by Katie King
Ted agreed, and the upshot of the conversation was that a few weeks later a series of self-protection classes were going to be run at the church hall, which would overlap with both the advice the police were giving the general public because of the rising crime rates, and also what the Home Guard were doing in case Jerry invaded.
Roger had popped into the local police station and, as he suspected might have happened to judge by what he was hearing when he was out and about on church business, there had been an (some would say) inevitable rise in petty crime during the blackout, with burglaries and thefts up and rather too many people having had purses and wallets snatched in the dark, or worse. There had also been a rise in traffic offences and accidents as driving in the blackout was fraught with problems, especially as road signs and place names had been taken down to make things as difficult as possible for Jerry should there be an invasion, and so if somebody wasn’t sure where they were or where they had to be, there was lots of room for error, both from drivers and pedestrians.
In short, there was an uneasy sense of distrust and cautiousness growing in the town, and this had translated to some women and the elderly feeling wary about leaving their homes at night. So although privately Roger felt there wasn’t really much that could be done to deter someone who was clearly out for causing trouble, he was going to host a series of what would hopefully be reassuring meetings on how to look after oneself and one’s property for anyone, grown-ups or children, who wanted to go. He hoped that would make people feel a little more active and in control of their own destinies, rather than them being stuck just waiting for something nasty to happen.
A PC Danders had been volunteered by the local police station, and he would offer some advice; and James said he was sure that one of his recuperating servicemen would be happy to help as well, which was indeed the case, in addition to the offer of running some elementary boxing lessons for boys.
A day or two later Peggy was talking about it to June Blenkinsop, who replied, ‘You know my father was an ex pat in the Far East where, aside from his export business, he studied martial arts, so I can rope him in to demonstrate some moves.’
Peggy immediately imagined the extravagantly moustachioed and very proper gent who she knew from taking his money when he visited the café and who proudly had what could only be described as a military bearing, demonstrating a few karate moves. It sprouted such an incongruous image of dear Horace in Peggy’s head that she had to quickly smother a rising chuckle in case June would be offended, although not before Peggy spied a look on June’s face that suggested she had been struck by the same thought.
Jessie and the other boys perked up a bit when Mabel mentioned the classes to them one morning over breakfast. There had still been no sign of the Hull gang, although the children from Tall Trees had been sticking close to home when playing, and had mostly been practising their riding on the nearby patch of waste ground where James had schooled them. What had also helped them was that Milburn’s food had been cut drastically in order to slim her down a little, and so she wasn’t being grazed as much in hand. A vote had been taken about the newspaper collection, and they had decided to go ahead with it with the proviso that at the first sight of trouble they could, if they so wanted, knock the collection round on the head.
The boys had felt very concerned the day of the first collection round, a feeling which they tried very hard to hide from the girls, who they had still not mentioned the animosity of the bigger Hull evacuees to. Connie twigged something was up but, despite grilling both Jessie and Aiden, she had to content herself with sulking and then pointedly talking only to Angela when she couldn’t get to the bottom of why the boys seemed so serious and wrapped up in each other. The round had, however, gone off without a hitch, and as time passed over the next few weeks and there was still no sighting of the Hull lads, the TT Muskets gradually began to relax.
In the evenings the children were kept busy cutting out and then sewing the cloth bags that James wanted for his patients at the hospital so that they had something to keep their bits and pieces in, as the TT Muskets were determined that one of their members would win the prize for the highest number of cloth bags made and donated to hospital. Connie and Angela were eyeing up the trophy for themselves too, and so there was a lot of friendly joshing and banter as the children cut out and stitched, and as Peggy commented to Gracie, quite a prodigious output, before realising by Gracie’s blank face that she had no idea what prodigious meant, and so Peggy quickly said, ‘They’ve made a large number,’ to which Gracie nodded gratefully.
