by Katie King
Mabel told Barbara how wonderful it would be and that the twins, and Peggy, would be over the moon.
Then there had been the usual friendly argy-bargy between the women over the financial arrangements, with Barbara offering a payment and Mabel refusing, and Barbara insisting, and Mabel refusing, and so forth, after which Barbara had begged Mabel and Roger to keep their visit a surprise.
Mabel had agreed, but actually it proved to be a trickier thing to keep quiet about than she had expected.
For first thing that morning Mabel had almost been caught by Peggy carrying fresh sheets and clean towels across the back yard on her way to sort out the generously proportioned room above the stables that Peggy and Gracie had once shared and where Barbara and Ted would now be sleeping.
A quick-thinking Mabel had had to dart into the pantry to hide as Peggy then spent what felt to Mabel to be an inordinate age standing just on the other side of the pantry door in the kitchen getting herself and Holly ready to leave the house and head over to June Blenkinsop’s. At one point, Peggy even asked Holly if she should take June the bag of currants she had for her that were – naturally – in the pantry, causing Mabel’s heart to do a flip, and then a double-flip as if in answer.
Holly didn’t say anything in reply – well, that wasn’t surprising given her tender age – but she did let out a cheery gurgle.
At last Mabel was able to breathe an audible sigh of relief when Peggy decided that the dratted currants could wait for another day as June probably wouldn’t be doing any of this sort of baking on a Sunday as she’d be concentrating on getting large trays of cottage pies and Lancashire hotpots ready for the coming week. Finally Peggy got around to pushing the pram out through the back door and weaving it through the yard and onto the garden path to the road.
This was a huge relief because, try as she might, Mabel hadn’t been able to think of a convincing reason why she was hiding next to the large bowl of eggs from their hens at the bottom of the garden and a hessian sack of potatoes with its top rolled over so that the teddies were easy to get to. And Mabel knew that Peggy would almost definitely have smelt a rat of the Barbara-and-Ted-arriving variety if she had caught her sneaking about in the pantry with an armful of clean laundry and no plausible reason for doing so.
Now, as the others would all be making their way back from the station, Mabel only just had time to find Peggy a handful of clean hankies following the telephone call with Bill, and to make her cup of tea. She’d sneaked a surreptitious peek at a soggy and spent Peggy, and couldn’t decide if Barbara’s imminent arrival was a good or a bad thing. It could go either way, to judge by the look of her, Mabel thought.
Peggy remained closeted still in Roger’s study with a desolate expression on her face, staring with unfocused eyes into the distance, obviously dazed and emotionally exhausted after her unheralded display of temper following her highly wrought outburst.
Although Holly had been bawling, Mabel wasn’t sure that Peggy had even heard her daughter’s cries, as for the very first time her doting mother hadn’t raced across the corridor to attend to her, and this neglect had made Holly wail even more loudly.
Now, across the way in the kitchen and jollied along by Roger, Holly had finally ceased crying although she remained restless and a little snivelly, her eyelashes still wet with tears, following such a rude awakening from her nap caused by the clatter of things hitting the floor in the study.
Once the baby’s wails had abated, a too casual-seeming Roger replaced Holly back in her sleeping drawer and then quickly made himself scarce, leaving Mabel to pick the baby up again when Holly started to grizzle, as she did almost immediately.
Mabel had no choice other than to walk around the kitchen, jiggling Holly in her arms as she showed her what was in the kitchen cabinets, and the eggs and potatoes in the pantry, in an effort to prevent her from returning to her full-blown wailing of a few minutes earlier.
Holly was surprisingly heavy for such a little thing and she obviously wasn’t very convinced that what was in the various cupboards was very much for Mabel to boast about, and so Mabel was relieved to hear the sound of those returning to Tall Trees heading across the back yard.
The baby immediately stopped grumbling, at last fully engaged in her surroundings, and quickly swung her head with interest towards the door from the back yard into the kitchen to see who might be about to come in.
Mabel could hear Aiden pulling the bolt to the stable door across and then encouraging Milburn inside as he told Larry where the hay and straw was, and she saw Tommy push Angela’s chair to the back door. Mabel noticed the Ross family huddled together as they gave Tommy room to help Angela inside.
