Free The Girls They Left Behind by Lilian Harry Page A

place.’
    The woman sighed and shrugged. ‘Well, it’s up to you.’ She looked past Kathy at the queue behind her. ‘Next.’
    Kathy folded the blankets they’d used and piled them
    neatly at the end of the bed, wondering if they would be used that night by some other bomb victim. With the two little girls, she walked through the streets to the church hall, where she found another camp bed, another pile of blankets, and another pile of battered cushions. Here she was told that she was on high priority for a house and could go to look at one at once She sat down on the bed and cuddled Stella and Muriel
    against her. She had done nothing all day, yet she was exhausted. Tomorrow they’d have to go out and find some cheap clothes, maybe in a second-hand shop. The grey-haired woman was right. Five pounds — even one pound ten — seemed a lot of money. But it would have to be spent carefully to buy all the things they would need.
    ‘Will I be able to have a new dolly?’ Muriel asked, and Kathy cuddled her closer, feeling the hard ache once again in her throat.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’ll find you a dolly.’
    Betty Chapman spent the morning cleaning the windows of
    the dairy where she worked. Even though they were crisscrossed with brown paper strips, Mrs Marsh insisted that they must be kept clean. A dairy had to be hygienic.
    ‘She’ll have me dusting and polishing the sandbags next,’
     
    Betty grumbled to her sister Olive as they ate the sausages and
    chips their mother had prepared for their midday meal. ‘I’m sick of frittering my time away in the dairy. Any old woman could do that job. There’s better things for people like me.’
    Olive sniffed and Betty felt exasperated. Although she had been married for less than a week, she seemed to think she’d gone up in the world, somehow. As if being a ‘married woman’ as she now liked to call herself, made her better than her younger sister. As if she knew more.
    Well, maybe she does, but! bet it’s not all that much, Betty thought. I reckon I know as much about the facts of life as she does — except that she knows what it feels like. She gazed at Olive’s face, trying to see whether there was any difference. Her sister was certainly apt to go off in a dream these days, staring into space with her fork halfway to her mouth. Was she thinking about it then? Was she remembering her wedding night, she and Derek in bed together, thinking about what they’d done?
    ‘I don’t think you’ve heard a word I said,’ she exclaimed crossly. ‘If you’re not going to be a bit more chatty than this, I might as well read Tit-Bits while I have my dinner.’
    ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Annie said sharply. ‘I’ll have no reading at table in this house. And it’s lunch, not dinner.’
    Betty made a face. All her friends called the midday meal ‘dinner’ and thought her stuck-up when she called it ‘lunch’.
    But Mum had picked up these ideas when she’d been in
    service in a big house, and you couldn’t argue with her.
    ‘Well, it’s like a morgue,’ she grumbled. ‘Our Olive sitting there with a face as long as a wet weekend and nothing
    cheerful on the wireless. And there’s been nothing but the air-raid in the shop this morning. Everyone was either in it or knows someone else who was in it. They can’t talk about anything elk.’
    ‘And can you blame them? There’s been people killed here, in Portsmouth, only half a mile away from this house. It could be us next time, don’t you realise that?’
    Annie’s voice trembled a little. The raid had frightened her badly. All the time she’d been worrying about Olive and Ted. Olive was at Harker’s and would almost certainly get into
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    their shelter, but Ted was on evening shift, taking the Ferry King across the harbour to Gosport, and she knew how much he hated it, especially since Dunkirk.
    ‘And how d’you think I feel?’ Olive demanded suddenly. ‘I was married last Saturday,