Down an English Lane

by Margaret Thornton

  ‘No, thank you, dear. They’re just about ready, and we’re not going to dish them out until the children have finished their sandwiches and cakes. Some of them might prefer to have just the red jelly… Is there something the matter, Maisie?’ Patience was looking at her concernedly. ‘You seem rather preoccupied.’

  ‘No…not really,’ replied Maisie. ‘There’s nothing the matter. I was just thinking that today, well, it’s a sad day, sort of, for some people, isn’t it, as well as us celebrating the end of the war. Audrey and Tim; it’s them I was thinking of, really. It’s sure to remind them of their parents… Of course I know that you and Luke are their mum and dad now, and that they’re very happy…’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean, my dear.’ Patience put an arm around her and gave her a quick hug. ‘You’re always a great girl for thinking things through, and, do you know, you and I always seem to think alike.’

  ‘Great minds, eh, Aunty Patience?’ smiled Maisie.

  ‘Of course! Yes, as you say, Audrey and Tim are sure to have memories today, but let’s hope that the pleasant ones outweigh the not so pleasant. Although none of us must ever forget… It’s a day of mixed feelings for a lot of folk; for your friend, Doris, as well. She’s always bright and cheerful, bless her, but there must be times when she thinks about her father… That tragedy all came about as a result of the war.’

  Maisie nodded, remembering how Doris’s father, Walter Nixon, had been killed, not by enemy fire, but on a training exercise in his army camp in the south of England, by a stray bullet. He had not even needed to have joined up at all as he was over forty years of age and, moreover, he was a farmer in a reserved occupation.

  ‘Yes… Doris as well, of course,’ said Maisie thoughtfully.

  ‘But let’s not be down-hearted,’ whispered Patience in her ear. ‘Come along; let’s make sure that we’ve got everything ready. It won’t be long before the hordes descend on us.’

  ‘Audrey…’ she called to her daughter, ‘and you as well, Doris. I think the next job is to put a selection of sandwiches on big plates to put in the middle of the tables. Allow three sandwiches each…’

  ‘Supposing some take more than three?’ said Maisie. ‘I’m thinking about our Jimmy actually. He can be a greedy little pig when he gets going, and I can just see some poor little kid only getting one.’

  ‘Mmm…good point,’ agreed Patience. ‘But we’ll be circulating, won’t we, to make sure there’s fair play? And I suggest we don’t put the cakes out until the sandwiches have gone.’ She laughed. ‘That’s what my mother used to say when I was a little girl. “Bread and butter first, Patience, and then you can have your cake.” And I’ve never forgotten it.’

  ‘And you’ve never let us forget it either, Tim and me and little Johnny,’ said Audrey, with a sly grin at her.

  ‘No; children don’t change much over the years,’ said Patience, smiling, ‘nor do mothers’ words of wisdom… Now, girls, I’ll leave you to get on with that little job, and I’ll go and help Mrs Hollins and Mrs Spooner with the big jugs of orange squash. And there are some little sausage rolls that Mrs Campion has made. I think it would be a good idea to hand those round, then we can make sure that nobody takes more than one… Oh help! They’re beginning to arrive already, and we did say not till half past three…’

  It was early for a teaparty – too soon after dinner, some had said – but it was necessary because the hall would need to be cleared afterwards and the chairs re-arranged ready for the evening concert. And whether the children had eaten a mid-day dinner or not, they all tucked in with gusto to the delectable treats on offer. The sandwiches and tiny sausage rolls, each one no more than a good mouthful, were soon demolished, and then it was time for the cakes to be handed round. Mouth-watering offerings, home-baked by the members of the Women’s Institute and the women of the St Bartholomew’s congregation: jam tarts; fairy cakes; iced buns decorated in white and blue, with a red cherry in the middle; chocolate clusters; and almond tarts and moist gingerbread for the children with a more sophisticated taste.

  Maisie, going round from table to table, handing out cakes – ‘Just one each at first’ – was viewing the scene with great interest. The grown-up helpers were pretty much the same, plus one or two new ones, as she remembered from her early days in Middlebeck. Mrs Muriel Hollins, with her co-workers – her minions, as they were often referred to – Mrs Jessie Campion and Mrs Ivy Spooner were very much in evidence. At the start of the war they had been stalwart members of the WVS, as well as the WI, whose job it had been to organise the evacuation scheme in their town. They appeared very little different now, some six years later. Mrs Hollins was just a shade plumper, maybe, and certainly a shade bossier; although she was jovial today, rather than her usual bossy self, determined that the children should have a whale of a time.

