by Katie King
‘Goodness, whatever were those children doing out at that time of night?’ exclaimed Barbara meanwhile in a shocked voice. ‘They would never have got away with this in London.’
Peggy didn’t necessarily agree, and she didn’t really think Barbara thought that either, as children in Bermondsey were often very ill behaved and out on the streets very late at night. While Ted and Barbara were strict parents, a significant proportion of their contemporaries barely seemed to notice their children, and allowed them to do pretty much whatever they wanted and when they wanted to do it, as long as they didn’t ask their parents not to go out to the Jolly or for any money.
‘Ah, nobutt comes out of tis reet well,’ June agreed.
Peggy had already seen that Barbara hadn’t been able to understand everything that June was saying as she described to them the game of spooks and what happened afterwards.
It was funny, Peggy realised, but she herself could now understand June Blenkinsop without too much difficulty, and June her, it seemed (or at any rate it was a while since they had stared at each other in incomprehension after one of them had said something), and so it showed that the accents in which they each spoke just needed a little bit of getting used to. And Barbara had already commented that morning several times about Harrogate being cold, the third time which Peggy had heard herself retaliate with one of Mabel’s favourite sayings: ‘There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.’ It was rather as if Harrogate was having a subtle effect on her, making her quietly but indelibly a little less ‘London’.
Peggy said reflectively, ‘There’s been increasing talk here about the evacuation, both the good and the bad. Some of the host families were horrified by the London children and how badly they behaved when they arrived – some kiddies when they got to their billets apparently seemed uncertain how to use a lavatory that flushed and thought they would drown or “die a death of cold” if they had a bath.
‘There was effing and blinding, and a couple of Jewish children were put with families who tried to make them eat ham and bacon, and who got very shirty when the children refused to do so.’
In unison Barbara and June shook their heads in an identical fashion at what Peggy was saying.
‘But,’ she went on, ‘many billets were more or less forced to take in the children. With the Air Ministry now moving up here to Yorkshire and requisitioning all the hotels, and with premium rates being paid for lodgings, as some of the banks and insurance companies are also relocating, some people think they’d be making more money, if they have to have strangers living with them, not to have the London kiddies.’
June Blenkinsop added that some locals were extremely embarrassed that a proportion of the Bermondsey schoolchildren had been barely allowed to go to school as they were working on farms or being made to do other sorts of heavy labour, while some families had been mean and downright unkind, and others had no experience of bringing up children.
It was Barbara and Peggy who shook their heads in unison this time.
There was a lull in their conversation as June topped up their teacups.
‘I’m sure there’s been wrong, and right too, on both sides – the London and the Yorkshire. It’s the government I blame most of all,’ said Barbara, bringing the silence to an end. ‘Really I do. And the Germans – I’m sure I speak for us all on that – as none of us would be in this position had they been content to remain in Germany, although I daresay that many of the ordinary German folk hate being at war just as much as we do. But I don’t think the government thought through the intricacies of the evacuation plan anywhere near sufficiently, and nor did they do enough to tell either side quite what they should be expecting.‘
The women were all quiet again.
Eventually a weary-sounding Barbara said, ‘Can you show me the way to the hospital, Peg, as I’d better try and see Angela, and maybe speak to the doctor in charge. I’m sure at some point I’ll have to have a word with her mother.’
Barbara and Peggy stood up and knotted their head-scarves over their hair again to keep out the mardiness of the Yorkshire weather.
Peggy told June she’d be back at eleven, and then she showed Barbara the way back to Tall Trees, as she had to confess that she wasn’t at all certain where the new hospital was, but she knew that either Roger or Mabel would be.
When they walked in through the back door into the kitchen it was clear that the Braithwaites had just heard about Angela’s accident, and were very concerned.
Mabel said that while Roger took Barbara and Peggy over to the hospital, she would make sure that Angela’s mother knew, and they could put her up at Tall Trees if she was to come to Harrogate, and in fact they could reimburse if necessary the cost of the ticket from church funds as they had an emergency fund for this sort of thing.
