The Evacuee Christmas

by Katie King

  ‘Peggy, I can’t stay ’ere as I’ve got my papers,’ Bill said as he sat on the other side of the kitchen table to her, ‘an’ I think you know that’s true for you too, as it’s likely that round ’ere it’ll all be bombed to smithereens an’ back.’

  Peggy’s breath juddered. Bill was right, but his blunt words rattled her, in part as she immediately thought of what Barbara and Ted might be going to have to face.

  Bill’s words were simple, but these were such big things he was saying. Of course she knew that she had a treasured new life growing inside – made all the more precious by the long time that she and Bill had had to wait for such a wondrous thing to occur – and so when push came to shove she would do what was best for their much-longed-for baby. And now that Bill had voiced his concerns about how dangerous London was very likely to be, she didn’t want him to worry about her and the baby when he would have quite enough to fret about just looking out for himself while he was away fighting.

  She would go, of course she would.

  But she wasn’t happy about it. She had never spent time away from Bermondsey before; it was a modest area, but it was home.

  In terms of what needed to be done in order for her to go, it wasn’t too bad. Peggy and Bill rented their house and it had been let to them along with the furniture they used. They didn’t have many possessions and very few clothes, and so Peggy knew that with Bill away she could easily make use of Barbara’s offer of storage space in the eaves of her and Ted’s roof, which was reached through a small trapdoor on their tiny landing, for Peggy to put their spare clothes and some of their wedding present crockery and so forth, if she did decide to be evacuated herself.

  Peggy was sure that if she supervised the packing then Ted would actually do it for her, as she got so tired these days she couldn’t face the idea of putting things in tea crates (of which Ted could get a ready supply at the docks) herself, and then Ted would borrow a handcart to lug everything over to his so that it could be safely stowed away.

  ‘Go,’ Bill urged once more, cutting across her thoughts. ‘Go and stay somewhere that’s safer – you’ll be doing it for our baby, remember.’

  Peggy understood what he was saying, but she could feel the ties of community entwined around her very tightly, and so she and Bill had to talk long into the night before she could find any sense of peace, and it was only after he had held her snugly for an hour once they had gone to bed that she was able properly to rest.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning at just gone seven Peggy kissed Bill long and hard in the privacy of their home, and then, after he’d swung his heavy canvas kitbag up and onto his shoulder, she walked at his side to the church hall, where there was already a heaving group of raw recruits and their loved ones saying goodbye as uniformed officers and civilian officials walked around and about with clipboards and organised those leaving into groups designated for particular buses to Victoria station.

  During her pregnancy Peggy had discovered that tears were never far away, and this Friday morning was no exception. She also felt a bit dizzy after just a couple of minutes, standing on the edge of the melee alongside Bill, as there were so many people bustling this way and that that it made for the sort of constantly changing vista that led to travel sickness.

  Bill smiled at her and said, ‘Peg, don’t wait around. You ’ead on to your Barbara’s for a cup of tea. There’s no point you stayin’ ’ere just to wear yerself out. We said our goodbyes earlier and now your work is to look after our babbie. I see Reece Pinkly over there and so I’ll ’ave someone to look after me, don’t you fear, my love.’

  It was too much for Peggy, and she found herself violently sobbing on Bill’s shoulder.

  Just for a moment, she wished she wasn’t an expectant mother. It felt too much responsibility, and in any case, just what sort of world was it going to be that in a very few months she would be bringing a poor defenceless baby into? How would she be able to manage? What if the future were very dark for them all? There was no guarantee that the Germans wouldn’t end the war victorious, and then where would they all be?

  Bill held her close for a minute and then he took a step back and looked at her seriously. ‘Peggy, it’s time for you to go,’ he said softly but firmly, and he stepped forward to give her back a final rub. ‘I’d say I’ll write, but you know that’s not my strong point… Still, I’ll do my best, Peg.’

  With great reluctance Peggy edged away from him, not daring to look back as she knew that if she did, she wouldn’t be able to let him leave.

