The Evacuee Summer

by Katie King

  Peggy paused and looked downwards towards the quivering hem of her skirt caused by her trembling knees, and then she continued bitterly before Bill could say anything in his own defence. ‘That little tart. That horrible stupid little tart. Maureen? Maureen… Maureen! What sort of name is that? And you’re no better than she! You’re a pathetic excuse for a husband, Bill Delbert. What could that trollop Maureen have ever seen in you? And what did I see in you? You tell me now, this very minute, Bill Delbert, precisely when that stupid strumpet is having your baby?’

  Peggy was close to screeching, unable to control her emotions in any way, although in this maelstrom of feeling she remembered guiltily for a split second that once she’d actually had a very nice friend at teacher training college called Maureen and so actually really she had nothing against women with the name, other than this particular piece of work, of course.

  Then Peggy realised with a whump that almost made her physically crumple, forcing her to grab the back of Roger’s desk chair in support, that at the very moment she herself had been close to rapture with a burst of sunshine springing from her heart at seeing a tiny Holly reaching innocently for her father’s finger when Bill came to meet his daughter for the very first time, the truth of it was that her supposedly loyal husband was nursing, close to his heart, the dangerous viperous secret of his infidelity and another woman opening her legs for him as she beckoned to him from under the covers. And so a precious memory that Peggy had believed was good and pure had been, in a crushing twinkling of an eye, tainted and besmirched for all time, leaving her flattened and despondent.

  Peggy felt a shriek of anguish building in her, but she forced herself to hold it in, although her hand holding the telephone was vibrating violently with the effort.

  ‘I noticed Maureen were plump round the middle a few days ago an’ she says she’s got three months to go.’ Bill sounded glum as he went on regardless, and as if he’d given in.

  Then Peggy did the mathematics in her head, and suddenly her need to know any further grisly details of the affair evaporated into a puff of nothingness. She understood that Maureen had almost definitely already been pregnant when Bill travelled to Harrogate to see Holly. It may be illogical, but the very idea of him playing the doting daddy in Yorkshire having already fathered somebody else’s baby was nothing short of abhorrent in Peggy’s eyes.

  ‘Well, you’ve made your bed, Bill Delbert, and now you have to lie in it. For your information, I shall take care that you never see Holly again,’ Peggy declared.

  Bill let out what she could only think of as a howl, and an instant later Peggy heard the sound of shattering glass as presumably her husband had in temper flung his beer bottle furiously to the concrete floor of the telephone box.

  ‘Holly is innocent and untainted by anything,’ Peggy went on resolutely, as if Bill were standing there eager to hear what she had to say. ‘She certainly doesn’t need to be contaminated by somebody as morally reprehensible as you, not now, and not ever, Bill. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?! And as for myself, I hope never to see you again. I don’t care what it costs, and I don’t care if I have to work for the rest of my life to pay it off and I don’t care how people will look down on me for being divorced. Your monkey business with that MaureenFromTheNAAFI tart is going to cost you, and I’m not thinking about money.

  ‘Our treasure is Holly, and as far as you are concerned she’s been thrown to the wolves by you, and there’s no return from that. I really hope that MaureenFromTheNAAFI gave you the very best time ever between the sheets, as if she didn’t, well, words fail me.’

  It was very unlike Peggy to veer onto such coarse territory, but she wanted oh so badly to shock Bill.

  ‘She didn’t, Peg, she were nothing like as good as—’ he said weakly.

  ‘Tough, Bill. Tough.’ Peggy’s tone was brutal as she cut him dead.

  She willed herself not to sob, but to avoid the risk she didn’t give Bill the opportunity to say anything else.

  As, surprisingly softly, she replaced the handset on the telephone, Peggy heard Bill’s last-ditch plaintive appeal sound increasingly tinny as she moved the handset from her ear and put it back in its place on the base of the telephone, his ‘But I love yo—’ being sliced off decisively.

