Kiss The Girls Goodbye

by Lilian Harry

Genres: World War II; Sagas

Synopsis

Set in a Lyon's Corner House in London, this is the second novel in the series set against the backdrop of the Second World War which began with CORNER HOUSE GIRLS. 'The Corner House was making a good job of New Year's Eve, despite the bad weather, the blackout, the looming threat of rationing...The Nippies were dashing to and fro with their big silver trays and the war seemed suddenly far away.' So begins 1940 for the Nippies at the Lyons Corner House at Marble Arch. But despite putting on a cheerful face for the customers, the war is taking its toll on all the waitresses: for Maggie, married just a few hours and then parted from her husband; for Jo and Phyl, anxiously waiting for news from their fiancés; for Etty, and the constant jibes she faces about her background; and even for Irene, who begins a new friendship which is not all it appears to be...

Release date: August 19, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 309

Sample

Thirty-first December, 1939.

It was the first New Year’s Eve that anyone could remember when there hadn’t been crowds celebrating at midnight in Trafalgar Square.

‘It’s like a blooming churchyard,’ Phyl Jennings whispered to her cousin Jo as they trudged through the snowy streets on their way to report for the late-night shift at the Marble Arch Corner House. ‘I mean, any other New Year’s Eve there’d be gangs of people dancing and singing in the streets, the pubs’d be packed full and the Square’d be one big party. Now look at it – no Christmas lights, no music, nothing nice happening at all.’

They stopped for a moment and stood looking about them. The streets were covered in frozen slush and newly fallen snow but, for the moment, the skies were clear and above the looming buildings the girls could see the shimmer of stars.

‘Well, that’s something you never used to see in London,’ Jo said softly. ‘There were always too many lights on.’ She paused, tilting her head. ‘Listen, Phyl – hear that noise? It’s people laughing, surely – laughing and shouting. Sounds like there’s something happening in Piccadilly. Perhaps there is a party after all!’

‘Let’s go and see!’ Phyl caught her arm and they stumbled through the icy, rutted slush. The noise was louder now, and Jo was right, people were laughing – laughing and calling to each other. There were flashes of light, too, and the girls glanced at each other in surprise. Nobody flashed lights these days, with the blackout restrictions so severe. Then they heard the shrill pierce of a police whistle and their excitement turned to alarm.

‘What is it? An invasion?’ But Phyl’s voice was lost in the uproar as they burst into Piccadilly Circus and skidded to a halt, staring in astonishment at the scene before them.

The Circus was crowded with roistering young men, just as it might have been on any normal New Year’s Eve. Shouting and laughing, they were milling around the stone plinth, trampling the snow as they flashed their torches at the statue of Eros, poised with his bow and arrow above them. One was already trying to climb up, egged on by his mates, and the girls began to laugh, too, as they watched. But almost at once their laughter was stilled as, in the brilliant white light reflected by the snow, they saw policemen converging from all sides and what had been a party scene became suddenly ugly.

‘Let’s get away,’ Phyl said, her voice trembling. ‘Let’s get out of here, Jo.’

Jo nodded and gripped her arm to pull her away. But their escape was barred by a mêlée of struggling bodies. Like a rugger scrum, it shifted from side to side across the road and the girls dared not get too near. Terrified, they pressed against a wall, clutching each other’s hands.

They could hear the youths swearing and the police snarling back. ‘We was only trying to see Eros … We wasn’t doing nothing wrong … It’s New Year’s Eve, for Gawd’s sake, can’t a bloke ‘ave a few beers and a bit of a party on New Year’s Eve? Gawd knows, there ain’t much ter sing about these days … Leave off, mate, can’t yer? We could be dead this time next week …’

‘Quick!’ Jo dragged at Phyl’s arm and they scurried through a gap and along a dark, narrow side street. To their relief, the noise of the fighting dwindled behind them. They paused and stared at each other.

‘That’s awful,’ Jo said shakily. ‘I mean, they only wanted to look at Eros. Something like that never ought to be a crime.’

‘It was because of the lights. They shouldn’t have been showing lights.’

‘I know, but still … To think of them ending up in prison just for showing a light on New Year’s Eve …’ They walked on slowly, shaken by what had happened. ‘I tell you what, Phyl – this war’s making everything nasty. I mean, I know we haven’t been bombed yet or nothing, but there’s other things happened – things like all the kiddies being sent off to the country and ships being sunk, and soldiers going off to France and Belgium … It’s horrible. Horrible.’

