Orphans of War

by Leah Fleming

  ‘Just shut up and behave or we’ll get chucked out,’ Gloria whispered in his ear. Didn’t he know when he was well off? He was looking queer again.

  ‘This is Gloria and her brother, Sidney, who’s not very well. They need a bed for the night and some medical attention, I’m afraid,’ Mrs Plum said.

  ‘This is impossible, Prunella. It was bad enough-having the one but now you’re asking me to put up three and to call out poor Dr David at this time of night. Can’t it wait?’ The two women were trying to argue quietly but Maddy could hear their angry mutters.

  ‘It’s like the pictures, innit?’ whispered Gloria, looking around with wonderment. ‘I keep pinching myself. If Mam could see us here…’

  ‘Where’s she gone to?’ said Maddy, hoping to catch Gloria off guard.

  ‘Dunno,’ came the guarded reply. She was too tired to think what Mam was doing now. She’d just left them on the train to fend for themselves and she didn’t understand why, but Gloria was still preening herself for having been picked out as the Belfield girl.

  Sid was looking funny again.

  ‘Miss, miss, he’s fitting! He allus does this when he’s sick,’ she yelled.

  The old lady looked on with concern as he was laid down, rigid with tremors. Perhaps Sid could be useful after all. If he was sick they couldn’t move him and she could stay the night in a palace. She was curious now and wanted to see what it all looked like in the morning light.

  ‘Shall I put something over his tongue? Miss Connaught does that when Veronica Rogers has a fit,’ offered Maddy. Her grandmother looked surprised to hear her speaking the King’s English in her best elocution voice. At least she wasn’t being ignored now in favour of Gloria’s pretty looks. That had hurt more than anything.

  ‘Now look what you’ve brought to our door…Send Ilse to The Vicarage and he can phone for Dr David. These lower classes don’t know how to look after themselves properly, letting children loose in this state. Those children look half starved and such coarse accents. I don’t want Madeleine picking it up. Arthur’s taught her some manners, I see.’

  ‘I can speak French too,’ Maddy added. ‘We did French and Latin at St Hilda’s but I hate Latin.’

  ‘Speak when you’re spoken to, girl,’ said the old woman. ‘Go and find Ilse and send her off with a torch. This is most inconvenient!’

  Maddy wondered if they were expected to bob a curtsy like the maids did, but decided against it. She raced across through the baize door into a warren of passages, Gloria clinging on to her, into the kitchen where they found two women sipping tea.

  ‘We need the doctor for a little boy. Please can someone go to the nearest phone?’

  The women jumped up and put on their coats.

  ‘Just the one of you, I think,’ Maddy ordered, but the girls shook their heads.

  ‘I not go in the dark. There be ghosts in the lane and soldiers. We go in twos together, please,’ pleaded the brown-eyed girl with her hair all scraped into a plait around her head.

  What sort of place was this house, where servants were afraid and Mrs Belfield lived all alone? No wonder Daddy never spoke of it and his horrid mother, who was a snob. Why had no one told her that the Belfields lived in a castle with big sweeping stairs and stone floors that smelled of old smoke?

  Tomorrow she would ask Aunt Plum if she could join the evacuees in the village. Gloria could stay here with Sid and be petted, but she didn’t want to spend another night in this horrible place where she wasn’t wanted.

  Later, when the doctor came to examine Sidney and pronounced that he’d burst his eardrum and needed bed rest and medicine, the two girls were tucked up in a huge four-poster bed with curtains round the posts. The room smelled of lavender and damp.

  Ilse had warmed the sheets with a big copper warming pan and made a fuss of the pair. Gloria was made to stand in a tub and be sponged down by Aunt Plum to see if she had fleas. Her underclothes were thin, clean and she wasn’t wrapped in brown paper like some of the vaccies were supposed to be. She was enjoying every minute of the fuss.

  Maddy had never undressed for bed with a stranger before. She wanted to be on her own, but not in this barn of a bedroom. She wondered about all the people who’d died in that bed. Were their ghosts still haunting the place?

  What a strange day! The only nice thing about it was meeting Aunt Plum, but they never got time on their own to talk over what had happened. Everyone expected Maddy to look after the other two.

