The Gunner Girl Read Online Free Page B

her pocket copy of the Bible, with the green leather cover, the one she’d been given after her confirmation. She never went anywhere without it. She clicked the bag shut, and
smiled.
    She picked up the handbag and tumbled downstairs to get her coat, fumbling with the bone buttons in the green serge, then grabbed her hat off the peg. Her parents never let her go out on her
own. Pop said that once she turned twenty-one, she could do whatever she wanted but, until then, she had to respect Mummy’s wishes. They want to keep me locked up in childhood like a caged
bird, she thought; they don’t want my life to change one bit, even though the whole world is changing around me.
    â€˜But I’m eighteen, now, and that’s got to mean something,’ she said aloud, as she pushed open the front door. The beech trees nodded as she passed, and her shoes crunched
on the gravel driveway.
    Edie turned right out of Victoria Station. In the newspaper article it said that Mary Churchill had joined up at the Grosvenor Gardens recruitment office. I’m only going
to look, Edie thought. I just want to see where she joined up, and after that I might go and have a look at some of the anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park. Just to see, that’s all. And then
I’ll go straight home, so I’ll be back before Mummy.
    Her shoes clopped on the pavement. Buses and taxis zoomed past. Her breath made smoke clouds in the wintry air. Across the road, Grosvenor Gardens park was a slice of dusty green amid the
greyness. A few brown leaves clung awkwardly to tree branches, fluttering madly, desperate to escape. A woman with a fur coat and a sausage dog on a red lead was walking in the other direction.
Edie caught her eye and asked the way to the recruitment office. The dog snuffled at her feet and Edie bent over to ruffle its ears. The woman said the recruitment office was just up the street on
the right and smiled. ‘Good luck, dear!’ she said, before yanking the little dog and walking on. She must think I’m joining up, thought Edie, feeling a mixture of pride and guilt:
pride that she should look like the sort of girl who would want to do her patriotic duty, and guilt that she wasn’t. I’m just a Mary Churchill tourist, she thought, and then laughed a
little to herself, because it sounded a bit ridiculous. She thought about how she’d describe the day to Marjorie, afterwards, when Marjorie was in the mood for company again, and how they
could laugh together about the way she’d spent her eighteenth birthday as a ‘Mary Churchill tourist’.
    She walked briskly, with purpose, spine straight, chin up, chest out, just as she’d been taught in deportment classes – all those afternoons in the dusty studio with a book balanced
on her head, trying not to catch Marjorie’s eye and giggle. She had always been very good at deportment, although French was the only thing she’d excelled at; she’d won the French
prize for her year. Mary Churchill had won the Queen’s College French prize the previous year, she remembered. They had that in common, didn’t they? Edie sucked in a sigh. Down the
curb, across the junction, just missing a grocer’s boy with his huge basket on the front of his bike (‘Watch your step, lady!’ he shouted, veering round her), and up again,
alongside the high brick terrace with its important-looking balustrades. Pigeons passed in the pewter sky like tossed handkerchiefs and she worried that her hat would fly off in the stiff
breeze.
    Finally, she was there. Stone steps led up to the double-doors with AUXILIARY TERRITORIAL SERVICE RECRUITMENT on a discreet painted sign to the right-hand side. So this
was it; this was where Mary came to join up. She wondered if Winston or Clementine came with her, or if she came all alone, trotting along from Victoria Station, just like Edie had done?
    Edie wondered what it was like inside?