by Katie King
Peggy had been so taken aback at June’s generous offer that she hadn’t known what to say, and had been left gawping with her mouth open and closed like a fish. The offer also implied that Peggy would be in Harrogate for some time to come, and while she understood this in the intellectual sense, in practical terms she always felt as if it wouldn’t be long until she and Holly and the twins were back in the crammed streets of south-east London that were so close to her heart, and she could go to see Barbara for a pep talk whenever she was feeling a bit down, which had sometimes happened since Holly’s arrival.
When, after a while, Peggy still hadn’t said anything, June had had to suggest that Peggy think about it for a while and then they could talk about it again when she didn’t feel to be quite so much on the back foot.
‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, Peggy,’ June added as she stood up and adjusted her apron ready to go back to the café’s kitchen, ‘but you don’t seem quite yourself today…’
June Blenkinsop had hit the nail on the head. Peggy absolutely wasn’t herself. No, not at all. The partnership discussion with June had been very flattering, naturally, and it had given Peggy a lot to mull over as she had never thought of herself as any sort of businesswoman. But she’d been a schoolteacher in Bermondsey for nearly a decade and so it was hard for her to think of herself as anything else.
Not that Peggy could do much thinking on what June had said just at the moment, as the truth of it was that she had too much else to worry about.
Normally, when Peggy pushed her daughter along, she felt consumed with love for her, as well as a very, very lucky mother indeed. Every few paces she would look down at Holly and make a funny face or say her name, and then the two would smile gaily at each other. Holly’s unexpected arrival on a snowy Christmas Eve had been traumatic to say the least, and indeed it was only the quick thinking of the children at Tall Trees that had saved both Peggy and Holly’s lives. Over a month in hospital under the watchful eye of the wonderfully sympathetic young doctor, James Legard, had meant that Peggy left the hospital feeling recovered and much stronger than she had felt when she had gone in, and with an always peckish although still tiny baby in her arms. But this was understandable as Holly had arrived dangerously early.
Not a day went by when Peggy didn’t remember what a very close call it had turned out to be for both of them, or the many ways in which she would be forever grateful to all concerned. Connie and Jessie, her niece and nephew, had been wonderful, and Peggy felt she might not be around today if they, and their friends, hadn’t acted so quickly and in such a grown-up way when they found her collapsed.
She knew too that her husband Bill was delighted to have a daughter, especially as they had had to wait many long years before, out of the blue, Peggy fell pregnant. They had been so thrilled with the news of Peggy’s pregnancy, as this had seemed to cement the cracks that had been starting to enter the marriage, cracks of frustration and thwarted hopes at their childlessness.
Bill had only been able to get away to pay them just the one visit since Christmas (and it was now spring moving into summer), catching a coach and then a train up to Harrogate one frosty morning in mid-January. After they had hugged and he had chucked Holly under the chin, he had commented on the several evacuees and their parents on the station waiting to catch the train out of the town to return home as more and more parents from the big towns and cities were coming forward to reclaim their kiddies.
But Peggy had hardly taken in what he was saying about the evacuees, so wrapped up was she in the precious sight of Holly’s tiny hand firmly clasping one of Bill’s giant fingers, the gold signet ring on his pinky glinting to remind him and Peggy of their marriage, and the salt tears slipping down Bill’s cheeks as he gazed lovingly down at his daughter.
Just that one perfect memory of a daughter reaching for a father’s finger had been worth a thousand hours of letter-writing and longings for her husband to be by her side. Peggy had allowed her own tears of joy and gratitude to well up as Bill had put his arm around her and pulled her close, kissing her brow and telling Peggy tearfully in a voice choked with gratitude what a clever, clever girl she was to have produced such a beautiful baby, and how lucky Holly was to have Peggy for a mother. It had felt a wonderful moment.
Now, Holly was lying on her back in the bulky black perambulator, looking for all the world as if she was trying to catch her mother’s eye in order to give her a gummy grin.
