Women on the Home Front (28 page)

Dulcie eyed the neat row of lipsticks on the counter in front of her impatiently. It was Monday. They were always quiet on Mondays, her working day seeming to drag, not that there was anything interesting to look forward to for the evening at number 13, not with Olive trying to get them all to give Sally a hand with her vegetable plot. She'd rather go home and listen to her mother praising Edith than do that. And tomorrow night that was what she would be doing, she reminded herself, since tomorrow was her mother's birthday. She'd got her mother a lipstick for her birthday present, a pretty soft pink, and some powder as well. Her mother never took the trouble to make the best of herself, and having some decent cosmetics was bound to cheer her up. Her present was bound to be more expensive than whatever Edith bought her, Dulcie decided with some triumph. That should show her mother how wrong she was to favour Edith all the time. At least with Rick still at home on his post-Dunkirk leave, there'd be someone there to have a bit of a joke with.

Dulcie frowned as she looked down and noticed a small wrinkle in one of her stockings. Automatically she bent to smooth it away.

As she did so, from the other side of the counter she heard a male voice asking, ‘So what exactly is it you'd want this boyfriend who isn't a real boyfriend to do?'

The voice and its amused tone were immediately recognisable. They had Dulcie standing up so quickly that she felt dizzy, which was no doubt why her face felt flushed, she decided as she stared up into Raphael Androtti's brown eyes.

Normally quick off the mark with a retaliatory comment, Dulcie for once was lost for words, finally managing only a defensive. ‘Is this some kind of joke?'

‘A joke? I thought we were supposed to be acting as lovebirds, not clowns. Of course, if you've changed your mind, and you've found someone else to play the role of doting boyfriend . . .'

He was turning to walk away. Caught off guard, Dulcie reached across the counter to stop him, protesting, ‘No. I mean . . .'

‘I've missed you.'

The smile and the not-so-softly spoken words were good enough to have come from the lips of any matinée idol worth his salt, as was the way in which he lifted his hand, about to touch her face, and then dropped it again as though realising where they were.

‘Why are you doing this?' Dulcie demanded.

‘You said you wanted me to.'

‘Yes, I know that,' she hissed, ‘but . . .'

‘But what?' His voice became slightly louder as he demanded urgently, ‘Have you changed your mind about me? About us? Please tell me that it isn't true and that you haven't.'

Somehow or other he had taken possession of her hand and was clasping it between his own.

He was enjoying this, Dulcie could see. ‘You're overdoing it,' she told him. A quick look round the cosmetics floor showed her that the other girls were goggling at them from behind their counters, and that Arlene was looking astounded – astounded and envious!

Oddly, though, Dulcie felt less triumphant than she should have. That was because she liked being in control. She did not like someone else grasping the upper hand and directing the things she had planned to direct herself. It made her feel . . . Dulcie didn't want to think about how it made her feel or about being taken over by someone else, controlled by someone else. Didn't he realise that he was going too far? All she'd wanted was for him to come in and give the impression that he was keen on her, not act like they were already an item. Now she'd end up having to come up with a reason for them breaking up.

‘The shop will be closing in couple of minutes,' she told him, wanting to get rid of him so that she could manage the impression he was giving when the other girls asked her the questions she knew they would ask.

His warm, ‘I'll be waiting for you outside,' wasn't the response she'd wanted, but she couldn't say anything, not with Lizzie standing within hearing distance.

Now he was giving her an openly languishing look, before turning on his heel and heading for the exit, just as the warning bell to customers to leave the store started to ring.

‘Well!' Lizzie announced as soon as the bell had stopped. ‘Who is he and why haven't you said anything about him?'

But before Dulcie could answer her, half a dozen of the girls were clustering round her, demanding, ‘Where did you meet him, Dulcie?' ‘Has he got any brothers?' ‘Cousins?'

Then Arlene came and joined in, her nose in the air, malice in the look she gave her, before she said, with what Dulcie knew was mock concern, ‘I don't want to spoil things for you, Dulcie, but your young man looks awfully foreign.'

‘He's Italian,' Dulcie responded with a small shrug of her shoulders, as though she herself had never for a moment shared the thoughts she suspected were going through their heads. ‘So what?'

‘An Italian!' Arlene pretended to marvel, before adding mockingly, ‘I suppose you met him when he sold you an ice cream.'

One of the other girls began to laugh.

‘And the way he speaks . . .' Arlene rolled her eyes.

‘He's from Liverpool,' Dulcie defended Raphael.

