by Katie King
The last time Peggy had been in Roger’s study was the day of the terrible argument that she had had with Bill, and as she passed through the doorway after Roger and Maureen, she shuddered. Right now it would be fair to say, she thought, that she would strangle Bill if she could get her hands on him. She had believed he had done his worst, but if this afternoon was anything to go by, evidently this wasn’t the case.
Once Roger had made sure the two women were settled and didn’t look like they were about to scream at each other again, or turn violent, he made himself scarce, shutting the study door firmly and shooing away the boys.
‘Tommy!’ said Roger, when Tommy didn’t leave immediately.
‘Pa, we want to see if we can listen through the wall with a glass,’ said Tommy. ‘We need the practice in case we ever have to spy on anybody. And it’s Jessie’s idea.’
‘I don’t care whose idea it was,’ said Roger. ‘It’s over now so go back to the garden.’
Back outside the boys spent quite some time lamenting the loss of an opportunity to hone some real-life musketeer surveillance skills.
Inside the study Peggy and Maureen both seemed at a loss for how to go on.
Peggy sighed, and then listened to the tick-tocking of Roger’s grandmother clock until the repetitive sound went a way to calming her.
‘How did you get here today, Maureen?’ Peggy asked after a while. She could hear the gloomy cast to her voice, and she wondered if Maureen could notice it also. ‘And how did you know where to find me?’
‘That was easy – I bribed somebody on the camp who hands out the post to let me know your address as Bill had let slip you were sending his letters back unopened,’ said Maureen wearily. ‘And then I just had to look up the train times, and I walked from the station as everyone seems to know about the clergyman who’s taken in a host of evacuees.’
‘What I don’t understand is what it is that you really want from me?’ Peggy took a sip from her own glass of water. She couldn’t imagine humiliating herself by travelling to a strange place just to have a showdown with another woman, no matter what a man had done to her. But maybe Maureen’s depth of passion was an indication of how much she, Maureen, cared for Bill; and could it be that Peggy’s inability to think of herself ever acting similarly was in fact a sign that deep down she had always known that she wasn’t in a perfect marriage? Peggy didn’t know, but she guessed she would be mulling all this over at length once she had got rid of Maureen.
Maureen had taken off the second of her gloves and was now anxiously twisting and pulling the pale kid pair this way and that.
‘Have you any other children, Maureen?’
Maureen shook her head, and Peggy realised how very pale she was looking. The foetus would be taking what sustenance it needed from Maureen, but Peggy thought she’d very likely have been in too much of a state to make sure she’d had enough to eat or drink while on the way to Harrogate, and this wouldn’t be good for mother or baby. ‘You look as if you need to refuel. Have a drink, and I’ll see if there’s anything left in the kitchen,’ she heard herself saying.
Maureen reached for her glass of water, and Peggy got up to see what was in the kitchen. But as she opened the study door it was to find Mabel just about to knock as she had thought ahead and was carrying a couple of tinned pilchards on a slice of bread and butter, and a knife and fork, ready for Maureen.
This was why Peggy loved being at Tall Trees so much; it wasn’t perfect by any means; it was noisy, the sleeping arrangements were a bit sardine-like and it was a squeeze cramming everybody around the kitchen table at mealtimes, but somebody was always looking out for somebody else, and this made the best of even totally horrible situations.
Peggy smiled her thank-you to Mabel, and was told in a whisper in return that Roger was tacking up Milburn and he would drive Maureen to the station in the trap. The next train out of Harrogate went in just over half an hour.
‘I can’t eat that!’ Maureen was looking down her nose at the pilchards, and Peggy’s shoulders tensed as Maureen still had that really annoying and grating tinge to her voice.
Peggy felt affronted on Mabel’s behalf – it was a modest meal, but it was what everyone at Tall Trees had been quite happy to eat for tea. She gave an audible sigh of displeasure.
