HAMMERSMITH, LONDON
‘You’ve changed,’ said Molly Peters. ‘Ever since you got back from that
last job. You ain’t been the same.’
‘No, I haven’t! Still the same normal, bolshie roommate I ever was.’
Maddie sat down on her bunk and hid her head in the towel, carried on
drying her damp hair. Tried not to start snivelling and give the game away.
‘That’s just it – you ain’t. What you done with that contrary, bloody
minded woman used to bunk here? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve
had some sort of love affair and now you’re mooning around like a sick
cow what can’t bear thinking on it.’
Maddie pressed the towel harder into her eyes and hoped the pain would
stop the tell-tale flow of tears. But it didn’t. And it had been daft to try and
hide anything from her friend Moll – the woman was practically psychic.
‘I knew it!’ said Molly. ‘Some bastard been playing fast and loose. Sod
’em, Madds. They ain’t worth the ’eartache. C’mon, love. Forget the
swine.’
Maddie felt her bunk sag, heard the protest of its ancient springs
beneath her, as her friend plonked her considerable weight down on it and
squeezed in beside her. Then the towel was suddenly tugged from her head
and she sat there minus the camouflage, feeling naked and vulnerable. No
longer able to hide the truth, or the despair written on her face, in the dark
smudges of strain, the ugly red bloodshot eyes.
‘Idiot child! Blow your nose,’ said Molly, and handed over the hankie
she’d fished from the pocket of her old worn candlewick dressing gown.
Maddie did as she was told and handed back the handkerchief.
‘Well, I don’t want it now, do I?’ Molly wrinkled her nose in distaste.
‘Not after that.’
‘He’s not a swine, Moll. Nor a bastard. He’s none of those awful things.
He’s the sweetest, dearest, most lovely, unselfish man on the planet.’
‘Gawd, it’s even worse than I thought,’ said Molly. ‘You got it bad, girl– you’re in love.’
She tried to stifle another pathetic sob. But it didn’t work, and the
shudder travelled right through her body. Proof, if it were needed, that
Molly was right. She was undeniably, hopelessly, irreversibly, impossibly,
in love. There was no cure. A problem with no solution. But then her friend,
with all her experience, might find one.
‘He likely to marry you?’ asked Molly.
‘I wish!’
‘Ah. So, he’s been playing away, then?’
‘What’s that mean?’ said Maddie.
‘Gawd, woman. You ain’t safe to be let out alone. Has he got a wife and
half a dozen nippers tucked away back home?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ Maddie said, miserably. ‘He loves me too. But
it’s impossible.’
‘What? Just like that, you’ll let him go? You ain’t the woman I thought
you were.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘No, I don’t. You need to hang onto this bloke, if he’s that special. They
ain’t like buses, you know. They don’t come along in bunches.’
‘I love you, Moll. But I can’t talk about this anymore. I just need to be
miserable and mope around for a bit. Till I get him out of my system.
Believe me, there’s no other way. And please don’t ask me to explain. It’ll
get us both sent to jail.’
‘Jesus! Gawd! That ain’t good.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Maddie blew her nose again. No doubt it would look as
attractive as her puffy red eyes. She couldn’t bear to look in a mirror. Not
that it mattered anyway. Who did she have to look good for?
‘You need to stop moping,’ said Molly. ‘We’ll go out. Fancy the flicks?’
‘What, like this?’ asked Maddie, and pointed to her nose. She figured it
must resemble a prize-fighter’s by now.
‘That’s it. You just keep on feeling sorry for your poor self. That’ll do
the trick,’ said Molly, unsympathetically. ‘We’re going down the Gaumont,
whether you like it or not. Doctor’s orders. Watch a nice flick. A musical or
something. Take you right out of yerself. No more arguments.’
‘Okay,’ Maddie relented. ‘But a musical or a comedy. Something
cheerful to make us laugh. Anything but a romance. I refuse to sit through
another of your soppy romances.’
‘Great. Some of the girls’ve already been to see Waterloo Bridge.
Supposed to be good. Vivien Leigh and that gorgeous Robert Taylor…’
‘Doesn’t sound much like a musical,’ said Maddie.
‘War movie.’
‘We got enough war of our own without going out to watch it, Moll.’
‘This is different. World War One. Our gorgeous Robert will be the
hero, I should think.’
‘Yeah, okay. But first sign of romance and I’m off, you hear?’ warned
Maddie.
What Maddie didn’t know was that most of their ATS pals who’d
already watched the film had come back home to the billet in floods of
tears.
Not only was it a war film, but it was also a romance and the saddest film
that Maddie had ever been forced to sit through. A two-hankie job, so that
she’d had to sacrifice her own best lace handkerchief, the one with the
butterflies on, that she kept for special occasions. She’d given it to Moll
when she had exhausted her own. But then her best friend had always been
a sucker for a weepy movie.
Maddie sat dry-eyed through all of it. She had her own sadness: why
would she need to watch it on a screen? As if she didn’t have enough real
life drama of her own right then, without seeking out more that was
manufactured.
They walked back home arm-in-arm, trying to cheer each other up.
‘Next time I’m picking the film,’ Maddie said, and dug Molly in the
ribs. ‘You’re useless.’