Phyl squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t let’s think about it any more, Jo. We’ll be in the Corner House soon and we’ve got to smile at the customers and make them feel happy to be there. We’ve got to make sure they have a good time. That’s what Nippies are for, remember? And you know what Mr Carter’d say. He’d say it was more important now than ever.’

Jo gave her a wry grin and nodded. ‘I know. And it is, I suppose. So – let’s take a deep breath and pretend everything’s just like it used to be. Even though we all know it’s not, nor ever will be again.’

The other girls had heard about the commotion in Piccadilly and were discussing it as Jo and Phyl walked into the dressing-room where they were getting into their uniforms. Someone had echoed Jo’s feelings that it was dreadful for young men, full of nothing worse than high spirits and a few beers, to be arrested for shining a light at Eros. Others didn’t agree.

‘You wouldn’t say that if some German bomber up in the sky saw the lights and dropped a packet of dynamite on Piccadilly,’ Maggie Wheeler declared. She was at the mirror, trying to push her thick yellow hair under her cap. ‘Mind you, it’s as light as day out there anyway, what with all that snow laying about. I dunno why they even bothered to use torches.’ She turned her back on the mirror and craned her neck to look down at the backs of her legs. ‘These seams just won’t stay straight tonight. I dunno what’s the matter with ’em.’

‘Maybe your legs have got twisted,’ Shirley Woods suggested solemnly. Slender and neat, she was ready, with her cloudy dark hair rolled under her cap where it would stay all through the shift, unlike Maggie’s unruly mane which needed to be continually pushed back. ‘I heard about a girl that happened to. Woke up one morning with her knees on back to front and they had to put her in a—’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Maggie, who had been staring at her as if half-inclined to believe the ridiculous tale, grimaced with mock exasperation. ‘Honestly, Shirl, you get worse instead of better. I wonder they don’t employ you to go behind the German lines and tell ’em lies about what our boys are doing. You could be our secret weapon.’

Her grin faded and she looked sober. The other girls glanced at her, knowing what was going through her mind. Maggie’s husband Tommy had been sent to France only days after their wedding in September on the day before war had been declared, and although she got regular letters from him Maggie didn’t really know where he was or when she would see him again. There were times when her normally cheerful face looked really sad, Jo Mason thought sympathetically, and she shivered at the idea that she might herself soon be fretting over the absence of her own man. Nick was training to be a pilot and sometimes, when Jo lay unable to sleep, her mind was filled with images of him in the sky, being attacked by flocks of black planes, like a cloud of starlings.

The door to the dressing-room burst open and Etty Brown shot in, flushed and anxious. ‘I’m late!’ she cried. ‘I’m late! Oh, goodness, where are my things – I’ll never be ready in time – there was that many people trying to catch the bus, I had to wait for another one and I only just managed to scramble on that – where’s my other shoe – and then an old woman slipped in the snow just outside and hurt herself and I had to stop and help pick her up, she was all right, thank goodness, but she was a bit shook up and you can’t just dash off and leave someone like that, can you – oh, now my cap’s disappeared, I’ll never be ready in time – Maggie, help me with my hair, would you?’ She found her cap and stood still while Maggie pinned it on. ‘Oh, dear, I hate being late for things.’

‘It’s all right, there’s loads of time,’ Jo comforted her. ‘Just calm down a bit. You looked like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, rushing in like that. Anyway, even dear Irene’s not here yet, and you know she’d never be late.’

‘I suppose you were out with our Jim,’ Maggie said, her mouth full of pins, and Etty blushed. ‘You’ll have to do your courting a bit nearer Marble Arch. There’s a few nice spots in Hyde Park.’ She winked and Etty blushed deeper. ‘Me and Tommy don’t need ’em no more,’ Maggie concluded, the sad note back in her voice, and she finished pinning Etty’s cap on and turned away, biting her lip.

‘Course you don’t,’ Phyl said stoutly. ‘You got a nice big double bed at home waiting for when he gets a bit of leave.’ She came over and put her arm round Maggie’s shoulders. ‘He’s bound to get some soon. There’s nothing much going on over there, anyway. All that shouting and waving and talk about air raids and gas attacks, and practically nothing’s happened. Half the kids in our street are back from evacuation already, just as if they’d been on holiday, and our air-raid shelter’s turning into a cats’ home. They dished out all these gas masks …’ she glanced over at the row of brown cardboard boxes hanging on the wall ‘… and give us shelters to build in the back gardens and told us all thousands of people would be killed by bombs, and there’s been nothing at all. I don’t think they know what’s going to happen.’