‘An Italian from Liverpool.' Arlene dissolved into fits of laughter. ‘Poor Dulcie, but then I suppose you won't mind. Sometimes I do wish that my own standards weren't quite so high.'

‘Don't pay any attention to Arlene, Dulcie,' Lizzie said stoutly after she and the others had gone. ‘I thought your young man looked lovely.'

‘He isn't my young man. He's just someone I know,' Dulcie told her crossly. Her plan seemed to have backfired on her, and that was his fault, not hers. If she did find him waiting for her outside then she'd give him a piece of her mind.

Only when she did find him waiting for her outside the staff entrance to the building, Dulcie discovered to her own surprise that her curiosity about why he had turned up in the first place was stronger than her desire to blame him for Arlene's mockery of her.

However, when he told her in response to her question, ‘I was at a bit of a loose end, so I thought I might as well do you a favour,' Dulcie was more incensed than grateful.

‘You overdid things,' she said, ‘and now I've had to put up with the Miss Snotty Nose looking down on me even more because of you being Italian.'

They had been walking away from the building as she delivered this attack but now he had stopped walking so that Dulcie was forced to do the same, and the look in his eyes was far from warm as he demanded, ‘Why should the fact that I'm Italian make her look down on you?'

‘Because you aren't British,' Dulcie replied irritably. Surely it was obvious to him that him being Italian and foreign, an immigrant, meant that he could never be considered as good as someone who was really British. After all, everyone knew that was how things were.

‘Actually I am British,' he informed her. ‘I was born in this country, to parents who were also born here, and who, whilst being part of Liverpool's Italian community, have taken British nationality.'

‘That doesn't mean anything,' Dulcie said dismissively. ‘You look Italian, and you were with Italians when I saw you.'

‘So I can't look Italian but be British is that what you are saying?'

Dulcie gave an exasperated sigh. ‘This is boring and I don't want to talk about it.'

‘It isn't boring to me,' he told her grimly. ‘This is my country, a country I have enlisted to fight for and to die for, if necessary, but according to you because of my Italian ancestry I am not good enough for Britain – or for you? My grandfather would enjoy listening to you. It would validate and vindicate everything he believes.'

They had to stop walking for a minute to allow the crowd of people coming the other way to surge past them, giving Dulcie the chance to demand, ‘Your grandfather?'

‘Yes. It is to see him that I am here in London, to see if I can mend a family feud. You see, he abhors the thought of me being British just as much as you abhor the thought of me being Italian.'

‘I don't abhor it,' Dulcie defended herself. She'd never heard the word ‘abhor' before, but she could guess what it meant and she certainly wasn't going to let him know that it was new to her, she decided. She had to hurry to catch up with him as he strode off. ‘But everyone knows that a girl who isn't Italian would be plain daft to get involved with an Italian chap when they always marry their own kind. Why doesn't your grandfather want you to be British?'

A shaft of sunlight beaming down as they crossed a road, highlighted the warm olive tint of Raphael's skin, catching Dulcie's attention. Here in the city, its buildings shutting out the sunlight, its dust filling her nose and its war-ready grimness all around her to be seen, that sudden glimpse of healthy vitally alive male flesh brought her an emotion she didn't understand. And because she didn't understand it, Dulcie refused to countenance it.

‘Because he believes, as so many of his generation do, that our presence here in Britain is temporary,' Raphael told her. ‘When he came here it was to work and send money home, to save up so that one day he too could return home. That was his belief and his dream. He and his contempararies do not consider Britain to be their home and their country because in their hearts Italy is that. They are fiercely proud of being Italian and they cling together in their communities because they are afraid if they do not, that they might forget and lose their traditions and their way of life. To Italians, family is all important, and family means not just husband and wife and children, but their whole community, to which they owe their loyalty along with their loyalty to Italy itself.'

He paused as a bus that had stopped to pick up passengers set off noisily, disgorging fumes that made Dulcie fan the air with her hand, continuing once it had gone, ‘When my father decided to become a British national my grandfather disowned him. He wanted my father to do as he had done and work to send money home to Italy but my father wanted to build a life here for my mother and for me. My father doesn't say so, but my grandfather's disowning of him hurts him. I would like to see them reconciled.'

‘It won't please your grandfather to know that you've enlisted then, will it?' Dulcie pointed out practically.

‘No,' Raphael agreed. There were deeper and more complex reasons why he wanted to speak to his grandfather, but he didn't intend to discuss those with Dulcie. He and his father had had several concerned discussions about the Italian Fascist movement in Britain, to which so many Italians belonged without really understanding the position in which it could put them in the eyes of the British Government, especially now with the country at war with Germany.

