‘You did?’ What kind of mistakes? What had happened between Ellie and her mother? Was that one of the mistakes?
‘Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Never mind. We all make mistakes, don’t we?’ Ellie gestures to the expanse of sea glinting in the late summer sunlight below. ‘Anyway, my decisions have brought me here, and that’s just fine with me.’
‘So Sam didn’t choose to be here.’
‘No. That’s why I expect he’ll move on, unless he finds a reason to stay. I think he’s getting restless.’ Ellie holds the drawing up to Sophie. ‘There, all done. What do you think?’
Sophie runs her finger over the pencil lines, over the loose ponytail with the strands flying about her face, at the light eyes narrowed with laughter, at the rolled-up jeans and Florie’s too-large striped sweater, and the greyed shading on her fingers where the berry juice has seeped into her skin. ‘I don’t recognise myself.’
Ellie tears the drawing out of the pad and hands it to Sophie. ‘Well, you should. It’s you.’
Sophie stares at the drawing. This isn’t me. I don’t know this person.
‘Are you sure?’
Ellie laughs. ‘Of course I’m sure! One for each of us. My niece who dropped out of the sky.’
Chapter 16
Norwich, England – 14 February 1941
Ellie taps her pencil on the desk blotter. She watches the minute hand on the wall clock click to four-forty. Just one more hour before she signs off. Another Valentine’s on her own. Well, not exactly on her own. She’d be with her father and Dottie, but family wasn’t the same thing. George probably hadn’t even remembered it was Valentine’s. Romance wasn’t something he was terribly good at.
What did Valentine’s matter now, anyway? George was needed on the searchlights over at the castle tonight. Two more people killed over on Plumstead Road in last week’s raid, and more injured. Everything had settled down now, people going about their daily business, but it was a veneer of normality. She was on edge, just like everyone else. Plymouth had received a bashing just a month ago, and she’d listened to Churchill’s speech with her father and Dottie on the wireless just a few nights ago when he’d asked the Americans to ‘give us the tools’. That’ll fall on deaf ears, her father had said.
She gazes around the cluttered room. Manila files disgorging paper spill out of the wooden shelves, and a cricket bat sits across the one spare chair. Her attempts at order in the fire station’s Stores Department seem destined to failure in any office shared with Fire Officer Williams. She tucks the pencil behind her ear.
‘Would you like some tea, sir?’
Fire Officer Francis Williams peers at her over the top of the requisition list, twitching his broad nose over his grey moustache. ‘That’d do the trick, Burgess. Milk, two sugars.’
She pushes her wheeled office chair away from her desk and heads over to the hot plate. After picking up the kettle, she holds it under the cold-water tap in the tiny kitchen. Milk, two sugars. Every time. Yes, Burgess. Milk, two sugars.
‘Burgess, would you check the store and count how many oranges came in? This list says twenty-four, but I’m sure there were only meant to be eighteen.’
‘Some oranges came in, sir?’ Ellie sets the kettle onto the hot plate and switches the knob to high. She hadn’t seen an orange since last summer. Nor a banana since the war began. It was Poppy’s birthday next week and he was going to miss out on his favourite banana cake for a second year running.
‘Commander Barrett brought them in from Filby. One of the Newfoundlanders got hold of some. Don’t ask me how. Those chaps could find a diamond in a glass mountain. Barrett said the chap insisted he give them to us here in the fire station. Said they were a thank you for all the work we did. Very nice gesture, don’t you agree?’
‘Very nice, sir. Yes.’
Leaning over the hot plate, Ellie unhooks the clipboard from a hook on the wall. She tugs the pencil out from behind her ear as she enters the store room. Oranges for the Norwich Fire Station? From a Newfoundlander at Filby? She’d told Thomas at the New Year’s Eve dance at the Lido that the thing she missed most about Christmas was not getting the orange in the toe of her Christmas stocking. She shakes her head. She’s being silly. Thomas wouldn’t remember a thing like that.
She heads past the shelves of blankets and steel helmets to the shelves stacked with boxes of canned goods. She rummages through the canned evaporated milk, salmon, and baked beans, and is about to give up when she spots a net bag full of fat oranges on the floor, hidden behind a box of powdered eggs.
She sets the bag down on her desk with a loud thunk. ‘Found them!’
‘Good show, Burgess. Have a count.’
Ellie is halfway through her second count when the kettle whistles. She hurries over to the hot plate and pours the boiling water through the tea strainer into the fire officer’s china cup. She adds a dollop of evaporated milk and two meagre teaspoons of sugar to the cup.
She shifts aside a stack of papers and sets the china cup of steaming tea and its saucer onto a clear spot on the fire officer’s desk. ‘There are definitely twenty-four oranges, sir.’ Who’d ever told him there were eighteen was very much mistaken.
Fire Officer Williams looks up from the requisition order and frowns, his thick grey eyebrows drawing together like two fat slugs. ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible, Burgess. Commander Barrett told me very clearly there were eighteen.’
Ellie stifles a frustrated sigh. ‘Yes, sir. I’ll count them again.’
She begins counting them out on her desk again. One, two, three … She is about to reach for the nineteenth when Fire Officer Williams’s thick-fingered hand picks it up.
‘There, eighteen. Correct?’
‘But—’ Ellie stares up at the fire officer’s florid face. He reaches for three of the oranges and sets them on the desk in front of her, then he chooses three of the fattest oranges and scoops them into his large hands.
‘Eighteen. Correct, Burgess?’
Ellie eyes the three oranges lined up in a neat row on her green desk blotter.
‘Bake your father an orange cake. He’ll enjoy that.’
‘An orange cake, sir?’
‘For his birthday. You said it’s his birthday next week.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course. Thank you very much, sir.’
The fire officer drops the oranges into his desk drawer. Closing the drawer, he peers over at Ellie. ‘You said you drove, I believe?’
It hadn’t entirely been a lie. Her father had let her practise on the farm lanes around Holkham Hall during their summer holiday. ‘Yes, sir.’
He gestures to the bag of eighteen oranges. ‘Take the staff car and share them around the chaps on the guns over at the castle. Can’t let them go to waste.’
She’d see George for Valentine’s after all! ‘Yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir.’ She grabs her coat and umbrella from the coat stand, and pulls her AFS satchel over her shoulder as she heads for the door.
‘Burgess!’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘You’ll be needing these.’ Fire Officer Williams tosses Ellie a set of keys. ‘I’ve not known an automobile to work without them.’