Gracie was now volunteering in the evenings at a third depot that was quite near both the paper-collecting and the scrap-metal depot, although the one that Gracie helped out at was mainly used in the packaging of weapons for sending abroad to the troops. Some of the new guns – usually Webley or Enfield pistols, although sometimes there were Lee-Enfield rifles or Thomson submachine guns to deal with, and once even Sten guns – arrived with a hardened amber waxy surface on their metal parts as protection in transit from the factory. Gracie’s job was to scrape this off gently with a piece of wood to prevent scratching or denting the metal as far as possible, and then she had to polish the weapons with an oily cloth ready for them to be packed into new crates for shipping abroad. She said it was very hard work as the wax was difficult to budge, especially around the tricky bits where there were more fiddly crevices to dig it out from, and that it played havoc with one’s hands. But Gracie also claimed it to be good fun more often than not, and that the other lasses there were full of life and cheekiness, and so Peggy thought she was enjoying her time at the depot, rough hands or no.
All in all, life felt pretty much in a pleasant enough routine at Tall Trees for now.
For everyone except for Peggy, that was, who realised she was the most unsettled one of the bunch. In fact she still felt out of sorts and, as Mabel described it, mardy. The brief excitement of almost suggesting – or was she imbuing what she had actually said with too much meaning? – as bold as brass to James that it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that they could, at some unspecified time in the future, share a drink in a public house hadn’t lasted long, and if she thought about what she had said now, she would berate herself for being so forward.
The result was that most days, Peggy found herself feeling in the doldrums and she realised that although she enjoyed helping June with the till and the cashing-up at the teashop, she felt a bit bored.
Lurking just below the surface as she went about her day-to-day life, Peggy found herself totally unable to shake off a depressing sense of failure about the end of her marriage, feelings intensified by the thoughts she’d had of all persuasions since Maureen’s visit. More than once Mabel caught her sitting at the kitchen table quite late at night, with Holly sound asleep in her arms, and with Peggy staring morosely at a cup of tea that had gone cold and unappetising without Peggy once having raised it to her lips to take a sip.
Peggy had thought deeply about whether she should make a move to instigate a more formal end to her marriage, although every time she considered even talking to someone like Roger as to how she might go about this – as she knew he must have had experience of discussing this sort of situation with his other parishioners – she felt overcome with such a wave of exhaustion that she couldn’t face it, at which point she would then tell herself she would think about it again, and tackle it another day.
Once, when Peggy was the only adult in the house, she had had to answer the telephone, which she had completely avoided using since the day of the terrible discussion with Bill. She felt queasy and breathless as she walked into Roger’s study where the ring was clanging insistently, as she knew she had to pick up the receiver in case it was someone ringing for Roger with an emergency for which he would be needed. Sometimes a parishioner would call with the distressing news that a family member was close to death, and Peggy would never have forgiven herself if she hadn’t stepped up to the plate when somebod
y else was having a much more traumatic time than she, even though there had been a discombobulating instant when she had contemplated pretending that she hadn’t heard the ring of the telephone.
Luckily though, as she reached for the handset with a sense of dread and trepidation, this quickly gave way to a feeling of relief that flooded through her when she discovered after her greeting of ‘Tall Trees Rectory’ that it was Barbara who had telephoned.
‘I thought I’d make a telephone call to give you a surprise,’ her sister told her.
‘For a terrible moment I thought I was going to be picking up the receiver to find Bill on the end of the line,’ said Peggy. ‘And so I can’t tell you how happy I am that it’s you! But nothing bad has happened, has it, as it’s not like you to telephone? The children are out with the pony at the moment, but they’ll be sorry to have missed you.’
‘No, no, nothing out of the ordinary is going on here. All penny-pinching and making-do, and trying to get used to the rationing, but that will be the same with you up there, and so that’s not really news, is it? And I’ve now got only the one pair of stockings left that aren’t darned to pieces. I’ve just posted long letters to the children, and so you can say that although I’m sorry I’ve missed them, I’m sending love and they’ll get my letters soon.’
