Sleepover Club Blitz (3 page)

“Let’s go,” I pleaded.

But all my friends were gazing at Owen as if they’d never seen anything so awesome. It was like all they’d fallen under some evil SPELL.

I’m not that crazy about football, so while I waited for my ordeal to be over, I kept myself busy by collecting incriminating evidence against Owen Cartwright.

Would you believe that boy POSES every time he goes to take a penalty? He even pushes his hand through his hair, David Ginola style!

This was truly one of life’s major mysteries. My friends were so SMART. Couldn’t they see this bogus boy was unworthy of their affections? URGH! I thought. How DARE he have my surname!!

Suddenly I’d had it up to
here
with that fair-haired phony! I informed the others of my decision as we were walking home in the rain.

“All bets are off,” I said crisply. “I refuse to help you guys make wallies of yourselves.”

“You can’t do that!” wailed Fliss.

“I just did,” I scowled. And while I was feeling brave, I told them what I thought of Mister Charisma.

Frankie was furious. “Rosie Cartwright, if you weren’t such a little fuddy-duddy, you’d know Owen’s the best thing to happen to our school in
ages.”

“Rubbish!” I snapped. “Miss Pearson’s history project is heaps more exciting than some – brainless HIMBO!”

I should have saved my breath. Even after I’d crossed the road, I could still hear my mates wrangling about which of them Owen liked best.

When I got home, I felt like a real Rosie No-Mates. Why couldn’t I fancy Owen too? I thought miserably. At least I’d have something to giggle about with the others.

But once I’d seen the creepy resemblance between our school Romeo and those two-faced M&Ms, I couldn’t NOT see it, if you see what I mean.

It was like that fairy tale in reverse. Inside Owen’s princely good looks lurked a seriously icky frog in disguise, I was sure of it. I just prayed that sooner or later, my friends would come to their senses and see that I was right.

The others must have agreed to stop going on about Owen – at least, when
I
was around anyway, because next day, they never mentioned him ONCE. Which was basically cool with me.

After registration, Miss Pearson got us buzzing with the news that some exciting visitors were dropping by later that morning, to help out with our history project.

In my opinion, “exciting” is a word teachers totally overuse. “Gosh, listen everyone! The school nurse is going to show this
really
exciting video about head-lice!” NOT. But Miss Pearson didn’t strike me as the kind of person to get psyched up about nit shampoo, so I was genuinely intrigued by who these visitors might be.

While we were waiting, our teacher showed us some old photographs which had been taken in and around our part of Leicestershire during the Second World War. We were gobsmacked. Sixty years isn’t that long, really, but it was hardly recognisable as the same planet!

The people looked as if they’d just stepped out of some crackly old black and white film. Plus there was almost no traffic. The few vehicles around were
total
museum pieces. Miss Pearson explained that petrol was in really short supply, so people only used cars when strictly necessary.

There was one photo of these three teenage girls. They were really pretty, in that well-scrubbed, healthy 1940s way. And something about their happy expressions made me think they’d be fun to know.

“How come they’re so stylish?” demanded Fliss. “You said clothes were rationed, same as food.”

“They were,” Miss Pearson agreed. She explained that the war changed women’s lives dramatically. Until then, they hadn’t been encouraged to go out to work. But with the men away at war, women were needed to work in the factories or on the land. Some even joined the forces.

“Girls and women had to become much tougher and more independent,” our teacher went on. “But despite all those wartime shortages, they were determined to look their best. If you look closely at this girl’s pretty coat, you’ll see she’s made it herself out of a 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 ended up deciphering secret enemy codes at Station X. Then she was whisked off to Egypt on some mysterious mission, travelling in the bomb bay of a Lancaster bomber!

She showed us a picture of herself, taken in front of the Pyramids, looking frightfully English, in a floaty summer dress. Beside her was a handsome man in uniform. (The kind who just HAS to be played by Joseph Fiennes if they ever make the film!)

“Who was
he
?” all the girls said at once.

“Oh, Mungo was a spy,” she said casually. “A double agent and a complete bounder!”

“Dishy though,” Fliss whispered.

Sharp-eared Edith heard her. “Extremely dishy,” she sighed. “But rotten to the core.”

At first, Iris’s war sounded tame in comparison with her sister’s. She basically drove tractors, and baled hay. Now and then she’d get an enigmatic postcard from Edith and wonder what she was REALLY up to! Then, some German prisoners of war (POWs for short) arrived, to help out with the harvest.

