Sleepover Club Blitz Read Online Free Page B

candlewick bedspread!”
    “Oh, yeah!” breathed everyone. “Excellent!”
    “In those days, girls thought it was amazingly cool to wear silk stockings with seams down the back,” Miss Pearson grinned. “But they were hard to get, unless someone sold you a pair on the black market – illegally, in other words. So girls painted fake seams on their bare legs, with gravy browning.”
    Fliss’s hand flew to her mouth.
    “That’s the bravest thing I ever heard!” she choked.
    Everyone was still falling about laughing when there was a knock at the door. A buzz of excitement went round the room. Our mysterious visitors had arrived!
    The door opened… And to our dismay, the secretary showed in two old ladies.
    I know, I know! Don’t give me that “All old people are not doddery” lecture. Like, some of them do yoga and belly dancing and go off backpacking to countries with no indoor plumbing, blah blah blah. And you totally don’t need to remind me that when Madonna draws her pension, she’ll still look incredibly sexy in leather trousers!
    But I’m telling you about
these
old ladies, OK? So trust me when I tell you they were the kind you’d pass in the supermarket without a second glance. Everything about them shrieked “old lady”: their handbags, their crinkly hairdos, those saggy tights which look like they’re sewn together from bandages, and their clumpy sensible shoes.
    You could see the whole class thinking, “WHA-AT!” I was thinking the exact same thing. As far as I was concerned, the words “exciting” and “old lady” had no right occupying the same sentence.
    “I’d like to introduce Mrs Iris Liddell and Mrs Edith Cooke,” beamed Miss Pearson. Even their names sounded kind of dusty, like they belonged in a museum along with all those comical old bangers.
    My mates assumed polite expressions, preparing to be bored out of their minds. To my surprise, Iris and Edith exchanged glances. A kind of “oh-oh”. I went hot and cold.
They know what we’re thinking
, I thought.
    Then it dawned on me. These old ladies might be able to read us like a book, but they didn’t give a HOOT what we thought about them!
    And quite suddenly, I sat up and took notice.
    “Mrs Liddell and Mrs Cooke kindly agreed to come into school to share their wartime experiences,” Miss Pearson explained. “And I must say, I’m looking forward to it enormously.” And she came to sit down with the rest of us.
    “Good morning,” said Iris, in her crackly old lady voice. “At this moment, you are all obviously wondering, ‘Why in the world should we listen to these two prune-faced old biddies?’”
    Everyone hastily stared at the floor.
    Iris roared with laughter. “And quite right, too!” she said sympathetically. “There’s nothing worse than listening to some old buffer rambling on. But sixty odd years ago, when war first broke out, my sister and I were not so prune-like. In fact, if I say so myself, we were pretty hot stuff!” And she twinkled at us over her bifocals.
    Everyone giggled with surprise.
    Iris held up a picture of two stunning girls dancing with two men in uniform. “That’s Edith and me doing the jitterbug, the night Glenn Miller’s Band came to Leicester,” she beamed. “They were very popular at the time, rather like Boyzone now.”
    Boyzone? These old dears were talking about
Boyzone
?
    “… and Edith and I danced the night away,” continued Iris. “It was the last evening we spent together for some years. Next day my sister went off to work for a hush-hush outfit in Bletchley, known as Station X. Shortly afterwards, I joined the Land Girls, and learned to drive tractors and muck out pigs!”
    In two minutes, Iris and Edith had got the entire class eating out of their hands. Prune-faced or not, they were stomping! Interrupting each other and cracking jokes, just like my mates in the Sleepover Club.
    Edith, Iris’s eldest sister, was this like, maths genius at school, which is how she