by Katie King
Suddenly she craved a new start, something completely different, far, far away from all this upset and strife.
Roger had a blanket in his arms and he gathered a bundle of hay to take to Milburn.
‘I think this is the final straw, Roger,’ Peggy said in a very low voice. ‘I can see that you’re just ordinary folk, Mabel and you, and the way you live your lives, it’s a good way, I can see that, but no matter how much I try to be like you both, it’s not how us from Bermondsey find ourselves living our lives. Every day there seems to be some new trouble we bring you, and it has all amounted to too much for generous people like yourselves. We’ve tried, and tried hard, and I know you have too. But I think we’ve all failed in stopping it being one drama after another, and it just can’t go on. It’s not good for any of us.’
There was a pause.
Roger said, ‘Peggy, I think you might be about to say something you will regret, and so please don’t feel you have to say anything at all, or even apologise. Certainly it’s been, shall we say, livelier than Mabel and I had imagined it would be, having you all here with us. But it’s not all been bad, has it? In fact I’d even go as far as saying it has been good for us all, really.’
‘I think it would be best if we go back to London. The twins would like it as they miss their parents, and I think I need to have my sister and Ted close at hand. I can’t do this on my own any more,’ said Peggy regardless, her tone more resolute although full of abject dejection. She hadn’t really heard what Roger had said, so convinced was she that what she was saying was the best option.
‘Are you sure you’re not saying this as a consequence of it merely being a horrid evening?’ Roger asked.
Peggy shook her head. ‘It’s too unsettling and too difficult not being at home in Bermondsey, and I suppose I accept now that I am just not up to it.’
And so Roger added, ‘Of course you must do what you think right, Peggy. But make sure your decision is thought through properly. Why not talk it over with Barbara and Ted?’
He laid a hand on her forearm, and she put her hand on his, saying, ‘Thank you, Roger. I don’t have the words to express what we all owe you.’
Roger sighed sadly and then filled a bucket with some water and shaking his head ruefully he went to the garden to check on Milburn, tactfully making himself scarce as he thought Peggy needed some time on her own to absorb what had just happened.
Peggy was left alone in the back yard. The moonlight was bright on her face still, which meant it was casting shadows that managed to seem somehow blacker than black, and she could hear what were presumably sounds of disentangling the car from the broken five-bar gate.
Peggy gave a small groan and then, exhausted, she slid her back down the stable wall until her bottom touched the ground, and there she stayed deep in the shadows cast by Tall Trees with her knees bent up in front of her. It wasn’t a very ladylike position, and ordinarily she would have been worried about her knickers or her petticoat being on show. But she was beyond caring.
She was also beyond being able to cry, she discovered. She recognised Holly’s wail, but in the knowledge that there were people with the baby, Peggy didn’t even have the energy to go and see to her daughter.
She wrapped her arms about her legs and rested her forehead on her knees as she tried to comfort herself. She stayed like that for a long while, until well after the police had removed their vehicle.
Peggy felt worse than she could ever remember feeling, certainly even worse than after she had hung up the telephone when Bill had broken the news to her about his relationship with Maureen, which she had thought back then, more than three months earlier now, was a low point beyond which she could never plunge again.
How wrong she had been, Peggy thought now. She hadn’t believed such pain and strife that she felt at this minute was possible.
But it was.
It was.
Peggy raised her head and looked up at the outline of Tall Trees’ roof, where the people she loved were all inside.
She sighed.
It was going to be the most terrible wrench, and she would lose good friends in Roger, Mabel and June Blenkinsop, she knew. And if she left Harrogate she was also going to lose the possibility of anything wonderful happening between her and James, but that was her own fault and actually she had lost that already. And she could see that there were many arguments for concentrating on being a good mother to Holly, rather than trying to find a new love herself. But it hurt – oh, how it hurt! – the thought of how she had been so callous-seeming in front of James.
Miserably Peggy tipped her head to look up at the stars, and she saw Orion’s belt twinkling directly in the darkness high above her.
