by Katie King
Your affectionate sister,
Peggy
The morning’s post was about to go and so reluctantly Peggy made herself stop writing. She had actually used up a whole three sheets of her Basildon Bond writing paper, even though she had made her hand as minuscule as it could possibly go while giving Barbara a fair chance of being able to unravel her script to work out what she had been saying, as she had never written such a long letter before. The slim box of writing paper and matching envelopes had been Barbara’s leaving-for-evacuation ‘proper present’ to Peggy (the Coty lipstick being more of a pick-me-up on a difficult day, so Barbara said), and Peggy wanted to eke out their use. But once she had started putting pen to paper she had found it extremely hard to stop, as she’d imagined Barbara sitting in front of her and consequently had found herself scribbling everything down that she would have said to her sister if they had been able to chat face to face.
Peggy folded the pages covered in her writing as tightly as she could, kissed them for good luck and then squeezed them into the envelope along with the children’s missives. She stared at the fat envelope after she had licked and stuck down the back, and then with a sigh, she tore off and moistened another stamp that she placed next to the one she had already put in the top right-hand corner of the address side, as she didn’t want Barbara or Ted to pay any excess in postage if she were mean with the stamps, and then she wrote the Tall Trees address on the reverse of the envelope under sender.
Chapter Twenty
After an early lunch (tinned sardines on toast) that day, Roger said he needed to clear the decks for the afternoon so that he could write his sermon for the following day, although he thought he would do something on tolerance and generosity, seeing as how many people had been evacuated to Harrogate.
Tommy said he had had an idea so that the house would be quiet for Roger to work in – he would take Jessie and Connie out to show them around Harrogate.
Roger seemed already to be lost in thought about his sermon, looking out of the window as if seeking divine inspiration and saying merely, ‘Good show, good show.’
Connie hadn’t said much to Tommy since she had been at Tall Trees, but now she began to chat to him about his life and what he liked to do. Once Roger has disappeared into his study, and Peggy and Mabel had gone upstairs to look at blankets, he boasted that Roger and Mabel allowed him to do whatever he wanted – which actually, Connie thought, from what she’d seen, was pretty much true – Tommy saying that it was great and really good, and he had lots of ‘schemes’ going.
Connie thought that he sounded as if he had read too many adventure stories with gangsters in them.
Jessie quite liked Tommy as they had had some fun games with the soldiers, but he thought Tommy was making the benign neglect on the part of his parents sound nicer than in fact Tommy found it.
Jessie had seen how Tommy’s eyes lit up if his parents wanted to spend some time with him, and he knew how troubled Tommy’s sleep was if Tommy had, say, wanted Roger to read the Dandy with him, and then a parishioner telephoned and took Roger away. But Jessie knew better than anybody how important ‘face’ was, and so he didn’t say anything about Tommy’s exaggeration of his happy life.
Still, the twins’ eyes grew round when, as they spent some time playing on the swing together, Tommy boasted further that some Harrogate children would do anything for a dare, and if Jessie and Connie proved worthy of the best top-secret dare, then he might let them know what the dare was.
Tommy’s voice dropped to a sinister whisper as he said it was highly illegal and that they could be sent to prison if they were caught. There might be someone there with a shotgun who would shoot at them, and so they would have to behave as spies would.
Stealth, secrecy, speed and success were to be their watchwords if they attempted the dare: the four S’s.
Even Connie was stunned into silence. This all sounded very serious, and not at all like a game.
Jessie was staring over to the chicken run, repetitively rubbing the cuff of the left arm of his flannel shirt in his right hand as if it were some sort of talisman that might bolster a feeling of safety within him. He looked as if there were just about nothing in the whole wide world he would rather do less than have anything to do with whatever it was that Tommy was speaking about.
‘You need to tell us more, Tommy,’ said Connie, ‘and it may well be the case that me and my brother will decide not to do it, whatever it is, if it really is as dangerous as you say.’
