And thin. Connie chewed her bottom lip helplessly. Did she really have to give up the idea of nursing? Surely there had to be another way? It was so bloody unfair. She had a right to live her own life but if she walked out on her mother now, she would just be plain selfish.
‘You don’t have to give me your answer now,’ said Ga. ‘Just think about it.’
‘All right,’ she said quietly, loathing the look of triumph in Ga’s eyes.
Ga nodded. ‘Good girl.’
Biting back her tears, Connie stood up. ‘If I do stay,’ she said stiffly, ‘it will only be for a while. I intend to be a nurse, no matter what you say.’
Ga’s mouth set in a tight line.
‘Oh, one more thing,’ said Ga, as Connie turned to leave. She opened her cavernous handbag, and pulled out a newspaper cutting. Connie took in her breath. It was the picture from the Daily Sketch, the one of her and Eva standing in the fountain at Trafalgar Square with the two sailors. The caption above it read, Playtime for English Roses. She remembered how she’d rolled up her slacks and stood in the water before the two sailors climbed in beside them. The picture was quite flattering too. Connie grinned.
‘It’s no laughing matter,’ Ga snapped. ‘I am absolutely disgusted.’
‘Why?’ Connie challenged. ‘It was only a bit of innocent fun. You were young yourself once, Ga.’
Olive’s face clouded.
‘Come on, it was VE Day,’ Connie protested mildly. ‘We were all happy. The war was over.’
‘And so you took it upon yourself to climb into a fountain with Eva Maxwell.’
For a minute Connie was thrown. She had thought she was going to get a lecture about flaunting herself with two strange men. She hadn’t forgotten the rage she’d felt herself when she’d realised who Eva was, but it didn’t seem that important now. ‘At the time, I didn’t know who she was,’ Connie said with a shake of her head. ‘She was a friend of a friend and she said her name was O’Hara.’
‘Typical,’ Olive sneered. ‘They’re all liars, that lot.’
For some reason, Connie felt the need to defend Eva. ‘O’Hara is her married name,’ she said haughtily. ‘And just for your information, I met her family. It was all very sad. Her husband was killed in the war and I didn’t know who she was until much later in the day.’
Their eyes locked together in a common challenge. Connie refused to look away but it was clear that Olive wasn’t beaten yet. ‘Perhaps that is why Emmett disappeared,’ she said cuttingly. ‘I wonder what he thought when he saw a picture of his fiancée cavorting about with other men? I should have thought you would have learned your lesson by now, my girl.’
Connie’s heart began thumping in her chest. ‘For a start, Emmett was never my fiancé,’ she snapped angrily. ‘And secondly, I have never cavorted with other men, Ga, no matter what you think.’
‘I have a long memory,’ said Ga pointedly.
Connie froze. ‘You always have to bring that up again, don’t you,’ she snapped. ‘I was only a child. It wasn’t my fault.’
Ga looked down her nose. ‘Huh. Seems to me you haven’t changed much,’ she said, waving the newspaper cutting in the air. ‘Most men can sniff out a loose woman a mile off and you’ve got Gertrude’s blood in you, that’s for sure.’
Gertrude Dixon had scandalised the family first by getting herself tattooed and then by running away with a man from the fairground. It might have only raised a few eyebrows now, but fifty years ago, it was so shocking the family had never spoken of her again. Only Ga was determined to keep her memory alive.
Connie felt her face grow hot. ‘The whole of Trafalgar Square was packed with people,’ she said from between her teeth, ‘and they simply climbed in with us.’
‘You’ve got your arms around them,’ said Olive looking at the cutting again. ‘Not to mention the fact that both of you were half undressed …’
‘We were not! We rolled our slacks up so that they wouldn’t get wet.’ Connie’s face was flaming with anger. ‘Anyway, you never read the Sketch. How did you get this?’
‘You’re right. I never look at such trashy papers,’ said Olive with a deep breath. ‘And I certainly don’t expect members of my family to be on the front page but you see, someone sent it to me.’
She pulled an empty envelope from her bag. Connie could see it was addressed to Ga and in the left-hand corner someone had printed in bold letters the words, CONSTANCE AND EVA MAXWELL.
That added insult to injury. Connie was furious but with one quick move, she snatched the cutting from her hand. It tore as she did so but she still had most of the picture. Screwing it into a tight ball, she swept angrily from the room.
Olive lay on her bed staring at the ceiling. She couldn’t sleep. She glanced at the clock beside her bed. One thirty. It wasn’t her leg that kept her awake, it was Constance. How dare she cavort in that fountain with Cissy Maxwell’s granddaughter? Everybody knew how she felt about that family. Constance should have known better.
Olive turned out the light and her mind drifted back some forty years ago, to a time when she herself was twenty, and the century was only five years old. Arthur was coming home. It had been a bleak time. The Boer War hadn’t been as terrible as the Great War nor as bad as the one they’d just gone through, but war is war. The enemy may be different and the weapons more sophisticated, but being wounded far from home and facing the prospect of dying in a foreign field was just as terrible whatever the age. Damn these ambitious men and their thirst for power, she thought. Most people simply wanted to live their lives in peace and safety. Why couldn’t they do the same?
She remembered how it was when the troops came back, all that marching in the streets, the parades, the flag waving and the cheers. She smiled when she thought of Arthur. Dear Arthur. How handsome he looked, so tall, so suave with his new moustache and smart uniform. It hadn’t been easy for him. She could tell that the moment she’d looked into his eyes. There was a weariness there that belied his twenty and six years. He never talked about what he’d seen but Pa had read about the war and what was going on in the papers at the breakfast table. He must have had a terrible time.
Life for Olive and her family had gone on as usual while they were away. They had been well off. Pa’s greenhouses were renowned for their beautiful grapes and cucumbers. There had been no need for her to work back then so she had grown up taking long walks on the downs where the musky scent of wild flowers, pink and blue and yellow mingled with the dainty call of skylarks and the curlew. She still recalled the spicy scent of honeysuckle and gorse and the more rancid odour of the sheep allowed to roam free. Back then, the silence of the countryside was only broken by the sound of bleating sheep or the occasional dog barking and on Sundays, the peal of church bells. How times had changed. When was the last time she had heard the sound of the coachman’s horn as he entered the village bringing much needed goods from Worthing three times a week and in all weathers? Not since the 1930s. Now it was all army lorries thundering along the lanes and coupons and going without.
Arthur had been part of the final stages of the Boer War, a time of ignoble victory. Frustrated by the constant skirmishes and guerrilla tactics, the British had adopted a scorched earth policy, destroying farms, homesteads and poisoning wells to prevent the Boers re-mustering. Any women and children left behind on their farms by their menfolk were rounded up and put into camps and because the supplies were hard to come by, tens of thousands of them died of malnutrition and disease. Much to his disgust, Arthur and his unit were left to guard them. How he’d hated it. He had even written to say that he would have much preferred to fight the enemy rather than take it out on women and children. Peace came with the Treaty of Vereeniging. The irony was, just as he was about to embark for home, Arthur was terribly injured.
She’d carried on writing to him of course, but