‘Well, I suppose they don’t, not really.’ Jo went over to the door to the underground passage that led through to the Corner House itself. ‘There’s never been a war like this before, has there?’ She glanced at the wall clock. ‘You know, it’s practically time to go – if that Irene don’t get here soon she really is going to be late, and then there’ll be trouble. There might not be much going on outside but it’s New Year’s Eve in the Corner House all right, and we’re going to be rushed off our feet.’

The door opened as she spoke and Irene sauntered in. Smart as always in her black winter coat and little fur hat, she looked as if she were on her way to the theatre or a cocktail party rather than to do a late-night shift as a waitress. Her sharp-featured face was made up to look rosily pink, her lips red and her green eyes shadowed. She gave the other girls a contemptuous glance as she slipped out of her coat and hung it up, taking care to separate it from the others.

‘What are you all staring at, then? Know me next time, will you?’

Phyl turned away without speaking. Jo said, ‘We’re not staring. We were just saying if you didn’t turn up soon you’d be late, that’s all.’

‘And I suppose you’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to see me get into trouble.’ Irene slipped out of her fur boots, damp with slush, and began to get into her uniform. ‘Well, hard cheese, because I’m not going to. I’m one of the favourites here, and don’t you forget it. Supervisor, that’s what I’ll be, and then manageress. I’m not going to stay a common waitress like the rest of you will.’

‘Come on,’ Phyl muttered, moving closer to her cousin. ‘She’s not worth talking to. Don’t start a row.’

‘I heard that, Phyl Jennings,’ Irene called out. ‘Not worth talking to, am I? I’ll remember that when I’m a supervisor and you’re still a stupid little Nippy. You’ll have to watch your words then, I can tell you.’

‘Oh, I will, will I?’ Phyl whipped back, her eyes flaming. ‘Well, let me tell you this, Lady Muck – if you ever get to be a supervisor, I’ll be putting in for a transfer! And I bet a lot of the other Nippies’ll be doing just the same. Nobody’s going to want to work here with you chucking your weight about.’

Irene started forward, her face red with fury, but Maggie grabbed her arm and dragged her back. Jo tugged at Phyl’s sleeve and muttered in her ear.

‘Come on, Phyl. I thought you said not to start a row.’

‘I’m not. It’s just that she gets my goat, the way she queens it over the rest of us. She’s nothing more than a spiteful cat.’

‘I know. I feel the same – and I can’t forget what she did to you, telling Mike those lies about you that time. But it don’t do no good to let her get your rag out.’

Phyl shrugged and nodded. ‘Well, it didn’t work, did it? Mike and me got together just the same.’ Phyl pursed her lips ruefully. Mike, Tommy and their mate Charlie had all joined the army together and had been sent across the Channel at the same time. It was as important to Phyl as it was to Maggie that they get some leave soon.

There was no more chatter. It was time to go through to the Corner House, and the girls wrapped their cloaks around them and scurried through the dank underground passage. It was colder than ever down there tonight, as the snow had started two or three days earlier. And nobody knew how long it might be expected to last now that there weren’t any weather forecasts.

All the same, Jo thought as they came through the tunnel from the dressing-room, the Corner House was making a good job of New Year’s Eve. Despite the bad weather, the blackout, the looming threat of rationing and the lack of festivities outside, once inside the brightly lit restaurant with its decorations and the band playing at one end you’d have thought there was nothing wrong at all. People were smiling and enjoying their food, the Nippies were dashing to and fro with their big silver trays and the war seemed suddenly far away.

I’m really glad we work here, Phyl and me, she thought, making her way over to the cluster of tables that formed her ‘station’ with her warm smile in place, ready to welcome her first customers of the evening.

‘That’s a happy face,’ a man greeted her as she came to his table. He was sitting with a pretty woman, obviously his wife, and they were dressed up, he in a dark suit and she in a red silk dress with a low-cut neckline. ‘I told you, didn’t I?’ he said to the woman. ‘I told you we’d get a warm welcome at a Lyons Corner House.’

‘You didn’t have to tell me,’ she said, laughing, and looked up at Jo. ‘He’s an awful tease. We always come here on New Year’s Eve – and on our wedding anniversary, too.’ She blushed. ‘We met at a Corner House, you see.’

‘Did you really?’ Jo gazed at them. ‘How long ago was that?’

