Home Front Girls

scramble as the couple got ready for the office.
     
    ‘Young Lucy is worrying me,’ Mrs P remarked a few days later as she got Fred’s snap tin loaded for work. He’d enjoy his dinner today; cold tongue and mustard was one of his favourites. ‘She just seems to have gone into herself, don’t she?’
    ‘I suppose she is a bit quiet,’ Fred agreed as he wound his scarf around his neck. ‘But then everyone is out of sorts at present. Seems the whole bloody world is at war now. There’s the Japs, the Italians, the poor bloody Jews . . . they’re all involved now an’ still there’s no end in sight. I’ll forget what me kids look like at this rate,’ he added gloomily.
    Mrs P glanced towards the photographs on the sideboard and her eyes filled with tears. ‘An’ they’ll be shootin’ up an’ all,’ she said in a wobbly voice. ‘Happen nothin’ will fit our Barry an’ Beryl by the time they come home.’ She and Fred had written to tell them that their elder brother had died bravely in combat, and to think of him as a hero. But oh, how Gladys Price had longed to comfort her little ones in person!
    ‘That’s the least of us worries, so long as they do come ’ome safe an’ sound,’ Fred retorted, and then after planting a hasty kiss on his wife’s cheek, he snatched up his snap tin, went out into the yard to collect his bicycle and pedalled off for work.
    Alone with her thoughts, Mrs P pondered about Lucy, who had just collected Harry after working a night shift. It was hard to get more than two words out of the girl nowadays, and she seemed to have lost all her vitality and sense of humour. Admittedly, Lucy had always been very guarded when it came to discussing anything about her family life, but things were going from bad to worse. Still, Mrs P thought optimistically, the girl had mentioned that Dotty and Annabelle were coming home for a visit the following week, so happen that would cheer her up a bit. Humming ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, she shook out her duster then and began to polish her children’s photographs, just as she did every single day. It was as close as she could get to them for now, and the way she saw it, that contact was better than nothing.
     
    ‘So what made you become a VAD then?’ Joel asked one day as Annabelle plumped up his pillows and straightened his blanket ready for Madam’s inspection. ‘What I mean is, you lot seem to get all the dirty work to do, what with emptying bedpans, washing smelly bandages and cleaning. Wouldn’t you have preferred to become a State Registered Nurse?’
    ‘I have thought about doing that once the war is over,’ Annabelle replied, ‘but when Owen Owen was bombed I needed to get a job fairly quickly so I became a VAD instead. After all, someone has to do the dirty jobs, don’t they? I was helping out in the operating theatres, but I don’t mind being back on the wards. As Madam always tells us, keeping the patients happy and the wards clean is as important as the job the trained nurses do.’
    ‘I suppose it is when you put it like that, but I still never pictured you doing something like this. You always seemed so . . .’ He tried to find a tactful way of saying what he was thinking, but Annabelle actually finished his sentence for him.
    ‘I always seemed so self-centred and spoiled? Is that what you were going to say?’
    ‘No, no of course I wasn’t,’ he muttered hurriedly.
    ‘Well, looking back, I was,’ she told him calmly.
    ‘So . . . what happened to change you?’
    Annabelle straightened and eyed him thoughtfully, wondering if she could confide in him. The secret her grandmother had let slip had been festering like a boil inside her and it would be nice to speak to someone about it. But now wasn’t the time, not with Madam’s ward inspection imminent. ‘I’ll tell you another time,’ she said, then collecting the dirty sheets she had just changed she walked briskly away, leaving Joel to stare after her.
    As Madam was leaving the ward, she stopped Annabelle, who was entering the sluice room, to tell her, ‘I’d like to see you in my office, Smythe. Shall we say about two o’clock after you’ve had your lunch?’
    Annabelle’s heart skipped a beat as she tried to think of what she had done wrong, but she nodded politely. ‘Certainly, Madam.’
    The woman walked away with the doctors as Annabelle chewed on her lip. Try as she might, she couldn’t think of a single thing that might have annoyed