your every step, what kind of parents would we have been? It’s the same now.’
Sighing to herself, Sally got up off the bed and opened her bedroom door. The house was still silent. The door to Dulcie’s bedroom was closed. Dulcie had not acted well in encouraging Tilly to lie to her mother, Sally thought, and their landlady was bound to hold that against her.
When Sally opened the kitchen door Olive was sitting at the table, her eyes betrayingly redrimmed, the handkerchief she had been holding in her hand pushed quickly into the sleeve of her jumper when she saw Sally.
‘I suppose you heard me having words with Tilly?’ Olive felt obliged to say.
‘Yes,’ Sally confirmed.
‘I can’t believe that Tilly would do something like this – lie to me.’ Olive had to bite her lip to stop it from trembling.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Sally offered, going over to the stove without waiting for Olive’s agreement, and then saying calmly, once she had checked that it was full of water and had lit the gas beneath it, ‘I remember having words with my parents about wanting to do things they didn’t think I was old enough to do.’
Olive gave her lodger a weak but grateful smile when she poured the boiling water on the tea leaves and then brought the pot over to the table, before returning to the cupboard to remove two mugs, cream ones with blue spots on them, and blue handles, which reminded Sally of some her own mother had bought one year at Preston’s annual Pot Fair.
Automatically Olive got up and went to the larder to get the milk jug, but it was Sally who poured their tea and who passed her mug to her.
‘Tilly said it was my fault and that she’d had to lie because of me.’ The words, so painful to say, felt like sharp pieces of flint tearing at Olive’s throat and her heart.
‘I dare say she was so shocked at being discovered that she didn’t really know what she was saying,’ Sally offered comfortingly.
‘Perhaps I have been too protective. But it was only for her own sake. She’s so young. She doesn’t know how hard life can be. I want her to have her youth whilst she can. I don’t want to stop her from having fun, I just want her to be safe and to take her time growing up.’
‘Would it help if I went to the Hammersmith Palais with them? Not immediately, of course, but if you wanted to let Tilly know that you do trust her to be properly grown up?’ Sally offered.
Despite the angry words that had been exchanged upstairs, the kitchen still had the lovely comforting and comfortable atmosphere that Olive had created throughout her home, but especially here at its heart, its cosiness reaching out to warm the heart.
‘I’d certainly far rather she and Agnes went with you than with Dulcie,’ Olive admitted, absently tracing one of the lines that made up the checks on the kitchen tablecloth with the tip of her fore-finger. Was Sally trying to say tactfully that she had treated Tilly like a child instead of recognising that she needed to know that she, her mother, trusted her? ‘You get all sorts going to the Palais, from what I’ve heard, and Hammersmith itself has a bad reputation,’ she defended her decision.
‘I know nurses who’ve been to the Palais and they say it’s just about the best dancehall in London. I think they’d say if they thought it wasn’t the kind of place one would want to go,’ Sally offered tactfully, pausing to take a sip of her hot tea before wrapping her hands round her mug and then continuing carefully, ‘Tilly is young, but she’s not the sort of girl to have her head turned by the wrong kind of young man, or the sort of girl who would behave in the wrong way.’
Silently Olive digested what Sally had said, moving slightly in her chair and pushing it back a little from the table, its legs making a small scraping sound on the linoleum as she got up and began pacing the floor. Sally had offered her a face-saving way out of what was a miserable situation and she’d be silly not to take it, Olive acknowledged, stopping her pacing to turn to Sally.
‘You’re right. She isn’t. And that’s just as well with this war, and young people being what they are. Perhaps I have been too hard on her, but the last thing I want for Tilly’s own sake is for her to meet some lad in uniform and then fancy herself in love with him and want to get married when he will have to go off to war and might not come back.’ Olive sighed. ‘I shouldn’t be talking to you like this, Sally. You’re only a girl yourself, and a very kind girl as well.’ She sighed again. ‘If you’re sure you don’t mind going with Tilly and Agnes, that would ease my mind an awful lot.’
‘Of course I don’t mind. I wouldn’t have offered if I did,’ Sally returned promptly. ‘In fact, it will probably do me good. It’s ages since I last went dancing and, by all accounts, the Hammersmith Palais is the place to go.’
‘So Tilly keeps telling me,’ Olive acknowledged ruefully.
From her favourite seat at her favourite table next to the dance floor, Dulcie was able to keep a close eye on everyone coming into the ballroom, and when an hour after her own arrival there was still no sign of Tilly and Agnes she gave a dismissive mental shrug and told herself that if Tilly was too soft to take her advice then that was her lookout, and more fool her.
Three girls she knew from school had taken the other seats at the table, the four of them exchanging nods of recognition, Dulcie well aware that the other three were covertly examining her appearance. Well, let them. It wasn’t her fault if she looked better than they did.
‘That good-looking brother of yours still in France with the army, is he?’ one of the girls – Ida Walton – asked Dulcie.
‘As far as I know he is,’ Dulcie replied. ‘Last time he wrote home he said how he’d been on leave in Paris.’
‘Huh, Paris.’ Rita Stevens, who was sitting next to Ida, joined the conversation. ‘My brother Harry was there before he got sent home on compassionate leave when his wife died having a baby, and he reckoned that the women in Paris are all tarts and that any British soldier who goes with one of them is a fool.’
‘Well, Rick certainly isn’t that,’ Dulcie said smartly, ‘’cos if he was he’d have ended up married to Beatie Sinclair from Brewer Street, she’s been chasing after him that hard.’
The other girls all laughed and the one sitting furthest away from Dulcie – Bettie Fields – asked her, ‘Still working at Selfridges, are you?’
‘Yes,’ Dulcie confirmed.
‘We’re all thinking of going working in munitions,’ Bettie told her. ‘They reckon the pay’s the best there is. Oooh, here’s that lad coming over that danced with you three times last week, Rita.’ She nudged her friend. ‘And he’s got a couple of pals with him.’
When she saw the three young men swaggering over to join them, Dulcie deliberately moved her chair away from those of the other girls. The young men were of a type and class familiar to her from her own family life, and Dulcie immediately mentally and somewhat scathingly dismissed them as being men she wouldn’t want to dance with. For a start their suits were shiny and ill-fitting, they were wearing boots, not shoes, and their stridently cockney accents made her grateful for the fact that she had learned to speak in a much more refined way since going to work at Selfridges. Neither Olive nor Tilly, nor indeed anyone she had spoken to in Article Row, spoke with a cockney accent, and when Rita flashed her a look and apologised insincerely, ‘Oh, sorry, Dulcie that there isn’t anyone for you to dance with,’ Dulcie was
