THE SISTERS' WAR TRILOGY BOOK 3
THESE WARTIME DREAMS
Chapter 1
Exeter, Devon, May 1942
‘Huh. So much for coming back to save our belongings. Look at it all. There’s nothing left. Those Jerry bastards have destroyed the lot.’
Sixteen-year-old Pearl Warren curled her fingers into the palms of her hands. She’d just about had enough of this war. What had Exeter ever done to upset the Germans? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Hadn’t stopped them coming over and flattening the place, though, had it.
From the moment they’d been startled awake by the air raid siren, May had done her best to reassure Pearl and their other sister Clemmie that, even if this turned out to be a real attack – as opposed to another false alarm – Albert Terrace would be safe. Enemy bombers, she had maintained, grouchy at being got out of bed in the middle of the night, would only be interested in places like the airfield and the barracks, or the quayside and the railway depot. Just went to show, then, how much she knew.
It would have been bad enough had she been right, had the three of them come up from the shelter to find just the gasworks destroyed, or the pumping station gone. From what she could make out, though, German bombers had laid waste to the entire city: the Sovereign Hotel, where May had worked as a cleaner, looked to be little more than a blackened façade; halfway down Chandlery Street, the front of Mundy’s the baker’s stood in ruins, meaning that Clemmie would be out of a job, too. And she just knew the Plaza would be gone. Best part of a year it had taken her to persuade the manager there to take her on, to convince him she had what it took to be an usherette, that she was too talented to languish in the role of junior sales assistant in a ladies’ clothing store. But now, even if by some miracle the Plaza had survived, she couldn’t imagine the first thing on people’s minds being an evening at the cinema – not if, like the three of them, they’d come up this morning to find their homes and jobs gone, too.
In the smoky brown dawn, Pearl exhaled a mixture of exasperation and despair. From the moment those first incendiaries had come whistling down – before the three of them had even reached the public shelter on Friar Street – she’d had a sense they were in for ‘the big one’ everyone kept saying was coming. Indeed, the longer they’d been confined to the shelter, the more she’d become convinced they wouldn’t be returning home to find things as they’d left them. Nonetheless, despite four hours spent cowering from the explosions thundering overhead and their attempts to ignore the terrifying rumble of the ground shaking all around them, she still hadn’t expected to come up this morning and find their home completely destroyed – to find the whole of Chandlery Street gone. In fact, when the raid had finally petered out, and the fracas going on above had been replaced by a silence as bone-chilling in its own way as the bombing had been, her thoughts had still centred upon what she would do first: have a much-needed wash and tidy-up of her hair, or put the kettle on and make a nice cup of tea. At no point had she envisaged emerging into a choking fog of brick dust and smoke. Nor had she imagined that, instead of filling their lungs with fresh air, the three of them would cough and splutter, the back of their throats crackling under a layer of grit, their eyes streaming uncontrollably from the acrid haze. Even once they had been let out of the shelter, it had taken her a while to grasp that not only was having a wash and a cup of tea going to be out of the question, but that they’d been left with nothing but the clothes they stood up in.
Her thoughts interrupted by the rush of collapsing masonry, she spun about, only to swiftly shut her eyes and turn back from the wall of dust hurtling towards them. When she felt it safe to look, she was aghast to see that Prentice’s had collapsed, leaving a gap all the way through to the remains of Bagwell’s the Printer’s, where flames were still licking from upper storey windows and the heavily blackened front wall looked as though it, too, was about to come crashing down.
Unable to shift the taste of wood ash from her throat, she directed her attention back to the mound of rubble that had once been their home. Here and there were the remains of neighbours’ possessions: the iron door from a kitchen range; a tin bath; closer to, a fire poker. Reaching across, she tugged it free and used it to stab at the debris. Ruddy Germans. What she’d give to flatten their homes, see how they liked it. Curse Hitler. Curse Göring. And curse this stupid war for ruining everything – she’d loved being an usherette. It might not have been what she intended doing for the rest of her life but being able to see the latest films over and over, especially the musicals, had been a joy: each new release brought the chance to study more actresses, to pore over their costumes, copy their hairstyles, their make-up. It had been through watching the leading ladies that she’d learned how to sashay down the aisles and glide across the foyer, exuding what she’d hoped was the same sex appeal as Jean Harlow – not for nothing known as the Blonde Bombshell. And then there was Rita Hayworth; she could watch her dance with Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich until the end of time and still never tire of doing so. The Plaza was also where she’d learned the words to all of the latest songs, and where she’d picked up how to use a gesture or an expression to convey meaning. And now look at her: still five years short of adulthood and yet, already, thanks to this war, her dreams lay dashed.
With a despairing sigh, she dropped the poker and turned to where Clemmie was stood sobbing.
‘What are we… going… to do? Everything’s... gone. All of it. All of it…’
‘Yeah.’ There was no sense sugar-coating the situation. ‘Ain’t so much as a matchstick to be saved from this lot.’
The sight of everything laying broken was too much even for May, who, despite being a woman to take life’s trials in her stride, looked as though she’d had all the stuffing knocked out of her.
‘No,’ the poor girl agreed.
Poor old May, when their mother had been taken ill and not long afterwards passed on, it had fallen to her to take care of everything from seeing the rent got paid and the laundry done, to putting meals on the table and keeping track of their food rations. But, no sooner had they got back on their feet when, like the bad penny that he was, Charlie Warren had shown up again. After an absence of God knows how many years, during which he couldn’t have given a tinker’s cuss what happened to his wife or his only daughter, and certainly not to his two stepdaughters, he’d simply moved back in and taken to scrounging or thieving from them as the mood took.