  ‘Now then, tuck in and enjoy yourselves, boys and girls,’ she boomed at them. ‘Isn’t this fun? And how smart you all look today. I can see a lot of mothers have been busy on their sewing machines.’ Suddenly, she burst into song, to the amusement of many of the children who started to giggle behind their hands.

  ‘Red, white and blue; what does it mean to you?

  Surely you’re proud; shout it aloud, Britons awake…’

  But her rich contralto voice was really quite a joy to listen to. Maisie knew that Muriel Hollins, also, would be singing a solo at the concert that evening.

  There was, indeed, an abundance of red, white and blue in the church hall, not only in the Union Jacks and the bunting and streamers strung across the room, but in the clothes of all the children and a goodly number of the adults. Maisie knew that her mother’s draper’s shop had run out of the special red, white and blue ribbon which they had ordered for the occasion. It now adorned the heads of the girls, both the big and the little ones, setting off all kinds of hairstyles: plaits and pony tails, bobbing ringlets and straight short hair finished off with a fringe.

  There had been a run, as well, on the red-and-white, and blue-and-white gingham that Lily had in stock. The majority of the smaller girls wore gingham dresses, and there were several boys, too, wearing shirts of the same material. Others wore white shirts, many with red or blue bow ties.

  The grown-ups, also, had risen to the occasion. The WVS ladies were not dressed in their usual green today, which they had proudly worn when occupied on their wartime duties. It would have been too hot for such clothing; besides, the war was over and it was time now for a bit of frivolity. Mrs Hollins wore red, not really a good choice for such a florid-faced lady, although it could be said that her dress matched her complexion. Maisie had never seen her so excited. Mrs Spooner wore a mid-blue dress with a white lace collar and a pretty white lace-edged apron; sensible attire for a sensible lady; and Mrs Campion looked like a stick of rock in vertical red, white and blue stripes.

  Miss Amelia Thomson, the spinster lady who lived in the house across the green, opposite to the Rectory, was more soberly clad, as one might have expected. Her ankle-length dress was of navy-blue crêpe de Chine with tiny white spots, but she had actually trimmed it with an artificial red rose pinned discreetly to one side. The woman had mellowed considerably over the long years of the war, Maisie thought to herself, remembering the forbidding person whom she and Audrey had met on their first day in Middlebeck.

  ‘Maisie, Maisie…’ shouted a little piping voice, near to her elbow. ‘Cake for me…please,’ he added, as he knew he should. It was Johnny Fairchild, bouncing up and down with excitement, but being kept in check, more or less, by his adoptive brother, Timothy, who was sitting next to him. A couple of Tim’s friends seemed to be finding the child highly amusing; and Johnny, knowing he had a captive audience, was acting up for all he was worth. He was normally a very well-behaved little boy. It didn’t help, though, that Maisie’s mischievous brother, Jimmy, was also at the same table.

  ‘Yes, Johnny; which cake would you like?’ asked Maisie.

  ‘That ’un,’ said
Johnny, laughing and pointing to an iced bun with a cherry on the top.

  ‘You mean, that one…please,’ said Maisie, frowning a little at him. ‘Say it properly, Johnny.’

  ‘Please can I have that cake, Maisie?’ he asked, more quietly, with a twinkle in his blue eyes, the legacy of both his mother and his father. Her heart leapt with a surge of affection for him. How like his mother he was with his shock of auburn curls and his winning smile; but you could see Luke there, too, in his finely drawn features. He would be a handsome lad when he grew up.

  The rector was still a handsome man. Maisie could see him now, out of the corner of her eye, standing at the side of the room and smiling indulgently at his son, but not wanting to interfere. He would know it was unlikely that Johnny would get too much out of control. She gave him a quick meaningful grin and turned back to his son.

  ‘That’s better, Johnny. Take the paper case off the bun… That’s right. And you, Jimmy…’ She frowned at her brother. ‘Don’t encourage him to be silly. Now, think on! Be a good boy.’

