‘Will your sense of duty allow you to meet me on Saturday night?’ Dilys asked. ‘Dancing at the Empire? I could meet you outside at eight.’

Molly began to laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’ Dilys asked.

‘You, me, dancing at the Empire. Because I’m so happy you phoned. Is that enough reasons?’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Two weeks after meeting Charley, Molly woke up to see her room bathed in a murky grey light. She groaned, as she knew that meant it had snowed again overnight.

She snuggled further under the covers, dreading the moment she’d have to get up.

It was March now, and she’d started to think that spring was just around the corner. But it seemed it intended to strike more blows before it slipped away. Molly was so tired of being cold, of the lack of sunshine, of hearing coughing and spluttering all around her and seeing small children with sore, red noses. It took away the joy she ought to be feeling.

She ought to be ecstatic that, just yesterday, Constance had said that friends of hers with a small hotel in Rye on the south coast would like to interview her for a job. If she got the job, she could live in warmth and comfort, and when spring eventually came she’d be in a beautiful part of England, having said goodbye to the slums of Whitechapel.

But she wasn’t ecstatic. She was scared.

Not scared of the job – that sounded perfect. It was for an all-round assistant, barmaid, receptionist and chambermaid, which was ideal for gaining valuable experience. It would also be wonderful to get to know new people who weren’t downtrodden, like they were around here.

There were two flies in the ointment. One was Charley. Molly didn’t want to move away from him. The other was Dilys. Having only just got in touch with her friend again, she didn’t want to lose her either. Both of them were very special to her. She knew Dilys would write and keep in touch, maybe even come down for a holiday, but Charley might lose interest if it was too hard to see her often.

She and Dilys had so much fun the night they went to the Empire in Leicester Square. Seeing one another again was like a magic potion that made them giggle like schoolgirls and talk as if they’d been in solitary confinement for a month. They danced with anyone who asked them but escaped to get back together again. There was so much to catch up on, and it felt as if there weren’t enough time.

Dilys said when they parted at the end of the evening, ‘You once said, “We’ll still be chums when we’re old ladies”; it was when we’d had too much to drink. But I believe it’s true. Even if we find our Mr Rights, get married and have lots of kids, we’ll still keep in touch. We’ll look at each other when we’re both sixty, and we’ll think we haven’t changed a bit, and I bet we’ll still be giggling the way we have tonight.’

Molly felt the same: they might go their separate ways because of husbands or children, but there would always be that invisible chain which either of them could tug on to bring their friend right back.

It wasn’t that way with men; for them, it had to be all or nothing. Since her first date with Charley, when he took her to the pictures, she’d seen him almost every day. Mostly it was just drinks in a pub, or a cup of tea in the café when she’d finished work, but then, she would’ve stood on a street corner in a howling gale if it meant seeing him. He was bright, caring, funny, generous – everything she’d ever wanted in a boyfriend – and he set her pulse racing, too.

The cold weather and having nowhere to go to be alone together was perhaps just as well, because one kiss was enough to set her on fire. She was pretty certain that if they had a warm, comfy place to be in, she’d be tempted to go all the way with him.

One of the very nicest things about Charley was that he behaved like a gentleman. His parents in Bethnal Green were, by his own admission, ‘a bit rough’. He’d been evacuated at the start of the war to Sussex and the family he was billeted with were ‘toffs’, as he put it.

‘I couldn’t believe the house when I first saw it,’ he said, his eyes shining as if he were recalling a very magical moment. ‘A huge great pile – I could count twenty windows just on the front! They picked me because they wanted help in the garden and with their horses, and I was about the oldest, strongest boy amongst the evacuees.’

‘Were they kind to you?’ she asked.

‘Fair more than kind. No demonstrative stuff, certainly no mollycoddling. But I think they liked me. I was fed far better than at home, I slept in a bed of my own – at home, I’d shared one with two of my brothers. But the best thing for me was learning about how people with money and position live and behave. I soaked it all up and promised myself that, one day, I’d live like that.’

‘So what was it like when you went home?’

‘Bloody awful.’ He pulled a face. ‘So many bomb sites. Whole rows of houses gone. Mum and Dad were virtual strangers, and they claimed I looked down on them and talked posh.’

‘I expect they felt bad that someone else had been able to give you things they couldn’t,’ she said, in sympathy with them.

He gave a snort of disbelief. ‘Not them – just put out ’cos I’d learned a thing or two while I’d been away, and one of them was that they both liked the booze more than they did any of us kids. They knew right away that when I got a job I wasn’t going to meekly hand my wages over to them. Why would I, when it would only make them drink more?’

He paused to ruffle Molly’s hair, and smiled at her. ‘That makes me sound hard but, if you ever meet them, you’ll understand. Anyway, I found some digs and got some demolition work while I waited to see if I’d be called up for National Service. I was well past the age then, but the family I was evacuated with didn’t want to lose me, because I was so useful to them. They pulled some strings so I could stay with them, but once I left there and got back to London I knew I was likely to be summoned again. Sure enough, I was. But being called up was the second best thing to being evacuated. I learned to drive and maintain not just cars and trucks but cranes and other machines, too. When I got out I was taken on straight away by Wates.’

Molly knew that Wates was one of the biggest building companies in London. They had contracts for clearing bomb sites all over the East End and then building flats and houses. One of Charley’s workmates had told her that he’d worked his way up and been made foreman. She’d also observed from the attitude of all the men who worked under his supervision that they respected him and admired his desire to get on in life.

Part of Charley’s long-term plan was to become a civil engineer and, to that end, he attended night school twice a week. His ambition and tenacity must have come from the influence of the people he was billeted with during the war; few other local men who worked as hard as he did by day would think of going back to school in the evenings when they could be in the pub with their mates.

To Molly, all this was very laudable, and she liked the fact that Charley seemed to be very serious about her, too. Yet men always expected their women to mould their lives around them, so he wasn’t going to like it when she told him later today that, tomorrow, she was taking the day off to go down to Rye for a job interview.

She expected him to ask why she’d want to move away from Whitechapel and Constance when she already had a job she liked. As ambitious as he was himself, he wouldn’t think any normal woman would want a career.

Molly had to go to the interview, or Constance would be offended after she’d gone to all that trouble to arrange it. And unless there was some serious drawback to the job, Molly had to take it. Not just to please Constance, but because she wanted far more out of life than cooking bacon and eggs in Pat’s Café.