A breeze gusted and Peggy felt her arms goose-bump. There was the faintest sense of the forthcoming crisp autumn nights in the air – and for a second Peggy imagined she had the smell of bonfires in her nose and the distinctive dull sound of footsteps on pavements on the first really cold morning in the winter echoing in her ears – but these sensations dwindled when she noted how the sky above her looked the most glorious she could remember, the velvety darkness majestically cushioning the mysterious dome of the moon and the stars sparkling just for her, it seemed, magnificent and awe-inspiring.
Peggy mused on how insignificant one person’s life was when compared to millions of years the stars and planets had witnessed, shining down at her from the heavens across all those light years away. She felt very small, a mere speck of humanity. And then the sound of Holly laughing rang out, and as her eyes flicked towards the back door and the sight of Connie and a limping Jessie sneaking out to find Aiden and Milburn, she realised that although she, and they, were simply a miniscule part of a pattern much more complex than she could ever hope to grasp, nonetheless she had achieved something vital by bringing Holly into the world and she should be proud.
Peggy allowed her shoulders to relax and her breaths to deepen. She tried to think of her hurt and her frustration as something she could package up deep within her and then push to somewhere far away. But try as she might, she couldn’t, and a fresh wave of despair engulfed her, dissolving the more positive feeling of a moment earlier.
She stared upwards once more, and saw something unusual shadowed in front of Orion’s belt, and Peggy’s brow wrinkled slightly in incomprehension.
A moment later she held her breath in trepidation as she realised she could hear now what was undeniably the drone of a bomber’s engine.
And then there was a trembling flicker of subdued light and, a few seconds later she fancied, a faint and muffled sound of a bomb exploding many miles away.
With a tremble, Peggy realised that she had just experienced her first bomb, and no matter how life-and-death her own personal struggles might be, as the summer of 1940 drew to a close, she understood with a breathtaking clarity that the war itself might be about to make fools of them all and annihilate each of their private battles.
Peggy felt as if a chapter of her life had just ended abruptly.
She thought that for ever in her mind, even if she and Holly survived the war, it would be ‘before the first bomb’ and ‘after the first bomb’ as far as she was concerned. It felt a significant moment, and Peggy felt the hairs on her arm stand proud anew, although this time because of a charge of emotion and not through chill.
She discovered she’d been holding her breath and as she let it out Peggy put her forehead back to her knees. What a horrible world it was. A cruel, stinking, unfair, horrible world.
Now she found she could weep.
She let the tears fall unchecked.
She wept for all the children at Tall Trees and the precarious futures that were facing them, she wept for Holly as it wasn’t Holly’s fault she had a mother as hapless as Peggy, she wept for James’s patients and what they had been through fighting for home and country, she wept for James’s skinned knuckles as she hoped that he hadn’t done serious damage as if he had then people might die who
he could have saved on the operating table, she wept for the people who might just have lost their homes or even their lives in the explosion she had witnessed just now, she wept for Milburn being so unnecessarily frightened, and afterwards she wept for Maureen’s baby boy, rejected by his father through no fault of his own, and even for Bill, and his failure to be as loyal as she had been.
There was a throbbing far above her that increased in intensity, and as Peggy heard more enemy bombers flying across Yorkshire, and as those inside Tall Trees spilled out into the yard to run to the road and stare at the sky, Peggy looked up to see these agents of death flying side by side, one line first and then a second line and even a third, as they crossed the shiny stars of Orion on their way to dropping their bombs on the cities of Britain.
And lastly Peggy wept for herself, and her fear at what might be her own – and her beloved country’s – destiny in this time of war.
Read on for an extract from the first book in this heart-warming series from Katie King
The Evacuee Christmas
Far from home, in the midst of war…
Chapter One
The shadows were starting to lengthen as twins Connie and Jessie made their way back home.
They felt quite grown up these days as a week earlier it had been their tenth birthday, and their mother Barbara had iced a cake and there’d been a raucous tea party at home for family and their close friends, with party games and paper hats. The party had ended in the parlour with Barbara bashing out songs on the old piano and everyone having a good old sing-song.
