Better Days Will Come by Pam Weaver

had to be very careful not to give him the wrong impression, but there were times, such as now, when he was useful to know. Once Uncle Charlie squared up to a man, any man, there was no argument. Of course, Grace was no fool. She knew as soon as she and Charlie had gone the wife would probably be beaten into submission; but if the woman had any sense, she would manage to squirrel away a fair bit of the money in her apron pocket while the man saw Grace to the door.
    The round was uneventful enough but every time someone said, ‘How’s your Bonnie getting on?’ it cut Grace like a knife. The truth was, she hadn’t a clue. Every day she looked for a letter to no avail. She’d had a few Christmas cards, but nothing from Bonnie. She had bought one herself in case Bonnie wrote, but with no address to send it to, what could she do?
    As she made her way through Station Approach, someone called Charlie’s name.
    Grace turned in time to see him conversing with a man in the shadows. All at once, the man took a swing at him and Charlie retaliated. At the same moment, someone grabbed her from behind and spun her round. The sudden move took Grace completely by surprise and she stumbled. The man raised his boot to kick her.
    ‘Oi!’ Someone near the corner of the street shouted at the top of his voice.
    The robber pushed her violently and Grace felt herself falling. The sound of running feet behind him in the silent street obviously focused the robber’s mind. He made a grab for the moneybag looped over her head and across her chest, banging her head against the wall. The blow nearly knocked her senseless but even as she hit the ground, Grace knew the moneybag was gone.

Seven
     
    Rita lay on her back with the water touching her shoulders. The tin bath was cramped and the edges a bit cold but it was warm in the kitchen. The fire in the range let out a fairly good heat and her clean clothes were hanging on the clothes horse for when she got out.
    She was brooding. Brooding on her sister’s disappearance and the unfairness of life. The more she thought about it the less she understood it. Bonnie often talked about George and Rita knew their romance was to be kept a secret but all that stuff about South Africa? Why did that have to be a secret anyway? She should tell Mum really. In fact, now that she thought about it, Rita wished she had told her mother about George in the first place. If she told her now, she would be angry that Rita had kept Bonnie’s secret. She soaped the flannel with Lux and then her arm. Mum was reasonable enough. She would have been a bit upset but if Bonnie was a married woman she would never have stopped her going anywhere with her husband.
    Mum would never allow any hanky-panky, as Mrs Kerr had called it, but Bonnie was a respectable girl. As they’d lain in their beds at night, she and her sister had talked about their wedding night often enough. Bonnie always said you should save yourself for the man you loved. She said Mum had done it and she would too.
    ‘Anyway,’ she told Rita, ‘if you give yourself to a boy, he won’t respect you and you’ll get a reputation for being flighty.’
    ‘I shall save myself for my husband too,’ Rita had said stoutly.
    She had read a letter on the problems page in
Woman
magazine just the other day. A reader was worried that her fiancé wanted her to go too far. Should she give in to him or wait until her wedding day? In the reply the girl had been advised to remain a virgin. In truth Rita had no real idea what happened on the wedding night but she knew that when a man and a woman got married sooner or later there was a baby. What exactly a man did was a mystery. At school, they had biology lessons but the life cycle of a frog wasn’t much help.
    Life threw some very unkind things at you. It had come as a shock when her periods started. When Mum explained that this sort of thing was nothing to worry about, and that it happened to every girl, she had talked a lot