She tried waving her small pink fists in the air and then putting one hand in her mouth, and when that didn’t work, a spot of further kicking that was so energetic that her thin crocheted pram blanket slipped completely askew. The silken bow that tied on a white bootee that Aunty Barbara had knitted loosened, and Holly did her best to work it off as she was sure Peggy wouldn’t be able to ignore that.
But Holly’s efforts, no matter how determined the baby was, were destined to fail, as Peggy’s brow remained wrinkled and her dark eyes anxious, as she stared unseeing into the distance while huffing and puffing the perambulator up the hill.
The reason for Peggy’s pensive expression and clenched jaw this sunny May day was because first thing that morning she had received a cryptic card from Bill, who was still located somewhere in the UK (she thought, although Bill had never been exactly specific as to quite what he was up to) as he had intimated he was now training tank drivers somewhere near the coast of Suffolk. Or might it be Norfolk?
Peggy had felt unsettled since the moment she’d laid eyes on the card. Somehow even before she picked it up to read, it seemed to beckon menacingly at her, driving thoughts asunder of the new pony and trap she could hear the children talking about, or Gracie wanting to have use of the perambulator in the afternoon. And reading Bill’s scribbled words had given Peggy no reassurance at all.
Before he’d been called up from Bermondsey for his military training, Bill had been a bus conductor on the number 12 bus that went from south-east London to the West End, or occasionally he was put on the number 63, and he’d hugely enjoyed the daily banter with his passengers. Sometimes, if the depot was short of drivers, he’d not put up a fuss if he’d been asked to get behind the steering wheel instead, even though Bill had often said to Peggy that it was nowhere near as much of a hoot driving a double-decker as it was dealing with all and sundry as he stood in his smart conductor’s uniform ready to take their fares. Once war had been declared and it became obvious to the authorities what his previous job had been, it made sense therefore to all that Bill turned his experience into helping less experienced drivers gain the knowhow of manhandling heavy vehicles. And that really was all that Peggy knew about what he did these days.
Bill was no letter-writer at the best of times, and so for Peggy to receive a card from him, the second in a week, was unusual to say the least. In fact it had never happened before.
The card merely said: ‘Peggy, we need to have a word – I will telephone you on Sunday, Bill’.
In fact it was so out of character for Bill to contact her again so soon after the last missive that now she was unable to dispel a niggle of worry that had multiplied and grown over the morning so it was now a seething mass squirming uncomfortably just beneath her ribcage, increasing in intensity with every passing hour. She couldn’t stop chewing over the fact that on Bill’s card there had been etched no ‘love’, ‘fondest wishes’ or ‘missing you’, or even ‘thinking about our dear Holly’, the last of which was a given in his communications these days. Most concerning though was that there hadn’t been the whiff of even one ‘X’ either, not to her, and – unbelievably – not to Holly.
Something was up, Peggy knew as surely as eggs were eggs.
And she was just as certain that whatever it was that had provoked Bill to contact her so soon after his last card (which had arrived only on the previous Monday and had been gaily filled with casual chatter about card games and japes to do with the NAAFI, before sending love to her and Holly, with a multitude of kisses) was lik
ely to be something that she wasn’t going to like in the slightest.
Peggy rarely experienced the sensation of a twinge of piercing worry as she was naturally quite a calm and resourceful person, but whenever she had had such a stab of anxiety in the past, it had always proved to be the precursor of something extremely trying at best, and downright infuriating at worst.
As she manoeuvred the perambulator into the drive at Tall Trees and headed toward the back yard (they all tended to use the back door to enter the house through the kitchen rather than the imposing front door that scraped heavily across the stone flags of the hall), Peggy was so deep in her thoughts that she didn’t even notice the upended trap in the corner of the back yard, its wooden shafts pointing up to the sky as if to announce it was keeping its own special lookout for enemy aircraft high above them in the endless blue sky. She and Holly had left Tall Trees to head for June’s teashop that morning before the children had come down to breakfast, and since then she had completely forgotten about the new arrival.
