by Katie King
Barbara turned to look at her own two children, and was comforted by the welcome sight of their cleanish hair (certainly nowhere near as lacklustre as Larry’s), their clear and shining eyes and their full, rosy cheeks. While Mabel and Roger might have had an issue or two in the discipline department in dealing with their evacuees on a day-to-day basis, it was obvious that Connie and Jessie were getting lots to eat and that their clothes were washed regularly, their shoes clean and their hair brushed every morning.
‘I shan’t be long,’ Barbara told her own children, and she turned to head over to the forlorn-looking lad about whom she had once held such a shirty opinion, and as she stood before him she tried to muster a kindly tone as she said, ‘Hello, Larry. I’m Mrs Ross and I saw your mother last week, and we spoke about you. Do you have a message for me to give to her if I see her when I get back to London? I can make sure she gets it, and I would be very happy to do that for you.’
Larry didn’t need to know, Barbara decided, that she and his mother had been extremely prickly and tetchy with one another, almost to the point of a full-blown argument.
Once Larry realised that Barbara was addressing him directly, he leapt out of his chair with alacrity, to stand up military straight, accidentally knocking his chair out of the way with an ear-splitting scape of its wooden legs across the parquet floor of the classroom, such was the anxious manner with which he had sprung up.
He stood with his chest clearly rising and falling, and with his fists clenched and his arms, legs and neck ramrod straight, his eyes staring oddly straight ahead as they locked onto something in the middle distance in front of him.
Barbara felt a peculiar sensation of awkwardness and a feeling that was very akin to embarrassment flush right through her as she had never before had this reaction from a child to anything she had said (or indeed from anybody older), and it seemed to her a hideous parody of something that Dickens-esque paupers might have been forced to do in the cold and harshly governed boarding schools of another era.
She turned her head quickly to see where the other children were in the classroom or if anyone else had noticed Larry’s reaction at her crossing the room to speak to him and thought it as odd as she did, but everyone else seemed to have their attention taken elsewhere.
Barbara thought she saw Larry smother a small but nonetheless distinct flinch caused by his reaction to her sudden movement, and in an instant her heart went out to him.
She realised how much more settled and calm both Connie and Jessie looked in comparison to him, and so Barbara concluded that the problem was arising at the billet and almost definitely not at the school, as Jessie was such a sensitive and emotionally twitchy boy that if it were too strict a regime at the school, it would be bound to be very apparent in the way he looked and acted, and Barbara could see nothing untoward with her son no matter how closely she scrutinised him.
Barbara didn’t want to draw further attention to how shocking she found Larry’s appearance or behaviour, and especially so in front of the other children.
Larry was big for his age, and already he had a not very faint outline of a moustache forming, and therefore Barbara knew it was very important that she take extreme care not to embarrass him, in part because she was aware that as he and Jessie had had such a troubled history – she most certainly didn’t want to do anything that would make that worse. She understood too that boys at Larry’s stage of development from child (in body at least, if not in mind) to young adult were awash anyway on a tide of emotions, and so she didn’t want to give Larry any hint that she was unnecessarily concerned by the state of him in case this spurred him to bravado that he might later regret, or to do anything that might convince him that he needed to be nervous of her doing something in consequence of how he looked, that might cause him to lose any all-important face in front of his classmates.
Whatever Barbara’s opinion had been of him previously, and mean as Larry had most certainly shown over the previous summer that he could be in his behaviour towards smaller or weaker children, right now he was clearly having a difficult time with his evacuation hosts since his arrival in Yorkshire. A mother – well, any normal adult really – would have to have a heart of stone not to feel a tremendous lurch at the wretched sight of him, and Barbara felt at the very least she had to make him think that he wasn’t utterly alone, unthought-of or uncared for.
‘I know who yer are.’ Larry cut across her thoughts with an attitude from which it was hard for Barbara to make out his precise feelings. ‘An’ I don’t ’ave a message fer my ma or my pa.’ His harsh-sounding words were delivered in a mechanical, one-note manner, and she found the tenor of the whole exchange very disconcerting and unsettling, especially as he was still standing preternaturally straight and rigid.
She dreaded to think what might have gone on where Larry was billeted during his time in Yorkshire.
‘I understand what you are saying,’ said Barbara levelly. ‘But I know that your family are thinking about you – as I say, I was talking with your mother only last week and she was telling me a lot about you – and so I will say to her that I have seen you.’
She chose her words carefully. She didn’t know who was friendly with who around here, and for all Barbara knew there could be somebody standing near to her and Larry right at that very minute who might go on to pass details of their conversation to the people he was staying with, which might not go down at all well at his billet if Barbara seemed overtly critical of his treatment at their hands or his condition.
Seeing how very downcast he looked, a mere shadow of the cocky, slightly loutish eleven-year-old of just a couple of months previously, and displaying the faintest of trembles to the muscles of his face as he looked as if he could be battling tears, she absolutely didn’t want to make his life more difficult in any way.
