‘I heard that Buckingham Palace was bombed this morning in that raid we had, and that the King and Queen only just escaped being hit,’ Mrs Windle told Olive as she sat next to her in the front passenger seat of Gerry Lord’s van. Gerry’s parents, who owned a local grocery shop, had loaned the van to the WVS whilst Gerry was in the army. Olive and Mrs Morrison, another WVS member had been taught to drive it by Sergeant Dawson. Now Olive was driving as many of their group as had been able to cram into the small van towards the rest centre where they were to be on duty that afternoon to help those who had lost their homes and their possessions in the bombings.
It wasn’t easy driving through London with so many streets blocked off because of damaged buildings and unexploded bombs, but Sergeant Dawson had taught Olive well.
‘But the King and Queen are all right, aren’t they?’ Olive asked Mrs Windle anxiously.
‘Yes, thank goodness. I do admire them for insisting on staying in London. It sets us all such a good example.’
‘It’s no picnic, though, is it?’ Nancy Black, Olive’s next-door neighbour complained.
‘No, it isn’t,’ someone agreed. ‘We were without electricity, gas and water on Sunday.’
‘Do you think it’s really true that Hitler is about to invade?’ Mrs Morrison asked from the back of the van, whilst Olive drove carefully round a bomb crater in the road, and then equally carefully over the fire hoses that lay beyond it. Blackened buildings still smoked and Olive glimpsed a small party of people, white-faced with plaster dust, being escorted away from a half-collapsed house by two rescue workers.
‘Well, Mr Churchill seems to think so, since he warned us all about it last Wednesday on the wireless,’ another member of the group answered.
Olive’s hands tightened on the steering wheel of the Austin van. She tried not to think about what would happen if Hitler did invade. To do so would be to add another layer of fear to those the war had already brought. No woman with a young daughter who had just entered womanhood could help but be fearful of what an invasion would mean for that daughter, never mind for the country itself.
‘The RAF will never let Hitler invade, and neither will Mr Churchill.’ Mrs Windle spoke up firmly. ‘I’ve heard that with every raid the Germans make, our boys are shooting down more of their planes.’
That was the kind of stirring talk they all needed to hear, Olive acknowledged gratefully.
‘Well, of course you’re bound to say that, Mrs Windle, with your nephew being in the RAF,’ Nancy replied, ‘but if you don’t mind me saying so, I think the RAF have been a bit slow off the mark. Where were they on Saturday night when the raids first started? That’s what I want to know.’
It was typical of Nancy that she should find fault, Olive thought, as she started to turn into a street and then had to reverse when she saw it was blocked halfway down by a fire engine.
She felt rather sorry for Mrs Windle, and cross with Nancy when the vicar’s wife leaned close and whispered to Olive, ‘I can’t say so publicly, of course, Olive, but my nephew hinted to us that the reason the RAF didn’t appear the first night of the bombs was because they’d been ordered not to. Apparently the authorities wanted the Germans to think that they’d done for the RAF so as to give our boys a better chance of getting more of them now. The Battle of Britain lost us so many planes and pilots that they needed to build up the numbers again. Not that I’d want to say anything about this to Mrs Black.’
Olive nodded, knowing what a gossip Nancy could be.
‘I dare say there’s a lot goes on that we don’t know about,’ she said to Nancy, in support of Mrs Windle.
Olive felt that that was the truth, but she was glad that she wasn’t the one who had to make what must be very difficult decisions, putting the future of the country in the long term above the safety of some of its people in the short term.
The next street was passable and within a few minutes she was able to park the van outside the school that had been taken over as a rest centre.
‘Just look at that queue, poor souls,’ said Mrs Morrison, as they passed the long straggling line made up mainly of worn-down-looking women and grubby children, some of the women clutched bundles of possessions, others tightly gripped the hands of their pale-faced, undernourished-looking children.
Poor souls indeed, Olive thought compassionately. The East End wasn’t that far, as the crow flew, from Article Row but, in terms of how so many of its people lived, it was almost another world.
‘I hope you’ve remembered to bring that disinfectant spray, Olive,’ Nancy warned, running true to form as she gave a dark look in the direction of the queue.
