Then, she spotted the three women in the garden, spilling out of the Anderson shelter. Elsie couldn’t help but smile at the sight of them: the grieving mother—all in black—and two hugely pregnant women, stooping, hobbling and stretching from hours of inactivity. Elsie pulled open the back door to let them inside.
‘Oh!’ Agnes murmured. ‘And where did you spring from?’ She set her knitting down on the table—the early stages of some hideous dress, by its appearance.
‘My bedroom,’ Elsie answered.
‘You should have been sheltering,’ Gwen said, eyeing her suspiciously.
Elsie wanted to say that she would rather take her chances with the Luftwaffe than sit for hours on end in a glorified tin can, knitting with three odious women, but instead she said, ‘Well, the twenty Messerschmitts that bombed Dover are now back at their base in Cap Gris Nez. The Defiants and Hurricanes sent up to chase them off are all safely tucked up at the aerodrome with their pilots enjoying a nice cup of tea; so, there seemed little point in sheltering.’ Her answer was false, churlish, in breach of the Official Secrets Act and mocked the terrible horrors that she had just witnessed, yet Elsie took a strange pleasure in knowing more than did they; every conversation between them seemed to actually be a game. A puerile pointless game.
‘So, what did you get up to today, then?’ Kath quizzed sweetly, lacing her arm through Elsie’s. Every day at least one of them had attempted to extract from her the precise nature of her work, and every day she had relished the opportunity to string them along.
Elsie returned the sweet smile. ‘Well, of course, I should have finished work at eight this morning but there was a terrible amount to do—all highly important for the war effort.’
‘Really,’ Agnes breathed, somewhere between mocking and disbelieving.
‘Work connected to the highest levels of government,’ Elsie added enigmatically.
‘And they let a simple teacher like you in on it all?’ Agnes asked.
‘Churchill himself was at the aerodrome just a week ago,’ Elsie said, truthfully. ‘Just before I arrived.’
Agnes made a scoffing noise and turned away, rummaging in a cupboard.
‘I won’t be here for dinner tonight,’ Elsie said.
‘Churchill want you to work, does he?’ Gwen smirked.
‘No, I’m going to a dance.’
Agnes looked up with fiery eyes. ‘A dance?’
‘That’s right. I’m going with the other WAAF girls.’
Agnes shook her head. ‘You’ve barely been widowed a month and you’re going to be cavorting with other men? I can’t believe it of you, Elsie—really I can’t.’ She looked incredulously at Kath and Gwen. ‘Can you believe what you’re hearing?’
They shook their heads.
‘I shan’t be cavorting,’ Elsie defended, fully expecting this reaction. ‘I shall be spending some time with my girlfriends from work, then I shall come home.’
‘Well,’ Agnes muttered. ‘I hoped you would at least show some respect for my poor son, lying on a French beach somewhere—probably in tiny pieces—and not dance with other men.’
‘I shan’t be dancing, Agnes,’ Elsie said. ‘Really, it will probably just be a gramophone, a few dried sandwiches and a bit of fun with the girls.’
Agnes shook her head. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Elsie. When my husband died, I was in mourning for years, not minutes.’
‘I can be in mourning and still live my life,’ Elsie said, turning her back on the three women’s disgusted gawps. She heard mumbling and murmuring as she left, but didn’t turn back.
Up in her bedroom, Elsie closed the door and fell onto the bed with relief. This musty-smelling room with its lumpy bed had become her haven of refuge. She stared at the yellowing ceiling, mulling over her decision to go to the dance. The truth was, she didn’t know if it was appropriate or not. Maybe things would be different if she had loved Laurie. Maybe not. She thought of her parents and wondered what they would think. She looked across at their photo on her dresser, wondering how they were getting on in Coventry. She still had plenty of time to get ready, so she decided to write to them, intending a happy newsy letter that would set their minds at ease. She lay on the bed with the paper propped on her pillow and began to write. But, after twenty minutes, all that she had to show were three screwed up balls of paper on the floor. The combination of the restrictions over her job and the knowledge that every letter leaving the coastal defence zone was opened by a censor, had left her letters devoid of anything but the banal. She tossed the writing paper under her bed, picked up The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire and shuffled herself around the bed bumps into a comfortable position.
She read until the long fingers of dusk sneaked into the room, stealing the light, then she set down her book and lit a cigarette at the open window. Minutes later, the aerodrome began to empty; first the poor beleaguered Defiants left, followed by the Hurricanes. The beautiful black silhouettes of the aircraft slowly dissolved into the burnt pastel horizon.
It was time to get ready.
For the first time in a very long while, Elsie felt like a real woman. Not a wife. Not a widow. Not a sergeant. Just Elsie. She had left Cliff House under the glaring disapproval of her mother-in-law, but now, as she walked gingerly towards the village hall, she felt fantastic. She wore a long red evening dress and a matching felt hat with a wide brim and large veil. She had applied Vaseline hair tonic to make her eyelashes appear longer and had used her best red lipstick sparingly, now that it was so hard to find in the
