My Sweet Valentine (22 page)

‘Oh, that’s rich,’ Dulcie told her, in full flight now, ‘trying to get us thrown out. She’s the one who ought to be shown the door.’ She nodded in Lydia’s direction. ‘You be warned,’ she told the apprehensive-looking naval officer, ‘don’t you go losing your legs, like her husband did, or she’ll drop you as well.’

‘Charles, call the manager.’

‘I think that’s enough, Dulcie,’ Drew said quietly. ‘We all know how loyal you are to David, but this isn’t really the place—’

‘How dare you speak to me like that, you … you nobody. I’ll have you thrown out of this place,’ Lydia hissed at Dulcie, before turning on her heel and stalking off to the table that Dulcie had wanted to move to, leaving her openly fuming.

‘Do you think she can get us thrown out?’ Tilly asked Drew uncomfortably. Now that Lydia and her party had gone, Tilly could see that everyone in the room was looking in their direction.

‘I don’t know,’ Drew admitted, ‘but perhaps it might be a good idea if we left anyway.’

Wilder, who had been steadily supplementing the whiskies he had ordered with his own whisky from a flask he had concealed in his jacket pocket, and was now quite obviously the worse for drink, suddenly stood up unsteadily, to announce, ‘I’ve had enough of this place. Never wanted to come here anyway. Wanna play poker instead,’ before heading for the stairs at an unsteady walk, leaving the others with no option than to follow.

Predictably, Dulcie was not pleased. ‘It will make me look like I’m letting her win,’ she protested, as she and Tilly collected their coats.

Outside the club they had to walk to Piccadilly Circus to find a cab, but as Drew was escorting both girls into it Wilder suddenly announced, ‘Not coming with you. Going somewhere else.’

‘Wilder,’ Drew protested, but Dulcie poked her head
out of the still open cab door and said crossly, ‘Oh, let him go, Drew.’

‘It’s not that late. We could still go to the Hammersmith Palais, if you like?’ Tilly suggested to Dulcie. She couldn’t help but feel a little bit sorry for her, all dressed up as she was, and Wilder deserting her.

‘What? Go to the Palais in me Norman Hartnell? No, thanks,’ Dulcie refused.

‘Where to, mate?’ the cabby asked Drew impatiently.

The unexpected and shrill rising sound of the air-raid warning shocked them all into silence for a few seconds whilst they looked at one another.

‘Where’s the nearest shelter?’ Drew began, but Tilly shook her head.

‘No. Let’s go home. Mum will be worrying, and we aren’t that far away.’

Nodding, Drew told the driver, ‘Article Row, please.’

They were almost home when they heard the ominous drone of the German planes followed by the first of the bombs starting to fall, the magnesium flares as they exploded lighting up the night sky.

‘Whose idea was it not to head for the closest shelter?’ Dulcie began to complain. ‘We’d have been safer if we’d stayed where we was.’

Under cover of the darkness inside the taxi Tilly reached for Drew’s hand. The incendiaries were falling thick and fast around them, fire engines racing past them with their bells ringing.

‘That’s your lot. I’m not going any further,’ the cabby told them when a fresh explosion of incendiaries lit up the sky.

‘Come on,’ Drew urged the two girls, ‘we’ll have to make a run for it.’

‘Run in these shoes, and with me bad ankle?’ Dulcie protested, but she still hitched up her skirt and grabbed Tilly’s arm as she followed her out of the cab.

At number 13 Olive and Agnes’s quiet evening had also been disrupted by the air-raid warning. With the fire-watching group not officially in action, and after so many bomb-free weeks, the sound of the alarm caught them off guard.

They looked at one another for a few precious seconds before Olive announced, ‘Agnes, you go down to the shelter. I’m going to go on fire-watching duties. It will give me a chance to see if it will work.’

‘If you’re doing that then I’m coming with you,’ Agnes insisted stalwartly. Inside she felt nervous, but she wasn’t going to let Olive go out on her own, not after everything her landlady had done for her.

At least Tilly would be safe at the Café de Paris, Olive reasoned as she clamped on one of a pair of hard hats she’d been given by Sergeant Dawson and offered the other to Agnes, before they pulled on their coats.

Outside, the incendiaries were already falling. Jane Barker, coming to her front door, looked relieved when she saw that Olive was already outside.