‘That reminds me, Barbara – James Legard read some of Connie’s writing the other day, and I could see he was shocked at what he saw. Now that school has broken for the summer it’s probably not worth bothering her too much, but they’ll be up at the big school next term, and so I think our Connie is going to have to try a lot harder there,’ said Peggy.
Barbara signalled her agreement with a heartfelt sigh, and the sisters talked for a while about ‘the conundrum of Connie’, as they called it, but as usual when they spoke on this subject they weren’t able to draw any conclusions. Then Barbara quizzed Peggy about Milburn and whether she seemed safe for the children to spend so much time with, seeing as both Connie and Jessie had mentioned her often in their letters home.
Peggy said she didn’t want to tempt fate and, while she hesitated to describe Milburn as ‘bomb proof’, the little mare really didn’t seem to be scared about very much, and then she enquired about her own and Bill’s cat Fishy, which Barbara and Ted were now looking after. Barbara made Peggy laugh by telling her that with a flurry of people late to digging out their yards in Jubilee Street to be ready for their self-constructed Anderson shelters (Barbara and Ted having installed theirs the previous summer), this was disturbing a depressing number of rat nests, and Fishy now had a growing reputation in Jubilee Street as a pretty good ratter. That had led Ted to mutter the cat should really be called Ratty, given her penchant for dragging back heavy brown corpses to number five, a habit which he and Barbara had tried (unsuccessfully) to dissuade her from. However, there was an upside, as it meant that Fishy was getting quite a lot of odd titbits as a reward from various neighbours, and so she rarely mewed at number five Jubilee Street for anything to eat, which was very helpful.
Barbara changed the subject to what she had really telephoned about, and Peggy could tell this by the more workmanlike cast to her voice. ‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot, Peggy, and I want to know how you are, how you really are. Your letters don’t feel quite the ticket at the moment, it seems to me. I hope you don’t mind me saying this, dear.’
Peggy sighed, and then she confessed to Barbara that she felt very up and down, and as if nothing – other than Holly – could quite please her.
‘Well, I don’t know how you’ll feel about what I’m going to say, but we had a knock at the door last night, and Bill was standing there, as large as life,’ said Barbara. ‘He had a forty-eight-hour pass and of course he wanted to plead his case with me, so that I could try and persuade you to take him back. I told him I didn’t think you’d be swayed, but I would say to you that he had visited, although that was all I was going to say, and I wasn’t going to pass on to you any of his excuses as whatever he had been thinking about, which he didn’t look too happy with.’
‘Too bloody right I’m not going to be swayed, and I think we both know exactly what he was thinking about!’ Peggy interrupted, and then harrumphed with feeling when her sister added that she’d also told Bill about Maureen’s visit to Harrogate. It wasn’t like Peggy to swear, and especially when she was speaking to Barbara, as Barbara could be sniffy about this sort of thing.
Barbara ignored the ‘bloody’, and went on, ‘I don’t think Bill knew about Maureen’s visit, to be honest, as he went very pale which makes me think Maureen has kept quiet about going up to Harrogate, and then Bill had the gall to ask me what Maureen had wanted with seeing you. Luckily Ted stepped in at that point as I think he could see that I was getting a bit hot under the collar with Bill, and so Ted took him off to the Jolly, where he was a bit surprised to see that Bill proceeded to get in his cups, given that he’s never been much of a drinker in the past. Ted told me that Bill had hoped, apparently, that he could stop with us, but Ted put the kibosh on that, thank goodness. So I’ve no idea where he ended up last night, although it wasn’t with us.’