‘Well, I think your baby is telling you to finish it up, whether you want it or not. And you’ve a fair way to go home tonight, so I suggest you tuck in now as you might not be able to get anything on the way back,’ said Peggy peevishly, hearing her own exasperation in her voice.
Maureen pulled off a dainty corner of the bread and butter, and chewed it in an extremely picky manner.
There was a soft knock at the door and Mabel interrupted with two cups of tea, and by the time Peggy looked at Maureen’s plate again, half of the food had already been scoffed, as Maureen was clearly starving and she was now tucking in like a proper trencherman. Peggy didn’t like anything about the woman, but she couldn’t have lived with herself if she hadn’t looked after her properly when there was a baby on the way, as it wasn’t the baby’s fault that his or her mother was so irritating, although it was an inescapable fact that Maureen was a very, very irritating woman indeed.
Peggy waited until Maureen had finished and was reaching for her tea, and then she said reasonably, ‘I don’t think there is anything I can do to help you, Mrs Creasey. I’m sure Bill will come around when your baby is here and he can touch him or her, but you must realise that I really can’t bear to have any contact myself with him just now. And I think if I did say anything directly to him just at the moment, then there’s a possibility he might feel then that he’s in with a chance with me, which he isn’t, or to be more exact I don’t think he is, although I’d be less than honest not to admit it does give me a pang to hear about him wanting us to be a family again, and I realise that now I’ve had time to think about it carefully I see increasingly quite what a large step divorce is for someone like me, and how costly it could be in terms of fees. I have to remember that Bill is Holly’s father, after all, and that I mustn’t do anything to hurt Holly’s future. It’s all very complicated, and anyway the immediate point is that Bill wouldn’t understand if I told him you had been to see me and so the upshot could well be in that case it would make things worse for you. Ultimately I think you have to look after yourself and your own interests, and to sit tight, trusting in him wanting this baby at some point, or at least hoping that he will do when he sees it.’
All of Maureen’s fight had dissipated and she looked deflated and tormented. When Peggy saw how diminished the older woman looked at that particular moment it was an image that was hard to square with the furious harridan who’d attacked her outside the gate at the end of the drive.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Then Maureen asked quietly, ‘What was it like?’
Peggy looked confused before she realised what the other woman meant.
‘The birth. Was it painful? I didn’t think I’d have to go through it on my own.’ Maureen sounded scared and alone.
‘Neither did I,’ said Peggy, who found herself softening a tiny bit towards Maureen. ‘And yet I managed, and I’m sure you will too. I was poorly right before the birth, and so I can’t remember very much about the actual birth itself, I’m afraid. But the moment I saw Holly I do remember that it all seemed worth it, although sometimes even months later I would find myself feeling blue and out of sorts. And when I found out about Bill and you, I knew I would never be without Holly, not for a single instant, even though I dare say it will be difficult to bring her up on my own. I’m sure that when you hold your own baby you’ll feel the same sense of love and purpose, whether you have Bill at your side or not.’
Maureen looked back at Peggy with an expression that was almost impossible to read, and then she pursed her lips and reached for her handbag to get out her compact and lipstick to make herself presentable again.
Roger put his head around the door
and said, ‘Ladies, are you ready?’ And with no real conclusion to what had gone on between them, Maureen and Peggy both stood up with uncertain expressions.
Maureen gave Peggy the briefest nod of acknowledegment as she passed her to go with Roger, and Peggy gave an equally small nod back. Then she experienced a stab of frustration with herself for even acknowledging the woman who had caused so much heartbreak over the past couple of months. And then Peggy felt even more frustrated with herself for being cross about giving Maureen the very tiniest of nods. She was a bigger person than that, surely, she admonished herself, and to not have done so back would have been diminishing and a sign of a wanting nature, wouldn’t it? Peggy thought about it, and she couldn’t decide.
Goodness, and damn and drat, Maureen had gone away although her distinctive and now headache-inducing overly flowery scent lingered, and yet here she was still spoiling Peggy’s evening.
