And then it was February and in February the winter began.
That first winter of the war was one of the coldest that anyone could remember. Down on the south coast the snow lay in drifts as high as a man’s thigh and all along the shoreline the sea was so cold that it froze into thin grey ice-floes that heaved and shifted on the sullen water. In mid-Sussex, roads were impassable for days at a time, pipes froze solid, schools were shut, sheep had to be dug out of the snow, and the children’s uncurtained bedroom window was perpetually patterned with thick ice crystals growing up across the glass like complicated white ferns. Now they had to trudge to school through heavy snow and across exhausting drifts, their bare knees stinging with cold. Before long they both had chilblains on their fingers and toes and Norman had a bright red crop all round the lobes of his ears.
And as if that weren’t enough they had another problem to contend with too. When the evacuees first arrived in Myrtlebury they outnumbered the local kids by nearly two to one, so although they were deeply resented – for hadn’t they invaded homes and taken over the local school for half of every blessed day, and didn’t they just stink – when resentment boiled over into pitched battles out in the fields, the intruders usually won. Now, after five months, the position had changed. So many of the Londoners had gone back home that the evacuees were fewer in number than their reluctant hosts. And the snow provided an ideal weapon. With a stone as the violent centre of every hard-packed ball, battle could be joined in earnest. And was.
The locals lay in ambush behind the drifts when school was over for the day, and if they weren’t wary the ‘vacuees were caught by a sudden attack, which was often quite dangerous, for when a snowball struck hard it could cut.
The first time Norman ran back to Mr Ray’s house with blood streaming from a gash on his forehead, Mrs Ray was cross with him.
‘Don’t come running to me for sympathy,’ she said. ‘If you will play rough games that’s what you’ll have to expect. Go and clean yourself up and don’t get blood all over everything.’
The second time, when both children were cut, they cleaned themselves with handfuls of snow and didn’t say anything when they got back.
By now their despair was total and numbing. The longer this evacuation went on the more like a trap it felt. There was no one they could tell and nowhere they could escape and the war was still ‘on’. Sir said so. And it was no good complaining about the cold because everybody in England was cold. Sir told them that too.
In Greenwich it was Peggy who found it particularly hard to keep warm.
For once in her life Flossie Furnivall approved of the bad weather. She and Mrs Roderick were convinced that the Jerries wouldn’t send their bombers over in a snowstorm, and now that they’d both got their little pocket torches and a secret supply of No 8 batteries they were ready for anything. The cinemas were open every afternoon and some of the films were really lovely with dancing and singing and such pretty clothes. It quite took you out of yourself and it was cosy all sitting close together on those nice plush seats.
‘If you ask me,’ she said, whenever anyone complained, ‘this cold can last as long as it likes.’
‘If you ask me,’ Peggy said, ‘it can stop tomorrow. I’m sick of it.’
The warden’s post at the flats had been draughty in the autumn, but now it was hung with icicles inside and out. Even with mitts and gloves on her hands her fingers were numb with cold within minutes of coming on duty. Charlie Goodall invested in a Thermos flask and provided hot coffee for the night-shift, but they were still long hours and they passed with glacier slowness.
Flossie knitted thick gloves for her and an even thicker muffler and knee-length socks to wear under her Wellingtons but the cold penetrated every single garment however thick. And to make matters worse Jim’s leave was cancelled because of the weather.
‘Pretty ropey here,’ he wrote from Catterick. ‘The oil is so cold it keeps congealing and then the engines won’t start.’
Pretty ropey was an understatement. They spent the winter dealing with flat starter-motors, burst valves, and congealed oil. The wind whistled across the airfield unobstructed, and as the temperature of the aircraft metal was usually several degrees below freezing, their fingers went numb within a few minutes of starting work. And there was nothing they could do to lower the viscosity of the oil. They tried a mobile heater to warm it before they transferred it into the aircraft’s tank, but unexpected scramble exercises made that method impractical. They tried canvas covers designed to fit the engines, cockpit, main-plane and tailplane, and even the propeller blades, but they weren’t the solution either. When they got damp they froze nearly solid, and then it took far too long to undo the lacing and release the plane for action.
