The Light Over London(48)

I have some friends here, but I miss you desperately. I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if we’d been assigned to the same unit, but then you’re doing ack-ack. I don’t think I’d ever have the nerve for that.

Yours always,

Kate

1 August 1941

Lou Lou,

I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back asleep, so I’ve come downstairs to write you. I had a dream that something happened to you on the battlefield. Your unit was hit by machine-gun fire from a plane flying low over you. Instead of sheltering behind a concrete barrier like the men of your unit, you ran out to try to drag one of your friends to safety and were hit yourself.

I know you’ve done your best in your letters to reassure me that nothing like this will happen, but I know that the Luftwaffe doesn’t just have bombers. There are fighters, too, that try to take out the spotlights and the anti-aircraft guns. You’re never going to be entirely safe. No one is.

No father wants to let his daughter think that he’s scared when he’s the one who is supposed to pick you up when you fall and kiss scraped knees, but I’m afraid for you. I’m also incredibly proud of you. Your mother thinks you joined the ATS because you were angry about your pilot, but I want to believe that some part of your decision was because you knew you had to do something to help end this war. That’s why, even though I wake up in a cold sweat when I have dreams like the one tonight, I know what you’re doing is more important than anything I could have asked of you if you’d stayed in Haybourne.

Your ever-loving

Da

Da is wrong, but so is Mum. When I ran away from home, I wasn’t angry about Paul. I was scared that if I didn’t leave Haybourne then, I would never get out. But now it’s more. Now I’m a part of something important, something that matters, and Vera, Charlie, Mary, Nigella, and Lizzie all rely on me. No one’s ever needed me to be anything other than a shopgirl before. Now I’m a gunner girl.

I’ve saved the best for last. Paul has written me—my first letter in almost a week.

30 July 1941

My darling,

It’s taken moving heaven and earth and perhaps the moon too, but I’ve finally done it. My leave is scheduled, my transit passes are in order, and I’ll finally be able to kiss you again on the first of September.

It was a struggle to set down the date. My commanding officer seems hell-bent on ruining every lovers’ reunion, but even he couldn’t argue with RAF regulations. He had to grant me leave, so I’ll be making my way to Dover and then onto the fastest train I can find to London.

Nothing will make me happier than seeing your beautiful face—even if it’ll be a shock to see you in drab ATS khaki instead of that bright red dress of yours. There are so many things I want to tell you. Things I’ve left unsaid for too long.

I’m counting down the days.

Yours always,

Paul

I cannot wait until the first of September, because I also have things to say to him. I started to fall for him in Haybourne, but it was our letters that made me realize how deep my love had grown. We hope, we quarrel, we dream, we despair. And soon we’ll see each other again.





12


LOUISE


The sun was setting when Louise let her pack slide off and hit the bare wood floor of the room that would be her home for the foreseeable future. They’d bumped along cratered and debris-strewn streets in a canvas-sided truck, stopping first at the Charlton Barracks, where Hatfield, Cartruse, and Williams had climbed out. They would be billeted there, but the girls were two blocks away from the Woolwich Depot, in a five-story redbrick building that before the war had been a shuttered hospital. Nigella, Lizzie, and Mary had the first room off the stairs, and Vera, Charlie, and Louise had been assigned the one right next door. Now, taking in the Spartan look of the place, Louise could see that it had been hurriedly fitted out to cram three ATS women into two bunks and a cot that blocked the door unless it was angled just so.

“At least it’s warm,” said Charlie, laying out the three cushions that would form her ATS-issued mattress. Louise had learned to call the cushions “biscuits” during her first week of basic training, which was also when she had learned that the only way to keep the bloody things from slipping apart in her sleep was to lash them together with a spare blanket. If there was one.

“It should be,” said Vera with a laugh, while she tugged at the heavy blackout curtains that covered every window in London to deter the Luftwaffe. “It’s August.”

Charlie smiled. “You never know in London, right, Louise?”

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t know—I’ve never been.”

Vera dropped her hairbrush on the floor with a clatter. “You’ve never—We’ve been training together for four months. How did you never mention it?”

“I thought your fellow was from London,” said Charlie.

“He is, but we met in Cornwall, remember?”

“Well, that settles it,” said Vera. “The first free afternoon we have, we’ll take you for a grand tour of the city. Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey.”

“Saint Paul’s and the Embankment,” Charlie chipped in. “There’s so much to see, even if half of it’s been bombed.”

Louise’s smile suddenly became a little watery at her friends’ enthusiasm. The months of hard work, huddling around an electric fire in a little hut on the edge of a training field before the air raid siren sounded for their training drills, had bonded her to these women in a way she never would’ve expected. She missed Kate, but in Vera, Charlie, Lizzie, Nigella, and Mary, she’d found a different kind of kinship. Her father had been right in his last letter: they were all in danger, but at least they were in it together.