Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London, SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Joanna Toye 2019

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photography © Johnny Ring (model), Alamy and Shutterstock.com (all other images)

Joanna Toye asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008298234

Ebook Edition © January 2019 ISBN: 9780008298241

Version: 2020-05-04

Dedication

For my grandmothers – and all the women of their generation.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Author’s Note

Keep Reading …

About the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter 1
June, 1941

‘Well? Will I do?’

Lily Collins hovered in the doorway of the small back parlour. Her brother Sid, shirt sleeves, flannels, wavy blond hair, broad shoulders – Sid was the looker of the family, and no mistake – his injured foot propped up on a stool, glanced up from his Picturegoer magazine.

‘Come in, then, Sis, give us a closer look!’

Coming in was just what she didn’t want to do. What she wanted, no, needed, to do was to get Sid’s swift approval, then shoot out of the house faster than a firecracker before her mum could see that Lily had dabbed on a bit of her powder and even (before quickly blotting most of it off) a smudge of precious lipstick. She’d only dared sneak down to seek Sid’s approval because she’d seen from upstairs that her mum was out in the back garden, sitting on a canvas stool in the sun, shelling peas.

‘Come on!’ urged Sid. ‘Let the dog see the rabbit!’

Lily edged forward. She was horribly aware of how young she still looked in her faded print frock and – horror of horrors – ankle socks.

Sid scrutinised her, his head on one side.

‘Um … your hair. What exactly were you aiming for?’

‘A mind of its own’ was the kindest description of Lily’s own fair hair. It made life interesting, she supposed, because she never knew when she woke up which way her strong-minded curls would have decided to arrange themselves overnight. She imagined them in the small hours, debating long and hard.

‘I’ll flop over her right eye if you stick out at an angle at the top.’

‘No, hang on, I stuck out at the top yesterday! Why don’t I do the flopping? And for a change, you can spring off her ear?’

It hadn’t used to matter that much. At school she’d had to force her hair back any old how with grips and a hairband, but for a job interview, and with hairgrips just one of the things that had started to disappear now the war was in its second year … The best she’d been able to do was a complex arrangement with as many grips as she could muster and a couple of combs – also her mum’s. The effect she’d been aiming for, since Sid was asking, was side-parted and crimped at the side – Bette Davis in Dark Victory, basically – but her brother’s face told her the effect was more like something from The Wizard of Oz. And not Judy Garland, either.

‘Sorry, Lil, I’m not sure …’

‘It hasn’t worked, has it?’

‘You’re ahead of your time, that’s all. Give it six months, a hairdo that looks like you’ve stuck your finger in the socket’s bound to take off.’

‘Sid! They’re never going to give me the job!’

‘No. They won’t. Not unless you get a shake on, have you seen the time?’

In her anguish, Lily hadn’t seen or heard her mother come in.

‘Now sit yourself down and let’s sort that hair out.’

Dora Collins crossed the room. Lily was her youngest child but neither being the baby of the family, nor, after two boys, being a girl – at last! – meant that she was in any way indulged. If their father had been around, it might have been different – a lot of things would have been different – but he’d died of a heart attack the year Lily was born and Dora had been left a widow with three children under five.

Lily’s stomach took a plunge.

‘Here we go,’ she thought. ‘She’ll see the make-up. I’ve had it.’

But if she noticed – and she would have done, Dora missed nothing – her mother said nothing. Instead she sat Lily down at the table, snapped her fingers for Sid’s comb, and began with practised eye and hand to tame her daughter’s hair. Miraculously she managed it with half the amount of hairgrips Lily had used.

‘Now you’re presentable,’ she said with brisk satisfaction. ‘If Marlow’s don’t take you on, well, it’s their loss.’

Marlow’s. Simply hearing the word set Lily’s stomach somersaulting again.

It had first come up at the end of the Easter term when her headmistress had called the girls in Lily’s year in one by one for the customary interview. She’d been sorry, she said, to hear that Lily wouldn’t be staying on to take her school certificate.

‘I’m sorry too, miss,’ said Lily with real regret. ‘But Mum can’t afford for me not to be working.’

Miss Norris sighed. As a bright girl unable to make the most of her chances because of her family situation, Lily wasn’t alone. It had been the case through all Miss Norris’s teaching career – all the previous decade and the one before – despite the Great War, despite the vote, despite the new opportunities that had supposedly opened up for women. And now another war, which had brought with it more opportunities – of a sort.

Miss Norris sighed again. It had come so close. In 1939 there’d been debate about raising the school leaving age to fifteen, but the outbreak of war had put paid to that, for the time being at least. And now that unmarried younger women had to register for war work – it’d be married women next, including those with children – there was even talk of women being conscripted before the end of the year – it also meant that girls like Lily were in demand for the jobs they’d left behind. Shops, cafés, laundries, pubs, hotels … there were plenty of jobs for fourteen-year-olds. In fact the country was relying on them to ‘do their bit’ as well.

‘What do you think you might do?’ Miss Norris enquired.

‘They’re looking for someone at the Fox and Goose – general assistant, they call it,’ Lily replied. ‘Or Mum’s got a friend that works at a laundry …’

Miss Norris looked pained.

‘Lily. You’re better than that,’ she protested. ‘You don’t want to go skivvying!’

‘Well …’

‘And I won’t let you. Let me make some enquiries.’

And so Miss Norris had made her enquiries, and within a few days told Lily of the opening at Marlow’s – the biggest department store in town. It was only a junior’s job – skivvying too, in its way, Miss Norris had explained apologetically – but it would at least have prospects – promotion, if she worked hard. And from the very start it would be better paid and what Miss Norris called a ‘better working environment’ than either of Lily’s other possibilities.

Lily had tried to look grateful – and she was. It was really kind of Miss Norris to have taken the trouble; she didn’t have to. But Marlow’s! Their motto was ‘Nothing but the best’. They might as well have added ‘for the best’ because who could afford to shop there? Not the likes of Lily’s family, for sure: she’d never been further than the black-and-white mosaic tiles in their doorway, and that was only because she’d sheltered there from the rain once, when she’d been in town buying a present – a scarf ring – for her mum’s birthday. Which she’d bought from the haberdasher’s in the market, of course.

And now Miss Norris expected her to work there? Marlow’s, with the drift of scented air which had escaped when the commissionaire had opened the door; Marlow’s with its oak-and-glass counters, polished parquet floor and dove-grey carpeted staircase – Lily had made sure to take a good look inside. Marlow’s … only the poshest shop in town. And Lily just a girl from a back street.

And now here she was, at two o’clock on a Monday in June, ready for her interview. Or was she?

Her mother jerked her thumb over her shoulder, jolting Lily back to reality.

‘Scullery, and double quick,’ she said. ‘Wash all that off your face. Wasting my powder like that! The nerve!’

Sid shot her a look that mixed sympathy with ‘might have known’ as Lily went to do as she was told. This never happened to Bette Davis, she thought wistfully, drying her face on the rough roller towel. Even at my age.

‘She doesn’t mean it, you know, our mum,’ said Sid consolingly as he walked, or more accurately, limped, alongside Lily into town.

Their older brother, Reg, had been eighteen the month war was declared, and had signed up straight away – Sid, too, enlisting for the Navy the minute he was old enough in April. Reg was doing well – going to be made up to lance corporal soon, he’d hinted – but poor Sid hadn’t got much further than training camp. He’d managed to crack a bone in his foot landing badly from the vaulting horse and, to his frustration, was now stuck at home till it mended. Not the sort of thing, he’d remarked ruefully, that you ever saw happening to James Cagney in the films – unless it led to him meeting a pretty nurse. Which in Sid’s case, it hadn’t, only an unsympathetic naval doctor with bad breath, apparently.

‘Thing is, she’s had to be mum and dad to us, hasn’t she?’ Sid continued now. ‘That’s why she lays it on a bit strong sometimes.’

‘I know,’ said Lily.

She knew her mum wasn’t really that cross, because after checking that Lily’s face was scrubbed as clean as the day she was born, she’d lent Lily her white fancy-knit cardigan, with her lucky horseshoe brooch pinned to it, and given her a hug and a kiss before she left.

‘So have you got all your answers ready?’ smiled Sid.

‘I don’t know what they’re going to ask!’

‘They probably only want to see that you haven’t got two heads. Let’s face it, they’re not exactly spoilt for choice at the moment, are they?’

‘Thanks very much!’ retorted Lily. ‘If you weren’t already on crutches I’d put you on them!’

But she knew he was only joking. Sid was four years older than Lily, but since they were children they’d always enjoyed teasing each other. Reg, Sid’s elder by eighteen months, was the quiet one, good with his hands, good at mending things. He’d spent the war so far being sent here and there for unspecified ‘training’ – Reg was very discreet – but after all that had ended up back at the searchlight battery in Nottingham where he’d started. This was a mixed blessing in the Collins household: it wasn’t what Reg had joined up for; on the other hand, Dora’s worries could be contained. Then, at last, his technical skills were appreciated – he’d been an apprentice mechanic when war broke out – so after more training, which this time he was happy to tell them about, he was going to be transferred to REME – the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers – to his great satisfaction, but their mum’s growing anxiety. Reg would be twenty in September, which meant he’d be considered for overseas service. The Mediterranean? The Middle East? The Western Desert? It was all much too worrying to think about.

‘Here we are, anyway.’

They stopped before the sandbagged façade of Marlow’s, its corner site bridging the town’s two main shopping streets. Even the Splinternet tape stuck criss-cross against the huge plate-glass windows – four down one street, four down the other, and two graceful curving panes each side of the entrance – couldn’t mask the elegance of the approach. Anyway, Lily thought, it gave the place a sort of charm, like the latticed windows of a cottage, albeit a cottage more the size of a mansion. The store’s name stood out above the entrance in stylish black on gold and was picked out again in gold on the mosaic tiles of the entrance. The huge clock which overhung the doorway showed five to three.

‘Right then. “The time has come, the Walrus said …”’ Sid squeezed her arm.

Lily gulped.

‘Don’t leave me, Sid.’

‘Of course I’m not going to leave you. I’m going to look at the ties,’ said Sid airily.

Lily’s eyes widened. At Marlow’s prices?

‘You’re never going to buy one here! Anyway, you’ve got a dozen ties already!’

‘Looking’s free, isn’t it? And they can’t stop me.’

The uniformed commissionaire gave them a hard look as he held the door open, but Sid’s salute and rueful glance at his foot brought a twitch of recognition from an old serviceman to a younger one and he swept them through with a gracious wave of his arm.

Once inside, Lily froze again. Now she was inside, properly inside, she could appreciate Marlow’s true magic. She’d never seen anything like it – or imagined such a place could exist in Hinton, their workaday Midlands town.

‘War? What war?’ she felt like saying, because there didn’t seem to be any shortages here. Overpowering scents wafted towards her from the cosmetics and perfume counters in front of her. To her right, scarves and gloves were fanned out in a rainbow of summer colours – palest pink through mauve to cornflower blue, and white through cream to lemon. Beyond were umbrellas both furled and twirled, handbags and shoes. Behind them, notices pointed to menswear, footwear, stationery, and gifts.