She didn’t want to say an outright no, as Tommy seemed as if he was trying to be chummy, but she didn’t want to drop herself and Jessie in it either, as Barbara and Ted had been very strict in their instructions that they weren’t to be caught doing anything naughty or that would give Peggy any trouble, especially as Peggy wasn’t feeling quite herself just at the moment.
In addition, Connie found herself unable to feel quite sure about Tommy, and this meant that she couldn’t decide if she and Jessie would be worse off or, on the other hand, better off if they agreed to go along with what he wanted.
The five days since they had met had only convinced Connie that she couldn’t quite work Tommy out, and this made her suspicious as she had always prided herself on her instinctive grasp of the type of person she was speaking to.
Connie had to acknowledge that she didn’t really know why she felt like this, as Tommy hadn’t actually done anything obvious to make her or Jessie put their guard up, and when the grown-ups were around at least he was the absolute model son and companion. He hadn’t been horrible to either of them in any way, and he seemed very willing to share his bedroom with Jessie, and even Jessie’s most loyal of supporters, as Connie was, doubted that Jessie would have been quite so magnanimous should the boot have been on the other foot, with Tommy having been forced to hunker down in Jessie’s own bedroom.
There was no doubt too that Tommy had a fun and charismatic side to him as well – the evening of the ‘On Ilkla Moor Baht ’At’ sing-along had shown them all that – and Connie could see that he had a wonderful singing voice and a good grasp of playing the piano. The way Tommy and Mabel had performed together for them showed what talent lay in the Braithwaite family.
These musical talents were both skills of which Connie was incredibly envious as unfortunately she had no aptitude for music or singing, although as she had shown all too clearly with her rendition of ‘Any Ol’ Iron’, this lack of talent never was enough to persuade her not to have a go.
Indeed, her inability to carry a tune had been proved categorically when she and Jessie had been taken to a West End movie house to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by their parents as a Christmas treat just before going back to school after the yule holidays at the start of the year.
It was the first time the children had been taken for an outing into the West End, and the children had both got ridiculously overexcited by the number of people milling about, the brightly lit shopfronts and the grandeur of the large cinema.
Connie had felt as if she were in a wonderful dream, and this was a feeling she wanted to continue for the family’s journey home. But unfortunately, after a bit too much loud and off-key ‘Hi Ho!, Hi Ho!’ing on Connie’s part on the top deck of the bus back from Leicester Square, the Ross family consensus had been that she would most definitely have failed the audition for being a singing dwarf.
Poor Connie had had to protest (not quite honestly) that she didn’t care a hoot, as if she were in the film she would have wanted to be Humbert the Huntsman instead, and if she couldn’t be he, then the role of the Magic Mirror would have done, as those were wonderful scenes.
Jessie said quickly he’d have liked to be the dwarf Happy, and then smiled broadly when nobody filled the short silence after he’d spoken by suggesting he be Bashful.
Ted claimed Doc as his alter ego, although Connie got quite shouty when she insisted that instead of the leader of the dwarfs, as Doc was, her father’s ideal casting would be as Grumpy,
causing Barbara to catch her daughter’s eye firmly and then hold a finger in front of her lips to suggest that Connie tone her penetrating voice down a notch as possibly not everyone on the upper deck of the bus was enjoying their conversation as much as Connie was.
Then Jessie giggled when he whispered ‘Dopey’ at Ted, who then pretended to cuff him, causing Jessie to giggle even more wildly.
Barbara declared herself Snow White, and nobody disputed this and so presumably they agreed with her, or else thought she was better suited at the nasty Queen but were too sensible to say.
Connie looked now with concentration over at Tommy. He appeared meek and helpful enough, but still, Connie thought she could detect a hint, a whiff of something else, a little niggle that was less bland and more conniving lurking beneath his innocent-seeming expression.
Her father had once said to her that ‘you can’t kid a kidder’, and for the first time Connie had a glimmer of understanding of what Ted had been driving at.
