The Evacuee Christmas

by Katie King

  It was Connie, though, who was the most excited by her room. It was tiny, hardly bigger than her bed.

  ‘You’re in ’ere, Connie, and you can do wi’ it just what you want. I don’t much ’old with tidying and t’like, and so it’s up to you if you keep it organised or not,’ Mabel told her.

  ‘Really?’ Connie breathed, her eyes shining. Her mother would never say this. How exciting!

  ‘Really,’ Mabel smiled back at Connie.

  With that there was the unmistakable sound of a boy charging up the stairs, and a loudly shouted, ‘’Ow do?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Roger, looking slightly surprised and almost as if he had forgotten for the minute that he had a son. ‘Meet our Tommy. Always in one scrape or another.’

  Tommy was a nice-looking lad, thought Peggy, strong and open-faced.

  Ignoring Connie, Tommy went up to Jessie and gave him a playful push on the shoulder. ‘London, eh?’

  ‘Um, yes,’ Jessie mumbled.

  ‘’Appen so,’ Tommy replied. Peggy and Connie weren’t sure what Tommy meant, and neither was Jessie. But Tommy went on, ‘What’s yer name?’

  ‘Jessie.’

  ‘Get much stick fer that, eh?’

  ‘No!’ Jessie’s voice was defiant and strong, and Connie felt proud of him.

  Tommy appraised Jessie with an expression that said he didn’t believe him for a moment.

  Connie wasn’t sure, but to her mind there seemed something calculating in the manner in which Tommy then said once more, ‘’Appen!’

  Jessie detected a distinct quaver of mischief in Tommy’s voice. Tommy rather liked the fact he was making an impression, thought Jessie.

  Roger chose that moment to ask if anyone liked ginger beer, and the next time either of the twins glanced at Tommy he seemed the model of an angelic schoolboy.

  The minute the children had had their ginger beer, which was homemade and also delicious, Tommy took Jessie back to the room they were sharing.

  There were bunk beds, and Tommy had said they must toss a coin, and the winner could choose which bunk they wanted.

  This proved to be more complicated an experience than Jessie had bargained for as he lost the first throw, to which Tommy said he’d meant best of three, and then when Jessie won those two throws, as Tommy had appeared to be so obviously trying to make him feel at home, Jessie had then to try to gauge which bunk Tommy really wanted to sleep on in order that he could choose the other one.

  ‘I’ve never slept in a bunk before, and so I’d better have the bottom one so that I don’t forget where I am and roll out of the top one on top of you,’ Jessie suggested tentatively, and was rewarded with such a genuine smile back that he knew he’d made the right choice, even though really he had wanted to bag the top bunk.

  ‘We need ’ouse rules,’ said Tommy. ‘No smelly fartin’ in t’bedroom, all worn socks left outside t’room and only pees done in t’jerry.’

  Jessie had no idea what a jerry was, but then Tommy waggled his foot, and when Jessie looked down he saw that Tommy was indicating a large chamber pot with a gilded handle.

  ‘And no burpin’ either,’ said Jessie, feeling he had to add his own rule, even though it was a pretty feeble one, otherwise if he kept quiet at this juncture he felt that he would always be the underdog as far as Tommy was concerned. And he thought he might have to come up with a further rule as to how the smell, or not, of a fart could be denoted before it arrived, although he decided to ponder more on the intricacies of that later.

  There was something he had to do first to establish his credentials. And with that Jessie let out a huge burp – he was very good at burping, but he thought this might be quite the loudest one he had ever done, and so he felt rather proud – and of course then what could Tommy do but burp back as loud as he could in reply (it wasn’t as loud, but it had a pleasing timbre to it all the same, plus it rang out for a satisfyingly long time), and then Jessie did another one that sounded for all the world like a dog barking.

  There was the sound of a tremendous, vibrating burp from the other side of the door, and then they heard Roger call cheerfully, ‘Beat that, boys!’ as he made his way downstairs.