  She wished she’d never gone to the washroom on the train, never seen the mother shove those two into her hands, but she had. Then she thought of her relief when Greg had limped down the platform to rescue them. Perhaps there was one friend after all who would look out for her–even if he were a boy.

  5

  December 1940

  ‘Can you pick up my knitting, dear?’ gasped Great-aunt Julia as she struggled with her two sticks across the hallway of Brooklyn Hall. Maddy wasn’t used to going at tortoise pace but she loved being useful to the old ladies in the drawing room who, wrapped in ancient fur wraps and shawls to keep out the draughts, were busy knitting for the Sowerthwaite Comforts fund. Everyone took it in turns to sit up close to Uncle Algie’s battery-operated wireless to catch the news as best they could.

  Maddy couldn’t believe it was nearly Christmas, nearly three whole months since that arrival at Brooklyn Hall, when Sid had had his fit and Grandma had eyed her up and down with disappointment.

  ‘It’s hotting up in Greece,’ shouted Great-uncle Algernon across the room, resting his half a leg on a leather buffet as he strained to catch the bulletin. ‘Metaxas has said “No” to Mussolini and there’ll be trouble in the Balkans, mark my words…Oh, and Liverpool and Manchester had another visit from the Luftwaffe last night. Three of our planes are missing.’

  ‘Don’t believe a word of it, girls,’ shouted Grandma, looking up from her letter writing. ‘It’s all lies and propaganda. I don’t know why you want to depress us with such news.’

  Maddy was glued to the six o’clock news every night. She had heard enemy bombers droning overhead at night on their deadly route across the moors, hoping that the searchlight on the field battery would be torching their path for the ack-ack guns.

  Her parents were on their way back from Egypt, hinting in their letter that they were going the long route round Africa and there was fighting in the Mediterranean. They were coming home for Christmas, but Maddy would rather they stayed put if there was danger.

  It was such an age since she’d seen them and so much had happened, so much to tell them about her new school and friends. How the Brooklyn seemed like a hotel full of shuffling old people, who played endless games of patience and bridge, who quarrelled and fussed over Ilse’s cooking and fought to get the best corner by the huge fireplace.

  Besides Uncle Algie and Aunt Julia and her companion, Miss Betts, there was a distant cousin Rhoda Rennison and her sister, Flo. It was easy to lump them all together somehow in their grey cardigans and baggy skirts, darned lisle stockings and tweed slippers. Around them wafted a tincture of eau de cologne that almost masked a more acidic smell. The oldies melted into the walls of the Brooklyn between meals along with their ear trumpets, stringy knitting in carpet bags and shawls. Then when the dinner gong rang they appeared from the far recesses of the house, back to the table like clucking hens at the trough, pecking at their plates, too busy to talk to Maddy

  Aunt Plum was worried about Uncle Gerald, who was waiting in barracks down south to be sent abroad soon. When she was upset she smiled with sad eyes and went for long walks over the hills with her dogs, when she wasn’t on duty at the Old Vic Hostel.

  Maddy walked to the village school each morning with the two Conleys, who now lived in Huntsman’s Cottage with Mr and Mrs Batty. It was a funny arrangement: normal school lessons in the morning, mixing with the local children at St Peter’s C of E School, and then lessons in the village hall, crushed in with a gang of evacuee kids from Leed
s, who were living the other side of Sowerthwaite. It was all very noisy and they didn’t do much work, just copying from the board until hometime. There weren’t enough teachers to go round.

  It was not like St Hilda’s at all, and the first thing she’d done was to lose her elocution accent in favour of a Yorkshire one, flattening her ’a’s so she didn’t get teased, though it made Grandma Belfield furious if she said bath instead of baath.

  ‘The sooner Arthur comes and puts you in a half-decent school…You’re turning into a right little Yorkshire tyke. It’s no good Plum letting you mix so much with that village lot. They’re teaching you nothing but bad habits. I hear they’ve been up to their old tricks again on the High Street,’ Grandma sighed, looking up at Maddy’s glasses and then turning back to her letter writing.