There was something about Tommy that did not quite add up, Connie was more and more convinced, even though she couldn’t for the moment identify what this ‘something’ was.
Tommy looked the part of an ordinary schoolboy admittedly, but she couldn’t ignore a relentless qualm that suggested he wasn’t exactly what or all he seemed. She supposed there seemed a neediness in him to be the centre of attention, and that this need sometimes got the better of him.
Connie thought about it a bit more, and then she realised that she could see this because it was a trait she recognised in herself, although it wasn’t something she was very proud of and so she tried to keep it more deeply hidden than Tommy did.
The best way for her to proceed would be to go along with what Tommy suggested, to see if he would reveal what he was really up to, she felt. And if it got too hairy – whatever it was that Tommy was suggesting – then she and Jessie had better make sure that they kept their options open and have a well-thought-through plan of retreat at the ready.
‘Maybe,’ said Connie now, as she stuck out a leg behind her, looking down as she scuffed the toe of her red sandal across the ground, deliberately (she hoped) putting up a show of reluctance.
If she gave in too easily to Tommy’s demands, then he might become suspicious of her, she suspected, and this may well have the result that they would start pussy-footing around each other as they each tried to gauge exactly what the other was up to, and that really wouldn’t help Connie get to the bottom of what made Tommy Braithwaite tick.
But if she pretended to take Tommy at face value, then perhaps in time his guard would drop and the real Tommy would be revealed.
Jessie was looking at his sister sharply with a quizzical look in his eyes, as clearly Connie’s tame response wasn’t the one he expected, and she had quickly to improvise by lifting her skirt to scratch very obviously her thigh just above her knee to make sure Tommy was looking at her and not Jessie as her brother’s surprised gaze was definitely too easy to read.
Jessie twigged – he was good like that, Connie knew – and as per usual immediately he backed her up by echoing faintly and in an equally deliberately reluctant manner, with his words characteristically fading out, ‘Um, yes, er, maybe. Later on. Or maybe tomorrow…’
‘We have church on Sundays, and this means that Saturday afternoons are perfect for what we can do,’ said Tommy, unable to prevent the tiniest note of dogged triumph creeping into his voice.
Tommy squared his shoulders and then spat into the palm of his hand. He rubbed them together, indicating with assertive nods at Connie and Jessie that told them that they should spit into their own hands as well.
They did so with only a little reluctance, after which Tommy indicated they should form a ring with each of them holding each other’s hands.
And then Tommy raised Connie and Jessie’s hands in his own, and they copied him so that they were all standing in a circle with their arms aloft as Tommy shouted, ‘The four S’s: Stealth, Secrecy, Speed and Success,’ and then a heartbeat later the three of them yelled as loudly as they could, and as one, ‘The four S’s: Stealth, Secrecy, Speed and Success.’
And then for a final time: ‘THE FOUR S’S. STEALTH, SECRECY, SPEED AND SUCCESS.’
It sounded terrifying. Exciting too. And for a moment, Jessie thought of a fifth S: SPECIAL. It wasn’t a feeling he was particularly used to, but he recognised it was a very potent sensation.
It turned out that Tommy’s idea of showing them around Harrogate seemed largely to do with pointing out things to do that grown-ups would classify as naughty.
There was ringing on doorbells and running away, calling out someone’s name if you saw them in the distance but then pretending it wasn’t you, trying to get an extra black jack from the sweet shop that you didn’t pay for, and so on.
Keen to ingratiate himself, Jessie told Tommy about a trick he had seen older boys do in Bermondsey, but had never done himself. It involved drilling a small hole into a sixpence or a shilling – it needed to be a big enough coin that people would take it seriously – and then tying a piece of thread to it. The coin would be left as bait on the pavement, but if anyone leant down to pick it up, the thread would be yanked by its hiding owner, making the coin dance away, to the shouted chorus of ‘Got you!’
‘Good idea,’ Tommy nodded approvingly. ‘I’ll get a shillin’ from tomorrow’s collectin’ plate, an’ I’m sure father’ll have summat in t’shed t’ make t’hole with.’
