Whistling in the Dark Read online

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  EPILOGUE

  For those brave men who served in the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War

  FOREWORD

  Like my earlier novel, Hero on a Bicycle, this story is set in the Second World War, but in a very different place: a suburb of Liverpool during the terrifying winter of 1940– 41, when the city was relentlessly bombarded almost every night by Hitler’s Nazi airforce, the Luftwaffe.

  I was living there then, aged thirteen, so it was very easy for me to imagine what it was like for Joan, my fictional heroine, her mum, her older sister, Audrey, her brother, Brian, and her younger sister, Judy (who, like all younger sisters, can be a bit of a pain at times!). Their father was lost at sea while serving in the Merchant Navy, and the family are struggling on as best they can.

  Wartime, when it was not frightening, could be very boring. There were no holidays – the seaside was covered with barbed wire and gun emplacements. Travel was discouraged unless absolutely necessary, and endless time was spent queuing for food. The rationing system was very fair but restrictive – just enough to keep everyone healthy. Luxuries like sweets were a rarity. Nice clothes and, worst of all, nylon stockings, were almost unobtainable. Except, of course, on the black market, which no patriotic person would have stooped to using.

  All troublesome enough, but in Whistling in the Dark, everything is further complicated because Joan’s mum is being courted by the pompous bore Captain Ronnie Harper Jones. None of the children, except Judy, can stand him. He is stationed locally and never seems to be short of much-coveted luxury food supplies.

  Despite the war and trouble at home, Joan and her friends somehow manage to have a good time, going to the cinema (Blitz-allowing), collecting salvage with a handcart and listening to the radio.

  It is into this scene that a mysterious man appears – first seen by Joan as a face at the window. And a series of events unfold which emanate from Nazi-occupied Europe, where conditions make life in war-torn Britain look like a bed of roses.

  But the real heroes of this story are the men of the Merchant Navy, who, like Joan’s dad and Audrey’s boyfriend, Dai, risked their lives to bring food and vital supplies across the icy U-boat-infested Atlantic Ocean and saved Britain from starvation and defeat. They were poorly paid and ill-armed to retaliate when they were attacked, and their bravery is one of the great heroic achievements of the Second World War.

  CHAPTER 1

  North-west England, autumn 1940

  “There’ll always be an England

  While there’s a country lane,

  Wherever there’s a cottage small

  Beside a field of grain.

  There’ll—”

  Joan Armitage snapped the radio off, bringing Vera Lynn’s famous voice to an abrupt stop. That song was definitely not one of her favourites. She preferred the big American swing bands like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller, which played really hot dance music. Anyway, it was especially irritating to hear Vera going on about cottages and fields of grain when there wasn’t anything like that here in their suburb, near Liverpool, in north-west England. Now, in wartime, even the beach was full of barbed wire and heavy artillery gun emplacements.

  Joan was supposed to be concentrating on her French homework. Mum was always telling her that you couldn’t do school work properly with the radio on. But if you were the one who actually had to do the work, you knew better. Music lightened the load a bit.

  Joan sighed and picked up the grammar book. No one else was home yet, so this was as good a time as any to get on with it. Her big sister, Audrey, was staying the night with her best friend, Pat, and Mum had taken Judy – the most annoying six-year-old on the planet – to a jumble sale in aid of the war effort. Joan’s brother, Brian, who had a half hour bicycle ride back from the grammar school, wasn’t in yet.

  The sitting room at the back of the house was freezing cold, as usual. Mum might light the fire when she came in, but you weren’t supposed to have any heating on until evening because coal was in short supply.

  It was late in the afternoon, but Joan did not want to close the blackout curtains yet. Instead, she pulled her chair over to the window to catch the last of the daylight. It was very still outside. She could hear the gulls crying as they swooped and wheeled over the miles of shining estuary mud out beyond the golf course. It was a sad, insistent sound, like someone calling and calling and never being answered.

  Joan’s attention wandered. She found herself looking at her legs. She stuck them out straight in front of her. Clad in grey socks, pulled up to the knee, they looked as discouraging as ever. Audrey had lovely legs, which made Joan rather jealous. It was a huge advantage when you got called up for military service and wore uniform, as Audrey, who was seventeen, soon would be.

  Audrey wanted to join the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) because they wore those nifty double-breasted jackets with gold buttons, black stockings and jaunty sailor hats. Brian wanted to go into the Royal Navy too, when he was called up, although that wouldn’t be for two more years. Mum, of course, was dead against it. She said the war would be over by then, anyway, but if he had to go, he should opt for something that offered a safe desk job – ordnance, or something like that.

