Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [46]
Lou was pulling a face. ‘Pooh,’ she objected, wrinkling her nose. ‘It’s horrid in here, really smelly.’
Jean nudged her daughter and gave her a warning look, even though she was forced to acknowledge that Lou’s criticism was well deserved.
The beef would be ruined now. What a waste.
Sam was coming towards them, and Jean waited anxiously as he stepped carefully over outstretched legs.
‘It’s all right,’ he told her. ‘False alarm. Captain Cocks, from the Fort Perch Rock Battery ordered a couple of rounds to be put across the bows of a vessel trying to enter the closed Rock Channel approach to the Mersey. I dunno about scaring them off – he’s certainly put the fear of God up all of Liverpool. Not that the powers that be will be too put out, mind. I dare say it’s given them a chance to see if the civil defence measures are working as they should.’
As they all stepped out into the sunshine, Grace was thinking that the next time she heard an air-raid siren she could well be in her nurse’s uniform and on duty waiting for the injured to be brought in for treatment. It felt funny to be both so frightened and yet at the same time so determined to rise to the challenge of what war could bring.
‘I think I’d better stay on here to lend a hand, if you don’t mind love,’ Sam told Jean, as she gathered her family together.
It was only natural that he should want a chance to talk things through with the other men who had been clustered together by the exit to the shelter as they left, Jean acknowledged as they made their way home.
She felt tired and miserable, and her head had started to ache, but most of all she was thinking about Jack, and how he must be feeling.
‘Poor little lad,’ she said under her breath.
‘What’s that, Mum?’ Grace asked.
‘I was just thinking about Jack,’ Jean told her. ‘Your Auntie Vi’s had him evacuated.’
‘Of course, Edwin suspected all along that this was going to happen, and that it would be war. He’s got very close contacts with the Ministry, you know – not that he’d ever breathe a word out of turn. They have absolute trust in his discretion. To be honest, that’s why we gave in when Alan begged us to allow Bella to marry him. They’re so very much in love, and with it being war, well, one never knows what might happen …’
‘But I thought that Alan Parker worked for his father and doesn’t have to join up,’ the neighbour Vi was talking to queried.
It was early in the evening, and naturally everyone wanted to talk about the morning’s announcement that they were now at war.
Vi had only come out to deadhead the last of her roses, but her trug was at her feet without anything in it, and she was determined to ignore her neighbour’s telltale glance towards her own front door when she had such an excellent opportunity to reinforce the fact that it was Edwin’s perspicacity in recognising that war was about to be declared that was responsible for Bella’s swift marriage, and nothing else.
‘Well, yes, of course, but one never knows what may happen …’
Really, Vi thought, humming happily to herself ten minutes later as she returned to the house, things could hardly have fallen better. She now had the perfect explanation for anyone who chose to ask questions about the hurried nature of Bella’s marriage.
Edwin was in the lounge, listening to the wireless and drinking a G and T – his second of the evening, not that Vi was counting, of course. Edwin with his bald head and his neat moustache had grown somewhat portly over the years, and had developed a decided air of importance. Unlike Jean’s Sam, he was not a tall man, and unlike him too, he was now wearing spectacles.
‘Of course, I had my suspicions that this was going to happen,’ he told Vi, puffing out his cheeks, both of them ignoring the fact that it was only a couple of weeks since he had been saying that there wouldn’t be a war at all, in private as well as in public. ‘Just as well I had the foresight to expand the business, because we’ll certainly be getting more work. Charlie