They had to stop to cross another road, the warmth of the sun making Dulcie begin to feel hot, hemmed in by the press of people on the busy street.

The movement provided Italian lessons for the children of Italians born in Britain, it provided meeting halls, schools, a place for Italian communities to be together, a small part of Italy and home in a foreign land. Only a small proportion of those who belonged to the movement were politically motivated and true fascists, and Raphael wanted to warn his grandfather against placing himself in that small group, especially as increasingly it looked as though Mussolini was about to ally himself to Hitler, and thus declare war on Britain.

He wasn't sure himself why he had elected to do what he had done with regard to Dulcie. It was true that he had had time on his hands, but he could have filled that time doing other things. It had surprised him to discover how much his pride had stung to hear Dulcie announce that he wasn't good enough for her, when her comment should have amused him. She was a shop girl, sharp enough when it came to her own wants, and ambitions, but oblivious to the political and social situations that were so important to him. If one of them should look down on the other then he should be the one looking down on her.

He stopped walking as they came to another crossroads.

‘I'm sorry but I must leave you here.'

It was only after they had gone their separate ways and Dulcie was almost ‘home' that she allowed herself to give vent to her feelings. Of all the cheek, him apologising to her for leaving her as though he thought that she had actually wanted his company, and would be disappointed at being deprived of it. Well, she wasn't. She didn't need anyone's company, much less that of a ruddy Eyetie. She was forced to admit to herself, however, for all that Arlene had affected to sneer at him, she'd seen the look in her eyes when they'd first clocked him. Eyetie or not, he was still a well set up and good-looking chap.

Sally pushed her hair back off her face, shading her eyes from the June afternoon sun as she looked up from the row of lettuces she had just been weeding around, leaning on her hoe as she did so.

‘Looks easy hoeing, but it isn't.' The voice of Nancy's husband, Arthur, reached her from the other side of the garden fence. Arthur was a kindly gentle man, the complete opposite of the image of him that Nancy held up to others with her frequent references to Arthur's dislike of all those things that Nancy had decided were to be disliked. Now, as he filled and then lit his pipe, Sally laughed and agreed.

‘Much harder. I've never been in full charge of a veggie plot before, although I helped my father with his.'

‘Tea leaves is what you need. Soak them in vinegar overnight and then put them round your lettuces, and you won't get no slugs coming after them.'

Nancy's, ‘Arthur, come and get a cup of tea,' over the hedge dividing the two gardens, had him giving Sally a farewell nod of his head before he dutifully headed for the back door where Sally could see Nancy standing with her apron on over her floral-patterned summer frock, her hands on her hips.

‘Poor Arthur,' Olive commented, coming down the path with a tray of tea and two scones from the batch she had just baked, just in time to hear her neighbour calling out to her husband. ‘He is rather henpecked. No butter for the scones, I'm afraid, but luckily I've got plenty of jam left from the batch I made last year. I'm really glad now that we've got rationing that I decided to sort out a stock cupboard last summer.'

‘I've been thinking that perhaps we could get half a dozen hens,' Sally began five minutes later when the two of them were settled under the shade of the apple tree, enjoying their tea and scones. ‘There's room for them, and I noticed a sign in the hardware shop as I came past the other day, advertising hen coops.'

‘Well, I can certainly use the fresh eggs,' Olive agreed, ‘but you can't be expected to look after the gardens and some hens, Sally. I feel a bit guilty as it is, watching you working so hard.'

‘I enjoy it,' Sally told her truthfully, ‘and you and Tilly and Agnes all give me a hand.'

‘Well, if you really want to take it on, I'm all for it,' Olive approved. She looked up at the sky through the leaves on the apple tree.

‘I can't imagine what it will be like to be invaded by the Germans, but that's what everyone says Hitler will try to do now that he's got France.'

‘It won't be as easy to invade us as it was to invade France,' Sally said stoutly.

Olive gave her a wan smile. ‘That's what everyone said about the Maginot Line – that he'd never cross it – but he did. I keep thinking of all those people who tried to escape.' She put her hand to her mouth and Sally knew that she was thinking of the women and children who had been killed by the Luftwaffe. She herself had heard the most graphic and awful stories from some of the injured soldiers they'd got at Barts, the words bursting from them as though they couldn't contain the horror of what they'd witnessed.

‘If they do invade, they're bound to march on London.'

‘We've got the RAF to hold them back, don't forget,' Sally tried to comfort her.

