My Sweet Valentine Read Free Page B

a lot of buildings we could have saved, that did, never mind the poor souls that was in them that’s now under them. We’ve had to send one of our lads home. Found a coupleof kids in one of the buildings – both of them gonners – same age as his own kids. He wouldn’t have it that we couldn’t do anything for them. Had to be dragged off in the end …’
    ‘Those men are saints,’ Audrey breathed fervently to Olive once the firemen had gone.
    ‘Most of them are, but sadly there are some bad apples. Sergeant Dawson told me that they’ve had to investigate cases of fire and rescue workers – and men in the Home Guard – helping themselves to things from damaged buildings.’
    ‘Yes, I’d heard that as well,’ the vicar’s wife said sadly. Then, changing the subject: ‘It’s such good news, though, isn’t it, about Sergeant and Mrs Dawson giving that young boy Barney a home?’
    ‘Yes it is,’ Olive agreed warmly.
    Barney was a bit of a tearaway, and worse – at least according to Olive’s complaining neighbour, Nancy. After the death of his mother and grandmother Barney had been roaming the streets and constantly escaping from official care because he was afraid that when his father got leave from the army, he wouldn’t be able to find him. His parents had been separated, and Olive had been able to tell from the start that Sergeant Dawson, who lived at number 1 Article Row, had a bit of a soft spot for the boy.
    When Barney had run away from the second children’s home that had taken him in and had been found begging in the streets with a group of older boys, at Sergeant Dawson’s suggestion and with the agreement of the local authorities it had been arranged that Barney would movein with the Dawsons until such time as Barney’s father was able to take charge of his son once again.
    ‘I just hope that Mrs Dawson will be able to cope,’ Audrey continued with some anxiety. ‘I wouldn’t say that to anyone else, Olive, and especially not Nancy, knowing how unkind she can be.’
    ‘You needn’t worry that I’ll say anything to anyone else,’ Olive assured her, ‘but it’s no secret to those who lived in Article Row when the Dawsons’ son was alive that it hit Mrs Dawson particularly hard when they lost him.’
    ‘The vicar and I came here after their little boy’s death, but Mrs Dawson was so much of a recluse I remember that I didn’t even realise that Sergeant Dawson was married at first.’
    ‘It’s going on for ten years now since they lost him. So sad … He was always very poorly, and Mrs Dawson devoted every minute to him. But I’m sure that Sergeant Dawson wouldn’t have offered Barney a home if he felt it would upset his wife in any way.’
    ‘You’re right,’ Audrey agreed. ‘I hope it works out well for them all. Sergeant Dawson is such a good sort – look at the way he taught you and Anne to drive so that we could take up Mr Lord’s offer of his son’s van for WVS use.’
    Olive nodded vaguely. She was listening to Audrey but her attention was really on Tilly and the rest of ‘her girls,’ as she had come to think of her lodgers.
    Sally, in her nurse’s cape, no doubt thinking of her young man, George, a doctor working under the plastic surgeon Mr Archibald MacIndoe in a hospital in EastGrinstead, where they did their best to repair those men who had been burned in the course of duty. Agnes, the orphan who had come to lodge at number 13, now newly engaged to Ted Jackson, who, like her, worked on the London Underground; she was still at the stage of gazing dreamily at her pretty little engagement ring. And then of course Dulcie, from Stepney in the East End, with her brash bold cockney ways and chippy exterior, which, as Olive knew, concealed an inner vulnerability. They had all three come to be extra daughters to her over the months they had lodged with her. It seemed odd to think now that she had viewed the thought of taking in lodgers as an unwelcome necessity.