and looked questioningly at Katie.
‘Katie Needham,’ Katie introduced herself. ‘I’m the new girl.’
‘Hilda Parker.’
The other girl shook Katie’s hand whilst ‘Gerry’ grinned and announced, ‘And I’m Geraldine – Gerry, for short – Smithers.’
‘There are six of us here in all, including you: me, Gerry here, Sarah, Peggy, and Alison. Peggy’s newly engaged to a corporal she met at Aldershot. She’s a darling but she tends to spend her time reading and knitting and writing to her chap—’
‘Whereas we spend ours looking for handsome men in uniform to take us out. If you are fancy-free then you’d be very welcome to come out with us. As far as chaps are concerned it’s the more the merrier where girls are concerned,’ Gerry added with a giggle.
‘Don’t pay too much attention to Gerry here,’ Hilda warned Katie. ‘The truth is that in a way we feel that it’s our duty not just to keep our own chins up but to try to bring a bit of cheer into other people’s lives as well, if we can. I think it comes from working at the War Office. One sees and hears so much about the importance of good morale, as well, I may add, Gerry,’ she punned, ‘as good morals.’
It seemed the most natural thing in the world for Katie to join in the laughter as Gerry herself laughed good-humouredly at the small joke against her.
Katie couldn’t help but feel her spirits lift a little. The ATS girls might initially have portrayed themselves as a fun-loving, slightly giddy bunch but Katie felt that Hilda’s comment was far more true of what they really felt, and that beneath their pretty hair, and the smart chat that matched their smart uniforms, they were all young women who took their responsibilities towards their country and the men fighting to protect it very seriously indeed.
Perhaps it would do her good to adopt a little of their outward attitude to life herself, Katie reflected. After all, the last thing she wanted to do was to cast a pall of self-pity over the house just because of her own heartache. There was a lot to be said for keeping up other people’s spirits in these dreadful times, the darkest times of the war in many ways, people were saying.
‘It’s a pretty decent billet really,’ Hilda continued, ‘although you have to watch out for the rules—’
‘No shaking of mats or cloths out of any of the windows, no hanging of laundry out of the windows, no spooning on the front step, definitely no bringing men into the house, and no gawping at Lord Cadogan when he’s on home leave and you see him walking past,’ Gerry broke in again, this time leaving Hilda to explain.
‘Lord Cadogan – Earl Cadogan, actually – owns the property. He owns most of the houses here, in fact, although the War Office has requisitioned some of them.’
‘I’ll take you up to your room, shall I?’ Gerry offered, leaving Katie to follow her as she started to climb the first flight of stairs.
Katie’s room was two flights up and was a very good size indeed, with a window overlooking the street and the garden beyond.
The room was furnished with a narrow single bed, a utilitarian dressing table and a wardrobe. It had a fireplace and, to Katie’s delight and astonishment, there was a door that led into her own personal bathroom. Luxury indeed, and yet after Gerry had left her to unpack, and despite her good intentions, Katie acknowledged that she was missing the cosiness of her room at Luke’s parents’ house quite dreadfully, and the loving kindness of Jean, and the company of Luke’s teenage sisters even more.
She must not think like that, she chided herself. She must put Liverpool and Luke behind her and get on with her life as it was now, doing all she could to play her own part in the war effort. perhaps right now this four-storey town house, with its cold air smelling of damp khaki and cigarettes, instead of being filled, as the Campion house had been, with the warmth of Jean’s cooking and her love for her family, might seem alien and lonely, but she must get used to it, and fit into it and with those living in it, and make a new life for herself. She was, after all, alive and in good health, and not suffering as so many people were in this war, and in so many different ways. All she had to live with was a broken heart. The newspapers were full of the most horrific stories of what was happening to others: the people taken prisoner by the Japanese, the Jewish people forcibly transported to Hitler’s death camps. She must put her whole effort into doing her bit instead of feeling sorry for herself.
Francine looked at her husband with some concern.
‘Are you sure you want to go to this reception at the American Embassy tonight, Brandon?’ she asked gently.
‘Sure I’m sure.’
They both knew that what she really meant was, was he well enough to attend the reception being given by the American Ambassador at the Embassy in Grosvenor Square, to mark the arrival of the first American troops on British soil?
Their marriage was an unconventional one in many people’s eyes: Francine was older than her husband by nearly a decade, and he was wealthier than her by several million dollars. What they did not see or know, however, was that Brandon was a young man living under a death sentence because of a rare incurable illness, and that their marriage was one between friends rather than lovers. Brandon had chosen Fran as the person he wanted to accompany him to the end of his personal road, and she had willingly taken on the responsibility of that role. She had lost so much in her life already: her son, Jack; Marcus, the man she loved, the major with whom she had fallen in love in Egypt and who she had lost thanks to the spitefulness of another member of the ENSA group they were both in. She knew and understood what loss was. What she felt for Brandon was a combination of womanly pity and a desire to offer him what comfort she could in memory of the child – the young son – who had died without the comfort of her presence and the warmth of her arms around him. She could not go back and change things where Jack, her son, was concerned. For him she could only grieve and bear the burden of her guilt. But in doing what she was for Brandon, she was, she felt, making some kind of atonement in her own small way.
‘Besides,’ Brandon continued, ‘you don’t think I’m going to miss out on celebrating the fact that America has finally officially joined this war of yours, do you?’
Francine knew better than to try to dissuade him.
Neither of his divorced parents knew of his condition. His father, according to Brandon, would simply refuse to accept that his son could suffer ill health, and his mother would threaten to have a nervous breakdown.
‘Poor little rich boy,’ Francine had sometimes teased him when they’d first met, but now that she knew how apt the description was she no longer used it.
They had met the previous autumn when Fran, as the lead singer in a London theatre revue, had been invited to attend a diplomatic event to help entertain some visiting American top brass.
She knew that her sister Jean had been worried by the speed with which they had married – until Francine had taken Brandon home to Liverpool with her to attend Jean’s daughter Grace’s Christmas wedding and had had a chance to explain the situation honestly to her older sister. Her family might know that Brandon was poorly, but only Jean knew the reality of Francine’s marriage.
Francine had stopped working for ENSA. Brandon’s needs came before anything else now. And for that same reason she had felt that it was wiser for them to live in a service flat at the Dorchester rather than rent a flat of their own. As an entertainer she was used to living in hotels, and Brandon’s service flat
