Home for Christmas. Annie Groves
have said to her mother if there hadn’t been a knock on the door. She looked at her watch.
‘That will be Sergeant Dawson, come to help me get back to Holborn. Luckily for me at least some folk think enough of me to worry about me,’ was her parting accusation as she stood up and reached for her crutches, making her way along the narrow hallway to open the front door.
Despite the justification she felt for simply walking away with Sergeant Dawson and slamming the door behind her without another word, somehow Dulcie couldn’t stop herself turning back into the house and hobbling down the hall.
‘You’d better write and let me know where you’re staying,’ she told her mother in a curt voice, ‘just in case Rick doesn’t get his letter from you and turns up in Holborn, wanting to know where you are.’ She paused, whilst her mother wrote down their new address for her and then, against her will and awkwardly, Dulcie leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled of dust and tiredness mingled with despair.
If she had hoped to feel her mother’s arms coming round her in a maternal hug then Dulcie had hoped in vain because her mother sat rigidly, not kissing Dulcie back or even looking properly at her, staring straight ahead.
It was her mother’s lookout if she was too wrapped up in ruddy Edith to remember that she had another daughter, Dulcie told herself fiercely as she rejoined Sergeant Dawson, pulling the door, with its peeling paint, sharply closed behind her, then carefully negotiating the front step. She certainly didn’t care!
Wearing her London Transport uniform of grey worsted fabric piped in blue, and trying to look as official as she possibly could, Agnes stood at the top of the stairs leading down into Chancery Lane underground station where she worked, watching the crowd of people making their way down to take refuge in the underground in case the night brought yet another attack from the German Luftwaffe.
When Mr Smith, who managed the ticket office, had asked for volunteers to help organise and keep an eye on things in anticipation of the number of people who would want to use the underground to shelter in, Agnes had been the first to shoot up her hand, but not just because she wanted to do her bit. Ted, the young underground train driver with whom she was walking out, and to whom she was going to become officially engaged at Christmas, had told her that he intended to bring his widowed mother and his two young sisters down to Chancery Lane for protection. This would be Agnes’s first opportunity to meet them. Ted had hoped to arrange for them all to meet up at the small café close to the station where Ted and Agnes often went, as Ted had explained to her that his mother was reluctant to invite Agnes round to their home. They lived in a tiny two-roomed flat owned by the Guinness Trust, which provided rented accommodation to respectable but poor working-class families in London.
‘The truth is that there isn’t room for the four of us to sit down together at the table all at the same time, never mind five of us,’ Ted had explained to her, and Agnes had understood. She might have been abandoned at birth by her mother and raised in the orphanage attached to the Row’s local church, but Agnes had seen how proud Olive, her landlady, was of her home and she had quickly grasped what Ted was not saying, which was that his mother felt embarrassed about inviting her to their small home. Or at least that was what Agnes hoped Ted had meant. She couldn’t quite stop worrying that Ted’s mother might think an orphaned girl who didn’t know where she came from was not be the kind she wanted her son to get involved with. Agnes didn’t like thinking about the circumstances of her birth and subsequent abandonment. Doing so made her feel all prickly and upset inside.
Now that the children and staff from the orphanage had been evacuated to the country, the building was used as a drill hall, and potential rest centre, should the unthinkable happen and the area be bombed, making people homeless.
Of course there was no question of her and Ted getting married any time soon. Not with Ted being the only breadwinner in the family and having his mother and two sisters to support. Ted had been honest with her about that, and Agnes fully understood what he had said to her. He wouldn’t have been her good kind Ted if he hadn’t looked after his family.
Ted was off duty at the moment and he’d told her that he would bring his family down early in the evening to make sure they got settled in a good spot before he went back to work, but the stream of people approaching the station was getting heavier now, and Agnes was worried that she might somehow miss them in the crush.
Predictably, of course, Mr Smith had initially thoroughly disapproved of and objected to the public more or less ‘taking it upon themselves’, as he had put it, to have the right to sleep in the underground. But once Winston Churchill himself, of whom Mr Smith was a great admirer, had sanctioned this, his objections had slowed to muttered grumbles about the mess people were making, especially those who had no homes to go to any more, and who brought with them what belongings they had been able to salvage.
Agnes, on the other hand, felt sorry for them. She was so lucky to have her lovely room at number 13 Article Row, her kind landlady Mrs Robbins, and her wonderful friends there, especially Tilly. She didn’t want to think of how it would make her feel if she were to lose any of that.
She scanned the growing crowd of people approaching the steps to the underground, searching for Ted’s familiar face, feeling both excited and nervous at the prospect of meeting his family – and especially his mother – at last.
However, when they did arrive Agnes almost missed them. An elderly woman was so laden with the weight of her possessions that her slow progress was holding other people up. Some were losing patience and starting to mutter complaints so Agnes stepped in to help her.
Once she got her down the stairs, though, the woman refused to let go of her, and Agnes tried not to react to the musty smell of stale sweat and bad breath coming off her as she dragged the girl closer with one grimy hand to insist, ‘I ain’t done with you yet, missie. I want you to find me somewhere comfy to put me bed. I’ve got it rolled up in here.’ She patted the bundle Agnes had taken from her. ‘Sleep in ’yde Park normally, I do.’ She tapped the side of her nose. ‘I knows all the ways of avoiding the park keepers, an’ all. They won’t catch me, they won’t, and neither will ruddy Hitler.’
As Agnes guided the woman along the platform one small boy protested to his mother, ‘I don’t want her near me, Ma. She stinks.’
It was true, and Agnes was glad to escape from her. She was almost at the top of the steps, struggling to pick her way through the mass of people coming down, when she heard Ted’s voice calling her name. He stood at the top, beaming her a smile.
To other people Ted might be a relatively ordinary-looking young man of middling height, with a wiry frame, mouse-brown hair and ears that stuck out, but to Agnes he was a hero and his bright blue eyes were the kindest she had ever seen.
Immediately she made her way towards him, until he could reach out, grab her hand and haul her onto the top step where he was standing,
‘I was getting worried that I must have missed you,’ Agnes said breathlessly.
‘As if I’d let that happen,’ Ted replied with a grin, giving her that special look that made her heart do a somersault.
‘Come on, you two,’ he called out, reaching into the shadows behind him. ‘Come and say hello to Agnes.’
The two small girls who emerged to stand beside him had Ted’s brown hair and blue eyes. Their hair was neatly plaited and their eyes filled with apprehension as they pressed closer to their brother, whilst staring saucer-eyed at the crowd which was now pouring down the stairs in front of them.
‘Marie, Sonia, you hold tight to your brother’s hand. Ted, you just make sure you don’t let go of them.’
The small thin woman, who had now materialised on Ted’s other side, and who it was obvious from her looks was Ted’s mother, hadn’t looked at Agnes yet, but Agnes could understand that her first concern must be for her younger children, just as she understood the bashful shyness that kept the two girls themselves silent as they looked swiftly at her, then away again.
‘Don’t fret, Mum, I’ve