The Light Over London(4)

I suppose that’s why I’m writing in this diary. Dad has been saying for ages that I ought to keep a record of this war and of what happens to me.

Just last week Mum was horrid about the idea, saying, “What’s she going to write about? Her job at Mrs. Bakeford’s shop?”

Well, something has happened and I have to write about it, even if it is simply to spite Mum.

It was a diary. A World War II diary. Cara skipped ahead a dozen or so pages.

21 February 1941

For months I felt as though I didn’t have anything to record in these pages. Everything stays the same here, but now things are different. Now it seems as though I can’t stop writing.

Paul took me to the pictures in Newquay yesterday afternoon to see Freedom Radio. I told Mum I was helping Kate knit socks for the war effort, but instead I ran to the bus stop to wait for him. He was a perfect gentleman, buying my ticket and helping me to find my seat. We arrived at the theater just as the film was starting, and as soon as the title card came up, he took my hand and didn’t let go the entire time. I don’t think I paid attention to a thing Clive Brook and Diana Wynyard were saying on the screen!

24 February 1941

Two days until I see Paul again.

I never thought I would be the type of girl to become all swoony over a man, but today at the shop I dropped a glass jar of boiled sweets. By some miracle it didn’t break, but Mrs. Bakeford scolded me for having my head in the clouds. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t my head but my heart.

With a smile, Cara flipped forward to a random section midway through.

25 September 1941

I said goodbye to Paul this morning. He tried to talk me into staying in bed, but I told him that would be desertion.

Cara paged through the rest of the diary, looking to see how far it went. The writing stopped abruptly with a single line.

5 January 1942

Everything is over. I thought I loved him.

Guilt tugged at her as she closed the cover, but sitting with her hand still touching the journal full of another woman’s most intimate thoughts, she couldn’t deny that she was curious. Who was Paul and what had happened? Why was everything over, seemingly in less than a year? And whose diary was this in the first place?

When she tipped the rest of the tin onto the floor, out tumbled a tiny compass with a bent edge, a locket, a photo, a few pieces of paper, and a scrap of cloth. The cloth was easy enough to identify: a man’s handkerchief, plain and serviceable, with a “P” stitched in one corner. One of the papers was bright coral and dry with age. She flipped it over. A cinema ticket to the Paramount Theatre in Newquay dated 20 February 1941, the day before one of the diary entries she’d read.

She set the ticket aside and examined the other scraps of paper. A small flyer with a torn corner for some sort of Valentine’s dance at the generically named Village Hall on the fourteenth of February. An unused tube ticket for the Central line.

She picked up the photo next. A woman wearing a uniform was looking over her shoulder, her hand raised to the cap that sat perched atop her swept-back, pageboy hairstyle. Her smile was bright and brilliant, as though the photographer had caught her in a moment of pure joy.

But that wasn’t what made Cara pause. It was the uniform—she’d seen it before. Gran had been issued the same one when she’d joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1943, and Cara recognized it from the two photographs Gran kept in her sitting room. One was a formal portrait taken on Iris Warren’s first day of leave from the women’s auxiliary branch of the army. In the other, she was lined up with four other uniformed girls, all linking arms and smiling.

“I met your granddad at a dance at the NAAFI,” Gran had explained to her once. “Every few months, something official would be put on in the canteens with as good a band as they could scrape together, but more often we’d dance to music played on a gramophone. The Americans had brought the jitterbug with them, and we were all mad for it.

“Your granddad was an American GI, with his hair cut short and his sharp uniform. He did his best to woo me with chocolates and the promise of silk stockings.”

But that was where Gran’s reminiscences ended. The last time Cara had tried to ask about the war when she was just sixteen, Gran had abruptly clammed up and gone to lie down, claiming to have a migraine. Mum had scolded her, saying, “There are some things your gran doesn’t want to talk about. Don’t push her, Cara.”

She traced her finger over the strong sweep of the woman’s jaw before flipping the photograph over. On the back, in a different handwriting than the diary, someone had written “L.K. on the Embankment.”

Setting the photo down, she picked up the simple gold heart locket and eased her thumbnail between the clasp to open it. One side was blank but the other held a tiny photograph of a dashing man in a fleece-collared bomber jacket with a pair of goggles perched on top of his head. A pilot.

“Miss Hargraves!” she heard Jock shout from somewhere downstairs.

Quickly, she gathered the things into the tin and rushed to find Jock in the study with Mrs. Leithbridge.

“What have you there?” he asked with a raised brow.

“I’m not entirely sure.” She set the tin down on a table. “Mrs. Leithbridge, did your great-aunt serve in the ATS during the Second World War?”

The lady lifted her brows. “I don’t know what the ATS is.”