‘Come on, Sis, you don’t want to be late. Who is it you’re to ask for?’

The name was imprinted on Lily’s mind.

‘Miss Garner, staff office.’

Sid motioned her towards the enquiry desk.

‘Now you really are on your own.’ He squeezed her arm again. ‘You’ll be fine, kid. Just be yourself.’

With that he was gone, swinging himself athletically on his crutches, and attracting as he passed, Lily noticed, interested looks from Elizabeth Arden and Max Factor – or at least their immaculately-presented salesgirls.

The enquiry desk was on her immediate right. Behind it was a woman in her fifties who regarded Lily over spectacles whose design made them look as if they wanted to take flight.

‘My name’s Lily – Lily Collins. I have an appointment. With Miss Garner. Three o’clock,’ she said – or squeaked. Her voice seemed to have been replaced by Minnie Mouse’s.

‘Let’s see…’

The woman ruffled a couple of sheets on a clipboard and placed a satisfied tick against a typewritten line. She replaced the clipboard in a wooden slot to her right.

‘They didn’t tell you, then?’ she enquired.

‘Tell me what?’

The woman raised her eyebrows higher than her aerobatic glasses, but her smile was kind.

‘This’ll be the last time you use the customer entrance. The staff entrance is in Brewer Street, at the back. That’s if you get the job.’

If I don’t get the job, thought Lily, it’ll be the last time anyway. I’m hardly likely to set foot in here again!

On the third floor, Miss Garner, the staff supervisor, was holding forth on her favourite subject – the difficulty of getting what she called ‘the right type of girl’.

‘I never thought I’d see the day’ – she indicated Lily’s letter of application, written not so much with the help of as by Miss Norris – ‘when Marlow’s had to take girls from anywhere but the grammar school!’

Cedric Marlow shrugged. He was sixty-three, the son of the founder of the original Marlow’s (‘Capes, mantles and bonnets – all the latest designs from Paris!’) and had been in the business since he was twenty. He’d seen plenty of commercial ups and downs, plenty of staff come and go, and more to the point had seen one war that was supposed to end all wars be followed by this one. If he’d learnt nothing else – and he’d learnt a lot – it was that a business had to adapt to survive and accepting reality and adjusting requirements to suit what was available was the only sensible strategy.

‘We don’t have a great deal of choice, do we?’ he said mildly. ‘And I can’t see things improving when—’

‘When they bring in conscription for women. I know.’

Miss Garner looked briefly at the floor. She didn’t ever mention it, but she’d done her bit. She’d served in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in the First War. She’d met her first love, too, when she’d nursed him back to health after the second battle of Ypres. Before he left for the front again, he’d asked her to marry him, and had become her fiancé, then her missing-in-action fiancé, then her missing-presumed-dead fiancé. His body, the body she’d bathed and tended back to health once already, was never found.

Miss Garner was too old now for nursing, or any interesting war work, and too useful anyway, doing what she did at Marlow’s, keeping the home fires burning, or rather somehow finding the staff to sell the coal scuttles and hearth rugs that flanked the home fires – while hearth rugs and coal scuttles were still available. Making do and mending, cutting her cloth … seeing the young, then middle-aged, staff leaving and replacing them with the halt, the lame, the very old – and the very young. Fourteen-year-olds, in fact.

A shaky tap on the door told them that the girl they were expecting had arrived.

‘Enter!’ called Cedric Marlow.

Lily’s interview was about to begin.

Chapter 2

‘So when do you start?’

‘Next week. Monday.’

‘That’s brilliant, Sis! Well done!’

Sid folded Lily in a huge hug and she relaxed for the first time that day. He was in the garden now, in an old collarless shirt and some ancient trousers, once their dad’s – nothing was ever thrown away in the Collins household. They were too big for him round the waist, so he’d found a huge leather belt which pulled them in tight and his braces were hanging down. Somehow, using the handle as a support, and putting as little weight on his bad foot as possible, he’d been hoeing between the lettuces, which were dangerously close to bolting, their mum said.

Now things were getting scarcer in the shops, Dora had taken ‘Dig for Victory’ to heart. She’d never done more than nurture the odd Christmas cactus or aspidistra for the front room, but now they grew what they could in a couple of small raised beds at the back of their terraced house. It had been nothing but a yard, but Lily and Sid had carted the soil in barrows half a mile from a bigger, boarded-up house with a garden. Every little bit they grew helped cheer up a diet that was becoming more and more repetitive and meagre.

Bacon, butter, sugar … they’d been rationed since almost the beginning of the war; even margarine had been rationed for almost a year now. Meat, tea, jam … sweets, of course … last month cheese and this month, eggs. One egg each a week!

Still, if it helped the war effort …

‘Where’s Mum?’ asked Lily. ‘I wanted to tell her straight away!’

‘Ah. She’s out,’ said Sid mysteriously.

‘She never goes just out.’ Lily looked puzzled.

‘She won’t be long,’ soothed Sid. ‘Anyway, you can tell me. Who was there? What did they ask you?’

‘Ohhhh,’ said Lily, covering her face. ‘It was dreadful. It wasn’t just Miss Garner, it was Mr Marlow himself! I mean, he seemed very nice, but … he asked what I’d liked at school and I said “all of it” and how I’d have liked to stay on, and then I thought that was the wrong answer ’cos he’d think I didn’t want the job … and then I blabbered on about how I liked meeting people, and talking to them, and about how I really really wanted to work there …’

‘Well, you do, don’t you? Better than that steamy laundry any day of the week. Or the Fox and Goose, with old Pearson trying to put his hand up your skirt.’

‘Sid!’

Sid grinned. ‘It’s true. There’ll be none of that at Marlow’s. Everyone there’s ever so well brung up, ain’t they?’ He lapsed deliberately into the strong local accent.

‘I suppose so,’ mused Lily.

‘Well, don’t sound so sorry about it! So no mental arithmetic or spelling? You were dreading that.’

‘Nothing like that,’ said Lily. ‘It’s only a junior’s job – in the Children’s department. I don’t suppose they’ll let me near a customer. And anyway I don’t know if I can take it. I haven’t got the right clothes!’

‘What, no uniform?’

‘They’ve scrapped it ’cos of the war. A dress in a plain dark colour, they said, or dark skirt and white blouse. And plain black shoes.’

‘Well, you’ve got those.’ Sid nodded at Lily’s best Sunday shoes.

‘They’ll never last the winter!’ cried Lily. She steadied herself against Sid’s shoulder and balanced stork-like to show him the soles, which were already worn. ‘As for a dress—’

‘Mum’ll come up with something. Or we’ll ask around. You know how it works in our street.’

Lily knew all too well. Hand-me-downs, making do. That was one thing the war hadn’t changed.

Sid went back to his hoeing.

‘Surely though, you’ll get some kind of discount? Buy some decent stuff?’

‘What, like a tie for you? On their prices, 90 per cent off wouldn’t be enough!’

‘They had some smashers,’ said Sid wistfully. ‘Silk. Still … one day, maybe …’

‘One day,’ sighed Lily. ‘When the war’s over …’

‘Dear me. A nice enough girl, but no polish.’

Miss Garner was assembling Lily’s staff manual, letter of engagement and terms and conditions of employment. Cedric Marlow was standing at the window of his office, looking down into the well at the back of the shop. A grimy pigeon was fluffing out its feathers in the sun and he was ashamed to realise that all he could think about was how good it would taste casseroled with bacon, mushrooms and shallots. His household could afford to buy its way out of the worst of rationing, and he could always eat out, but there was less and less variety on the menu.

‘I think she’ll suit very well,’ he said mildly.

‘She’ll need a few rough edges knocked off her.’ Miss Garner tapped the pages straight and pinioned them with a precious paper clip. They’d be the next thing to disappear. She’d make sure the girl gave it back once she’d signed her contract.

‘I daresay. But we’ve had worse.’

‘I’ll say.’

Her thoughts swung immediately to Beryl Salter on Toys. A year at Marlow’s had knocked off her rough edges, it was true, but at the expense of the girl giving herself a most uncalled-for air of superiority and what she obviously thought was a ‘refined’ accent.

Shaking her head, Miss Garner returned to the latest candidate.

‘Miss Collins is a little too keen to pipe up, I thought. “Likes talking to people” – she’d better not try that with the customers! She’ll have to learn to speak when she’s spoken to. But Eileen Frobisher will keep her in line.’

Miss Frobisher was one of Miss Garner’s protégées, having soared rapidly through the complex sales hierarchy to the dizzy heights of buyer on Childrenswear. They’d been so lucky to get her back. She wasn’t really a ‘Miss’ of course, else she’d have been in a munitions factory or the services by now, but Marlow’s convention was that all saleswomen were addressed as ‘Miss’ whether they were married or not. And Eileen was, with a husband serving overseas and a little boy of four, which excused her from war work. An elderly neighbour looked after him during store hours.

Cedric Marlow let the net drop back as the pigeon fluttered off.

‘How’s that new young man on Furniture and Household getting on by the way? James Something-or-other.’

‘Oh! You mean Jim. Jim Goodridge,’ confirmed Miss Garner. ‘From what I can gather from Mr Hooper,’ she named the Furniture buyer, ‘he’s made quite a good impression. He’s rather quiet, not the most pushy, but as third sales he doesn’t have to be. There’s plenty of time for him to learn. And with experienced salesmen like Maurice Bishop to learn from … Why do you ask?’

‘Oh … he simply popped into my head for some reason,’ Cedric Marlow replied. Then: ‘Did you notice that poor kid’s shoes? Literally down-at-heel.’

‘I’ll make sure her presentation on the sales floor is up to scratch, Mr Marlow, don’t you worry.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’ He turned away from the window. ‘The Queen may feel she’s able to look the East End in the eye, but sometimes … I wonder. I mean, I don’t suppose Lily Collins’ family were exactly flush before the war, her mother being a widow, but so many like them are suffering more than ever now. As is anyone who can’t buy their way out of it. And here we are, selling only the best … ’

Miss Garner cleared her throat. Mr Marlow wasn’t usually given to sudden enquiries about random members of staff, nor to such outpourings – and certainly not this kind of sentiment. It had been a long day, clearly.

‘It’s got very warm in here,’ she said. ‘Might I suggest you open the window? And I’ll ask the restaurant to send you in a tray of tea.’

‘Lay the table will you, love?’

Her mother’s voice carried over the clattering coming from the scullery.

Lily went to the sideboard for the knives with the yellowed bone handles and the tarnished forks and started doling them out on the cloth.

After the elation of getting the job, it had all been a bit of a comedown. Her mum had been pleased, of course, and Lily could see the relief on her face. But on hearing of the uniform requirements, she’d jumped up, gone upstairs and come back down with a hideous dress in navy gabardine.

‘Cousin Ida’s,’ she announced. ‘I knew it’d come in useful!’

