Where the Heart Is (18 page)

‘Oh, no, look at that. She’s telling him that she can manage with her case now.’ Grace clicked her tongue, suddenly a nurse before she was a sister. ‘Here, Mum, hold my handbag for me, will you, and wait here whilst I go and get her? The last thing we want is Lou being all independent and then coming a cropper.’

And so it was that within a handful of minutes, Grace and Lou were coming towards her, Grace holding Lou’s case in one hand, her free arm tucked very firmly and protectively through Lou’s as she walked alongside her.

‘Honestly, Grace, it’s true, I don’t really need this. I just thought I’d bring it so that you’d all feel sorry for me,’ Lou was laughing as Jean opened her arms and hugged her tightly to her, before pushing her gently away and looking at her.

‘You’ve grown at least another half an inch,’ she announced a bit tearfully, ‘and you’ve lost weight.’

‘Three-quarters of an inch, and I expect that Sash has done the same. You’ll have to measure us back to back like you used to do when we were little, Mum.’

‘I remember Mum doing that, and I remember too that you’d always rise up on your heels and make Sasha do the same so that you’d look taller.’

‘That was because Mum said Dad wouldn’t let us go to the Grafton until we were at least five foot five inches.’

Lou might not have said anything about her twin not being there but Jean, with a mother’s eye, had seen the way she had glanced quickly round when she had reached her, as though hoping that Sasha would appear.

‘Sasha said she couldn’t trust herself not to disgrace you in public by bursting into tears, that’s why she isn’t here.’

‘This is better, like opening Christmas presents slowly,’ Lou smiled.

It wasn’t just outwardly that Lou had changed, Jean recognised with another surge of shock tinged with pride, and her height obviously wasn’t the only way in which she’d grown.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Jean asked.

Lou shook her head. ‘I’d rather wait until we’re home.’

‘You just be careful with that leg,’ Grace was warning, as they made their way through the bustle.

Where once Lou would have teased her elder sister, calling her ‘nursie’ or some such thing, now she nodded and replied, ‘Don’t worry, the last thing I want is to slow up my recovery and not be able to get back to my training. Sister’s promised me that if I do my walking exercises whilst I’m at home, she’ll have a word with the MO when I get back to see if I can be allowed to return to training a couple of hours every day, instead of having to wait until the PT instructor has signed me off as fit. It’s been ever such a bind having to miss out on lessons, especially when the other girls are talking about what they’re doing and I know that I’m falling behind.’

Jean and Grace exchanged astonished looks. Was this the same Lou who had abhorred school and lessons and done everything within her power to undermine her poor teachers?

‘So you’re happy in the WAAF then?’ Grace asked.

‘I love it,’ Lou responded immediately, adding quickly, ‘Of course I miss home and all of you, but it really makes you think that you’re contributing something important towards the war effort, knowing that the work we’ll be doing on the planes will help to keep them flying.’

Lou displaying tact and discretion, and actually thinking about how what she was saying might be received? If that was the effect being in the WAAF was having on her then Grace was impressed.

Unaware of her elder sister’s thoughts, Lou continued, ‘So far I’ve only worked on pieces salvaged from crashed aircraft, and I’m just so envious of the other girls starting working on the real thing soon. Mind you, if I can get my leg passed by the MO then there’s no reason why I shouldn’t join them. I must have taken in more than I knew, listening to Dad talking about his work, because our sergeant says I’ve got a natural aptitude for the work.’

Hearing her daughter talking so enthusiastically and confidently about what she was doing filled Jean with relief. But alongside that was a certain sadness. This Lou, the Lou who was walking along arm in arm between her and Grace as they started out towards Edge Hill and home, was not the Lou who had left Liverpool earlier in the year. That Lou had been a young girl, awkward sometimes in adult company, rebellious, stubborn and headstrong, filled with an energy she had not learned how to channel, and unhappy because of that–with herself as well as with others. This Lou was a young woman, poised, determined, confident, but most of all happy.

Pleased as she was for her daughter, Jean still felt cheated that she had not been there to witness the almost magical transformation that turned all young human ‘cygnets’ into the adult ‘swans’, who filled their parents’ hearts with pride.