‘You shouldn’t ask,’ the man told her, grinning. ‘It gives away too much! But I’ll tell you this – she’s as pretty now as she was fifteen years ago, so work it out for yourself. Now, what special dishes have you got for us tonight?’

Jo made a face. ‘Nothing as special as you ought to have. Not with this war on. Everything’s going to be rationed now, same as at home. Only two lumps of sugar each, and one sixth of an ounce of butter! I don’t even know how they manage to measure it out in the kitchens. And you won’t be able to have two lots of protein at the same meal, so it’s no use asking for ham and eggs!’

‘I dare say we’ll manage to have a good time.’ They studied the menu. ‘It’s being in here that counts. All the decorations and the chandeliers, and the music. They can’t ration that, can they?’

Jo took their order and hurried back to the kitchen. The band was playing a selection of tunes, from Ivor Novello’s ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’ to some of the new Ambrose tunes that the girl singers like Anne Shelton and Vera Lynn were making so popular, and the lively dance music of Glenn Miller. Now and then there was a different selection, something from Gilbert and Sullivan or a bit of light classical stuff, but as midnight grew closer the music became softer and more romantic, nostalgic tunes that made the eyes grow moist and the heart begin to yearn.

‘I wish my Tommy was here,’ Maggie whispered as the band swung into a Scottish dance tune. ‘I keep thinking about him and wondering where he is now and what he’s doing. It’s breaking my heart, all this separation.’

‘I know. It’s like half of you’s not here.’ Jo and Phyl stood one each side of her as they linked arms for ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Three girls, all thinking of three men who were just as close friends. Tommy Wheeler and Mike Bennett, in the army somewhere behind the Maginot Line. Nick, learning to fly his Spitfire somewhere in Sussex.

Where would they be this time next year? Jo wondered as every customer in the place surged forward to the strains of the traditional tune. What would happen to them all during this coming twelve months?

What would 1940 bring, to the girls of the Corner House and the men and the families they loved?

Maggie got home late that night, but not as late as she’d have liked on New Year’s Eve – or New Year’s Day as it was by then. Any other year she wouldn’t have been going indoors till the small hours – she would have been out in the streets, maybe joining the crowds in Trafalgar Square or maybe with her own family and some of the other Pearlies, dressed to the nines in glittering finery and banging on each other’s doors to offer lumps of coal and crusts of bread. Coal and bread! she thought wryly as she fitted her key into the front door. You’d think twice about giving them away these days.

The house was in darkness except for the glimmer of a light from under the kitchen door. Everyone else had gone to bed. There was going to be a bit of a knees-up in the street, she knew, but what with not being able to show a light without a yell from some nosy copper or ARP twerp, and half the young blokes having already joined up and gone away, it must have finished early. Maggie sighed. It was an anticlimax, coming home like this after the brightness and cheer of the Corner House, but she was lucky to have had that. No use in grumbling.

She opened the kitchen door, hoping that Mum had left her a bite to eat, and jumped with surprise as her brother Jim looked up from the newspaper he had spread out on the table. He nodded and got up to put the kettle on. The match wouldn’t strike, and he muttered and used his cigarette lighter instead. It was the one Etty had given him for Christmas.

‘Cor, you gave me a shock,’ Maggie said, shutting the door behind her. ‘I thought everyone was in bed.’

‘You gave me a bit of a surprise yourself,’ he said, getting cups from the dresser. ‘Creeping in like that. I never heard a thing till you opened the door. Training to be a cat-burglar, are you?’

‘Trying to be considerate and not wake the whole house, that’s all. Anyway, what are you doing down here? Don’t you have to go to work in the morning?’

‘Course I do. It’s Monday, isn’t it? Not that we’ll get much done – I bet half the blokes will come in with thick heads.’ He grinned. ‘We had a good time up the Dog and Duck. Ivy Parrish come in with some of her mates and gave us a song. Got things going a bit.’

‘So why aren’t you in bed?’ Maggie mixed cocoa and sugar with a small amount of milk in the cups and filled them with boiling water. ‘I’d have thought you wanted a bit of shut-eye.’

‘Oh, well …’ Jim shrugged. ‘I just thought you might be bringing Etty back with you.’

‘Oh, Jim.’ Maggie set his cocoa before him. ‘You know she said she’d be going back to the hostel tonight. She’s been here all over Christmas, after all.’

‘I don’t see why she can’t move in here,’ he said, repeating an argument they’d had several times already. ‘I mean, she’s just miserable in that hostel. And it’s daft, her having to trail back all that way on Saturdays and Sundays when she’s been over here.’