Roger drove Barbara and Peggy over to the hospital, and he then proved to be very effective at getting information from the doctors as to what the latest was regarding Angela’s condition.
The news wasn’t good – the little girl still hadn’t regained consciousness, and so they were going to operate later by removing a small part of her skull as they thought there was build-up of blood that was putting her brain under pressure. It was by no means certain that she would pull through the operation, let alone regain consciousness.
Chapter Twenty-six
At lunchtime Barbara went to collect Connie and Jessie from school. She was a little early in spite of it having been quite a busy morning, what with going with Peggy to the café and then heading over to the hospital to see Angela.
If the war dragged on for a substantial time, Barbara wondered now as she waited, would Connie and Jessie get just that bit too used to all of what they were experiencing since their move to Yorkshire, such as the large houses and the sense of space? Would number five Jubilee Street seem, when they came home again, to be unbearably modest and embarrassingly hand to mouth, with the surrounding Bermondsey streets unpleasantly dirty and packed together with workers’ housing, God willing, of course, that they all and their Jubilee Street house survived the war intact?
While Barbara believed with all her heart that her children were in the best place for them to be just at the moment, she thought that if the weeks stretched into months, and – a terrible thought – the months into years, it might well be the case that she and Ted would be welcoming two virtual strangers back into her home at some point.
It was a thought she’d not had before but it was one that made her feel most peculiar indeed.
She heard a school bell and she scurried back to the school gate. Connie and Jessie were amongst the first out of the building, and they skipped across the playground to Barbara, unbridled delight showing in their faces at the sight of their mother.
Barbara waved as they ran towards her. What a lucky woman she was, she acknowledged to herself, to have two such wonderful, healthy kiddies. Her heart felt an overflowing of love at the sight of them bounding happily in her direction, an overflowing that almost (but not quite) subsumed the strange thoughts she had just had as to whether her and Ted’s decision to send Connie and Jessie away to another home might in fact be storing up trouble for the future.
The children each hugged her tightly. The twins had never been so demonstrative when living at Jubilee Street but Barbara supposed that this more emotionally charged behaviour was a symptom of their unsettled feelings since the evacuation.
The close clinches felt natural, though, and, it had to be said, just as nice for Barbara as for the twins as the three embraced in a little Ross family circle, with none of them caring a jot as to who saw them or who might think the children too old for such molly coddling.
Barbara then walked Connie and Jessie towards the busiest area of Harrogate, promising that in a little while they would have something nice to eat as a special treat – maybe even some ice cream too! – and then perhaps they could go to the cinema if they could find a suitable matinee.
But first the
y had to have The Talk, she said. The Talk about the scrumping. The children’s faces shifted from a look of excitement at the promise of ice cream to something more brooding.
Their mother saw Connie and Jessie look at each other meaningfully. They had clearly known that something such as this was coming but, understandably, neither looked very enamoured of the idea.
The day wasn’t too nippy now, and so at Barbara’s suggestion the three of them made themselves comfortable on a slatted wooden bench in a park as they watched the occasional bird hop around on the grass.
‘Right,’ she began, bringing her mind back to the unwelcome task in hand, ‘who out of you two is going to be the brave person who can tell me exactly what went on that got you into trouble and put your Aunt Peggy into such a tailspin that it made her feel poorly?’
Neither child said anything.
‘I’m waiting,’ said Barbara gently but firmly after quite a long while.
‘Mummy, it’s been horrible.’ There was a distinct note of anguish in Connie’s voice as she broke the silence. ‘It was scary, and bad.’
‘We didn’t want to do it,’ said Jessie more plaintively. ‘We didn’t mean to do any harm or to get into trouble.’
‘Mummy, can we come home with you?’ said Connie.
‘Please, Mummy,’ echoed Jessie.
