Sleepover Club Blitz Read online

  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!!”

  I had some serious brainstorming to do. So after I’d watched a bit of TV and had a little snack (or four!), I got stuck in.

  The sisters had asked us to describe what we’d learned from our history project, and show how it related to our own lives. Should be a doddle, I thought. There’s got to be LOADS of ways!

  But the minute I tried to put even ONE down on paper, all my great ideas vanished in a puff of smoke.

  After about an hour of mental torture, I rang Frankie. “How’s the brainstorming going?” I asked.

  “A total write-off,” she yelled over Izzy’s howls. “I can’t hear myself think. My little sister’s getting some new teeth!”

  OK, I thought. Frankie’s in Baby World. Let’s try Fliss.

  “I have NO idea how this is meant to work!” Fliss wailed. “I wouldn’t paint my legs with gravy browning if you paid me and Mum would MURDER me if I cut up my bedspread and used it for a coat.”

  Fliss had got hold of the wrong end of the stick as usual, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue, so I just told her to chill, and punched out Lyndz’s number. Can you guess what was wrong with Lyndz? SURE you can!

  “Can’t talk now, hic, Rosie,” she gasped. “I’ve got some serious, hic! hic! hiccups!!”

  “BOO!” I yelled down the phone. But Lyndz’s hiccups are not easily impressed, so I hit the TALK button and cut her off.

  It’s lucky I left Kenny till last, I thought. SHE won’t let me down.

  “Hiya, Kenz!” I said breezily. “How are you doing with the Blitz Sister thingy?”

  Unfortunately Kenny was in a really bad mood. I found out later that she’d had a HUGE row with her sister Molly.

  “I’m not,” she snapped. “Plus my rat went missing.”

  “Euw,” I said. “Oh,” I corrected quickly. “I’m really sorry.”

  Rats totally freak me out. Even tame ones like Kenny’s. I think it’s their tails that give me the horrors. But Kenny’s crazy about hers (her rat, you wally! Not her tail!), so I tried to sound sympathetic. “Hope you find him soon,” I croaked.

  “I can’t talk, OK?” Kenny said irritably. “I’ve gotta look for poor old Merlin.” And she put down the phone.

  “Gr-reat,” I sighed. Instead of boosting my morale, my friends had totally depressed me. Maybe I should sleep on it, I thought. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow, and go “Eureka! That’s IT!”

  But as it turned out, I didn’t have to wait NEARLY that long. Because, just as I was helping my brother Adam with his tea, I had this BRILLIANT brainwave.

  I didn’t write it down then and there. First Adam had to finish eating, then I had to check out my idea with my mates. But when the others heard what I had to say, they were over the moon.

  “Coo-ell,” whispered Frankie. “You’re the best!” (I assumed she was whispering because they’d finally got Izzy to sleep.)

  “MAJOR breakthrough,” said Fliss admiringly. “The M&Ms are going to be GREEN!”

  “I’m v. impressed!” said Kenny. “And so’s Merlin. Would you believe he was cuddling up to Molly’s old Barbie in the garage? Isn’t that cute?”

  “Euw,” I said faintly. “Yes, really cute.” (NOT!)

  Lyndz was finally hiccup-free, so she was in an excellent mood. “Go for it, Rosie,” she said gleefully. “Knock their socks off!!”

  So I went for it. It still took me ages to get it right. But by bedtime, I’d got our entry completely sorted. This is what it said:

  Nowadays we have this stupid idea that some people aren’t as useful as others. it’s like you’re meant to fit into this tidy category, and if you don’t, you might as well be invisible.

  For instance, if you’re too young, that’s not useful. But if you’re too old, that’s just as bad. And if
you’ve got some kind of disability, FORGET it!

  Well, during the war, people in this country couldn’t afford to think like that. Everyone had to do their bit. And I mean EVERYONE, from little kids to housewives to wrinkly old grandads.

  And that’s how it is in my house. Without my dad, things are sometimes tough going. But everyone pulls together and somehow it works. People seem to think my brother Adam doesn’t contribute anything to our family, because of his cerebral palsy. But they’re SO wrong.

  It’s the same with my mates in the Sleepover Club. They’d have been brilliant during the Blitz, because each of them has something really special to contribute.

  Frankie would keep everyone entertained with her jokes and silly impressions. Fliss would make sure all our clothes were mended, and that everyone was scrubbed squeaky clean. kenny would run around Stacking sandbags, and collecting old pots and pans to be recycled into bombs and aeroplanes. And Lyndz would have been a land girl like Iris, helping out on farms and looking after the horses.

  Miss Pearson’s history project taught us that wars aren’t just about fighting. They’re also about getting the best out of people in a crisis, and everyone playing their part, however small. And from this point of view, the Sleepover Club girls would have been total stars!

  Next day, my mates read my entry in absolute silence. I got more and more nervous. They hate it, I thought.

  I was about to make a run for it, when I saw they’d all gone red.

  “It’s rubbish, isn’t it?” I said miserably.

  Frankie shook her head. “It’s beautiful, Rosie,” she said softly. She actually had tears in her eyes. Then she flipped her hair behind her ears. “Erm, did you mean it about me being funny and entertaining?”

  “I meant what I said about ALL of you,” I said truthfully.

  “That’s SO sweet!” breathed Fliss.

  “It’s brilliant, Rosie!” beamed Kenny. “You’re a genius!”

  “It’s all down to Adam, really,” I said. And I made up my mind that if we won, I’d give my brother an extra squeezy hug!