Apple Blossom Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

long as we actually arrived. If two hundred women, shoehorned into cabins, felt ill, God knows how the two thousand soldiers felt, swinging in their hammocks in the airless, fume-filled hold. By the time the ship swung southwards, we were all several pounds lighter.
    By now I could distinguish Pansy’s little, whiffling breaths, polite even in her sleep, across the room. Thank goodness for Pansy. She kept me sane when military bureaucracy might have driven me mad. We’d been so lucky to be able to stick together. Vee’s dry cough, which had been so irritating at the beginning of the long voyage around Africa, no longer bothered me. Grace was usually quiet, except now and again, when she’d mumble to herself. That didn’t bother me any longer, either. The other four beds in the hut would soon be filled by the next draft.
    A vicar’s daughter, a débutante, a shop girl and me. What an odd collection. Saintly Pansy, motherless daughter of a saintly father. Grace, with her wicked grin and her extra long stride that always clipped the heels of the girl in front when our squad was drilling. Fluffy-haired Vee, whose cap wouldn’t sit straight and whose magnificent bosoms were never meant to be covered by pleated, button-down pockets. And me – skinny, stubborn and far too bolshie to make a good soldier.
    We’d been through basic training together, scrubbed ablutions together, polished lino, heaved coal, plastered each other’s blisters, battered each other’s caps into more becoming shapes. We’d stood in line, shivering and half-naked, on FFI, Freedom From Infection parade, to put up with the indignity of a medical officer pulling out our knickers to the furthest limit of the elastic (none of us had a clue to what he was looking for). We’d all had stiff arms at the same time from inoculations against every disease known to man, given by an orderly with a blunt needle and a sense of humour that would have done him credit in the Gestapo. We’d been homesick together, seasick together, put up with the attentions of hundreds of men together, all the way round the Cape, eaten, marched, slept, slapped mosquitoes, laughed and cried together. No wonder we were friends.
    I shifted around on the joins of the three-piece biscuit mattress, strange tonight, but soon these lumps would be as familiar as my own bed in Ansty Parva. My tummy was full of mince with a funny little square of pastry that tasted like a mortarboard, carrots, mashed potato, stewed plums and custard – the ideal diet for a soldier in the Nile valley.
    It was our first night in a bed that didn’t rock for – oh, ages. How odd it felt, not to be moving, like a mild case of seasickness. No danger of torpedoes here, no need for warship escorts. No air raids either. Cairo wasn’t like a war zone at all. Well, not yet, anyway. Nor could I see that it ever would be, even though the Italians had bombed Maadi before we had arrived. They never got as close as that again. Rommel and his Panzers may have been on their way, with almost legendary verve and dash, but there was still an awful lot of sand between them and Cairo.
    I wondered sleepily how Mother and Tom were managing, whether they were safe, whether Grandmother would ever be reconciled to her evacuees from Bermondsey, whether Kate was settling down in the WRNS. She’d been so envious of my posting. I don’t know what she’d imagined – a sort of 1940s Arabian Nights, I suppose – a cross between The Thief of Baghdad and The Garden of Allah!
    ‘I’d give anything for a posting like that,’ she’d said. ‘Almost anywhere sounds exciting compared to Somewhere On The Clyde.’
    From what I’d seen so far, we were going to be as closely guarded as a harem. No romantic stranger would be likely to get a chance to gallop off with me to the Casbah – more’s the pity!
    Now that I’d stopped travelling, there’d be a chance at last for letters to catch up. The last letter I’d had from Mother had been