  Peggy made her way slowly out of the church hall and crossed the street to stand with some other wives as they gathered on the pavement outside the meeting point.

  She was unable to say for certain if she had managed to grab a final glimpse of Bill as she craned her head this way and that to look through the open door to the church hall, trying to pick him out from the constantly moving mass of people. Unfortunately the men all looked similar in their dark wool suits and Homburg hats (most of them having dressed in their best clothes to go), while more and more wives and children were now cramming the pavements around her, squeezing close, and suddenly Peggy felt nauseous and unbearably oppressed.

  She staggered slightly for the first few steps as she headed in the direction of her sister’s house but then she felt calmer and a little more certain of herself as she moved along the pavement.

  There was a thrumming engine noise behind her, and a horn blasted out as a gaily painted charabanc that looked so hideously at odds with Peggy’s dark mood began to inch by.

  With a whump of her heart, Peggy saw Bill standing up in front of his seat, with his face pressed sideways to the narrow sliding bit at the top of the window, and he was waving frantically at his wife. Peggy could see the shadow of Reece Pinkly alongside.

  ‘Peggy Delbert, I love you!’ was a shout Peggy thought she heard above the din as now some wives and kiddies were pushing past her to run right beside the moving vehicle, some even banging the charabanc’s sides as it edged its way through the grimy street.

  She hoped she had caught Bill’s words – he clearly had been saying something to her – but she couldn’t prevent a slither of concern that perhaps some little mite would take a fall as he or she ran beside the bus, slipping to a heinous end under the rear wheels, and so she felt thoroughly discombobulated, quite done in with her undulating feelings. Bill’s declaration of what she hoped was love now felt tainted somehow by the worry of the children running beside the large vehicle.

  ‘Bill, I’ll look after our baby, I will, I will,’ she shouted back, her hands either side of her mouth in an attempt to make her voice as loud as possible. She hoped against hope that her husband could feel the strength and resolution in her cry, even though she knew he was already out of earshot.

  She hoped also that he knew she was feeling the pain of his absence almost as sharply as if she had lost one of her own limbs. She had married him for better or for worse, and they had had the ‘for worse’ for too long – she was now determined on the ‘for better’.

  Evacuation simply had to be for the better. Didn’t it?

  Chapter Five

  ‘Yer better give Barbara ten minutes on ’er own with our Jessie and Connie,’ advised Ted, when he ran into Peggy as she was trudging towards her sister’s house just a couple of minutes later. ‘We’ve jus’ told ’em they’re to be evacuated on Monday mornin’ along with the rest of their school an’ it didn’t go down well.’

  Peggy couldn’t fail but notice how deep were etched the lines on the face of her brother-in-law all of a sudden. He was only in his early thirties, but just at that moment, as he stood half in a weak shaft of early-morning sunlight and half in heavy shadow, she could see exactly how Ted would look at age sixty. Then she hoped that he would make it to such advancing years, and not be cut down in his prime as many people would inevitably be during the war.

  ‘How did they take it, the poor little mites?’ she aske
d, swallowing her sad feelings down and trying to concentrate instead on Connie and Jessie. ‘I really feel for them as they’ll hate being apart from you and Barbara. And I’ve promised my Bill that I’m going to go out of London too. I don’t really want to, but if I stay and something happens to the baby, then I’ll never forgive myself, and he won’t either.’

  Ted nodded to show his approval of Peggy’s decision, and then he confessed that it had been very hard for him and Barbara to find the right words to break the news of the forthcoming evacuation to the children.

  They had found it a difficult line to tread, he explained, as they wanted to make it sound as positive an experience as possible for Jessie and Connie, without there being any option for them not to go, but with it all being couched in a manner that wouldn’t make the children worry too much once they had gone to their billets about Ted and Barbara remaining in London to face whatever might be going to happen.