But although Tommy was sounding excited about the jape with the shilling, the truth of it was that as Jessie had been describing the trick with the coin, Tommy had been thinking of another ‘S’.
An ‘S’ that was much less savoury.
Scrumping.
And Tommy had a plan.
Chapter Twenty-one
Connie and Jessie were unhappy. Extraordinarily unhappy.
It was the third Saturday afternoon in a row that Tommy had made them go scrumping. If there was a word they now hated the sound of, it was scrumping.
Neither of the twins could see what all the fuss was about. It was simply a field of apple trees, and Tommy would make them all climb over a very high wall.
Privately, Jessie thought it was more to do with Tommy making them bend to his will than it being anything about what they were actually doing as such, but that didn’t make it any less horrid an experience for him and his sister.
The first time it had been enough that the three of them stole some apples from the trees nearest the wall.
The second time, Connie had said she and Jessie weren’t going to go scrumping. She added, with her bony chest thrust forward, that scrumping was silly, and there was no point in it.
Tommy’s eyes narrowed as he stared at her appraisingly.
Connie stood up straighter and looked at Tommy with a gimlet stare. Sometimes, back in Bermondsey, that had been enough to get the bullies backing down.
There was a knock at the door, and the tension in the room evaporated a degree or two as Roger could be heard telling someone where to find the children.
After a silence, Angela poked her head round the door. She looked wary, and rather shocked to find herself at Tall Trees.
Tommy tossed his head in Angela’s direction. Jessie thought it hard to tell if this gesture was inviting Angela into the room or telling her to go away.
‘Yer’re ’ere, an’ so we can all go now,’ said Tommy.
This was a surprise, thought Jessie, as he had had no idea that Tommy had even noticed Angela before.
‘We’re not coming,’ said Connie. ‘And Angela doesn’t want to either.’
Angela’s face looked pensive as she could feel there was something going on here that might be difficult for her to navigate.
Tommy stood stock still, and Jessie saw a muscle on the side of his face twitch, close to where the back of his teeth would be.
‘Jessie and me. We’re staying here. Along with Angela,’ Connie reiterated.
�
��If yer don’t, when yer aunt’s babbie’s here, I’ll pull ’is arms off,’ Tommy growled with a sneer.
‘Get lost, Tommy.’ Connie’s tone was defiant, even though she felt anything but. To her ears, Tommy sounded very much as if he meant business.
He sidled up to her. He looked bigger and more threatening than Connie would have given him credit for. She thought of something. ‘It was you who beat up Larry, wasn’t it?’
A flicker in Tommy’s eye confirmed Connie’s suspicion, but he didn’t deign to give a response.
There was a horrible, twitchy-feeling silence.
Then, ‘Yer fuckin’ wan’ t’test me about Peggy’s babbie?’
Connie had heard swearing often before – and she could be potty-mouthed herself at times – but the shock lay in the quiet but immensely sinister way that Tommy spat these words in her direction.
She looked at Jessie, who shrugged with a defeated air.
And so she agreed that she and her brother would do Tommy’s bidding.
They couldn’t take the risk of going against him, not if there was the slightest chance that Aunt Peggy’s longed-for baby might bear the brunt of his displeasure.
Nobody mentioned Angela, but she trotted along with them anyway, looking too shocked at what Tommy had said to risk his ire.
That day Tommy was very demanding when they were over in the orchard. He’d got some chalk and he made Jessie write rude words on the trees.
After a quantity of apples had been picked, all well past their best, Connie and Angela stood on the side edge of the field frowning at each other, as they didn’t know what to do or to say, although they both hoped that eating the apples wasn’t going to be part of Tommy’s plan.
They turned to look at Tommy, whose attention seemed luckily to be elsewhere as he drew some obscene drawings with the chalk on a piece of tarmac that had been laid at certain points in the orchard to give access to vehicles.
