by Katie King
Aiden and Connie had sat together just behind James, and Peggy could just about make out them asking the doctor a raft of questions about the hospital, and the sort of things James did there running his team of doctors. Above the noise of the charabanc’s engine as it made heavy weather of going up a hill she heard James say, ‘Aiden, if you come over one evening and it’s not a busy time I’ll show you around and you can see for yourself things like the operating theatre and the X-ray machine. I might be able to find a book or two that will tell you more.’
Connie had a slightly petulant tinge to her voice as she asked James what about if she were interested in medicine too and wanted something to read, and then there was a pause as both James and Peggy thought about a tactful way that he could deal with the fact that Connie’s reading probably wasn’t up to this sort of material just yet. But then James avoided this particular prickly issue altogether by saying, ‘I meant both of you, of course.’ Connie was mollified, leaving Peggy uncertain whether she was pleased or cross with James’s diplomatic reply.
Oh dear, it seemed that neither James nor she could win, as far as her own thoughts were going that afternoon. They were damned if they did or said anything, and damned if they didn’t, it seemed to Peggy.
Jessie and Larry were sitting in opposite seats, with their backs against the windows and their legs stretched out on the seat in front. They were silent for a while, but after that the tense atmosphere in the charabanc lightened as they led a round or two of singing, opening with ‘Ten Green Bottles’, and then Tommy, who had a lovely singing voice, and Angela, whose voice wasn’t bad, joined in for a couple of verses each of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘Good-Bye-Ee’. It was only when the children launched into ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World and I Was the Only Boy’ that Peggy risked another look at the charabanc’s mirror again, and her heart bumped alarmingly when she saw James steal a glance at her, and she had to turn her head obviously to stare out of the window and make it seem like she hadn’t been looking at him, although she doubted he’d been fooled.
By the time they got back to Tall Trees Peggy felt quite worn out with the effort of thinking too much and trying not to look in the wrong place. Holly had picked up on her mother’s now fractious mood, becoming quite grizzly, intimating with cries rising in volume that in all honesty she’d also had enough of the charabanc’s noisy engine and a mother distracted by something that wasn’t her, and so she was very much looking forward to her bath, supper and bedtime.
Holly’s snivels gave Peggy a welcome excuse for slipping away with the minimum of fuss, ignoring James’s outstretched hand he’d extended politely towards her elbow in an attempt to ensure she got herself and Holly safely down the charabanc’s steps.
Once on firm ground Peggy made a show of keeping her eyes turned downwards in order to wrap Holly’s blanket around the baby, and then called out in a falsely jolly tone, ‘What a lovely trip, James, thank you so much, but I’d better get this little one inside right away, don’t you think? And children you won’t forget to say a nice thank-you and goodbye to James, will you? And if you can, everybody, just double-check that nothing of ours is left on any of the seats, as that would be really helpful. And Connie dear, can you bring me all of Holly’s things please?’ and without looking back, Peggy headed up the drive to the rectory.
She hot-footed it inside Tall Trees, bypassing with only a hasty smile in their direction in response to a ‘hello there, have you had a lovely time?’ from Mabel and Roger who were on their way out to help with the unloading, and who raised their eyebrows questioningly at each other in the wake of Peggy’s hasty departure.
This, with the sound of the children saying in chorus ‘Thank you, Dr Legard, for giving us a lovely day,’ and James ignoring the children’s thanks as he called to Peggy’s retreating back a distinctly plaintive, ‘But I was hoping…’, made a cacophony of sounds that an overheated and overtired Peggy found stayed whirling in her ears as she heaved a still blubbing Holly up the stairs to their bedroom.
Chapter Twenty-four
My dearest Jessie and Connie,
How are you both? It’s almost your birthday, and Ted and I can hardly believe you are going to be eleven! How exciting – and how big! Me and Ted are excited, that’s for certain. And there’s only a few weeks now until big school starts.
Did you enjoy your day out at the seaside? Peggy said it was lovely and sunny for the whole day you were out, and that everyone had a good run-around and a big blast of fresh air, but that there was no fish when you got to the chippy.
I promise you both, my darlings, that when this war is over and we are all back together in Jubilee Street, one of the very first things that we’ll all do as a family is that we’ll gorge ourselves silly on fish and chips until we just can’t move. How does that sound to you, my dear Connie and Jessie? Is that a deal?
Daddy and me had a day trip out of London too. We went on the train down to the South Downs in Sussex, where there is some really good walking. (We honeymooned nearby, and so it is a place that holds very special memories for us, not least as the next year both of you were born!)
It was a beautiful sunny August day for us as well, and we both struggled to remember a better one. The air was clear and there must have been a shower of rain overnight that made the grass look very fresh, and greener than what we see in London around what hasn’t been given over to food growing, and everything we could see was clean and almost sparkling, so much so that it felt almost perfect. It would only have needed the two of you there with us to be perfect, in fact!