Several times a day, the propellers had to be turned by hand to break the cold seal of the oil in the cylinders, and then once they were started the engines had to be run excessively to warm up, and that caused problems too. There was never any end to it because the fighters had to be on almost perpetual stand-by.
But the one consolation in all this was that the phoney war continued. The fighters were on stand-by but the German bombers didn’t arrive.
‘We’ve run through the rule book,’ Jim wrote to Peggy, ‘and now we’re thrown back on our own resources. That’s what happens with a combination of war and foul weather. You improvise. Most of us here are pretty brassed off what with the snow and no leave. Still it can’t last for ever. I keep lighting two fags every time and then I don’t know what to do with the other one. I haven’t kissed you for months! Roll on the spring. The minute the thaw starts I shall be knocking on your door, to see if you’ve thawed out too.’
But when the thaw eventually began, it wasn’t Jim who came knocking on Peggy’s door, just as she’d got home from night-shift one morning, it was Sid Owen.
‘Off ter France in a few days,’ he explained. ‘Embarkation leave, this is.’ He looked very smart in his uniform but there was something odd about his expression that put Peggy on her guard. If she hadn’t known what a bold man he was she’d have thought he was anxious, the way he kept wrinkling his brows and looking away from her.
‘Wish you luck,’ she said, wondering what he really wanted. She felt too tired to want to entertain him for long but there was nobody else to do it. Baby was at work and Mum had gone off to get the shopping
‘Thing is,’ he began, frowning again. ‘Thing is, I got a favour to ask.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s my Joan you see,’ he said. ‘She ain’t exactly in the pink nowadays. Leastways I don’t think she is. Always on about the kids and whether they’re all right an’ that sort a think. So what I was wondering was, could you keep an eye on her for me? Just till I get back.’
‘Of course,’ Peggy said at once, smiling at him with the first real warmth she’d shown towards him since he married her sister. Fancy him looking after Joan like this. Perhaps she’d misjudged him all these years. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll all look after her.’
‘Ta,’ he said. ‘I knew if I came an’ saw you … ’
CHAPTER 24
Once she’d had her first much-thumbed letter from ‘BEF in France’, Joan wrote and told the kids that their father was on active service. It was a proud moment for her and she wanted them to share it. ‘Your daddy is in France with the army’, she wrote. ‘They are going to beat Hitler and then the war will be over and you can come home.’
Yvonne read the entire letter without help and showed Norman the words where it said ‘your daddy is in France with the army’ so that he could decipher them too, and when they’d both read it several times they took it to school to show their teachers, walking between the wakening hedges with the precious paper clutched in Yvonne’s right hand. There were primroses under the hedges and the apple trees were already putting out pink and white blossom and Daddy was going to beat Hitler. After that awful winter things were coming right again.
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��You must be very proud of him,’ Sir said, when Yvonne showed him the letter. ‘You must write to your mother and tell her how proud you are, mustn’t you. Or better still you can write a message on your Easter card. We’re all going to make Easter cards this morning, when we’ve done our sums.’
‘Are we going to post them?’ Yvonne asked, seeing hope of deliverance at last.
‘We’re going to pack them up in a big parcel,’ the teacher told her, ‘and send them all to Mr Griffin back in London and he’s going to deliver them for us.’
‘Can I write anything I like?’
‘Of course.’
So when the card was drawn and she’d coloured it neatly and Sir had folded it in two for her, she sat quietly at her desk and wrote her first uncensored message to her mother.
Joan came home from work that evening tired to the bone. They’d had a terrible day in the factory. The new explosives they were working with were so potent that they all had to wear special cream on their hands and faces for protection, but that day her skin was irritated despite the cream, and the smell in the workshop had made her feel sick all afternoon.