  ‘What, me? I’m always good!’ replied Jimmy, to guffaws of laughter from the rest of the table.

  ‘Shh…’ she admonished them. ‘Mrs Hollins and Mrs Campion are coming round to see who wants some jelly and trifle. They won’t give it to silly boys and girls.’

  Sure enough, the two women, Muriel Hollins in the lead bearing the trifle dish, and her second-in-command, Jessie Campion, following behind with the dish of jelly, were already doing the rounds. The lads fell quiet. Some of them had been in Mrs Hollins’s Sunday school class and knew her as something of a dragon.

  Audrey appeared at Maisie’s side with a large jug. ‘Now, boys; who’s ready for some more orange squash?’ she asked.

  ‘Me, me, me!’ shouted Johnny, bouncing three times on his chair. Audrey scowled at him in a pseudo-stern manner, and he added, angelically, ‘I mean…can I have some, please, Audrey?’

  She ruffled his ginger curls fondly before half filling his cup. ‘Good boy, Johnny. Just try and calm down, eh? If you get too excited Mummy might not let you stay up for the concert tonight.’ Johnny would be there, though, as she well knew, as there would be nobody left in the Rectory to look after him.

  She poured the squash into the other cups that the boys were holding out, then put the jug down. ‘Do you know what this reminds me of?’ she said to Maisie. ‘All the kiddies sitting round the tables…’

  Maisie nodded. ‘I can guess what you’re thinking about. The day we arrived in Middlebeck, eh? When we were poor homeless little evacuees…’ She gave a mock sniff of despair. ‘Oh dear, oh dear… But it all turned out OK, didn’t it?’

  ‘I know it’s not just the same, not really,’ Audrey went on. ‘We sat at long trestle tables, if I remember rightly…’

  ‘And we weren’t even here, were we?’ said Maisie. ‘We were in the Village Institute, not the church hall.’

  ‘Goodness, so we were. I’d forgotten that…’

  ‘And it was a sad time, wasn’t it, all of us feeling lost and bewildered, and wondering where we’d end up? And today’s a happy occasion.’

  ‘Yes…’ Audrey nodded thoughtfully. ‘It brings back memories, though, seeing the same people that were there then; Mrs Hollins and Mrs Campion…and Miss Thomson.’ She smiled reminiscently, shaking her head. ‘I was frightened to death of her at first, but really she was just a prim and proper old lady who wasn’t used to children. She’s quite nice to us all now, isn’t she?’

  Maisie nodded, recalling that Audrey had spent a not very happy couple of months staying at Miss Thomson’s house across the green, until circumstances had changed and she had been moved to the Rectory to be with Maisie.

  ‘And I’ll never forget how you took care of me that first day, Maisie,’ Audrey continued. ‘I was a real misery, wasn’t I, weeping and wailing and making a fuss?’

  ‘You were homesick,’ said Maisie, ‘that’s all. None of us had ever been away from home before, without our parents. But as for me…well, it was more of an adventure, really.’ And a happy release, she recalled, from Sidney Bragg, her stepfather, and his loutish son, Percy.

  ‘Then we met Doris,’ said Audrey. ‘She was kind to us, wasn’t she?’

  ‘That was the next day at Sunday school,’ said Maisie, ‘when we were all put into Mrs Spooner’s class… And there were four of us at first,’ she added in a low voice, glancing towards Timothy.

  ‘I know; I hadn’t forgotten,’ said Audrey. ‘That’s why today is a little bit sad, as well as happy.’

  Both girls were remembering Ivy Clegg, Tim’s sister; the two Clegg children had been amongst several evacuees from Hull. The four girls – Maisie, Audrey and Ivy, the evacuees, and Doris had formed a close foursome. Then, that first Christmas of the war, Ivy and Tim’s mother had taken her children back to Hull. It had been the time of the ‘phoney war’, but all too soon the bombing raids had started on the major cities. Ivy had been killed, along with her mother and father, and Timothy, injured, but the only one of the family to escape death, had been brought back to Middlebeck, where he had been fostered and then adopted by the rector and his wife.

