The Girl on the Beach by Mary Nichols Read Free Book Online Page A

both of them. The seaside holiday had grown in popularity in the intervening years, but it was essentially the same. The donkeys still plodded up and down with children on their backs, Punch still beat Judy about the head, children still paddled, built sandcastles, played bat and ball and poked about in rock pools for living creatures. Harry had booked them into the boarding house that his family had always frequented and here they spent the first night of married life.
    They were both virgins, but Harry had a little more idea of what was expected of him than Julie had. They undressed shyly and scrambled into bed and lay there in each other’s arms. He put his arm beneath her shoulders and pulled her round so that he could kiss her. He was gentle, she was responsive, and then nature and instinct took over and their marriage was consummated in the most joyful satisfying way. Exhausted and happy, they slept.
    The week flew by – they paddled and swam and walked along the beach, skimming pebbles; they strolled along the pier and tried out the slot machines with pennies; they played bowls on the green, went to the theatre and the cinema, and at night they made love, discovering new pleasures along the way. It seemed nothing and no one could spoil their delight in each other. And the following Saturday they went home, taking with them a garden gnome whichhad taken Julie’s fancy because of his round red cheeks and beaming smile. ‘He’s one of Snow White’s dwarves,’ she told Harry, hanging onto his arm. ‘He’s Happy. Just like me.’ He had bought it for her and found a spot for it in the garden and they settled down to married life in their new home. It would have been idyllic if the fear of war had not been hanging over everyone.
    Harry went to work at the factory every day, working twelve-hour shifts. Radios were needed for the new aircraft coming off the production line, for communications in the army and navy, and for the ordinary household who needed the wireless to listen to the BBC and keep abreast of the news. The Great Depression of earlier in the decade was put behind them as the populace found employment in the preparations for war.
    ‘Too little, too late,’ Donald Walker said gloomily as he stood beside his son’s workbench one day in October. Everyone in the factory was working flat out and most were doing overtime every evening. ‘We should have been doing this years ago.’
    Hitler had annexed Austria earlier in the year with hardly a murmur of dissent and now his attention was turning to Czechoslovakia, a country created by the Versailles Treaty after the Great War and which contained, in Sudetenland, three million German-speaking people. In an effort to avoid war Neville Chamberlain had flown to Munich to meet Hitler and come back with a document they had both signed. It was not a treaty but an agreement not to go to war so long as Germany was allowed to take over Sudetenland. The whole country gave a huge sigh of relief, but it did not stop the preparations. Only the foolhardy believed it meant peace was assured.
    ‘I think you had better get that wife of yours out of London,’ Donald added. ‘We’re right on the docks here and a prime target for the bombers.’
    ‘I’ve told her all that, but she won’t have it. She won’t leave me and she won’t leave her home, especially after Mr Chamberlain came back from Germany waving that scrap of paper and saying it meant peace in our time.’
    ‘Do you believe that?’ his father asked him.
    ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t, but Julie has been brought up to believe implicitly whatever those in authority tell her and she is convinced there will be no war. I don’t want to worry her by shattering her faith, especially now.’
    ‘She ought to have more faith in you, if only for the baby’s sake.’
     
    Julie, like many another, chose to put her head in the sand and get on with her life, a life entirely wrapped up in Harry, her cosy little home