  She stood head bowed and statue-still at first. But it wasn’t long before Peggy started to sway from side to side, and she had to grab hold of the edge of the desk to steady herself, as wave after wave of fresh emotion swept over her, and then washed back through what felt like every fibre of her very being.

  And then with a long clamped-down shriek of what felt like agony Peggy picked up the closest thing to her, which was the leather desk tidy in which Roger kept the pencils that he used to draft his sermons, and she hurled the whole lot with as much force as she could muster against the wall, the pencils cascading to the ground and then bouncing merrily around, with Roger’s carefully sharpened lead points shearing off the pencils as they smashed against the stone flags of the floor.

  The crash was a surprisingly loud noise that cut across the calm of Tall Trees and wrecked the peace.

  But Peggy couldn’t hear anything now, such was the rushing of blood in her ears. Keening desperately, she continued to rock both left and right.

  She picked up the pile of scrap paper on which Roger would write and she rent it this way and that, virtually growling with the effort of ripping it into tiny unusable squares, and then with a final shove of her elbow she cast the telephone and handset off the desk, the loud crash and the strange hawk of the telephone’s ring of surprise at such harsh treatment finally quelling Peggy’s temper.

  Exhausted, she sank down onto Roger’s desk chair, with the chaos of his desk settling askew on the floor around her, and bitter sobs shuddering her slim shoulders and setting her curls a-quiver as she leant forward on her folded arms and howled, wishing herself to be any place but where she was.

  Roger and Mabel, who had been inspecting the vegetable patches on their way back from church and had only just come through the kitchen door, came running, their faces panicked at the unusual sounds erupting from within the study.

  However, when Roger saw the state Peggy was in, he stayed on the other side of the door and stood aside to make way for his wife, as he beckoned Mabel forward in place of himself.

  He knew Mabel would be much better at the helm of this situation than he.

  As the older woman crouched down to clasp an exhausted Peggy to her breast without saying a word, Peggy gave into ugly, animal noises and a fresh avalanche of tears.

  A worry-faced Roger was left to creep into the office as silently as he could, stepping behind the women so that he could replace the receiver on the telephone as he always felt panicky at the thought of a parishioner in distress being unable to reach him, although he left the telephone on the floor, after which, without catching the eye of either woman, he hotfooted it to the kitchen in order to deal with baby Holly.

  She had been rudely woken by all the kerfuffle in the study and was keen to let everybody know this, bellowing with all the strength she could muster in her little lungs in tandem with the throaty blubs of her distraught mother just across the passageway.

  Chapter Six

  Over at the train station Jessie and Angela remained outside with a bored-looking Milburn, while the other children headed onto the platform to wait for Larry.

  After Jessie had gently teased Angela that he and Connie thought that maybe Tommy had a bit of a soft spot for her, Angela went very pink, leaving Jessie to guess whether she might reciprocate these feelings.

  Angela noticed Jessie’s expression reveal all too clearly that he was pondering what she and Tommy thought about each other, and so as a distraction she quickly reminded Jessie again of lots of the things she had learnt in the library about ponies, which seemed to make much more sense now that they had Milburn standing in front of them

  When she had run out of useful titbits to share, she was relieved to see
her tactic had worked, as Jessie said that he wondered if Milburn was well behaved when ridden, as he rather fancied a go.

  At this Milburn gave Jessie what seemed like such a look of disgust, followed by a shake of her head that jangled the metal bit in her mouth and set her springy mane and forelock bouncing as if to say No-o-o-o at the very thought, and both children couldn’t do anything but laugh.

  ‘She’s good, isn’t she?’ said Angela, and Milburn nodded.

  ‘Yes, she seems to be,’ Jessie agreed, although the moment was immediately somewhat spoilt as Milburn swiftly dipped her nose into the wicker basket of a passing woman and nimbly lifted out a greaseproof-paper-wrapped sandwich, much to the ire of the woman and the embarrassment of the children.