‘Ugh,’ groaned Peggy in such a heartfelt way that Barbara wished they were together so that she could properly comfort her sister, and that they weren’t divided by hundreds of miles. ‘Just the very thought of Bill is like a low-lying cloud hanging right above me, following me about and threatening to rain. I’m sick and tired of it. What am I going to do, Barbara?’ said Peggy
The sisters talked for another minute or two, during which time Peggy told Barbara that if anything similar happened again then Barbara was to come right out and say it to her and not waste time or energy pussy-footing around in the way she had begun this telephone conversation. Barbara wanted to say she had been trying to see first how Peggy was feeling, but then she decided to keep quiet as Peggy had sounded grumpy and so her sister thought that to defend herself would only lead to more grumpiness. Nevertheless Peggy felt much better by the time they said their goodbyes, not least as Barbara had pointed out that Bill looked haggard and very wretched about the parlous state of his marriage and lack of contact with his baby daughter.
In fact Peggy’s new-found feeling of being bolstered was still with her several hours later, and she awoke the next day in a stronger frame of mind.
Right after she had finished for the day at June Blenkinsop’s she went to the post office to pay half a crown for a postal order to send to Barbara to cover the cost of what she would have had to pay the barman at the Jolly for the long-distance telephone call, and to send her as a small thank-you a bar of violet-scented soap she had bought in one of Mabel’s bring- and-buy sales, and had been saving for a special occasion.
Peggy very much wanted Barbara to know that she had telephoned at just the right time, and that she had made her feel much restored – sisters were like that, weren’t they? And this was a very valuable relationship, and a connection to be cherished. Peggy smiled at the thought of what she and Barbara meant to each other, and then her grin deepened as she thought of the tight bonds of affection that bound Jessie and Connie to each other too.
Family life had a lot to recommend it, she reminded herself, and more fool Bill for forgetting that in his haste to bed Maureen (from the NAAFI).
Chapter Nineteen
Unfortunately Jessie and Connie weren’t feeling at all brotherly and sisterly right at that moment.
Connie was distinctly peeved at being cut out of whatever it was that was going on with her brother and his friends, and which she quite obviously had been excluded from. She’d had enough – more than enough actually – and she felt at the end of her tether. She pondered for a while and then she came up with a plan.
So she laid in wait for Jessie as he came out of the bathroom following his weekly bath – he’d drawn the short straw and had had to go into the now tepid and distinctly grey and murky water last out of the four boys – and, using the element of surprise as she knew that th
is would be Jessie at his most defenceless, she had sprung on him physically and had quickly pushed and bundled her affronted and complaining brother into her little box room, whereupon she had closed the door and quickly wedged her bedside table against it to prevent Jessie from making a run from her too easily.
As Connie had bargained – she was good at strategic planning, even Jessie had to acknowledge this – Jessie’s cries that the boys should come and rescue him fell on deaf ears as the Tall Trees grown-ups were all out and about on their daily business, while the other boys were playing a very noisy game of gin rummy in their bedroom. The door to their dorm was firmly shut and so their shouts and ribbing of each other made them quite oblivious to the predicament that Jessie now found himself in.
Poor Jessie quickly realised he had to handle this on his own, and he could only make a sound that was a bit like ‘eek!’, which he followed with a strong ‘gerroff!’ as he tried to clutch his damp towel more firmly around himself as Connie forced him onto the bed, before then backing a step or two away and positioning herself firmly between him and the door.
He gave a baleful look at his sister, and to his horror Jessie saw that there was one end of the towel still firmly held in one of her fists, and an extremely cross look on her face. This wasn’t good, no, not at all.
‘I’ve had enough, Jessie! If you don’t tell me exactly what you are all up to, then I’m pulling this towel away, and pushing you out into the corridor and then chasing you down it to your room and then you’ll have to explain to your pals why you are as naked as the day you were born and running away from me, and don’t you dare think that I wouldn’t,’ Connie said to him, and then dramatically narrowed her eyes and stuck her head forward as if to further emphasise her point. Jessie’s whole body quivered with tension. He’d never live this down if Connie actually fulfilled her promise. There was worse to come.
