Page 71 of The Girl from the Tea Garden (The India Tea #3)

‘You know they’re wanting more of us to volunteer for North Africa now that the Germans have surrendered there. Desert is positively groaning with army boys with not enough to keep them from going mad with heat and boredom.’

‘I’d heard ENSA is wanting to send touring parties further east to India,’ said Josey.

‘India?’ Adela felt a quickening of interest. ‘Really?’

‘I heard Basil Dean discussing it when I was last in London. Thinks Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command troops are being neglected as far as entertainment goes– they’re the forgotten army.’

‘You’ll not get me going out there,’ said Helen, a fellow Toodle Pip. ‘It’s all disease and creepy-crawlies and horrible heat, isn’t it?’

‘Not all the time,’ Tommy said, winking at Adela.

‘Do you think there’s a real chance ENSA will get sent there?’ Adela asked.

‘Not if we’re all as squeamish as Helen,’ Josey said in derision.

‘Would you sign up for it if you could?’ Tommy asked her.

Adela didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes. What about you?’

Tommy looked unsure.

Prue said, ‘I’ll go if Adela does. Come on, Tommy, we’re The Simla Songsters. We have to stick together.’

Tommy gave a wry smile. ‘I’d much rather stay in Blighty and see out the war here. But if you insist on making me sail dangerous seas to perform in a country on the point of being invaded, then I suppose I must.’

‘You’re such a drama queen, Villiers,’ snorted Josey. ‘I might just have to come too.’

By November Adela, Prue, Tommy and Josey had signed up for a nine-month contract to the Middle East and India. Blonde Helen resolutely refused to go, so they replaced her with an older dancer called Mavis, who claimed she’d once been a Bluebell Girl in Paris.

‘The Bluebell Inn at Pontefract more likely,’ Tommy muttered to Adela.

‘Her dancing is okay and she’s got a blonde wig,’ Adela replied, ‘so let’s take her.’

The only other one from their review who was prepared to go all the way to India was the accordionist, a middle-aged Scot simply known as Mack. Tommy complained at the paucity of talent going with them.

‘An impressionist who can’t do anyone famous, a juggler who drops everything and an alcoholic magician. Oh, and not one but three ukulele players. I can’t stand the ukulele.’

‘Well, the boys will love them,’ said Josey.

‘We’ll be laughed off stage.’

‘Laughter is better than booing.’ Adela smiled. ‘And you will look after them all like a mother hen, just like you do us.’

With passports and nine inoculations in order, costumes made and scripts and routines practised, Adela and Josey managed to get away to Tyneside for a final week of leave before embarkation.

Taking a night train, Josey found no difficulty in falling asleep on a prickly seat, but Adela’s nervous excitement kept her awake.

She hadn’t been back to Newcastle for over a year.

Since then George had come back from flight training long enough to marry Joan, which had lifted Olive’s spirits, according to a letter from Jane, who was working in Yorkshire, helping operate searchlights and an anti-aircraft gun.

Her letter sounded happy, and she got home every few weeks, but had missed her brother’s snap wedding in July.

A small do– registry office and tea at Number 10. Lexy made a cake. Joan’s moved in with Mam and Father.

That had really surprised Adela. She wondered how Joan would cope with being at Olive’s beck and call. But perhaps Joan’s placid nature would be good for Olive, and Adela was glad Jack had someone who could share the burden of keeping Olive’s melancholia at bay.

Tilly was as busy as ever with her WVS duties and still had one of the Polish refugees lodging with her.

Libby had left school at seventeen and for a while had returned to Newcastle to volunteer at the services canteen again.

The last letter from Tilly had said that Libby, now eighteen, had enlisted and been drafted into the Land Army.

She was working on a farm near Morpeth in Northumberland, and Tilly complained she hardly saw her now.

Lexy never wrote; she just waited for Adela to turn up and resume their friendship.

The thought of seeing her soon brought a wide smile to Adela’s lips.

Rattling over the High Level Bridge as the dawn broke over a smoke-hazed Newcastle, Adela leant out and breathed in the acrid smell of coal fires and felt a pang of affection for her adopted home. The women went straight to Herbert’s Café for breakfast and received an ecstatic welcome from Lexy.

‘Why didn’t you say you were coming, lass? I’d have got something special baked.’

‘Didn’t know till the last minute. We’ve brought you jam, coffee and American chocolate bars,’ Adela said and grinned. ‘Been saving them from our trip to a US airbase.’

Adela was astonished to find Maggie working in the café kitchen and living with Lexy.

‘Old Ina died in October,’ Maggie explained. ‘She didn’t suffer, but she’d had enough. Hated all them sirens and that. Thought I was her daughter at the end.’

