transparent excuse for ‘just dropping by’ at dinnertime. Dora pursed her lips and unwound some more navy wool. It was an expletive too far for her, but that was war for you. ‘She can’t half talk, that one!’
It was true. Beryl had always had plenty to say for herself.
‘You’d told me a bit about her,’ Reg went on, ‘but in the flesh … I should think “my Les” is glad to get away! I daresay you will be too, Jim, surrounded by all these women. You’re next for call-up, aren’t you?’
Lily swatted at her brother again, and caught him this time, on the arm.
‘Cheek! You tell him, Jim! You like it here!’
Jim gave a half-smile and shrugged.
Lily thought nothing of it at the time. But afterwards, she’d remember that.
It might have been cold and dank and generally horrible outside, but the hens still had to be seen to and locked up before dark.
Reg declared he was ‘gasping for a fag’ so the three of them wrapped up and went out into the yard in the last of the feeble daylight. Jim didn’t think Reg’s cigarette and the henhouse straw would be a terrifically good mix, so he volunteered for the hens’ bedtime lock-up, leaving Lily stamping her feet and swinging her arms as Reg lit up. He still couldn’t get over the fact that Beryl was convinced he and Les were bound to meet.
He drew on his cigarette and chucked his spent match over the fence.
‘Anyway, if he’s just been called up, he’ll get a home posting for the first few months, if not years – how old is he?’
‘That’s the thing,’ Lily said. ‘Les is twenty, the same as you.’
‘What? How come he hasn’t been called up till now?’ Reg sounded outraged. ‘Or volunteered? You mean he’s sat on his backside when he could have been—’
Reg had volunteered the minute he was eligible, at eighteen – and Sid the same.
‘Before you get on your high horse, Reg, Les was called up before.’
Lily had only learnt this herself when Les’s call-up papers had come just before Christmas.
‘Don’t tell me,’ exclaimed Reg. ‘Tried to pass himself off as a conchie! Or unfit!’
‘He was unfit the first time. Susan, his sister, because she’s like she is, she’s not strong. She gets all sorts of infections and things,’ Lily explained. ‘Les had tonsillitis that he’d caught off her, so he failed the medical.’
Reg snorted and took another disdainful draw on his cigarette. Lily could see she wasn’t convincing him.
‘Les isn’t a shirker, Reg, honestly,’ she insisted. ‘I mean, he’d hardly have planned it this way. It’s not the best timing, is it, for him to be called up now, when Beryl’s due in a couple of months?’
‘It’s how it is, Lil,’ said Reg plainly. ‘There’s plenty of blokes fighting this war that have never seen their kids.’
‘I know, I know.’
The tip of Reg’s cigarette glowed in the dusk. Lily wondered if he was going to tell her, or if she’d have to ask. That was the trouble with Reg. He was such an oyster. You had to prise things out of him.
‘Reg …’
But for once, Reg saved her the trouble.
‘I know what you’re going to say, Sis. And yes, it’s why I’m home. This leave isn’t just in place of Christmas.’
‘Oh, Reg! You’ve got your posting! Where? Tell me! Where are they sending you?’
Jim had finished his henhouse duties now, and he joined them, cradling two brown eggs in his hand. He could tell from Lily’s face that something was up.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Am I interrupting?’
Though they’d been putting him up for six months now – or putting up with him, as he joked – Jim was always sensitive about not intruding into family matters.
‘He’s got his posting,’ Lily said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it, Reg?’
Red took a final long drag on his cigarette and pinched it out between his thumb and first finger. His hands were so worn and calloused after years of grappling with the insides of engines he could crush a wasp the same way and not feel the pain, he’d told them.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Jim.
The Army didn’t send you abroad till you were twenty – or tried not to; Reg’s last birthday had been a turning point, they all knew.
‘I’ll tell you two,’ said Reg slowly. ‘And I’ve told Sid. But not a word to Mum, not yet. I’ll tell her tomorrow – and in good time, not just before I leave, so she’s got the chance to take it in. But I don’t want her brooding on it longer than she has to.’
‘For goodness’ sake Reg, tell us!’ Lily had trouble keeping her voice down. ‘Where?’
‘They haven’t told us officially,’ said Reg. ‘We’re not allowed to know – and nor are you. But we all do know.’
Jim and Lily looked at him, waiting.
‘Africa,’ said Reg quietly. Walls, even those between their house and their next-door neighbours, were reputed to have ears, after all. ‘North Africa. This bit of leave’s my pre-embarkation. We sail next week.’
Africa! In the wintry dusk of a Midlands’ backyard, Lily closed her eyes and she was there.
Africa! Heat, dust, the spice smell of the bazaars; snowy-robed Arabs haggling over brass coffee pots; captive cobras swaying to snake charmers’ fluting; tall, half-naked Nubians in marble halls, waving ostrich-feather fans over doe-eyed women reclining on cushions …
But before her fantasy could get any more, well, fantastic, Lily pulled herself up. Stupid! Africa, North Africa at least, was nothing like that. Her dimly-remembered geography lessons had taught her that. Most of it was desert, unpopulated because it was uninhabitable, and the vast sand dunes and midnight oases she might have gone on to imagine were only a tiny part of that. The rest was stony desert scrub, more like the surface of the moon than the setting for a romantic encounter with a real-life Rudolph Valentino. And now, the desert meant other things too. It was The Western Desert – those capital letters said it all – it was—
‘The Desert War, then?’
Thank goodness Jim was there. The words had formed in her mind, but she hadn’t seemed able to organise her lips, tongue and teeth to get them out. Maybe it was the cold. Or maybe it was because she couldn’t bear to hear herself say them out loud.
Reg pulled a face.
‘Sounds
