Christmas for the Shop Girls by Joanna Toye

Author:Joanna Toye [Toye, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-10-05T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Jim and Lily were nearly home. They crunched along the cinder path which ran between the backs of the houses in Brook Street and Mill Street, though it was years since there’d been a brook or a mill anywhere near, then through the back gate with the stiff latch and the hinge that had gone back to squeaking since there was no oil to be spared. The back door stood open, and from the kitchen, Lily could hear women’s voices.

‘Mum’s got a visitor,’ she tutted. ‘I hope it’s not Jean Crosbie.’

Their next-door neighbour was a waspish woman with a fussy husband and an adenoidal son, but they had to tolerate her because the Anderson shelter was in the Crosbies’ yard, and they shared it. But as they got nearer, Lily realised it wasn’t a voice she recognised – it wasn’t a local accent and it was a young voice, too.

She pushed the door open further and went in.

Dora was sitting at the table, and a young woman was washing up some teacups. Lily gaped. Was her mother ill? Washing up had always been expected of her children, and Jim as well, but a visitor?

The young woman turned when she heard the door scrape open – that needed fixing too. She pushed a lock of dark hair out of her eyes with a damp wrist.

‘You must be Lily!’ she smiled. ‘I’m so glad I haven’t missed you! I can’t shake hands – look at me, making myself at home! I’m Gwenda.’

‘Our Reg’s fiancée,’ said Dora, as if that explained everything.

Yet more tea was made, not for Gwenda – (‘I’m practically afloat!’) but for Lily and Jim, who were agog.

Excitedly, talking over one another – Lily had hardly ever seen her mother so animated – Gwenda and Dora explained between them. Gwenda, apparently, was a driver with the Mechanised Transport Corps based in Alexandria and she’d been sent back to England to collect a customised Daimler with a special long-range radio installed. She’d only arrived on Friday, had been given the weekend to see her family and was on her way back to an air base to fly off with the car the next day.

As she talked about life in Egypt, a whole world opened up before Lily. She knew there were women bus and tram drivers in Hinton, and all over the country. She knew about the women of the MTC who drove Government officials and visiting foreign dignitaries. She knew they drove ambulances too, but she’d never thought about them working abroad. She gazed at Gwenda in awe.

‘Of course,’ Gwenda was saying in her slightly sing-song accent, ‘my dad having the garage business, he taught me to drive – me and my sister – on the lanes and the fields by us from when we were about twelve. So when the war came – well, there was only one choice for me.’

‘Her sister’s out there as well,’ Dora put in. ‘Not a driver though. She’s a plotter with the WAAF.

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