We walked for two hours and we had just sat on some grass and were enjoying our picnic when we could hear aeroplanes flying above us. We looked up, and there in the skies very high up we could see all of a sudden our lads from the RAF fighting it out with what looked to be the same number of Luftwaffe planes from Germany. The sun was so bright that now and again we could see it shining off the metal of the aeroplanes, and there were so many aircraft up there that at times the sky looked quite crowded, can you believe?
Jessie, I’m not good at recognising types of aeroplanes but Daddy told me that he could see flying on our side mainly Spitfires, although he thought he might possibly also have seen a couple of Hawker Hurricanes up there for us too, with the Germans mainly in Messershmidts (not sure how to spell that – I should have checked this earlier!), I think he said.
The planes dipped and rose, and chased each other. I can’t pretend it wasn’t exciting to see – the weather was so clear and so completely without any clouds that the sky was almost dark blue, a real azure, Peggy would have called it.
After a while there was something about it that brought lumps to our throats I’m not ashamed to say that we both shed a tear as it was such a beautiful day and a sight we won’t forget.
I want you both to know how very, very much Daddy and me love you, and that whatever happens to us all during this dreadful war, I don’t want either of you to forget this one really important thing, that we love you and we think of you both all the time.
I’ll write again soon, but in the meanwhile remember to eat up everything that Mabel gives you, and not to do anything silly with Milburn that might end up with any of you getting hurt. Be good, and do everything that Peggy asks you to as well.
With all my love, Mummy xxx
There was an emotional silence when Connie finished her laborious reading out loud of the letter over the breakfast table, with both Jessie and Aiden helping her out at times with some of the longer words, and Peggy once offering to take over the reading from Connie, who just ignored the offer.
Peggy had to swallow and wipe under her eyelashes as she understood that Barbara had seen something that would be talked about for years, and that she had been shocked to realise that she was watching young men die.
Roger cleared his throat loudly and made a show of shaking out and then folding the newspaper to another page, while Mabel gave a trumpeting blow of her no
se into a hankie.
This wasn’t at all what Peggy had been expecting when she’d handed the letter to the twins, as Barbara’s missives were normally positive and cheery, and sometimes even contained a joke that would make the children laugh. Peggy always encouraged Connie and Jessie to take it in turns to read their letters out at the breakfast table as she was surreptitiously trying to get Connie to be a bit more confident in this area, but this neatly addressed envelope hadn’t at all contained what she had bargained for and unfortunately it had been Connie’s turn to read, which had further dragged things out, which in turn had highlighted the emotion behind what was being said. Now, in the dank silence following Connie saying ‘kiss, kiss, kiss’, Peggy wasn’t at all sure what to say to the children in the letter’s gloomy wake.
The situation was further complicated as Peggy was aware too that Larry or Angela hardly ever got letters from home, and in the past she’d noticed how they also really enjoyed hearing about what was going on back in Bermondsey and so she always encouraged them to sit and listen to the twins’ letters from Barbara and Ted, almost as if they were pretending that Barbara was writing to them too. Larry’s mother Susan wasn’t good with pen and paper, Peggy knew, and of course his father was a raging drunk who didn’t pay any credence to reading and writing at the best of times. And Angela’s mother Ethel had her hands full with being the family’s only breadwinner, while she also had to look after Angela’s heavily disabled sister, Jill, who’d had polio as a baby, and a father suffering very poor health with shellshock from the Great War and such bad seizures every day that he was unable to work.
But now neither Larry nor Angela looked as happy to hear one of Barbara’s letters being read out as usually they did, while Peggy could see both Tommy, who of course saw his parents every day, and Aiden, who saw his parents often too as they didn’t live far away, were looking anxiously in their direction, before switching their gazes back between them and the twins.
Awkwardly, Larry pushed his chair back with an ear-jangling scraping sound on the stone flags of the kitchen’s floor, and he hurriedly left the room without looking at anybody. Angela looked down moodily into her lap, and picked at the hem of her skirt.
Barbara’s unsettlingly confessional tone and her uncharacteristically insistent declaration of her and Ted’s love for the twins had of course been lovely in many ways, and fortifying too, Peggy was sure, for Connie and Jessie to receive, but it must have highlighted to both Angela and Larry that their own family situations didn’t provide anything like the same succour for them. All in all, it would have been a perturbing letter for all the children.
‘I think Mummy must have been very upset when she wrote this to us at it didn’t really sound like her,’ unintentionally agreeing with her aunt, Connie broke the silence, her voice and her brow crinkled with thought as she had been so concentrating on saying the words as she read, that Peggy thought she hadn’t until then had time to absorb what Barbara had been saying. Still frowning and looking at the letter, Connie hadn’t seemed to notice that Larry had left the room so suddenly.
With a twist to her heart, Peggy saw how Connie’s contemplative expression, just for a short while, made her look almost grown up. It was the first time Peggy had had a glimpse of the woman that Connie would become one day, but she could see this clearly now, and then Peggy thought of the inexorable way that time passed them all by and how time really did, as the saying goes, wait for no man. Trying to brush these philosophical thoughts aside, Peggy wondered then whether any of the others had also spied what she had just fancied she had seen in Connie, although she could see too that the moment had passed and Connie was back to looking just like any girl a week or two before her eleventh birthday, and actually nobody really seemed to be looking at her just at the moment as they all seemed lost in their own thoughts.
