You lived for each day as it came, everyone looked after everyone else, and you simply didn’t have time to think about yourself and the danger you were in.
She also organised teas and concerts for convalescent men in hospital, even the occasional dance, and they were incredibly popular, restoring happiness and hope however briefly, by way of the music of the great Glenn Miller and England’s own Henry Hall, and such great dance-floor hits of the time as the Lindy Hop and the Jitterbug, imported mostly by the dashing new arrivals, the GIs. And as well there were such staider home-grown counterparts as the Palais Glide and ‘Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree’, greatly favoured by the King and Queen and the little Princesses. She danced herself if invited, but mostly she was content to stand and watch the girls in their pretty dresses, stocking seams drawn on bare legs with eyebrow pencils, their hair in elaborate Betty Grable curls, flirting and laughing, the men in their best suits, their drawn faces flushed with pleasure. She would often sit with the men who liked to come even if they were in wheelchairs, chatting and sometimes flirting with them, listening to their stories about the girls they had loved and left behind, and who had been to visit them in the hospital or were coming ‘any day now’. She worried about the ‘any day now’s. If Tom had been in hospital over the past three years, she would have been there with him somehow, every weekend. But she would smile at them and admire the battered snapshots that were pulled out of wallets and pockets and they would smile back and when she returned to school on Monday, exhausted, she never complained, never talked much about what she had been doing. For her, as much as it was her war effort, it was also a bargaining with fate, warding off something worse: losing Tom.
And it had worked. Just. She had nearly lost him, but now he was safe, and properly safe for the rest of the war, for he had written to tell her he was no longer required, as he put it with a certain bitterness, but invalided out.
Well, she would disabuse him of the bitterness, the sadness. And they would be together, properly together, perhaps married, before they had dreamed possible, their lives fused, their happiness safe. And in only twenty-four hours that happiness would begin.
Tom lay in his bed in the hospital at Aldershot, focusing on nothing but Laura’s arrival, his mind wiped clean of anything but his love for her. He was still in a lot of pain; his breathing was a struggle and his left leg, patched together by a novice field surgeon in an operating theatre lit by a hurricane lamp while a sandstorm raged outside, and now a little shorter than the right one, ached constantly. He slept badly. Normally he dreaded the nights, but this one was a joy, because it gave him time and space to think about Laura. He could conjure her up in his head, the brown curls, the wide brown eyes, the curvily sweet mouth that she hated – ‘I look like a soppy girl in a story’ – and her small, bustling figure, the full breasts, the frankly plump thighs that she despaired of but he loved. He could hear her voice in his head too, a little deep for a girl, expressive, and capable of roaring across a room and a playground, but he somehow couldn’t quite put it all together, conjure her up and imagine her beside him. When he had been really ill and they thought he would die, he had wild, feverish dreams in which she was always on the other side of a door, standing behind him, walking away from him, never standing and smiling in front of him. But today, today he would have her, the real her, there, by his bed, holding his hand, talking to him, listening to him. It was happiness too impossible to believe.
He had been in the hospital for three weeks and now at last Sister, the stern sister who terrified everyone, even the young doctors, had told him he could have a visitor. ‘Just one, mind,’ she said briskly, only her twinkling eyes giving her away. ‘I don’t want all your friends and family here.’
The nurses all knew Laura was coming; he had been walked to the bathroom, helped into the bath, clean pyjamas had been found, his hair brushed, even his nails cut by his favourite nurse, Molly she was called, while Sister wasn’t looking. She wasn’t coming until three, he knew, but by nine he was ready, too excited to eat his breakfast.
‘If you don’t eat we won’t let her in,’ Molly said briskly.
Six hours to go: what could he do? He tried reading; he had discovered the works of Rider Haggard and was presently deep into She. But even that failed today; it simply could not compete with thoughts of Laura and her arrival. About ten o’clock, having slept so very little, he drifted into something that was half sleep, half memory about his time in the desert, mostly the good – the camaraderie, the sense of adventure, and of knowing that what they were doing was truly vital, of Monty’s presence, so strong, so driving, the palpable relief when he arrived to take over from Auchinleck, the sense within days that they were in good hands.
Monty had an incredible rapport with his soldiers: ‘Gather round, boys, gather round,’ he would say before some briefing of vital information he needed to impart. And the arrival of the tanks, the Sherman tanks, he could remember that so vividly, knowing they were there, knowing how many they had, hundreds more than Rommel. It had been a huge morale boost. The bad was mostly physical; the awful sand, worse in the sandstorm when it stung your face and all you could do was bury your head in your arms; it got in your tea and gave you dysentery. The heat you got used to, but never the sand. And never the lack of water, only enough to clean your teeth for days on end, not to wash – and just enough to drink.
His job was laying mines. They would arrive at some place, as they drove forward through the desert, clear the German ones away and lay their own. He could still remember the one that had done for him and knew he always would; it had gone off a yard or so away, badly injuring his foot and hip and then torn up to his waist and burst again. It hadn’t hurt at first and he remembered being furious because he couldn’t move, couldn’t get on with his work; then he blacked out, and came to being stretchered to an ambulance. After that the pain began. Weeks, months of it, and then the illness, making him so weak he thought quite often he must be dying.
Now he was lying in a cool, clean hospital, with no sand, plenty of water – and Laura on her way to see him. Laura. His love.