All Fall Down Read Online Free

Tommy?’
    â€˜On the bleeding wireless?’
    â€˜ “Can I do you now, sir?” ’
    â€˜ “I don’t mind if I do!” ’
    Smart responses clicked to and fro in the smoky atmosphere. Annie swiped glasses from the bar and wiped it clean, George served steadily.
    â€˜I heard it from our Jimmie, if you must know.’ Tommy tapped the bar rail with his toe. He’d noticed a crowd of girls come in, among them a couple from his own shop. He picked out Edie Morell, in charge of wages and accounts. She was all dressed up, with her honey-blonde hair piled high on her head, her dress tight over the bodice, falling in a bright swirl of tropical flowers to her knees.
    â€˜You don’t say,’ said Charlie Ogden. He was home for the weekend from his teaching job in Welwyn Garden City, and miserable as sin according to his mother, Dolly. He and his wife of ten years had just decided to split up, and he planned to move out of his nice semi-detached house back into Paradise Court to live with her.
    â€˜Get it, Charlie? Course, it’s the poor old Tommy’s hand she shoves away, not the pilot’s. They don’t get a look-in with the RAF around.’ Tommy made room for the girls at the bar. Edie had recently palled up with her old school chums, since her husband, Bill, had enlisted, and they went about pretty much as they had in the good old days. Lorna Bennett in particular was regarded as fast, in her hip-hugging slacks and tight jumpers, with a striking dark pencil outline around her eyes and a bright crimson mouth. ‘What’s it to be, girls?’ He offered to buy them a round. ‘Something strong to steady your nerves?’
    Lorna and the two others made a great show of deciding what they wanted to drink, while Edie quietly accepted a pale ale.
    â€˜Whisky for me, please.’ Lorna dug her friend with her elbow. ‘What’s up? He’s made of money, ain’t he?’
    â€˜More money than sense, if you ask me.’ Annie came to give George a hand. She didn’t approve of these good-time girls. In her day the market women would come in for a drink after work, buttheir old men would be snug in another corner, not away fighting a war. She thought the young ones lacked respect.
    â€˜Have one yourself, Annie.’ Tommy’s offer was guaranteed to shut her up. ‘You’re looking like a million dollars tonight, you know that?’
    She grunted. She kept to the style of her youth; long hair, now pure white and lifted into a bun, nice crisp blouse with pleats and tucks, navy-blue skirt of decent length. She would sometimes add bits of costume jewellery for a touch of colour, and she was always beautifully starched and ironed. ‘Flattery won’t get you nowhere with me, Tommy O’Hagan. That’ll be three shillings and threepence to you.’
    â€˜Two and six to anyone else.’ Lorna took her drink and laughed.
    Not minding a bit, Tommy bantered for a minute or two before drawing up a stool alongside Edie. ‘What’s new?’ He leaned in close and offered her a light for her cigarette.
    â€˜A war, that’s what’s new.’
    â€˜Apart from that.’ He was determined to stay cheerful.
    â€˜I had a letter from Bill yesterday. His ship’s off to Malta.’
    â€˜But he’ll get home beforehand, I expect?’ Tommy knew that Bill often showed up on forty-eight-hour leave. He could always tell when it happened; Edie would come into work on a Monday quieter than usual. Apparently she missed him badly when he went back to barracks.
    â€˜I don’t know that he will, not now.’
    â€˜Still, chin up. You know what they say, it’ll all be over by Christmas.’
    â€˜Yes, Christmas 1942,’ she said mournfully.
    â€˜But life goes on, don’t it?’ It was all very well for him to say this, he realized. At forty he was well past the age of conscription and he could