Where the Heart Is (41 page)

He might be able to stand firm against his daughter but he couldn’t do so against the combined will of both Jean and Sasha, Sam recognised.

‘Very well, lad,’ he gave in. ‘But there’s to be no talk of any marriage until after this war’s over,’ he warned Bobby. ‘And no doing owt that wouldn’t be right either. I don’t want to see my daughter hurt or disgraced in any way,’ he added meaningfully.

Bobby went bright red and stuttered wholeheartedly, ‘No, never, Mr Campion. You can depend on me for that.’

‘Good,’ Sam told him, extending his hand to
take Bobby’s somewhat sweaty palm in his own. ‘Well done, lad. And welcome to the family.’

One look at Bobby’s beatific expression when he and her father emerged from the front room and came into the kitchen told Sasha all she wanted to know.

She flung herself into Jean’s arms, tears rolling down her face as she hiccuped, ‘Oh, Mum, I’m so happy.’

‘Well, now, I’d better put the kettle on,’ Jean announced once Sasha’s tears had been dried and Sam had disappeared off to his allotment, leaving Bobby to stand proudly in the kitchen, his face still pink with relief.

‘We’ve got the ring, Mum. Show her, Bobby,’ Sasha commanded.

‘Have you now? Well, that was a bit of a risk, wasn’t it?’ Jean commented drily.

Watching them she couldn’t help contrasting this engagement with Grace’s to Seb. Bobby was a lovely lad but there was no denying that Sasha ruled the roost with him and bossed him around in a way that Grace would never have done with Seb. Mind you, it took all sorts, Jean acknowledged fairly, and if Sasha and Bobby were happy together then that was what mattered. It was certainly a welcome change to see her daughter smiling and relaxed instead of anxious and on edge, the way she had been these last months.

Obediently Bobby produced the small jeweller’s box from his battledress tunic pocket.

When his hand trembled when he tried to open it, Sasha said, ‘Oh, let me do it, Bobby,’ taking the
box from him and opening it to show Jean the three small diamonds on the ring inside it.

It was a lovely ring, Jean acknowledged, and Bobby must have saved ever so hard to afford it. He was a good lad and he thought the world of Sasha, there was no doubt about that.

‘Put it on for me, Bobby,’ Sasha commanded, handing the box back to him.

Beaming with pride and pleasure, Bobby did as she had instructed. The ring was a perfect fit, the jeweller had seen to that when they’d first gone in and looked at it. It wasn’t new, of course–new jewellery was hard to come by now–but Sasha had fallen in love with it the minute she’d seen it and that had been good enough for Bobby.

‘Happy now?’ Bobby asked Sasha tenderly an hour later when Sasha’s mother had tactfully slipped out to go to the allotment with some sandwiches for Sam, leaving them alone in the kitchen.

Perched on Bobby’s knee, her head on Bobby’s shoulder, his arm round her waist holding her tight, whilst she admired the sunlight striking sparkles of light off her ring, Sasha nodded.

‘Yes,’ she assured him.

She was happy, wonderfully happy, but underneath her happiness, like a bit of grit in a shoe, there was still that feeling she hated so much. That fear was still there deep down inside where it lay waiting to leap out at her and drag her down with it.

She had done it. She had finished and passed her Primary Training. Lou felt so buoyant that she could almost fly without her ‘wings’ with the heady mix of excitement and relief.

Not that the last few weeks hadn’t been without their disappointments and difficulties. She’d sailed through her twenty flying hours’ test, and the over-confidence and the impatience to be trained that had given her had led to her thinking she was a lot better than she was, she admitted now. At the time it had been a crushing blow when she had been told that her forty flying hours’ test had been so borderline that they had been tempted to drop her from the course. Not all the girls who were taking it were going to be good enough to be pilots they had all been told right from the beginning.

Of course, the shock of nearly losing her place had done her good in the end. She had worked like a Trojan to make up for that poor forty-hour result, but she hadn’t taken anything for granted until yesterday, when she had been told that she had passed.

If she was up in a plane right now, she’d be doing loops and rolls and every other exuberant aerobatic manoeuvre she could think of, Lou admitted, so it was probably a good job that she wasn’t because that would get her so many black marks that she’d be banished from ATA for good, and that was the last thing she wanted.

