The Book Group 49
Getting Married
3 months later.
The mums who brought their children to Penny’s reading group, and who enjoyed a cup of tea and a cake while their children were being entertained, were, as a group, disappointed to learn that Mr. Carter, the handsome, taciturn owner of the bookshop had been nabbed, and by no other than the young lady who read stories to their children three mornings a week. However, they rallied, and when the banns were posted, they decided, as a group, to attend the service when that day arrived.
Paul was a favourite, and rumours of his supposed heroics during the war were passed back and forward, alternately hoarded like gems, and swapped like recipes. Penny, when she learned of these stories, strongly suspected that they were spread by Vivien, though she denied all knowledge. Amongst the mums it was strongly believed that Paul had been a spy and had entered Nazi Germany with the intention of assassinating Hitler, but had been thwarted, captured and tortured, but gave up no information, and then escaped back to Blighty in a stolen aeroplane. His quiet, understated demeanour was somehow taken as proof of his heroics.
And on at least two occasions, some said it might have been three, he had volunteered to take Penny’s place reading to the children, and in this endeavour, he was an absolute smash: his voice was gentle but manly, his humour and the twinkle in his eye, his ability to pause for dramatic effect when reading Hansel and Gretel, plus the fact that he obviously liked children, all left the mums in a swoon. He was, in all, seen as the perfect man for those ladies whose lives had lacked, at least since the war ended and the Americans had gone home, most forms of excitement or intrigue.
However, they rallied, and Penny became their mascot. If he must marry, they said, and he must, obviously, then Miss Ward was a bright girl from a good background and worthy of the prize. Her father, it was said, had been an aide to Churchill, driven to the edge of breakdown by vain attempts to keep the great man away from the bottle, and then pushed entirely over the edge by his heroic efforts to keep the old bulldog from grabbing a tommy gun and being amongst the first wave to hit the beaches in Normandy back in forty-four. Penny herself ws described working for the boffins who had broken the German secret code which, in turn, led to the Battle of the Atlantic being won. Again, Penny suspected Vivien of spreading these stories, but all was denied.
All in all, disappointment gave way to pride, and Penny became “our girl” and her reading groups grew and grew in size, until the bookshop had to open up and furnish the basement to take the extra kids who arrived for Story Hour. Which gave the mums more time to enjoy their tea, purchase Sid’s cakes, and an indulge in a whole lot of gossip.
And buy books.
The date was set for wedding.
Purely coincidentally, it was also a half-term holiday for Terrence and his new life at Sloane Square Grammar School, a place at which he was excelling, and in which he had won a bursary due to the high score he’d achieved in his Eleven Plus exam. The church where the wedding was to take place was St. Marks in Primrose Hill, a Victorian Gothic with a tall spire where Penny’s parents had wed over three decades earlier. And so, on 14th October 1948, a bright, breezy Thursday, for the first and only time in the history of Carter’s Bookshop, the doors were closed and the shop was shut.
And on the door was hung a sign.
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