Joanna Toye - Wartime for the Shop Girls

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2019

Copyright © Joanna Toye 2019

Cover [photograph/illustration] © Gordon Crabbe/Alison Eldred (woman), CollaborationJS/Arcangel Images (street scene), Shutterstock.com(all other images)

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Joanna Toye asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008298692

Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008298708

Version: 2020-10-05

For my parents, John and Mary – this was their war

Contents

Cover

Title Page WARTIME FOR THE SHOP GIRLS Joanna Toye

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Author’s Note and Thanks

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Joanna Toye

About the Publisher

‘Reg! It’s Reg! He’s here!’

Lily couldn’t help herself. She’d been stationed at the window for the past two hours, as tense as a look-out in a south coast pillbox. Now she tore to the back door the second she saw the latch on the back gate start to quiver. The hinge didn’t even have time to squeak.

‘Mum! Jim!’ she hollered excitedly over her shoulder. ‘He’s home!’

Then she was flying out over the yard bricks, her feet skidding on the frosty surface. A few days ago, the whole country had been blanketed in snow, nearly five inches in their Midland town of Hinton, which had cast feverish doubt on Reg being able to get home at all. The snow had shrunk back now, leaving a scummy tidemark on the fringes of the yard, though it was still cold enough to make her eyes sting.

But Reg was here, finally, and guaranteed a warm welcome. His forty-eight-hour leave was in place of the family celebration they’d hoped to have at Christmas – insofar as anyone was celebrating Christmas in this third (the third, already!) winter of the war. If anyone had thought in 1939 that they’d still be fighting … Still, at least up till now it hadn’t been as cold as that dreadful first winter, or as nail-shredding as the second, at the height of the Blitz.

‘Lil! For goodness’ sake, get back inside! You’ve only got your slippers on!’

The first words from her brother, and he was telling her off! No change there, and Lily had to smile. But she wasn’t surprised: Reg, bless him, was the oldest in the family, and had always been the sensible one, the responsible one – he’d had to be, after their father had died.

Her other brother, Sid, would just have clocked the slippers’ red pompoms, called her Frou-Frou or Fifi – he was always messing about with names – and made some crack about her pinching them off a French sailor. The fact that the British Navy, in which Sid was serving, issued its men with a plain flat-topped cap was a matter of some grievance with him, even though Lily was sure he’d have felt a right cissy in a hat with a pompom on it.

But Sid was away down south at HMS Northney on Hayling Island, and much as they’d tried, he and Reg hadn’t been able to co-ordinate their leave to get home together. When she gave in to despair, which wasn’t often, Dora, their mum, sometimes wondered out loud when or if she’d ever have her three children under the same roof again. But it was no more than everyone else had to put up with, and as Dora was more likely to be heard to say in one of the many maxims she could produce to suit any occasion – ‘What can’t be cured must be endured.’

‘Come on inside, then!’ Lily hung on Reg’s arm. ‘We’ll get the kettle on.’

‘I wouldn’t say no.’ Poor Reg looked chilled through. His train must have been delayed – they mostly were, these days, if not actually cancelled – and he’d probably had to hang about on a freezing platform. ‘Where’s Mum?’

‘She’s upstairs, trying to keep herself busy and not watch the clock—’

‘No, I’m not. I’m here.’

And there was Dora Collins, expectant in the scullery doorway. She was in her best dress in honour of the homecoming, with a Jacqmar scarf at the neck, no less, her Christmas present from Lily. Ever since she’d started at Marlow’s, the town’s smartest department store, or so it liked to claim, Lily had promised herself that as soon as she could afford it, she’d buy her mum something nice. And when Marlow’s had given every junior a small bonus ‘in gratitude for your hard work throughout the year in these difficult times’, it had been earmarked straight away.