The Grafton Girls. Annie Groves
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must have passed the hospital she had been told to look out for and that she could now see the Picton Clock landmark she had been warned meant that she had gone too far and missed her turning.
An elderly woman, obviously having noticed her looking around, came over to her.
‘Lost your way, have you?’ she enquired.
‘I’ve been billeted to Chestnut Close,’ Diane explained, ‘but I think I’ve missed my turning.’
‘Well, as to that,’ the other woman sniffed, ‘you have, yes. This is Wavertree, not Edge Hill.’ The way she stressed what she obviously considered to be the superiority of ‘Wavertree’ would normally have made Diane smile. A similarly petty type of snobbery existed in Melham on the Green, the village where she had grown up, with one end of it being considered ‘better’ than the other. Kit had enjoyed teasing her about her mother’s pride in the fact that their well-cared-for semi was just over the invisible border that separated the ‘better’ end of the village from the ‘other’ end. ‘And, of course, we aren’t supposed to give out directions to strangers,’ the elderly lady added pompously.
‘No, indeed,’ Diane responded with suitable gravity. ‘Actually, I do have the directions, but I’ve wandered off track. I believe that I should have turned off left for Chestnut Close before I got here.’
‘There’s some folks that live there that like to claim that it’s in Wavertree, on account of it being on the border, but even if they are right, the better part of Wavertree is further up the road, past the tennis club and that. I expect you play tennis, do you? I used to play myself when I was younger.’
Diane made her excuses as tactfully as she could. The older woman’s question had brought a fresh wave of painful memories. The previous summer she and Kit had just managed to snatch the mixed doubles trophy from the previous year’s winners at the Cambridgeshire courts where they and other members of the RAF squadrons based locally played.
It had been at the tennis club, on a warm September night just after the Battle of Britain, not yet two years ago, that Kit had proposed to her.
If they had got married straight away then, instead of deciding to wait, would things have been any different?
It didn’t take Diane long to retrace her steps and find the turning into Chestnut Close, which turned out to be a neat collection of small semidetached homes and terraces of four interlinked red-brick houses, with low red-brick front garden walls and privet hedges.
Number 24 was about a quarter of the way down Chestnut Close, and Diane suspected that she saw several sets of net curtains twitching as she walked up its tidy gravel path.
The front door was opened the moment she knocked.
‘Come in, dear,’ she was instructed by the small, plump woman in her fifties who greeted her, whom Diane assumed to be her landlady. ‘I’ve bin expecting you. Tired, are you, and parched too, I’m sure? I’ll put the kettle on and then I’ll take you up and show you the room. You’ll be sharing, did they tell you that? Another young lady who’s working at Derby House. I told them when they asked me if I’d have some lodgers that with me being a widow and liking things just so, I’d only take young ladies. Not that some of them I’ve had have been what I’d call “ladies”, but then I can tell that you’re a decent sort. I’m Mrs Lawson, by the way. It’s a good-size room, the largest in the house. It was me and my Herbert’s room but seein’ as I’m on me own now I moved out of it, like, and I got rid of the double, had a pair of single beds put in – there was that many young couples wanting to have it, what with the furniture shortage an’ all, and there’s much more space in the back room now with only a single in it. It’s funny, isn’t it, some folks don’t like sleeping in a single after they’ve shared, but me, I don’t mind at all. I like me own space, you see, and men and marriage -well, they aren’t allus what they’re made out to be, take it from me. It’s this way,’ she continued without pausing for breath, as she started up the stairs, leaving Diane to follow her.
‘Now I’m very fussy about the state of me bathroom – I won’t have no makeup nor any of that fake leg stuff all over everything. Baths are once a week, unless you want to pay for extra. You’ll get your breakfast, and a meal before you go out when you do your night shift. But there’s to be no food taken upstairs to your room. And no followers neither,’ she added firmly. ‘I won’t have no truck with any of that kind of goings-on.’
They had reached the landing and Diane reflected ruefully that beneath Mrs Lawson’s soft outer plumpness lay a core of pure steel.
‘The lady wot you’ll be sharing with is married. Only bin here a couple of weeks herself, she has.’
‘This is the room.’ She gave a small knock on the door and called out, ‘It’s only me, Mrs Stone, duck, bringing up the new lady.’
Diane heard the sound of the door lock being pulled back, and then the door opened.
‘I’ll leave you two to get to know one another whilst I make you both a cuppa,’ Mrs Lawson announced.
‘Not for me, thanks, Mrs L. I’ve got to go soon,’ said the room’s occupant.
‘Right you are, duck,’ said the landlady, leaving Diane and the girl now seated on one of the room’s two narrow single beds to study one another surreptitiously in the slightly awkward silence that followed her exit.
‘I’m Diane – Di,’ Diane introduced herself.
‘Myra Stone,’ the other girl responded.
Diane had never seen a more stunningly beautiful nor sensuously voluptuous-looking young woman. She had the kind of looks that would have turned men’s heads in the street. She had glossy brown curls, and brown eyes that should have looked warm but which instead held an expression of cynical brittleness that both shocked Diane and made her feel wary. Somehow that voluptuous body and those cold eyes just did not match up with one another.
‘You’d better come in and shut the door. I’ve already bagsied this bed,’ Myra told her, indicating the better positioned of the two beds. ‘And I’d better warn you now that there’s next to no wardrobe or drawer space left.’
‘I dare say I’ll be able to manage,’ Diane responded lightly. ‘It can’t be worse than we had at camp. I haven’t lived out before.’
‘Well, you won’t have to bother about curfews or anything like that,’ Myra told her, ‘and the social life’s pretty good up here, especially now that the Yanks have arrived. Have you dated any Yanks yet?’
Diane stiffened. Already a certain amount of competitive hostility had developed between the RAF flyers and the newly arrived Americans. The readiness of some girls to accept ‘dates’, as the Americans called them, from the newcomers had resulted in them being branded as ‘disloyal’, and there had even been incidents of outright hostility, with them being accused of favouring the Americans because of the luxuries they could provide.
‘You’ll be working at Derby House, I expect?’
‘Yes,’ Diane agreed, as she removed her gloves and her jacket, and then lifted her hand to make sure that her blonde hair was still smoothed neatly into its chignon. Her fingers were slender and fine-boned, her wrist blue-veined under creamy skin. Her colouring was more Nordic than English rose, and her father had always teased her that her blonde hair and blue eyes, together with her height and slender frame, were a throwback to some Viking ancestor on her mother’s side of the family. Diane had learned young that her looks made her stand out from the crowd and that sometimes other girls could be wary of her because of them. That in turn had led to her developing an initial defensive calm coolness of manner with people. ‘My Ice Princess’, Kit had called her. Diane knew that she did tend to hide her own shyness away behind a protective front with new people.
‘So what happened to him, then?’
Myra’s question caught her off guard, causing the colour to rise in her face. ‘What happened to who?’ she responded