Her bedroom, at last. She was certain that she could have slept standing up. She collapsed back into the bed with no energy with which to even bother undressing.
As she lay down, she noticed the pot of quinine pills beside her on the bedside table. She looked at it for a long time before picking it up and holding the pot above her.
Finally, she unscrewed the cap and poured the contents into her cupped hand.
Chapter Fifteen
25th December 1940, West Kingsdown, Kent
‘Bloody thing!’ Elsie cursed, trying to do the buttons up on her uniform. ‘Help me, will you, Violet?’
Violet, curled up in a ball on the bed beside her, groaned. ‘No.’
Elsie removed the blackouts from the window, sending a shock of sunlight into the room, then tugged the blankets from Violet’s bed. ‘I’m serious, Violet. I need you to help me.’
Violet rolled over, making a feline whine as she did so. ‘Please tell me that you’re not on duty today, Elsie Finch.’
‘Only a short one—I’ll be back in time for dinner.’
Violet sighed noisily and rose from the bed.
‘Pull it around from the sides, will you?’ Elsie said, placing Violet’s limp hands on her hips.
Violet pulled the material taut, but even that wasn’t good enough—there was no way that Elsie was going to be able to button up her tunic. Until now, she had managed to keep the bump well hidden, with only a few passing comments from the other girls that she had gained some weight recently. But in the last few days her belly had grown preposterously large. Her new uniform, with its red silk lining and thin cuff stripe, had only had two months’ wear, and now it was too small. Or she was too big.
‘Great. Now what am I going to do?’ Elsie asked.
‘Get a corset? Tell people the truth?’ Violet suggested, falling back into bed and pulling the blankets over her head. ‘It’s not as if they won’t find out at some point anyway. You had your chance with the pills but now it’s too late.’
Elsie swallowed hard, knowing that underneath Violet’s bullish words were the grains of truth. The morning after the Coventry raids, Elsie had flushed the quinine pills down the lavatory. When Violet had asked—and repeated to ask on a daily basis—what Elsie’s new plan was, she had told her the same answer: that she had no idea. One thing was certain, however, she could no longer disguise the fact that she was expecting a child. ‘I’ll tell Jean today,’ Elsie murmured, as much to herself as to Violet.
‘I think it’s probably the right thing to do,’ Violet agreed. ‘Clause 22.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Clause 22—your exit from the WAAF,’ Violet clarified. ‘I’ve considered going out that way myself. Ruth Selmes was selling her urine for two pounds a bottle.’
Elsie shot a horrified look at Violet. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean it’s an easy way out of the WAAF.’
‘I don’t want to leave the WAAF,’ Elsie retorted.
‘You didn’t seriously think that you would be able to continue in the service with a baby, did you?’
‘I don’t know…’ Elsie hadn’t thought—that was the problem. She couldn’t leave, not now. The Y-Service was doing such important work. She was doing such important work. She had only just recently been promoted. The letter recommending her advancement to the rank of Assistant Section Officer had arrived on the same day as the letter confirming what she had already known: that her parents and grandmother had been killed in the raid on Coventry. In the days following the attack, Elsie had used a forty-eight hour pass to visit the city, where she spoke to neighbours and the local ARP warden, who had found all of them dead in their beds. They had apparently made no attempt to seek shelter and were killed instantly in one of the first raids of the night. Elsie had picked her way across the rubble-strewn city that no longer bore any resemblance to the place that she had often visited when staying with her grandparents as a child. The house—the entire street, in fact—had been reduced to an unidentifiable mound of bricks, wood and household detritus. She had stood on the street corner, behind a safety cordon and wept.
The memory made her stomach quiver, bringing her back to the present, back to her first Christmas alone.
‘Are you okay, Elsie Finch?’ Violet asked, reaching for her hand.
Elsie smiled. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Thank you.’ She took a few moments to compose herself, then said goodbye to Violet and left the house.
‘Göring and his cronies are having the day off, by the looks of it,’ Jean Conan Doyle informed Elsie, when she arrived at work.
The operations room was almost deserted. Just six operators were twiddling their dials, searching for sounds of the enemy.
‘There’s been nothing at all so far today, thank heavens,’ Jean added. ‘Make yourself a cocoa—take your time.’
Elsie smiled. ‘Before I get started, there’s something I need to tell you.’
Jean lowered her glasses from the bridge of her nose, letting them dangle from the chain around her neck. ‘Sounds ominous. Come into the office.’
They entered the Intelligence Office and Jean closed the door.
‘Take a seat,’ she said, sitting behind the desk in RKB’s chair.
‘I’m pregnant,’ Elsie announced, staring at the ground between her shoes. She had just needed to blurt it out, or she knew that the words would never have come.
‘Pregnant?’ Jean echoed.
Elsie nodded and looked up. She saw the shock and disappointment in Jean’s eyes as she processed the information.
‘How far gone are you?’ she asked.
‘Four months.’
‘But…’ Her words trailed into a silence that betrayed her thought process. Jean cleared her throat and