  Their dad had been a sailor – a wireless operator on a Merchant Navy oil tanker – and had travelled to and fro across the Atlantic to Canada and America. “Sparks” everyone had called him. “Sparky by name, sparky by nature,” Mum used to say. She had often grumbled about him always coming and going, leaving the hard, boring job of looking after everything at home to her – and she had hated the permanent suitcase in the hall. But Joan could remember how there was always a bit of a party atmosphere when their dad was around. He made them all laugh, gave her rides on his back, and brought presents back for her – often things you couldn’t buy in England.

  He had been due on leave, and they had all been half expecting him to walk in through the front door on that terrible day when the telegram arrived. It said that the oil tanker he was on had caught fire in the mid-Atlantic and had gone down with all hands lost. The company sent its sincere sympathy.

  After that day, Joan had sort of blanked out for quite a while. She could hardly remember anything about all those relatives dressed in black who turned up and sat in the front room to “pay their respects”, whatever that meant. Or the lady none of them liked very much who came to look after them for a bit while Mum was too ill with sadness to manage. There remained only a few sharply defined pictures in Joan’s head – such as when she ran out into the back garden, blocking her ears, so that she didn’t have to hear the awful muffled gulping noise Mum made when she was crying. The sky then had been flushed with fiery red, menacing and cruel. In Joan’s mind, it fused with a picture she had seen on a postcard – a painting of a ship on fire at sea – which had terrified her. It was by an ar
tist called J. M. W. Turner. She had a good memory for paintings that impressed her. They stayed in her head.

  If she was being really honest, she didn’t miss Dad so much now. He had been like a nice extra in her life, all fun and excitement when he was on leave, but there had usually been a tinge of relief when he set off again and they all settled back into their peacefully humdrum routine. She still thought about him, of course, especially when she was in the front room, where there was the photograph of him looking handsome in his uniform on the mantelpiece.

  Judy, who was only a baby when he was killed, could hardly remember him, and Audrey was good at getting on with her own life. Next to Mum, it was Brian who missed him the most.

  It is a pity, Joan thought, that Mum never wants to talk about Dad. It was as though it gave her pain whenever his name was mentioned. They all would have liked to talk about things they’d done with him, and what he had been like when he was young, and all that stuff. But as soon as they brought up the subject, Mum’s face settled into a sad expression and she fell silent.

  All this had been before the war against Hitler had started. Now quite a few local families and girls Joan knew at school had lost a father or brother, killed in action. There was a bond between people who had also suffered that first sickening moment of opening the telegram and the long drawn-out misery that followed as the reality of their loss began to sink in.

  The war news since the German occupation of France and the evacuation of the British forces at Dunkirk had been very bad. And then the bombing had begun in earnest. Almost every night when it got dark, the air-raid siren began its warning wail, telling everyone to take cover.

  Mum said that if Britain was ever occupied by the Nazis, they would have to leave their home and everything in it, and try to get to Ireland. In the meantime, they would just have to get on with it, as everybody these days was being urged to do. “Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory!” as the slogan on the poster said, although this was easier said than done.

  Joan stared hard at her grammar book, stretching her eyes wide in a futile attempt to force herself to concentrate. The light was getting too bad now to see properly. She was just wondering when Mum and Judy would come home so they could have tea when she heard a gentle sound coming from outside, quite close to the window. A faint, low whistle.

  Joan sat very still, listening. The hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle. She had that feeling you get when you know someone is watching you. Slowly, Joan turned her head. Over her shoulder, very near to the glass, she saw the dark shape of a man looking in at her.

  CHAPTER 2

  Brian sped down the final homeward stretch, freewheeling, and then expertly swerved his bicycle through the front gate. He was easing his heavy satchel from his back when he saw a shaft of light coming from the front door and Joan standing there, on the top step.

  “Shut the door, quick!” he called. “The air-raid warden’ll get us fined if he sees us showing that light!”

  Joan didn’t answer. Brian went in, slammed the door behind them both and then slung his satchel on the floor. “I’m so hungry! Is Mum in?” Still no answer from Joan. Then he saw her white face. “What’s up?”

  Joan replied in a whisper. “It’s a man. I saw a man, staring in at me through the sitting-room window. Just now. He was right there in the garden.”

  “What? What man?”

  “I don’t know. He was just sort of peering in. So I pulled the curtains and put on the lights.”

  Brian slowly loosened his school tie. “Do you think he’s still here, then?”

  “I don’t know. I’m glad you’re back. Ought we to go and look?”

  “Not me. Not likely! Have you locked the back door?”

  “No! Oh, I didn’t think of that!”

  Together they scooted through the kitchen, past the place where Mum kept her cleaning things and did the washing, and down to the end of the passage. Brian turned the key in the back door and bolted it. Then he peeped out of the little larder window. It wasn’t quite dark yet. A watery sun was just disappearing into a low belt of purple cloud.

  “I can’t see anyone,” he said.

  “He was there. He had a cap on.”

  “An army cap?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I couldn’t see very well. Only his eyes, sort of staring.”

  “Are you sure you’re not making this up?”