Cousin Ida. Her mother’s cousin – a shrivelled spinster who worked as an assistant in a chemist’s so old-fashioned they practically had leeches in jars. Hardly a fashion plate at the best of times, this particular dress was at least ten years out of date, Lily could tell from its straight up-and-down shape. It was already seated in the behind and sagging at the hem, but Dora Collins loved nothing like a challenge. Lily had had to stand while her mother forced her to put it on – smelling of camphor and itchy in the afternoon heat – and primped about with a pincushion, tucking and pinching, prodding and poking, telling Lily to stand up straight, before proclaiming that with a few darts, a nice Peter Pan collar, and cuffs if they could run to them, it would do fine. A Peter Pan collar! Cuffs! As if they’d make it look any better!

Out came the cruet, the mismatched plates … What was the point, thought Lily, of getting a decent job if she was going to look such a frump? She might as well have been stuck slaving over a mangle at the laundry.

Sid came downstairs, spruced up after his stint in the garden. Dora had fretted that he’d overdone it, standing all that time on his injured foot, but she and Lily knew sitting about wasn’t his style – he wanted to be up and doing. He’d got to report to the local medical officer weekly, but the doctor had advised against going back to training too early. ‘You’ll only set yourself back’ had been his advice, so it looked as though they’d have him around for a while yet. Lily was glad. She loved her mum dearly, but Dora had always been so occupied with making ends meet and keeping them fed, clothed and shod – even more so nowadays – that there wasn’t much time or maybe energy left over for the smiles and cuddles which Lily had craved since she was a little girl. That was another reason she was happy to have Sid around. He was always ready with a joke and a hug.

On trailing feet Lily carried through the breadboard and breadknife with the inevitable loaf – they seemed to live on it – the pot of dripping, the dish shaped like a lettuce leaf with, yes, lettuce on it. A few tomatoes, a dish of radishes, half a pot of green tomato chutney. Was that it? Hardly a celebration tea. She’d hoped her mum might have conjured something tasty from somewhere – potted meat? Pilchards? Or at least fried up a few potatoes – Sid had dug some up, she’d seen – but it looked as though this was going to be their lot.

Sid carried the tea things through one at a time – he used a stick inside the house – and dispensed pot, milk jug and cups and saucers. Maybe that was the celebration, no milk bottle on the table. Lily thought he was limping more than he had been at the start of the afternoon and gestured to him to sit down, bringing him the rush-topped stool.

‘I could get used to this!’ he smiled as she stuck a cushion under his foot.

‘Well, don’t!’ she retorted. ‘Who’s going to look after you in the Navy? One of the Wrens? You hope!’

Sid winked.

‘Wouldn’t say no.’

Lily was pouring tea when her mother finally appeared, so she didn’t notice the serving dish till it went down in front of her. She lowered the pot in wonderment.

‘Oh, Mum!’

There, in all their jelly goodness, were three fat slices of pink, speckled brawn. Lily bent and sniffed the plate. It smelt heavenly.

‘Meat? On a Monday tea? Where did it – how did you …?’

Her mother sat down in her place with that little ‘Oof’ which she so often gave these days when taking the weight off her feet.

‘Never you mind,’ she said. ‘I wanted us to have something special. To celebrate.’

‘But – how could you be sure I’d get the job?’

Lily sat down too, almost in slow motion, still transfixed by the sight and smells in front of her. Sid was watching it all with amusement. Dora served a slice of brawn on to each of their plates.

‘I never had a minute’s doubt! I knew you’d impress them. If you ask me, they’re lucky to have you!’

Lily bit her lip. It was one of the nicest things her mother had ever said.

Her mother put her hand over hers.

‘You’ve done very well, love – and thank you.’

‘You’re thanking me? Why?’

‘Oh, Lily,’ said Dora. ‘You know and I know you should have stayed on at school. And you know as well as I do that you could have gone to the grammar school back along if things had been different.’

Lily knew. But she hadn’t even taken the exam, because she also knew her mother could never have afforded the uniform.

‘You’ve had to give up so many opportunities already,’ Dora went on. ‘I hope this job’ll be the start of something good for you. And it could be, you know, if you work hard.’

‘I know, Mum. And I will. I’ll do my very best to make them like me and keep me on.’

‘Course they will,’ Sid assured them. ‘Give her a few years, she’ll be running the place, won’t you, chick?’

Her mother squeezed Lily’s hand and they both had to squeeze back tears.

‘Oh, blimey,’ said Sid, offering his handkerchief to each in turn. ‘Women! Give over, will you? There’s a slice of brawn with my name on it in front of me! Can we get stuck in?’

Chapter 3

‘Are you coming, going, or going to stand there all day thinking about it?’

Lily’s feet had brought her as far the staff entrance of Marlow’s, but they were showing a complete inability to take her any further.

‘Oh, never mind!’

A sharp-shouldered blonde pushed past her in a swirl of cheap perfume and peroxide and disappeared through the door.

‘Take no notice,’ said a voice at Lily’s side. ‘She’s like that with everyone.’

Lily smiled gratefully. The girl was shorter than Lily, and plumper, with straight brown hair in a pudding-basin shape. Under a too-small jacket, she was wearing a plain black dress. With her intimate knowledge of second-hand, Lily could tell from its greenish tinge that, like her own, the dress had had at least one previous owner. The girl’s white lacy collar, too, had suffered many launderings – but never mind her clothes. Best of all, from Lily’s point of view, she was wearing a smile.

‘You wouldn’t happen to be the new junior on Children’s?’

Lily nodded.

‘I was the same on my first day – stomach feels like it’s in a lift!’

Lily nodded again. Her head would fall off at this rate.

‘Don’t be. It does get better. I’m Gladys, by the way. I’m a junior on Children’s too. Well, I suppose I’m the senior junior now! We’ll be working together!’

‘Lily.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

They shook hands awkwardly.

‘Come on, I’ll show you what’s what.’

Gladys pushed open the door and Lily entered another world.

If what she’d seen of Marlow’s on the day of her interview was like something from a fairy tale, this was more like the reality Lily knew. There was nothing fairy tale here. The corridor walls were scuffed where pull-along wagons delivering goods had bumped against them, the lino was worn, and the stairs which led to the basement staff cloakrooms were stone, dipped from years of footfall and as far away from the soft-carpeted dove-grey staircase inside the store as it was possible to get.

All around them staff moved purposefully this way and that. Men in brown coats rattled past with sack trucks or shoved metal cages full of boxes into a creaking goods lift. Shop-floor staff, some in outer coats going in their direction, others without their coats and ready for the day ahead going in the other, pulsed and flowed in a human tide. Lily dodged as best she could until Gladys pushed through a swing door into a long, low room alive with noise and movement. Wooden benches with pegs above ran down the centre and the walls were lined with pitted metal lockers.

‘My locker’s along here,’ explained Gladys, leading the way. ‘Let’s see if we can find you one close by.’

‘Oh, look, it’s Slow and her new friend Slower.’

The girl who’d accosted Lily outside was patting her hair in a cracked mirror fixed to the wall before retying the bow at the neck of her blouse.

‘Don’t ever go to the zoo, you two, will you? You might get dizzy watching the tortoises whizz round!’

She smiled to herself at her witticism and turned away.

‘Who is she?’ whispered Lily. ‘Or who does she think she is?’

‘Beryl Salter,’ muttered Gladys. ‘Junior on Toys – well, fourth sales she calls it, though there’s no such thing. And Toys is right next to our department, unfortunately.’

‘There’s always one, my mum says.’

Gladys said nothing more, so Lily bundled her gas mask, bag and cardigan into the locker Gladys indicated and checked that the clean handkerchief her mother had insisted on was still tucked up her sleeve.

‘But we don’t have to take it, you know.’

Gladys shook her head. ‘You don’t answer Beryl back.’

Lily had already noticed that, in front of Beryl, Gladys looked like a rabbit being hypnotised by a snake.

‘You may not,’ she responded. ‘But I’m here now.’

‘Well, Lily, you join us on something of an unusual day.’

Lily was hardly listening to a word Miss Frobisher, the Childrenswear buyer, was saying, so dazzled was she by her appearance. Though Lily was no judge of age – anyone over twenty-five was simply ‘old’ – Eileen Frobisher was probably not much over thirty. Tall and imposing, she had a proper figure (hour-glass, Lily would tell Sid later) outlined in a fitted grey pinstriped costume. Her enviably smooth toffee-blonde hair was swept round her head into an elegant French pleat in which not one single hairpin showed. How did she do it?

‘For reasons that … well, reasons you don’t need to know, Furniture and Household are having to move down from the second floor to join us here on the first. So we shall have to condense our stock. The good news for you, Lily, is that you’ll get to know everything we sell straight away. The bad news for the two of you’ – she included Gladys – ‘is that we’ll be losing a display counter, drawers and several racks. So in future you girls’ll be running back and forth to the stockroom a lot more.’

Lily and Gladys nodded dutifully. The department’s two saleswomen – or salesgirls, as Lily learnt they were called – Miss Thomas and Miss Temple – were already going through the racks, removing the covers that protected the stock from dust and dirt overnight. As the morning ticked away, along with Miss Frobisher, they pondered party dresses and picked out little summer coats. Beautifully smocked romper suits, tiny embroidered blouses, fluffy pram covers and soft leather bootees piled up on the counters as they made their decisions over what should stay and what should go.

As she smoothed and folded, Lily marvelled at the detail, the workmanship in every garment – all in miniature – and tried not gasp when she saw the contrastingly enormous prices. Not that she had much time to gasp. Her job, with Gladys, was to carry armfuls of tiny clothes and boxes of accessories to the stockroom and stow them away under the supervision of Miss Thomas, who was now stationed up there. Occasionally, to rest their legs, they folded fresh tissue and cut holes for the hangers to protect the clothes from the stockroom’s much dustier atmosphere.

But their main task, as it turned out, was trying to avoid Beryl, whose own department was also being reduced in size. Despite her self-styled senior status, Beryl had been set the same job, carrying boxes of Meccano, train sets and soft plush toys off the sales floor and up three flights of unforgiving stone stairs to the fourth-floor stockrooms – with accompanying moans.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she complained as they toiled up the stairs for the umpteenth time. ‘But Toys have already moved once to make space for the Red Cross and St John Ambulance stalls. Now I’ve got to lug this stuff about again! Where are the porters?’

‘Helping bring the furniture down, I suppose,’ panted Lily as she plodded on up.

‘Children’s has moved too,’ pointed out Gladys mildly. ‘From ground to first. That was soon after I came,’ she explained to Lily. ‘To make way for the Permits Office and the interpreter’s desk. For French and Belgian refugees,’ she added, when Lily looked blank.

Lily couldn’t help but be impressed. It seemed there was nothing Marlow’s wouldn’t do to attract custom. Mr Marlow must have a very shrewd brain.

‘And now it’s the Air Ministry!’ snorted Beryl, grabbing at a velveteen monkey as it tried to make a break from the armful she was carrying.

‘What?’

‘Oh, hasn’t Frosty Frobisher taken you into her confidence? I wonder why?’

‘I don’t think she’s frosty.’ Lily was defensive. ‘She seems very nice.’

‘Thinks a lot of herself, if you ask me.’

‘She’s not the only one,’ muttered Lily to Gladys, thinking that Miss Frobisher had a lot more right to than Beryl, about whom you could say the same.

