As Time Goes By

ANNIE GROVES

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2007

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2007

Copyright © Annie Groves 2007

Annie Groves asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007283682

Version: 2017-09-12

For my sternest critic, my mother

– who ‘was there’

Title PageCopyrightDedicationChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-OneChapter Twenty-TwoChapter Twenty-ThreeChapter Twenty-FourChapter Twenty-FiveChapter Twenty-SixChapter Twenty-SevenChapter Twenty-EightChapter Twenty-NineAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorBy The Same AuthorAbout the Publisher

ONE

September 1942

Samantha Grey, or Sam as those closest to her called her, put down her kitbag and wrinkled her nose. A school dormitory! Well, she had had worse billets, she admitted ruefully.

She had travelled to Liverpool by train, sharing a compartment with several other young women in uniform, all of whom had been going to different destinations. One of them knew Liverpool quite well, having once been posted there. She had told Sam that her new billet, in the Wavertree district of the city, had been a small private school occupying a large Victorian house, which the War Office had requisitioned because of its proximity to Liverpool’s famous Bluecoat School, which had also been requisitioned. Such requisitioning was a wartime necessity to provide accommodation for the country’s service personnel.

There was no sign of the girls Sam would be sharing her new quarters with, which meant that either they had not yet arrived, or they were already on duty.

Sam hadn’t been at all pleased when she had been told that she was being posted to Liverpool. She had hoped she might get a really exciting posting like some of the girls she had trained with – maybe even overseas – after all, she had won praise from her tutors on both the ATS courses she had completed, a standard one for typewriting and a second and far more enjoyable one for driving. The latter equipped her for one of the ATS’s more exciting jobs, such as being a staff driver to drive visiting ‘important’ personnel. She suspected that if it hadn’t been for the unfortunate set of circumstances that had led to her getting on the wrong side of a certain sense-of-humourless sergeant who hadn’t appreciated her pranks, she probably would have had such a posting. After all, she had passed the driving course with higher marks than anyone in her group.

But then she had had the wretched bad luck not just to injure her thumb, larking about demonstrating her skill at ‘wheel changing’ to the other girls, she had also been caught doing so by the car’s owner. Unfortunately she had not been authorised to do any such ‘wheel changing’, especially not on the duty sergeant’s chap’s precious MG sports car. It had been rotten bad luck that the duty sergeant and her chap had appeared just when Sam had the wheel completely off the car, and even worse bad luck that in the panic that had followed she had caught her thumb in the wheel spokes, and that the injury she had received had become infected. As a result, she had been hospitalised until the infection had cleared up and then sent to work as a clerk/stenographer in the quartermaster’s office at her Aldershot barracks, and denied the opportunity to drive anyone anywhere as punishment for her prank.

A clerk. How her elder brother, Russell, would have laughed at her for that, knowing how much the dullness of such duties would chafe against her exuberant adventure-loving nature. He would, though, have understood her disappointment.

Sam gave a small shake of her cropped golden-blonde hair, a new haircut that had caused her mother such distress.

‘Well, the sergeant said that our hair has to clear our collars,’ she had told her mother in answer to her bewildered, ‘What have you done to your lovely hair?’ ‘And besides, I like it,’ she had added truthfully, giving her mother a mischievous smile. ‘At least this way you won’t have to worry about men in uniform trying to take advantage of me. From the back now, if I’m wearing slacks I look more like a boy than a girl.’