‘My sister Peggy – that’s her over there in the blue coat, talking to Connie; they and Jessie all live at Tall Trees as I daresay you know already, where Reverend Roger Braithwaite, Tommy’s father, is the rector – anyway, Larry, Peggy can always get a message to me by telephoning me at work, or else she can telephone the Jolly, and I can pass what you say on to your mother,’ Barbara said to him very quietly and seriously. She thought she saw a tense double-blink in one eye and a corresponding twitch of muscle at the outer edge of his other eye at the mention of Tommy’s name as he stared off somewhere to the side of her, but she didn’t know Larry well enough to be sure.
She paused, and adult and child looked at each other for a few seconds, before Barbara said levelly, ‘Larry, do know that any time, day or night, Peggy would be ready to get in touch with whoever you want back in London. Her bedroom at Tall Trees is above the stables, and so if anybody wanted a word with her in private then nobody needs to go to the main house to be able to knock on her door, which is at the top of the wooden steps at the side of the building.’
She turned to go and speak to Connie – she really didn’t want to make too much of this in any obvious way – but she saw from the corner of her eye Larry give her an almost imperceptible nod to show that he had taken Barbara’s message on board as he turned away from her in order to slump disconsolately down once again in his chair.
Chapter Twenty-five
As she and Peggy were walking down the road a few minutes later to June’s tea shop, Barbara said to her sister that even when Jessie had been at his most unhappy over the previous summer, she could never remember him appearing quite as down in the mouth as Larry was looking currently. It was just about the last thing she had expected to see in Harrogate.
‘I might have thought that once,’ agreed Peggy glumly. ‘Now, I am not so sure. There’s lots and lots of things to like here in Harrogate, I don’t doubt, and the people I have spoken to have all been very kind, and of course it feels like a prosperous and grand-feeling place that’s at the opposite end of the social scale to what we’ve all know in Bermondsey.
‘But it is very hard to describe how peculiar
one feels when uprooted and away from everything and everyone that is familiar – it is definitely very unsettling, and so far, not wholly pleasant in my experience. And I suspect – well, in fact, I know – it is equally as hard for those forced to offer us billets, and so I do have a lot of sympathy for our hosts too – we are strangers invading the sanctuary of their own homes, after all, and I think some children have been found very awkward and difficult. We are all so powerless, and this is in no way a pleasant thing to experience, is it, no matter which side of the fence you are on.’
‘Some sisters too may have been a bit awkward and difficult, I expect,’ said Barbara, and then the sisters laughed as they knew Barbara was making a joke. Granted, it was a very small quip, but any attempt at humour these days was very welcome, and that was really what the sisters were agreeing on. As the nights lengthened and the days drew in, with plummeting temperatures, it was hard not to feel permanently sorry for oneself.
Barbara was continuing to talk and her words ate into Peggy’s thoughts. She realised her sister was speaking in a manner that was much more conciliatory in tone than the one she normally employed.
‘I hope,’ Peggy heard Barbara say, ‘that you don’t mind, but just now I told Larry that he could come to you at any time, and that he didn’t have to go to the front door of the main house to do this, as I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure he would come to you with a problem if he had to go through Reverend Braithwaite or Mabel, or especially Tommy, and so I explained to him where exactly you are billeted above the stables.’
Peggy agreed with Barbara, adding, ‘Larry looks in a bad way, doesn’t he? I did actually give him my address when he had his black eye after the first night, but he didn’t get in touch, and then I meant to check up on him but somehow I never did. I feel that I’ve been remiss. I was quite shocked just now actually at what I saw, the poor lad.’
Barbara asked her sister if she thought that Connie and Jessie were very homesick for London, as Peggy saw them every day and would be able to better gauge how they were feeling than she.
Peggy had to admit that she was pretty certain that they were missing their home very much indeed, and their parents too, of course. While the Braithwaites were kindly people and the house was much larger than number five Jubilee Street, with a lovely big garden for the children to charge about in as they wanted, and while Jessie very much appreciated Roger’s well-stocked library of books, Tall Trees just wasn’t ‘home’, was it?
And that was where the rub was.
Home back in Bermondsey might not be up to much in the practical sense, but in the emotional sense it was where the heart of the family lived, and not to be there made them feel vulnerable.
‘It’s so hard as Ted and me hate having them here too. But everything tells me that if they came back home right now, it would in all likelihood be terrible timing, even though that is a very difficult message to get over to a ten-year-old when there hasn’t been any bombing, and the most obvious sign of us being at war is that usually these days it’s a woman driving the buses you’re going to catch,’ admitted Barbara. ‘This bloody war.’
The sisters had been brought up not to swear – in fact, their father had been very strict about that sort of thing, and as teenagers they knew they’d be for the high jump if ever he caught a whiff of even the slightest profanity leaving their lips – but these were days that were quite unlike those of their formative years.
They stopped walking for a moment and then turned to look at each other, Barbara with a slight but undeniably defiant air about her that Peggy was unable to match.
Then Peggy said deliberately as she drew back her shoulders full square, so that her stance looked much closer to that of her sister’s, ‘Blimey, Barbara. Yes, this bloody war!’
Although still terribly early as it wasn’t yet eight fifteen, June Blenkinsop’s tea shop was busy as increasingly people were starting to pop in after finishing a night shift.
