her Sam could see girls moving like lightning, fastening ties, doing up blouses, reaching for shoes and jackets, and at the same time straightening up their beds, the girls who were already dressed quickly leaving their own made-up beds to deal with those of the girls who weren’t, so that by the time the warrant officer had reached the doorway, every young woman in the room was fully dressed, and every bed was neatly made.
Sam could have sworn that her glance lingered longer on her than it did on anyone else as they filed past her and headed for the stairs, but she refused to give in to the temptation to look directly at her in order to check.
‘Thanks for making up my bed,’ she told the pretty fair-haired girl whose bed was next to her own, as she caught up with her on the stairs, five minutes later when they had been dismissed.
‘We all help one another out in this unit,’ came the smiling response. ‘I dare say you’ll be repaying the favour.’
‘Yeah, by keeping a window open so that you can get back in when you haven’t got a late-night pass, Lynsey,’ Hazel commented, overhearing their conversation. ‘Lynsey here has a raft of men queuing up to take her out and she believes in doing her bit for our boys, don’t you, Lynsey?’ she teased.
Sam held her breath, half expecting the blonde girl to take offence, but instead she laughed and winked at Sam. ‘I certainly do.’
‘You want to get her to show you her collection of engagement rings, Sam,’ Hazel grinned. ‘How many was it at the last count, Lynsey?’
‘Eight. It would have been nine, but Pat, that Canadian I was seeing, changed his mind and said that he thought we should just be unofficially engaged. Huh, as if I hadn’t worked out what his game was. You could see as plain as anything the white mark on his finger where he’d taken off his wedding ring. The cheek of it, thinking that I wouldn’t guess what he was up to.’ She gave a disapproving sniff. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a married man pretending that he isn’t. You’ll get a lot of that here in Liverpool, Sam,’ she warned. ‘There’s troop ships arriving every week filled with men who haven’t seen a girl in months. Have you got a steady?’
Sam gave a brief shake of her head. Her lack of a young man had recently become a bit of a sore subject, mainly because her elder brother had given her a bit of a lecture on his last leave, warning her that she should start behaving in a more feminine manner and that she frightened off his friends with her tomboy ways. She had shrugged off his criticism, affecting not to care when the following evening, at the dance he had taken her to, she had been left to sit on her own whilst other girls – girls with curls and soft curves and giggling voices – were surrounded by uniformed young men eager to dance with them. That night, lying in bed unable to sleep, she had been forced to recognise that her youthful daydreams in which she had outshot and outdared Robin Hood, outrode and outrobbed Dick Turpin, to win their admiration and the friendship – daydreams that as she had matured had grown into an unacknowledged belief that one day she would fall in love with a real-life hero whose heart she would win with her prowess and her ability to compete with him – were never going to be recognised and that heroes did not fall in love with girls who matched them skill for skill but instead preferred girls dressed in pretty clothes who stood on the sidelines, watching them admiringly.
Sam had told herself that she didn’t care, and she wasn’t going to change, not even though Rory Blake, the ringleader of her brother’s gang, whom she had secretly admired for years, hadn’t once asked her to dance, and had laughed at her short hair.
Why should she care? She had more important things to do and think about. There was a war to be fought and won, and that surely was far more exciting than having a steady, she assured herself as the welcome smells of breakfast filled the air of the large panelled room they were all filing into.
*
Sally sighed but gave in when she felt Tommy’s eager tug on her arm the minute they drew level with the large furniture van parked outside old Dr Jennings’s house. The back of the van was open and, as they watched, two men lifted out a heavy mahogany sideboard and started to carry it towards the house. If furniture was being moved in instead of out – and very good quality furniture too, by the look to it – then that surely meant that the new doctor was moving in as well.
Virtually anything with four wheels enthralled Sally’s sons, and Harry, restrained in his pushchair, yelled out excitedly, ‘Big car.’
‘No, it’s not a big car, it’s a van, Harry,’ Tommy corrected his brother sternly.
Sally hid a small smile.
‘Come on now,’ she urged her elder son, not wanting anyone who might be in the house to think she was being nosy.
The removal men were carrying a packing case out of the van, and as they crossed the pavement a photograph frame fell out of it, the glass shattering as it lay face up on the pavement.
‘No, Tommy, be careful.’ Sally hurried over to him with the pushchair, warning, ‘You’ll cut yourself.’ Beneath the shattered glass she could see the photograph quite clearly: a pretty fair-haired young woman smiled towards the camera, a chubby blond baby on her knee whilst her free arm drew an equally fair-haired little boy closer to her. Sally had a similarly posed photograph of herself with her own sons, although the young woman in the photograph was wearing far more expensive clothes than she could ever have afforded, she acknowledged ruefully.
She was so engrossed in the photograph that she didn’t see the grim-faced man watching her from the bay window of the house until his shadow darkened the photograph.
‘Daddy,’ Harry announced proudly with a beaming smile for the stranger, oblivious to his glower, as he showed off his newly learned words.
‘That’s not Daddy, it’s a man,’ Tommy corrected him scornfully.
In an attempt to hide her embarrassment, Sally shushed her sons, gasping in protest as Tommy ignored her earlier warning to bend down to pick up the photograph.
‘No. Leave it. Don’t touch it!’
If the Scots accent was unfamiliar, the harsh anger in the male voice was easily recognisable, causing Tommy to draw back his hand too quickly and then whimper as a piece of broken glass pierced his skin.
‘Can’t you control your children?’ he demanded tightly as he bent down to retrieve the broken photograph.
So this was the new doctor Molly’s mother-in-law had told her about. Sally eyed him warily. There was a white line of fury round his mouth; his whole body was rigid with it, Sally saw. He obviously had a nasty temper on him, she thought critically. After all it was only a photograph.
Gathering her now sobbing son into her arms, she retaliated protectively, ‘If you hadn’t scared him half to death by shouting at him like that he wouldn’t have touched it. He’s only a little boy. He didn’t mean any harm. You should know what they’re like. After all, it looks like you’ve got two of your own.’ She looked meaningfully at the photograph.
The expression of bitterness and loathing he gave both her and the boys shocked Sally as much as though he had physically struck her. He was a doctor, a father, and yet he was looking at her and her boys as though he hated them.
It took one of the removal men’s brisk, ‘Where do you want this, guv?’ to break the tension that that sprung up between them, allowing Sally to turn on her heel and hurry away.
What a dreadful man he was, not fit to step into the old doctor’s shoes at all, and the way he had looked at the two poor innocent boys … like he hated them, Sally thought indignantly, relieved to see that Tommy’s cut had stopped bleeding. And just because little Tommy had touched his precious photograph. She knew his sort, the sort who looked down on her sort. Well, he could look down on her all he liked but she was not having him frighten her little boy like that, she decided, her maternal ire aroused.
She had almost reached the end of the street and some compulsion she couldn’t resist made her turn to look back the way she had come, her heart