‘Yes, I think Barbara was very upset when she wrote to you both,’ Peggy agreed sadly. ‘To me it sounds like by chance she and Ted saw something they’d never come across before, and then when they realised quite what it was they were watching, Barbara felt full of awe and also very sad, both at the same time. And I think these feelings have stayed with her. I expect Daddy is feeling a bit the same.’
‘I can’t imagine Daddy crying,’ said Jessie loyally. ‘I think Mummy made a mistake and his eye was watering because he’d got something in it, or because he had been staring at the shiny Spitfires for too long.’
To Peggy, Jessie appeared to be very young and very much a little boy still, experiencing nothing near the shift of physical development and hormones that Connie seemed to be just on the cusp of. Peggy’s heart went out to Jessie and the way he was trying to stand up for his father in front of them all.
‘Well, we all know how Ted is very strong and not overly emotional, a bit like your mother is usually,’ said Peggy carefully, as it was important that she didn’t make her nephew lose face, although she didn’t want to allow Jessie to believe that boys always had to button bad things up, ‘and it was very bright and sunny from all accounts, and my eyes water sometimes if the light is very bright, and so Barbara might have made a mistake if Ted were crying or not. But if Daddy did cry just a little when he was standing on the Downs with Barbara and watching the fighting, then you do know that is nothing to be ashamed of, don’t you, Jessie? Some things in life are so sad that they would make anybody – simply anybody at all – have a quick cry.’
The boys looked askance and as if this couldn’t possibly be true in any circumstances, and even Gracie seemed distinctly dubious.
There were unexpected repercussions to Barbara’s emotive letter arriving at Tall Trees as it kick-started an obsession amongst the boys with the aerial dogfights now taking place over British soil and also over the English Channel. The newspapers were full of descriptive reports too, and following a speech Winston Churchill had made in the House of Commons the aerial offensive had now been widely dubbed as the Battle of Britain.
The boys became increasingly fanatical about paying attention to any reports of what was going on as regards British combat in the skies, and so on Roger’s collection of ancient road maps of Great Britain, which had been put up on the long wall of the upstairs landing, they began to plot with drawing pins holding little stickers, various strategic events they heard on the radio or read about in the papers.
Aiden and Larry began bringing discarded newspapers back with them when they had finished their shifts at June Blenkinsop’s, and the boys would scour the newspapers later in the evening, cutting out various stories so that they would then have to get the sticky pot of Gloy glue out in order to paste the cuttings into a scrapbook, and then put the remains of the newspaper in the stable where the papers and metals were being piled ready for the depot.
Pride of place in the scrapbook, on the very first page, was a London Calling story with the blousy headline ‘The Fighting Spitfire’, as this outlined all the attributes of the Spitfire and, fascinatingly, gave a detailed diagram of the craft, very neatly labelled, that showed all its features, both outside and inside. On more than one occasion, as Peggy went upstairs to put Holly down for the night, she heard the boys quizzing each other in the intricacies of this and other British fighter aircraft, or destroyers if there had been reports of something happening at sea.
The girls were less interested in the technicalities of the various aeroplanes or aerial strategy, but hours would pass when they seemed happy enough to allow the boys to show off to them all they were learning about a variety of planes, tanks and sea-going craft. And as a present for the lads Connie and Angela spent a whole two days making up a set of playing cards for Snap using carefully traced drawings of the various fighters, the cards then being used in some nail-bitingly lively games.
‘I’m not sure I approve of this fixation the children have at the moment with the war,’ said Peggy to Mabel a day or so later. She had been hoping that all this talk of fighting strategy and aircraft was going to be a brief craze that would blo
w over after several days, but it looked like the children’s interest was much deeper than ideally she’d like and that in fact their interest was increasing rather than going the other way.
‘Me neither. But it’s only t’ be expected, I supp’se,’ Mabel pointed out.
It wasn’t long before the children asked – no, they absolutely begged – to be taken to the cinema more regularly as Pathé News was now starting to broadcast newsreel of actual fighting, and the children were desperate to see some films of real-life action. There was a debate between Peggy, Roger and Mabel as to whether this was a good thing or not, as Peggy was concerned that if not checked, the war would grow into a truly unhealthy obsession, while Roger felt that for the children to be informed sensibly of what was happening was the best way to stop them getting too imaginative as to what was going on elsewhere and perhaps frightening themselves.
Peggy thought overnight about what Roger had said, and then she decided that he had made a valid point, and that for Roger to accompany the children to the cinema as per his suggestion was probably the best option as otherwise the chances were that they would start to sneak in anyway on their own, in which case they wouldn’t have an adult on hand with them to put into a wider context what it was that they were seeing, or to explain what the news broadcasters were speaking about if there was talk about political strategy. Still, Peggy decided not to consult Barbara as to what she thought any about this, as it might make things awkward if Barbara said a firm ‘No’ and then the twins disobeyed her by going to see the Pathé News anyway or refused to desist in their avid poring over stories in the newspapers of the course the war was taking.