As Roger and Maureen drove out of Tall Trees, Peggy went to find Holly. Her head was aching with the effort of it all, and so she felt very much in need of a cuddle with her own dear baby.
Chapter Seventeen
Understandably Ted didn’t find Jessie’s letter to him about wanting help with fighting techniques very reassuring to receive, and he and Barbara couldn’t quite decide about the best way of handling this. It was very rare for Jessie to ask for anything, as he was naturally quite a reserved and shy boy, and as he had been badly bullied when he was at the Bermondsey school, anything that would help give him a bit of confidence might be good. It sounded as if something had most definitely spooked Jessie, and that it was probable that the ‘something’ wasn’t very good, and so neither Ted nor Barbara wanted Jessie to worry himself into believing that dealing with something by fists was necessarily the right or indeed the most appropriate first course of action.
One thing they did agree on though (well, Barbara did the agreeing, and more or less told Ted what he should be thinking) was that Jessie’s spelling was coming on. While his letter was by no means perfect in the grammatical sense and there were some spelling mistakes, nevertheless it was a vast improvement to the letters he’d written before Christmas.
Ted had never enjoyed his lessons when he was a lad and he’d been proud to be a docker, following his father and big brother Jessie (the family tradition being that in each generation the oldest Ross boy was called Jessie) into the trade. While Ted had never wanted for more than to wake up each morning in the grubby narrow streets of Bermondsey and, when the wind was in the right direction, the wafting smells from the Peek Frean biscuit factory nearby that would drift over Jubilee Street, he now wondered if he’d be the last Ross to feel like this. During reflective moments watching the refuse barges navigate the Thames on the way to dump the city’s waste in deeper waters, he would sometimes look down at his own work-worn hands and feel the ache in his shoulders from pulling chests and crates this way and that, and find it impossible to imagine Jessie following in his own footsteps on to the docks, or Connie being happy with working for somebody else like her mother did.
Indeed on their last visit to Yorkshire, Barbara and Ted had noticed how much time Roger and Mabel spent encouraging all the children to read. Jessie mentioned Peggy and Mabel had even taken the children to see a play one afternoon – it had been an amateur dramatic musical that one of Roger’s parishioners had written, and although not very good, the children had enjoyed it (a lot more than Mabel and Peggy had, Mabel had whispered later to Barbara), and on another day there had been an outing to a museum that had an exhibition of bones that Roger had told the boys about.
Ted and Barbara often talked of the twins when hard at work on their allotment near Jubilee Street. The government was encouraging every square inch to be used for growing vegetables, and so six plots had been squeezed in following the demolition of a couple of stables – harking back to when there were more dray horses in the area – to allow the exposed earth to be dug over for planting up. Several months later the summer crops were verging on the bumper, which Ted said must be down to years and years of manure being piled up when the stables had been cleaned out,
As they hoed and weeded, Barbara and Ted talked over the quite different problems the children presented, Connie being too inattentive at school and too bold, and Jessie looking set to be something of a cuckoo in the nest, bookish and a deep thinker.
‘I find it hard to credit them as ours,’ said Barbara. ‘Connie’s so knowing, and I don’t know where Jessie gets half his ideas from. He spent a good quarter of an hour when you were talking to Connie, telling me about codes and secret messages, and how they can be sent. It all sounded very clever.’
Ted didn’t say anything, although he nodded. He’d expected the twins to turn out to be quite like him and Barbara, and that they would go on to live similar lives. But the war was altering things, he could see, and now none of that could be taken for granted.
‘It’s so difficult when we don’t know what’s going on,’ Barbara continued as she pulled up some potatoes. ‘I don’t like that letter Jessie wrote. And I miss them, frankly.’ There was a pause, before she added, ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t bring them home, Ted? Lots are, you see.’
Her husband stopped what he was doing and leant his elbows on his spade. ‘I know, Barbara, I know,’ he said gently. ‘But we’ve been through this, an’ jus’ think what you’d feel if we brought ’em back and then the bombs come.’