‘Oh, and you’ll probably be interested in this, Grace,’ Lou told them. ‘The surgeon who operated on my leg instructed that I was to be given a new medicine. Penicillin, it’s called. Have you heard of it?’

Indeed Grace had, and Jean listened in silence as her daughters talked enthusiastically about the marvels of modern medicine and what a difference this penicillin would make to treating wounds that might once have turned gangrenous.

‘You’ll have had the drug by injection,’ said Grace knowledgeably.

Lou laughed. ‘Yes, I was a bit like a pin cushion, but without it Sister said that I might well have ended up losing my leg.’

Jean’s gasp had them both looking at their mother.

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ Lou was quick to reassure her. ‘I didn’t lose it and I’m not going to now. The MO says it’s a lovely clean heal and that I’ll only have a small scar.’

‘What happened to the pilot you saved?’ Grace asked diplomatically after a quick look at Jean’s pale face.

‘Oh, they shipped him off to another RAF hospital closer to his own base, in Leicestershire. He’d been on a bombing raid, and somehow or other they’d got lost on the way back.’

‘He was very lucky, and you were very brave,’ Jean told her.

‘I didn’t do anything that any other WAAF wouldn’t have done in the same circumstances, Mum.’

There she was again: the new grown-up Lou, quick to be calm and modest, not at all like the younger Lou, who would have fought passionately with Sasha to claim the glory.

Sasha! What would her twin make of this new Lou, Jean wondered a little anxiously.

It was only when they turned into their own
road, just on the border between Edge Hill and Wavertree, that Jean saw a glimpse of the old Lou when suddenly she held back and looked uncertain, saying with more than a touch of bravado, ‘I suppose I’m going to get it from Dad, especially since I joined up without getting his permission. He’ll be saying, “I told you so,” to me, I expect–and worse.’

‘Well, if your dad were to tell you off it would be no more than you deserve,’ Jean felt bound to stick up for her husband, ‘but, like me, all your dad really wants is your happiness and your safety, Lou, and you have to admit that going behind our backs like that would upset any man.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Lou agreed. ‘It was the wrong thing to do, I admit.’

Again Jean and Grace exchanged astounded looks.

‘But I’m ever so glad that I did do it, Mum, because I’m just so happy now.’

‘You must miss Sasha, though?’ Grace asked.

‘Of course. It would have been wonderful if she’d joined up too, although I dare say they’d have been bound to separate us. But the thing is that I don’t think that Sash would have enjoyed it as much as I do, so it’s better that she’s here in the telephone exchange, like she wanted to be.’

There was no truculence or resentment in Lou’s voice, only acceptance.

‘I had a lovely letter from Luke,’ Lou continued. ‘He didn’t say much about how things are for him, of course, but he did say that he was proud of me. I do wish that he and Katie were still engaged. Do you hear from her at all, Mum?’

‘No.’ Jean tried to smile. ‘She felt that it wouldn’t be right to keep in touch, on account of Luke, and of course she was right.’

They were home now, Sam and Seb and of course Sasha waiting to greet them and to welcome Lou home, the family filling the small cosy sparkling clean kitchen with its bright yellow walls and its air of being the heart of the house.

Lou hugged Sasha first, not trusting herself to say anything really meaningful to her twin until they were on their own, and having to make do instead with a muttered, ‘We can talk properly later,’ before releasing Sasha to go and hug her father.

Watching Lou hug Sam, Jean knew that Sam was as aware of and bemused by Lou’s changed demeanour as she had been herself.

It was only when Lou took off her cap, though, that Jean finally couldn’t control her emotions any longer.

In place of the neat bob with which Lou had gone away, her hair–or what was left of it–was a mass of short feathery curls that somehow, instead of making her look boyish, had just the opposite effect and gave her a gamine femininity instead.

All Jean could say though was, ‘Oh, Lou, your hair! What happened?’

‘What? Oh, this.’ Lou raked her fingers through her curls and looked rueful, giving them all an impish smile, before saying lightly, ‘One side of my hair was badly singed when I was dragging
the pilot free. I could smell burning hair but I was so busy trying to get him to safety that I didn’t stop to think that it might be my crowning glory. Obviously I couldn’t go around with a lopsided bob so it had to be cut. Luckily one of the other girls was a hairdresser before she joined up and she offered to cut it for me, otherwise I’d have probably ended up with the RAF barber giving me a short back and sides.

