PART ONE
1943
1
RUBY
July
Hidden amongst the dunes above Bartonford beach, I threw my head back and yelled. The wind snatched my voice away and Toffee looked at me with his head tilted sideways, one ear pricked. I bent and rubbed the top of his head. In front of me, through a gap in the dunes, I could see all the way past the beach defences to the sea where steely waves tumbled fiercely over one another, capped with brownish foam. A summer storm had blown in last night and the wind was still charging across the bay like an express train.
It was just past seven o’clock in the morning, and I was the only person here. Just as well, really – if anyone heard me screaming like this, they’d think I’d gone quite dotty. But mornings like these, when I had the bay to myself, were the only time I truly felt like me. At eighteen, my life was one of strict routine: unless I’d been on duty the night before I rose at half past six, washed and dressed, and walked Toffee for Mrs-Baxter-down-the-lane who was so hampered now by her rheumatism that she couldn’t manage it anymore. Then I returned home, fetched Father’s paper from the main house and laid the table for breakfast.
After we’d eaten, Father walked over to the psychiatric unit and I made my sandwiches and did the dishes, unless it was Mrs Blythe’s day to come in. Then I cycled to the Herald offices. After work I came straight home. Usually the rest of the Herald staff went for a drink at the Bartonford Arms Hotel; Vera was always pestering me to come too, but I already spent several evenings a week out on duty, and the thought of leaving Father with only the wireless for company every night of the week made me feel unbearably guilty. Anyway, he often needed me to help him type up his notes.
When I was on shift, though, I’d change into my Air Raid Precautions uniform – a smart blue serge tunic – straight after supper and cycle back into town to the sector post, my helmet with its white ‘W’ painted on the front looped over the handlebars and my gas mask in the basket, unable to help the spark of rebellious joy deep down inside me at the break from routine it afforded, however small. I would have loved to have done something practical – work in a factory or as a land girl – but because leaving Father was out of the question I’d become a warden instead, signing up to the Women’s Voluntary Service the day after my sixteenth birthday.
Toffee pulled stubbornly on his lead, desperate for a good run. ‘Sorry, boy,’ I told him. ‘I can’t let you off. Not here. I’d never forgive myself if you got tangled up in all that wire.’ I shivered as the wind cut through my thin coat with its too-short sleeves; I didn’t have enough coupons for a new one yet. I was about to turn for home when something caught my eye: a group of three men at the other end of the beach, one digging around the bottom of one of the posts, the others looping a heavy length of chain around it. The end of the chain was attached to a bulldozer. Panic spiked through me. Had the Germans invaded at last?
I crouched behind a hummock of marram grass, trying to see through the stalks as they tossed in the wind and wondering if I was brave enough to challenge the men. I imagined the headline in the Herald: PLUCKY REPORTER DEFEATS ENEMY INVASION! The more sensible part of me reminded me that I could hardly be called a reporter, and that if they were Germans, they’d have guns. But I wanted to get my facts straight before I fetched the constable. Check, double-check and check again for luck – that’s what Vera always said.
Then I looked again and let out a relieved laugh. The men were wearing Home Guard uniforms; I knew them. Barnaby Sykes, who was blind in one eye – another casualty of the last war – was doing the digging and helping him were old Tom Bidley and Alfie Blythe. I stood, brushing sand off my skirt and coat, picked Toffee up and made my way down there, squeezing past the enormous cubes of concrete placed to prevent enemy tanks from being able to drive up into the dunes, and stepping carefully through the rolls of barbed wire. Several posts had already been taken out and lay scattered across the sand like tree trunks uprooted by a playful giant.
‘Hullo, Alfie,’ I said as I reached them. Alfie jumped. He was trying to tighten the chain while Barnaby carried on digging around the base of the post with a shovel, Tom watching with one hand resting on the bulldozer.
Toffee was wriggling; I put him down and he strained forwards on his lead, wagging his tail. Alfie ignored him. ‘Ruby! What are you doing here?’ he said.
I raised my eyebrows. ‘I might ask you the same thing. I thought you were Jerry, digging up the defences so you could invade the town!’
Alfie, Barnaby and Tom looked at one another, and Alfie pressed his lips together primly. ‘I can’t tell you anything, I’m afraid.’
‘Might as well,’ Tom interjected in his thick Devon burr. ‘Whole town’s gon’ know soon ’nough.’
Alfie and Barnaby exchanged another glance. Then Alfie said: ‘It’s for the Americans.’
‘The Americans?’ I asked.
‘The American troops. They’re coming here. They’re going to be training on the beach. We have to clear it for them.’
‘Buildin’ some girt big huts up on them dunes, they will be, too, and a dance ’all too if the lil’ bird that told me about it is right.’ Tom grinned at me from underneath his bushy white moustache, showing the gaps in his teeth. ‘That’ll liven things up for you and that friend o’yours at the newspaper, eh, missy?’