When she saw the envelope lying on the doormat at the foot of the stairs addressed in Yvonne’s lovely round familiar handwriting she was cheered at once. She stooped to pick the letter up, moving slowly because her back was aching and opened it with her thumb as she was climbing the stairs, relishing the moment and feeling just a little closer to her distant children even though they were only linked by paper. An Easter card, she thought, dear little girl. I’ll bet she’s done it herself, with that yellow chick drawn so neat and everything.
She half filled the kettle and set it on the stove to boil, then she sat down at the kitchen table to read her message. The pathetic words gave her such a shock, it was like being punched in the stomach. ‘Plese coem and get us,’ Yvonne had written. ‘We are unhappy hear. Mr and Mrs Ray are nasty. With love from Yvonne. Plese, plese coem.’
She put the card in her bag and without even stopping for the cup of tea she needed so much she set off for Greenwich.
To her anxious eyes, the kitchen at number six seemed to be full of noise and people. Jim was home on his long-awaited spring leave and he and Peggy were sitting at the kitchen table eating an early supper before she went on duty. Mrs Geary was knitting in the corner by the wireless set, and Flossie and Baby were putting on their make-up ready for a night at the pictures.
Joan plunged into her news without greeting or preliminary. ‘They want to come home,’ she said, ‘I’ve had this awful letter. They’re unhappy they say. You look. What am I going to do?’
Flossie put her lipstick on the mantelpiece and swept across to read the card. ‘Poor little beggars,’ she said. ‘They’re unhappy right enough. No mistake about that. Turn the wireless down a bit, Mrs G.’
‘I knew it,’ Joan mourned. ‘‘‘I always said it was a mistake, only he wouldn’t have it. What am I going to do?’
‘Leave ’em where they are,’ Peggy advised, unconsciously using the words of the ARP poster. ‘They’re bound to be homesick now and then, anybody would, but at least they’re safe.’
‘I don’t know,’ Joan worried, dithering beside the table.
‘It’s nice writing,’ Baby said when she’d read the card. She felt obliged to make some contribution and didn’t know what else to say.
‘Oh dear oh dear,’ Joan said.
‘Have a cup a’ tea, lovey,’ Mrs Geary offered. ‘There’s one in the pot.’
But it was Jim who made the most pertinent remark.
‘What do you want to do?’ he asked.
Joan’s answer was immediate and honest. ‘Go straight down there an’ see for myself.’
‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ he said. ‘First thing.’
‘We?’ Joan asked.
‘I’ll come with you.’
How straight and quick he is, Peggy thought. Make a decision, act on it, no messing about. Her own advice seemed negative now beside his good sense. ‘I’ll come too,’ she said, making her own decision equally quickly and when he looked a query at her. ‘It’s all right. I can sleep on the train. Well, cat-nap anyway.’
‘You better stay overnight,’ Mum said to Joan. ‘I’ll make up the camp bed, then you can make an early start.’
So they went to Myrtlebury on the first train out of Greenwich the next morning. It was a cool spring day, all gold and blue and green and white, a day of budded daffodils and tender primroses and willow catkins trembling like lambs’ tails under a blue sky full of white clouds billowing clean as sheets. A hopeful day, Peggy thought, striding along the dusty lane towards Myrtlebury with Jim close beside her, hopeful and peaceful and miles away from air raid shelters and tin helmets and the long cold watches of the night.
But Joan carried guilt and anxiety through the Sussex lanes like a yoke across her bowed shoulders, as the familiar smells of the countryside rose to plague her, damp earth and decaying leaves, middens and muck heaps, stale straw and stagnant pools. There was a dung spreader at work in one field they passed, tossing manure into the air in dark pungent gobbets and she could hear sheep bleating pitifully somewhere out of sight.
‘It’s so cruel in the country,’ she said as memory stuck pins in her mind. ‘I should never’ve sent ’em, only he would have it. I always knew it was wrong. It’s all very well people saying send ’em, they don’t know what it’s like, and I do. I always knew it was wrong.’
They let her grumble, he out of compassion for her anxiety, she because she remembered Tillingbourne.
And presently they came to the village school and the sound of children chanting tables.