‘You’re right, but at this rate they’ll be all grown up before we’re all together.’ Barbara sighed with petulance, and then ground a cabbage-hungry caterpillar deep into the sod with her heel.
Ted nodded morosely with eyes that were just a bit too bright, and then he said, ‘Why don’t you go home, love, and ’ave a bit of a rest? You look done in.’
Back at Jubilee Street, Barbara allowed herself a cry, which wasn’t at all like her, although she had to acknowledge that afterwards she felt more composed.
When evening opening hours came around, she put on her headscarf and headed to the Jolly to make a long-distance call to Tall Trees to see if she could find out a little bit more about what was going on. The plan she had discussed with Ted was that once she had scoped out the lay of the land, then Ted would write back to Jessie, seeming to keep it strictly a manly conversation between father and son.
Roger picked up the telephone, and told Barbara that he had no idea why Jessie had written this letter as he’d not noticed anything especially untoward, although Mabel had commented earlier that morning that she thought the children had in general seemed a little preoccupied. He added that he didn’t think it was anything too much to worry about though, but he and Mabel would keep an eye on things, and he’d have a word with Peggy too to see if she were aware of anything that they didn’t know about. If he didn’t get back to her, then Barbara was to assume it was business as usual and that as far as anyone could tell, everything was all right.
‘Actually I’ve just had an idea about something else that could help, but leave it with me, Barbara, as it might not come off,’ Roger added as the conversation was coming to a close. ‘But don’t you worry about anything in the meantime. It’s all under control here, and I’ll let you know toot sweet if not.’
Jessie was less convinced than Roger about things being under control, however, as in the wee small hours of the night he’d started waking suddenly, with his heart beating furiously and with an ominous sense of dread sweeping over him. He’d tried telling himself that this crippling sense of fear was a bit irrational as the Hull lads seemed to have slithered back into their hole as neither hide nor hair of them had been seen since that time they had stood in silence sending the unmistakeable ‘fucker’ message to the Tall Trees boys that a fight wasn’t going to be far off.
As battle tactics go, Jessie recognised, the major spear-rattling and then a long period of nothing either good or bad happening, was almost definitely more unnerving than if an ambush had been laid for the very next day, or there had been a phy
sically aggressive-seeming and immediate blatant call to arms. This was because the period of waiting allowed one’s imagination to work overtime, and Jessie found it very disturbing the longer the period of waiting lasted.
It struck him early one morning when he’d not been able to get back to sleep after waking with a start when it was still dark, that it was a little like the Phoney War the journalists were sometimes talking about and that Roger, Mabel and Peggy were often to be found discussing after their tea; once hostilities with Germany had been declared the previous September, other than a lot of men leaving to fight, and their own experience of being evacuated from London to Yorkshire, it was true that Hitler didn’t immediately attack Britain, and so wartime life had quite soon gone on with a new sense of normality, a normality made twitchy with everyone being jumpy, waiting for something to happen. As far as the children were concerned the Hull boys had issued a challenge, but then done nothing further, and Jessie thought this might be worse than if they’d set a trap the very next day.
Tommy must have felt similarly as he suggested the boys hold a powwow in their bedroom at Tall Trees to discuss what they should do.
Larry and Jessie kicked all the clothes and towels on the floor aside, and the snakes and ladders, the Happy Families cards, and the try-outs for the latest code Jessie was working on, and then they all sat cross-legged in a square on the floor. Dusk was drawing in and so the boys used their torches to light the room, casting long shadows onto the unmade bunk beds and the blackout curtains.
After Larry had held the torch upwards under his chin and made the obligatory ‘oooooh’ ghost noises, Aiden gave a signal for quiet by miming his throat being cut, and then Larry reminded everyone they must remember their musketeer pledge of ‘all for one and one for all’.
First of all, they decided, it would be good for morale to call themselves a name, and eventually they voted in Larry’s suggestion of dubbing themselves the TT Muskets, the TT standing for Tall Trees and the Musket bit having the advantage of being both a gun and a shortening of their musketeer bonding.
