by Katie King
Peggy had said to Barbara and Ted that so many London children had returned to the city that she thought the early and late system was all but finished, and that at some point soon the children would be merged into classes that were taught together, although for now the dwindling class sizes could only be good for the twins, as it meant they were getting more attention from their teachers.
The last time Barbara had been to the school had been six months earlier, and on this Monday morning once again she was impressed by the four-square look of the solid building, with its boys’ entrance to one side, and the girls’ at the other. The window frames around the tall windows looked relatively freshly painted, and the playground was clean and tidy, with none of the stray bits of rubbish that had always collected in the nooks and crannies of the run-down outside area at the Bermondsey school the twins had attended. Once inside though, the difference between the schools didn’t feel so marked with the parquet flooring having the same sound as Barbara and Ted walked to the classroom, and there being a similar smell in the air of grubby hands and none-too-clean hair of some of the pupils, while the sound of the children gathering for the lessons was also the same.
As always happened, these sounds and smells brought back happy memories, and Barbara and Ted smiled at each other. The first time they had met was when they were in primary school, when Barbara had given Ted a lesson in using a blade of grass carefully split for a nail’s width and then pressed between two bent thumbs and blown into as a means of making a loud whistling noise.
As expected the news from the twins’ teacher was that Jessie was doing really well at school in his lessons, and everyone was very pleased with him. He had a real aptitude for puzzles and problems, and the teacher was encouraging him to play some chess at lunchtimes and to do crosswords. Jessie was still shy when left to his own devices with the other children in the playground who weren’t part of his Tall Trees coterie, but he was starting to come of out his shell a little (especially when talking about codes and ciphers), and this was deemed to be excellent progress.
It was a different matter with Connie though, which saddened Barbara and Ted a great deal, although they weren’t exactly surprised. They knew all too well that Connie, although whip-smart when out of the classroom, had always struggled once she was sitting behind a desk, never having enjoyed her letters and being the sort of girl who much preferred being read to than to do any reading herself. The teacher’s voice was sombre as she explained that Connie’s attention was amongst the poorest in the class, her sums full of crossings-out, and her ink-splodged handwriting appalling and looking as if she were still in kindergarten. And as for her reading out loud, poor Connie was probably two years, if not more, behind where she should be, to the point that she would do anything to get out of standing up in front of her class with a book to read from. She was good at remembering things said out loud to her, apparently, but that seemed to be about the only thing she excelled in, in the classroom.
Barbara wasn’t sure what to say, and neither was Ted. Connie had wiped the floor with the rest of her family at cards the previous evening, and then again in the games of Ludo and Lookabout, so either the rest of Ross family was unbearably stupid – which didn’t seem to be the case given the high praise heaped a minute or so ago on Jessie – or maybe there was a resilient streak of naughtiness in Connie that meant she just wouldn’t knuckle down and pay attention when she was in the classroom.
Looking out of the window at Connie who was currently holding court to a group of school pupils, both boys and girls, with everyone apparently eagerly hanging on to her every word as she gesticulated in a lively way to illustrate whatever it was that she was saying, Barbara knew she shouldn’t feel disappointed, although she did.
Connie had always had poor reports from school, and Jessie really good ones, and so it was unrealistic to expect that anything would have changed just because Connie was living several hundred miles away, Barbara acknowledged. Connie was a healthy, bright girl who made friends easily and who had a bold, resourceful streak that served her well. Jessie, although a model pupil in the classroom, was much more introverted, and was all too ready to step aside so that Connie could be the spokesperson for both of them. In fact, Barbara thought that Connie could reason and structure an argument in favour of her doing something or other with a speed and alacrity that many adults would be jealous of and that completely diverted attention from her lack of prowess with paper and pen.
But it was galling, all the same. Connie was letting herself and by association the whole Ross family down, and Barbara wasn’t happy.
Once everyone was home from school that day, as promised the previous afternoon, Ted took Milburn out in the trap again, this time for the children to have a go at driving the pony.
