Annie Groves - When the Lights Go On Again

As this is the final book in the Campion series I would like to dedicate it to all the ‘real life’ families and their descendants, who lived through WWII

Cover Page

Title Page When the Lights Go On Again Annie Groves

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

Also by Annie Groves

Copyright

About the Publisher

Late August 1943

Jean Campion was standing in her kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil. Today was her birthday. Her soft brown wavy hair had been freshly cut and set the previous day especially for the occasion, the last drops of the precious Chanel scent that her son, Luke, had brought her back from Paris the first Christmas of the war, dabbed behind her ears. Jean smoothed down the cotton fabric of her blue floral print summer dress, loose on her now after nearly four years of wartime rationing. She had bought the dress from Lewis’s in Liverpool, when her eldest daughter, Grace, had been working there, before the store had been bombed in the dreadful blitz of May 1940.

The kettle was coming up to the boil. From the front room, with the doors open into the hallway, Jean could hear the voices of her family, come to celebrate with her the birthday she shared with her twin sister, Vi. The voices of her daughters Grace and Sasha, her niece, Bella, her sisters, Vi and Francine. Female voices. Female voices because they were at war and so many men were fighting for their country – and their lives. A heartfelt sigh escaped Jean’s lips.

She was lucky, she reminded herself; many women she knew had lost sons and husbands. Luke might have been injured fighting in the desert, but at least he had recovered now, even if he had made that recovery far from home and, according to his most recent letter – which had miraculously arrived today – was about to rejoin his army unit.

She was lucky too in having the rest of her family close at hand. Grace, who was a nurse, might have moved to Whitchurch because her RAF husband, who was part of the very important and secret Y Section, had been posted there, but she too had her husband living at home with her.

Seb and Grace had come up from Whitchurch today on the train, and right now Seb and Jean’s husband, Sam, were down at Sam’s allotment, no doubt talking about the progress of the war and the recent invasion of Sicily by the Allied Forces, as well as Seb’s desire to turn part of the rambling garden attached to the cottage they were renting into a vegetable plot.

Thinking of that invasion made Jean’s heart thud with anxiety, for Luke, who was with the Eighth Army, and bound to be involved at some stage in the Allies’ push into the Italian mainland to force back the Germans and Italians.

And Luke wasn’t the only one of her children she had to worry about, Jean admitted, lifting her hand to smooth back a wayward strand of hair. There was Lou, who of all things was now learning to fly aeroplanes, if you please, having been transferred by the WAAF into something called the Air Transport Auxiliary service. And Lou’s twin, Sasha, despite having a nice steady job at the local telephone exchange and an equally nice steady fiancé working in bomb disposal, never seemed to be happy.

As she poured the boiling water onto the precious tea leaves, Jean thought how typically generous it was of her younger sister, Francine – a singer with ENSA, and recently married to a major in the army – to have brought her own rations with her for the birthday get-together.

On cue, the kitchen door opened wider to admit Francine, a rueful look of mischief sparkling in her eyes.

‘I thought I’d escape from Vi by coming to see if you needed a hand.’

Francine was by far the prettiest one of the three sisters, with her strawberry-blonde curls and her heart-shaped face. Grace had the same pretty features.

As always, Francine was beautifully dressed, in a floral silk frock. She’d had the foresight to have some new clothes made whilst she’d been posted to Egypt with ENSA. You simply couldn’t get clothes of the quality and style Fran had brought back with her in England now, not with rationing and the rules the Government had laid down for austerity clothing. Not that Jean minded having to stick by those rules, not when she knew the danger the country’s poor merchant seamen had to endure bringing raw materials into the country for the war effort.

No, she didn’t feel the lack of pretty things for herself, but she did feel it for her girls sometimes, Jean admitted, although Fran had been wonderfully generous, not just bringing a whole trousseau of clothes, including her wedding dress, back from Egypt for Grace, but also bringing lovely fabrics that she had shared with them all.

Fran pulled a face. ‘I know that it can’t be easy for Vi with Edwin having left her for someone else, but she doesn’t exactly make it easy for others to sympathise with her, does she? I’ve never heard anyone complain so much, and over next to nothing.’

‘That’s just Vi’s way,’ Jean tried to defend her twin. ‘She’s always been like that, boasting when things are going well for her and complaining about life not being fair and her being hard done to when they aren’t, but Edwin wanting a divorce, and the war, have made her worse. You can carry that tray through for me, if you will.’ Jean nodded at the tray with the pretty china tea set that Grace had given her the first Christmas of the war. ‘And I’ll bring the teapot.’

Over a decade younger than Jean and Vi, Francine had been through such a lot. Pregnant at sixteen by a married man she naïvely believed loved her, Francine had given in to pressure from Vi and her husband to allow them to bring up her baby as their own before she left for America to make a new life for herself there as a singer.

But then the war had brought her back to do her bit for the country, and Francine had found out that Vi and Edwin had not been the loving parents to little Jack that she’d expected. That had been ever such a bad time. Poor Jack had run away from the people Vi had sent him to, supposedly to keep him safe from the war, and Jean had seen what Francine had gone through, wanting to claim her little boy and mother him, whilst Vi and Edwin did their utmost to stop her. And then had come the terrible tragedy of Jack being killed when a bomb had dropped on the farm to which he’d been evacuated. Such a terrible thing to happen. Of course, things had never been the same between Francine and Vi after that.

‘I don’t know how Bella puts up with Vi,’ Francine told Jean. ‘Vi’s done nothing but complain about how hard done by she is since she got here, when it’s perfectly plain that she has poor Bella running round after her, as well as working full time managing that nursery.’

Bella, the elder of Vi’s two children, was in charge of a government nursery in Wallasey where she and her new husband, a Polish fighter pilot, lived.

‘Vi’s worried that, now that Bella’s married, once the war’s over she’s going to be left on her own. She might complain about having Bella living with her when Bella has got a perfectly good house of her own, but she’d be lost without her,’ Jean told Fran.

Fran had picked up the tea tray but now she put it down again, the tone of her voice softening, as she told her sister, ‘I had a letter from Marcus this morning. His regiment is still on home duties but he thinks now that we’ve got Sicily, if we can win Italy, it won’t be long before we invade Western Europe, and that his regiment is bound to be part of that. I feel so guilty at times, Jean. One half of me is jubilant because we’re beginning to win the war at last, even though I know that there is still more fighting to be done, but the other half of me is so terribly afraid for my own happiness and for Marcus. Life is so precious and so very fragile, and loving Marcus makes me feel so vulnerable. If I should lose him…’ She gave a deep shudder. ‘I’m being selfish, I know. After all, there isn’t a woman in the land who doesn’t feel as I do for someone.’