My heart skipped a beat at the thought of whirling around to the sounds of an upbeat dance band in the arms of a handsome American soldier or airman.
Alfie saw my smile and sniffed. ‘I do hope everyone’s not going to go completely silly about them.’
I sighed inwardly. Alfie had shot up suddenly last year, his arms and legs filling out with sinewy muscle. Because of his asthma he couldn’t sign up, or go to his father’s engineering works, so he’d taken a job at the post office, delivering letters, which meant he called in at the Herald nearly every day. I caught him looking at me like this sometimes, as if he was sizing me up for something and finding me lacking, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. I missed the wiry, cheerful boy in baggy shorts I’d gone to school with, and the easy closeness we’d once had, more than I cared to admit. But perhaps it was inevitable – we were both growing up, after all.
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I said. ‘The Americans’ll be on the lookout for something far more exotic than a lot of country bumpkins from Bartonford. Anyway, I’ll leave you to it. See you later if there’s any letters, Alfie.’
‘Don’t say anything to anyone!’ Alfie warned as I walked away.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t!’ I called over my shoulder, and smiled, wondering exactly how he proposed to hide the fact that the beach defences were being torn up.
*
‘You’re in a good mood,’ Father said from behind his newspaper as I poured the tea and made the toast.
I realised I was humming to myself. ‘Oh, yes, I suppose I am.’
He smiled. ‘I’m glad. I’ve been worried about you lately, Ruby. You look worn out.’
‘I’m OK,’ I said. I was tired – I didn’t seem to have a minute to myself these days – but I didn’t want him to start pestering me to give up my ARP post. When I had my uniform on, I felt as if I was doing something useful; something real.
I wondered whether to tell him about the Americans, then decided not to; I wanted to break the news to Vera first. As Tom had said, everyone would know soon enough anyway. I wondered what Father would make of the news, or if he’d even care. When Barton Hall was requisitioned by the government as an Emergency Medical Service hospital, a few months after the war began, it looked as if we would have to move too, but Father was asked to stay on to treat the psychiatric cases. As a result, his workload had doubled. Sometimes I even caught him muttering about his patients during our Saturday night games of Monopoly.
I ate my toast and marg as fast as I could. Annie Blythe had been right about the jam; you couldn’t get it anywhere these days, not even the stuff with sawdust pips in. When I’d eaten I made my escape, grabbing my gas mask in its cardboard case – Father insisted I carry it everywhere with me, and became terribly anxious if I forgot – and fetching my bicycle from where it was propped up beside the Anderson. I freewheeled down the hill into town as if Hitler himself was after me, rehearsing what I was going to say to Vera in my head: You’ll never guess what I’ve found out!
‘Have you heard about the Americans?’ she said when I burst into the little office we shared on the first floor of the Herald building.
I stared at her. ‘How did you know?’
I didn’t know why I was surprised; there was a good reason everyone said Vera Spencer was the best reporter in our little corner of Devon. She was twenty-five, and what I wouldn’t have given for her glossy dark curls and her figure with its curves in all the right places – she could have made a piece of blackout curtain look stylish. I’d turn nineteen in October, but I was still all elbows and knees, and my hair never stayed neat no matter how many pins I stuck in it. People sometimes told me I looked like my mother, Ellen, but I couldn’t see the resemblance. A successful theatre actress, she hadn’t just been pretty but beautiful, whilst my features could at best – and if you were feeling especially kind – be described as agreeable.
Vera blew a stream of cigarette smoke into the air with that mysterious half-smile of hers, the one that made her look like Lauren Bacall. ‘A little bird told me.’
‘Well, a little bird told me, too,’ I said. ‘I saw Barnaby Sykes, Alfie Blythe and old Tom on the beach earlier, pulling up the defences. Tom says they’re going to be building huts up in the dunes. And a dance hall!’
‘A dance hall?’ Vera’s face lit up. ‘Oh, darling, how simply splendid!’
I sat down at my desk, smiling too. She didn’t have the scoop on everything after all!
Vera finished her cigarette and stood, gathering up her notebook and Brownie box camera. ‘I’ve got to pop over to Ilfracombe this morning – Howler wants a story about the evacuees from Bristol and Exeter at the school there. Will you be all right here on your own? We’ll go down to the Red Cross canteen for a cup of coffee when I get back.’
In front of me were three stacks of envelopes I hadn’t had time to finish looking at on Saturday because Mrs Dobbs had got it into her head that someone needed to tidy up the archive, and that someone had, of course, been me. The envelopes contained small ads offering positions and places to live, birth and marriage announcements, and obituaries. These days, the third pile was always the largest. It was one of my many jobs to open them, check the content was suitable and type them up before passing everything to Dobbsy, who had the final say in what made it into the paper. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said breezily. ‘Plenty to do! And a cup of coffee later would be lovely.’