‘We were just wondering if we should come on duty, even though nothing official has been arranged yet,’ she told Olive. ‘We’ve equipped ourselves with a rake and a spade, just in case.’

Not really wanting her elderly neighbours to put themselves at risk, Olive suggested, ‘Why don’t you go back
inside and fill the bath with water as Sergeant Dawson instructed us? That way, if an incendiary should fall through your roof, you’ll be able to dowse it and put out any fire.’

‘Good idea, Olive,’ she beamed. ‘We can open the trap-door to the loft as well, just to be on the safe side.’

Olive took hold of the handles of the wheelbarrow filled with sand, now parked usefully and as out of sight as possible in the front garden, although of course Nancy had already complained about the untidiness of the sand-filled wheelbarrows standing in so many of the Row’s small front gardens.

She was just pushing it through the gate, Agnes carrying the spade and the hoe, when she saw Tilly, Drew and Dulcie come running down the Row.

Relief at knowing her daughter and lodger would be here at Article Row under her protective watch was mixed with surprise that they had come home so early.

‘Wilder didn’t want to stay at the club so we’ve ended up coming home,’ Tilly told her. No need to mention to her mother the altercation between Dulcie and Lydia. ‘We knew once the bombs had started to fall that you’d be worrying, even though the Café de Paris is so safe.’

This was more like her old thoughtful loving girl, Olive acknowledged, as she gave her daughter’s hand a grateful squeeze.

‘You’d better go and get changed out of those clothes, all of you, and then you can help me keep an eye out for any incendiaries falling here,’ Olive told them.

‘What, spend the evening out here? No, thank you,’ Dulcie retorted huffily. She was still in a bad mood at the disruption of her much-anticipated night out.

You’d never have got David behaving like Wilder, she told herself bitterly upstairs in her room, reluctantly removing her lovely new dress. David would have been proud to show her off wearing a Norman Hartnell dress. He’d have bought her the right kind of corsage. He would have treated her like a lady. He would have … Inside her head Dulcie had an image of David coming to the Hammersmith Palais and dancing with her there. He had been ever such a good dancer. So tall and handsome and so … so gentlemanly, even if he had tried it on a bit, and him an engaged and soon-to-be married man. She could forgive him that. After all, he’d backed off when she’d said no, she wasn’t the sort to get involved with a married chap. Backed off and disappeared from her life. But that hadn’t mattered. There were plenty of men who wanted to date her and she wasn’t ready for marriage, tying herself down to a man who’d want her at his beck and call just like her mother had been at her father’s beck and call. And then there would be the kids, too many of them too quickly after one another. No, she wasn’t ready for that, and she doubted that she would ever be, Dulcie admitted, as she hesitated between going into a full sulk, putting on her night clothes, going back downstairs and listening to the wireless with a cup of cocoa, or going out and joining the others.

Sociable by nature, never one to miss out on whatever was going on, as much as she disliked the idea of mucking in and helping out, Dulcie knew she did not want to stay in on her own. And besides, wouldn’t she be far more help to Olive than that dopey Agnes, who always stood about waiting to be told what to do instead of working it out for herself? If Agnes saw an incendiary land two
feet in front of her she’d have to ask someone else whether or not to put it out, Dulcie thought scornfully, as she pulled on her oldest clothes, and then tied her hair up in a scarf.

Outside in the street it looked rather like Bonfire Night, the incendiaries, as they burst into flames, like thousands of sparklers throwing off their fierce white light.

Initially it looked as though Article Row was going to be lucky. Up above them in the night sky the flare from the falling magnesium incendiaries was so bright that they could easily see the bombers looking for fresh targets.

‘They’ll be after the docks, not us,’ said Mr Edwards, who, like so many of the other neighbours, had come out to see what was going on.

But just as he spoke a sudden shower of bombs descended at the bottom of the row, falling from the basket that contained them.

‘Quick, one’s gone through the roof of one of Mr King’s houses,’ Olive warned. ‘Come on, Agnes, we’ll go and deal with it.’

‘No, me and Mr Edwards can do it,’ Drew began, but Olive shook her head. She was already on the move, telling both Agnes and Dulcie briskly, ‘You come with me, girls. Tilly, you stay with Drew.’ As she hurried towards the house she recognised that she had another reason to thank Sergeant Dawson for his forethought, since he had suggested to Mr King that he gave her a spare set of keys for just this kind of emergency.