  Maisie smiled consolingly at her friend. ‘Cheer up, eh? Tim’s happy enough now, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, and so am I,’ replied Audrey. ‘You know I am. But memories are precious, too, aren’t they, Maisie? We can never forget…’

  Audrey moved away to the next table with her jug of orange squash, and Mrs Hollins and her partner arrived to dish out the trifle.

  ‘Just jelly for Johnny, and for you, too, Jimmy,’ said Maisie in a motherly way. Lily, busy working in the shop, was not there to see to Jimmy. ‘We don’t want you being sick and missing the concert.’ The same applied, of course, to the rest of the children, but they were not her immediate concern. To her surprise both boys nodded in agreement.

  ‘I’m so full I could burst,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Me too!’ piped Johnny. ‘I could burst, I could burst…’

  ‘Well, we mustn’t have that,’ said Mrs Hollins, laughing. ‘What a mess it would make…’

  The dishes were soon scraped clean, and whilst the tables were being cleared and an army of ladies prepared themselves for the mammoth task of washing up, Mrs Hollins, a veritable Jack of all trades, seated herself at the piano.

  ‘Come along, boys and girls,’ she shouted. ‘Pull up your chairs and we’ll have a sing-song…’

  And soon the roof of St Bartholomew’s church hall was almost raised from its rafters by the strains of, ‘Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run…’

  Chapter Two

  The stage in St Bartholomew’s church hall was used only rarely for concerts. If there were meetings of some importance then the rector and his spokesmen from the church council might sit up there, the better to command the attention of the audience. And during the recent elections the Parliamentary candidates from all three of the main parties – Conservative, Labour and Liberal – had used the stage as a rostrum. They had found themselves, however, addressing gatherings which could be described as ‘only fair to middling’. It had been regarded as a foregone conclusion that the Conservative candidate, a businessman from Leeds who had held the seat for years, would be returned once again. And so he was, but with a vastly reduced majority. And countless other seats, in all parts of the country, had been lost to the victorious Labour party.

  ‘Poor old Winston!’ was the cry on the lips of many people. ‘And after all he’s done for our country. What a shame…’ But politics were not openly discussed. What went on between the voter and the ballot box was strictly confidential. There would have been many more surprises if the folk of Middlebeck could have seen the crosses on the voting papers. As well as the ‘Poor old Winnie’ brigade, there were countless others who were thinking, if not saying outright, ‘It’s time for a change…well, maybe next time.’

  But on this day politics was forgotten as the stage was being prepared for its proper purpose, that
of putting on an entertainment. The red velvet curtains were somewhat faded and not used to a great deal of opening and closing – they must have been there since the first war, many folk remarked – but after a slight adjustment to the pulleys and runners they were soon in working order again. There were even a couple of spotlights which were rigged up for the infrequent concerts by able men from the church congregation.

  There were two small cloakrooms to the right and left of the stage which served adequately as dressing rooms, one for the men and boys and the other for the women and girls. It was a tight squeeze in the women’s room, but everyone was in good humour and the feeling of excitement and anticipation was palpable.

  ‘You look lovely, Maisie,’ said Audrey, with not a trace of envy. ‘It’s a real glamorous dress, just like a film star’s.’

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Maisie. ‘You don’t think it’s too…well, daring, like? A bit too low at the front?’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t. I thought it might be when you described it, but it’s just right. It’s a gorgeous colour, and that coral lipstick you’re wearing matches it exactly.’

  Maisie rubbed her lips together a little self consciously. ‘You don’t think it’s too bright? It was Mum’s idea, actually. She never really liked me wearing it before, but she said with me being on the stage it would give me a bit more colour.’ She did not need any artificial colour on her cheeks, however, as the excitement, tinged with nervousness, that she was feeling had heightened them to a rosy glow.

  ‘I’m dead nervous,’ she said, clutching at her stomach. ‘Talk about butterflies; it feels more like baby elephants doing a dance in my tummy! But at least I’m getting my solo over with quite early in the programme. I wouldn’t have wanted to wait till the second half.’

  ‘Good luck, anyway,’ said Audrey. ‘Oh no; you’re not supposed to say that, are you, when you’re going on the stage? You’re supposed to say “Break a leg”, aren’t you? But I think that sounds silly. Anyway, I know you’ll be just great.’