Little had she known that December day in Liverpool, when she had been filled with such despair and misery, that a chance meeting and a throwaway comment from another girl who had just enlisted with the WAAF would lead to her discovering what now felt almost like a missing part of herself. A part to replace Sasha, her twin? Lou clamped down on that unwanted question. Whilst the rebellious streak within her had made her feel back then in Liverpool that it would be exciting and different to learn to fly, she had had no real idea of what would be involved, or that something about learning to fly would speak to her on so many different levels. She had been so lucky; she could have remained in Liverpool, at the telephone exchange, feeling resentful and unhappy. She could have joined the WAAF and ended up in an office filing paper, feeling equally bored, but somehow fate had taken a hand and guided her into the perfect place for her, so that her life now fitted her as snugly as the cockpit of a Spitfire fitted round the body of its pilot.

Spitfires. Lou was longing to try one, but of course she wouldn’t be able to do that until she had completed the next phase of her training–her Class 2 Conversion Course at Thame in Oxfordshire, where she would move on from the
basics she had now learned, to learn to fly a wider variety and twin-engined aircraft.

For now, though, excited as she was, it was almost enough to simply enjoy the thrill of actually being able to fly.

Lou reached into the pocket of her dark blue regulation ATA trousers to remove her cigarettes, lighting herself one and then pushing her hand through her hair to let the breeze cool her down. Her hair needed cutting; her curls were well below the collar of her light blue RAF shirt, thick and wayward, the soft brown bleached gold at the ends by the sun. Lou inspected her nails. It was a point of honour amongst ATA pilots that they kept their nails polished, the camaraderie of the service ensuring that girls willingly shared precious bottles of varnish. Dark red was the favoured ATA pilot nail varnish colour–it went sooo well with their dark blue uniforms, as Lou had heard one of the American ATA pilots drawl in her lazy Deep South accent.

Appearance was very important if you were to be welcomed and well thought of by the other pilots, and appearance covered not only the way one looked, but the way one acted. It was the ‘done’ thing to assume a certain degree of faked female helpless insouciance around male pilots that was totally at odds with the gritty ability and determination the girls really possessed.

‘It stops the boys from feeling too jealous of us,’ Verity Maitland had told Lou when she had paid her one of her brief visits, to check up on how she was doing and to gift her with a large number of verbal dos and don’ts.

Although Verity hadn’t said so, Lou felt that she had in a sense taken her under her wing, and because of that Lou was determined to do her best to be worthy of Verity’s support.

She finished her cigarette and stubbed it out. She still hadn’t told her family just what she was doing. They’d got enough to worry about with Luke, she’d reasoned. That was all right where her parents were concerned, but what about Sasha? What was her excuse for holding back from her twin something that was such an important part of her life? After all, Sasha hadn’t hesitated to write to her telling her that she and Bobby hoped to get their father’s permission to become engaged.

That was different, Lou told herself. The importance of getting engaged was something that anyone could understand, even her, although she had no desire whatsoever to do the same thing. Her dream of becoming a pilot, though, was something that only those who felt the same could understand. It wasn’t something she could share with Sasha; they weren’t close enough any more for that. And that was her fault, Lou acknowledged. In Sasha’s opinion as well as her own.

‘Hey, Campion, stop daydreaming about flying Spitfires and come and listen to what Sandra’s got planned for our next forty-eight-hour pass. She’s suggesting that we all go to London.’

‘Coming,’ Lou called back. This was her life now, not Liverpool. She wished Sash well, but Lou knew she would choke on her own boredom if she had to return to the life she had left behind.

* * *

Weddings. Why was it that there was something about them that brought tears as well as smiles, Katie wondered, blinking back her own as Gina and Leonard emerged from the small grey Norman church into the June sunshine of the Dorset village where her parents lived.

Gina had worn her mother’s wedding dress, hastily altered, and Leonard, of course, was in uniform. Katie, at Gina’s request, had worn her, or rather Francine’s, grey silk, and the two mothers had done the bridal couple proud with silk frocks and elegant hats bought before the war, but none the less appropriate for all that.