  The boys looked at each other wide-eyed for an instant and then began to laugh, with Tommy chucking a pillow softly at Jessie.

  As the children explored their bedrooms, Peggy said she’d be back in a little while and they could all sit down to write their letters to Barbara and Ted.

  ‘I’ll pop them into the post box for you – we have one just outside our gate, handily. They’ll go first thing in the morning,’ said Roger.

  Then Mabel lifted up Peggy’s suitcase, and escorted Peggy over to where she would be sleeping. This turned out to be across the yard and above the stables, which were in the large building to the side of Tall Trees that the evacuees had noticed when they first arrived.

  These days the stables were more likely to be garages, Peggy supposed as she laboriously climbed a wooden staircase that had been constructed externally to the building.

  Before they got to the top of the stairs, a pretty girl with her hair in a gaily coloured crocheted snood stuck her head out of the door.

  ‘I’m Gracie,’ she said with a wide grin, ‘an’ I were told I migh’ ’ave someone in wi’ me. Sleepin’ in my room is like sleeping wi’ a badger, my ma says, I snore so much, so I’s feels sorry fer you already!’

  Peggy was exhausted, but there was something cheerful and energetic to Gracie that was most appealing and impossible not to respond to.

  She laughed. ‘Peggy,’ she said, extending her hand. ‘I’m deaf to badgers.’

  ‘Nice lipstick,’ said Gracie in reply, as she caught Peggy’s hand and then drew her into the room, as Mabel turned away to clatter down the stairs to let them get acquainted. ‘Good brows too.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Dear Mother and Father,

  I hope you are well. We are to stay at a vickerage. The vicar is called Revv Braithwaite, but he says we’re to call him Roger, and his wife Maud, I think he said. They have a boy called Tommy and I am to share his room. Connie has lucked out as she has her own room! Tommy says he has a big box of soldiers – all from the Napoleonic war – and so he says he might let me play with them when he is playing with them. But he will have to get to know me first.

  Your affectionate son,

  Jessie Ross

  Dear parints,

  I got my room and I dont have to share as it is all to my own. I lik it. Our tea waz not nice tho. Well some of it waz but we had kabbage. They have a Cat, but it won’t come in.

  Connie

  11th September 1939

  Dear Barbara and Ted,

  Well, we’re here, and all I can say is that it took a long, long day and masses of patience to get here. All of the St Mark’s children were good, with only one travel-sick, and fortunately Miss Crabbe was the ‘lucky’ person who had to sort that out, and just to be sure it was her and not me, I made very certain I looked in a very deep doze!

  We have all found a billet with a Reverend Braithwaite, although he wants the children and me to call him Roger – he calls himself ‘progressive’, whatever that means (he said it in a way as if I should know; I didn’t!) – and his wife is Mabel, with a son called Tommy who’s the same age as your two.

  I’m to share above the stables with a young woman called Gracie, who is local and who has been there already for a couple of months. It’s much nicer than it sounds, and it’s where the lads used to live when there were horses below. Gracie tells me the Braithwaites are very nice, although without enough money as they are always doing Good Works. Gracie is quite happy to admit she is ‘a fallen woman’ – and then when I looked at her, I saw that she is also going to have a baby, just like me, only poor Gracie doesn’t have the benefit of a ring on her finger.

  I might have minded about sharing with someone like her once upon a time, but this evening I didn’t at all, as she was so friendly and full of beans. Sh
e’s only fifteen and her parents won’t have her in the house since she came down with the baby, and she’s lost her job at the farm where she was working while the father-to-be doesn’t want to know, so goodness knows what would be happening to her if Roger and Mabel hadn’t taken her in. Some of the women in his congregation complained about Gracie being at the rectory, she told me, but Roger’s next sermon had him booming out about those without sin casting the first stone, and that was enough to shut everyone up.

