Table of Contents
Note on Currency
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
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Afterword
THE H-BOMB GIRL
Stephen Baxter
Note on Currency
Modern “decimalised” money, pounds and pence, wasn’t introduced in Britain until 1971. In 1962 the money system was pounds, shillings and pence. You got 240 “old” pennies to the pound, so an old penny, a “copper,” was worth a bit less than half a new penny. You had 12 pennies to the “shilling,” called a “bob,” worth 5p in new money. There were 20 shillings to the pound.
In your change you had halfpenny coins and farthings (a quarter of a penny), threepenny bits and sixpences (“tanners”) and half-crowns (two shillings and sixpence, or 12.5p).
A pound was a pound, but it would buy you a lot more in those days than it would now. The average wage was around twelve pounds a week. A Saturday job might earn you thirty bob (£1.50). A pound would buy you a good night out.
Chapter 1
Laura’s first day in a new school, in a new city, at the wrong end of the country, was always going to be tough.
Even though she didn’t know, yet, that the world was due to end in two weeks.
And a bad day got off to a worse start. She wrote in her diary:
Friday 12th October 1962, 8 a.m.
Got out of bed.
Found an eight-foot-tall American soldier on the landing.
She had been woken up by her father calling from downstairs. “Laura. Get a move on. We leave for school in fifteen minutes.”
Dad was an officer in the Royal Air Force, and when he said fifteen minutes he meant it. She got up, pulled on her shapeless old dressing gown, a hand-me-down from Mum, and opened her bedroom door.
And there was the stranger staring back at her.
He was a pillar of muscle in brown slacks and a crisp white shirt. He was in his socks, no shoes. He might have been forty, about Dad’s age. He was standing outside the bathroom’s closed door with a towel around his neck, so he couldn’t have washed yet, but somehow he smelled of aftershave.
“Well, hi, little missy.”
Laura was horribly aware of every stray strand of hair that hadn’t been brushed yet, and of the crust of sleep-time dribble she probably had around her mouth. “Who the hell are you?”
The American gave her a mock-salute. “Giuseppe Mortinelli the Third, Lieutenant-Colonel, US Air Force, at your service, missy. Just call me ‘Mort’, like everybody else.”
Little missy. She’d never met an American in the flesh before. He sounded a bit like the colonel from Sergeant Bilko on the telly. His head was square, his jaw a slab of bone, his hair shaved to a frosty stubble. His nose was so flat it looked as if his face had been worn away with sandpaper. And his eyes were so deep she could hardly see them.
“Mort,” she said reluctantly. “I’m sorry I said ‘hell.’”
He just laughed. “I hear worse in the barracks.” There was something cold about him.
She turned to go back into her room. “I’ll let you go first, once Mum’s out.”
“Oh, no. I heard your fifteen-minute warning. I’ll go get breakfast.” He headed for the stairs. “You know, at home we have two bathrooms. I kind of thought you English folks wouldn’t have inside bathrooms at all…”
Mum came bustling out of the bathroom, a towel around her wet hair. Freshly washed, free of make-up, her oval face looked younger than her years. Laura looked a bit like her, but Mum had always been prettier than Laura would ever be.
Now, though, Mum’s pale-blue eyes were sharp with fury. “Mort is a colleague of your father’s, and an old friend of mine from the war. Don’t you ever speak to him like that again.”
Laura knew the tone. She was supposed to be a good little piece of furniture, just fitting her own life around whatever scheme her parents came up with next, like the Separation, and selling their home in High Wycombe, and coming to Liverpool, and now letting some American loser stay in this rubbish little house.
“So can I use the bathroom now? Or have you got another lodger in there?”
Mum got angrier.
Dad called up the stairs, his voice flat, controlling. “Twelve minutes.”
Laura pushed into the bathroom. It was steamed up, and all the towels were wet.
Her new school uniform was black tights and skirt, a blouse that was too big, and a blazer too small. The blazer was a hideous purple colour.
On the way out of the house she glimpsed the American, Mort, in the parlour. The little room was full of bedding. The house only had two bedrooms, one for Mum and one for Laura. Presumably both Mort and Dad had slept on the chairs down here.
Mort was sitting in front of the telly, chewing his way through a mound of toast. The telly was a polished wooden box with a small screen of thick glass. It had come with the house, which had belonged to an old lady who had died. Mort was turning the channel-selector knob, a heavy dial that turned with a clunk. All he got was test cards. Neither of the two channels, BBC or ITV, put out programmes at this time of the day. You would think he’d know that, Laura thought. But maybe they did things differently in America.
Mort didn’t look round as Laura left.
Outside, the morning was sunny, warm for October. Dad was standing beside the car, his new Ford Cortina. Mum was already in the passenger seat.
Dad usually kept his cars spotless, but the Cortina was still grimy from the long, unhappy journey from High Wycombe they had made on Wednesday. He was supposed to drive back at the weekend, and today was Friday. Maybe he didn’t think it was worth cleaning it in the meantime.
Holding her new satchel, Laura hung
