Rising Summer by Mary Jane Staples Read Free Book Online Page A

everyone except Major Moffat, our battery commander. He preferred happenings. Accordingly, when he was alerted to the possible misappropriation of WD petrol, he was only too happy to conduct an enquiry, even though he must have known it might result in two unwelcome findings. One, the misappropriation could have taken place under his nose. Two, someone in his battery could turn out to be a fiddling shower.
    The first I heard about it was a week after I’d brought Sergeant Masters and her two girls to BHQ. The information arrived with Jim Beavers’ daughter, the precocious Minnie. As I came off duty one afternoon, Frisby advised me she was waiting to talk to me. She was loitering outside the open double gates in the high brick wall fronting the forecourt of the mansion. In her straw boater and gymslip she looked like a peachy-faced angel, but I knew the holy terror was lurking.
    ‘Dad sent me,’ she said.
    ‘What for?’
    ‘To tell you.’
    ‘Tell me what?’
    ‘Not ’ere,’ said Minnie, ‘someone might be listening.’
    ‘And looking as well,’ I said, quite sure that across the road the workshop personnel were interesting themselves in what I was doing to a village schoolgirl.
    Minnie got moving and I moved with her. She had a lively walk, typical of a healthy country girl. She was a south London cockney who’d turned herself into a country girl with no trouble at all. Bursting with health, Minnie was.
    ‘Well, let’s hear it, then,’ I said, ‘but if it’s anything saucy I’ll wallop you.’
    She gurgled. ‘Ain’t you comical, Tim? You make a girl laugh, you do.’ She stopped, and from under her boater her blue eyes cast their cheekiness.
    ‘Come on, why did your dad send you?’
    ‘He said someone’s been round.’
    ‘Who, your Aunt Flossie?’ That was her mother’s aunt.
    ‘Course not Aunt Flossie. Oh, you Tim,’ she said and another gurgle escaped from her Cupid’s bow. ‘I’m praying, I am.’
    ‘Praying?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m praying I’m goin’ to be your best girl soon as I’m sixteen.’
    ‘Well, I’m praying that when you’re sixteen you’ll disappear in a puff of smoke,’ I said. ‘Now, come on, who’s been round to see your dad?’
    ‘Some soldiers, he said. From your lot. Dad said better he didn’t come and tell you himself, better he kept away. You go, Min, he said, it’ll only look as if you an’ Tim is courtin’.’
    ‘Don’t say things like that, Min, you’ll give me a headache.’
    ‘I didn’t say it, Dad did.’ Minnie fluttered her lashes. ‘They went an’ took his drum of petrol. He said they couldn’t, they said they could an’ they did. He said he thought you ought to know.’
    ‘Nothing to do with me,’ I said. ‘Still, tell him I’d better not have any more eggs from him for the time being, tell him to keep them tucked into the bosom of his family.’
    ‘Whose, Mum’s or mine?’ asked Minnie.
    ‘I’ll tan you,’ I said.
    ‘Honest?’ Minnie looked eager. ‘Would you, though? Be bliss, it would.’
    ‘Don’t talk daft.’
    ‘Not daft.’ Her smile was terrifying. ‘You’re fun, you are, Tim. Best ever. But you’re shy, like.’
    ‘Shy? Of what?’
    ‘Me. I don’t mind, though. It’s nice in a way. Goin’ to be your best girl, I am, you see. Oh, Dad said he won’t say.’
    ‘Won’t say what?’
    ‘Don’t know, do I?’ she said, the April sunshine dancing on her boater. She did know, of course, but nobody was going to prise it out of her. Good little Suffolk scout she was. In a frightening way. ‘All that porridge and all, Tim.’
    ‘Never mind what your mum gives you for breakfast, just tell your dad to say the drum dropped off the tail of a Heinkel. All right, off you go, Min. Ta for coming.’
    ‘Kiss first,’ said Minnie, standing in the lee of the hedge and pursing her lips.
    ‘Not this year, Min.’
    ‘But I’m sixteen in June.’
    ‘That’s not now. If I’m going to be shot at dawn with