  Maddy smiled to herself as she sat with her arms out so Aunt Julia could unravel a jumper that smelled of mothballs. Peggy, Greg and Enid knew all the best wheezes. It was Enid’s idea to fill the cig packet with dirt and worms and then box it up as if it was new and toss it on the pavement. They hid in the little alleyway while the passer-by spotted the cigs and pounced only to jump back in horror. They filled blue sugar bags with horse droppings and left them in the middle of the road so the carters stopped, hoping for a present to give their wives, only for the smelly muck to spill out while the gang had to look, duck and vanish like the Local Defence Volunteers down the ginnel.

  Everyone got a telling-off from the constable, and poor Enid was grounded for being the ringleader by Miss Blunt, but she complained they’d all helped so all of them missed the Saturday film show as a punishment except Maddy. Going on her own was not much fun.

  Greg was out cleaning the Daimler and helping Mr Batty, and begging old wheels to make a go-kart from the salvage cart. There was always something happening at the Old Vic even though Miss Blunt was strict and didn’t like mess. They were busy making Christmas presents out of cocoa tins, painting them and putting holes in the lids to pull a ball of string through. String was very precious now. Aunt Plum took her down to the hostel to join in the crafts after school. They were turning dishcloths into pretty dolls and sewing dusters into knickerbockers with frills on to sell at the bazaar for War Comforts. Soon it would be time to make Christmas paper chains and tree decorations.

  The Brooklyn was fine in its own way, but since Gloria and Sid had moved in with the Battys, Maddy felt lonely at night, the draughts whistling round the house like banshees. Aunt Plum and Grandma were always out at committee meetings; the Comforts fund, the WVS, the Women’s Institute and the Church Council, so she sat with the oldies listening to the wireless while they dosed after supper. Uncle Algie let her listen to the Light Programme, and the music that reminded her of Mummy.

  Mummy’s letters were full of interesting places that Maddy dutifully looked up in the atlas with Uncle Algie’s help. They had sung in concerts in the desert under the moon and stars.

  We’re so looking forward to Christmas and to being a proper family once more. We should never have left you behind, but we thought it was for the best. You have had to suffer because of us doing our duty but be strong and brave. Not long now, darling.

  It was a funny war here, nothing much happened at all. There was a gun battery up behind Sowerthwaite, and the Local Defence Volunteers paraded in church. The town was bursting with kids from all over the place but no bombs and no big factories belching smoke were to be seen. It was a relief to wake up each morning to silence and the bleat of sheep but she still felt sad. In her dreams she went back to Chadley, chasing Bertie, singing round the piano with Uncle George, playing with the button tin, making corkscrew coils of knitting with Granny Mills. If only they were here with her for Christmas too.

  Her biggest surprise was that the Yorkshire of her Jane Eyre heroine was so beautiful and wild, with hills and stone walls creeping in all directions, green grass and hundreds of sheep, cows and pigs in makeshift arks, chicken coops and duck ponds, horses ploughing up the fields by the river and gardens crammed full of vegetables and apple trees.

  They were making an allotment behind the Old Vic and Mr Batty was helping the big children plant vegetables. None of them had known a fork from a spade before they started but they did now. Enid and Peggy complained their hands were getting blisters. It was all so peaceful and safe, as if she’d moved to another world, but at what a cost? Why couldn’t they all have come before the war to enjoy the scenery?

  Maddy’s favourite spot was high up in the big beech tree that was planted right at the back of the Old Vic in the corner where the garden became a field. There was a swing rope up to a little wooden den in its branches. The tree was very old.

  From their hide-out they could spy on German planes and hide if the enemy invaded. There was a password to climb up that changed every week.

  Aunt Plum said the tree was planted long ago by subscription after some famous victory. No one could remember which battle it was but it had to be hundreds of years old. It must have been in honour of the men of Sowerthwaite who took part; a bit like Grandma’s line of Lombardy poplars on the lane up to Brooklyn Hall, which Maddy always felt were sad trees. She called them the Avenue of Tears.

  One of those trees was for her Uncle Julian-no wonder Grandma hated anything to do with the war. She did her duty on her committees but her lips were always set in a thin line and she had no smile wrinkles round her eyes like Aunt Plum.