  ‘Connie seemed the most taken aback, which were a shock, but that could be because we’re more used to seeing Jessie lookin’ bothered an’ so we didn’t really notice it so much on ’im. Still, it were a few minutes I don’t care to repeat any time soon, and Barbara were lookin’ right tearful by the time I ’ad to go to work and so she’ll be glad to ’ave you there, I’m sure,’ Ted confided to his sister-in-law.

  Peggy went to touch Ted on the arm in comfort, but then thought better of it. He looked too tightly wound for such an easy platitude.

  She contented herself instead by saying she was sure that he and Barbara were doing the best thing and that they would have broken the news of evacuation to the children in exactly the right way.

  Nearly everyone, she’d heard, was going to evacuate their children out of London and so it wouldn’t be much fun for those that didn’t go, she added, as they wouldn’t have any playmates, while schooling would be a problem, too as the government was going to try and make sure that all state schooling was taken out of the city.

  Peggy thought she saw the glint of a tear in the corner of one of Ted’s eyes as she spoke, but then he cleared his throat sharply as he averted his head, and added quickly that he had to go or else his pay would be docked, and with that he walked away curtly before she could say anything else or bid him farewell.

  Peggy remained where she was standing, wondering if Barbara had had long enough on her own with the children, or if she could go and call on her now. She felt she had been on her feet for quite some time already that morning and over the last few days she had grown a bit too large not to be having regular sit-downs.

  Then she saw Susanne Pinkly hurrying in her direction, with a cheery sounding, ‘Peggy, I need to talk to you but I’m late for school – can you walk over to St Mark’s with me? I was going to come and see you at lunchtime, but this will save me an errand if you can spare me a couple of minutes now?’

  Peggy and Susanne Pinkly were good friends, having been at school together from the age of five, and later in the same intake at teacher’s training college before they finally simultaneously landed jobs at the local primary school where they had once been willing pupils.

  They’d also spent an inordinate amount of time during their teenage years discussing the merits of various local lads and how they imagined their first kiss would be. Susanne was fun to be with, and was never short of admirers who were drawn to her open face and joyful laugh. Peggy had often envied Susanne her bubbly nature that had the men flocking, as Peggy was naturally more serious and introverted, and so when Bill had made it clear he thought her a bit of all right, it was a huge relief as she had been fast coming to the conclusion that the opposite sex were hard to attract.

  Although some schools wouldn’t let married teachers work, fortunately this hadn’t been the case at St Mark’s Primary School. While Susanne was still an old maid, being positively spinsterish now at thirty-one, Peggy had married Bill just a term into her first job without much thought as to what this might mean for her in the working world. Luckily St Mark’s didn’t have a hard and fast policy as regards making married female employees give up work, as some schools did, which Peggy found herself very pleased about, and increasingly so when she didn’t become pregnant for such a long time. She couldn’t have borne being stuck at home on her own and without anything to do – she would have felt such a failure, she knew.

  However, when she fell at last with the baby, Peggy had had to stop working at the end of the summer term as her nausea had got so bad, and since then she very much missed her lively pupils and the joshing camaraderie of the staffroom. Bill spent long hours at the bus depot, and he was rather fond of a tipple with the lads on a Friday and a Saturday night if he wasn’t rostered on the weekend shifts. Barbara’s time was taken every weekday by her job at the haberdashery, and so quite often the days felt to Peggy as if they were dragging by. She discovered all too quickly that there was only so much layette knitting an expectant mother could enjoy doing.

  It was still up in the air whether Peggy would ever be able to return to work following the birth of the baby, as most employers didn’t want a mother as an employee, and Peggy knew that if in time she did want to return to her classroom – after the war with Germany was over, of course – then she would have to make a special plea to the local education authority that she be allowed to go back to work.

  Before that could happen, she and Bill would have to decide between themselves that she should resume her job, and then they would need to sort out somebody to look after the baby during the day, which might not be so easy to do.