  Roger says if I want he can ask around to see if somebody else has a room for me, but to be honest I think I might rather like Gracie – she has a few rough edges and she’s a bit brazen and I bet she can argue like an old fishwife if she’s in the mood (although of course just yet we can’t make out at all what the other is saying!). But Gracie smiles a lot, and after a day’s travelling that counts for a lot, let me tell you. She was kind enough to go and get me some tea and toast, and then she went back over to the kitchen to fetch me a hot-water bottle as my back is achy – and so for now I’m happy enough, not least as it’s lovely being so close to Connie and Jessie, who seem happy enough with their billet.

  Very best wishes,

  Peggy

  PS and a special kiss for Fishy. There’s a large black and white cat here, a tom, called Nebuchadnezzar, or Bucky for short, but he has refused to take any notice of me!

  PPS I forgot to mention that, luxury, the Braithwaites have a telephone! Harrogate 4141 – I’m sure Mrs Truelove would let you telephone from hers if you pay her for the call, or else perhaps the Jolly would.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next morning Connie woke, quite literally it felt, with the lark, to judge by the cacophony of birdsong what sounded like only inches from her bed. She sat up and pulled aside a flimsy cotton curtain to glance out of the window under which her bed was placed, and she saw that there was a large garden outside.

  It needed some work doing in it as even Connie, who had never been in a house that had a garden big enough to have a lawn as this one did, could tell that the grass badly needed mowing and something doing in the flower beds (was it weeding or cutting or hoeing? Connie wasn’t sure), as quite a lot of the plants looked to have flowered and gone past their best, and there were things sprouting she thought looked possibly like weeds, if she had any idea of what a weed really did look like. Across the garden there were bushes and trees dotted about in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, and from these the birdsong was hailing forth. And then Connie spied a plank of wood, with ropes suspending it from a low branch in one of the trees – it was a swing! Another tree looked heavy with fruit, and Connie sighed as they were apples that looked as juicy and red as the one Snow White had eaten.

  She began to look forward to exploring the garden and she hoped that she and Jessie would be allowed to play on the swing.

  If she listened hard, she could hear hens doing chickeny things in a pen that she could see at the far end of the garden, and as she knelt up to get a better view, a conker-coloured rooster with a greeny-black cascade of tail feathers jumped up on top of the chicken house and belted out to the world at large a huge cock-a-doodle-do.

  Connie peered to either side of the garden, but couldn’t see any other houses. How odd, she thought, as Harrogate had looked like it was most definitely a bustling town as the train pulled in last night, but maybe she was mistaken as it had been nearly dark.

  There were no sounds from elsewhere inside the house and so Connie supposed it wasn’t yet time to get up and she lay back down in bed, and stared around the room she’d been given.

  It wasn’t very much larger than the bed she was in, and the wallpaper on the wall looked old-fashioned and faded. But to Connie it was as grand as any a bedroom in the land. It was hers, and hers alone, and that’s what made it special.

  She’d always thought she’d never have her own room, as she would share with Jessie, and would probably only leave number five Jubilee Street in order to get married, after which she’d presumably be sharing a bedroom with her husband.

  Connie thought back to when Mabel had told her that the little bedroom was hers to do with as she wished, and she could hardly believe her ears. She could put her clothes away in whatever way she wanted in the drawers of the tiny wooden bedside table (or not at all, if that was what she wanted, Mabel had added with a wink in Connie’s direction), and nobody would enter her room without knocking first. She could even pin some drawings up on the walls if she wanted.

  Connie hadn’t known what to say, and so she hoped now she hadn’t seemed ungrateful when Mabel was obviously trying to be kind. It was more that she had been so overwhelmed at the prospect of her very own room that she feared she would burst into tears of excitement if she opened her mouth to say anything, and so she had just stared back at Mabel and hoped that somehow she knew how thrilled Connie felt.

  Connie longed to talk to Jessie, and to see his room. But she didn’t dare to go looking for him, not least as he was sharing with Tommy, and she felt peculiar at the thought of going into a strange boy’s bedroom.

  She’d been so thrilled at the prospect of her own room that she hadn’t paid too much attention to Tommy, who hadn’t been there when they had arrived, coming back an hour or so after them.