  Maddy lay across a branch of the tree daydreaming, her arms dangling down, hidden by a curtain of rusting leaves. It reminded her of the apple tree near The Feathers, but that made her think of Bertie and Gran and the terrible blitz that haunted her dreams. She hoped her little dog had found a new home.

  Aunt Plum’s dogs were big and bouncy, not the same as her own special friend.

  Everything was so different here, she thought, hiding under the canopy whilst she watched for spies. There had to be spies in the district if there was going to be an invasion soon, she thought. She knew the fire drill by heart. Now she was supposed to be collecting beech mast to feed Horace the pig in the shed.

  It was fun going on salvaging trips down the cobbled alleyways and lanes, staring in through the doors of stone houses with slate rooftops like fish scales. Sowerthwaite was full of secret lanes that opened out onto the wide marketplace. Its shops lined the streets with arched doorways and bow windows straight out of her fairy-tale book. There were banners across the town hall urging the townfolk to buy Savings Bonds, posters in the shop windows warning of ‘Careless Talk’, but no bomb sites or proper air-raid shelters in sight, not like Chadley.

  Peggy, Gloria and she were in Greg’s team, collecting newspapers and jam jars for salvage. Peggy was very round, always puffing, and didn’t like pushing the handcart; Gloria was always sneaking off looking through shop windows, so Maddy and Greg did most of the hard work, dodging dogs, knocking on doors and trying to beat the other gang for the team to collect most. Big Bryan Partridge’s gang cheated by hanging round the back of shops, sneaking cardboard boxes while Mitch Brown and Enid hung round the Three Tuns to cadge bottles, but Miss Blunt liked to have them out of the Vic all day being useful, come rain or shine.

  Maddy loved practising for the school Christmas concert in church, making secret presents for the oldies, and now with Mummy and Daddy coming home it was going to be just perfect. Only one thing was spoiling everything now.

  Last night her dreams were disturbed by bangs and flashes and the flames burning the pub, and she was running to save them but she couldn’t reach them in time and then she woke and her bed was wet again.

  Aunt Plum had put a rubber sheet on her mattress when she first came and told her not to worry, but she woke crying from the dream and crying with shame as she sneaked her sheet and her pyjamas down to the scullery to soak in the sink. She was making extra work and there was a war on and it worried her. Then she’d had to creep back in the dark, feeling up the oak banister rail and curl up with Panda, trying to be brave.r />
  The silence outside was scary at first but she strained to hear the night sounds, the bleating sheep, the owl hooting, the drone of a night plane or the rattle of the night express in the distance. She was lucky to be safe and warm in this hidy-hole, but until Mummy and Daddy returned it could never be home.

  The old house was friendly in its own way, cluttered with walking sticks and cushions and doggy smells. There were rooms boarded off and shuttered to save on heating. The sun shone through dusty windows, but it gave off little heat now.

  Sometimes she walked up from school, up the Avenue of Tears, wondering if Daddy did the same dawdle with his satchel all those years ago. Why had he never come back here?

  It was something to do with Mummy and the Millses being ordinary and saying ‘bath’ in the wrong way, but Mummy was beautiful and sang like a ‘storm cock’. When Maddy grew up she would marry someone she loved, however poor he was, if he was handsome and kind. He wouldn’t mind that she was leggy and plain with a turn in her eye that never seemed to get any better. She didn’t want another operation to straighten it out. The last one in Chadley hadn’t worked for long.

  Aunt Plum promised when things were less hectic they would take her to see a specialist in Leeds who might sort out her eye once and for all. With the war on, though, Aunt Plum said all the best surgeons were at the front so they might have to wait until peace came again.

  It was so peaceful here. The war hadn’t bothered Sowerthwaite, and it wouldn’t if Grandma had anything to do with it. Maddy touched the bark of Uncle Julian’s poplar for luck.

  Gloria Conley skipped round the playground singing ‘Little Sir Echo, how do you do…’, her bunches bobbing behind her. She’d just been chosen to sing a solo in the school concert and Miss Bryce said she had lovely voice. She couldn’t wait for it to be Christmas now.