Leaving the wheelbarrow outside, but instructing Agnes to carry in the bucketful of water and Dulcie the bucket of sand, Olive, paused in the hallway before hoisting the hose onto her shoulder as Sergeant Dawson
had shown her, grabbing the hoe and the shovel in her other hand and hurrying up the stairs with Dulcie and Agnes at her heels. Mr King’s houses, which were all let out, weren’t anything like as well cared for inside as her own home. The war had meant fewer tenants but Olive actually welcomed the dank musty smell that came from the unused and unheated building, hoping the damp would make it less easy for the fire to take hold.

The smoke coming from beneath one of the bedroom doors warned her that her hopes were misplaced, though.

‘Keep back,’ she warned the two girls, as she opened the door, ‘and pull your scarves up round your faces. We don’t want to be breathing in smoke.’

Dulcie, never willing to take orders from anyone, started to complain that her lipstick would come off on her scarf if she did that, but her protest ended in a coughing fit from the smoke escaping from the room.

‘’Ere, we can’t go in there. It’s too dangerous,’ she coughed, forgetting to use her ‘refined’ Selfridges voice in the panic of the moment when she saw how quickly the fire had taken hold.

If the sight of the bedroom carpet well and truly on fire had momentarily filled Olive herself with shock, the sound of the fear in Dulcie’s voice and the realisation that she was responsible for the safety not just of the house but, far more importantly, of the two girls with her, was enough to have Olive stiffening her spine and deciding that no German incendiary bomb was going to get the better of her.

Aiming the nozzle of the hose at the fire and then pulling the door almost closed as they had been instructed, Olive called back to Agnes, ‘Start pumping.’

After what seemed like a lifetime the satisfying hiss of the water hitting the flames brought her a wave of relief. This was no time for complacency, though.

‘Get ready with that sand,’ she warned Dulcie. ‘As soon as we’ve got this fire under control we need to take up the bomb and put it in the sand bucket.’

Outside in the street, Drew was wishing that Ian Simpson wasn’t at work and that he had a few more young men to help him. Not that Tilly wasn’t a good helper – she was – but Drew didn’t want her to be in danger, and it
was
dangerous out here, he recognised, even if the residents were reacting to the falling bombs with what he now knew to be typical British resilience.

‘Look, that’s another lot falling,’ Tilly gasped pulling the tin hat one of the Misses Barker had handed her further down over her head.

‘Come on,’ she urged Drew, as a fresh basket of incendiaries fell from the sky down at the far end of the road.

‘Tilly, wait,’ Drew protested, but it was too late, she was already pushing the barrow down the street at some speed.

Up above them two incendiaries landed on the roof of number 46, close to the end of the Row, both of them easily piercing the roof slates.

As they hurried over, the front door of the house opened and the Polish refugee family who were living there came running out.

And then the most horrific thing happened – so awful that it sucked the breath from Tilly’s lungs and almost stopped her heart. As the Polish father ran out into the street to attract their attention, one of the falling incendiaries hit him, its fin piercing his back.

For a handful of seconds no one moved, not even the man who had been hit. Everyone was silent. Then that silence was broken, first by the man’s agonised scream and then by the shocked cries of grief of his family.

People were coughing in the smoke billowing out of the incendiaries as they hit the ground.

Automatically Tilly started to run towards the injured man, who had fallen to his knees on the cobbled road, although without any idea of what she might usefully do.

‘Tilly, keep back,’ Drew yelled frantically.

The man’s screams of pain filled the street, blotting out even the sound of the bombers, his family rushing towards him, as Drew cursed and warned them to stand back. It was obvious to him that nothing could be done for the man, who had collapsed and was now lying face down in the street.

At the sound of Drew’s voice Tilly froze. The shock of what she was witnessing kept her rooted to the spot, her body cold with sick horror, even whilst she could feel a hot sweat of nausea rising up inside her. And yet when Drew ordered her to start pumping water, somehow she managed to do so.

The poor man was still screaming, whilst Drew trained the hose, even whilst he knew that it was just a waste of time. The man’s family tried to go to him. Afraid for them, Drew urged them to stand back, lifting the nozzle of the hose to spray water at the children, making them cry even harder as they clung to their white-faced mother.