‘I suppose she knows you two dumbclucks’ll do as you’re told without asking questions. I asked Mr Marlow.’

Gladys’s eyes widened.

‘Robert Marlow. Floor supervisor,’ she mouthed to Lily. ‘Mr Marlow’s son.’

‘The management have known about it for weeks but the communiqué’ – Beryl rolled the word around triumphantly like a diver surfacing with a rare pearl – ‘only came through on Friday. They’ve requisitioned half the second floor for aircraft parts.’

‘Come along, come along!’

Miss Thomas was waiting for them at the double doors to the stockroom.

‘Come along, girls! The war’ll be over before we get our stock moved at this rate!’

But she gave them a smile and when dinnertime finally came – Lily’s stomach had been growling for over an hour – Miss Frobisher let them both go off together as it was Lily’s first day – as long as they only took forty minutes instead of the usual hour.

At last, in the basement canteen, where Marlow’s provided a daily hot meal for all their employees, Lily got a chance to take stock instead of moving it.

As they chewed their rissoles – not as good as her mum’s, but they were grateful for anything; you had to be these days – Lily learnt that Gladys was six months older than she was and had started at Marlow’s just before Christmas. As soon as she heard where she’d been born – Coventry – Lily had a horrible feeling she knew what Gladys was going to say – and she was right. Worried for their only child’s safety, her parents had sent her to stay with her gran in Hinton soon after Dunkirk – and they’d also been right in their thinking. When Coventry had taken its pounding from German bombers the previous November, the cubbyhole under the stairs where Gladys’s parents had been sheltering was no protection against a petty burglar armed with a paper knife, let alone the Luftwaffe. The house had been completely obliterated and Gladys’s mum and dad with it. With no home or other family to go back to, Gladys had had no option but to stay on with her gran – and since she’d never enrolled in school in Hinton in the first place, she thought she might as well find herself a job. She thanked her lucky stars every day, she said, that she’d been taken on at Marlow’s – her chances boosted by the fact that her parents had run a small corner shop and she’d always helped out there.

‘What happens if there’s an air raid here?’ asked Lily. ‘I mean, there must be over a hundred staff, more maybe, and with customers too …’

‘I’ll show you when we’ve finished.’ Gladys forked up a final shred of cabbage and a chunk of watery potato. ‘There’s an air-raid shelter down here, big enough for all the staff and as many customers as Mr Marlow thinks could be in the store at any one time.’

Lily couldn’t help but be impressed again by Cedric Marlow’s foresight.

‘And he’s had a door cut through that leads into Burrell’s basement too.’

‘Burrell’s! But that’s way down Market Street!’

Burrell’s was another big store and, Lily would have assumed, a rival.

‘Their basement and ours meet in the middle. Weird, isn’t it? So if there was a raid and we got hit, we could get out through their shop, and the other way round.’

‘What are you two gassing about now?’

Beryl plonked her tray down on the table and plumped down beside them – naturally assuming there’d be no objection. Lily noted that, however much she appeared to despise them, she didn’t seem to have anyone else to sit with.

‘Air-raid precautions.’ Lily sipped her water.

‘Hah! I suppose Little Miss Muffet’s been telling you how they say it’s all about “protection not profit”. Has she told you how long we have to wait till we can go down the shelter?’

Lily shook her head. Beryl sprinkled salt and pepper vigorously over her rissole and pushed her cabbage disgustedly to one side.

‘It used to be that we all went down the minute we heard the siren. But now they’ve got plane spotters on the roof – with flags.’

‘So have Burrell’s. And Marks and Spencer. And Boots. And—’ added Gladys.

‘Yes, thank you, we don’t need the entire Trade Directory.’ Beryl didn’t appreciate being interrupted. ‘White for the alert, shop to shop, then red once they actually see a plane,’ she continued matter-of-factly. ‘Then it’s all bells and whistles on the sales floor and everyone scuttling down as fast as they can. Well, you have to make way for customers, of course.’

She didn’t sound too impressed with that, either.

‘But sometimes the air-raid warnings can last all night,’ objected Lily. ‘What then?’

‘You’re stuck, ducky.’

‘It’s never actually happened,’ said Gladys consolingly. ‘And we’ve never actually been seriously bombed, have we, in Hinton. There’s only a couple of factories, and nothing big like Birmingham or West Bromwich or …’

She obviously couldn’t bring herself to say ‘Coventry’.

‘No, but … well, they can always get things wrong,’ said Lily. ‘Burrell’s got hit last winter.’

‘That,’ said Beryl dismissively. ‘A couple of incendiaries the Jerries couldn’t be bothered to lug back with them.’

‘I suppose.’

Lily was glad she’d be able to tell her mum about the precautions at Marlow’s. She knew it had been bothering her. Dora would be relieved Lily had had a hot lunch too. It wasn’t just Lily’s wage which was going to be a help to their household budget.

‘Why does Beryl have to be so snide all the time?’ she asked Gladys as they made their way back to the sales floor. ‘I notice she still had to sit with us. Obviously nobody likes her. And fancy asking the boss’s son what was going on!’

‘I know,’ Gladys sounded resigned. ‘But that’s Beryl. She seems to get away with it. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get” is what she says.’

‘Yes,’ replied Lily. ‘And one day you might get more than you’re asking for, like the sack!’

Gladys shook her head.

‘Not Beryl. Mr Bunting, the buyer on Toys, you’ve seen him—’

Lily had. Short, plump, with a frill of white hair round a bald crown, he looked like the old toymaker in the fairy story. It had come as no surprise to Lily to learn that he doubled as Santa at the staff Christmas party.

‘He’s been here years. He’s a soft touch – that’s what I heard Miss Frobisher call him.’ Gladys hesitated. ‘Beryl calls him something quite different, of course.’

Beryl would, thought Lily.

Lily was on her hands and knees, trying to brush up the nap of the carpet where a set of glass-fronted drawers had stood, when she was aware of a little cough behind her.

‘Excuse me …’ It was the first time a male voice had spoken to her since she’d stepped through the staff entrance and the first time that day that anyone who might be senior had given her, however nicely phrased, anything but an order or an instruction.

Without looking round – surely it wasn’t Mr Marlow Junior, the floor supervisor? What had she done? What hadn’t she done? – Lily scrambled to her feet. Her hair, tamed by her mum that morning, had gone its own way with the effort of her scrubbing, and she pushed it out of her eyes with the back of her hand. With the other she smoothed down the skirt of her dress, horribly aware of the dust and fluff it had attracted. And she’d been congratulating herself on being put on a carpeted department instead of having to stand on a hard parquet floor all day!

‘Will you be much longer? Only I rather fancy the dining set that we’ve got on promotion in that little area. Sideboard in carved oak, Tudor – well, Tudor style – to the right, draw-leaf table central, a couple of chairs … Think I’ll have room?’

‘Erm, probably, as long as you’re not planning on Henry VIII sitting there with a goblet and throwing a chicken bone over his shoulder as well,’ offered Lily.

‘Hah! Hadn’t thought of that!’ said the young man. ‘But now you mention it …’

‘I was only joking!’ said Lily quickly.

‘I realise that. But I could set the table to make it look more tempting. Sorry, I should introduce myself. James Goodridge. Jim. Third sales, Furniture and Household.’

‘Lily. Lily Collins.’

Lily found herself looking up into deep-brown eyes behind wire-framed glasses. And looking a long way up. Sid was tall, but this lad – Jim – must be well over six foot, and skinny with it – a right bean-pole, her mum would have said.

‘I’m sorry if I’m holding you up. It’s my first day,’ she added.

‘I thought I hadn’t seen you before. Well, seems we’re going to be neighbours.’

‘Looks like it.’

She couldn’t place his accent. Not Midlands, definitely, but not posh, like old Mr Marlow, and not put on, either, like she could tell Beryl was trying to do. It was sort of natural, gentle, like the hills on the calendar her mum kept in the kitchen, the one that had come as a pull-out with Woman’s Weekly at the turn of the year. And then she heard herself saying – a bit forward, perhaps, but he seemed so normal and friendly …

‘Perhaps once you’ve set the table I can come for tea.’

‘You’re on! So what do we need? I’ll half-inch some stuff from Small Household – tray, tray cloth, crockery, teapot …’

‘Cake stand,’ suggested Lily. ‘No cake, we’ll have to pretend that …’

‘Cake stand! Of course! You’re going to be good at this sales lark, Lily.’

‘Well …’ Lily was pleased with the compliment, but cautious. ‘I’ve got to be good at being a junior first.’

‘It’s not so bad. You can soon work up.’

‘I hope so.’

Then, in case anyone was looking, she added quickly:

‘I’d better get on. Or you’ll never get your stuff moved in time for breakfast, let alone tea! You should probably check with Miss Frobisher, but she told me and Gladys she wanted our old sales space clear for you by three o’clock.’

‘Perfect. See you later!’

Lily watched him go, skirting a display of soft toys in his dark suit, watched him stop by Miss Frobisher, checking with her as she’d suggested, presumably, and then bound back up the stairs. He was all angles, tall and gawky, nothing like as smooth as the other salesmen she’d observed, with his wrists poking out from his shirt cuffs, his thatch of dark hair, and his glasses ever so slightly askew.

He seemed awfully nice, though. Friendly. And he’d spoken to her like a human being although he was a salesman proper, and she was a very junior junior.

She might be bounded on one side by bitchy Beryl in Toys, but with Household and Furniture on the other, Gladys an ally on her own department, and Miss Frobisher to learn from, Lily, as she went back to her brushing, felt very fortunate indeed.

Then it happened. The air-raid sirens began their wailing in the street outside. Above her head a bell shrilled, across the floor a whistle sounded, then another, sharper, longer … There was a flurry of alarm, then the buyers took charge, shepherding customers towards the stairs, prising people who were insistent on completing their purchases away from counters, making sure they had their own belongings and, crucially, their gas masks, with them. Lily looked round, not sure what to do, but Gladys was at her side.

‘Wait till Miss Frobisher tells us we can go. Or gives us a customer to take down.’

‘A customer?’ Lily looked horrified.

‘Don’t worry, it’s never happened yet,’ Gladys assured her.

Luckily, because of the disruption of the move, there weren’t many customers on the first floor and within seconds Miss Frobisher beckoned them over and told them to take the back stairs as quickly as they could. Lily had hoped to get away from the ear-splitting bell but another was clanging on the stairs, which with the ringing of feet on stone and the carrying of voices up and down the stairwell – some anxious, some bored, some annoyed – was even worse. And then, worse still, there was Beryl.

‘All we need!’ she cried. ‘Me and Les are going to the pictures tonight! Well, supposed to be!’

She glared at Lily.

‘I hope you’re not going to be bad luck!’