For a moment Mabel wondered at Ted Ross allowing Tommy to push Angela what looked like all the way back from the station to judge by Tommy’s pink face, but then she thought that actually for Tommy to have a bit of responsibility and to do something for somebody else wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, the episode to do with his bullying and the orchard affair being still rather a raw memory for all the Braithwaites, although the other children never seemed to refer to it.
Barbara bustled into the kitchen, which was smelling deliciously of the barm cakes baking for their dinner and Barbara could see what looked like a giant mixing bowl with bread dough proving on a warm part of the range.
Connie and Jessie stayed out in the yard in order to tug Ted, once he had set all the luggage down, good-naturedly across the yard and over to see for himself where Milburn was housed. Barbara undid her headscarf with one hand as with the other she plonked the wicker basket full of small thank-you gifts for Mabel – some homemade biscuits, a couple of new tea towels, a vest for Tommy and some hankies, several pork chops, some juicy-looking carrots and a very late dark-green Savoy cabbage that the caterpillars had only had the merest chomp on the outside leaves of – down on the rather battered kitchen table that had obviously seen many years of faithful service.
She and Mabel smiled in greeting at one another, and then Barbara raised her eyebrows in a quiet query as to where her sister Peggy might be.
Mabel put a finger in front of her mouth to signal silence, and then with Holly still in her arms she edged over to her guest and then stage-whispered in Barbara’s ear, ‘She’ll be jiggered, Barbara. There’s jus’ been an awful ding-dong on the telephone not more than twenty or so minutes ago betwixt her an’ Bill. She’s ’avin’ a quiet moment jus’ at present in t’ study wi’ a cup o’ tea to set ’erself to rights, but there no denyin’ it were right bad. She’ll be glad yer ’ere.’
‘Oh my goodness!’ Barbara hissed quietly back. ‘That’s unlike them. Poor Peggy… I can guess what he’s done, I suppose.’
Mabel said she hadn’t asked Peggy what the row was about, but she thought she’d heard Peggy moan the name Maureen as she had sobbed in her arms in the aftermath of the argument.
Then the two women shook their head at the thought of what was happening to a lot of couples during their enforced separations. Many relationships were suffering badly, and both of them were pretty sure that Peggy wouldn’t be the only woman in the land who had just had a big barney with her husband over another woman, while many men away from home drove themselves to distraction with dark thoughts of what their wives might be getting up to back on the home front without them. It wasn’t an ideal situation, no matter how one tried to look at it.
Barbara then saw that Holly was looking curiously towards her aunty and waving an arm in her direction, opening and closing her fingers, and so Barbara whispered to Mabel, ‘May I?’
With a rather relieved smile Mabel promptly handed her over, and after deeply inhaling the familiar scent of the young baby and then gently touching Holly on the head with her lips in a feather-light caress of hello, Barbara clutched her affectionately to her chest and went to find her sister.
She was taken aback a moment later to see how large and black the pupils in Peggy’s eyes appeared, and how pale her face was.
Peggy was totally still as she gazed with unseeing eyes out of the study window and down towards the hen coops on the far side of the garden, with the undrunk cup of tea by her elbow, and she didn’t notice that it was her sister who had come into the study.
It was only when Barbara said gently, ‘Peggy, my darling, whatever’s happened?’ that Peggy turned to face her.
For an instant Peggy’s brown eyebrows wrinkled in incomprehension and she looked confused as she gazed at Barbara.
And then she simply flung herself at her sister, leaving Barbara only a moment to move Holly out of the way. As Peggy broke once more into sobs, Barbara was able to feel hot tears on her neck as Peggy held her close in a vice-like grip. Barbara stood still as a rock and pulled her sister close.
The sisters didn’t say anything for a while, as Peggy was too upset to speak, and Barbara thought it best that this new wave of emotion be allowed to crest and then die of its own accord.
After a while Barbara contented herself with repeating ‘Sssssh, there now, there now. Sssssh, there now’ in the same way that she had comforted Jessie and Connie when they were colicky as babies.