‘Dear Ina,’ Adela said, her eyes prickling with emotion to think of her weeks of refuge in the old lady’s house nearly five years ago. Ina had given her sanctuary when her own aunt had not. It all seemed a lifetime ago.

Over a meal of scrambled powdered egg, thin rashers of bacon and fried bread, Adela caught up on all the news. The most startling was that George’s new bride, Joan, had given birth to a baby the previous month.

‘A baby?’ Adela exclaimed. ‘But—’

‘Aye,’ said Lexy, ‘three months after the weddin’. We can all do the sums. It’s a lass. Joan’s called her Bonnie after that bairn in Gone with the Wind .’

Adela felt her insides clench. She tried to hide how flustered the sudden news made her. ‘Well, she always did like going to the pictures,’ Adela joked.

‘She certainly does,’ Josey agreed, ‘and not always with George.’

They all stared at her.

‘What do you mean?’ Adela asked.

‘Oh, nothing,’ Josey said. ‘Don’t listen to me.’

Adela tried to shake off her upset feeling. ‘Bet George is pleased to be a dad.’ She forced a smile.

‘He hasn’t seen the baby yet,’ Lexy replied. ‘His ship sailed for Ceylon the week before the birth.’

‘Oh, that’s terrible,’ Adela cried. ‘Poor George.’

‘Aye,’ Lexy said and sighed, ‘and poor bairn. Not likely to set eyes on her dadda till this war’s over.’

A silence fell over them. How uncertain life was for all of them, Adela thought. There might be signs of the war turning in their favour in North Africa and southern Italy– and the Russians had held off the Nazis in Eastern Europe– but most of the Continent was still in enemy hands.

‘Come on.’ Josey roused her from jittery thoughts. ‘Let’s go and see Tilly. We can leave baby worship and the Brewises till later.’

‘Yes, let’s.’ Adela smiled gratefully. She was far closer to Tilly than she would ever be to her own flesh-and-blood aunt, and Josey knew that.

Both Adela and Josey stayed at Tilly’s house for the week; Josey found Tilly’s easy-going household refreshing, and Tilly mothered her as much as she did Adela.

They had a carefree few days, dropping into the café daily and visiting Derek and their friends at the theatre, who were gearing up for a production of Oscar Wilde’s satire The Importance of Being Earnest .

‘It’s the nearest I’ll ever get to putting on a panto,’ Derek said with a lugubrious smile.

Libby, on hearing that her cousin and friend were briefly in Newcastle, hitched a ride in a milk delivery lorry to come and see them.

As she bounded in and greeted them with robust hugs, Adela was amazed how Libby had suddenly grown into a woman.

She had lost her childhood plumpness, and her body was toned and fit from outdoor work.

Even her face seemed to have changed shape from round to oval, accentuating her plump mouth and her deep blue eyes, which still flashed with a familiar bold look.

There was a sprinkling of freckles across her small nose that added to her prettiness and air of good health.

Her unruly waves of dark red hair shone like fire in the wintry sun.

‘Libby, you look wonderful!’ Adela cried. ‘Your mother never told me how pretty you’ve grown.’

‘No, she wouldn’t,’ said Libby, giving a deep-throated laugh.

‘She’s always been pretty,’ Tilly said without really sounding like she meant it.

They spent a happy winter’s afternoon by Tilly’s kitchen fire, toasting stale bread and drinking tea from a special hoard that James had managed to send from the Oxford. Libby stayed the night and left before dawn.

‘I’ll catch a lift going up the Great North Road,’ she told her fretting mother. ‘Be back for breakfast. They won’t have missed me.’ She turned to a sleepy Adela, who was wrapped in a blanket, yawning.

‘I’m so jealous that you’re going to India,’ she said. ‘You’ll see Daddy before I will.’

‘I hope to get to Assam,’ said Adela, ‘but who knows where we’ll be sent?’ She smiled sympathetically. ‘Any messages for him if I do?’

Alarmingly she saw tears well up in the girl’s eyes; Libby hardly ever cried.

‘Tell him I send my love,’ she said, her voice cracking, ‘and that we’ll all come back as soon as we can. Tell him that.’

Libby planted a swift kiss on Adela’s warm cheek and then bolted into the dark.

With two days left of leave, Adela realised she couldn’t put off going to visit Aunt Olive any longer. She was baffled by her own reluctance to do so. Perhaps it was just the effort of being cheerful in the face of her aunt’s habitual complaining.

‘Will you come with me?’ she asked Josey.

‘Reinforcements at the ready,’ Josey agreed.

To Adela’s delight she found her aunt in better spirits than she’d ever seen her. Olive greeted them at the door in a bright blue dress instead of her usual drab black or grey, and her hair was neatly permed.

‘Come in, come in! I heard you were back. Thought you would have been round before now.’

‘Sorry, Aunt Olive—’

‘Well, you’re here now. Come away in, the pair of you.’