Olive exchanged a rueful look with the vicar’s wife. It was true that the smell from some of the really poor people from the East End was very pungent and unpleasant, but one had to be charitable and do the best one could to ignore it, and to think how lucky one was to have the life one did.
‘A cousin of mine who works as a social worker told me yesterday that she’d had to cover her nose with a handkerchief soaked in eau-de-Cologne when she went with a group of dignitaries to inspect one of the public shelters. No toilet facilities,’ Mrs Morrison explained succinctly. ‘Apparently the council had simply not thought to provide anything more than a couple of buckets and a curtain. They’d had over four hundred people crammed into the shelter, so you can imagine the result.’
‘Some councils have been very lax about providing adequate resources in the shelters,’ Mrs Windle agreed.
Their WVS uniforms proclaimed their status and their purpose, allowing them to go ahead of the queue into the school, where they were welcomed with relief by the hard-pressed volunteers.
In a cloakroom to the rear of the main school hall, with its green paint and wooden floors, Olive removed her smart WVS jacket and hung it on a peg. The smell of chalk, damp woollen coats, and cabbage, which hung in the air, took her back to her own schooldays. She took an apron from her basket and put it on to protect her uniform blouse and skirt, whilst a weary-looking fellow WVS volunteer waited for her.
‘As people come in we try to find out their situation and then we divide them into three different queues,’ she explained to Olive. ‘One for people who have lost everything – that’s the hardest queue to deal with, and the longest I’m afraid. Some of them are in such a state that they can barely comprehend what’s happened to them. They need everything: new ration books and papers, somewhere to sleep; food, clothes . . . We explain to them where to go to get their replacement papers, give them a cup of tea and something to eat here, and some clothes. We’re using one of the classrooms to store all our second-hand clothes in. They can go there and be issued with whatever they need, and then we hand them over to the billeting officers at the other end of the hall. We’ve got a fully operational canteen here, with it being a school, so they can get a proper meal, but what we could do with is better washing facilities.’ She pulled a tired face. ‘The local public baths are still operational so we’re sending people down there. It’s all a bit of a muddle, really, but we’re doing our best.
‘Some of them come in with the most pitiful stories. There was a woman this morning who never spoke, she simply stared at me, and then another woman who was her neighbour told me that her little girl had run back into the house for her doll just as a bomb struck it. All they found of her was one of her shoes. It really makes you think, doesn’t it?’
‘It certainly does,’ Olive agreed quietly as she followed her guide towards the long row of trestle tables behind which the WVS volunteers were seated to deal with the queue as it filed into the building.
Olive sighed a little when she realised that Nancy had taken the seat next to her. Olive was a peaceable person but Nancy’s acerbic tongue and lack of compassion for others could be a trial at times. They had had words over Olive learning to drive. Nancy hadn’t approved at all, but Olive had stuck to her guns and now she was glad that she had done so.
The first person Olive dealt with was a young mother with two children clinging to her legs.
Tired and unkempt-looking, with a thin face and wary eyes, the woman announced immediately, ‘I’m not having you taking the kiddies from me. Not for anything, I’m not. We might have been bombed out but that doesn’t give no one the right to take my kiddies.’ Her voice was high and strained, rising in volume as she spoke.
‘Of course you want them to be with you,’ Olive agreed gently. Like their mother, the children looked underfed. Gently she coaxed the mother to give her her name and those of her children.
‘And your address?’ she asked patiently.
‘We haven’t got no address, not any more. Blown up, it was.’ The woman started to shake.
‘You stay here,’ Olive told her. ‘I’m going to go and get you a nice hot cup of tea and some biscuits for the children. And don’t worry, we’ll get everything sorted out for you.’
‘You’re too soft by half that’s what you are,’ Nancy chided Olive later when they were having their break.
‘I can’t help thinking how I’d feel if I were in their shoes, Nancy,’ Olive replied.
‘Well, for all you know we may be soon, if Hitler keeps up this bombing. Not that you’d ever get me coming in somewhere like this, all covered in dust and looking like a scarecrow. Mrs Dawson wasn’t at church again on Sunday,’ she told Olive as they queued together to get tea from the large urn standing on the table in the classroom that had been designated for the volunteers’ tea breaks.
