by Katie King
Neither Connie nor Angela knew what the drawings were of – well, they could guess that one of them was of bosoms – but the other two were very rude if Jessie’s shamed and tight-lipped, pale face was anything to go by.
But back at Tall Trees that evening, strangely, it was as if nothing untoward had happened earlier in the day.
Tommy laughed and joked, and played jaunty tunes on the piano when Mabel asked him, and even made sure he encouraged Connie to have the last half of the toasted teacakes, even though she had had two halves already.
The next evening Tommy behaved in the same way, and the evening after that.
Jessie and Connie talked about it, but they couldn’t make out what was going on. They didn’t feel able, either, to talk to Peggy, or to Roger and Mabel about their concerns: Peggy because of the threat to the baby, and Roger and Mabel because Tommy was their son and so they doubted their claims about his behaviour would be believed.
They didn’t know what to do for the best, and it was an unpleasant but insidious feeling that gnawed away deep inside them every moment they were awake.
The next Saturday, Tommy jangled their nerves up and down all day, sometimes smiling at them with a guileless look in his eye, and at other times looking at them with the intensity of a pantomime baddie.
No mention was made of either the orchard or the Four S’s.
This was almost worse than having to go to the orchard, Jessie said to Connie later, who could only nod; she knew exactly what her brother meant.
In his bunk bed that Saturday night, a sleepless Jessie felt his body twitch and jerk as his tense muscles slowly relaxed. Going scrumping was almost better than this, as at least something would have happened and Jessie would feel spent and worn out by the time he laid his head on his pillow with the result that he would quickly fall asleep.
Business was resumed as normal, though, the following Saturday, Tommy grabbing the top part of Connie’s arm as they passed on the stairs just after breakfast. ‘Do as yer told today, an’ I’ll call off the gangsters watching yer family’s house. Disobey, an’ they gets it. Unnerstan’?’
Connie understood.
Early in the afternoon Angela’s tap at the door was followed by another knock. It turned out to be from Larry, and an already unbearably tense atmosphere was further loaded by Jessie and Larry finding themselves standing directly in front of one another, each furiously trying to work out the part the other was playing, and who was answerable to who. Their eyes flickered about, and they both kept putting their hands in their pockets and taking them out again.
The five of them trooped in a nervy silence over to the orchard, Connie catching sight of Aiden circling around on his bicycle in a park a way away, but perhaps close enough to take notice of them.
Jessie saw Aiden too, and felt desperate enough to tap out the Morse code signal for SOS on his trouser leg with the hand that was nearest to Aiden, not that he had any hope of Aiden seeing or understanding his message. It just felt better to be making a gesture of protest, no matter how small it was.
They got to the orchard, at which point Angela complained that she didn’t feel very well. Connie didn’t believe Angela for a moment, but then she rather regretted not saying something similar herself as, much to her surprise, Tommy dismissed Angela with a surly wave of his hand.
Angela didn’t need asking twice and she scampered down the road back towards the town as quickly as she could without once looking over her shoulder at Connie and Jessie.
As the sound of Angela’s retreating footsteps faded, Tommy indicated they should go over the wall. But when they pulled themselves to the top of the now hated wall they’d scaled so reluctantly the previous Saturdays it was to find that barbed wire had been strung around the top.
Tommy’s trousers were well and truly caught, but Connie and Jessie were more frightened of Tommy than they were concerned about the wire, and so they managed to slither over it as best they could, not much caring if their flesh was nicked, and then they jumped down into the orchard.
Larry had pulled himself to the top of the wall almost right beside Tommy, but when he hesitated about untangling Tommy, Tommy leant forward and gave Larry an almighty thrust with the flat of his hand, right in the middle of Larry’s chest, with a curt ‘Nobody disobeys me.’
Larry’s expression was one of pure surprise, and an oddly small ‘oooph’ escaped his mouth as the breath rushed from his lungs.
He teetered for what felt like a second stretching out into infinity, and at last crashed from the top of the wall, landing on the ground with a sickening thud; and in a shaft of weak autumn sunlight Connie saw a jewel-like shard of one of Larry’s front teeth fly through the air and disappear into the grass behind her, while Jessie heard the mangled sound of the splintering on the bone in one of Larry’s fingers and the sharp snap of his upper and lower teeth as they clashed together.
‘Agh,’ was all Larry said at first, but it sounded anguished. And then he gave a sound that could only be described as a keening, high-pitched cry.
Jessie had never heard anything like it before.
‘Connie, he’s hurt bad, I think,’ he said.
But before anyone could decide what to do there was the sound of whistles and baying dogs.
‘Larry. Larry! Get up,’ somebody yelled. And then Aiden jumped neatly down from on top of the wall and pulled Larry up to a dazed standing position before Aiden moved to stand in front of Larry as the sound of the barking dogs got louder.
As a car drove at speed towards them on the tarmac path through the middle of the orchard, two dogs raced in their direction.
Jessie looked at his sister’s terrified expression, and the last thing he saw before the car screeched to a halt was Tommy’s anguished face as he wrenched his trousers free from the spikes of the barbed wire and hurtled himself off the wall back into the road away from them, presumably intent on trying to run away, leaving those in the orchard to their unwelcome fate.