Holly made some adorable snuffling noises and reached pudgy fingers towards her mother’s hair, but Peggy didn’t look at her and so Holly turned towards Barbara with a puzzled expression, causing Barbara to give her a jiggle of acknowledgement with her other arm and a smile, as she knew the baby would be feeling unsettled at these unfamiliar goings-on and the strange sounds coming from her mother.
When Peggy’s grip on her sister had reduced to less of a stranglehold, Barbara said, ‘Peggy, dear, we’ll have a long talk very soon, I promise. I want to hear all about it, really I do. But first why don’t you have a lie down and have a little rest? Take Holly up with you as to me she’s looking as if she still needs a bit more of a doze after her lunch, and then I’ll come and find you when I’ve got everyone else sorted and have caught up with Connie and Jessie. How does that sound, dear?’
Tiredly, Peggy untangled herself and then nodded a damp and exhausted smile of agreement, before she quietly slipped upstairs with her daughter cleaved tightly to her bosom. She felt done in, and now she could hear Connie and Jessie’s happy voices outside, she wanted to make sure that her tear-marked face wouldn’t dampen the party mood that was sweeping the rest of Tall Trees with Larry being back with them, and the pleasure of the unexpected visit from Barbara and Ted.
With a concerned expression, Barbara watched the sway of her sister’s disappearing world-weary steps with a tremendous pang of sympathy and trepidation, and then she sighed in empathy before she consciously made herself look happy as she turned to retrace her steps outside and find her husband and the twins.
Chapter Seven
Ted was full of surprises, it seemed.
‘Mother, you’ll never believe it,’ squeaked Connie breathily, her cheeks red with excitement as her mother joined her family. ‘But Father can drive a trap! And he’s going to teach us. He knows all about ponies, and he’s going to teach us everything!’
‘Oh, he can drive a trap, can he?’ Barbara raised an amused eyebrow in the direction of her husband, who winked in response. This was news to her, as was Connie’s use of the formal-sounding ‘mother’, but she supposed this was a sign of Connie getting older as perhaps ‘mama’ or ‘mummy’ seemed babyish, especially in front of the other children.
Ted grinned back at Barbara, causing her to shoot him a rueful, only half-amused grin in return. He’d never mentioned to his wife that as a child he had helped out at the local coal merchants, so much so that by the age of ten he had been allowed, after much begging, to take the reins on the delivery cart whenever he wasn’t at school.
Barbara prided herself on knowing all there was to know about Ted, and to learn this news so hot on the heels of discovering that something dire had happened with Bill that Peggy had had no idea about and therefore had been unprepared for, she felt now slightly peculiar and wrong-footed by Ted’s admission, harmless though it was.
The children were mightily impressed with Ted’s insouciant wink, however, to the extent that they were all pulling a variety of comical faces as they tried to outdo each other in the winking stakes, with Tommy and Larry trying the hardest, but Tommy getting the eventual thumbs-up from the others for a particularly showy double wink at the same time tipping his forefinger to his brow.
‘Okay, you lot,’ Barbara interrupted their fun, ‘let’s go in for some food as I believe Mabel is setting the table and has the kettle on, and then we’ll see if Roger minds Ted taking you all out later in the trap.’ Barbara sounded quite firm as she looked around at the children and pulled her best delicately scalloped beige cardigan together over her chest as if she meant business.
As one, Ted and the children all looked a bit crestfallen as they had clearly wanted to go out in the trap right away, but then they realised that Barbara wasn’t saying a firm no as such, but just that Roger had to give his seal of approval first.
Tommy summed up their thoughts with, ‘Let’s go in an’ see Pa – ’e’s always ready for ’is dinner, and I’ll bet ’e’ll like a bit of teachin’ too ’ow t’ ’andle t’ trap proper.’
And indeed when Roger learned that Ted had some experience with horses and would be very happy to spend a bit of time showing them what to do with Milburn, there was an unmistakable sigh of relief bubbling up from below his white dog collar. He’d not yet tried to go out in the trap on his own, not least as he wasn’t sure he could quite remember how to put the harness on Milburn or how to attach the trap to all the harness gubbins, although these were admissions that he didn’t particularly care to make in front of all the children.