Barbara put her arms around each of the twins’ shoulders and drew them close. Their small resigned sighs told her they realised that she was comforting them but the answer was no, they weren’t going to be coming back to number five Jubilee street with her on the train – they had to stay in Harrogate and to make as good a job as they could of settling in to a new way of life while the war went on.
Barbara gave them some time to get used to the idea, and then as the children seemed reluctant still to come out and say clearly to their mother precisely what had gone on in the orchard, she patted their shoulders in encouragement, and gradually they began to open up.
Tommy, it turned out, had been the ringleader, and it had all been his idea.
He and some other lads had already been waging a war of hate on Larry, in part as Larry had been allocated the bedroom of the older brother of one of the other boys (this older brother had already been called up, but with the cruel logic of children it seemed to the younger one left behind that somehow Larry was to blame that this younger brother hadn’t been promoted to the better bedroom, even though Larry hadn’t said or done anything to provoke such an outcome), a feeling exacerbated when the younger brother had tried to insist within an hour of Larry’s arrival that he should move into the older lad’s bedroom and Larry could have his old room but his mother had put her foot down most firmly, refusing to give in to her son’s pleas no matter how he framed them.
Before long these children, orchestrated by Tommy, had also taken a dislike generally to the thought of ‘their turf’ being invaded by the ‘brats’ from London.
And so not only had they beaten Larry up right after he arrived in Harrogate – this group led by Tommy had been, it was now clear, the boys who had pounced on Larry close to the compost heap he’d been sent to take the vegetable peelings to on his very first evening at his billet, and Tommy had been the first person to land a punch apparently – but on other occasions they had urinated in his bed, and they’d hidden his clothes (Barbara wondering if this had led to Larry losing the slip of paper that Peggy had given him just after he had arrived in Yorkshire).
For these misdemeanours poor Larry had been punished soundly by his host family, much to the delight of Tommy’s gang, with the result that subsequently they had gone out of their way to make Larry’s life a misery in every way they could think of for getting on now for two months.
Larry, much more used to being an aggressor than a patsy, had been at a complete loss to know how to handle such vile treatment by children the same age as he, and he had found himself cowed and unhappy as a result.
Somewhere along the way Tommy had told the local lads he routinely bossed around – he was well known as a bully, Aiden had confided to Connie – that he was widening the offensive to include other children from London, beginning with Jessie and Connie, and so he had hatched the plan to do with scrumping the apples in the field that the scientists had been monitoring. It had seemed a golden opportunity to get up to some mischief, for which the Bermondsey evacuees would take the blame.
‘Mummy, I really don’t think, though, that Tommy knew how special the field was, or what the response from the scientists was going to be, or that they would have guard dogs,’ said Connie, who sounded to Barbara’s ears as if she were trying very hard to be fair and grown up. ‘I thought there was something wrong with the idea at the time, but I couldn’t work out why. Tommy seemed friendly at first when we arrived, but I didn’t trust him ever, and I thought that if Jessie and I went along with it for a little while, then he might get bored and lose interest in trying to make us do what he wanted. And if he didn’t lose interest, I was certain that in that case I could beat him at his own game. But it turned out that I never got the chance.
‘Tommy said that he knew where gangsters lived in Bermondsey, and if we didn’t do as he wanted on this and every other day that he chose, if he felt like it, he would telephone the gangsters to send them to Jubilee Street and that it would end up that we’d never see you or Daddy again as your bodies would be thrown in the River Thames with your throats cut. I believed him as he said it just as if he really did know these gangsters, but now I feel silly for believing him. He said he was going to come with us to the apple trees and so why would we feel worried unless we were real babies, and that in any case there was nothing for us to be scared about.’
