Women on the Home Front by Annie Groves Read Free Book Online Page A

another maternal squeeze on her arm.
    â€˜Yes, the poor little thing was left on the doorstep of the orphanage as a baby. According to Mrs Windle, she’s very shy and quiet,’ Olive approved. ‘She’ll be good company for you, darling. You’ll be able to go to church social events and dances together, I expect. Young people need to have fun, especially now, when there’s so much to worry about.’
    Because it was such a warm day neither of them felt like a heavy traditional Sunday lunch, and so instead they were going to have a nice salad made from a tin of John West salmon Olive had splashed out on, and some lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes bought from Alan, the barrow boy from Covent Garden, whose pitch was just off the Strand. Eaten with some thin slices of buttered brown bread from the local bakery, it would be a feast fit for a queen, so Olive had pronounced before they had left for church. As an extra treat they were going to have a punnet of strawberries, again bought from Alan, with either some Carnation milk or possibly some ice cream from one of Italian ice-cream sellers who sold their wares from the tricycle-propelled mobile ice-cream ‘vans’ they drove round the streets.
    The houses of Article Row didn’t have large back gardens, but at least there were gardens and not merely back yards, like those of the poorer quality houses in the area.
    Olive and Tilly’s garden had a small narrow strip of lawn surrounded by equally narrow flowerbeds, with an old apple tree down at the bottom of the garden almost right up against the wall.
    The Government had been urging people to think about growing their own salad and vegetables, but Olive wasn’t keen. She was city born and bred and didn’t know anything about gardening. The garden had been her father-in-law’s preserve before he had become too ill to work in it, and although she and Tilly kept the lawn mowed, pushing the small Wilkinson Sword lawn mower over the grass in the summer, and weeded the flowerbeds Olive didn’t fancy her chances of actually being able to grow anything edible.
    â€˜We could take a walk over to Hyde Park this evening, if you fancy it,’ Olive suggested to Tilly as she unlocked their front door. ‘We might as well enjoy this good weather whilst we’ve got it.’
    â€˜Yes, I’d like that,’ Tilly agreed immediately. ‘Bob was saying after church this morning that some of the men will be parading and drilling there – you know, being put through their paces a bit.’
    â€˜We’ll go then. We have to support our young men in uniform.’
    It was dead on three o’clock when Sally knocked on the well-maintained dark green front door of number 13. She had liked the look of Article Row the minute she had walked down it, after exploring a little of the area. Article Row might be different from the neat semi in Liverpool’s Wavertree area where she had grown up and lived with the parents, but she could see that here the householders were every bit as proud of their homes as her parents and their neighbours in Lilac Avenue had been of theirs.
    Her keen nurse’s eye saw and immediately approved of Olive’s sparkling windows, immaculate front path and tidy little front garden. Sally liked too the way that the door was answered within seconds of her knocking on it.
    She would have known that the woman stepping to one side to invite her into the clean fresh-smelling hallway was Tilly’s mother because of their shared looks, even if Olive hadn’t introduced herself with a warm but businesslike smile and a firm handshake.
    The hall floor was covered in well-polished linoleum in a parquet flooring design, with a red and blue patterned carpet runner over it, the same carpet continuing up the stairs and held in place by shining brass stair rods.
    â€˜I’ll show you the room first and then you can see the rest of the house