turned up this morning, Dulcie thought grumpily as she watched the worshippers leaving, all the young men in uniform grouping themselves together, passing round their cigarettes, not joking and indulging in horseplay as they had on previous Sundays, like children let out of school, but instead exchanging brusque words, spoken from the sides of their mouths, frowns replacing smiles. Even her own brother, Rick’s, normal smile was replaced by a look of determination. She hadn’t bothered going to the Palais last night after all. She hadn’t felt like it somehow.
Moving a little away from everyone else – in part because her mother was still going on about Edith’s singing and how she’d been clapped through three encores at a local working men’s club the previous night, and in part because she liked standing out from the crowd – Dulcie caught the now familiar words being spoken grimly into the warm September air, words like ‘devastation’, ‘POWs’, and ‘blitzkrieg’, mingling with phrases like ‘it will be us next’, ‘thousands left for dead’, ‘poor bloody bastards’. . .
Then one of the boy messengers that worked with the ARP men came cycling up full pelt, yelling out as loud as he could, ‘It’s happened. We’re at war. Mr Chamberlain has just said.’
Of course, uproar followed, with the ARP lot grabbing hold of the boy and hauling him off to question him, whilst the lads in uniform followed after them. Wives and mothers, sisters and sweethearts, clung together, whilst the older men, including her father, looked smaller and shrunken somehow.
‘Well, that’s all I need, isn’t it?’ Dulcie could hear Edith complaining. ‘A war, just when my singing career is looking like taking off.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry too much. Perhaps you’ll be able to sing to Hitler. Course, you’ll have to learn German first,’ Dulcie taunted her.
‘Dulcie, that’s enough of that,’ her mother stopped her, giving her an angry look. ‘There’s no need to go upsetting people more than they need to be upset.’ She looked across to where Rick was standing with a now much larger group of men.
A shiver of foreboding went through Dulcie. Thousands the soldiers had killed in Poland, thousands of young men just like her brother. For the first time since all the talk of war had started Dulcie felt its ice-cold fingers clutch at her heart and grip it painfully hard. She might argue with her brother, she might mock him and taunt him, but of all her family it was Rick to whom she was the closest, Rick who she secretly thought was the best brother that any girl could have, with his handsome looks and his easy-going charm, his way of somehow always being there to calm things down when she felt hard done by. Rick might look so tall and manly and indestructible in his army uniform, but he wasn’t indestructible, he was human flesh and blood, and vulnerable. A huge lump blocked her throat, feelings and thoughts she had never had to worry about before swarming through her head like wasps provoked by someone deliberately stirring up their nest.
‘The next thing we know, the ruddy Germans will be bombing us out of our houses and gassing us all to death,’ one elderly woman was screeching. ‘I can remember what it was like the last time, our lads coming back from the trenches with their lungs rotting from the Germans gassing them.’
Dulcie looked down at her own side. She’d tossed her gas mask to the back of her wardrobe, but of course Edith had hers and was now clutching the strap of its box tightly.
Rick came over. ‘Forget about dinner for me, Ma. Me and some of the other lads are going to see what we can find out. Sid Winters – you know, him whose cousin is a regular in the army – reckons that those who’ve already done their training will be shipped out to France pdq, and that our training will be rushed through now.’
Her brother seemed excited now that the initial shock of the announcement had faded, Dulcie recognised, her earlier concern changing to resentment that he could look so pleased when she was worrying herself sick about him. Her mother’s pinched expression became even more strained but she didn’t say anything, simply nodding and then turning to put her arm round Edith and draw her close to her in a manner similar to which Olive had drawn Tilly close the previous evening.
Mothers fussing over their favourites – well, let them, Dulcie thought acidly; she didn’t care.
‘I’ll have my dinner at Article Row,’ she told her mother tersely, turning on her heel without waiting for her to respond.
‘So it’s happened then?’ Olive found that she was automatically speaking in a lower voice as she asked the vicar’s wife the question to which she already knew the answer.
‘Yes. The Prime Minister has already made a formal announcement. I expect we’ll be able to hear what he said on the news at twelve o’clock.’ The two women exchanged tense white-faced looks.
The news that Britain was now formally at war with Germany hadn’t come out of the blue but it was still shocking, making the heart race and the stomach tense.
‘So many of our young men are already in uniform,’ Mrs Windle continued with a nod in the direction of the young men standing together outside the church in their khaki, their Royal Navy dark blue and their RAF blue serge. ‘And now thousands more will be joining them.’
Their small, well-attended church had been built at the same time as Article Row, by the same philanthropist, and stood on the site of a much older church, along with a neat little rectory, a church hall, and the orphanage, the congregation coming from Article Row and the surrounding area. Olive’s husband and in-laws were buried in its graveyard, and on the anniversaries of their deaths and at Christmas, Olive always made a special point of placing fresh flowers on their graves. She could see the graveyard from where she was standing, sunlight dappling through the shade of the yew trees standing sentinel over the dead. Her heart lurched, a shiver striking through her as she looked from the graveyard to the eager young men in their uniforms.
‘We lost so many in the last war, I can’t believe there’s to be another,’ she said sadly. ‘Look at them. They’re all standing so tall and proud, so determined to do their bit, but they’re so young.’
And so many of them would die, was what Olive was thinking but could not say, especially when one of those young men in air-force blue was Mrs Windle’s own nephew.
At her mother’s side, Tilly held on tightly to her gas mask in its smart box, which she and her mother had covered with some scraps of lace to make it look more attractive, a fashion that many young women in the country were adopting, according to Woman’s Weekly.
‘Everywhere is so quiet without the children,’ Tilly commented as they walked home together.
‘Their poor mothers were besides themselves with grief last week when they sent them away, but I dare say now that they will be feeling that they have done the right thing. Hitler is bound to target London.’
‘If you’re going to say that you wish that I’d been young enough to be evacuated, then please don’t,’ Tilly begged her mother. ‘I want to be here with you, Mum.’
As they passed the ARP station on the corner, Sergeant Dawson was standing outside it smoking a cigarette.
‘You’ll have heard the news, I expect?’ he asked.
‘That we’re at war? Yes.’ Olive shivered a little despite the warmth of the sun flooding between the buildings at the entrance to Article Row.
‘I never thought I’d say this, but right now I’m sort of glad that our lad’s already been taken,’ the sergeant told Olive quietly. ‘There’s
