“Put your arms around me honey, hold me tight.
Cuddle up and cuddle up with all your might.
Oh. Oh, won’t you roll them eyes,
Eyes that I just idolise.”

The rag rug was curled back into the hearth while the Big Girls, Frances and Betsy, danced together, squeezing around the furniture in the kitchen. They would ease their way out through the door, into the passage and vanish a while before rejoining the broadcast of Joe Loss and his Orchestra. I loved it when they danced back in, and the whole circuit started again. The fabric insert on the front of our wooden wireless vibrated with every “Oh. Oh,” and I battled the temptation to reveal my bedtime hiding place under the table, by singing along. 

They corrected each other’s “slow, slow, quick-quick-slow” and complained that there wasn’t space in here. They could each do it perfectly well-it was the other who had got the steps wrong and caused the trampled toes. They blamed the tune. 

“It’s a good tune for a quick-step, if you know how to do it properly," Bobby said, making them snarl. “You don’t do the spin-turn like that.” She went on attending to her serious concerns, leaning out of their way as the others danced past. She was pressing her skirt with a hissing iron on a wet tea towel, then broadening out the bow of her lips to look like Lana Turner.

Mum shook her head and said, “Tut-tut, just look at you, wiggling your bottoms. You don’t know what you are up to!” and, “don’t let your father catch you dancing like that!”

Frances and Betsy clung together and laughed. I was impatient for the seven-year age-gap to close so I could develop the same curves and curls and grown-up lives. I longed for my turn to have “Evening in Paris” perfume in dark blue bottles, Coty talcum powder with a crinoline lady on the drum, real bosoms, over-night hair-curling and mysterious, giggly 'can’t-swim-this-week’ excuses.

I peered up at Mum. Her cheeks were red patches and a smile twitched, battling with her scolding words. Betsy stopped dancing and sat down, her legs in front of my face. She put down her hand and surprised me by knowing I was there, stroking my hair. Frances turned up the volume on the wireless, and danced alone. She exaggerated the sway of her hips, the twitch of her shoulders. 

“Aggravating hussy,” Mum said. She looked up from her darning and reddened some more. Mum hated songs about young men touching their girl friends. When they sang, ‘ Oh you beautiful doll…I cannot live without you, how I want my arms about you…’ she would blush and shuffle off to do something unnecessary, tilting her face away.

The Big Girls always alarmed Dad. Mum showed her feelings with a pursed mouth, he by yelling at them. They retaliated by saying they would be joining the Land Army as soon as they were old enough.
“Or the WVS!”they said, “ I can’t see what you’ve got against it!” This was enough to cause an explosion of fury far exceeding his stature. He slammed doors, which resulted in more high-pitched giggles. Then, “Does this look all right?” they would ask each other. They curled each other’s hair with tongs, tested the heat on bits of paper and pressed waves into place with their fingers.

“They sisters of yorn, Chrissy-girl. Gettin’ to be a reet pair o’ corkers,” the man at the Windmill Bakery said one day, and he grinned and winked.

Some instinct warned me not to pass on this message or mention his expression when I handed over to Mum the crusty loaves and the change.

The landlord refused to install power points. “You’ve got the electric light,” Mr. Carpenter said. Mum pushed her signed rent book back into her apron pocket. “What do you want points for? Anyway, with the supply on and off like a tart’s knickers what is the point of a point?” He laughed at his own joke but Mum blushed and slammed the door.  

“Better get the accumulator to the garage for re-charging, then,” she sighed, “or we shan’t be able to hear the news.”

The Big Boys brought the contraption back on some old pram wheels, battery acid sloshing behind its green glass panels. John attached the cables and tuned in the wireless. The needle on the orange dial twitched to and fro past Hilversum, Moscow, Luxembourg, Belgrade, back to London.

He said, “Hush! It’s the news.” The whole family gathered to hear what the BBC Home Service had to tell us about the war.

We had a walk-in larder with marble shelves, but no other means of preserving food, so shopping was a daily chore. Everything we ate and drank seemed to be too warm or too cold. Mum took milk, cheese and butter from bowls of cold water and sniffed, frowning, in the hope of finding them useable, and sufficient, each morning. Sour milk made good scones---if there was flour to be had, but other dubious foodstuffs were mourned over. Meat was a weekly reward for standing in queues: the butcher, like the coalman, was suspected of nepotism and chicanery. He unhooked meat for some, but for others slid packages from under the counter. With coupons needed for some things, points for others, and money for everything, scarcity made shopping a challenge. 

The iron was a capricious gadget that either burned the clothes or wasn’t warm enough to remove creases. It ran off the central light fitting. When someone wanted to press her clothes, Mum used to wobble onto a chair to grasp the twisted fabric cable and replace the light bulb with the socket for the iron. She would put the precious bulb carefully into her apron pocket before manoeuvring herself down. 

 One day John brought home an adaptor for the iron: a light bulb fitting with a second outlet. “Look what I found at work! We can use the iron and the light bulb together.”

Now John’s labour-saving device meant she need not climb again, and ironing need not wait for daylight hours. Dresses and shirts could now be given a “freshen-up” before the Big Ones went out, so in the evenings, competition for space in the kitchen became even greater. Mum would guess the iron's temperature by how smartly spittle ricocheted off the upturned plate. 