‘Yeah? Well, I didn’t know she was going to kill herself ’cause she
couldn’t have him, did I? They don’t tell you these things on the poster.
Why couldn’t they just have ended up together? Happy ever after.’
‘It’s called drama,’ said Maddie, with a sigh.
Maddie went to bed that night thinking about the film. The image of
Waterloo Bridge made its way into her dreams: the two lovers who met
there for the first time in the middle of an air raid. And the man who
returned there alone many years later, thinking about what might have been.
A pain that was too close to hers for comfort.
The handsome actor Robert Taylor magically morphed into her own
hero, Rudi Fischer, and she felt his hands on her body once again, enjoyed
the same sensations he had evoked in her. And, in the bizarre way of
dreams, she ended up being hunted down by a horde of Military Police and
an angry gang of squaddies all looking like the ugly, fat sergeant at the
camp at White Cross. Just as they fell on her and dragged her off in
handcuffs, Maddie woke up sweating.
How long before she was found out? Before the treason against her
country was laid out for all to see?
The fear of discovery and the guilt that she had betrayed her uniform – even
though the crime was unintended – stayed with Maddie for a while. But like
all things, the passage of time made it easier, and gradually she began to
feel more like her old self.
As the days moved slowly into weeks, the guilt faded until the strange
events in Cornwall turned into nothing more painful than a bittersweet
memory. And sometimes, she even allowed herself to stoke the fires of
memory by secretly staring at Rudi’s photograph, which she kept hidden
under her mattress. But the rational part of her brain warned that this was a
luxury she couldn’t afford to indulge in. Forget him! The thought of him.
The feel of him. The idea that there can be any kind of future for us! It was
ludicrous. He was the enemy.
Being busy helped. Exhaustion, falling into bed after long, arduous days
of ferrying officers and equipment through the streets of London. One day,
she’d be driving a truck, the next, an ambulance. You went where they
pointed you. Drove what they told you to.
Her beloved staff car was no more: it had been crushed to chunks of
unrecognisable metal along with others in the garage compound when the
place took a direct hit from a large parachute mine. She’d grieved for
Harriet even though she knew it was stupid feeling sad over inanimate
things when there were people being killed. Families being torn apart.
Loved ones dying.
That night, after she dropped her truck off, Maddie trudged back tiredly to
the tall, ugly house in Hammersmith that had become her home. The
building where the ATS women were billeted was old and often cold, the
one bucket of coal a day they were allowed for the fire in the common room
hardly taking the chill off.
Still, Maddie had grown used to the place and the feeling of
camaraderie among ‘the girls’ made up for the lack of home comforts. The
water was usually cold, not that warm water would have made much
difference when you could only take your weekly bath in a miserly five
inches of the stuff. But it was your patriotic duty to stick to the water ration
and most of them did.
And at least they weren’t all stuck in a barracks, like she’d been in basic
training. Crammed in together, thirty to a room with an eagle-eyed sergeant
watching your every move. Two women to a bedroom here, quite luxurious
when you thought about it. Except some bedrooms were bigger than others.
She and Molly had one of the smallest, with only a single long pole
attached to the wall for them both to hang their clothes on. And the space
between their narrow bunk beds was tiny. It meant they had to get into their
bunks at separate times as there was hardly enough room to pass each other.
Cosy, Molly had said when they’d first arrived. But then that was Molly for
you: she usually found something good in everything. Decidedly chirpy at
times was our Moll. And singing a lot. Dragging others into her singsongs
with her.
Maddie managed a smile. It would be good to see her friend tonight
after a long, frustrating day. Molly was a proper optimist. And soon they
were both due a 48-hour pass, might even pop into the Hammersmith
Palais, a cheerful place with its classy musicians in evening dress and
impressive revolving bandstand. Or take a trip to the Stage Door Club. That
was another favourite of theirs.
She stepped carefully around the rubble of last night’s raid. It had been
a bad one and the blokes from the Heavy Rescue Squad hadn’t managed to
get around to clearing up yet. Poor old London – some of its bombed-out
streets were unrecognisable. Piles of bricks everywhere, ugly scarred
buildings that used to be people’s homes. And the smells that pervaded the
air for days after a raid were something you expected but, still, they
managed to shock. The acrid smoke, the musty smell of damp plasterboard,
the nausea of gas from a broken main, and – worst of all – the stench of
rotting corpses trapped under the rubble.
Maddie shivered with the thought. Coming home one night she’d
spotted a woman’s shoe lying among a pile of rubble. She’d gone over to
investigate, had dropped her torch in shock and ended up throwing up her
lunch onto a pile of bricks. Just beside the shoe was the lower part of a
woman’s leg, the nylon stocking still in place. Nothing else. There had been
no sign of the woman.
She hurried on through the streets. The light was starting to fade, the
blackout beginning to kick in. Don’t take no chances in the blackout – she
heard Lizzie Retallack’s voice in her head, and Maddie quickened her pace
through the darkening streets. She needed to be back home, needed the
comfort of her bedroom, familiar things around her.
And her friend Molly’s optimism. That’s what she needed most. Molly’s
total belief that things would get better soon and that this crummy war
couldn’t last forever.