The wedding breakfast was to be held in the pretty Queen Anne house owned by Gina’s parents, and Katie had been touched by the genuine kindness and warmth both families had shown her, especially Eddie’s parents.

‘They’re sizing you up for the family jewels,’ Eddie had warned her the previous evening after his mother had finished showing her a family photograph album. ‘They’re desperate to find a decent girl to take me on and produce grandchildren for them.’

The twinkle in his eye had confirmed, as Katie had guessed, that he was teasing her. She doubted that there would ever be any lack of ‘suitable’ girls willing to marry a man as attractive and from such an obviously well-to-do family as Eddie.

‘What do you say?’ he murmured to her now as they watched the bridal couple walk under the raised swords of their RAF guard of honour ‘Shall we make it a double, and tell the vicar that he can
start to call the banns. The parents would be jolly pleased, I can tell you.’

Katie laughed. She liked Eddie and felt all the more at ease with him for knowing that she would never be in any danger of falling for him.

‘You are a wicked tease,’ she told him, ‘and it would serve you right if I took you seriously.’

‘No, it wouldn’t serve me right, dearest Katie, it would serve me very well, and better than I deserve to have such a sweet girl as you as my wife. You should think about it, you know. After all, the war isn’t over yet and you could end up a very comfortably placed young widow.’

‘Eddie, don’t. You mustn’t say things like that,’ Katie told him fiercely. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you, and when the war is over you’ll find a girl who is far more suited to you than I could ever be.’

‘How do you know we aren’t suited? You haven’t even let me kiss you yet.’

Katie gave him a stern look. He really was irrepressible.

‘No, and I’m not going to either,’ she told him severely.

Happiness was such a fragile thing, a chameleon in many ways, sometimes so intense you could hardly bear it, and other times, as light as a drift of cloud.

Perhaps it was cowardly of her, but really she preferred the light fluffy white-cloud kind of happiness that couldn’t hurt you to the heartstopping-intensity kind that could, Katie decided.

It was a hot day, and she had been working hard in the garden. Surely she deserved a few minutes of blissful uninterrupted peace and laziness, Bella thought crossly as she heard the squeak of the front gate, and resolutely kept her eyes tightly closed as she lay in a deck chair, wearing an old sun top and a pair of shorts, hoping that whoever it was would go away when no one answered the door, instead of coming to look in the back garden. After all, it wasn’t often these days she got time to herself, and she wouldn’t have it now if her mother hadn’t been coaxed into manning a stall at the WVS bring-and-buy sale.

The sun was so warm and more than anything else she simply wanted to drift off and daydream about Jan.

Something was tickling her chin, a greenfly, probably, from the roses. Without opening her eyes she lifted her hand to brush it away, her body going rigid with shock and her eyes opening wide when hand took hold of her own.

The bright sunlight was dazzling but that wasn’t
why she blinked and stared and tensed again, this time with disbelief, whilst all the while the hand holding hers stroked her fingers, and her lips formed the name it was surely impossible for the man standing over her to be.

‘Jan. It can’t be you. It can’t be.’

But it was, and she was on her feet, laughing and crying, holding him tightly whilst he held her tightly back, and the joy of it, of him being here with her, filled her until she was overflowing with it.

Miraculously Jan was here, holding her and kissing her, and she was kissing him back, and she didn’t care who saw them. She didn’t care about anything other than this, holding the man she loved in her arms, the feel of him, the scent of him, the reality of him, all and everything she could ever want or need.

It took a while and a lot of shared intense kisses before she could come back down to earth enough to ask, ‘Jan, how can you be here? We heard that you’d been taken prisoner, that you were a prisoner of war. I wrote to you … I…’

‘I know. I got your letter.’

‘You didn’t write back.’

‘I did but obviously my letter never reached you. Bella, before I answer any more questions, I’ve got one I have to ask you.’

Bella looked at him.

‘Will you marry me?’

She didn’t need to hesitate or think. Her fiercely determined, ‘Yes, yes I will,’ came straight from her heart. Against all the odds she had been given a second chance, and she wasn’t going to risk losing it.