  Tommy looked okay, although possibly slightly on the sly side, Connie thought now as she tried to picture him. She had caught him appraising Jessie through half-closed eyes as he tilted his head back, and she hadn’t much liked that look. But only an instant later he’d looked much more open-faced and affable, and so Connie doubted what she had just seen.

  Certainly Tommy had seemed very friendly to Jessie, and the boys had talked happily for a long time about their collections of small toy soldiers.

  Connie realised she was desperate to spend a penny, but she didn’t think the house, which, although large and comfortable, was also distinctly on the shabby side, had an upstairs toilet, and so she put off going as long as she could, as the previous night she had been told to use a WC in an outhouse beside the kitchen door – meaning you had to walk outside and into the backyard – and she wasn’t sure she would be able to find her way there.

  Eventually she could wait no longer and so she stood up and went to put her shoes on, but when she leant down to tie her shoelaces she spied a huge Victorian china chamber pot with a cloth square with little weights in each corner draped over it that somebody had thoughtfully placed just under her bed, and it was with huge relief that she squatted over it, replacing the cloth square when she had finished and carefully sliding the chamber pot back to its spot under the bed.

  What a puzzle, Connie thought, as she snuggled back under the bedclothes again. The Braithwaites lived in a much larger and, from the outside, grander looking house than the Rosses did, and yet they didn’t seem nearly so house-proud as Barbara was. The previous evening Connie had seen quite a lot of dusting and tidying up that needed doing and that Barbara would never have gone to bed on, with dried mud from boots all around the inside of the front door and fire grates with ash and fallen soot in front of them; and as she’d noted already, the sanitation arrangements were more basic than she was used to.

  But there were simply masses and masses of books lying around in rickety bookcases or in haphazard piles on tables or on the floor, and Roger had quoted from both the Bible and Shakespeare last night, not that Jessie or Connie would have recognised this had Mabel not tipped them off with a comical waggle of her head and a mouthed ‘Bible’ or ‘Shakespeare’ in their direction as appropriate.

  And there was a piano and a trumpet and a fiddle that all looked as if they were used regularly at one end of the huge kitchen, and a massive pile of music and song scores piled on the piano, and with an abandon that Barbara would never have allowed them, she and Jessie had been allowed to eat as much supper as they could cram into their chops.

  Roger had explained to Connie and Jessie that Harrogate had made a lot of money in the past from nearby wool production, and also from Regenc
y and Victorian visitors coming to the town on special jaunts to take dips and drink the ‘efficacious’ spa waters, and that it was still a popular spa destination – well, at least until war had been declared.

  Jessie said to Connie on their way up the stairs to bed that before the week was out he was going to include the word ‘efficacious’ in one of his letters to their parents, to which Connie hissed back, ‘They’ll think you’ve gone soft in the head if you do.’ Then Jessie had to admit he didn’t know what it actually meant, to which Connie added that he shouldn’t worry as she doubted that their parents would either.

  Roger had also said something about the Yorkshire Dales (‘Very ’illy. And very wet,’ was Mabel’s commentary), the Pennines (‘Makes an ordinary ’ill look a ’illock’ – Mabel again) and the Pump Rooms (‘Very Jane Austen’ – yes, still Mabel, although the children had no idea what or who she was alluding to).

  By this time Jessie and Connie had cottoned on to the fact that Roger and Mabel saw themselves as something of a double act, although they quite often spoke across each other, or happily interrupted, which was something that Barbara and Ted would never do, as they would always politely let the other finish whatever it was that they were saying before they gave their answer or continued the conversation.

  Connie couldn’t understand a whole lot of what the Braithwaites were saying as she wasn’t used to the Yorkshire accent yet, but also she wasn’t used to people quoting playwrights in everyday conversation, and so it had all felt quite peculiar, which meant, by the time she had climbed into bed clutching her knitted panda, she was quite glad to have some time on her own to think about everything that had happened since they had all left London, a place which right now felt a very, very long way away indeed.