The Penny Bangle (18 page)

‘Africa’s quite big, you know,’ said Frances. ‘You’re not exactly likely to run into him.’

‘I didn’t think I would!’ cried Cassie, blushing.

‘Wherever you go, be careful.’ Stephen glanced down the line and saw the London train approaching, so he kissed Frances lightly on the cheek, and then he turned to Cassie.

‘Goodbye, Stephen.’ Cassie hugged him, but made sure she turned her face away, so Stephen couldn’t kiss her if he tried. She didn’t want to kiss him or be kissed. He’d been so kind when she had first arrived in Melbury, and she wanted him to be her friend – but no more than her friend. Frances, she thought, you should be kissing Frances, she’s the one who loves you.

‘You look after yourself, my sparrow,’ Daisy said, and then she enveloped Cassie in an Arpège-scented, warm embrace. ‘Come and see us in London, will you, if you have the time?’

‘I’ll try,’ said Cassie.

‘Good,’ said Daisy, standing back and tweaking one of Cassie’s curls so that it sat just right. ‘We’ll go shopping, shall we, and buy you something pretty? We should celebrate that nice new stripe.’

‘You’re going to stay with Mrs Denham, then?’ asked Frances, as Stephen’s and Daisy’s London train went steaming down the line, and she and Cassie waited for the one to Chester.

‘Yes, I got a thirty-six hour pass.’

‘She’s made her mind up you’re going to marry Robert.’

‘I don’t know why.’ Cassie felt the blood rush up her neck and flood her cheeks, warming her face in the still, frosty air. ‘We’re only friends, like you and Steve.’

‘I don’t think Stephen wants to marry
me
.’

‘Well, he just kissed you, didn’t he?’ asked Cassie.

‘I suppose so.’ Frances shrugged. ‘But – ’

‘There you are, then.’ Cassie smiled. ‘Stephen likes you, Fran. He thinks you’re great. Salt of the earth, he said you were – and then he said it was a pity there weren’t more girls like you.’

‘He did?’ said Frances doubtfully.

‘Yes, Fran – cross my heart and hope to die.’

Cassie looked down the line. She didn’t want to have this conversation. ‘Look, Frances, here’s your train.’

‘Cassie, write to me from Africa.’ After she had got into the carriage, Frances tugged at the leather strap and then let down the window. ‘Let me know what happens, and listen, midget – you take care.’

‘Of course I will,’ said Cassie. ‘You take care, as well. Look after Steve, all right?’

‘You take care, my girl,’ said Lily Taylor solemnly.

‘Yes, Granny,’ Cassie said, for what seemed like the hundredth thousandth time.

After she’d been vetted, prodded, had all manner of injections, and been passed fit for service overseas, Cassie had four days’ embarkation leave.

She’d been very tempted to spend one of them in London seeing Daisy and going shopping. How wonderful it would have been, she thought, to go to all those famous London shops with a famous actress, have people bowing, scraping, opening doors and calling taxis for them as if they were royalty. But in the end she’d gone to Birmingham to spend the whole time with her granny.

There, she helped to purify the shrine, listened to hours of good advice doled out by Father Riley, and felt slightly guilty because Lily didn’t want her to go sailing off to Egypt, and she said so, many times.

‘Granny, I’ll be all right,’ insisted Cassie as she polished up a statue of the Blessed Virgin. ‘It’s not as if I’m going into battle. I’ll just be driving trucks.’

‘Mind you go to church, if they have any Catholic churches in those heathen places.’

‘Yes, I’ll go to church,’ said Cassie, crossing her fingers underneath her apron so the promise didn’t count.

‘If Our Lord had meant us to go visiting foreign parts, he would have shown us how to walk on water,’ added Lily crossly. ‘You were born in England, and that’s where you should stay – it stands to reason.’

‘Granny, other people go abroad, and most of them don’t come to any harm.’

‘Mrs Murphy’s son, he’s in the Navy, but he’s seasick all the time, and I expect you will be, too,’ said Lily, with the grim satisfaction of someone who was always right. ‘You’ll heave your heart up and you’ll pray to all the saints, but they’re going to think it serves you right and take no notice.’

I couldn’t be any sicker than I was that night at Daisy’s place, and I got over that, thought Cassie wryly.

‘Say your prayers each night,’ continued Lily.

‘Yes, of course I shall.’

‘Just remember, child, you’re all I’ve got.’

‘I know that, Granny.’ Cassie put down her duster and hugged Lily round her bony little shoulders. ‘I’ll come back to you.’

‘We ought to go and see your mother before you leave,’ said Lily, as they ate their breakfast the next morning. ‘You’ll need to ask her blessing.’

So they spent that gloomy winter morning visiting poor Geraldine, Lily tidying up the grave and talking to her daughter, Cassie standing there embarrassed as her granny chatted to her mother, hoping nobody she knew would see them. It had dogged her childhood, the awareness that the whole of Smethwick thought that Lily Taylor was completely round the bend.

‘Cassandra’s here,’ said Lily suddenly, startling Cassie out of dreams of Robert. ‘She’s going away, she’s going on a ship to somewhere hot, but she’ll come back to see you soon.’

As Lily talked to Geraldine, Cassie bowed her head and tried to think of something she could say to a mother she had never known.

It was so exciting, going on board ship and sleeping in a bunk and having a little porthole window from which she could see the cold, grey water.

But soon Cassie wished that she had listened to her granny’s good advice, and stayed in dear old Blighty.

It had been all right in the Channel. The sea had been quite choppy, but it hadn’t been
too
rough. Seamen, troops and ATS had all been in good spirits, looking forward to their great adventure, and hoping they would see the Pyramids and the Sphinx.

