A Christmas Promise by Annie Groves Read Free Book Online Page B

ripped it up for dusters, but this was no longer an option. Most of the younger women who had come to the mending classes were so pitifully grateful they could send any of their children who had not been evacuated or who had come back home to school looking half-way decent.
    Many thoughts filtered through Olive’s head as she prepared to do her daily chores. The war, in many Londoners’ eyes, seemed never-ending now; people were bone weary no matter how much the Pathé News people tried to convince the world that ‘London Could Take It’.
    If the truth were told, London was sick and tired of it – and ‘taking it’ wasn’t an option!
    From the time the Americans entered the war Olive knew that Mr Churchill was certain of an Allied triumph. She also recognised, after avidly following the nightly news, that the Germans’ disastrous campaign in Russia over the winter and the Allies’ success in East Africa and at El Alamein had improved this guarantee. Nevertheless, the longed-for Second Front, designed to attack Hitler’s Atlantic Wall on the north coast of France, still seemed a long way off. And as days turned into weeks she knew that it was still hard to endure the prolonged absence of husbands, sweethearts but, most of all, her daughter.
    Sally had thrown herself into her work at St Bartholomew’s Hospital as well as raising her three-year-old half-sister, Alice, who was also being looked after by Olive and Agnes. She doted on the little girl, and her presence at number 13 was part of the reason why Agnes hadn’t gone to the farm long ago. Although Olive knew that the Germans had other countries to fight now, she did worry that London was still not safe. Raids were an ever-present terror and were growing more frequent again of late. She vowed that when she and Sally had a moment she would broach the subject once more of Alice being evacuated. She knew how heart-breaking it would be for all of them to see little Alice being farmed out to somewhere quiet, but it was for the best, especially if the Axis powers turned on Britain once more.
    And Tilly, her own darling girl, had lost her sweetheart, Drew, not through action or fighting in the war, but in a motor car accident that had left him in a coma for a long time, and who had been brought to London for major, experimental surgery on his back, to help him walk again. Olive pulled at the skin around her knuckles and her forehead pleated as she frowned … She had tried so desperately to put the thought of Drew leaving hospital out of her mind. Tilly would never forgive her for not telling her that her sweetheart was so, so close and that she could have gone to see him any time she felt like it.
    ‘Hi, Aunt Olive!’ Barney’s deepening, fourteen-year-old voice made her jump as he came through the back door, and Olive was sure she had a guilty look about her as she turned to see him carrying new-laid eggs in the turned-up bottom of his pullover. ‘I found these.’
    ‘You found them before they were lost, you mean.’ Olive smiled, going to fetch a bowl to put the eggs into. Barney was a good lad, she thought, knowing Archie – and herself, if she was honest – had done a really good job of taking care of him, with help from the rest of the inhabitants of number 13, of course.
    There had been no word of Barney’s father, who was away fighting and hadn’t been back home since Barney’s mother and grandmother had been killed during the blitz back in 1940. Archie had said many a time that he would love to adopt the boy, but with things being the way they were he hadn’t looked into it yet.
    Barney had wandered into Archie and Mrs Dawson’s life before she died tragically last year, and Archie, being the kind-hearted man he was, continued to take care of the lad. Now, Barney was almost as tall as Archie, and already taller than Olive, and he made her feel much safer when he stayed in Dulcie’s old room when Sally was working nights at the