Automatically Olive delved into her bag for her mug – one soon learned that it helped others if you were as organised as possible – putting it under the tap on the urn to fill it with strong hot tea.
‘She’s always kept herself very much to herself,’ Olive reminded her neighbour as she added a dash of milk and then wrapped her hands round the hot mug. It was only September and warm outside – the burning buildings had seen to that – but inside the school there was that lack of warmth that Olive remembered from her own schooldays.
‘And who can blame her, with that husband of hers carrying on the way he does with other women?’ Nancy pursed her lips in a disapproving manner whilst Olive gazed at her in astonishment.
‘Nancy, what on earth are you saying? Sergeant Dawson is a good husband, and a good man.’
‘Well, you would say that, you being taken in by him, but I’ve got eyes in my head. I saw him going into Mrs Long’s house this morning and he didn’t come out again until after the all clear went. What was he doing there all that time, I’d like to know?’
Olive frowned. She didn’t like argument or quarrels, and she had no idea just why Nancy seemed to have taken so against Sergeant Dawson, but she couldn’t allow her to talk about him in that way.
‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ she told her quietly but firmly. ‘I’m surprised at you, Nancy, making such suggestions against Sergeant Dawson. I dare say the reason he was at Mrs Long’s was to make sure she was safely in her Anderson shelter. He probably stayed with her until the all clear had gone out of kindness. You know how nervous Mrs Long is now that she’s widowed, and Christopher’s not always there.’
‘Oh yes, we all know about the kind of men who have wives of their own but go round preying on lonely women. Look at the way Sergeant Dawson’s been buttering you up, Olive. I’m surprised at you being taken in by him, I really am. Not that I’m saying that you’d do anything wrong, but like I’ve warned you before, people notice these things and you did spend a lot of time with him when he was giving you those driving lessons. Always up and down the Row, he is, when there’s a pretty girl walking along it.’
‘He’s a policeman and our ARP warden,’ Olive pointed out. She was horrified and angry but she had no wish to feed the flames of Nancy’s unkind gossip by seeming to be overprotective of the sergeant. Not for a minute did she believe a word of what Nancy was implying. She’d seen and heard in his expression and his voice Sergeant Dawson’s concern for and loyalty to his wife. He had certainly never once given her any cause to feel uncomfortable in his company.
The trouble was that in her widowed state, and given Nancy’s turn of mind, she could hardly leap to his defence without potentially making matters worse.
‘Of course, it’s up to a wife to make sure her husband doesn’t stray, and that he gets all he needs at home, if you take my meaning, and from what I’ve seen of her, Mrs Dawson doesn’t have much about her.’
‘She’s never got over them losing their boy, Nancy. You know that,’ Olive felt obliged to remind the other woman.
‘Well, that shouldn’t stop her coming to church, should it? Many a time I’ve been round there to knock on the door and do my Christian duty by her, but never once has she asked me in. And as for him asking me not to call round any more! I’d give a pound to a penny that’s because he doesn’t want her being put to the wise about what he’s up to. ‘
So that was it, Olive thought. Nancy was offended because Sergeant Dawson had stepped in to protect his wife from her nosiness and she was now trying to get her revenge.
Olive was glad when they had finished their tea and it was time to return to their work. She just wished she had someone other than Nancy and her spiteful tongue sitting next to her.
David shot down and injured. Dulcie put down the copy of
Picture Post
she had gone back to reading, as she stared round Olive’s pretty kitchen without really seeing it. She had meant what she had said to Lizzie about being better off single, Dulcie assured herself. She certainly wasn’t mooning around over David James-Thompson. She had known right from the start that there could never be anything between them, even without David telling her about his snooty mother. And Dulcie hadn’t wanted there to be anything between them. Why should she? She could take her pick of lads, and that was how she liked it. All she’d wanted to do was get her own back on Lydia for being so stuck up about her, by flirting with David, who she’d known immediately found her attractive. Well, she’d done that all right, what with him waiting for her when she’d finished work, and then giving her that expensive vanity case she’d fallen in love with. Of course, she’d made it plain to him that she wasn’t the sort to do what she shouldn’t with any man, never mind one who was married, but that hadn’t stopped him trying to persuade her – or kiss her.