Swansea Girls Read Free

dinner dance in the Mermaid. And if Joe ...’
    ‘My brother’s going to a party. Have you noticed how university students go to ten times as many as we do?’
    ‘You could have gone to university if you’d wanted to.’ Lily finally relinquished the petticoat.
    ‘With my brains?’
    ‘What it must be to have a father who owns a warehouse full of clothes,’ Katie murmured enviously as Helen turned her back for Lily to unzip the dress. Her friends fell silent. Fathers were a touchy subject.
    An evacuee who hadn’t been claimed by her family after the war, Lily couldn’t remember her father – or mother. Judy’s had been killed in the last week of hostilities and her secure upbringing was down to her mother’s business acumen and the success of the hairdressing salon she had opened, rather than any foresight on the part of her father who hadn’t taken out a single insurance policy. Katie’s father, like Helen’s, lived with his family, but you couldn’t get two more different men than Ernie Clay and John Griffiths.
    Surly, foul-mouthed and bad-tempered, Ernie kept his family short of money, and spent every minute that opening hours and his night watchman’s job allowed in the back bar of the nearest pub. And the remainder of his free time bullying his family and beating his wife, if the shouts that resounded from the Clays’ basement flat and Annie Clay’s perpetual crops of bruises were anything to go by.
    Conversely, despite disabilities, which everyone in Carlton Terrace politely and pointedly ignored, John Griffiths was hard-working, industrious and gave his wife a housekeeping allowance that was the envy of every woman in the street. He had expanded the small fancy goods warehouse his grandparents had left him into a Ladies’ and Children’s wear trade outlet that supplied the best department stores in south and west Wales. And although GRIFFITHS’S WHOLESALE FASHIONS AND HOUSEHOLD LINENS wasn’t quite the establishment Esme Griffiths liked to think it was, it was successful and profitable. So profitable that John had recently opened a Ladies’ wear outlet in the seaside village of Mumbles that catered for holiday-makers’ needs as well as locals.
    ‘My father’s not rich, just a working man the same as everyone else.’ Helen repeated her father’s maxim a little too dogmatically as Lily eased the dress back over her head. ‘I think I’ll run a bath. Pass me the Veet hair remover and Golden Dawn bath cubes, Judy. They’re in the top drawer of my dressing table. Not those, the yellow ones.’
    ‘You’d better be quick if you’re going to wash off the smell of the Veet,’ Judy warned. ‘It’s a quarter past six now. We ought to aim for the eight-o’clock Mumbles train if we’re going to get into the Pier before it’s too crowded for you to spot Adam Jordan, let alone stun him.’
    ‘Are you really going to wear this?’ Lily carefully draped the tapes that held the satin evening dress back on to the hanger.
    ‘Most definitely,’ Helen retorted, refusing to back down in the face of her friends’ collective disapproval.
    ‘In that case, do me a favour, pinch Joe’s razor to shave under your arms, otherwise you’ll be keeping us waiting.’ Judy brushed the end of Katie’s ponytail into a neat curl. Satisfied with her handiwork, she held up a hand mirror so Katie could see the back.
    ‘Thanks, Judy, that looks great.’
    ‘As the dress is already there, want to get ready in my house?’
    ‘Please.’
    ‘See you at half-seven.’ Helen waited until Lily closed her wardrobe before opening her bedroom door.
    ‘Twenty past, or we may not get a seat on the Mumbles train.’ Lily hesitated, glancing back at the petticoat on the bed. ‘You sure you won’t be wearing this, Helen?’
    ‘Absolutely. Now go or we’ll all be late.’
    ‘Lily, is that you, love?’ Roy Williams called from the back kitchen-cum-living room as he heard the front door close.
    ‘Yes, Uncle