Chapter 4

Lily’s first impression of the shelter was its size. It seemed to stretch for miles – well, it must do, if it connected in a sort of dog-leg with Burrell’s basement way down the street. She’d seen newsreels at the pictures, of course, of big air-raid shelters in London and people sleeping in the Underground’s own tunnels. She’d watched grimly as they tucked small children up with their teddy bears, tried to read in the gloom, or knit, or play cards to pass the time, and not to flinch too much in front of the camera when the air juddered with explosions on the streets above. The sirens went often enough in Hinton, because of planes flying over and back to other, bigger towns, but Lily had never had to spend a raid in a public shelter. She didn’t count the one at school, because you knew everyone; you were among friends, and the teachers were in charge, and however frightened you might have been you had to put on a brave face for the younger kids and try and keep them amused – or at least not let them get upset. And if the warning went when she was at home, their next-door neighbours had an Anderson shelter in the back garden, and she and her mum had always taken refuge there.

It had been a right performance getting it installed, Lily remembered. Their neighbours’ backyard had been concreted over, so Sid and Reg, before Reg had joined up, had helped break up the concrete with pickaxes and dig the deep hole to fit the shelter in. Lily had helped pile all the soil from the hole back on top of the shelter, and the biggest slabs of concrete and some fresh cement had been put back to make a sloping roof. Lily had wondered why – was it to make it look nicer? But Mr Crosbie, their neighbour, had laughed in a scornful way and Reg had quietly explained that no one cared about the look of the thing. It was so that any incendiaries would slide off and not burn through.

Lily had hated every moment she’d spent in there. Obviously, there was the being scared, and not just from the moment you heard the whine of the siren. Sometimes, often, she was scared even before. She couldn’t say exactly why, but it was as if since the start of the war – from the time she’d realised what it actually meant – she’d been living with her head constantly on one side, her heart beating that little bit faster, her mouth dry yet needing to swallow, her stomach turning over, the blood in her ears constantly pulsing, alert to anything that could be the sound of a plane. As if that wasn’t enough, there was the damp earthy smell of the shelter, the raw slats of wood to sit on, the battery-powered lamp which would often give out, the stink of the paraffin heater and worst of all, the bucket in the corner, which they’d all had the embarrassment of having to use. Fear played its part there as well.

Mr Crosbie was a warden at the public shelter two streets away, so if there was a raid he wasn’t usually there, just twittery Mrs Crosbie and their son Trevor, who was eight, and had adenoids and sniffed a lot. Lily sometimes wondered, when the war was over and she thought about it all, what she’d remember most. She hoped it wouldn’t be smells: the smell of stale breath, and the bucket, and the graveyard smell of the shelter making her feel she was dead already, when being walled up in this tomb was the very thing that was supposed to be keeping her alive.

‘Oy! Dopey!’ Beryl waved her over. ‘There’s a space here.’

Somehow, in the crush, Lily had lost sight of Gladys, though she could see her now, lucky thing, sitting with Miss Thomas on one of the benches along the walls. Lily squeezed in beside Beryl who, relieved from her duties on the shop floor, seemed to have decided to use the hours that lay ahead to interrogate Lily. Not about her family, or where she lived, or what she was like as a person, but if she had a boyfriend, what film stars she fancied, and whether she owned a pair of stockings. Needless to say, Lily did not, but Beryl did, of course, and soon, unsatisfied with Lily’s disappointing answers, was happy to hold forth about her own likes, dislikes, and achievements. Rather too happy for Lily, especially in a public place, as Beryl divulged details of some of her past boyfriends and advised Lily on suspenders. Though she did learn one useful piece of information: in the fullness of time, and still using precious coupons of course – there was no getting round that – she’d be able to put her name down at the hosiery counter at Marlow’s for stockings to wear to work.

‘Not the best, of course, not fully fashioned,’ explained Beryl. Lily wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but she wasn’t going to admit it and open herself up to more teasing. Doubtless Sid could fill her in: he’d probably had to buy them for girlfriends. ‘But at least then you can stop wearing those stupid ankle socks!’

Having to wear socks to work had been another thing that had depressed Lily about her appearance, but she’d noticed all the other juniors wearing them, Gladys included. Let’s face it, grown women were having to wear ankle socks these days, at least for everyday.

Not Beryl, who extended a stockinged leg.

‘These are only rayon, I’m working up to nylons,’ Beryl went on. ‘If I play my cards right with Les … who knows …?’

She gave Lily a sidelong, smirking look, including her in the conspiracy. Lily felt instantly sorry for Les, poor mug. He must be the one forking out for stockings already. Lily wondered how he could afford it.

So the time passed, awkwardly for Lily. Beryl prattled on, reading out snippets from the Reveille and Picture Post magazines that were being passed around. The hands on the clock passed five o’clock, then six … The ladies from the canteen came round with meat-paste sandwiches, and you could get a drink of water from a big urn if you wanted. Lily had one, but only took sips – she was sure there’d be a better arrangement than a bucket in the corner, but she was embarrassed to ask, and didn’t want to find out. But she had to admit, spending time in the shelter at Marlow’s, even with Beryl as company, was preferable to hours with Mrs Crosbie and Trevor. Though she couldn’t help thinking about her mum. She hoped she was safe in the Anderson shelter. Dora didn’t know yet about the safety precautions Marlow’s had taken, though surely she’d assume that a place with its sort of reputation wouldn’t take any risks with its staff, let alone customers. Lily had no way, anyhow, of letting her know she was all right – in fact that she felt safer here than she’d felt in any raid so far. At least she could breathe. At least she could stand upright if she wanted to. And at least there was light.

Finally, finally, Beryl turned away to torment her other neighbour, Mr Bunting, her boss. Lily saw him reluctantly put down his Just William book (‘Research!’ he’d claimed with a twinkle) to listen to Beryl’s chatter. He really was a softie, bless him.

At last Lily was free to look around. Though there was no aircraft noise that sounded close by, still less any bombs, Gladys was sitting stock-still and staring straight ahead of her. However bad the raids might be for Lily, she reflected, how much worse for Gladys, every one a reminder of what her parents had gone through. Miss Thomas was chatting to Miss Frobisher, she saw, Miss Frobisher as immaculate as ever, her skirt and jacket still looking crisp, her stockinged legs crossed, though in a concession to the situation, she’d kicked off her shoes. The other Childrenswear saleslady, Miss Temple (Lily couldn’t imagine ever feeling familiar enough with them to think of them as ‘girls’), was sitting not far away. She must have come down with a couple of customers. They had their coats with them, and handbags; the older woman had a couple of parcels. They looked like a mother and daughter, the girl not much older than Lily. They were holding hands, and tightly, Lily noticed.

She was just thinking about her own mum again, and that at least she had Sid with her, who’d be some comfort, and would talk sense about Lily being bound to be safe, when it happened. It came out of nowhere. One minute there was a hum of chatter from the hundred and fifty-odd people in the room, the next there was the sound of a plane and a terrific tearing, screaming sound, followed by a massive chest-constricting thump. Somehow, deep down as they were, however many floors of concrete and steel of Marlow’s were above them, it rocked people back in their seats and almost winded them. The lights suspended from the ceiling shook, flickered and went out, before coming back on again in time for Lily to see the girl opposite – the one who’d been holding her mother’s hand – jump up and start screaming.

‘Violet!’ Her mother tried to pull her down again. ‘Violet, it’s all right. We’re all right! Stop that!’

But Violet couldn’t. She stood there, shaking and screaming, screaming and shaking, all eyes on her, her mother trying hopelessly to calm her. Miss Frobisher wriggled her feet back into her shoes and got up to try to help, Miss Thomas following behind. A couple of other salesladies crowded round, offering a handkerchief dipped in water and smelling salts. Soon the girl was surrounded by well-meaning do-gooders, who were doing no good at all. Lily couldn’t bear it. Jumping up, she crossed the floor, found a way through the crowd, grabbed the girl’s shoulders, and shook her, hard. Violet stopped screaming momentarily, then started again. Without hesitation, Lily raised her hand and slapped her. Violet took a step back, opened her mouth to scream, then raised a hand to her face and sank down into her seat. Her mother put her arms round her and leant her head against hers as the girl started to cry. Then, apart from Violet’s sobs, there was a deathly silence broken only by the far-away clanging of fire engines as they rushed to the scene of the blast. Lily slowly raised her head and met Miss Frobisher’s eyes. Miss Frobisher shook her head. Lily put her own hands to her face, both of them. What had she done?

‘You’re all right! Oh, Lily! Thank God!’

Lily’s face was pressed to her mother’s shoulder, against the old plaid dressing gown with its frayed yellow piping. It smelt of her mum, of lily of the valley talc, of camphor, of home.

It was nearly midnight. The raid, or the danger to Hinton at any rate, had been over by ten, but it had taken Lily over an hour to get home in the blackout, trying and often failing to pick out the now patchy luminous paint on the kerbs. She stumbled a few times, often finding her way more by the glow of lit cigarettes than anything else. There weren’t many of those – though enough for her not to feel scared – but at least there were some people about, trapped in town, perhaps, like she had been, by the raid. She was more shaken by what she overheard. The bomb had dropped near Tatchell’s, the only decent-sized factory in Hinton, that had made carburettors and speedometers for cars before the war and was now making aircraft parts. But if it had been aimed at Tatchell’s, people were wondering, why not a bigger payload? Why only one bomb? Everyone had an opinion or had heard something different. The plane had been winged by an ack-ack gun … no, it had been hit in the fuselage and been leaking fuel … no, it was the pilot; he’d been wounded, so had hit the button to offload the last of his ordnance and headed for home … No one knew for sure and they probably never would, unless the plane had come down somewhere this side of the Channel, so what was the point of guessing, thought Lily. It was a sign of how tired she was that she didn’t care. She was usually the first to want to know; to try to make some sense of the nonsense of it all, death dropping from a summer sky on to a blameless row of houses and a pub, apparently … a few more lives and families destroyed. Again, rumour had anything between two and twenty dead, plus, people speculated, those dying, injured, trapped, survived …

It was all too much for Lily. She’d got home in a daze and was still in a daze when Sid pressed a mug of cocoa into her hand. He was dressed – he’d been out looking for her and couldn’t think why he’d missed her on her way home.

Lily looked down through the coiling steam of her cocoa. She felt the warmth of the mug and held on tight. It seemed like the only real thing in the world.

‘I came through the park,’ she confessed.

‘The park! What were you thinking?’ cried her mother. ‘You don’t know who could have been hanging about in there and—’

But at Sid’s warning look, Dora held up her hands in submission and turned away.

‘You were just trying to get home double quick, weren’t you, Lil?’

Sid was trying to help her out and Lily nodded. She couldn’t tell them she’d walked home in such a state she hadn’t really noticed which way her feet were taking her. She’d been too busy replaying the awful aftermath of what she’d done.

Violet and her mother had been quickly led away to another part of the shelter. In fact, Lily had learnt, there was a sort of dormitory where anyone who wasn’t feeling well could go and lie down. There were half a dozen camp beds screened off from the rest of the space by a wooden partition, and the store’s nurse had a basic medical kit for use in emergencies. Lily had been led away too, by Miss Frobisher, out on to the stairs.

‘I don’t quite know what to say.’