Moved back in. Dear God, her father. When the sirens had gone off, they’d left him, slumped, in his usual drunken stupor, over the kitchen table – which is where he would still have been when the bombs started. The fact only now registering, she shot a look to where May was standing with an arm around Clemmie’s shoulders. Then, to make sure Charlie wasn’t lurking somewhere, watching them, she cast about more generally. Satisfied that he wasn’t, she said, ‘You know… there is one good thing...’
May’s expression, as she met her look, was one of puzzlement. ‘Really? Not sure how you fathom that.’
‘Well… you got to think we’ve seen the last of Charlie.’
The look on Clemmie’s face suggested she doubted they could be so lucky. ‘You think he were definitely still in there, then? You don’t think he could have got himself out before the bombing started? He couldn’t have… he couldn’t have woken up after we’d left and took himself off to shelter someplace else?’
Withdrawing her arm from Clemmie’s shoulder, May shook her head. ‘Think about it—’ Keen to hear what she thought, Pearl picked her way across the rubble towards her. ‘When the three of us left, he was snoring fit to wake old Mrs Tuckett on the top floor. So, no, I reckon that skinful he had yesterday was his last, and that when he came stumbling in, cursing and lashing out as usual, it was for the final ever time.’
Relieved that May should agree with her, Pearl nodded. ‘Yeah. There’s no way he could have got out. He’s gone. Dead and buried. And I, for one, shan’t mourn his passing.’
‘But—’
‘Face it, Clem.’ The more she considered the possibility, the more certain Pearl became. ‘That foul-mouthed bastard might have been my father, but he was rotten through and through. And yes, I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but you’re not supposed to tell lies, either. So, let’s none of us pretend we’ll miss him. You, Clem, might have been the one to feel the back of his hand most often but weren’t none of us spared his wrath. It was me he swore at for fighting off the drunks he brought home. It was me he told not to be so prissy every time I complained about one of them putting a hand up my skirt or trying to reach inside my blouse. And if I can’t forgive him that, then why would I mourn him? And you, May – don’t tell me you weren’t brassed off with him constantly helping himself to the coins from your purse.’
‘Trust me,’ May said stoutly, ‘many’s the time I could gladly have taken the carving knife to that man—’
‘—or that you, Clem, weren’t browned off with him sending you out with your own money for his fags or his booze.’
Clemmie’s reply was barely audible. ‘I daren’t never disobey him.’
‘See, that’s what I mean. So, no, I shan’t lose sleep over him being dead, and nor should either of you.’
Watching Clemmie dab at her tears, Pearl heaved a sigh of dismay. How on earth, given the torment that man had put the girl through, could Clemmie still feel sorry for him?
‘It’s true,’ May said. ‘He don’t deserve to be neither mourned nor remembered.’
‘Even so…’
‘Look,’ May went on, her words this time directed at Clemmie. ‘You’ve had a shock. You’re tired. We all are.’
‘Besides,’ Pearl went on, gesturing about her, ‘we’ve more important things than the demise of Charlie Warren to worry about.’ She supposed it was a bit of a pity about Dad – although a rather greater pity about the ten shillings he owed her. Still, at least her days of fending off the stream of lecherous old men he brought home were at an end. ‘I mean,’ she picked up again. ‘What the hell do we do now? Where do we even go?’
May’s response was accompanied by a weary sigh. ‘Well, when we came up from the shelter, that warden told us we were to go up the church and wait there. So, I suppose we go and see what the arrangements are, see if a rest centre’s been set up, like that time last month when those few stray bombs fell on Marsh Barton. I don’t see as we have a choice. I mean, look about you. High Street’s flattened. Fore Street’s burned out. Even Bedford Circus is gone. There’s nowhere left.’
That might be true, Pearl thought as she stared at the remains of the only home she’d ever known, but at least by bombing most of the High Street, the Luftwaffe had left little chance of her having to go back to shop work. On the other hand, if she was to avoid being sent to a job in a factory – thank God she was still too young for compulsory war work – she was going to have to be a sight quicker off the mark than every other young girl waking up this morning to find herself out of a job.
Her thoughts interrupted by the sight of something glinting in the rubble, she reached to pull it out; it was a tiny mirror in a metal frame, the likes of which old Mrs Duncan upstairs would have hung in her budgerigar cage. It being of no use to her, she let it go. ‘So,’ she said, brushing the dirt from her hands, ‘that’s what we’re going to do, is it? Go up the church?’
May nodded. ‘It is. We’ll go and see what’s what. And we’ll do it now, early, before every other soul does the same and we’re left to traipse here, there and everywhere in search of any old place that’ll have us.’
‘Which makes me proper glad then,’ Pearl said, making no attempt to hide a satisfied grin, ‘that on the way down the shelter last night, I thought to grab this.’ Proud of her foresight, she held aloft her pink vanity case. ‘Because at least I shan’t be without my curlers or my toothbrush. Nor lipstick and mascara.’
‘Yes, because let’s face it,’ May said, glass crunching under her shoes as she turned away from the ruins. ‘Looking your best really ought to be your biggest concern when you’ve just lost your livelihood, your home, and everything that was in it.’
Following the path May proceeded to pick across the firemen’s hoses snaking their way up from the river, Pearl gave a weary shake of her head. Those two might be her half-sisters, but they never had understood her; neither, between the pair of them, did they harbour a single dream. She, on the other hand, had plenty. And while she would be forced to concede that losing what May had described as her livelihood, her home, and everything that was in it, was thoroughly aggravating, it might also be the kick she needed to set about achieving her dream. This war couldn’t last forever. And when it did finally come to an end, folk were going to need entertaining, cheering up. When they did, she would need to be ready.
Besides, it was a well-known fact that no one could keep a talented girl down for long. Sooner or later, the cream always rose to the top. Until then, however, she would keep her wits about her and her eyes open for anything – and anyone – that might help her to realise her dream just that little bit sooner...