no wonder people are calling it a phoney war.’
‘It may be phoney for us here in London,’ Sally agreed, ‘but we had a young merchant seaman in today whose arm had to be amputated thanks to the wound he’d suffered when his ship was torpedoed by the Germans. He was telling us that the Germans are inflicting serious losses on our merchant fleet, and that the Government aren’t letting on how bad the situation is. He reckons that it will be much more than butter and bacon that goes on ration soon, with so much having to be brought in to the country by sea.’
‘Poor boy,’ Olive sympathised.
‘Yes,’ Sally agreed. The young seaman had been visibly shocked when he’d been told that he would have to lose his arm or risk losing his life because of the gangrene that had set in to the crushed limb. He’d told her worriedly that merchant seamen, unlike men in the Royal Navy, did not get paid when they weren’t actually working at sea, and she had really felt for him, his situation making her aware of how lucky she was, which reminded her . . .
‘I’ll be going out straight from work tomorrow afternoon,’ she told Olive. ‘One of the other nurses has got tickets for several of us for the matinée of the ENSA Drury Lane show. Apparently the theatres are really good about letting nurses have seats at a cheaper rate and when she asked me if I’d like one of them it seemed silly not to say yes.’
‘I should say so,’ Olive agreed. ‘It will do you good to go out and have a bit of fun.’
‘Yes, I think it will,’ Sally agreed happily.
Chapter Twelve
‘Tilly, I don’t think I want to go dancing after all.’
They were in their bedroom after what had felt like the longest day Tilly had ever known. So tense with nerves and excitement was she that she’d barely been able to eat her tea.
Agnes’s words, along with the distinct tremor in her voice, had Tilly putting down the hairbrush to give Agnes an anxious but determined look as she told her firmly, ‘Of course you want to go.’
‘But what about your mother? She’s been so kind to me.’
‘Mum will be fine about it once we’ve been. We just aren’t telling her because she doesn’t understand yet that we’re grown up. Once we’ve been then everything will be all right. You wait and see.’
Tilly had convinced herself of the truth of what she was saying and her belief in it propped up Agnes’s wavering courage, although she did protest, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. If I wasn’t then we wouldn’t be going, would we?’
Her hair brushed, Tilly dipped her forefinger in her precious pot of Vaseline and then, with her tongue tip protruding slightly as she concentrated, she smoothed her dark eyebrows down and then very carefully Vaselined the ends of her long dark eyelashes as well.
Watching her, Agnes was impressed. Her own eyelashes and eyebrows were a plain mouse brown and she shook her head when Tilly offered her the jar of Vaseline.
‘Knowing me, I’d probably end up sticking my finger in my eye.’
Her eyebrows and lashes done to her satisfaction Tilly reached for the Tangee lipstick that her mother had only allowed her to wear once she had started work. The lipstick looked orange but once on Tilly’s lips it gave them a satisfyingly rosy-pink lustre that Tilly was convinced made her look much more grown up.
‘Here, you have some,’ she invited Agnes.
Hesitantly, Agnes took the lipstick. Living at the orphanage, she had been denied the opportunity to experiment with growing up in the way that other girls did and the movement of her hand as she applied the lipstick to her own mouth was shaky and uncertain.
‘We’d better get a move on,’ Tilly warned, turning to their shared wardrobe and opening its doors. ‘Here’s your bag and your dress.’ She thrust both at her so that Agnes had no alternative other than to take them from her whilst Tilly removed her own dress from its hanger and quickly folded it up to put it into her own bag.
‘Your mother is bound to ask what we’ve got in these,’ Agnes warned Tilly as she eyed the over-filled bags.
‘Not if we take them down into the hall and leave them there whilst we say goodbye. She’ll be listening to the radio so she won’t get up to see us off. She said how tired she was at teatime after Sergeant Dawson had her driving through the afternoon traffic. Come on,’ Tilly urged. ‘We’ve got to get changed yet into our skirts and jumpers as though we were going to the cinema.’
Upstairs in her own room on the top floor, Dulcie was also getting ready for the evening ahead, surveying her appearance in the full-length mirror. The dress she was wearing – pale blue silk, its V neck trimmed with a slightly darker shade of velvet ribbon, the same ribbon trimming its puffed sleeves – was cut on the bias, skimming her curves but not clinging to them. Dulcie knew where to draw the line and which side of that line she intended to stay. Other girls might make the mistake of dying their hair a too brassy blonde and wearing clothes that were too tight, but Dulcie never would. They could make themselves look cheap but she was certainly not going to. That sort of girl more often than not ended up having to get married quickly with a baby on the way and a life of hardship ahead of her.
Piling her curls up on top of her head and securing them there with some Kirbigrips that she’d been holding between her teeth, Dulcie paused to admire her own reflection. Classy, that’s how she looked, she decided triumphantly. Her smile widened as she reflected on her other triumph of the evening – Tilly and Agnes’s illicit attendance at the Palais. Olive might think that her precious daughter wouldn’t listen to anyone but her, but Dulcie was going to prove her wrong.
‘That’s Dulcie going downstairs now,’ Tilly told Agnes as she heard the tap of Dulcie’s heels crossing the landing outside their room. ‘Come on.’
‘I can’t go yet. I need the lav,’ Agnes protested.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Olive too heard the tap of Dulcie’s heels on the stairs and then the sound of the front door opening and closing, and frowned to herself. Tilly and Agnes were cutting it fine if they weren’t going to miss the beginning of their film. She’d better go upstairs and hurry them along, Olive decided. Tilly could be such a daydreamer at times.
In her room, Sally hummed one of the tunes from the review to herself. She’d really enjoyed her outing with her fellow nurses, right from the moment at the hospital in the room where they’d all changed with Sister’s permission, when Rachel had complimented her with a teasing, ‘Well, don’t you scrub up well?’ as she admired Sally’s appearance in her pretty hyacinth-blue dress, with its neatly fitted bodice closed by tiny pearl buttons and its softly gored full skirt.
‘If I do I’m not the only one,’ Sally had laughed in response.
It had been true. Eight of them had gone to see the show, and seeing her fellow nurses out of their uniforms, with their hair down, anticipation of a happy afternoon out adding a soft glow to their skin and eyes, and wearing pretty clothes, made Sally think how attractive everyone looked.
‘It should be a good show,’ Rachel told Sally, linking up with her after they had all pulled on their coats and were heading for the door. ‘Of course, some of the jokes will probably be a bit warm . . .’ She paused and Sally laughed.
‘Yes, I expect they will,’ she agreed.
‘Thank heavens you aren’t the stuffy sort,’ Rachel told her with evident relief, adding, ‘Since the tickets haven’t cost us anything I reckon we can splurge a bit and go by taxi. You go and hail a couple, Brenda,’ she commanded one of the other girls. ‘That blonde hair of yours is bound to have them stopping. A London cabbie never misses a blonde.’ Rachel had been proved right a couple of minutes later when two cabs pulled up a few yards from them.
‘What’s this then?’ one of the cabbies asked cheerfully. ‘Nurses’ day out? Matron