‘It’s very pretty, isn’t it, Seb?’ Grace announced, asking for her husband’s support.

‘Very,’ Seb agreed with such relish that Lou promptly blushed and Grace turned on Seb with mock wifely anger, warning him, ‘That’s quite enough of you noticing that my little sister has turned into a beauty, thank you, Seb.’

Standing on the sidelines, watching everyone gather excitedly about her twin, Sasha wasn’t sure just how she felt. She had been desperate to see for herself that Lou was, as she had written to her, recovering well from her injuries, but where there should have been relief Sasha found that what she was actually feeling was closer to anger, as though the changes she could see and sense in Lou–not just in her appearance but in her self–somehow took something away from her.

For instance, their mother was going on about Lou having grown, and making a fuss about it, without making any reference to the fact that she had grown too, Sasha thought crossly, as she justified her feelings to herself. Her mother and Grace were talking about Lou as though being a bit thinner and having had to have her hair cut because
she had behaved in her normal reckless, unthinking way had somehow turned Lou not just into a heroine but also into a beauty.
She
was thinner too, but no one seemed to have noticed. It was Lou they were all fussing over, as though being away from home and joining the WAAF and risking her life had turned her into a new person, a Lou whom they admired and wanted to praise, instead of cautioning as they had done in the past.

These were difficult thoughts and feelings for Sasha to digest and understand. She had been longing to see her twin and yet now, instead of being thrilled to see her, she was actually wishing that she wasn’t here, and that made her feel dreadful.

‘What I don’t understand, Lou,’ she challenged her twin, ‘is why you were the only one around when the plane crashed.

When everyone turned to look at her with varying degrees of astonishment, Sasha realised that she had gone too far. But instead of backtracking, as she would normally have done, to her own confusion she heard herself saying even more challengingly, ‘Bobby says that it was more than likely that you shouldn’t have been there at all.’

Now she had done it. Lou was bound to retaliate with a nasty comment about Bobby saying something, like he wasn’t a part of the family so he had no right to comment. Sasha had been warned by her mother not to rub Lou up the wrong way by going on to her about Bobby because in Lou’s eyes he had come between them.

Poor Sasha couldn’t understand her own behaviour. She was saying the kind of things, behaving in the kind of challenging way that in the past would have been Lou’s chosen role. Now her mother had a small anxious crease between her eyebrows and her father was frowning heavily, whilst Grace was giving Seb one of those stupid married looks that said quite plainly how much she disapproved of what Sasha had done.

A horrible feeling was twisting angrily inside her, a sort of hot miserable pain that was driving her to be even more cross and outspoken, and yet at the same time also made her want to burst into tears and beg Lou to forgive her. What was happening to her? Sasha wasn’t used to Lou getting so much approval and praise. It had always been Lou who had been the one who provoked others, and who always caused the trouble they had both so often ended up in, not her.

It was Jean who spoke first, not just surprised but also a little bit cross with Sasha for spoiling the happy mood of Lou’s homecoming, and after everything she had said to her about not mentioning Bobby as well. Jean had thought better of Sasha, she really had, and now because of that, her voice was quite sharp.

‘That’s quite enough, Sasha.’

Lou could almost feel her twin’s misery and immediately wanted to protect and defend her but, more than that, she discovered a little to her own surprise, she didn’t want her family making her out to be something she wasn’t, especially not at Sasha’s expense, so she spoke up quickly, admitting without heat, ‘Actually, the truth is,
Mum, Bobby is sort of right. I wasn’t doing anything wrong or breaking any rules in being where I was, but the reason that I was up so early in the morning and on my own was because that trouble I’d got into had affected all the other girls in my hut as well.’

Quickly she explained about the points, then turned to Sasha.

‘So you can tell Bobby that he was right, but do tell him too that I have well and truly learned my lesson. I felt dreadful knowing that the other girls were being punished because of me. It made me think of how often you’d been punished along with me, Sash, when we were young, and yet you never complained or told on me. I’m so lucky to have such a loyal and wonderful twin.’