 The room filled with the movement of my sisters, who combed and curled, and brothers who hissed the iron onto their trouser creases, sending up coils of wet-wool steam. Tongs drawn from the fire sizzled and sent up toasted paper, then acrid wafts of singeing hair, to join the scorched smell of the ironing blanket. They dabbed long brushes into polish, swishing and huffing on shoes, “Till you can see your face in it,” they said. One carried a dress high, another painted her legs with artificial tan for stockings. Peering at sections of their faces in the mirror they wailed, “I can’t possibly go out looking like this!” 

“Are my seams straight?” 

“Does my petticoat show?”

They fumbled with suspender belts, licked a finger to smooth their brows. I loved Betsy’s skin, soft as her name and her nature. I loved her delicate hair, fine as I imagined silk would be.

When she and Frances set off together, “You’re got up like a dog’s dinner,” Dad would snort. But I was sure they were the prettiest girls in Lytham, perhaps in the world. Bored on a rainy evening, one or other might notice me noticing them, and attack my vertical hair, cutting, curling in rags, bunching or plaiting before tiring of the activity and packing me off to bed. 

"I can’t sleep. It hurts!” I’d yell down the stairs, seeking to prolong the girls’ company. After some muttering at the nuisance, they would come up and pull all the rags out again, leaving me to blush next day over hair which jutted at angles.

Occasionally Mum would insist one of them share her permitted four inches of bathwater with me. I peeped round the folded flannels she insisted I put over my eyes, and envied her amazing bosom, feeling dismay at my flat chest. All three shaved their legs with much-used razorblades that nicked their skin, and walked around the house with dabs of Izal toilet paper on the cuts. They wailed that they could not stop the bleeding and they wanted to go out.

Their outgrown clothes were held up, possibilities debated. Each garment was stripped of buttons and linings, then cut down to provide dresses or skirts for me. 

“It will do Christine a turn.” Mum would say. “Hey. What are you doing, still up? Get on up to bed young woman!”

So I had to leave the fun, as they sang along to ‘Amapola’ and ‘Jealousy’ and the brassy excitement of Glen Miller’s band, making Mum “tut-tut” all over again. By the bend in the stairs I could hear them interrupting a comedy show on the wireless, shrieking out the punch lines, Can I do you now, Sir!” and, “It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going,” and knowing they clutched their ribs and each other, and made round red mouths in their laughter, I felt banished. 

Blurred with sleep, and wanting to miss nothing, I spied down on them from the bend in the stairs as they got ready to go out. Like the colourful aviary birds in Lowther Gardens, Bobby, Betsy and Frances seemed to twitter and flutter, awaiting the three handsome servicemen who would take them dancing at the American air base nearby.

I must retain a composite memory of the scene by the front door, for they surely did not always wear the same coat or use the same phrases. The dresses I recall were sprigged with flowers and belted, blousing over their bosoms and edged with white, lace-edged collars. Their feet angled uphill from scarlet toenails. They had peep-toes and ankle straps. They checked behind themselves, looking down, they touched, patted, tweaked, tugged, smoothed. The way they swiveled their shoulders told me they were aware of being pretty. Francis’ bottom swayed as she passed through the front door, laughing into her airman’s face and her skirt flicked from side to side. She looked bright and young. Betsy looked down, only flicked a shy smile at her beaux and slipped her free arm through his crooked elbow. Her hand lay softly along his forearm as he beamed. 

Bobby’s smile did not reach her eyes. She tugged at her hemline, cradled her hair with crimson nails, ran her hands up her shins to smooth her stockings and sighed. Only then did she look at her partner, long and hard. He cupped his hands round a glowing match and stared back. I wondered why they did not laugh too.

“What do they think they look like? Hussies, going out made up like that!” Dad erupted into the hall, white-faced with helpless, protective fury. “They’d better be in when I get back from the pub!” he yelled to their retreating backs.

The door slammed behind them.

Giggles, shrieks, baritone rumbles, chatter and laughter rose and faded; six tattoos of footsteps died away to leave a last male ‘whoop’ hanging on the night air. A rare sound: a car door thumped, the sound of an engine changed from a thrum to a roar. 

Creasing my forehead against the banisters I looked down on Dad’s white knuckles gripping the top of the kitchen door. He was fore-shortened: a bald head, rolled white sleeves, waist-coated shoulders and a gleam of black shoe seen through a drift of cigarette smoke. In the new stillness I saw him lean forward, gasp, and start on a crescendo of coughing. Mum pulled on his arm and the kitchen door closed on murmurs and muted wheezing.

Betsy joined the WRAF during the war and married a gentle airman, Bill Brook, who made use of his wartime training in the air force to become a clockmaker. The pair was photographed outside our house in Lytham, wearing the uniforms they were married in, each with a regulation flower on a lapel. Tinned peaches and evaporated milk had been scrupulously hoarded for the small reception. There were fish paste sandwiches.
Impatient for their return from the church, I opened the door to the forbidden front room. The spread was waiting for the wedding party, the peaches shining and viscous in a glass bowl. I held the slug-textured orange crescent until the syrup stopped dripping, then popped it in my mouth. Despite its slimy feel and strange flavour, I went on gobbling slices down for the sweetness and richness and the fact they were something new and precious and forbidden. Apart from scrumped apples, they were my first experience of fruit.

I was banished upstair, and when the party returned they found that I had been sick on the parlour floor. The house was suddenly full of strangers who stared as the family scolded, “Serves you right. Your eyes are bigger than your belly!”

Later Betsy and Bill came in to the bedroom to which I had been banished, and while the downstairs chatter went on, held hands and bent over me. They gave off a warm air of completeness. They said they were going away on a train for the few days’ leave they were allotted.

“We’ll make sure they keep you a piece of the cake,” said Betsy, and kissed my forehead.