During the afternoon, before Aiden and Tommy had got home and while the others had done their homework, Ted had led Milburn to the edge of the town, and allowed her to graze on the verges and hedgerows. Barbara and Peggy, and baby Holly, had gone to June Blenkinsop’s, and so Ted had a welcome hour or so to himself.
It was warm and sunny, and the rhythmic sound of Milburn pulling herself mouthfuls of grass made his eyes feel heavy. Ted sat down on the verge with his back comfortably propped against a dry stone wall, the lead rope in his hand, enjoying the clean air and the smells of the hedgerow, and he tried to concentrate on the butterflies he could see fluttering nearby and the intermittent drone of bumblebees going about their business.
When he woke up about thirty minutes later it was to find Milburn stretched out beside him, having a snooze in the sun as well, while a concerned woman with a pram was staring down at them both.
‘Thank ’eaven,’ she exclaimed when she saw Ted open his eyes, ‘I thought summat bad ’ad ’appened, an’ I weren’t sure wot t’ do.’
Ted and Milburn both scrambled up quickly, apparently equally embarrassed to have been caught napping out in the open, and after Ted had apologised for scaring the woman with the pram he quickly led Milburn home, deciding not to tell Barbara what had just occurred as she would certainly think it extremely bad form to be caught sleeping outside in broad daylight like that, especially as some people might – shamefully – have thought he was sleeping off a drinking session, which of course was very far from the truth.
Quite a while later, after Barbara had made both Jessie and Connie read to her, and once Tommy and Aiden had returned from the lates at school and joined the others for a barm cake with a scrape of margarine, just to keep the wolf from the door until their tea at six, all the children, except Angela, had a go at putting the harness on the patient pony, and Ted was pleased to see that they all managed to do it without a hitch.
Ted noticed Angela looking downcast, and so asked if she wanted to have the first go at driving, and her face lit up. She was lifted up into the trap by Ted and she proved a natural, and actually probably the most intuitive of all the children at controlling Milburn, although Aiden was pretty good too, it had to be said.
Ted thought he’d have a word with Roger as this could be a way of giving Angela a little independence and she could have one area in her life where she wasn’t totally reliant on other people helping her move around.
They’d gone through the back streets almost right over to the other side of Harrogate, and it was time to turn for home.
Ted felt confident enough of Milburn, who hadn’t spooked once that afternoon or the day before, to let the boys now bundle themselves into the back of the contraption rather than having to walk alongside, and so while Tommy and Larry were facing forwards as they watched what Connie was doing, Aiden and Jessie were sitting cross-legged with their backs to their pals as they looked down the road the way they had just come.
A few minutes passed and then Aiden and Jessie watched a group of rough-looking larger lads scramble over some railings edging what looked like a park and then arrange themselves in a line behind them, none of them taking their eyes off the old-fashioned pony and trap.
These boys – ‘Them’s the ’Ull lads,’ said Aiden in a low voice to Jessie – were staring unblinking at the retreating trap with undisguised dislike.
Jessie noticed how they all stood with their feet firmly planted apart and their hands bunched and their elbows slightly bent as if they were inviting fisticuffs. Not one of them said anything and not one of them did anything other than frown menacingly in his and Aiden’s direction, but this was almost more threatening than if they had done something more overtly aggressive.
‘Look at these evacuees from Hull.’ Jessie didn’t dare take his eyes off the other lads as he hissed this command over his shoulder, and alerted Larry and Tommy with a couple of well-aimed jabs of his elbow backwards, who quickly turned around and stared back.
Connie and Angela were oblivious to the silent drama going on behind them as they were both sitting on the driving seat alongside Ted, Connie having her first go at taking Milburn’s reins. The girls were chatting fervently about this and that as if they’d forgotten about Ted being beside them, and to his surprise Ted found himself rather enjoying this ringside glimpse into the girlish chatterbox world of what Miss had said at school earlier, what was annoying about no longer being in Bermondsey, and who was sweet on who.