  Bill didn’t earn much as a bus driver (his route was the busy number 12 between Peckham and Oxford Circus), and aside from the fact that Peggy missed her pupils, and she knew she had been a good teacher, she suspected too that one day she and Bill might well feel very happy if she could start to add once again to the family pot by bringing in a second wage.

  Peggy turned around and, linking arms with her friend, she walked along with Susanne, who wanted to see if Peggy was going to evacuate herself.

  When Peggy nodded, Susanne cried perhaps a trifle too gaily, ‘Music to my ears! I’m having to stay behind to work at the bakery, as you know Ma’s been taken poorly and Reece is leaving today with your Bill. But if you’re choosing to be evacuated and are planning on going on Monday as most people round here seem to be, then St Mark’s needs another responsible adult to help escort the children to wherever they are being sent to, and I couldn’t help but think of you! So far there’s Miss Crabbe and old Mr Hegarty to look after them – well, Mr Jones is going too, but he won’t want to be bothered with the nitty-gritty, as it were, and in any case, he’s coming back just about the next day. One-Eye Braxton will be there and the kiddies run rings round him – and so I thought you would be the perfect person to go and keep an eye on both pupils and teachers.’

  There was definitely a logic to this despite the chirpy tone of Susanne’s words, Peggy could see, as she was familiar with the children and they with her, and she knew the quite often crotchety Miss Crabbe (‘Crabbe by name, and Crabby by nature’ was Peggy and Susanne’s private joke about her) and the ancient Mr Hegarty (who was increasingly doddery these days after teaching for over forty years) would make for dour overseers for the evacuation journey for the children, and with headmaster Mr Jones planning on not sticking around…

  And if Peggy went with the children of St Mark’s, then it would probably mean that she would end up being billeted near where Jessie and Connie would be, and this would be reassuring for Barbara and Ted; and for herself too, it had to be said.

  They’d reached the school gates, and Susanne nodded and then smiled encouragement at Peggy, obviously willing her to say yes.

  ‘Let me think about it overnight, and I’ll let you know first thing in the morning as I’m not quite certain about the other options for the evacuation of expectant mothers,’ Peggy said, trying to look resigned and as if she shouldn’t be taken for granted, but failing to keep the corners of her mouth from tur
ning up into the tiniest of smiles.

  Then Peggy caught Susanne looking pointedly at her expanded girth so she added, ‘I think it’s probably fine for me to come with your lot, but I just want to consider it for a while as I don’t want to promise you anything I can’t actually do.’

  Susanne was already nipping across the playground towards the steps up to the girls’ entrance as she called over her shoulder, ‘Honestly, Peggy, it’s just to make sure they don’t get up to too much mischief on the train – and that’s just the teachers! And Mrs Ayres will be there too, and Mr Braxton, and so you won’t be too heavily outnumbered by the kiddies.’

  This latest comment wasn’t necessarily as hugely reassuring to Peggy as Susanne probably meant it to be, because although as sweet-natured a widow as Mrs Ayres undoubtedly was, she was a gentle soul, and even the youngest children could boss her around with absolutely no trouble, while Mr Braxton, who had had such a severe facial injury in the Great War that meant he’d lost an eye and part of a cheekbone, and who now wore a not very convincing prosthetic contraption that attached to his spectacles, also had problems in keeping the children in line, in large part as they didn’t really like looking directly at him.

  Peggy sighed. She could already imagine how this was very probably going to work out for her.

  Several minutes later, as Peggy made her way at long last over to Barbara’s, Jessie and Connie were walking along the street to school in the opposite direction, and they were so deep in conversation that they didn’t notice their auntie until they were almost level with her.

  Peggy thought they both looked wan and anxious – the news of leaving their mother and father to head for pastures new with their classmates had obviously hit them hard.

  ‘Hello, you two. You’d better look sharp or else you’re going to be late,’ she said. ‘But first, I’ll tell you a secret. If it helps cheer you up, I think I might be coming on the train with you and your fellow school pupils on Monday. Won’t that be fun?’