The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [68]
It was the worst kind of tragedy because it was one that those who had had to deal with it believed could have been avoided.
‘Not seeing Walter tonight then, Jess?’
‘No, I’m not. Not that it’s any of your business, Billy,’ Jess answered with a toss of her head.
‘I was telling your uncle this dinnertime that he seems like a decent sort – for a GI.’
‘You’ve no business talking about me and Walter to my uncle or anyone else.’
‘Going steady now, are you?’ Billy asked, ignoring her.
‘You mean like you and Doreen Green?’ Jess demanded stalwartly, determinedly ignoring the sharp pain that thinking about the two of them gave her.
Billy frowned. ‘Who says that I’m going steady with her?’
‘She does, for one,’ Jess informed him pithily, ‘and so does that cousin of hers. The one that does all the boxing,’ she added meaningfully.
To her chagrin Billy laughed. ‘You don’t want to listen to everything that folk tell you, young Jess. That Doreen Green has had her eye on me since we was at school together,’ he told her smugly, ‘but that doesn’t mean she’s going to get me.’
‘No, I dare say it doesn’t,’ Jess agreed hardily. He took the biscuit for cheek, did Billy. ‘After all, she’s got to get all them other girls out of the way first, hasn’t she? But then, like I said, she has got their Malcolm to help her.’
‘I’m surprised at you, speaking like that,’ Billy told her sorrowfully. ‘I thought better of you than that you’d go round listening to silly gossip. There’s only one girl for me. Allus has been and allus will be.’
Did he really think she hadn’t heard that kind of line before?
‘Oh, yes,’ she challenged him, ‘and we all know who that is, don’t we? It’s the next girl you come across wot’s daft enough to believe you when you tell that line to her. Anyway, shouldn’t you be on duty, seeing as you’ve got such a responsible job an’ all, guarding them barrage balloons?’
‘It’s not them we’re guarding tonight, Jess. We’ve had reports of an unexploded bomb being found in one of them bombed-out houses down near Pickering Street. Seems some kids found it so we’ve been called in to take a butchers at it.’
‘Take a butchers at it? You? What do you mean? That’s a job for the bomb disposal lot and you aren’t one of them.’
‘You mean that I wasn’t,’ Billy agreed. ‘Seems like they’ve got short of men, so our sergeant asked for volunteers to mek up their numbers. You and you and you, he yelled out, and just my luck I happened to be one of them he picked.’
Jess struggled for something to say but all she could think about was the danger he was going to be in. She had heard tales from her uncle of the bomb disposal teams and the terrible death toll of the men who worked on them.
‘Well, that’s just typical of you, isn’t it?’ she burst out as she tried to calm her thudding heartbeat. ‘Going and getting yourself involved wi’ summat daft and dangerous like that. It will serve you right if you get blown up straight off, it will.’
‘Thanks for that. I can tell that you won’t be shedding any tears for me if I do.’
Jess could hear the harshness in his voice and immediately she felt ashamed of herself. There had been no call for her to say what she had. She couldn’t explain to herself how her fear for him had made her say it, and she certainly wasn’t going to try to explain it to him, and have him laugh at her and guess…Guess what, exactly? Guess nothing, she told herself sternly. She looked up at him silhouetted against the