What a lot of fun it had been, even though by bedtime Connie felt queasy from eating too much cake, and Jessie had a sore throat the following morning from yelling out the words to ‘The Lambeth Walk’ with far too much vigour.
On the twins’ iced Victoria sponge Barbara had carefully piped Connie’s name in cerise icing with loopy lettering and delicately traced small yellow and baby-pink flowers above it.
Then Barbara had thoroughly washed out her metal icing gun and got to work writing Jessie’s name below his sister’s on the lower half of the cake.
This time Barbara chose to work in boxy dark blue capitals, with a sailboat on some choppy turquoise and deep-blue waves carefully worked in contrasting-coloured icing as the decoration below his name, Jessie being very sensitive about his name and the all-too-common assumption, for people who hadn’t met him but only knew him by the name ‘Jessie’, that he was a girl.
If she cared to think about it, which she tried not to, Barbara heartily regretted that Ted had talked her into giving their only son as his Christian name the Ross family name of Jessie which, as tradition would have it, was passed down to the firstborn male in each new generation of Rosses.
It wasn’t even spelt Jesse, as it usually was if naming a boy, because – Ross family tradition again – Jessie was on the earlier birth certificates of those other Jessies and in the family Bible that lay on the sideboard in the parlour at Ted’s elder brother’s house, and so Jessie was how it had to be for all the future Ross generations to come.
Ted had told Barbara what an honour it was to be called Jessie, and Barbara, still weak from the exertions of the birth, had allowed herself to be talked into believing her husband.
She must have still looked a little dubious, though, as then Ted pointed out that his own elder brother Jessie was a gruff-looking giant with huge arms and legs, and nobody had ever dared tease him about his name. It was going to be just the same for their newborn son, Ted promised.
Big Jessie (as Ted’s brother had become known since the birth of his nephew) was in charge of the maintenance of several riverboats on the River Thames, Ted working alongside him, and Big Jessie, with his massive bulk, could single-handedly fill virtually all of the kitchen hearth in his and his wife Val’s modest terraced house that backed on to the Bermondsey street where Ted and Barbara raised their children in their own, almost identical red-brick house.
Barbara could see why nobody in their right mind would mess with Big Jessie, even though those who knew him soon discovered that his bruiser looks belied his gentle nature as he was always mild of manner and slow to anger, with a surprisingly soft voice.
Sadly, it had proved to be a whole different story for young Jessie, who had turned out exactly as Barbara had suspected he would all those years ago when she lovingly gazed down at her newborn twins, with the hale and hearty Connie (named after Barbara’s mother Constance) dwarfing her more delicate-framed brother as they lay length to length with their toes almost touching and their heads away from each other in the beautifully crafted wooden crib Ted had made for the babies to sleep in.
These days, Barbara could hardly bear to see how cruelly it all played out on the grubby streets on which the Ross family lived. To say it fair broke Barbara’s heart was no exaggeration.
While Connie was tall, tomboyish and could easily pass for twelve, and very possibly older, Jessie was smaller and more introverted, often looking a lot younger than he was.
Barbara hated the way Jessie would shrink away from the bigger south-east London lads when they tussled him to the ground in their rough-house games. All the boys had their faces rubbed in the dirt by the other lads at one time or another – Barbara knew and readily accepted that that was part and parcel of a child’s life in the tangle of narrow and dingy streets they knew so well – but very few people had to endure quite the punishing that Jessie did with such depressing regularity.
Connie would confront the vindictive lads on her brother’s behalf, her chin stuck out defiantly as she dared them to take her on instead. If the boys didn’t immediately back away from Jessie, she blasted in their direction an impressive slew of swear words that she’d learnt by dint of hanging around on the docks when she took Ted his lunch in the school holidays. (It was universally agreed amongst all the local boys that when Connie was in a strop, it was wisest to do what she wanted, or else it was simply asking for trouble.)