  Joan flung herself away from him, near to tears. “Of course I’m not. I told you. I was doing my homework and I looked round and there he was.”

  “Well, he’s not there now. At least, I don’t think so.”

  But even Brian was relieved when they heard Mum’s key in the lock.

  Her reaction was briskly practical, as it always was when there was any kind of family crisis, but they noticed that her voice was a bit shaky. “The sitting-room window, was it? Well, he can’t have been a paperboy or he would have rung the doorbell. You two stay here with Judy. I’ll just go and have a look around.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Brian offered bravely.

  Judy, left alone with Joan, set up a wail. “I want my tea! When are we having tea? We didn’t get anything to eat at the jumble sale. What’s Mum doing in the garden? It’s nearly dark! Is there a horrid man out there?”

  Joan was in no mood to comfort her. Together they watched from the window as Brian and Mum searched the garden in the dying light, looking behind bushes and all around the rustic arbour where a neglected garden seat swung and creaked in the wind. It wasn’t a very big garden, so it didn’t take them long. At the far end, beyond the rubbish heap, there was a fence with a gate that led directly onto the golf course.

  “If there was someone nosing around, he probably went out that way,” Mum said when she and Brian came back indoors. “Anyway, he’s gone now. Let’s light the fire and have a cup of tea.”

  Judy was already asleep, and Joan was brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed in the room they shared. She kept peering out of the window, worried that the man was still lurking around. By the next morning, when it was beginning to get light, Joan was feeling braver. As Mum cooked breakfast before school, she opened the back door and stepped outside. The fear of the previous night’s events was now eclipsed by her anxiety about not having done her French homework.

  Joan wandered out a little way into the garden, scuffing her feet on the wet grass. The old seat hung there, dripping with rainwater and swaying gently. She went up to it and absently gave it a push. As it creaked to and fro, she noticed some muddy footprints underneath, quite fresh in the dewy grass. It looked as though somebody had been there, maybe slept there, quite recently. Last night, perhaps? She shivered and hurried back inside to get ready for school.

  CHAPTER 3

  Joan was ten minutes late for school, but she managed to slip into her classroom just before the bell went for prayers. There was a new girl in the class, standing awkwardly beside Miss Sanderson’s desk. She was not a local girl. She was wearing the school uniform – a long-sleeved blouse with a school tie and a pleated navy serge tunic – but there was something weird about her. Her clothes looked too big and hung off her thin frame, and her hair was screwed up into braids and wound tightly around her head. She stood there with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes cast down, as though she was frightened to meet anyone’s gaze and was already expecting to be bullied.

  Miss Sanderson tapped her desk with a ruler for silence.

  “Girls, before we go into prayers, I want you to meet Ania. She is Polish, and she is joining our class. Her English is not too good yet – although I hear you’re working hard on it, aren’t you, Ania? – but I know you will all welcome her and help her settle down as soon as possible. Ania, would you like to take the desk here at the front, next to Angela Travis? She will help to explain any of our rules that you don’t understand. And, by the way, Ania won’t be joining us for prayers.”

  Just then the bell rang
, and most of the pupils stood up. School prayers were strictly for Church of England girls only. Catholic and Jewish girls remained behind in the classroom, taking the opportunity to gossip and catch up on unfinished homework. Ania stood still, looking at her feet. Heaven help her, thought Joan, if she’s got to sit in the desk next to Angela Travis.

  Angela was a great favourite with the teaching staff, but among the girls she was known as the Himmler of the Lower Fifth, named after Hitler’s Gestapo chief, and for very good reason. She was an outwardly demure girl with neatly combed, slightly sandy-coloured hair, and her mother always managed to send her to school every day in a freshly ironed blouse. Angela had a way of lowering her eyes and whispering behind her hand about other people to her particular gang of friends, or rather, to those luckless girls who were too frightened not to be her friends in case they got whispered about too.

  Angela and her gang usually waited until mid-morning break, when everyone was in the playground, before giving the signal to begin the daily victimization. This began with sniggering, meaningful looks and some very carefully judged and easily overheard personal insults. Then they closed in on their prey: pinching, hair-pulling and dragging her clothes awry. If they did not succeed in making a girl cry before the bell went for the end of break, they reckoned they had failed and would intensify their efforts during the next one.

  Doreen, Joan’s best friend, was one of the few girls in the class who didn’t care a jot for Angela and her gang and treated them with offhand contempt.

  That morning, when the bell went and they were all outside, Doreen strolled over to where Ania was standing on her own, marooned like a stag at bay, and tried to start some sort of conversation. She met with very little success. Ania’s eyes widened with fright and she could hardly manage more than a few replies in broken English in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. But Doreen’s support did the trick. Angela and company, who had been circling like vultures, could not summon the nerve to pounce with Doreen standing there and Joan hovering in the background. Ania was saved, for that day at least.