Cassie had thought, there’s nothing to it, being on a boat. People who say it takes a couple of weeks to get your sea legs, and everybody’s ill, just want to make you scared.

But now the wind was blowing hard, pushing up the waves until they were great walls of water, and Cassie was so ill she thought she’d die. She grasped the holy medals which her granny had hung around her neck, and prayed to God, his Virgin Mother, and any saint who might be listening, to save her life.

But whichever saint was now on duty, and responsible for sailors being tossed around in storms while in the Bay of Biscay, took no notice. The whole convoy, troopships, corvettes and destroyers alike, was tossed about like toys in a child’s bath.

‘So you’ve never been to sea before?’ enquired a red-haired, grey-eyed Scottish girl, who’d also volunteered to go abroad, and for some reason wasn’t being sick.

‘No,’ said Cassie, hating her for looking so flipping pink and healthy. The girl was lounging against the rail and cheerfully eating something from a dish. It smelled like bacon and tomatoes, and Cassie felt the bile come pumping up into her throat again. Then she was sick again and yet again. ‘I wish I’d never come,’ she groaned, as she clung to her medals and cursed her wretched fate.

She prayed and prayed for calm, for the storm to die down just a bit. But the storm got worse.

Soon, they were being stalked by German U-boats, and rocked by exploding mines that damaged several of the vessels. But the convoy battled on, each ship a heaving cesspool of injured, sick, and sometimes even dying.

When at last they’d passed the Straits, and got into the Med, the sea was calmer. But there were many other hazards now. Italian bombers strafed the convoy, and by the time the troopship in which Cassie was a passenger was lying off Algiers, its many decks looked like a battlefield, with wounded soldiers lying in groaning rows on makeshift stretchers, and lots of others being ill below.

Some ATS girls had been slightly wounded, too. A few of them had been more sick than Cassie. Then one got hit by shrapnel and was badly hurt, so she would be going straight back home to England.

Cassie realised she was in a battle zone, that perhaps all this would not be an exciting new adventure, after all.

Maybe she had signed her death certificate, instead.

But then the wind came out of Africa, a fresh, clean breeze that blew away the acrid taint of sickness. As she leaned upon the rail and watched the coast come nearer, keeping her eyes trained on a line of purple hills that closed the far horizon, Cassie felt much better.

This foreign wind smelled sweet, she thought, and sniffed it gratefully. It smelled of Robert’s letters, dry and crisp and scented with lemons, mint and thyme.

Closer to the land, it didn’t smell so lovely. In fact, it stank of fish and sewage. But now the ships were safer, lying under the protection of the British guns.

When they docked at Algiers to let some soldiers disembark, little brown-skinned boys came swimming out and clambered up the sides of the huge vessel, shouting to the passengers, grinning and demanding to be given cigarettes or baksheesh.

The soldiers didn’t give them anything. Instead, they hit them, knocked them down into the sea, but the boys came back, swarming up the sides like ants, and Cassie was dismayed to see the soldiers smash the children’s fingers with their rifle butts. She hadn’t realised ordinary men could be so cruel.

Cassie and nine other ATS girls were going on to Alexandria. The periscopes of U-boats dogged their progress. When Italian bomber planes went screeching overhead, she clutched her holy medals, and she prayed.

She had told Frances she didn’t know if she believed in God. But now she recognised the truth of the old saying from the previous conflict – there were no atheists in trenches.

Or on troopships in the Med.

She thought of Robert constantly. She wondered where he was, and if he was in action, if he was in danger, if he had been wounded. She didn’t allow herself to wonder if he might be killed.

‘Blessed Mother, please keep him safe,’ she prayed.

She hoped her prayers might be answered, especially since nowadays she wasn’t asking for anything for herself.

Thanks to the corvettes which kept the German submarines at bay, the convoy got to Alexandria more or less unscathed.

Cassie and the other drivers, smartly turned out in their tropical kit and lugging heavy kitbags, were quickly disembarked, loaded on to an army truck, and taken to their quarters.

‘We’re going to see the Sphinx,’ said one girl, happy to be off the ship at last.

Cassie wasn’t bothered about the Sphinx. She was looking forward to eating something tasty, and not seeing it come up again.

‘Look at all the bugs!’ exclaimed the red-haired Scottish girl, as she stared in horror at the squalid bedrooms in the white-washed villa which had been commandeered for their quarters.

‘Look at these beds!’ added another girl. ‘They’re absolutely crawling!’

‘We’ll need to burn these mattresses,’ said Cassie, eyeing the iron bedsteads with distaste, and wondering how many thousand bugs could be in all the nooks and crevices. ‘We could have a bonfire in the courtyard. We’ll stuff the cracks in all the bedsteads with cotton wool we’ve soaked in paraffin, and then set fire to it.’

‘How do
you
know what to do?’ enquired the Scottish girl, suspiciously.

‘I – I just know,’ said Cassie.

She wasn’t going to tell them she’d seen even bigger bugs in Birmingham, or that where she came from the paraffin-and-cotton wool routine had been a regular event.

‘Settling in then, ladies?’ asked a harsh, deep voice.

Cassie turned to see the owner of the voice was almost six feet tall. She had close-cropped grey hair, and wore a well-pressed skirt and jacket made of khaki drill, with major’s crowns upon the epaulettes.

A dark-haired female sergeant accompanied the major, and now she brought the new girls to attention.

‘I’m Major Sheringham,’ the officer continued, as Cassie and the others stood as stiff as ramrods, staring straight ahead. ‘I’m your new commanding officer. Welcome to Alexandria.