Wartime for the Shop Girls. Joanna Toye
like when he was posted? She dreaded to think how her mum would take it when Reg told her. And how on earth could Beryl be so calm when Les was likely to be posted abroad so soon?
‘Maybe she doesn’t realise he could be off straight away,’ reasoned Reg later, when she asked him the same question.
Tea was over and their mum had gone out to a Red Cross meeting – she’d upped her voluntary work now that even more younger women were being called up. Jim was out too. He was attached to a local ARP unit, and even though, thankfully, with Hitler occupied on other fronts, the threat of constant night-time bombing over England seemed to have gone away for now, he still had to patrol to give anyone not observing the blackout a good ticking-off.
The beastly blackout! At Marlow’s, they’d had to install double doors to stop any chink of light escaping as customers left in the dark winter afternoons. And at home, every night, every single night, the scratchy, stiff material had to be put up – and every single morning, taken down. Lily hated the way it made the house so stuffy and tomb-like, but most of all she hated herself for hating it. She’d have liked to be more noble, somehow, to rise above it. It was a small thing, after all, when you thought of what other people in other countries were suffering. Terrible things, persecution, starvation … but even so … it was the small things that so often got you down. The chilblains because coal was rationed; the bra strap that broke or sagged, and no chance of any elastic to replace it.
Reg was looking at her, waiting for a response.
‘Oh, I don’t know what Beryl thinks any more,’ she said. ‘When they announced they were getting married she went all soppy, and I remember thinking then that her brain had turned to mush. I thought it was just about the wedding, but maybe it’s being pregnant that does that to you.’
‘I wouldn’t know about any of that,’ shrugged Reg. ‘You’re asking the wrong bloke.’
Lily felt suddenly awkward. Reg had been courting before he joined the Army: he and his girl had been going steady for over a year. But when Reg had signed up, distance hadn’t made the heart grow fonder, it had just made things very difficult, and she was engaged now to someone else, who worked at the Town Hall and was in a reserved occupation.
‘Things are pretty sticky out there beyond Hinton, you know, Lil,’ said Reg gently. ‘They need blokes desperately. They can’t make any exemptions now, compassionate or otherwise. Or everybody’d be trying it on.’
‘No, I suppose they can’t,’ said Lily reluctantly. ‘But I don’t like to think of Beryl having the baby on her own.’
‘She won’t be on her own, will she?’ reasoned Reg. ‘There’s you and Mum and her mum-in-law … like I said, Lil, she’s not the only one, not by a long way.’
‘No, I know. But when it’s someone you really know, it’s different.’ Lily sighed. ‘There’s so many people I know around here or at the shop – their husbands and sons and brothers are away fighting. I thought I understood how awful it must be. But now, with you going – well, I don’t know how they stand it.’
‘Blimey, I haven’t even gone yet! Wait till Sid gets posted! Then what’ll you be like!’
‘Don’t!’ the word was out before she could stop herself, and Lily was embarrassed that for all her dismay on hearing Reg’s news, it was obvious that Sid’s eventual posting would affect her far more. She quickly backtracked. ‘Anyway, that’s not for ages. He’s not even nineteen yet.’
‘Listen,’ said Reg even more gently. ‘When I said things were a bit sticky, I wasn’t just saying it for effect. We’re in a mess, frankly. They can’t keep fit blokes in England square bashing and saluting all day. They’re sure to lower the age for sending blokes overseas.’
Lily gaped.
‘But – I don’t understand!’ she cried. ‘America’s in the war now! What about all their thousands of troops?’
‘Lily,’ said Reg patiently. ‘They’re still collecting their dead from Pearl Harbor. Well, not literally,’ he reassured her when she looked horrified. ‘But the Japs knocked out eighteen of their ships, for heaven’s sake. They’ve got to regroup, get organised. The Yanks aren’t going to come riding to our rescue tomorrow.’
That was that, then.
‘The Japs are ripping through the Far East like a dose of salts,’ Reg went on. ‘They’ve got their eye on India, you know. The Americans and the Aussies can’t do it all. So if we’ve got the blokes already trained up … I’m sorry, Lil, but there it is. It’s going to be every man jack of us soon.’
Lily got up – and wished she hadn’t. Her legs were shaking.
‘I’m going to make some cocoa,’ she said. Her voice was thin and weedy, even thinner than it had sounded in the cold air of the yard. ‘Do you want some?’
‘You bet! And let’s cheer ourselves up. See what’s on the wireless, eh?’ Reg leant forward to switch it on.
Their old set exploded into voice: it did that sometimes, catching you off guard. It was the evening service – the middle of a hymn.
‘Through many a day of darkness,’ sang the congregation,
‘Through many a scene of strife,
The faithful few fought bravely
To guard the nation’s life—’
‘Blimey,’ said Reg. ‘That’s all we need. Let’s find something brighter … Oi! Careful!’
Blundering out, Lily had knocked against the standard lamp. It wobbled crazily.
‘Sorry.’
She made her escape. In the scullery, she sat down on the hard wooden chair and pressed her knees together.
She was already losing Reg. In the next year she could lose, then, not just Sid, but Jim as well. He’d be turning eighteen, and would have to join up, and he wouldn’t be sorry about it, she knew. More and more these days he kept saying that selling reconditioned sideboards to the good ladies of Hinton wasn’t exactly a reserved occupation, and he felt increasingly guilty about it. She’d had time to get used to the idea that Jim would be called up, but she’d thought at least that he’d be in the country. There’d be letters, and he’d get regular leave, and for the first few months, maybe years, he’d be doing something menial, and relatively safe. But the thought that he might be sent overseas almost straight away, into the thick of the fighting … Jim? Really?
It would be the Army, for sure: he’d said that much. Jim, who she was used to seeing either in his work suit or in old flannels and a tatty shirt digging the veg bed, in a stiff khaki uniform. Jim, pushing his glasses up his nose as he wrote out price tickets at the shop, or did the crossword at home, instead shouldering a rifle, or on the march, or charging at someone with a bayonet. Jim, over six-foot tall, bent double inside a tank, loading shells. Jim under fire, or laying explosives to blow up a bridge, or defusing bombs. Jim broiling in the desert, sweating in the jungle, freezing somewhere in Eastern Europe … Jim, hungry, thirsty, exhausted; captured, injured, dead …
Lily found she was shuddering all over. And five minutes ago, all she’d had to worry about had been the blackout.
When Jim came home, Lily was still up, and being soundly beaten by Reg at dominoes. She didn’t say anything to him about what Reg had told her, and next morning, after a restless night, what with her and Jim rushing to get to work, and Reg getting in the way of them having their breakfast, she didn’t say anything either, or any more to Reg.
But Reg caught her in the hall as she was putting on the ankle boots she couldn’t believe someone had actually been mad enough to give to the WVS jumble.