Joan went straight in through the half-open door, her face eager and her feet quick now that she’d arrived at last. But she emerged minutes later to tell the others that the London children weren’t there.
‘Only the locals in the morning,’ she said. ‘Our kids come in in the afternoon.’
‘Where are they now?’ Peggy asked.
‘In their billets, the teacher said.’
So they followed the lane a little further. It was a surprise to all three of them when they rounded the bend in the road and discovered that the address that Joan and Peggy had been writing to all these months belonged to an undertaker. And their second surprise was the sight of Mr Ray, who came to answer Joan’s knock wearing his obsequious professional face, drooping with assumed sorrow.
‘How can I help you, Madam?’
‘I’ve come to see my children,’ Joan said, standing belligerently on his doorstep, feet astride.
‘Children?’ he said, misunderstanding her. ‘I don’t believe we have any children in our chapel of rest at present. Always such a sadness, children.’
‘My children,’ Joan said, scowling at his idiocy. ‘Yvonne and Norman Owen. My children.’
Understanding dawned visibly. The expression changed from unctuous to guarded, and then, after a quick glance at Jim’s uniformed belligerence, with equal rapidity from guarded to welcoming. ‘My dear Mrs Owen, of course.’
‘Where are they?’ Joan said, setting her arms akimbo.
‘Oh,’ Mr Ray said vaguely, his watery eyes flickering, ‘somewhere or other. Out at play you know. We don’t proscribe them in any way. Come in, why don’t you, Mrs Owen? I’ll send someone out to find them.’
‘We’ll look for ’em,’ Joan said to Jim and Peggy, ‘and we’ll all come back when we’ve found ’em.’
‘Where to?’ Jim asked. As a townie he was lost among all these fields.
Fortunately Joan and Peggy knew where to look. ‘Water’s our best bet,’ Joan said. ‘There’s got to be a stream or a river somewhere.’
And sure enough there was a group of scruffy children paddling in a rather muddy stream just below the undertaker’s house.
‘Yvey?’ their leader said. ‘No, Miss. She ain’t here.’
‘Probably got the stick,’ another urchin offered.
Joan’s heart contra
cted with rage and misery. The stick. She knew it. Hadn’t she always known it? ‘Who gives her the stick?’
‘Her foster mum.’
Oh she does, does she? Joan thought. I’ll see about her. But first things first. ‘Where does she go when she’s had the stick?’ she asked.
‘Up the barn most times,’ the urchin told her, pointing at a distant building covered in decaying thatch.
They ran to the barn, stumbling through the weeds and willows at the water’s edge, tripping over fallen branches, leaping forward along the slippery path.
But at the barn door, Joan stopped and signalled to the others not to make a sound because she could see her children squatting among the straw. They had a jam-jar full of water set between them and Yvonne was bathing her brother’s legs with a dock leaf. Even from the door and in the half light of the barn Joan could see the red weals and purple bruises on their arms and legs.
There was no doubt now what had to be done. No doubt at all.
‘Yvey! Norman!’ she called. ‘It’s Mummy. I’ve come to take you home.’
They hurled themselves into her arms, weeping with relief, and soon all five of them were sitting on the straw cuddling and kissing and examining injuries, talking and weeping and laughing all at once.
‘Take ’em to the station,’ Jim said to Joan when the first flush of the reunion was over. ‘Me an’ Peg’ll pick up their things.’
‘I’ve got a score to settle with that old humbug and his wife,’ Joan said.
‘You stay with the kids,’ Jim told her. ‘We’ll settle the score, won’t we, Peggy?’
But settling scores with Mr Ray was like picking up jelly in a sieve. He oozed away from every accusation.
‘All children need discipline, as I’m sure you’ll agree,’ he said, when he’d ushered them both into his sitting room and Jim had told him they’d seen the results of his caning.
‘Discipline’s one thing,’ Jim said angrily. ‘Brutality’s another.’
‘Oh come now, not brutality,’ Mr Ray demurred. ‘You make me sound like a Nazi.’
London Pride Page 34