Miss Frobisher was lighting a cigarette. Like everything else about her, the whole action was elegant – the cigarette tapped on a green enamelled case and lit with the snap of a matching lighter. She drew a deep breath and the tip of the cigarette glowed in the gloom. She seemed as cool and in command as ever but smoking on the premises by staff, except in the canteen, was strictly forbidden, so Lily could gauge the extent of her boss’s agitation.

‘I’ve simply never had to deal with anything like this before.’

‘I’m so sorry, Miss Frobisher,’ stammered Lily. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

Except she did. She knew, because she’d seen one of the teachers do it, when they’d been caught in a raid at school, the very first time the sirens had gone, and Deborah Lowe, with her silly fringe and freckles, had gone glassy-eyed with fear, and started an awful wailing, and one of the teachers had given her a good smart smack which had sorted her out.

‘Only … no one else seemed to be doing anything much and what they were doing, well, didn’t seem to be working. And I do believe that –’ Lily was basing this on a newsreel she’d seen – ‘if one person gets upset and panics, it … well, it can affect other people too.’

‘That may well be,’ said Miss Frobisher, puffing a ribbon of smoke up the stairs with a toss of her head. ‘But it’s beside the point. If it had been another staff member, even someone senior to yourself – well, that would have been one thing. Bad enough, but we could have dealt with it internally. But a customer …!’

Lily hung her head. Was she going to break all records at Marlow’s, and not in the way she’d hoped? The first person to be sacked before they’d even completed a full day’s work?

‘I shall have to take it to Miss Garner. As I said, it’s beyond anything I’ve ever had to deal with before.’

‘I’m really sorry if I did wrong, Miss Frobisher,’ said Lily again.

‘And she’ll have to take it to Mr Marlow, I should think. Oh, Lily. And I really thought I could perhaps make something of you.’

Looking down now into her cocoa, Lily bit her lip. She’d let everyone down, her mum, Sid, Gladys, herself. It’d be the laundry or the Fox and Goose after all. And thinking about the opportunity she’d lost somehow unfroze everything she’d been keeping in. Her lip wobbled and tears dripped into her cup.

‘She’s washed out, Mum, get her to bed,’ Sid took away the mug. ‘She’ll have to be up again in a few hours.’

Dora put her arm round her daughter, regretting her previous outburst. She’d only spoken that way because of the fear and the worry. Why did anxiety so often come over as anger?

‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m sorry,’ said Lily obscurely, apologising not for the park, but for something her mother didn’t even know about.

‘Don’t be silly. I’m sorry for going off like that. It was only because … oh, never mind. We’re all a bit beyond ourselves, aren’t we?’

Lily nodded.

‘Bet this feels like the longest day of your life, eh, Sis?’

Sid patted Lily’s shoulder and she nearly crumpled. Please don’t be nice to me, she thought, forcing her eyes wide to stop the tears, or it’ll all come out!

‘Tell you what. You can sleep in with me tonight, love,’ offered her mum. ‘Would you like that?’

Lily nodded dumbly.

‘Yes, please,’ she whispered.

She didn’t imagine she’d sleep much, wherever she was.

Miss Frobisher had told her not to go down to the lockers the next day, but to take the service lift up to the third floor, the floor where Miss Garner – and Mr Marlow – had their offices. The floor where only a week ago, Lily had had her interview, and had left with such high hopes. She wasn’t sorry not to have to mix with the others, to see the stares and the nudging. She was sorry not to see Gladys, to say goodbye if nothing else, but never to see Beryl again could only be a blessing.

She had to squash into the lift with a cage of gents’ socks and caps steered by a grizzled man with a moustache, presumably on his way up to the stockrooms. He manoeuvred his load wordlessly aside so Lily could get in with her gas mask and bag, which contained the contract of employment she’d signed only yesterday and hadn’t had the chance to drop off at the staff office. Nice waste of paper and ink that had been!

‘It’s you, in’t it?’ the man said as they creaked up past the first and second floors. ‘The little miss who slapped that other little madam down the shelter last night?’

‘Don’t, please.’

‘No need to apologise, love. There’s plenty on the staff who’d love to land one on a few of our customers, and without the excuse of a Jerry overhead! And on a few of the management, come to that! You only did what no one else dared. It raised a smile with some of us, I can tell you.’

‘Oh, well, that’s all right then!’

‘Sorry, chick. I didn’t mean … you’re new, ain’t yer?’

‘Newer than new. Yesterday was my first day,’ Lily confessed.

‘Dear oh dear! Start as you mean to go on, eh?’

‘I don’t think there’ll be any going on,’ said Lily sadly.

Her new friend shook his head.

‘That’s a pity. Even more of a pity there’s no union here that might fight your corner. We’re trying to set one up, but these family firms …’ He tutted and rolled his eyes. ‘You wouldn’t be able to join till you was sixteen, of course, but at least a union’d look out for you if you was in trouble.’

‘Well, that’s good to know. For other people,’ said Lily. ‘But it won’t come in time for me, I’m afraid.’

‘In that case you’ll have to stick up for yourself, won’t you? You don’t seem backward in coming forward.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Lily sadly as the lift clanked to a halt at her floor. ‘That’s what got me into trouble in the first place.’

‘My forms from yesterday, Miss Garner.’

Lily placed them on the desk.

‘I’d already signed them, I’m afraid. I’m sorry about the waste of paper. But I know you wanted the paper clip back especially.’

‘I did, Lily. Thank you.’

Miss Garner was still trying to come to terms with all she’d learned about the events of the previous evening from Eileen Frobisher, who’d sought her out to explain the situation. This was, of course, precisely the sort of thing Miss Garner had dreaded with the type of girls she was having to take on. She’d anticipated most things – or thought she had. Slapdash appearance, grubby fingernails, slatternly habits, dropped aitches, mispronunciations … chatting amongst themselves or, worse, over-familiarity with the customers … that was as far as her imagination had taken her. Assaulting the customers had never occurred to her. But …

‘The thing is, Lily,’ she said, ‘I’ve had a telephone call. From Mr Marlow.’

So he knew as well! Lily’s cheeks flamed.

‘And he …’

Miss Garner removed her treasured paper clip from Lily’s forms and stowed it in a little japanned box on her desk.

‘He’d had a telephone call from Mrs Tunnicliffe. Violet Tunnicliffe’s mother,’ she added, inscrutably.

Lily bit her lip. Hard. Was Miss Garner going to deliver the killer blow, or would Lily be passed on to Cedric Marlow? Would he rant and rage? She didn’t somehow think that would be his style. More a sort of sad disappointment that she’d turned out so badly. Either way, it’d end with her being shown the door.

But Miss Garner was speaking again.

‘It seems that Violet’s very highly strung. They’ve had trouble with her before in air raids. The doctor prescribed a bromide, but they didn’t have any with them yesterday.’

‘That’s awful,’ said Lily. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, well, it gets some people like that, doesn’t it?’

The little japanned box had a picture of a temple or a palace or something on it, brilliant in gold and turquoise. When the sun poked through the taped-over window, it throbbed with colour. Miss Garner saw her looking at it.

‘My brother sent it to me. He’s out in Syria. Perfect for paper clips.’

‘I see,’ said Lily automatically, though she couldn’t believe they were talking like this, about paper clips of all things.

Please. Get on with it, she thought. Why are you dragging it out?

‘The fact is’ – Miss Garner couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice – ‘Mrs Tunnicliffe’s actually rather grateful to you. She can’t do anything with Violet when she gets like that. If it had gone on much longer she’d have screamed herself into fits, and it needed someone to bring her to her senses.’

Another ‘I see’ would have done well here, but Lily was too stunned to speak.

‘In fact, Lily, if you really want to know—’

Miss Garner herself sounded amazed as she pulled a piece of scrap paper towards her.

‘I wrote this down so that I could relay it correctly. Mrs Tunnicliffe couldn’t praise you highly enough. “Quick-thinking” was the phrase she used. And she told Mr Marlow to make sure you were properly thanked.’

‘Never!’ The word was out before Lily could help herself.

A brief smile touched Miss Garner’s lips.

‘That’s what she said. But—’

She couldn’t let this go without delivering something of a lesson.

‘You crossed a line, Lily, and I can’t recommend you ever do the same in future. Though let’s hope the situation won’t arise.’

‘No, Miss Garner. Of course not. But – have I got this right? Shall I … can I … can I stay on?’

‘Yes. You can consider yourself reprieved.’

Lily looked blank. It wasn’t a word she knew.

‘It means that it’ll go in the incident book, though I’m not quite sure under what heading … but when it comes to your staff record – well, it’s more likely to be entered as a mark in your favour than against. Anyway, leave that to me. We’ll say no more about it. Well, go on!’ she chided. ‘You’d better get to your department! Or you’ll be late!’

‘Yes, Miss Garner.’ Lily was beaming. ‘Of course! And thank you!’

She scuttled down to the basement and stowed her things away. As she straightened her hair in the mirror – no Beryl to hog it today, just a few stragglers, as the ten-minute bell had already gone – she still couldn’t stop smiling. She’d somehow got away with it, she’d lived to fight another day. No, bad choice of words – lived to work another day. And at Marlow’s, not at the laundry, not at the Fox and Goose!

‘Thank you, God,’ she breathed, as she walked on to the sales floor. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

Miss Frobisher looked surprisingly unsurprised to see her – Miss Garner must have tipped her off. Miss Thomas raised an eyebrow to Miss Temple but gave Lily a smile. Gladys was open-mouthed, her face a pantomime of astonishment, delight and relief. But best of all was Beryl, whose mouth also fell open – in shock.

‘Not so unlucky after all,’ she hissed as she passed Lily later that morning. ‘How did you do it? Who do you know up on the third floor? Got a mate up there, have you?’

‘No,’ said Lily.

‘Well, you’ve got away with it this time,’ said Beryl nastily. ‘But you’d better watch your step.’

‘Oh, I will,’ Lily assured her. With you and everyone else, she thought, as Beryl turned back to her own department.

She wouldn’t be taking any more chances.

Chapter 5

Over the next few weeks, as a thankful Lily settled in, she began to feel more and more at home at Marlow’s.

Miss Frobisher was certainly determined to make sure she ‘got to know the department’. Day by day she took Lily round the racks and display cabinets, pulling out drawers, showing off leather bootees with embroidered flowers (pink or blue), tiny but fully fashioned socks and miniature vests. In the toddler section for boys there were flannel shirts, elasticated bow ties, velveteen shorts, and child-sized braces. For girls, there were Liberty lawn dresses, corduroy pinafores and Viyella blouses. The party dresses, their protective tissue removed for the day’s trading, hung stiffly on their racks, crying out for jelly, ice cream and streamers. Some hope these days, thought Lily – though maybe not for the sort of children whose parents could afford these prices on top of their child’s coupons. Miss Frobisher pointed out again where items were missing – the sizes and styles Lily and Gladys had carted up to the stockroom. These were the ones the juniors would be sent to fetch.

Lily’s bond with Gladys was strengthening every day and Lily was so relieved that it was Gladys she worked with, not someone like Beryl, who continued to smirk when she saw them leaving the store arm-in-arm, and mockingly called them ‘the lovebirds’.

‘She’s just jealous,’ Lily reassured Gladys. ‘She doesn’t seem to have a single friend of her own on the staff.’