The small chestnut mare, only just big enough to be able to angle her head upwards so that she could look over the rather high half-door (clearly made for a creature larger than she), thoughtfully watched Peggy bounce the pram across the bumpy yard.
She almost let out a neigh just in case Peggy had a stray carrot lurking in her pocket, but there was something so distracted about Peggy’s demeanour that the whip-smart pony quickly divined it wasn’t worth bothering.
Peggy shoved the brake on the pram down with her foot and gathered Holly into her arms, not noticing the delicate blanket hadn’t been grasped too as was usual, or that there was now a bootee amiss.
Holly didn’t appreciate not being the centre of her mother’s attention, and she gave a little cry just as a reminder that she was there and that she was looking forward to her lunchtime feed.
Peggy didn’t say the soothing ‘shush, poppet’ or ‘there’s my girl’ that Holly expected, or give her a jiggle to make her laugh, or swing her high into the air.
Instead her mother’s face remained stony as she clutched Holly a little tighter and concentrated on balancing her in her arms along with her handbag and a lentil ‘surprise’ in a tin pie-dish that she had bought from June for their supper later on, whilst also trying to open the kitchen door.
There was only one thing for it, and Holly filled her baby lungs to capacity so that she could produce the first in a rapidly escalating series of loud wails that no mother could ignore.
Laying her ears flat against her head, Milburn dipped her head back inside the box and dropped her nose down to inspect her empty bucket just in case she had missed a morsel. She couldn’t compete with that racket and she wasn’t going to try.
Chapter Four
The next day arrived, which was Sunday, and the sense of excitement from the previous morning still held strong amongst the children, not least as there was due to be another arrival at Tall Trees.
Larry was moving back up to Yorkshire to take up residence with them once again, and everyone was looking forward to it as the atmosphere just hadn’t felt the same in the rectory since he had departed several months earlier.
Larry had attended Jessie and Connie’s school back in Bermondsey, and so the previous September he’d been evacuated up to Harrogate along with the twins, Angela, and indeed the rest of their school too.
Larry had had a chequered time in Harrogate, having been bullied at first and then later moving to Tall Trees where life settled for him a little. But with the Phoney War dragging on and on, his mother Susan had arrived at the end of January to take him with her, back to London.
Once Larry had been waved off on the train Jessie and Connie had been very subdued for the rest of that day. Although they suspected that Larry might be going back to a rocky situation inside his family home, as his father was known for being a lout, they couldn’t help but wish that they were also on the train heading south with the prospect of seeing their own mother, Barbara, and father, Ted, very soon and moving back into their two-up two-down in Jubilee Street in Bermondsey to be a proper family again. Harrogate and Tall Trees was fine as far as it went, the glum faces of the twins seemed to say when they were alone together, but despite all that Roger and Mabel did to make them feel settled, it just wasn’t their home, was it? And they did miss their parents terribly. Peggy knew what they meant – she had mixed feelings about their evacuation too.
Unfortunately for Larry, the situation he found back in London turned out to be every bit as unpleasant as he’d feared it would be. Peggy knew that Larry’s father, Trevor, had been banned several times from the Jolly, and other public houses too, but business was business and somebody such as Trevor did spend a lot of money, so a temporary ban was more a rap on the knuckles for poor behaviour rather than anything permanent.
Peggy had taught Larry back in Bermondsey, and she had once had a worrisome run-in with Trevor in the street a day after she had encouraged Larry to take a storybook home so that he could finish off the chapter he’d begun reading aloud in class and had been very taken with. A clearly tipsy Trevor had demanded aggressively, even going so far as to poke Peggy in the arm with a ragged-nailed nicotine-stained finger, to know if she could be so good as to explain why it was that she was wasting Larry’s time with something so pig-ugly useless as a piece of make-believe. Peggy tried to say that The Family from One-End Street had a lot to recommend it, and that Larry’s engagement was excellent news.