Dinner was eaten hastily, with no one mentioning anything about Peggy and Holly not being there, most probably because it was only Barbara and Ted who noticed, and they contented themselves with acknowledging the absence of the two Delberts with the exchange of silent but nonetheless telling looks.
There was a scrag end of mutton stew Peggy had prepared the evening before, that was surprisingly tasty as she was picking up some good tips for flavoursome food over at June Blenkinsop’s, and Mabel had eked it out to make sure there was enough as of course she couldn’t say to Peggy that her sister and Ted would be joining them, seeing as this was a surprise. It was served along with fluffy dumplings and the unexpected gift of the Savoy cabbage to go with the runner beans that Roger was very proud he’d grown.
Once everyone had wiped their plates clean with a still-warm barm cake and sat back replete, Barbara announced that she wasn’t going to partake of the pony and trap session, which made the twins put on deliberately dejected faces in an attempt to get their mother to change her mind. But Barbara held firm, although she tried to sweeten the pill by saying that for this meal, as a special treat, the children could be let off their table-clearing and washing-up duties as she would put the kitchen to rights and everyone else could go out into the yard to practise tacking up Milburn. ‘Go on, out you scoot, and leave me to it,’ she said, waving a tea towel around as if to scurry them outside.
‘Please come and watch Daddy with us,’ said Jessie. Barbara noticed the ‘daddy’.
‘Oh, we so wanted to show you Milburn,’ Connie wheedled.
Barbara wavered for a moment but then she thought of Peggy, and held firm, their pleas being to no avail.
‘I’ve seen her and she’s a very eye-catching pony, right enough, and I’ll be there tomorrow when no doubt you will want to repeat it all again. I’m sure Milburn won’t mind if I watch you then. And I promise that tomorrow I will even let you drive me along in the trap, if it’s still sunny and Ted thinks you know what you’re doing,’ said Barbara. ‘But right now, there is something else that I really need to see to instead, and so you all vamoose.’
The children knew that Barbara never reneged on a promise and so they decided to make the best of it as it was really good to have Ted there to spend some time with. Mabel stepped in to
ease the moment further with a vigorous call of ‘last one out there’s a sissy’ ringing in their ears as she bolted out of the back door before the children, with Roger hot on her heels. The children all scampered off happily enough to watch, along with Milburn’s quizzical expression, Ted untangle the harness as he muttered that they must hang it up properly when not being used, and not leave it in a heap like they had as to do so was to risk the leather perishing, before reminding them how it should be put on the pony.
When she had sorted out the kitchen to her satisfaction, which was a much tidier and cleaner satisfaction than Mabel, or even Peggy, would have deemed acceptable, Barbara made a fresh pot of tea that she placed on a doily-covered tray along with two cups and a small jug of milk. She put a couple of plain biscuits that Gracie had made on a side plate and popped that on the tray too.
As Barbara carried the tray out of the kitchen she could hear her twins laughing out in the yard as Roger attempted but failed to get Milburn to open her mouth so that he could put the bridle on. The familiar sound of them enjoying themselves brought a rush of happiness to Barbara’s chest.
Barbara climbed the stairs right to the top of the house and tapped on Peggy’s door, and was greeted with a husky ‘come in’.
Holly was sound asleep in a large but battered crib that looked as if it had had the pleasure of nursing many children from babyhood through to them being ready for a ‘big’ bed.
Looking distinctly bleary, a blinking Peggy watched her sister put the tray on top of a chest of drawers, and then a bit reluctantly it seemed, she pulled herself up to sitting position and gratefully accepted the cup of tea that Barbara poured for her.
Barbara tried not to look too obviously at the darkly shadowed puffy bags under Peggy’s eyes, or her dry and cracked lips, her rumpled cotton summer dress that was hanging too loosely on her slender frame, or the constant twitching of a muscle in one of her eyelids that was punching out a tiny SOS of distress. Peggy did look a mess and a wretched sight but her sister thought it kinder not to say.