‘She’s more interested in boyfriends, isn’t she?’

They’d both seen Les, who, Lily learned, worked as a driver in Despatch, lounging with a cigarette by the staff entrance as he waited for Beryl to complete her elaborate toilette at the end of the day.

But there was something admiring and envious in Gladys’s tone, and Lily knew there was nothing her new friend would have liked more than to have a boyfriend of her own. But if Lily despaired about her looks, at least she had a pert little nose and wide-set blue eyes, unlike Gladys whose hair was poker-straight, whose looks were unremarkable, and who was prone to the odd outbreak of angry spots.

Gladys was almost as potty about the pictures as Sid, though naturally she preferred a ‘nice romance’ to the action-adventures Sid enjoyed. Her search for a Hinton-based Errol Flynn was hardly likely to be satisfied soon, though, if ever, and not just because of her looks. It was a shame, because Gladys was so kind and generous – such a good person – but the sort of person people took advantage of. As Lily had realised on that very first day, it was a good job Gladys had Lily to be her protector, even if only from the likes of Beryl.

Despite her bravado, Lily was still a bit nervous of Beryl herself. She had such a bold manner with men, and such a sharp tongue. Beryl would smile quite brazenly at Robert Marlow when he toured the first-floor departments, whereas Lily and Gladys tried, as the staff manual urged the juniors, to make themselves helpful but invisible.

Only with Jim did Lily risk a smile and a word on the shop floor. The day after the air raid, he’d arranged his Tudor-style dining set in the corner he’d identified, and set the table with cloth and crockery, but Lily hadn’t been invited to tea. He hadn’t witnessed the shelter incident but he’d heard about it, of course, because he’d grinned at her and asked where she’d learn to throw such a powerful right hook. Lily had blushed and he realised he’d perhaps gone too far.

‘One way to get yourself noticed, I suppose,’ he’d commented.

‘I shan’t be repeating it, don’t worry,’ was Lily’s response.

After work, as they walked to their respective bus stops, Gladys took her to task.

‘How do you do it?’ she demanded.

‘What?’

Lily wasn’t aware she’d done anything.

‘Talk to people – boys – like that Jim – the way you do.’

The question baffled Lily but it was true, Gladys blushed and stammered if anyone in trousers, staff or customer, young or old, gave her so much as a polite nod of the head and a ‘good morning’.

‘I suppose,’ said Lily thoughtfully, ‘it’s because I’ve grown up with them. Boys, I mean – my brothers. I’m used to having them around. I don’t think anything of it.’

Gladys sighed enviously. Apart from the father she’d adored, she’d never been exposed to male company the way Lily had.

‘Come to tea,’ said Lily impulsively. ‘One night soon. Then you can meet Sid for yourself. You’ll see, it’s impossible to be shy with him around!’

Gladys’s face lit up.

‘Oh, Lily, I’d love that!’ she cried. ‘Thank you!’

‘I’ll have to ask my mum,’ warned Lily. But she knew Dora wouldn’t mind. She was over the moon that Lily had found such a good job. Her wages helped with the housekeeping, and with Sid at home to help with the veg plot, life was easier all round. His foot was healing, but he needed to give it a while before he could fully put his weight on it without doing further damage, the doctor reckoned.

Before Lily knew it, she’d been at Marlow’s a month, and Miss Frobisher took her to one side. Her probationary period was up.

‘So, how are you liking us?’

‘Oh, Miss Frobisher, I love it!’ exclaimed Lily. ‘I feel so lucky, I really do!’

‘Well, that’s good to know. You’ve certainly knuckled down after your rather … rocky start.’

Lily knew what she meant and hung her head.

‘It’s all right, Lily,’ said Miss Frobisher kindly. ‘I think you’ll do very well. I need a bright girl like you. There used to be six staff on this department – myself, three full-time salesgirls and two juniors. Now all my full-timers have gone off to do war work, so there’s only you and Gladys, and Miss Thomas and Miss Temple, who retired years ago, really – and Miss Thomas only part-time. You could be serving customers sooner than you think.’

Lily glowed. And gulped.

‘Don’t worry,’ Miss Frobisher smiled. ‘Ask the others if you’re not sure. Gladys will give you all the help she can, I know, and the salesgirls if they’re not busy. But never let a customer see you look confused. Take your troubles away to a colleague. Is that clear?’

Lily nodded.

‘I’ll try not to let you down, Miss Frobisher,’ she assured her. ‘I really am grateful for this job. And, well …’ Her eyes met Miss Frobisher’s cool grey ones for a moment. ‘A second chance.’

‘Then prove it to me,’ she replied, but with a smile. ‘And you can start by tidying away those vests, please.’

As usual, without even seeming to move her head, she’d noticed that Miss Temple had finished serving a customer and was now escorting her to the lift. Miss Frobisher herself swooped off to attend to a woman dithering by a display of little Argyll pullovers.

‘Mrs MacRorie! How good to see you … how are your boys?’

Lily moved to the counter and started re-tying the ribbons on the little crossover vests. As she slid them as neatly as she could back into their cellophane packets, her gaze drifted to Household where she could see Jim serving a tall, bulky man with a military moustache. The man was jabbing his finger repeatedly, evidently making a point. And making sure Jim took it …

‘I said “usual arrangement”, didn’t I?’ he boomed. ‘What part of that do you not understand?’

Jim paused in wrapping the purchase, a fancy chrome ashtray on a stand.

‘All of it, I’m afraid, sir,’ he replied, genuinely puzzled. ‘The usual arrangement for a purchase like this nowadays can only be “Cash and Take” or “Account and Take”. Is that what you mean? I take it you have an account with us?’

Sir Douglas Brimble looked at him coldly.

‘Of course I have an account! Do you think you’re being funny, young man?’

‘No, Sir Douglas, I wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘Not your idea of a joke? Nor is it mine. I’m not talking about my account!’

Jim still looked baffled.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, the same arrangement that I have with Mr Bishop. Look, just fetch him, will you?’

Maurice Bishop was Second Sales on the department, a sharp-faced chap in his twenties – an Army reject on account of his supposed asthma.

‘I’m sorry, sir, Mr Bishop has taken his annual holiday this week.’

This was not the answer Sir Douglas wanted. Irritably, he leant further over the counter and the jabbing forefinger made contact with Jim’s lapel.

‘Do you know how much I’ve spent in this store over the years? This past year, even? It’s customers like me who keep places like this going, especially in these straitened times. We pay your wages!’

Jim had certainly seen Sir Douglas in the store, indeed on their department, but he’d always been served by Maurice Bishop until now.

‘That may well be, sir, but—’

‘Account and Take indeed!’

‘Don’t you have a car, Sir Douglas? Is that the problem?’

‘Of course I have a car! Impertinence!’

Sir Douglas Brimble of Holmwood House, stockbroker, landowner, former councillor, and past Mayor of Hinton, was a man accustomed to getting his own way. Instantly.

‘My problem, as you put it, is that my wife dropped me off. I shall walk to the station where I am catching a train to Birmingham for a business lunch. If you think I’m going to lug an ashtray on a stand round with me all day, you’ve another think coming!’

There was a pause while the bristling moustache bristled.

‘Usual arrangement!’

The one thing Lily was still uneasy about was going to dinner alone. For the first few days after the incident in the shelter, she’d had to endure a lot of sidelong looks and questions and it was hard to explain away how she’d managed to be kept on without revealing what Miss Garner had told her. Even a few weeks on, she still felt some of the staff were looking at her, judging her, and, not knowing of Mrs Tunnicliffe’s intervention, wondering how she’d managed to hang on to her job. Lily certainly didn’t feel she could share the real reason for Violet’s hysteria – the secret wasn’t hers to tell – on top of which she felt strangely protective towards Violet. In any case, if she wanted further vindication, customer confidentiality, she’d learnt when she finally got to the end of the staff manual, was paramount. At the same time, she knew that her first day’s dinner break with Gladys had been an exception: the two juniors couldn’t be off the department at the same time. Today, however, as she left the sales floor, by great good fortune Jim caught up with her and they walked down to the canteen together. Lily was still getting used to the menu and brightened when she saw it was Irish stew.

‘Don’t get excited. Gravy with gristle,’ warned Jim, but Lily eyed the ladleful on her plate with relish. There were the usual collapsing potatoes too, and cabbage – again. But there was roly-poly with currants (‘If you can find them,’ warned Jim) for afters – and Lily intended eating every mouthful. They carried their food to a long table, squeezing with their trays held high past men from the warehouse playing cards for matchsticks.

It was then, as they ate, that Jim related his odd encounter with Sir Douglas.

‘But what did he mean?’

‘That’s what I didn’t know. But I wanted to find out. So I had to pretend I did.’

‘How?’

‘Come on, you go to the pictures, don’t you?’ grinned Jim. ‘You know the bit where our hero has a sudden thought, or realises something, or remembers. They do this knowing sort of look. So I gave him one of those.’

‘Knowing?’

Lily stopped with a forkful of stew halfway to her mouth. She’d never heard anyone talk quite like Jim. Not to her, anyway, not even Sid, who had a pretty vivid turn of phrase when he liked, the more so since he’d joined the Navy – and not in a good way, Lily’s mum often scolded. Jim’s tone was sort of casual, but confidential, and chatty. Now he tutted impatiently.

‘Like this!’

He mimed an expression somewhere between surprise and ‘Aha!’

Lily nodded uncertainly.

‘I don’t think Clark Gable’s got anything to worry about,’ she smiled. ‘And then?’

‘And then I apologised profusely. Claimed I understood. So Sir Douglas huffed and puffed, said he should think so too. We made out his account as “Account and Take”, he signed it, I put the docket in the tube, it came back receipted from the cash office, he crammed his hat on his head, and off he stomped.’

‘Leaving you with his ashtray! But if you only pretended to know … and he left without it … what are you going to do with it?’

‘Not going to do, already done,’ said Jim triumphantly. ‘Are you eating that potato?’

‘Yes!’ said Lily.

‘Just thought I’d ask. You eat a lot, don’t you, for a girl.’

‘Oh, go on, have it then.’ Lily forked the potato on to his plate. ‘It’s got an eye in it, though. Be careful.’

‘Thanks.’ Jim attacked it eagerly.

‘You eat a lot, for one that’s so skinny,’ said Lily. ‘Doesn’t your landlady feed you?’

‘Not much,’ said Jim ruefully. The potato had already disappeared.

Lily returned to the subject in hand.

‘So, the ashtray. What have you done with it?’

‘Well,’ began Jim, leaning in and dropping his voice, obviously relishing the telling. ‘I don’t know if you’ve been told, and maybe it doesn’t apply to those tiddly little baby things you sell, but with petrol restricted to essential work only, we can only deliver larger items. Sofas and chairs and tables and beds and wardrobes – if we can get them to sell in the first place – but – well, you get the idea.’

‘Definitely not ashtrays on stands.’

‘Absolutely not. Anything like that the customer has to take away. Though evidently not in Sir Douglas’s case. So here’s the good bit. He goes off, I wrap the thing up, address it to him and take it down to Despatch. The office assumed it was an add-on to some bigger item, told me it was Les Bulpitt’s round, so I went and found him.’