In fact, June had confided to Peggy several days earlier that she was wondering about whether she should go to the trouble of getting a proper catering staff together so that they could start to do twenty-four-hour hot food, now that more and more people were being put by the authorities on to various kinds of shift work. It would mean thinking about the business differently and putting a lot of investment into it, June said, but she could see there was a demand for it. Peggy had told her that it was certainly something to think about seriously, and that June would be better placed to do this than some other Janey-Come-Lately.
On this first morning in November the café was simply awash with gossip, both in the tea shop proper and in an anteroom behind the kitchens at the back of the building, which June had recently had redecorated in a cheery primrose yellow and then decked out with an array of scavenged tables and chairs so that more customers could be catered for.
And the talk wasn’t of very good news by any stretch of the imagination, Peggy and Barbara were to learn as June ushered them towards one of the few empty tables. They sat down to hear more about what had happened, and June pulled up a chair so that she could sit down too to join them.
Apparently one of the other evacuee children from St Mark’s had had a terrible mishap while larking around out and about in the unlit streets the previous evening.
There’d been the usual pretty harmless knocking on front doors and running away, and then a more serious game had started, apparently, involving playing at spooks in a graveyard (luckily not a graveyard that had anything to do with Reverend Braithwaite’s church, as undoubtedly Roger would have felt very put out if this had proved to be the case, Barbara and Peggy agreed), with what was eventually a quite large group of children gathered from both the Harrogate and Bermondsey contingents.
The children celebrated Halloween by playing at being spooks by shining the beams of light from torches upwards onto their chins to make their faces take on the characteristics of scary skeletons. The two or three torches between them were held aloft during the few minutes the children were able to dodge the wrath of the ARP wardens, who walked about every evening to make sure diligently that not even the tiniest chink of light was escaping anyone’s home to break the blackout.
Needless to say, an ever-alert ARP warden had spied what the children were up to and he had shouted at them in no uncertain terms to put out the damn light.
His admonishment hadn’t been too strictly given, the children had to admit later when questioned by the police, but then the children egged one another on as to ‘’e’s comin’ t’git us’, and in a matter of moments the game had degenerated into a rowdy gang of children running up and down the streets.
Overexcited and without a thought for any potential consequences, a gaggle of unchaperoned children had broken away from the others, who now were in hot pursuit, and inevitably (it seemed at least to the grown-ups discussing the matter the following day in June’s café) they had run straight into the road and unfortunately slap bang into the path of an oncoming car.
The driver hadn’t seen them and the children hadn’t realised there was a car coming in their direction. The road was unlit and the blackout had been in full force, and the car had actually been driven with its headlights off as there had been a full moon, and so stupidly the car’s owner thought he had enough light to navigate safely by.
One of Jessie’s classmates – in fact, it was little Angela, who had run away down the road from the orchard on the fateful day of the dogs and the Black Maria – had taken the full force of the brunt of the collision, her small body being tossed high into the air before crashing back down to the road.
Two other children had also run into the car, but they were fortunate enough to have bounced off its huge rounded bonnet and so they had escaped with mere heavy bruising.
Aiden had been one of the children a-larking, although he’d been in the chasing group, and he had run to the nearest house to raise the alarm as the car driver, the only adult on the scene, seemed to be in shock and was
incapable of doing much to help Angela.
For Angela, the outcome was much more serious than her sustaining mere cuts and bruises.
She was lying now in hospital with a fractured skull, and she hadn’t shown any sign of regaining consciousness since the collision while nobody quite seemed to know what her long-term prognosis was.
She had been taken to a new hospital in Penny Pot Lane that was still under construction for use by the planned-for injured of the British forces (the memories of the Great War’s field hospitals being brought into play by the authorities, with the result that preparations were being hurried along before the casualties were brought home in any great number).
It turned out that this new hospital was the only place locally to have on standby the right sort of expertise with head wounds such as Angela’s, and as there was a specialist medic already there who was training up other doctors and nurses, and as Angela was a child who obviously needed expert treatment, they had made an exception that she should be dealt with there immediately rather than taken to a bigger hospital in one of the other larger towns in the county.
June Blenkinsop described what she had heard other customers say had happened.
Shaken, Peggy laid a hand on Barbara’s and said, ‘Connie and Jessie have been spending time with Angela, and so they will be upset.’
How strange life was, Peggy could only muse. While she and her sister had been looking forward the previous evening to the comfort of some hot tea and a sticky piece of parkin each, it was very likely that at that precise moment, and only a matter of streets away, poor Angela had been lying bleeding in the road, perhaps fighting for her life with a serious and possibly life-threatening injury. Even if she lived, perhaps it would be to face the consequences of the sort of injury that might make the rest of her life dismal. It was dreadful, and it didn’t make sense. But things like this rarely did, Peggy reasoned. Although she wouldn’t have said this to Roger and Mabel – they tended to steer clear of discussing much that was to do with belief and faith – it made it hard sometimes to believe that there was a God, Peggy thought. Angela was a pleasant child, and she certainly didn’t deserve to be right now lying in a hospital bed far from home, that much Peggy was convinced of.
