The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [138]
Jess’s heart turned over slowly and painfully inside her chest. It was Billy, she was sure it was, but she still didn’t let her breath out until he straightened up. A huge rolling wave of relief picked her up, carrying her with it so that she had no awareness of running towards the men, no awareness of sobbing out Billy’s name, no awareness of anything at all really until Billy turned round and then started to run towards her, snatching her up and then holding her so tightly that she could hardly breathe whilst he said chokily over and over again, ‘Ruddy hell, Jess…ruddy hell. I thought you was dead.’
He kept on hugging her tightly whilst Jess hugged him equally tightly back. She could taste the salt of his tears mingling with her own and see the tracks they had made on his smoke-blackened face.
‘Ruddy, ruddy hell…Jess,’ he kept on saying brokenly until she told him breathlessly, ‘Give over saying that, will you?’
‘I thought you was in that number three shed,’ he told her. ‘I thought you was gone like them other poor things.’
‘Poor things. Daft things, more like, for getting themselves killed like that,’ Jess contradicted him angrily. ‘Why did they have to go and let summat like that happen to them? I only have to turn me back for a couple of hours, and they go and get themselves killed.’ She could feel the anger bubbling up hotly inside her, like jam in her mam’s jam-making pan, suddenly boiling upwards in a surge of unstoppable fury. Deep down inside herself she knew that what she was feeling was unreasonable but somehow she couldn’t stop the angry words from spilling out whilst Billy held her as though he would never let her go.
‘There must have been a couple of them wot’s alive, Billy,’ she pleaded, ‘and that had the sense to get out in time?’
His arms tightened round her, giving her the answer before his gruff, ‘I’m sorry, Jess.’ He wiped one hand across his eyes whilst still holding on to her with the other.
‘I thought you were dead, an’ all, I really did. Felt like me own life was over, I did,’ he told her hoarsely. ‘Didn’t seem as though there was any point to it any more wi’out you to scrap with. You must have had someone up there looking out for you – ruddy hell, you must,’ he swore, looking skywards meaningfully.
‘It was on account of Ruthie. I had to take Ruthie home. She had an upset,’ Jess stumbled over the words and then broke off and pulled back from him, fresh tears filling her eyes.
‘Oh, Billy, I’d almost forgotten. Poor Walter…he’s dead.’ The way Billy was looking at her hurt her physically for him. ‘It’s all right,’ she heard herself telling him shakily. ‘Me and Walter, we were only friends really, but I still feel on his account, dying like that after he’d been beat up by that Myra’s GI. Oh, that poor girl he was sweet on, Billy. I hope that someone thinks to let her know what’s happened to him.’ She shivered. despite the heat from the still burning fires.
‘’Ere, Billy, stop that canoodling and get yourself over here. Orders are we’re to get back to base, seeing as there’s nowt else we can do here now that they’ve got the last lorryload of shells out of the way,’ one of the other men called out.
Immediately Billy’s hold on Jess tightened as though he didn’t want to let her go.
‘You’d better do as he says.’ Jess gave him a little push and, disengaging herself from him, suddenly started to feel more like her normal self.
‘And you’d better take yourself off back home. Your mam will be at her wits’ end worrying about you,’ Billy reminded her with a sternness with was almost proprietary. And she realised how much she liked it.
TWENTY-NINE
Diane tried not to think of the reason for the acrid taste in the air as she walked up the path to her digs. A sombre mood of mourning had enveloped the whole city following the explosion at the munitions factory, and it seemed that everyone you spoke to knew someone who had died in that inferno. Every day one heard heart-rending stories of young children who had been left without mothers, parents left without daughters,