As Time Goes By by Annie Groves Read Free Book Online Page A

your bed.’
    Sam smiled at the other new girl to join the group, as they emerged from the showers at the same time. She didn’t look old enough to have joined up, Sam thought, with her huge hazel eyes and her patent shyness. Sam hadn’t missed the nearly bald teddy bear hastily stuffed out of sight before she had got out of bed.
    ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Sam assured her with a smile.
    The other girl looked relieved. ‘I’m Mouse,’ she introduced herself. ‘At least that’s what everyone calls me although I was christened Marianne. I didn’t think that they’d be sending me to work in a barracks, I really didn’t. I mean, I only joined up because I had to. I didn’t want to at all really. It was my aunt’s idea … She said that with me being on my own … I thought I’d be staying close to home, and doing a bit of office work.’
    Sam could see that she was close to tears.Mouse’s naïvety, combined with her air of helplessness made Sam wonder how on earth she had managed to survive the ATS long enough to get through the training weeks. The Government must indeed be desperate for young women to fill the mundane jobs left empty by the men who had been sent on active service.
    ‘Well, that’s where you went wrong,’ she told her wryly. ‘You should have told them you wanted to drive trucks and be posted as far away from home as possible and then you’d have probably ended up being a stenographer.’
    ‘Drive trucks?’ Mouse shuddered. ‘Oh, no … I couldn’t possibly do anything like that.’
    She was as green as grass and apparently completely devoid of a sense of humour, Sam reflected pityingly. The kind of girl who should have been allowed to stay at home with her mother.
    ‘Come on, you two, buck up,’ Hazel, who Sam thought would be much more her cup of tea with her jolly no-nonsense manner, called out, warning, as she fastened her own uniform blouse and tucked it into her shirt, ‘You’re not dressed yet and if you don’t get a move on you’ll miss breakfast.’
    Miss breakfast. Sam’s stomach gave a worried growl. She was just about to hurry over to her own bed, when she realised that somehow or other Mouse had already managed to get into the disgusting pink foundation garments that were part of their official uniform whilst in the shower and that she was now trying to keep the towel wrapped protectively around herself as she continued to get dressed.

    Shaking her head over such time-consuming and unnecessary primness, Sam reached her bed and grabbed her own clothes.
    ‘You’ll never get away with wearing that,’ Hazel warned her when she saw the non-uniform white brassiere Sam was fastening. ‘Not if Toadie sees it. She likes the thought of us being trussed up in our passionkillers, doesn’t she, girls?’
    The chorus of assents that greeted Hazel’s comment made Sam laugh. With her slim almost boyish figure, the last thing she needed was the one-size-fits-all proportions of the regulation underwear and corsetry supplied to the ATS. In addition to two uniforms, and four pairs of lisle stockings, everyone was also issued with three pairs of khaki lock-knit knickers, two pairs of blue and white striped pyjamas, eight starched collars and two studs, and the bane of Sam’s life, three pink brassieres and two pink boned corsets. The corsets Sam was determined never to wear, but the bras had to be worn for the sake of decency, if nothing else, and she had been very grateful when her mother had managed to find a local tailoress who had enough experience of the corset industry to be able to alter the firmly structured cone-shaped cups designed to control to military standard any potentially overexuberant female breasts, to something more appropriate for Sam’s much less voluptuous shape. She still felt trussed up and uncomfortable, though. They chafed her skin as well as her desire for freedom, and she would wear her own non-regulation underclothes as long as she could get away with