Meanwhile, as Connie berated all and sundry, Jessie would freeze with a cowed expression on his face, and look as if he wished he were anywhere else but there. Needless to say, it was with a ferocious regularity that he found himself at the mercy of these bigger, stronger rowdies.
Usually this duffing-up happened out of sight of any grown-ups and, ideally, Connie. But the times Barbara spied what was going on all she wanted to do was to run over and take Jessie in her arms to comfort him and promise him it would be all right, and then keep him close to her as she led him back inside their home at number five Jubilee Street. However, she knew that if she even once gave into this impulse, then kind and placid Jessie would never live it down, and he would remain the butt of everyone’s poor behaviour for the rest of his childhood.
Barbara loved Connie, of course, as what mother wouldn’t be proud of such a lively, proud, strong-minded daughter, with her distinctive and lustrous tawny hair, clear blue eyes and strawberry-coloured lips, and her constant stream of chatter? (Connie was well known in the Ross family for being rarely, if ever, caught short of something to say.)
Nevertheless, it was Jessie who seemed connected to the essence of Barbara’s inner being, right to the very centre of her. If Barbara felt tired or anxious, it wouldn’t be long before Jessie was at her side, shyly smiling up to comfort his mother with his warm, endearingly lopsided grin.
Barbara never really worried about Connie, who seemed pretty much to have been born with a slightly defiant jib to her chin, as if she already knew how to look after herself or how to get the best from just about any situation. But right from the start Jessie had been much slower to thrive and to walk, although he’d always been good with his sums and with reading, and he was very quick to pick up card games and puzzles.
If Barbara had to describe the twins, she would say that Connie was smart as a whip, but that Jessie was the real thinker of the family, with a curious mind underneath which still waters almost certainly ran very deep.
Unfortunately in Bermon
dsey during that dog-end of summer in 1939, the characteristics the other local children rated in one another were all to do with strength and cunning and stamina.
For the boys, being able to run faster than the girls when playing kiss chase was A Very Good Thing.
Jessie had never beaten any of the boys at running, and most of the girls could hare about faster than him too.
It was no surprise therefore, thought Barbara, that Jessie had these days to be more or less pushed out of the front door to go and play with the other children, while Connie would race to be the first of the gang outside and then she’d be amongst the last to return home in the evening.
Although only born five minutes apart, they were chalk and cheese, with Connie by far and away the best of any of the children at kiss chase, whether it be the hunting down of a likely target or the hurtling away from anyone brave enough to risk her wrath. Connie was also brilliant at two-ball, skipping, knock down ginger and hopscotch, and in fact just about any playground game anyone could suggest they play.
Jessie was better than Connie in one area – he excelled at conkers, he and Connie getting theirs from a special tree in Burgess Park that they had sworn each other to secrecy over and sealed with a blood pact, with the glossy brown conkers then being seasoned over a whole winter and spring above the kitchen range. Sadly, quite often Jessie would have to yield to bigger children who would demand with menace that his conkers be simply handed over to them, with or without the benefit of any sham game.
Ted never tried to stop Barbara being especially kind to Jessie within the privacy of their own home, provided the rest of the world had been firmly shut outside. But if – and this didn’t happen very often, as Barbara already knew what would be said – she wanted to talk to her husband about Jessie and his woes, and how difficult it was for him to make proper friends, Ted would reply that he felt differently about their son than she.
‘Barbara, love, it’s doing ’im no favours if yer try to fight ’is battles for ’im. I was little at ’is age, an’ yer jus’ look a’ me now’ – Ted was well over six foot with tightly corded muscles on his arms and torso, and Barbara never tired of running her hands over his well-sculpted body when they were tucked up in their bed at night with the curtains drawn tight and the twins asleep – ‘an’ our Jessie’ll be fine if we jus’ ’elp ’im deal with the bullies. Connie’s got the right idea, and in time ’e’ll learn from ’er too. An’ there’ll be a time when our Jessie’ll come into his own, jus’ yer see if I’m not proved correct, love.’
