and demanded, ‘Can you jitterbug?’
When he nodded, Lou didn’t waste any more time. Grabbing hold of his hand she hurried him onto the floor, immediately picking up the beat of the music. She and Sash had loved dancing so much, and the magic it had always held for her was still there; there were some things, some skills, that were never forgotten.
As she let the music seize her and take her, Lou could hear the astonished and admiring gasps from the ATA girls now crowding round the edge of the dance floor to watch them, and cheer her on, their support reinforcing her determination to make Frankie Truebrooke regret her arrogant claim.
Cliff, who had initially looked apprehensive, was now throwing himself into the spirit of things. Luckily he was a good dancer himself, but it was Lou who held everyone spellbound and who the band played for as they recognised her skill, whilst her comrades clapped and cheered her on.
Thank goodness she’d decided not to bother wearing stockings because her legs were tanned, Lou thought, as Cliff swung her round, then up and then down again.
Laughing up at Cliff, she wouldn’t have seen the bottle that Frankie had thrown down deliberately to trip her up if it hadn’t been for the fact that Kieran Mallory had moved, no doubt wanting to get closer to the American, and his movement had caught her attention, showing her the bottle rolling towards her. She heard her friends gasp; she could see the look of malicious triumph on Frankie Truebrooke’s face, but Lou knew what to do. In a manoeuvre that had been part of one of the routines she and Sasha had taught themselves, Lou changed feet, and hands, and spun round anticlockwise, turning under Cliff’s arm, in a movement that pushed him to the side, and took them both safely away from the bottle.
The roar of approval and the hand clapping that resulted from the British ATA contingent said everything that needed to be said, Lou recognised, both about Frankie’s spitefulness and her own quick reaction to it.
Of course, when she came off the dance floor all the Brits gathered round her, wanting to praise her.
‘Well, you’re a dark horse,’ said June, tugging on Lou’s arm. ‘You never said a word about being able to dance like that.’
‘It’s just something Sash and I taught ourselves,’ Lou insisted, feeling uncomfortable about all the attention she was getting now that she had stopped dancing.
‘You were a wow,’ another of the girls approved. ‘You knocked that show-off American sideways, you were so good.’
Everyone was making such a fuss that Lou began to wish that she hadn’t given in to the impulse to show Frankie that she wasn’t the only one who could jitterbug.
‘You didn’t just outdance Frankie Truebrooke, you’ve outclassed her as well,’ Hilary told Lou, later on in the evening when they were on their way back to their own base. ‘She needed teaching that kind of lesson, and I for one am glad that one of us was the one to do it. She’s got a reputation for being spoiled and wild,’ Hilary continued, ‘and she likes stirring up trouble. One of my pals was posted to Ratcliffe and she said that Frankie was always trying to prove how much better she is than everyone else, but especially the British ATA pilots. Apparently she likes to boast that the ranch her father owns in Texas is bigger than the whole of England and that she’s been taught everything she needs to know.’
‘Except good manners,’ June pointed out trenchantly.
‘Absolutely,’ Hilary agreed. ‘You really put her nose out of joint tonight, Campion. It was about time someone showed her what it means to be British and I am so glad that it was one of us. I felt dreadfully sorry for that nice RAF flight lieutenant she was trying to lead on, though.’
Lou had to bite on her tongue not to retort that Kieran Mallory was far from nice and would certainly not need any leading on.
The first thing Lou noticed after she had stepped out of Liverpool’s Lime Street Station, packed with travellers, most of them in uniform, was how grey and grimy Liverpool looked after the pretty English countryside she had been living in. Quickly she pushed away her disloyal judgement on the city. Liverpool was her home, it was the place where she had grown, and most of all it held the people she loved.
She was wearing her uniform, more for her parents’ benefit than her own. Her father was a traditionalist and a bit old-fashioned, and Lou suspected that he wouldn’t understand or indeed approve of the way things worked in ATA. Not that she minded wearing her smart tailored navy-blue skirt with its matching jacket worn over a lighter blue blouse. Unlike the well-to-do pilots, who all had their uniforms tailored for them at a store in London called Austin Reed, Lou had been perfectly happy with the neat fit of her regulationsized clothes. Rammed down onto her curls was the peaked forage cap that none of the girls really ever wore, her golden wings stitched proudly to her jacket denoting that she was now a Third Class ATA pilot.
After the sleepy green peacefulness of the narrow country lanes around their base, connecting small rural villages and towns, the busyness of Liverpool’s streets, teeming with traffic and people, came as something of a shock. Her strongest memories of her home city were those of the dreadful days of Hitler’s blitz at the start of May 1941 and the terrible time after that when her sister had nearly lost her life in the bomb-damaged streets. Then the city had been silent, mourning its dead, and filled with grief, its people weighed down with the enormity of the task that lay in front of them.
Now all that had gone and in its place was a sense of expectation and energy, brought about, Lou suspected, by the country’s growing hope that Hitler was going to be defeated.
The city centre was busy and bustling with men and women in every kind of uniform: British Army, Royal Navy, and the RAF; American infantry and airmen, Poles, Canadians New Zealanders and Aussies.
As she passed the street that led to the Royal Court Theatre, Lou felt her heart give a flurry of angry thuds. It was there that she and Sasha had first met Kieran Mallory, the nephew of its manager, Con Bryant. They had gone there naïvely hoping to be taken on as dancers. Instead of sending them on their way, Kieran and his uncle Con had deliberately encouraged them to believe that they had a stage future ahead of them. And by playing each of them off against the other, pretending to each behind the other’s back that he liked her the best, Kieran had cleverly come between them, fostering a mistrust and jealousy that had ultimately almost led to a terrible tragedy.
That was all in the past now, Lou reminded herself. Sasha was happily engaged to the young bomb disposal sapper who had saved her life, and Lou herself had achieved her ambition of becoming a pilot.
But the division between them was still there.
Not because of Kieran Mallory, Lou assured herself. He meant nothing to either of them now and she certainly wasn’t going to give him an importance in her life that he didn’t deserve.
Her nose, accustomed now to the smell of aviation fuel, hot engines, and Naafi food, set against a countryside background, was now beginning to recognise the smells of home: sea salt-sprayed air mixed with smoke and dust; the smell of vinegar, fish and chips wafting out of a chippy as she made her way up through the city streets toward Edge Hill; the scent of steam and coal from the trains in the Edge Hill freight yard, those smells gradually fading as she walked further up Edge Hill Road, leaving the city centre behind her, so that by the time she was turning into Ash Grove, Lou could have sworn she could smell the newly turned earth from the row of neat allotments that ran behind
