsey demanded.
They were sitting together at the supper table, and Sam’s could feel her face burning with self-consciousness.
‘Don’t talk such rot. Sergeant Brookes is—’
‘Oh ho, so it’s Sergeant Brookes, is it? Bet that’s not what you call him when you’re on your own with him, is it, girls?’ Lynsey teased Sam, winking across the table at the other girls.
Sam knew that it was silly to feel so self-conscious and defensive about her good-natured teasing but she couldn’t help it. Whilst there had been kindness in the tall fair-haired Royal Engineer’s eyes and voice, there had been none of the male appreciation she had seen men exhibiting towards girls they found attractive – nothing improper in any way, in fact. The truth was that she just wasn’t the sort that got those kinds of looks from men, and she was sensitively aware of that fact even if the girls ribbing her weren’t.
‘You’ll have to drop a hint to him that you’ll be at the Grafton on Saturday,’ Lynsey told her knowledgeably. ‘If he’s got anything about him he’ll be there looking out for you. Nothing like a slow smoochy dance to help you to get to know someone.’
‘Not eating that, are you, Mouse?’ May asked cheerfully, eyeing Mouse’s barely touched food. ‘’Cos if you aren’t you can pass your plate over here.’
Sam frowned as she saw the relief in Mouse’s expression as she handed over her supper. She had noticed that Mouse had only had a few bites out of the sandwiches they’d been given for their midday meal, and now she wasn’t eating her supper.
‘You’ve got to eat something,’ she told her, ‘especially if Captain Elland is going to keep us working the way he did today.’
Just the mention of the captain’s name was enough to have Mouse trembling and blinking back tears, and Sam cursed herself inwardly. She had never come across anyone like Mouse before and her pity for her warred with her own far more robust temperament.
Later in the evening, when the girls were enjoying an hour’s relaxation in their shared common room, Hazel confirmed Sam’s own opinion of Mouse by commenting to her quietly, ‘That poor kid, she should never have been allowed to join up. Pity that no one’s seen that and sent her home. She’s far too nervy to be in uniform. We’ll need to keep an eye on her.’
‘I thought she was going to break down in tears and run off when Captain Elland refused to let her go to the lavatory,’ Sam confided. ‘Mind you, it was a rotten thing to do to the poor kid.’
‘It sounds to me as though you’re going to have to watch out with him, Sam,’ Hazel warned her, looking serious. ‘You do get that sort sometimes, worse luck, and sadistic bastards they are too. Toadie’s another of the same breed. Wants bringing down a peg or two, she does. Pity we can’t give her a dose of her own medicine, not that I should be saying so. I think we’d better talk about something else.’ She looked pointedly at her corporal’s stripes and then took a deep breath and told Sam lightly, ‘I hope you’ve brought a decent dance frock with you. I dare say I should warn you that there’s a strong bit of competition between the services here in Liverpool to see whose girls can look the best. All the more so because we’ve got a fair contingent of Wrens based here, working at