Olive gave her a troubled look. ‘I worry for Tilly and Agnes, and you too, Sally. You are young with your whole lives in front of you, and I can't help thinking that if Hitler does invade you'd all be safer out of London.'

‘If he succeeds in invading,' Sally told her gently. ‘I personally don't think he will. If those of us who live and work here did desert London then what kind of message would that send out to him, and to our boys who are fighting for this country and for us? The BEF have taken a terrific blow to their pride. We need to show them, as well as Hitler, that we have faith in them.'

Olive looked at her lodger, taking in Sally's determined expression. ‘You're right,' she agreed, adding, ‘You have such a wise head on your young shoulders, Sally.'

‘My mother's head, or rather her teaching.' Sally's smile softened and then disappeared, to be replaced by a look of sadness. ‘I miss her so much. The trained nurse in me knew that she couldn't survive and that she would die, but as her daughter I couldn't bear to lose her.'

‘Your father is still alive,' Olive began, but Sally shook her head.

‘Not for me. I have no father any more. My father ceased to exist for me the day he married Morag. The man I knew and loved as my father could not have performed such a betrayal. I must finish this weeding before I have to go in and get changed for work. Arthur has recommended that I put tea leaves soaked in vinegar round the lettuces to keep the slugs off. I've never heard of that remedy before.'

Recognising that Sally had changed the subject because she did not want to talk about her father, Olive began to gather up their empty cups and plates. She couldn't really, after all, expect someone who had been as close to her mother as Sally had obviously been to understand the ache of emptiness and the fear of aloneless that came with the loss of a husband or wife, or to accept that sometimes the widowed partner felt driven by a need to fill that empty gap in their lives, especially when it was a man who had been widowed. Women were expected by their own sex to wear their widow-hood as a form of respectability; men, on the other hand, were seen by that sex as poor creatures in need of the comfort that only a new wife could give. A widow's respectability was a fragile garment, easily tarnished and damaged, her behaviour constantly under the eagle-eyed inspection of other women. Olive could still remember the lectures she had been given by her mother-in-law in the months following her own widowhood, about the need to preserve her ‘respectability' and that of her late husband's family. She had had no desire to marry again, though, Olive admitted. All she had wanted to do then was pour her love into her precious daughter.
Then?
What she meant was that all she had ever wanted to do was pour her love into Tilly, Olive told herself firmly.

‘Well, I don't know why you've wasted your money on giving me this stuff, Dulcie, I really don't. Mind you, Edith can probably make use of it.'

Dulcie stared at her mother in outrage, opening her mouth to tell her that if she didn't want her present then Dulcie would take it back because there was no way that Edith was going to have it, her angry words converted to a yell of pain when Rick very deliberately nipped her arm.

‘I'll have a bruise on my arm now,' she complained to him half an hour later as they left the house together, Dulcie to return to Article Row and Rick heading for the local lads' boxing club to meet up with his friends, ‘What did you have to go and pinch me like that for anyway?'

‘You know why,' Rick told her.

‘Mum had no right saying she was going to give my present to her to Edith,' Dulcie objected. ‘Why does ruddy Edith have to have everything? Mum said that she was going to give her that scent you gave her as well.'

‘That's Mum's way, and making a song and dance about it won't change anything,' Rick advised as they set off down the street. ‘Edith's always been her favourite.'

‘Well, I don't know why,' Dulcie complained, still aggrieved.

‘Ma's proud of Edith, Dulcie, because of her singing. Remember how when we were kids Ma used to tell us about how she'd won a prize for singing herself when she was at school?'

Dulcie nodded.

‘Well, I reckon Ma favours Edith because of that. She wants Edith to have what she never did.'

‘A greasy-hands-all-over-you agent, you mean?' Dulcie asked cynically.

Rick sighed and gave her a rueful look. ‘You know the trouble with you, Dulcie, is that you can't just let things be. You've got to make your point, and have the last word, even if it means getting folks' backs up.'

They'd crossed the road and turned into another street whilst they'd been talking, any attempt Dulcie might have made to respond to Rick's accusation made impossible by the growing volume of noise.

‘What's that?' Dulcie protested, raising her voice.

‘Sounds like someone's having a bit of a set-to,' Rick told her unnecessarily as they both heard the sound of breaking glass joining the chants and jeers of angry raised voices.

Street fights weren't an uncommon occurrence in their neighbourhood, so Dulcie shrugged. Then they turned the corner and she could see the gang of youths up ahead.