‘Got ’im!’ was shouted from the other side of the wall, and then there was the sound of what sounded like a tussle, followed by Tommy’s violent sobs.
There must have been a pincer movement from whomever was so irate, as they could hear that Tommy was now in the hands of somebody on the other side of the wall.
As the dogs circled them, furiously barking, the children huddled together, too terrified to speak or move.
This wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, no, not at all.
Chapter Twenty-two
16th October 1939
Dearest Peg,
Still no envelope to you from Bill, I am afraid, and so I do hope that by the time you are reading this you will have heard from him. It must be very difficult for you if he still hasn’t been in touch, as it has been quite a long time now. I do hope you are taking good care of yourself, and are getting enough rest.
You’ll be pleased to know I’m becoming quite fond of Fishy as she understands the value of friendship – or at least, the value of pandering to the hand that feeds her, being very ready to sit on your lap if you are listening to the radio although, less happily, she also wants to sit on my lap if I am knitting and I have discovered to my cost that knitting and cats Do Not Mix, as cats – well, Fishy – are all too often extremely intent on playing with the wool.
The good thing is she’s trying to earn her keep as, when Ted and I were at the pictures the other night we came back to a dead woodpigeon on the doorstep that was still warm and that Fishy was sitting by very proudly – goodness knows where she had found or caught that as the only ones I have seen in London have been over Greenwich way, but I had plucked and gutted it and popped it under a pie crust by the time I had to leave for Mrs Truelove’s the very next day.
The gossip in the shop is that some people are starting to bring back their children from evacuation as they can’t bear to be parted from them any longer. It’s been over six weeks since the children and you left us, and actually life has gone on
as normal since then in that everything is still running and no bombs have been dropped. I really don’t approve of those who are breaking the evacuation, but there it is.
So if the children mention to you anything about them coming home to Jubilee Street, please say back to them that you know without a shadow of a doubt that is not going to be an option for them as me and Ted still want them safe and out of harm’s way. Although we miss them, I think real love can mean that sacrifices have to be made, and how could we live with ourselves if we brought them back merely to keep us happy, and then they were hurt, or worse, if a bomb went off?
Other news is that I have blotted my copy-book rather with Mrs Truelove as I had quite a set-to with Larry’s mother the day before yesterday in the shop, as she is thinking of bringing him back as he’s not happy. Even so, I told her, he is probably safer up in Harrogate than here.
She stalked out of Mrs Truelove’s leaving the bias binding she’d been about to pay for on the counter, and then she (Mrs Truelove, I mean) gave me a stern talking-to, saying that I must save this sort of thing for after working hours as she ‘can’t have people who work for her behaving like harridans’! And then she said to me that from all accounts Larry’s mother didn’t have a very nice time of it at home as her husband is known for being a bit handy with his fists, which you and I know anyway.
Then the sirens went off and we had to troop out back to head down into the Andersen shelter that’s been dug out (that was back-breaking work apparently as the yard had been paved over for years, Mrs Truelove was saying), although then that siren turned out to be a practice that we should have known about but which we didn’t, and during it, some weasel had run into the shop and stolen some wool as Mrs Truelove had been in such a panic to vacate the premises that she’d forgotten to lock the shop door at the front. She (Mrs Truelove, not the robber!) was livid and tried to blame me for making her forget to lock it.
That evening I really wished you were here for a natter so that I could get everything off my chest! I can’t remember being as short-tempered as I am these days before the war started. I think it’s that feeling of being on edge all the time. It almost seems normal on the surface, but deep down we all know that life has changed and most certainly not for the better, and it’s just not very easy. All I know is that I feel jittery and quick to take offence at the littlest of things.
I’ve posted separately the woollen gloves that I have knitted for each of the children – the talk is of clothes’ rationing soon, and so I don’t want the children facing the cold weather without being wrapped up properly. I know they’ll be sorry at what is in their packages, but I thought an individual package, even with their new gloves in it, is going to be more exciting for them than if I sent them to you to pass on.
Hopefully we’ll be seeing you all soon, and I hope you are getting enough rest, my dearest Peggy.
With deep love, Barbara
30th October 1939
Dear Barbara,
I’ve now talked to Bill at long last (at very l-o-o-o-n-g last, may I say!), thank goodness – he telephoned me out of the blue, although when Roger came to fetch me to the telephone I was sure it was either you or Ted calling with some sort of terrible news and so for a moment I felt as if I might be about to give birth then and there. Mabel said she was delighted that Bill had finally rung me as I’d fair worn a groove on the hall runner going to check for the mail so often.
Anyway Bill sounds like he’s been living the life of Riley, being on a training camp in Norfolk on the east coast (I think it is, to judge by his hints), and getting up to lots of japes with Reece Pinkly. He couldn’t say of course exactly where he is, but I think that is what he was getting at. He says they’ve been doing lots of training, and there’s a big NAAFI and also a nice local pub nearby. He was contrite and very apologetic, but he said he’d tried to write to me several times but he hadn’t known what to say – and then he felt guilty for not doing so, and then this made it even harder for him to write.