‘Les …?’ Lily frowned. ‘Beryl – you know, on Toys – she goes out with someone called Les who works in Despatch. Same one?’

‘Tall, a bit of a swagger and a lot of Brylcreem?’

‘That sounds like him.’

‘Interesting … Anyway, I offer up the parcel, and say the magic words. “Usual Arrangement for Sir Douglas Brimble.” At which Les does a double-take and says, “You’re in on it now, are you? I suppose Maurice filled you in …”’

‘Maurice Bishop? In on what?’

Jim had demolished his pudding (not a bad number of currants, actually) in about four mouthfuls and was now eyeing Lily’s. She curled her hand protectively round her bowl. Defeated, he took a sip of water.

‘Les was due a break, so I went and stood on the loading bay with him while he had a smoke. Did the “all boys together” act. Pretended Bishop hadn’t had the chance to explain it all to me before he left. Asked a few discreet questions. With my coat collar turned up, of course, best gumshoe style,’ he added.

Lily never knew when Jim was joking. He was very like Sid in that respect.

‘Turns out,’ Jim went on, ‘Sir Douglas and a select few of his cronies still have everything they buy delivered, large or small. There’s a salesman in the know on every department they might use – Wines and Spirits, Tobacco and Cigars, Gents’ Outfitting, Household. There’s a “consideration”, naturally, for any salesman involved for adding the stuff on the van, and any driver involved for adding the delivery on to his round when he’s next in the immediate area. In fact, it turns out that’s how Maurice Bishop is spending his annual holiday – not in Stoke-on-Trent with his aged mum but in Blackpool, if you please. It obviously all tots up.’

‘But that’s …’ Lily hadn’t yet memorised every single line of the staff manual but ‘Private arrangements with customers are strictly forbidden’ was one sentence which she very much remembered reading. ‘That’s a sacking offence!’

‘Worse than that,’ said Jim. ‘It’s illegal. How are they getting their hands on the extra petrol, for a start? Les, Maurice, all the others involved and, worse, Marlow’s itself, could be prosecuted – and found guilty!’

‘But, Jim,’ Lily was aghast, ‘if you’ve given Les the parcel, you’re involved now, you’re as bad as the others!’

‘This is the clever bit,’ explained Jim. ‘I told him to hang on to it. Told a little white lie – well, a big white whopper. Said Sir Douglas might be adding a couple more small things to his order. Les was fine about it. He wasn’t going anywhere near Sir Douglas’s today anyhow.’

‘Fine,’ said Lily. ‘But now what are you going to do about it?’

‘Good question.’

Jim returned to his pudding bowl and scraped at an all-but-transparent smear of custard.

‘You’ll have to report it, surely?’

‘I will. But …’

‘But what?’

Jim leaned forward.

‘Thing is, I need to find out a bit more. Who knows, exactly who’s involved, names, how often it happens, how long it’s been going on. That sort of stuff.’

‘Can’t you ask Les?’

‘How can I? It’s not as if I know the bloke. And as I’m supposed to be in on it, I can’t pretend I’ve no clue what’s going on. I’ve asked enough already. It’s going to look too obvious.’

‘You’re stuck then.’

‘Not entirely.’

A cunning look, much more believable than his ‘knowing’ one, crossed Jim’s face.

‘Not if you’re right and Les and Beryl are—’

Lily could see where this was heading.

‘Hang on!’

‘No, listen – it’s brilliant. You know Beryl. All you have to do is get her at tea break, or go for a drink or something after work—’

‘A drink?!’

‘Only a lemonade!’

‘But, Jim, I don’t know her! And what I do, I don’t much like. And she positively hates me!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. How could anyone hate you?’ Jim smiled.

And instantly, still shaking her head in disbelief, Lily knew she’d do it. Quite how she was going to win Beryl’s confidence – and before Sir Douglas started wondering where his blessed ashtray was and caused a stink – was another matter.

‘I’d be so grateful. You see, Beryl, I haven’t really got a clue.’

Leaving a baffled Gladys to walk on her own, and gasping that she’d explain everything in time, Lily had managed to catch up with Beryl as they left the store. Now they were standing in the evening sun by the sandbagged Post Office on the High Street.

‘I’d be so grateful. Truly I would.’

Beryl took a step back and smiled. Though her smiles always seemed more like a sneer to Lily.

‘Well, I’m sorry, but where exactly do you expect me to start? Hair, clothes, shoes, socks – socks! – make-up – or lack of it – I mean, really!’

Lily looked meekly down at the offending shoes and socks. Her appeal had been one she calculated Beryl would not be able to resist – to offer the hapless Lily advice on clothes and make-up.

‘This is what I mean, Beryl. Anything you could do to help – not that I can afford much …’

She suddenly realised with alarm that Beryl might actually expect her to buy something to prove her new-found interest. Lily handed most of her wages over to her mum and did so gladly. The first thing she was going to spend her savings on, she’d decided, was a better birthday present for her mum than something from the market. And the second thing would be a tie for Sid. Only then was she planning on spending anything on herself.

‘Well, I hardly expect you to start off in Marlow’s! But I tell you what …’

Lily’s ruse had worked. Beryl was clearly flattered to be asked, though it would have killed her to have shown it.

‘Woolies’ll still be open. We’ll go there.’

Five minutes later, as the Woolworth’s sales assistants sighed and looked at their watches – they stayed open half an hour later than Marlow’s, but it was very nearly closing time – Beryl was demonstrating lipsticks.

‘If you’re serious, you ought to get in quick,’ she advised. ‘’Cos this is the next thing that’s going to disappear. So, I mean with your next wage packet.’

She twirled a lipstick up from its case and displayed it.

‘Tangee Uniform lipstick,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t touch it, but for a baby like you, it’s just a hint of colour, see? First step up from Vaseline. Good for starters. But still looks natural.’

Lily nodded, her eyes widening when she saw the price. The whole thing was impossible – but Beryl was so carried away with her own sense of importance and so enjoying imparting information that she didn’t notice.

‘Yes,’ she lamented. ‘They say Coty’s going over to making foot powder and anti-gas ointment, and the metal in lipstick cases and compacts has all got to go for shells. So much for keeping up morale, eh!’

Lily tried to look as shocked and disgusted as Beryl about it, though privately, and despite her desperation to look older, it seemed to her a much better use of resources. The important thing was that Beryl believed she was genuinely interested in all this and was a willing disciple.

‘That was so kind of you, Beryl,’ she said as sincerely as she could when they stood outside again. Behind them the staff were covering the counters and bolting the doors. ‘Thanks so much for explaining it all. I’d never have known all that any other way.’

Basking in the false flattery, Beryl preened, while Lily waited for a thunderbolt to strike her down.

‘So,’ she added oh-so-casually. ‘Which way do you walk home from here?’

‘I’m not going home,’ said Beryl. ‘I’m meeting Les. By the bandstand.’

‘Oh, I can cut through the park!’ said Lily, adding boldly, ‘Shall we …?’

This was where Beryl would surely say she wasn’t being seen with a frump like Lily, and the plan would fall to bits, but to Lily’s amazement, Beryl hooked her arm through hers and gave her a grin.

‘Come on then, kid. At least there’s no swings, so you can’t embarrass me by wanting a go.’

Like the park railings, they’d been taken away for armaments last summer.

‘It’ll be the blooming bandstand next,’ mourned Beryl. ‘I hate this war, don’t you?’

Lily shrugged. ‘Yes, of course, but what choice do we have?’

‘I’m sick of it, no this, no that, nothing decent to buy that we can afford, rotten food, and not much of it, nothing nice or fun—’

‘You have fun with Les, don’t you? Going to the pictures and stuff.’

Lily couldn’t believe how easy it had been to bring his name into the conversation.

‘Oh, Les!’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s all right, I suppose. I mean, he’ll do for now. Until someone better comes along.’

‘He’s got a good job at Marlow’s,’ started Lily, but Beryl looked at her with narrowed eyes.

‘A driver in Despatch? I hope I can do a bit better than that for myself. But at least he knows how to give a girl a good time. We don’t sit in the cheap seats at the cinema, I can tell you.’

‘The circle? How can he afford that?’

Beryl gave her a sidelong look and another smile-cum-smirk.

‘You don’t have to stick with what Cedric Marlow pays you. If you know how to play the system.’

Lily did her best to look both curious and impressed.

‘Beryl … How do you mean?’

They’d reached the park now and her new confidante drew her down on to a bench. In front of them was what before the war had been a flowerbed full of salvias. Now it, and the grass around it, had been ploughed up for allotments.

‘All right,’ began Beryl. ‘I’m going to tell you something. There’s a bit of a racket going on with some of the wealthier customers. Those who’ve been used to snapping their fingers and having everything done for them.’

There was admiration and bitterness in her voice.

‘Well, they don’t expect the war to change that. So to keep them happy, to keep the wheels turning so to speak, Les and some of the other drivers and sales people make it easier for them. Oil those wheels if you like. So they’ll do that bit extra.’

Lily goggled obligingly as if this was the first time she’d heard all this. Beryl looked gratified.

‘Les has got to be careful, of course. All his mileage is logged, but if he organises his round carefully, and filches some petrol from the vans whose drivers aren’t in on it, or tops up with petrol from … well, that he’s got hold of … he can hide the odd bit of extra distance. With road blocks and the Home Guard doing their stuff, who’s to say if he’s had to go a bit out of his way?’

‘Very clever,’ said Lily acidly. Caught up in her story, Beryl didn’t notice.

‘People might have to wait a day or so to get their things, but they don’t mind that. And the other bit extra – the bit of money he gets from doing it – he’s taking a risk, after all – well, it all helps, doesn’t it?’

‘So hang on, you’re telling me certain customers can get stuff delivered that they shouldn’t?’

‘You’re quick, aren’t you? Of course, management mustn’t know. Well, with certain exceptions.’

‘Managers are involved?’

‘Why not? Everyone’s on the make, aren’t they, given the chance?’

‘I can’t believe it!’

Now Lily genuinely was shocked. She could well believe the racket – it only confirmed what Jim had been told. But managers! When they were so trusted and, well, respectable – and earned, surely, a decent salary anyway? That really did amaze her.

‘Who?’ Lily sat forward. ‘Which managers exactly?’

Beryl looked at her, long and hard. Lily could see the emotions fighting within her: self-importance and the satisfaction of imparting what she knew versus discretion. It wasn’t a long struggle. Beryl swooped towards her and whispered in her ear. Lily fell back as if she’d been thumped in the chest.

‘No!’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Not really?’

‘Yes, really! Well, you said you wanted to learn, kid.’

As Lily shook her head, still disbelieving, Beryl sat back herself, pleased with the effect she’d had. She examined her nails and found them pleasing too, even without the crimson nail polish she’d have preferred – forbidden of course for Marlow’s staff, who were only allowed clear – not that any was readily available now.

‘Well, there’s your first lesson,’ she pronounced. ‘Everything and everyone may not be quite what they seem.’

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