Annie Groves - London Belles

Sally gave a brisk nod of her head, and then turned on her heel to hurry away, thinking what a stroke of luck it had been to bump into Tilly like that – fate, almost. Sally considered herself to be a good judge of character and she had liked Tilly straight away. Not that she was going to get her hopes up too high until she had seen the room in question. She’d certainly feel more comfortable if she wasn’t easy accessible to anyone who might take it into their head to come down from Liverpool and enquire for her at Barts’ nurses’ home, and she was conscious of the fact that her room there was only temporary. She’d meant what she’d said before she left when she’d told her father that she didn’t want anything to do with him in future – him or his new wife.

Chapter Three

‘The vicar’s wife has just told me that she thinks she knows someone who’d be exactly right for a lodger,’ Olive told Tilly as they walked home together arm in arm after the Sunday morning service. ‘I mentioned to her that I wanted to let a couple of rooms at our Women’s Voluntary Service meeting on Wednesday night, and now it seems she’s heard of a girl who’s looking for a room.’

Despite the warm sunshine Tilly shivered as she glanced down a side street to see a convoy of army lorries loaded with men in uniform rumbling along the Strand. The signs of preparation for a war that Mr Chamberlain had assured them would not happen were all around them, from the sandbags piled up around buildings, to the men in ARP uniforms, and the ongoing work on preparing public bomb shelters. In Hyde Park work was underway to dig trenches for shelters and war defences, and Tilly and her mother were doing their own bit ‘just in case’ it came to war. Tilly had joined her local St John Ambulance brigade, and her mother had joined the local Women’s Voluntary Service group – the WVS for short – run by Mrs Windle, the vicar’s wife.

There’d been a smattering of young men in uniform in church this morning, with their families, and Tilly had stopped to speak with one of them – a boy who had been ahead of her at school and who was home on leave from his obligatory six months’ military training.

The last time she’d seen Bob had been early in the summer, before he’d started his training, and the difference in him had really struck her. Gone was the soft-featured, faintly shy boy she remembered and in his place was a thinner, fitter, tougher-looking young man who spoke proudly of his determination to do his bit for the country, and his belief that Hitler would not stop merely at invading Czechoslovakia, no matter what the Prime Minister might want to think.

After church the talk had all been of the prospect of war.

Now, though, feeling her mother’s slight squeeze on her arm beneath the smart little white boxy jacket trimmed with navy blue she was wearing over her Sunday best frock, Tilly turned to her to listen.

‘The girl Mrs Windle has in mind is your own age, Tilly, and an orphan. Apparently she’s spent virtually all her life in an orphanage run by the Church, but now she’s too old to stay there any more. They’ve kept her on to help with the younger children but the Church has decided to evacuate the orphans to the country, they can’t take her with them. They’ve found her a job working on the ticket desk at Chancery Lane underground station and now she needs somewhere to live where she’ll feel comfortable and safe. She’ll be coming round to look at the room at four o’clock this afternoon, after the nurse you were telling me about. They both sound ideal lodgers for us. I’m looking forward to meeting them.’

‘Sally, the nurse, is a bit older than me, Mum, but I think you’ll like her.’

Like Tilly, in her navy-blue, white-spotted dress, Olive was wearing her Sunday best outfit, an oatmeal linen two-piece of neatly waisted jacket and simple straight skirt, made for her by a local dressmaker from the Greek Cypriot community. Both women were wearing hats, a girlish white straw boater with navy-blue ribbons in Tilly’s case, a neat plain oatmeal straw hat for Olive, which she was wearing tilted slightly to one side, in the prevailing fashion.

‘I feel sorry for the orphan girl, though. How awful never to have known her parents,’ Tilly sympathised, earning herself another maternal squeeze on her arm.

‘Yes, the poor little thing was left on the doorstep of the orphanage as a baby. According to Mrs Windle, she’s very shy and quiet,’ Olive approved. ‘She’ll be good company for you, darling. You’ll be able to go to church social events and dances together, I expect. Young people need to have fun, especially now, when there’s so much to worry about.’

Because it was such a warm day neither of them felt like a heavy traditional Sunday lunch, and so instead they were going to have a nice salad made from a tin of John West salmon Olive had splashed out on, and some lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes bought from Alan, the barrow boy from Covent Garden, whose pitch was just off the Strand. Eaten with some thin slices of buttered brown bread from the local bakery, it would be a feast fit for a queen, so Olive had pronounced before they had left for church. As an extra treat they were going to have a punnet of strawberries, again bought from Alan, with either some Carnation milk or possibly some ice cream from one of Italian ice-cream sellers who sold their wares from the tricycle-propelled mobile ice-cream ‘vans’ they drove round the streets.

The houses of Article Row didn’t have large back gardens, but at least there were gardens and not merely back yards, like those of the poorer quality houses in the area.

Olive and Tilly’s garden had a small narrow strip of lawn surrounded by equally narrow flowerbeds, with an old apple tree down at the bottom of the garden almost right up against the wall.

The Government had been urging people to think about growing their own salad and vegetables, but Olive wasn’t keen. She was city born and bred and didn’t know anything about gardening. The garden had been her father-in-law’s preserve before he had become too ill to work in it, and although she and Tilly kept the lawn mowed, pushing the small Wilkinson Sword lawn mower over the grass in the summer, and weeded the flowerbeds Olive didn’t fancy her chances of actually being able to grow anything edible.

‘We could take a walk over to Hyde Park this evening, if you fancy it,’ Olive suggested to Tilly as she unlocked their front door. ‘We might as well enjoy this good weather whilst we’ve got it.’

‘Yes, I’d like that,’ Tilly agreed immediately. ‘Bob was saying after church this morning that some of the men will be parading and drilling there – you know, being put through their paces a bit.’

‘We’ll go then. We have to support our young men in uniform.’

It was dead on three o’clock when Sally knocked on the well-maintained dark green front door of number 13. She had liked the look of Article Row the minute she had walked down it, after exploring a little of the area. Article Row might be different from the neat semi in Liverpool’s Wavertree area where she had grown up and lived with the parents, but she could see that here the householders were every bit as proud of their homes as her parents and their neighbours in Lilac Avenue had been of theirs.

Her keen nurse’s eye saw and immediately approved of Olive’s sparkling windows, immaculate front path and tidy little front garden. Sally liked too the way that the door was answered within seconds of her knocking on it.

She would have known that the woman stepping to one side to invite her into the clean fresh-smelling hallway was Tilly’s mother because of their shared looks, even if Olive hadn’t introduced herself with a warm but businesslike smile and a firm handshake.