  Jessie wrestled the package from Milburn’s mouth, and then he offered it back to its owner, who took one look at the slobbered paper and the indent of the pony’s teeth and said crossly, ‘Those were fer my Bert, but ’e won’t want them now, will ’e? An wot’ll he ’ave fer his dinner now, an’ ’e’s on blackout checkin’ after? T’ pony had better have ’em, I s’ppose, an’ mind you keep more control of ’im in future. There’s a war on, you know.’

  The affronted woman stalked away, and Jessie and Angela exchanged glances and then as one they looked accusingly at Milburn, who was concentrating very hard on the package in Jessie’s hand.

  ‘I suppose I ought to have paid more attention to Milburn,’ admitted Jessie, sounding a little guilty.

  ‘Poor Burt,’ said Angela, and the mere mention of him made the children hoot.

  Jessie unwrapped the sandwiches, which had reconstituted egg as the filling. He and Angela gave the top one to Milburn, who snaffled it greedily, but they decided the bottom one wasn’t too squished for themselves to eat and so they shared it quickly, keen to finish before the others came back.

  They talked then of the posters they could see up, seeing the irony of a poster urging a visit to the Yorkshire dales smack bang alongside a poster of a British Tommy questioning ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ Angela angled her chair slightly differently so that she could see the other side of the station’s entrance, where there was another poster urging people to bring their own cups and glasses to railway refreshment rooms as they were often running short, but the children couldn’t find much to interest them or to joke about in this last poster.

  After what seemed hours, there was the sound of an ancient puffing billy chugging slowly into the station, at which Milburn held her head very high, her small ears so pointed towards where she could hear the unfamiliar sound coming from, that their darker tips looked to be almost touching.

  As the sound of the final burst of steam from the train’s engine gave way to the noise of doors opening and the passengers alighting, Angela started to say, ‘It won’t be long before Lar—’ when Connie’s unmistakeable voice rang out in a loud and high-pitched yelp that sounded as heartfelt as it was hard to interpret.

  It was such an unexpected outburst that Jessie immediately felt queasy as these days, like so many other people, he tended to overreact to any unexpected shock, knowing that it could herald bad news, and he swung towards Angela, whereupon the children stared at each other with worried faces.

  Then Jessie sprang forward as he dropped the lead rope to Milburn’s halter so that it dangled in the road. Uncaring and with his thoughts of paying more attention to the pony completely forgotten, he fairly pelted towards the station platform to run to his twin’s aid.

  Angela apprehensively watched him go, and then as he raced inside and turned towards the platforms she saw him halt suddenly, his mouth open in obvious shock. Her heart lurched more stomach-churningly than before, and a rising panicky feeling made her tingly and jittery.

  Jessie ran forward again abruptly, but not before Angela had seen his face break into a tremendous grin as he stretched both arms out as wide as they could go.

  He does seem very pleased that Larry is coming back to Tall Trees to be with us all, thought Angela, the sickly feeling quickly dissolving and falling away.

  It wasn’t long before the reason for the excitement of Connie and Jessie became clear.

  Barbara and Ted had come all the way to Harrogate on a surprise visit to see the twins, and to catch up with Peggy and Holly too, of course. They had travelled up to Yorkshire from London on the train along with Larry.

  Neither of the twins would remove their arms to let their parents go from their hugs, they were so excited to see them.

  Barbara and Ted had spent a weekend with them at the end of January, as their train tickets had been funded for that journey by the government.

  Understandably, since then it had felt a very long four months for the ten-year-olds to be without their mother and father, instead having to make do with letters, and – joy! – on Easter Sunday, even a telephone call made from the Jolly for Barbara and Ted to say they hoped that Mabel’s Easter Egg hunt of hand-decorated hard-boiled eggs hidden in the garden was going to be fun.

  ‘My, look how you two have grown!’ said Barbara now, as despite having a shopping basket hooked into her elbow, she managed to put an arm around both of her children to pull them close.

  ‘You’re nearly as tall as yer ma, both of yer!’ Ted added, standing close. He was naturally a more reserved person than Barbara, but the tremor in his voice gave away how happy he was to see his children, and then he allowed himself a gentle pat of hello on each of the twins’ shoulders, just so that they knew how deeply he cared for them.