Deep down, though, I couldn’t help feeling a tiny spark of envy. It was my dearest wish that Howler would let me write a real story for the paper – one of my most enduring daydreams was of being a war reporter, travelling overseas and interviewing servicemen in the thick of the action. But there was no use in dwelling on it; I knew it would never happen. I’d probably spend the rest of my life right here in Bartonford.
As Vera looped her satchel over her shoulder there was a knock on the door. Vera made a face. ‘I bet that’s Dobbsy.’ But it was Alfie. He’d changed out of his Home Guard uniform into his post office uniform, and looked very smart. ‘Good morning, Vera. Hullo again, Ruby. I’ve brought the post.’ As he put a fresh bundle of envelopes down on my desk, I noticed he was holding a small, battered biscuit tin. ‘Oh, and, er, Ruby, my dad asked me to give you these. His hens are laying like billy-o at the moment.’
I prised off the lid to see four eggs inside, nestled in a bed of straw. ‘Alfie, you shouldn’t have!’
He coughed, shuffling his feet. ‘Oh, it’s nothing. We’ve more than we need.’
‘That’s very kind.’ I smiled at him. ‘Do tell him thank you. Father will be pleased.’ I put the lid back on the tin and set it down carefully on my desk before feeding a sheet of paper into my typewriter, a monstrous Underwood that was at least twenty years old with stiff keys that hurt my fingers if I used it for too long. I looked at the piles of envelopes and squared my shoulders resolutely.
‘He’s sweet on you, you know,’ Vera said when Alfie had gone.
Startled, I turned in my chair. ‘What? No – I don’t think so.’
Shrugging her coat over her shoulders, she raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows. ‘Oh, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. That’s the second time he’s brought you eggs this month. He never brings me any.’
My face grew hot. ‘He’s just being kind, that’s all.’ Years of caring for Father had made me something of an expert on bad chests, and when we were younger, I’d walk to school with Alfie and sit with him in the playground so he didn’t feel left out while the other boys tore round with their footballs and cricket bats, making sure he kept the big, green woollen scarf his mother insisted he wore at all times tucked snugly around his neck. He had always been like a brother to me; I’d never thought of him in any other way and it certainly hadn’t occurred to me that he might think of me as more than a friend.
Vera raised her eyebrows again. ‘Well, see you later. If I finish early I might wander down to the beach and see if I can get us an exclusive about the Americans!’
Then she was gone too.
As I turned back to my envelopes, I couldn’t help suppressing a sigh. Before the war, the Herald had had a full staff, but, bit by bit, they’d volunteered or been called up. Now there were only six of us. Mr Howlett – Howler – was the editor, and an acquaintance of my old headmistress, which was how I’d ended up with this job in the first place. He spent all day shut away in his office on the second floor, only emerging for two reasons: to go to the pub or to shout about something. You could hear him bellowing before he’d even reached the top of the stairs, which was why Vera and I had nicknamed him Howler. I’d been scared of him to start with, but it hadn’t taken long to discover his bark was worse than his bite, even if his yells did, on occasion, make me wonder if the office windows, covered in diagonal lengths of scrim to prevent glass flying everywhere if we got bombed, would stand up to the strain.
Next door to us was Mrs Dobbs’ office. Dobbsy, as Vera and I called her, was Howler’s sister, a formidable widow who wore lumpy knitted cardigans and had an enormous wart above one eyebrow. As well as being in charge of what went in the paper, she answered readers’ letters, transcribed recipes for carrot fudge and prune pudding, and – to anyone who was unlucky enough to be in earshot – bemoaned the paper rationing which had cut the Herald down to a shadow of its former self, both in size and content. Meanwhile, down in the basement, Charlie Hopkins and Robert Towle, both of them the same age as old Tom Bidley and with even fewer teeth between them, manned the press, a fearsome, clanking beast. Then, of course, there was Vera.
I’d started out as the office girl, answering the telephone, making the tea, changing typewriter ribbons and doing all the other little jobs no one else wanted to do, but now, like everyone else, I had to fill in for the people who were no longer here. That meant checking copy, typing the small ads and obits, and occasionally – excitingly – going out on a story with Vera. Between us, we all kept the paper running, although it was often a scramble to get everything ready in time for it to go to print on Wednesdays.
Unable to face the obituaries just yet, I picked the first envelope up off the small ads pile. As I opened it carefully – we kept envelopes to be reused, and woe betide anyone who tore one – I allowed myself to daydream about the Americans. My soldier would be called Dirk, I decided. He’d look like Cary Grant but he’d sound like Clark Gable, and after a whirlwind romance we’d elope, leaving dreary, war-smashed England behind for the glamour and bright lights of America…
That was where my imaginings ended, washed away by reality. Father was the only family I had. He was ill – he needed me – how could I even think about leaving him? Anyway, I couldn’t see myself with an American soldier. I’d read enough stories in Father’s Times to know what they were like. Not for me, thank you.
Resolutely, I slammed a mental door on the imaginary Dirk and began to type.