‘That's Mr Manelli's ice-cream shop they're throwing bricks at.' Dulcie stopped walking. ‘They've got no right doing that. Ever so nice to us when we were kids, Mr Manelli always was, giving us an extra scoop of ice cream when we took Ma's baking bowl round on a Saturday to get it filled up for tea.'

As several more bricks were thrown into the broken window they heard a woman's screams from inside the shop.

‘Come on, Rick. We've got to stop them.'

The sight of Dulcie, of all people, advancing on the jeering violent crowd of boys held Rick motionless for a second. But then he set off after her, calling out to the attacking mob, ‘Come on, lads, what's going on?' The firm sound of his voice and the fact that he was in uniform were enough to bring a momentary halt to the attack. The youths turned to look at him, whilst Dulcie, to his bemusement, marched in between them and the shop front, her hands on her hips.

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, doing summat like this to Mr Manelli,' she told them. ‘What's he ever done to you?'

‘He's an Eyetie and a traitor, that's what,' the largest of the youths told Dulcie glowering at her. ‘A ruddy Fascist, and him and his family want running out of the street and putting in prison like all the rest of his kind.'

‘Give over, lads,' Rick counselled. ‘We all know Mr Manelli – he's no traitor.'

‘Well, if that's the case then how come the police have took him and the other Eyeties off to prison?' one of the other youths demanded, giving Rick a challenging look. ‘My dad heard it from the police themselves. They've had orders to round up all the Eyeties and shove them in goal on account of them being Fascists and spies. 'Oo knows what's bin going on inside there?'

The mood of the mob was turning ugly, Rick recognised. If they chose to go on the attack again he certainly couldn't stop them by himself, and anyway, his first duty was to protect his sister, who was still standing in front of the smashed shop window.

Mentally Rick cursed Dulcie for getting them involved. He had no quarrel with the Manellis, but he couldn't hold the mob off by himself if they chose to turn their anger against him and Dulcie. Out of the corner of his eye he saw their local policeman crossing the top of the street. Quickly he hailed him, relieved to see him stop in mid-stride.

The sight of a burly policeman coming towards them at the run was enough to frighten off the mob, who quickly dispersed, leaving Rick to explain to Constable Green what had happened.

‘That's the trouble when feelings start running high. Folks start taking the law into their own hands,' was his verdict on Rick's explanation of the mob's attack on the ice-cream shop.

Over an hour later, when Rick and Dulcie were finally on their own again, a still visibly terrified and sobbing Mrs Manelli having been handed over by Constable Green into the care of her neighbours and fellow Italians, Rick was finally free to ask his sister, ‘What was that all about?'

‘What do you mean?' Dulcie affected not to understand him.

Rick heaved a patient sigh and pointed out, ‘We could have had those young idiots turning on us. Why take that risk?'

‘Because I felt like it,' was the only answer Dulcie would give him.

Women and sisters – especially this particular sister, Rick thought in bewilderment – he would never understand them.

As she made her way back to Article Row, Dulcie was no more inclined to answer Rick's question to herself than she had been to him, other than to think that it had been high time she proved to a few people who thought they were so much better than her that they weren't. People like Edith, and Olive, and some of the girls at work, who thought they could look down on her and get away with it. And him too, that Raphael, who had tried to make out he was so much better than she was. Well, they weren't 'cos it was her that had had the guts to stand her ground and helped old Mrs Manelli, and not them!

Rick was just about to leave the boxing club and make his way home, when Raphael found him, having heard the story of Mrs Manelli's rescue whilst he'd been at the headquarters of the Italian Fascist Organisation.

He'd gone there in the hope of picking up some information about what had happened to the men who had been arrested in the early hours on 10 June, taken from their homes without warning under suspicion of being active Fascists. One of those men had been his grandfather, and naturally Raphael was concerned for him, an old man of eighty-one who was stubborn enough and foolish enough to cling to Fascism out of sheer cussedness.

The Italian communities, in Britain's main cities were all in shock over the night-time raids on their homes, their men being removed by the police, taken from their homes in the clothes they'd pulled on after being woken from their sleep, with no information being given about what was going to happen to them except that they were to be interned as enemy aliens.

Raphael had telephoned his father in Liverpool to discover that the situation there was even worse than it was in London. In London it was only those who were believed to be active Fascists who had been arrested. In Liverpool there had been a wholesale taking into custody of a huge swathe of the entire Italian adult male population. Only those, like his father, who had naturalised and become British citizens legally had escaped arrest.

Naturally the Italian community had flocked to their Fascist clubs, both for information and for comfort, especially those women whose husbands or fathers or sons had been taken.