Iris turned pink as she described how one of them made her laugh. His name was Helmut and he spoke very good English.

“Highly inconvenient,” she said, “falling in love with the enemy! I longed to tell my friends how Helmut had rescued a baby rabbit from the combine harvester, or that he hated Hitler as much as they did. But I had to keep everything locked tightly inside me, until I thought I’d burst.”

She paused and there was this electric silence. Everyone wanted to know what happened next.

Iris sighed. “Then, when the harvest was over, Helmut was sent to another farm in deepest Devon, and I didn’t see him again.”

“Not ever?” we gasped.

“Oh, yes,” she smiled. “After the war ended, he wrote, asking me to come to Germany.”

“Did you go?” asked Danny McCloud, totally caught up in her story.

“I did,” she nodded. “And it was terrible. Helmut came from Dresden, which if you don’t know, was badly fire-bombed by us. It was a place of absolute despair. I still dream about it.”

“They deserved it, though, Miss,” Alana piped up. “After what they did.”

Iris gave her a sad smile. “I’m not qualified to decide who deserves to die horribly and who does not. I only know it was terrible. Everyone in Helmut’s family had been killed, except his mother. She died soon after I arrived, and Helmut and I came back to England together.”

“As you can imagine,” said Edith dryly, “our parents were not exactly delighted.”

“Our father never spoke to me again,” Iris sighed. “Luckily my mother forgave me the instant she set eyes on our first baby.”

I could have listened to those incredible Blitz sisters all day! Even my Owen-crazy friends were utterly spell-bound.

But just before Iris and Edith left, something AMAZING happened.

Edith explained that she and Iris owned a house which was maintained in perfect Second World War condition, like a Blitz time-capsule.

“It’s only small,” said Edith apologetically. “Which means only a few of you can participate at any one time.”

“So we thought the fairest thing would be to set you all a competition,” said Iris. “The lucky winners will get to spend a weekend in the Second World War!”

A ripple of excitement went round the class.

“A Blitz sleepover!” gasped Kenny. “I can’t wait!”

“Me neither!” said Frankie. “This is one competition we’ve GOT to win!”

“Coo-ell,” Lyndz and Fliss agreed.

“No question,” I said.

Twenty-four hours ago, the Sleepover girls were totally anti-Blitz. Now we were all
desperate
to ace Iris and Edith’s competition!

Miss Pearson asked us to give the sisters a big clap for being such total stars. A few people got carried away, whooping and whistling as if they were on
Ricky Lake.

Danny McCloud actually asked for their autographs. “I’ve never met any spies before,” he told Edith.

“I wasn’t a spy, dear,” she chuckled. “I was really just a number cruncher.”

“Number
what
?” he frowned.

“What you’d call a computer nerd,” she explained. “Except they hadn’t invented computers then.”

“Oh, I get you!” beamed Danny. “I’d still like your autograph!” he added cheekily. “I think you’re really cool!”

At lunchtime, the Blitz competition was the sole topic of conversation.

“How do we make sure we ALL go?” wailed Fliss.

“Yeah, only some of us might win,” agreed Frankie.

“Hmmn. Good point,” mused Kenny.

At that moment there was a squeal of Minnie Mouse laughter. We looked up and saw a horrifying sight. Owen Cartwright and the M&Ms were at the SAME dinner table, laughing away like old friends!!!

I counted to ten, and took a sacred vow that the words “Told you so, you big wallies!” would never pass my lips.

Frankie jumped to her feet and stormed out. “That does it,” she snarled when we caught up with her. “Those girls have gone too far! We’ve got to get them back BIG time.”

We started thinking up satisfying forms of revenge, like zapping them with water-bombs, or sneaking opened tins of Whiskas into their PE bags. But Frankie rejected all our creative suggestions.

“The best revenge is for us to win the competition,” she said fiercely.

Kenny looked doubtful. “Nice thought. Any idea how we pull it off?”

“Yes, actually,” said Frankie smugly. “We’ll submit a joint Sleepover entry.”

“All
right
!” we all cheered.

“As individuals, we’re the best,” Frankie beamed. “Think how awesome we’ll be as a team!”

Wow, I thought. This is only happening because Owen was hanging out with the M&Ms. Mum’s right. Things really DO happen for a reason!

I grinned at my mates. “Yeah,” I said aloud. “We should be truly unbeatable!!”