It was a different story at the back of the trap. As the four boys from Tall Trees looked down the road towards the Hull scallywags, who stared back with a clear aggression, it seemed as if some sort of unspoken gauntlet had been thrown down, and picked up by the other side. There didn’t seem any obvious reason why such a challenge had been proffered or accepted, but Jessie and his friends just took it as what was going to happen.
‘Blimey O’Reilly,’ said Larry under his breath.
‘Bugger,’ Tommy added. The four boys nodded as one.
Connie drove the trap around the corner and the Hull contingent could be seen no longer.
But none of those in the back of the trap were under any impression that this was the last they’d see of that motley Hull crew who had stood so confidently and united as they had issued a wordless invitation to battle with the boys from the rectory. It was a grave thought.
Chapter Eleven
Two weeks later and well after Barbara and Ted had returned home to Bermondsey, Peggy continued to feel as if almost her whole world had been rocked off its axis.
Her body ached constantly from chin to toe, and she nearly always had a nagging headache. She felt worn out during the day, yet unable to sleep at night, waking with a feeling of exhaustion that somehow managed to eclipse that of the day before. Thoughts of Bill and Maureen tumbling in the sheets together raced unbidden through her mind at the oddest of moments as she lay in the dark, and although sometimes they were oddly exciting, more often than not she couldn’t help but keep going through all the signs she might have missed, and then berating herself for even caring when it was obvious that Bill hadn’t given a jot.
Well, maybe it wasn’t as simple as all that, she’d think at other times. Bill had telephoned on numerous occasions, and he had written to her most days. But Peggy steadfastly refused to speak to him, even though sometimes she really wanted to, and she made sure she sent all his letters back with ‘Return to Sender’ in firm letters on the front.
Barbara said that Bill had contacted her too, asking her to persuade Peggy to open up a means of contact, but Barbara had said back to him, in a curt note, that she trusted Peggy would do the right thing, and if Peggy couldn’t see her way to a telephone conversation or a letter, then Barbara certainly wasn’t going to do anything to convince her otherwise. Bill then tried telephoning the Jolly on a Thursday night to speak to Ted, but Ted said sharply he wasn’t going to get involved and it was Bill’s mess to sort out.
Mabel advised sticking to a routine as the best way forward, and so Peggy made sure that however unhappy she felt she turned up every day at June Blenkinsop’s, no matter how little she believed herself able to contribute to the war effort there, and she would always do her very best to smile warmly at the customers in the café. But the number of times she gave customers the wrong change, or couldn’t add up what they had had to eat, or said it was cottage pie on the menu rather than the Lancashire hotpot that was actually being served when she was asked what was on offer that day, or vice versa, told both Peggy and June just what a low ebb she was at. June told her to shelve the idea of the mobile canteen for now as it was quite clear that Peggy had enough on her plate already.
Peggy didn’t feel heartbroken any longer – she’d cried too furiously on that dreadful Sunday of the telephone call, and she was still livid with Bill for that – but she felt more that she’d been tipped upside down by her mistaken belief in a marriage that, now they had their darling Holly, had been cleaved together in a way that with Bill at her and her daughter’s side, they could weather any storm.
The long and short of it was that she believed she had been publicly made a fool of, and this, Peggy discovered, hurt almost as much as Bill’s casual infidelity with MaureenFromTheNAAFI.
But depressed and glum as Peggy felt, it wasn’t all bad.
Every day seemed to bring with it something new that Holly could do, which was a complete joy. Peggy never tired of watching the tiny girl look about curiously, eager to absorb more and more of what was going on around her, or how Holly would, if laid on her front, put her little towelling-nappied behind in the air and waggle it about, followed by putting her hands on the ground close to her shoulders as if she were about to lift her shoulders up. This, Mabel said, meant that she’d be crawling before too long, and that Peggy would never get a moment’s peace then as Holly would be into everything, and so Peggy had better make the most of the time before Holly made herself mobile.
