keen on us taking someone in but, like I said to him, it’s our duty really. We’ve got two spare rooms now, after all, with you in the army and based at Seacombe, and Grace training to be a nurse and living in at the hospital, and only me and your dad and the twins here. Mind you, your dad said straight out that it would have to be a woman, on account of Lou and Sasha.’
The mention of his fifteen-year-old twin sisters made Luke smile.
‘Well, I hope whoever she is that she likes jitterbug music,’ he told his mother.
‘I’m putting her in what was the twins’ room now that they’ve moved up into Grace’s old room in the attic,’ said Jean, ignoring his teasing comment about the twins’ devotion to their gramophone and the dance music they played on it. ‘It will be more fitting. I could have done wi’out her arriving the week before Christmas, mind, but there you are.’
‘In uniform, is she?’ Luke asked.
Jean shook her head. ‘No. She’s going to be working at the old Littlewoods Pools place off Edge Lane, where they censor the post. You know where I mean.’
Luke nodded. ‘They’ve got going on for two thousand working there now, so I’ve heard.’
‘Well, never mind about her,’ Jean said, ‘let’s have a proper look at you.’
They had the kitchen to themselves, otherwise Jean would not have risked embarrassing her tall handsome soldier son by subjecting him to the kind of maternal scrutiny that more properly belonged to his schooldays, minus a brisk demand as to whether or not he had washed behind his ears, but the truth was that she was concerned about him.
It might be over six months since Dunkirk but Jean knew that her son had still not got over the heartache he had suffered then.
It was thanks to Grace that she knew how he had been led on and then let down by the very pretty, socially ambitious nurse he had been hoping to become engaged to. According to Grace, Lillian Green had never had any intention of getting seriously involved with Luke and had simply used him. She and Grace had done their nursing training together and she had boasted right from the start that she had decided to train as a nurse only because she wanted to marry a doctor. A decent ordinary young man ready to give up his life for his country wasn’t good enough for her, and she had told Luke as much when he had gone to the hospital to see her on his return from Dunkirk.
How much the experience of the British Expeditionary Forces’ retreat to Dunkirk, and its subsequent evacuation from its beaches, was responsible for the sometimes remote and grim-looking young man who had taken the place of the laughing boy Luke had been, and how much the heartbreak inflicted on him by Lillian was responsible, Jean didn’t know. What she did know, was that it made her heart ache to see her once carefree son turned into a man who looked at the world through far more cynical eyes, and who sometimes betrayed a sharp edge of bitterness towards love and romance.
He was young yet though, Jean comforted herself. Plenty of time for him to meet someone else, a girl who would give him the real love he deserved. At least she hoped there would be plenty of time.
To distract herself from such worrying thoughts she asked, ‘Will you be getting any leave over Christmas, do you think, now that Hitler has stopped dropping bombs on us every other night?’
It was over two weeks now since they’d last been woken from their sleep by the sound of the air-raid sirens, and everyone was hoping that situation would continue.
‘We haven’t been told yet, Mum – at least not officially – but the word is that we should get a couple of days off, so with a bit of luck I should be home on Christmas Day, at least.’
‘Oh, I do hope so, love, especially with Grace and Seb going down to spend Christmas and Boxing Day with Seb’s family. Oh, did I tell you that she’s had ever such a nice letter from them, saying how pleased they are about her and Seb getting engaged and how much they’re looking forward to meeting her? I must say I was pleased. I don’t mind admitting that I was a bit worried when she first started talking about Seb, on account of him being related to Bella’s late in-laws.’
Luke agreed. He was well aware, of course, of the full story, but he knew how fiercely protective his mother was of them all. And not just of her own children and husband. She was equally protective of her twin sister, even though, in Luke’s opinion, neither his auntie Vi and her husband, Edwin, nor his cousins, Charlie and Bella, deserved his mother’s staunch loyalty.
So far as Luke was concerned, his auntie Vi was a snob, his cousin Charlie a bragging fool, and his cousin Bella a spoiled and very selfish young woman. A young widow now, he reminded himself since her husband and his parents had been killed when a bomb had fallen on their house last month.
Luke was glad that his auntie Vi’s social aspirations meant that they didn’t have to see much of her and her family, who lived across the water from the city of Liverpool in posh Wallasey Village. Of course, Luke himself was also living across the water now, seeing as he was based at Seacombe barracks, close to Wallasey and New Brighton, and, like them, accessed by the ferry boat.
‘I’d better get back to the barracks. It will take me half an hour or so to walk down to the ferry,’ Luke told his mother, returning her hug and then shrugging on his army greatcoat, with its recent addition of his corporal’s stripes. ‘Our sergeant gave me a few hours off on account of all the extra time we’ve had to put in clearing up after the bombs, seeing as it doesn’t take me long to nip home, but I don’t like taking time off and leaving the other lads to it. It’s all right for me being stationed at Seacombe barracks and so close to home, but some of them haven’t seen their families in weeks.’
Luke had changed so much since the outbreak of war, Jean acknowledged as she waved him off. Sam was tall and broad-shouldered, but Luke was now both taller and broader than his dad, his boyishness stripped from him by the experience of war.
More than anything else she wanted this war to be over and her children kept safe, but Churchill had warned them that they were in it for the long haul. Jean shivered at the thought. She should be counting her blessings, she scolded herself. Her children were all safe and well, and here in Liverpool where she could see them, and put her arms round them to reassure herself that they were safe. Unlike some. She didn’t need to look at the damage the Luftwaffe’s bombs had caused in the city to remind herself of the cost in human suffering of this war.
Her ten-year-old nephew Jack, legally the son of her twin, Vi, but in reality the illegitimate child of their younger sister, Francine, had been killed outright when a bomb had been dropped on the Welsh farmhouse to which he had been evacuated.
Sadness clouded Jean’s eyes as she set about wiping the already immaculately clean oven, before refilling the kettle ready to put it on the boil when her family started to arrive home.
Unlike some housewives, at Sam’s insistence Jean did not wear a scarf over her shiny brown curls when she was doing her housework.
‘You’ve got a lovely head of curls,’ Sam had told her gruffly the one and only time she had attempted to cover them inside the house. ‘One of the first things I noticed about you, them curls and that smile of yours.’
Jean paused in her cleaning, a tender smile curling her mouth. She’d been so lucky in her husband and her marriage. She started to hum softly under her breath, and then stopped, her smile fading, remembering how Francine had always sung around the house as a young girl.
Poor Francine. Vi hadn’t been pleased at all when their younger sister had returned to Liverpool from Hollywood, where she had been living and working as a singer, since she had left England in disgrace after giving birth to her child.
Vi had been even less pleased when Fran had started to question the way in which Vi and Edwin had been treating the little boy they had vowed to bring up as though he were their own. Jean suspected that Fran had been within a heartbeat of really throwing the fat into the fire and insisting that she wanted to take Jack back and bring him up with a proper mother’s love, when the poor little