Now Connie had started talking there seemed no holding her back. ‘But there was – it was awful, Mummy. Tommy kept making us go back to that orchard to climb over the wall again and again. We tried to stand up to him and then he said he’d hurt Peggy’s baby when it came if we didn’t keep agreeing to do everything that he told us to do. He kept making us go back, even if it were only to chalk silly marks on trees or climb them or draw rude pictures on the road that’s down the middle of one of the fields. I tried then to threaten him back and it didn’t work, not like it did when I stood up to the big boys in Bermondsey, as Tommy just stood and laughed at me, right to my face, telling me that Roger and Mabel wouldn’t believe me if I went running to them, and that we wouldn’t dare to say anything to Peggy because of what he had said about hurting the baby.
‘And then I tried taking Tommy’s toys for ransom and he said some very rude words back. I didn’t understand the meaning of any of the words but I knew they must be very bad when he called me a troll and a tail and a shicer and a sheeny. Worse was to come when Roger then heard me yelling them back to Tommy, and he told me he was very disappointed in my language and then he made me apologise to Tommy, as he thought I was teaching those words to Tommy rather than the other way round, and so I knew just how bad they must have been.’
‘Tommy looks so good, and he sings in the choir, and his parents are nice,’ Jessie picked up the thread. ‘At times he’s been nice to me and I think he likes it that we can play together in his room, but then he just wakes up one day and he’s odd for the whole day, and he’ll say that terrible word beginning with F, and all the time nobody at Tall Trees seems to see it. He’s horrible as well to Bucky and now Bucky won’t go near him. He’s a scallywag and a tearaway, and he does exactly what he wants.’
Jessie’s voice made it clear he was battling tears now. ‘None of us wanted to go scrumping, and of course Larry and I weren’t talking so that was bad anyway, and Angela came along too after a while, which made Tommy worse as he was showing off to her. After that he made Larry be there, which Larry really didn’t want to be. And I’d spent such a long time thinking how much I hated Larry and how badly I wanted him to have a horrible comeuppance, then when I saw Tommy be as mean as he was to Larry, it made me feel funny and as if I’d been thinking bad things about
him, which I had, and then they were coming true.
‘Then Tommy was furious on the day we got caught as he had problems climbing over the wall into the field with the apples as his trousers got caught on the barbed wire, and in a temper he pushed Larry off of the top of the wall, which is when Larry fell down – it were a long way – and he bashed his tooth and he hurt his fingers. Connie and me were already over the wall by then, and we were at the apples, and suddenly there were whistles and we could hear the dogs barking, and it was really frightening.’
Jessie was gulping for air but he couldn’t stop. ‘We didn’t know what to do, but Tommy just got down off the wall on the other side and he tried to run away and leave us. I’d never have done that, not run away like he did, no matter what, and neither would Connie – but Tommy just didn’t care what happened to any of us, and I couldn’t understand that as it seemed wrong, and bad. And then this lad Aiden – he’s the one Connie is setting her cap at – appeared from nowhere and he got down over the wall very quick and he helped Larry stand up, which were in the nick of time as they let the dogs out then and I think the dogs would have mauled Larry to death if he were lying down as they were that ferocious, and it was Aiden who told the policeman what had happened, and that Tommy had been there too. Aiden had been watching out for what Tommy was up to, as Tommy has a reputation and Aiden likes Connie and so he were looking out for her. Then the police dog got Larry’s arm in his teeth and Larry yelled fit to burst.’
Barbara didn’t like the sound of any of this in the slightest, although she was rather proud that in the midst of what undoubtedly was a very scary time, Jessie had held onto the idea that strength was to be found in sticking together. She doubted that Larry would have been badly hurt by the dogs, as surely they would have been trained to hold a robber and not to bite him, but that really wasn’t the point. The point was that Jessie must have been terrified, but to try and run away in order to protect himself when other people were still left behind wasn’t something that had entered his mind for a moment – indeed a cowardly reaction was abhorrent to him, it seemed, which must be an indication of a fledging bulldog spirit, his mother thought. And Connie had been brave too – she hadn’t been taken in by Tommy, and she had tried to stand up to him.
