The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [88]
‘Yes.’ She’d have said anything to get him to move away from her.
‘And once we get to this place here then you’ll need to call out the directions to me. Think you can manage that?’
‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ Diane replied, almost lurching into him as he swung the Jeep round to face the opposite direction.
‘Cut the sirring, soldier – and that’s an order.’
‘Yes, sirrrr,’ Diane threw at him through gritted teeth.
It was six o’clock in the evening but no way was Diane going to point out to the major that her eight-hour shift had ended well over an hour ago. So far they had ‘checked out’, as the major called it, over a dozen of the properties on his list, and with each one, or so it had seemed to Diane, the major’s expression had grown grimmer and his silence more condemnatory. Now, with her stomach aching with hunger, she was beginning to wonder if the major was even human. The joke in the British Naafi canteens was that being on parade for the Americans meant slouching off to the nearest PX to stock up on Hershey bars and the like, but the major had shown no inclination to stop to eat at all. She, on the other hand, was beginning to feel so hungry that she was afraid her stomach would humiliate her by starting an audible protest.
The billets they had seen had ranged from an empty girls’ school – where the major had studied the instruction pinned up on a dormitory wall, ‘Ring for a Mistress if Required’ without betraying even a flicker of amusement – to pin-neat bedrooms in private homes. But the thing the rooms all had in common was their war-weary shabbiness. It was evident everywhere: in the eyes of the people, in the way they walked and talked and the very air they breathed, Diane admitted, and it was in stark contrast to the vigour and smartness of the American forces, in their ‘pinks and greens’, as their dress clothes were known.
The major had certainly been thorough, both in his inspection and his reportage of each potential billet. As the day wore on, his dictation speeded up rather than slowed down so that Diane’s wrist was now aching from the unfamiliar shorthand writing, and she groaned inwardly at the thought of its transcription and typing-up.
‘It’s coming up for eighteen hundred hours,’ the major informed her, glancing at his watch. ‘I guess we should break for something to eat before heading back.’
‘There’s a village a few miles down the road,’ Diane told him. ‘It should have a pub but I don’t know if we’ll be able to get something to eat.’
The look she could see in his eyes rubbed painfully against the raw patch of misery that was her pride in her country and her feelings of shame for what it had become, and her equally intense feeling of anger against the man who was forcing her to see it through his own eyes.
The village, when they came to it, was a straggle of houses either side of the road, surrounded by the fields in which Diane assumed the original villagers had once worked. A garage, its solitary petrol pump forlorn and unattended, marked the boundary between fields and village, the houses old and huddled together, the paint flaking off the doors and windows. A group of boys, old enough in reality to be wearing long trousers, but forced by the war to remain in shorter ones to save on cloth, who had been aimlessly kicking a ball around in the road, scattered at the sight of the Jeep, only one of them brave enough to stay where he was and yell out, ‘Got any gum, chum?’
Diane curled her fingers into her palms when she saw the way the major’s mouth tightened as he flicked a grim look at the boy. No doubt in America, that land of plenty, children did not beg from passing strangers. She could feel the pressure of her own defensive tears against the backs of her eyes. ‘This isn’t how we really are,’ she wanted to tell him ‘This isn