‘Well, I don’t mind her stopping the night at weekends, and I don’t suppose Mum would either. But you’ve got to see, Jim, it’s my room she’s sharing and when my Tommy comes home it’s him I’ll want with me, not Etty. And what’s she going to do then if she’s given up her place in the hostel?’

‘Maybe we’ll be married by then,’ Jim said, ‘and she can share my room.’

Maggie looked at him. ‘I didn’t know you were planning to get married that soon. You’re not even properly engaged yet.’

‘We are, to all intents and purposes. We got an understanding.’

‘You haven’t given her a ring.’

‘No, because we’re saving up. I want to be able to give her something decent. She’s never had anything nice, you know that. I want her to have something she can be proud to show off at that Corner House of yours.’

‘Well, all right, but if you’ve got to save up for a ring when are you thinking of getting married? It’ll take a lot longer to save up for that.’

Jim shrugged with exasperation. ‘I don’t know, for goodness’ sake! Why are you keeping on at me about getting married? Who said anything about that?’

‘You did. You said you and Etty might be married by the time my Tom comes home, and I said I didn’t know you were planning it so soon. So when—’

‘I don’t know! I didn’t mean anything like that. I just meant—’

‘You meant you think it’s going to be a long time before Tom comes back here to live,’ Maggie said heavily. She sat down suddenly and rested one hand against her forehead. ‘Oh, Jim, I feel real fed up. Our first Christmas and New Year and I don’t even know where he is, not properly. I don’t know when I’m going to see him again, or what’ll have happened to us by then, and all we had of being married was an hour. One hour.’

‘I know, Mags. I suppose that’s why I’d like Etty to be over here more. I dare say I’ll be joining up myself soon and then it’ll be the same for us. It seems as if we’re wasting our time, being apart.’ He stared moodily at his cocoa. ‘Anyway, it was daft, what I said. We couldn’t share my room if we did get married – not with our Gerald and George in it as well!’

Maggie giggled. ‘A bit embarrassing way to start married life! And I’m not moving out to share with them, so you needn’t even bother to ask.’ She gave him another look. ‘D’you mean that? About joining up?’

‘Well, it’s either join up or be called up, isn’t it? We’re all going to have to go one way or another. Better to jump than wait and be pushed.’

Tommy had said almost the same thing, Maggie remembered. And now he was over the Channel in France, or maybe Belgium, digging trenches and waiting to fight. ‘It might be better to wait, all the same,’ she said. ‘All the time you’re at home, you’re safe. I bet our Mum don’t want you to go.’

‘Nobody’s mum wants them to go,’ Jim said soberly. ‘But they don’t ask people’s mums when they decide to have a war, do they? They don’t ask anyone. They just go ahead and have it – and we has to do the fighting.’

*

Etty, catching a late bus back to the hostel, was just as miserable as Jim. Despite all the restrictions, she’d had a Christmas with the Pratts such as she’d never had before, and leaving that big, sprawling warm-hearted family to go back to the chilly hostel with its mixture of rough girls and standoffish businesswomen was like being sent into exile. In the Antarctic, she thought bitterly as the bus drew up at her stop and she stepped down into a gutter full of slush. All we need is a crowd of penguins.

There were no penguins in the hostel, but a gaggle of young women came in from a nearby pub at the same time, and they didn’t sound very different. Their squawking voices grated on Etty’s ears and when they saw her in the hallway with its cracked linoleum and dark brown anaglypta walls they cackled with drunken laughter.

‘Well, if it ain’t our little Nippy! Bin nippin’ about all night, have yer? Bet you had a great time down the Corner House, sittin’ on all them soldiers’ knees. All the fellers go there now, hopin’ to pick up a nice little bit of fluff, so I hear.’

‘Ow, my dear!’ screeched another girl, affecting what she evidently thought to be a ‘posh’ accent. ‘I ’ear it’s the ownly plyce to go to meet a young man these days, my dear! Nowbody goes ter the Ritz these days, doncherknow.’

‘’Ow many soldiers bin after you, then, Etty? Bet you’ve ’ad a few behind the bushes down ’yde Park, aincher?’

‘Bet she hasn’t,’ someone else said abruptly. ‘No bloke with an ounce of decency would lower hisself to touch her – dirty little Jew. It’s people like her what’s caused all this war. Jews! Oughter be sent back where they come from and made to stop there, so’s the rest of us can live in peace.’