Peggy didn’t feel capable of ‘making the most’ of anything just at the moment, but Holly was such a happy, good-natured baby that it was hard to stay miserable for all the hours in the day, Peggy found, when Holly was all too ready with her gummy but adorable smile. And she found that she didn’t often have any more down-at-the-mouth thoughts as she had sometimes had in the months following Holly’s birth, although of course by now these feelings had become inextricably confused with the high emotions that Bill’s revelation had provoked.
Everyone at Tall Trees continued to rally round, all trying to help Peggy as best they could.
Gracie was there most of the time with her baby Jack, when she wasn’t stopping over at the Kells’ house if Jack’s father Kelvin were home on leave, and she would keep Holly amused for a couple of hours in the late afternoon once she had finished her shift at the greengrocers. If it was sunny, Grace would place both babies on their tummies on a rug in the garden where they would stare at each other as if trying to unravel a puzzle, and although Peggy would never relax enough to drop off as she lay on her bed upstairs, she did appreciate a little time on her own so that she could have a few minutes to herself where she didn’t have to do anything, or even think.
And Mabel, who was privately worried that Peggy’s drawn face and increasingly gaunt figure were also because she was still feeling the after-effects of her difficult pregnancy and Holly’s traumatic birth, and not just because of Bill’s silly antics, made sure that all of Peggy’s linen was taken care of, and that Peggy had an egg for breakfast each morning, freshly gathered by Tommy from the hen run. Roger religiously cleaned Peggy’s shoes each night and made sure the perambulator always looked spick and span, while Angela and Connie would spend ages at teatime trying to amuse Holly.
Jessie was hard at work on an ABC book for Holly, which he was making from a spare roll of old lining paper that Roger hadn’t pasted up when – some time ago, it had to be said, well, actually it had been before Tommy had been born – he had done his last lot of wallpapering at the rectory. Jessie had been ribbed about the book he was making by Larry and Tommy, who’d called him ‘a big girl’, but Jessie ignored them, and made several trips to the library with Angela, much to Tommy’s chagrin who didn’t like it
when anyone besides Connie did anything with Angela, to look up various pictures in the library books. Peggy found Jessie’s thoughtful gesture of making the ABC book to be unbearably touching, especially when she saw the care with which he was sketching and then colouring in the illustrations for each letter. Perhaps she would have advised something a little less war-relevant than Jessie’s choices – she wasn’t sure, after all, that Holly wouldn’t have preferred a colourful golly for the ‘G’, rather than Jessie’s gun; or an apple for the Army of his ‘A’, or a dog for the Destroyer of ‘D’, but she would have bitten her tongue off rather than say anything other than, ‘Well, Jessie, if Holly decides one day to join the military she’s going to be streets ahead of the competition and she will be thanking you all the way as she heads to try on her uniform. She’s a very lucky girl to have a cousin like you.’
Aiden had meanwhile talked June Blenkinsop into allowing him to sit on the till in the teashop for an hour or two the moment he had finished school if he was on earlies, so that Peggy could slip off back to Tall Trees. Afternoons in the teashop were the quietest times, and he was a bright and conscientious boy, and so even though he was only eleven, he was making a pretty good fist of taking the money, although Peggy would do the totalling-up for him when she came in the next day. And Larry was helping out in June’s kitchen by making sure the tables were cleared and cleanly wiped, and all the used cutlery and crockery was neatly piled by the sink ready for washing up. He revelled in the title of ‘bus boy’, which one of the customers told him he’d be called if he were working in a posh restaurant in London, and as a surprise one evening June made Larry a ‘Bus Boy’ badge to wear, and Aiden one that said ‘Till’, which the boys were very pleased with. June paid them each a shilling a shift, and would send them back to Tall Trees as often as not with a pie made of scraps or some leftover cooked greens for bubble and squeak, which Mabel was always grateful for, but with the firm instructions from June that they weren’t to show off about the money they got for each shift to Tommy or Jessie, who weren’t earning and had only very limited pocket money, otherwise Aiden and Larry would both be ‘out on their ear’, no matter who had done the boasting.