  Jessie and Connie were both too overcome to do anything more than grin at each of their parents with glee, as they both turned around to hug their father too, their eyes shining bright with the unexpected thrill of what had just happened.

  Jessie, who was more observant than Connie, noticed a few wrinkles at the corners of Barbara’s eyes that had not been there before the war, and some white hairs glinting in Ted’s short hair. He thought too that both of his parents seemed a bit smaller and very slightly shabbier than they had before, but Jessie was wise enough to know that maybe he had grown a little and that these days nobody could buy new clothes for best as often as they had done previously, and so most people were making do and mending to preserve outfits and shoes for as long as possible.

  Barbara and Ted felt just as overcome, although they were making a better fist of hiding their exuberant feelings. They really missed having their children at home, but Ted was convinced that the bombs would soon be falling on London and so Connie and Jessie were much less likely to come to physical harm, or worse (although that didn’t bear thinking about) if they stayed billeted in Harrogate. And although Barbara probably would have brought the children back to Bermondsey if it had been left up to her, she trusted Ted’s opinion and knew that he wouldn’t be so insistent if he didn’t really believe that Jubilee Street was going to be very vulnerable to aerial attack.

  Angela had no option other than to wait for them all to walk back to her, while she sat marooned in her wheelchair on its wheels as she noticed how alike Peggy and Barbara were, and how Jessie favoured his father’s colouring.

  Milburn’s lead rope was still hanging downwards but the pony hadn’t taken the opportunity to test her freedom and instead had edged over so that she was standing beside Angela, casting curious looks towards the new arrivals. Then the small mare shook her nose forwards and backward several times as if she rather approved of Ted looking strong and muscular in his Sunday-best suit and Barbara smart and pretty, with the sunshine highlighting her freshly pin-curled hair.

  ‘Blimey!’ yelled Larry, the second he spied the pony. And then a little more quietly but with an unmistakeable tone of wonder in his voice, ‘Blimey O’Reilly.’

  Milburn looked as if she were pretty much thinking the same thing as Larry headed towards her.

  ‘Larry, language please,’ Barbara reprimanded.

  She might as well have saved her breath as Larry looked around at his pals with a massive grin and then simply r
epeated ‘Blimey!’ again, although this time in the most excited tone of all, as if he were thinking of all sorts of things they could all get up to now that they looked as if they might have the cheeky-looking Milburn with them as a partner in crime.

  Milburn’s mischievous glint in her eye seemed to say that yes, she agreed with Larry, and that they only had to say the word and she’d be ready and willing for all manner of fun and frolics over the summer. Whatever japes they could think of would be all right with her, yes sirree.

  Larry appeared to everyone as if he had grown taller too, although his scrawnier frame, sunken cheeks, shadows smudged under his eyes and generally a more put-upon demeanour were a far cry from the bonny boy who had left them at Tall Trees earlier in the year.

  As Tommy went to grab hold of the handles to push Angela’s chair, Aiden picked up Milburn’s rope, Ted divided everyone’s luggage between his two hands, and Larry seemed unable to take his eyes off Milburn. And then he said as if he hadn’t uttered anything a matter of seconds ago, ‘Wot the bloomin’ ’eck is that?’

  ‘It’s a pony, dimwit. A pony,’ said Tommy, laughing. ‘And when Father isn’t using her, she’s ours to do with what we want.’

  ‘Blimey. Blimey O’Reilly.’

  ‘Lang—’ said Barbara, and then gave a defeated smile. ‘Oh, what’s the point!’

  Ted laughed and pulled Barbara close to him for a moment, and then they broke apart, eager to hear what the twins had been up to.

  And with that, the odd mismatch of people trooped back to Tall Trees.

  Mabel and Roger knew already that Barbara and Ted were coming to visit, although they hadn’t given as much as the tiniest hint about this to anybody else, even Peggy, as Barbara had telephoned the previous afternoon to say that she was terribly sorry for the short notice, but she wondered if it were all right if she and Ted could stay over for a day or two at Tall Trees.