Etty’s face burned. She had heard sentiments like this often enough, from people in the street, from people at the orphanage where she had spent her childhood, even from people like Irene Bond at work, but although she’d been aware of the other girls’ animosity nobody at the hostel had ever said so quite so offensively. She thought of the newspaper reports, the cinema newsreels, the stories of Jews in Germany, forced to wear yellow stars on their sleeves, forced to live behind high brick walls in ghettos, forced to leave their jobs, their homes, even their country.

‘You’re a bitch!’ she told the girl. ‘A nasty, horrible bitch. And you’re unpatriotic, too, what’s more. We’re supposed to be fighting a war against Hitler, but you’re on his side.’

‘Ow! Did you ’ear that? She good as called me a traitor. Look ’ere, you.’ The girl pushed her face close to Etty’s. She had small, spiteful eyes like hard little toffees and a thick nose and sullen lips. ‘At least I’m British. Not like you, come from Gawd knows where. Not like a nasty, dirty little Jew.’

The other girls were beginning to look uncomfortable. One of them pulled at the toffee-eyed girl’s sleeve, muttering at her to come away, leave the kid alone, she couldn’t help being what she was. But she was shaken off and Etty found herself being pushed against the wall.

‘What I wants to know is, why ’aven’t you bin interned? I thought they was doing that to all the aliens, puttin’ ’em in prison where they belongs? Why ’aven’t they done it to you, eh?’ She stared at Etty, her face so close that Etty could feel her beery breath on her cheek. The girl’s nose was almost touching hers and Etty shrank away, revolted.

‘Maybe it’s because nobody’s told ’em you’re ’ere,’ the girl said slowly. ‘Maybe it’s time someone woke the orthorities up a bit.’

‘Come on, Dotty,’ the friend urged, pulling again at her sleeve. ‘You’ll ’ave Mrs Denton down ’ere in a minute, wanting to know what all the racket’s about. Let the kid go and let’s get up to bed. I’m dead beat and we got to get up early in the morning.’

This time, Dotty allowed herself to be pulled away. The threat of the hostel manageress being brought down in her dressing-gown and curlers was enough to subdue most of the hostel inmates. Mrs Denton wielded absolute power, and any girl who annoyed her was likely to find herself turned out, with nowhere else to go. Nobody wanted that, least of all in the middle of winter and with a war on to make everything worse.

The girls staggered upstairs, leaving Etty in the hall alone. She leant against the wall, waiting for them to disappear. They’d go to the lavatory first, she thought drearily, all of them, one at a time, so she had a wait of several minutes before the coast was clear.

As she stood there under the dim lamp, struggling to get her breath back, the front door opened again and one of the businesswomen came in, pulling it shut hurriedly behind her. You didn’t dare show even the smallest chink of light these days – or these nights, rather – for fear of being shouted at or reported to the police. Every week the papers had columns of names of people who were hauled up in court for blackout offences. Most of them got off with a small fine, but one chap who had flashed his torch in a policeman’s face, saying it was better than getting run over, had found himself in jail for a month, and Etty had heard of a girl who’d got six months’ hard labour for swearing at a copper who’d told her to put out her torch. And look at what had happened in Piccadilly Circus that very night. Just a bit of fun, and now there were a couple of dozen young chaps in prison for it.

The newcomer stopped and stared at Etty. She was one of the older women, who had rooms on the top floor and a bathroom and lavatory between only five of them. She worked in one of the big stores; Etty thought she was a buyer or something.

‘Hullo. What’s up with you, lurking there? Here, you haven’t had a boy in, have you?’ Her voice was Streatham, overlaid with a more refined accent that she had probably learned at work and which occasionally slipped, and she used words that marked her out as ‘posh’. She dressed smartly, too, wearing a black business suit by day and, tonight, a red silk jacket and black frock, and her dark brown hair was cut short and set in sharp, gleaming waves.

‘No, I haven’t,’ Etty answered wearily. ‘I’ve just got in from work. Some of the others came in at the same time – I was just waiting for them to go to bed.’

‘Oh.’ The woman looked at her thoughtfully. Etty remembered her name now. She was called Miss Chalk. ‘Giving you a bit of trouble, were they?’

Etty flushed. ‘Not really.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Miss Chalk said, her tone more friendly, ‘I’ve heard them getting at you. Especially that one with the hair like a woolly bear. Dotty, she’s called, isn’t she? Dotty by name and dotty by nature, that’s what I think about her.’

Etty giggled, almost as much