Trevor hadn’t been having any of it, with the result that the next day Peggy had had to say to Larry during morning playtime that perhaps it would be a good idea if he tried to get all his reading done in the classroom during the day and not take any storybooks home again. It was no surprise to Peggy that Larry never willingly picked up a storybook in her classroom again. She had always felt bad that she hadn’t stuck up for Larry more, but, although she would never admit this out loud to anyone, she had felt scared and intimidated by the gruff tones and beery stench of Larry’s father.
Once Larry was back in London Peggy suspected that, older and wiser, he’d be less tolerant of Trevor’s evil moods. Peggy’s intuition proved correct and Larry’s mother had telephoned Mabel from the Jolly – it was actually the first time Susan had ever made a telephone call off her own bat – when, clearly at the end of her tether, she had asked in a quavering voice if there were any way that Larry could come back to Tall Trees for a little while? Mabel confessed to Peggy that she’d thought she’d heard a muffled sob, before Larry’s mother added in a tight voice, ‘Only until things settle at ’ome, that is, you unnerstan’. I’m sure it’ll calm directly.’
Roger and Mabel had been very generous in welcoming a gaggle of strangers into their home, and after a sticky period where their good intentions had been tainted by son Tommy’s vindictive response to the arrival of a lot of strange-seeming children from London arriving at Tall Trees, eventually an easier equilibrium had been established. The atmosphere lightened further once Aiden Kell and Larry had moved in. And then Angela had arrived a couple of months later to make the ensemble complete, and although her wheelchair meant she couldn’t share Connie’s bedroom upstairs, she had fitted in with no trouble.
Tommy’s large bedroom had been made into a dorm for the four boys, and although they could be loud at times and the bedroom always looked fearsomely untidy, Mabel having to shut the door on it every time she walked by despite her high tolerance for clutter, there was something about the dynamic that made the lads all rub along together without too much ribbing or outright argument under the new regime, and so Larry had been missed when he had gone back to London.
Connie slept in her little box room at the far end of the corridor to the boys’ room, while Angela was in a snug on the ground floor, not far from the large kitchen.
The two bedrooms on the second floor, up above the other bedrooms and high in the eaves, had Peggy and Holly in one, with Gracie and baby Jack in the other. Having to navigate so many stairs obvi
ously wasn’t ideal for the new mothers, but once they had moved into Tall Trees proper, across from their previous room above the stables during the cold weather, somehow they had never moved out of the main house and back into their old lodgings. As Gracie joked, all the stairs helped them get their figures back double-quick after the babies had arrived.
Tall Trees was definitely a full house these days, with or without Larry, and Peggy sometimes felt there were just too many people jammed together under the one roof, but then she would chastise herself for being so uppity as she knew that few evacuees had been welcomed the way they had by Roger and Mabel. There was a war on, after all, and there were many far worse places to be than in a large and trifle chaotic rectory, with chickens in the garden providing daily eggs, and constant fresh greens from a sizeable vegetable patch that they all took turns in digging out (Peggy thought that was the term) and planting up.
With a bit of luck they’d all be home for Christmas, Peggy sometimes sighed to herself when stuck in a queue for the bathroom. Then she would remember she had thought precisely the same thing the previous autumn; and look how that had worked out.
Anyway, nobody was thinking much about any of this as while Roger was taking his Sunday morning services at church, the atmosphere back at the rectory was one of excitement about Larry returning.
There were crisply ironed sheets on his bunk, and a clean folded towel on the pillow.
‘I know, let’s put somethin’ in Larry’s bed ter gi’ ’im a surprise later,’ said Tommy to Jessie, once Aiden – who could be a bit of a killjoy, he was so sensible – had gone down to feed the hens along with Connie.
‘What about Connie’s hairbrush? Nice and bristly if you’re not expecting it.’ Jessie’s eyes twinkled at the thought.