He’s very likely off abroad soon, so we’ve agreed that every time it’s a clear and starry night we’ll both go outside and look at the North Star, and then we’ll know that wherever we each are in the world we’ll be connected, at least just a little, through the heavens – it sounds silly, I know, but oddly it’s almost more comfort than if he were writing regularly to me, which I know really is most unlikely, given it’s Bill I’m married to, as I know he does struggle with his letters (both in the actual writing as he had a bad time at school, and in the setting down of what he feels he should say). But while Bill is nowhere near a Wordsworth, he does have many lovely qualities otherwise – only I can’t help hoping the baby takes after me a bit more than his or her daddy when it comes to reading and writing.
I’m feeling much better in general these past couple of weeks, and I’ve even landed myself a little job. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to feel a little useful again, even if only in the smallest of ways. June Blenkinsop, the nice lady with the tea shop, has got me in for two hours every lunchtime and I sit at a small table and tot up what people should pay and give them any change. June has been asked by the government to offer something more substantial, and to cut back on the cakes and teacakes and fancies, and they are getting busy as people are working longer hours and have less time for cooking at home.
Now for something I should have told you earlier. It’s not very nice, I warn you in advance. Indeed, I was so cross about it that I couldn’t tell you until I had calmed down and I forbade the children to mention it to you either when they wrote until I had told you first.
Since it happened Connie has definitely been contrite and sometimes – unusually for her, I think – verging on the tearful, asking me several times if I know whether she and Jessie will be home for Christmas, while Jessie seems now to spend most of his time holed up at Tall Trees somewhere with his nose stuck in one of Roger’s books, and he doesn’t have much to say about what went on at all.
The long and short of it is that Connie and Jessie and a group of other children, including Tommy and Larry, were caught stealing apples, or ‘scrumping’ as Tommy calls it. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
But actually, it’s much worse than it sounds – it turned out to be in an orchard that was part of an experimental government-funded research field with a special crop that was being monitored by a university with guards and all sorts – I think it’s to do with working out a way to breed qualities of old fruits into easier-to-grow, newer varieties to boost food production.
The irony of course is that the garden here at Tall Trees is awash with apple trees and the fruiting has been heavy this year, with a bumper crop of round red apples, and so the children really weren’t short of apples, if that was what they wanted.
It was more that they wanted to do something naughty, and was this naughty?!
The first that me, Roger and Mabel knew of it was when the three from Tall Trees got delivered home in the back of a police car, and it was parked up on the road outside in clear view of everyone, and the policeman literally led Tommy and Jessie into the garden and up to the front door by their ears, with Connie trailing behind them. (Jessie complained later that even the Bash Street Kids in the Beano wouldn’t get treated in this way.)
For once, both Mabel and Roger were here when the Black Maria drew up and so they could speak to the policeman instead of me, as the minute I started to hear him say words like ‘destroying valuable work’ and ‘treason’ I felt woozy.
Roger proved that he is made of sterner stuff than me fortunately, and he sounded very reasonable as he spoke to the constable, and after a long talk the policeman agreed that the children could all be let off with an unofficial warning, although the school would have to be told, the policeman said. Later Roger explained to me and Mabel that the constable had been laying it on a bit thick to scare the children, although they would very probably have been charged if they were older – they’d blundered into a carefully monitored
area and because of writing on the trees and climbing them they had possibly corrupted the experiments.
So, the long and short of it is that Connie and Jessie insist that the scrumping episode was all Tommy’s idea: Tommy blames Larry (and your two, to some extent), and there’s also been a local lad called Aiden involved somehow, although I can’t quite make out what his role was – he stuck up for the London kiddies, I think, and it seems that somewhere along the way Jessie sent a panic message in Morse code that Aiden understood.
I said to Connie and Jessie, whatever were they thinking, when they knew you had forbidden them to do anything naughty? And to this they have no answer – privately, I think they were looking just to get themselves ‘in’ with the local kiddies, most of whom have been keeping their distance from the London children.
When it all came out into the open I was so furious with Connie and Jessie that I wanted to shake them, and so I had to go out into the garden and stand in the cold for quite a while until I had calmed down – Bucky came and sat about a yard away, and I found him more of a comfort than any of the people around me. Connie, I could believe, would perhaps have been something of a ringleader, but I was shocked that Jessie had been involved; it just felt so out of character for him to have been caught up in something like this.
I don’t know, but Larry is in a pretty bad way from all accounts as Gracie saw him the other day, and he looks as if he’s really been through the wars, which is awful as on his very first day in Harrogate he got set on by local lads and given a black eye – I’m sorry, but this is another thing I didn’t want to burden you with, as I thought it would only make you worry unnecessarily about Connie and Jessie been at the mercy of the local children and Connie says this was at Tommy’s hands too.
There have been tears, lots of tears in fact, all round, and Tommy’s been sent to Mabel’s poorly mother’s for a fortnight to cool off, although I think this is partly because he was shouting and swearing at his father (using the F word, can you believe? I said to Roger I’d never heard your two use it, and so it might not be from them that Tommy heard it, as Tommy immediately claimed, but you know how this sort of thing sticks), rather than for what went on with the apples.
