London Belles. Annie Groves

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      Sally could still remember how awkward and excited at the same time she had felt when Morag had first introduced her to her elder brother, Callum, with his dark hair and piercing blue eyes. Callum, who looked as handsome as any film star and whose smile had made her insides quiver with delight.

      Morag and Callum had become regular visitors at her parents’ home, welcomed there by her mother once she learned that they had lost their own parents, when the small rowboat they had taken out on Loch Lomond during a holiday there had sunk, drowning them both. That had been two years before she had met them, and before Callum’s job, as a newly qualified assistant teacher, had brought them both to Liverpool, where Morag had decided to train as a nurse.

      They had all got on so well together, her father and Callum sharing an interest in natural history and often going off on long walks together, whilst Morag had shown Sally’s mother how to make the Scotch pancakes they all learned to love too much, small rounds of batter cooked on a flat skillet and then served warm with butter.

      But then her mother had become ill, and had felt too sick to want to eat anything.

      It had been Morag who had held her tightly after the doctor had broken the news to them that her mother had stomach cancer, Morag who had so willingly and, Sally had believed, lovingly helped her to nurse her mother through the long-drawn-out and heart-searingly hard to bear pain she had suffered in the last weeks and days of her life. Morag who had comforted Sally before, during and after the funeral, and not just Morag but Callum as well, both of them standing staunchly at her and her father’s sides to support them through the ordeal of her mother’s loss and burial.

      In the weeks that had followed they had all become closer than ever, Callum calling regularly to spend time with her father, Morag too calling at the house to make hot meals for her father when she was off duty and Sally wasn’t.

      Sally had been grateful to her then, loving her for her generosity in treating Sally’s father almost as though he were her own and helping to ease their grief.

      Only it hadn’t been as another adopted ‘daughter’ that Morag had been comforting her father at all.

      Sally closed her eyes and put the photograph face down inside her case before closing it, as though she couldn’t bear to have her mother ‘face’ the betrayal that still seared her own heart. It was time for her to go; her new life beckoned. It might not be what she had hoped for in those heady days when she had first felt the thrill of excitement that came from having her hand held in Callum’s, nor the warmth she had felt at believing that Morag was her best friend and as close to her as any sister, but it was her life and she had to live it, doing what she had been trained to do and remembering always what she owed to the mother she had loved so much and who had loved her. How her father could have done what he had she didn’t know, but she must not think of him. She must think instead of what lay ahead. There were those who had warned her that what she was doing was reckless when she had announced that she was leaving Liverpool to go to work in London, and right at its heart, the very place that would be most exposed and at risk if they did end up at war with the Germans. Sally had said nothing. What could she say, after all? That she didn’t care whether or not she lived or died, that part of her actually wished that she might die rather than go on living with the feelings that were now tearing her apart, the memories of her father’s voice, at first defensive and then angry when she had told him how shocked she was by his betrayal of her mother and the love they had shared? She had pleaded with him to change his mind and not to go ahead with his plans to marry Morag. How could her mother and she herself mean so little to him now when they had been everything to one another before? How could Morag actually expect her to ‘understand’, as she had pleaded with her to do? How could Callum – how dare Callum – have stood there and told her that she was being selfish and cruel and that her mother would have been ashamed of her?

      Whilst she didn’t want Barts or its patients, or indeed anyone, to suffer the horrors of war, if there was to be war then she might as well be in the thick of it, she might as well risk her life in the place of another nurse who might have more reason to want to survive than she did. The truth was that she no longer cared what happened to her. Barts, like the rest of London, had laid its contingency plans for war. What could not be moved to a place of safety must stand and bear the onslaught of that war, and she fully intended to stand with it and to play her part. Better if anyone were to die that it was someone like her, with nothing and no one to live for.

      ‘And then when I told Matron what had happened she actually hugged me and told me that she was proud of me.’

      After rushing headlong into her story the moment she had seen Ted waiting for her outside the café, now that they were inside sitting at ‘their’ table, their tea and teacakes in front of them, Agnes finally paused for breath.

      ‘You were right to tell me to go and see Mrs Robbins. She’s ever so nice, Ted, and Tilly, her daughter, has offered to share her room with me. She’s lovely, and so pretty. It was awful at first, me thinking that I’d lost the chance to have the room, but then when Tilly came running down the road after me, well . . .’

      Ted listened sympathetically whilst Agnes told him yet again of her astonishment and gratitude. When she was all sparked up like she was right now, Agnes was a pretty little thing, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining.

      He’d told his mother about her over breakfast this morning when he’d finally got in from his late shift. She’d pursed her lips and said that she wasn’t sure she held with orphans, on account of it being odd that someone shouldn’t have any family at all, but Ted had insisted that Agnes was all right.

      ‘Look I’ve done this for you,’ he told her after taking a bite of his teacake and chewing on it, reaching into his pocket to remove some sheets of folded paper. Spreading them out on the table, he explained, ‘See, this is a map of the underground, and these different colours, well, they’re for the different lines.’

      Impressed, Agnes studied the complex interlinked coloured lines, all drawn so carefully.

      ‘This here dark blue, that’s the line I was telling you the stations for last night. And see, I’ve written down all the station names in the same colour as the lines.’

      ‘You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble on my account,’ Agnes said.

      ‘It wasn’t any trouble,’ Ted fibbed. His mother had had a real go at him, telling him off for missing out on his sleep to sit up and ‘draw lines for a daft girl who could be anybody’. But Ted had wanted to do it, and the look of delighted gratitude on Agnes’s face was more than enough payment.

      ‘See here,’ he continued, producing another sheet of paper and putting it down on the table on top of the first one. ‘I’ve listed all the stations again and I’ve written them down in the same colour as I’ve drawn the different lines, so as you can remember them better.’

      ‘I’ll never be able to remember them all,’ Agnes told him, shaking her head. ‘I got two tickets wrong again today and Mr Smith wasn’t at all pleased.’

      ‘His knees were probably bothering him. Suffers something rotten with his knees, old Smithy does. It comes of playing football when he was a youngster, so he says. He was a likely-looking junior for Arsenal before he went and broke a bone in his foot.’

      Mr Smith, as wide as he was tall, had been a football player? Agnes’s eyes widened in amazement. Ted knew so much. He knew almost everything there was to know about the underground and those who worked there, she felt sure.

      ‘And here,’ Ted produced a third sheet of paper, ‘see these СКАЧАТЬ