by Lissa Evans
When the whistle blew at St Pancras, he watched the guard slide backwards. The train moved from under the blacked-out roof and sunshine slapped him in the face. He wrote: I am sitting next to Harvey Madeley. His backside is so enormous that he is wearing his father’s trousers cut down into shorts.
‘Here we all are,’ said Mr Waring, entering the compartment. ‘The Rhyll Street Fifth Column. And young Noel with his pencil and paper. A child amang ye taking notes.’
‘Where are we going, sir?’ asked someone.
‘All very hush-hush,’ said Mr Waring. ‘I have not been party to the plans.’
‘Is it Wales?’
‘Let us hope not.’
‘They don’t speak English in Wales,’ said one of the Ferris twins.
The only discernible difference between the Ferris twins, wrote Noel, is that one of them is even more cretinous than the other.
‘They eat squirrels in Wales,’ said the other Ferris twin.
‘I won’t go anywhere with cows again,’ said Alice Beddows. ‘In Dorset I could see a cow out of every window. And I could smell a cow out of every window.’
‘Corned beef,’ said Roy Pursey, peering into the brown paper bag that the WVS woman had given him.
‘Don’t open those bags yet,’ ordered Mr Waring. Everyone but Noel immediately opened their bags.
‘The items those contain are for your foster mothers, not for consuming on the journey,’ said Mr Waring, but Roy Pursey had already started to turn the key on the tin of corned beef. Noel watched as a thin pink wound began to gape around the top of the tin.
‘Biscuits!’ shouted Harvey Madeley.
‘When we find ourselves at midnight, progressing at a walking pace up the north-west coast of Scotland,’ said Mr Waring, ‘you may come to regret your current greed.’ He leaned back in his seat and opened a book.
Outside, London moved past very slowly. Most of the view was of backyards and washing lines, though if Noel squashed his cheek against the window, he could see enough of the sky to spot the odd barrage balloon.
‘I need to go to the WC,’ said Shirley Green.
‘In Dorset,’ said one of the Ferris twins, ‘they only had an outside lav. That’s why we came home. We wrote to our mum and she came and got us. She said if we’d stayed we’d have got typhoid. Mr Waring?’
‘Hmm?’
‘We’re only allowed to go somewhere with an inside lav. Our mum said that we—’
‘There wasn’t even electricity where I was,’ said Roy Pursey, interrupting. ‘They used flipping candles.’
‘Detention,’ said Mr Waring.
‘We’re not at school, sir.’
‘Nevertheless, my first act when we resume lessons will be to place you in detention for use of bad language.’
The train passed over a bridge and Noel glimpsed a lorry-load of soldiers on the road beneath. If Hitler invaded, as he probably would, then the next time he came to London, the streets might be full of Nazis. Everyone would have to learn German. Uncle Geoffrey, as a member of the Conservative Party, would be lined up against a wall and shot.
‘What are you smirking about?’ asked Roy Pursey.
‘Nothing,’ said Noel.
‘What’s in the notebook?’
‘Nothing,’ said Noel, again. Roy snatched it and squinted at the rows of symbols.
‘It’s gobbledegook,’ he said.
Noel took it back, quietly satisfied. It was a very simple code called ‘Pigpen’ and he had just written Roy Pursey is the most ignorant and unpleasant boy in Rhyll Street Junior School.
The train gathered speed through the suburbs. Noel wrote down a list of other people who ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. The next time that he glanced out of the window, he saw a field, with a goat.
‘It’s a cow!’ shouted a Ferris twin.
‘And there’s a horse getting on top of another horse,’ said Shirley Green. ‘Right on top of it. Why’s it doing that, Mr Waring?’
‘If a train travels at an average speed of forty-five miles per hour for three and a half hours,’ said Mr Waring, ‘and then an average speed of twenty-two miles an hour for five and a quarter hours, what distance would it have covered?’
Noel wrote two hundred and seventy-three miles in his notebook and then stared out at the mild, flat countryside. The train was beginning to slow again.
‘Are we there yet?’ asked one of the Ferris twins.
‘We’ve only just left London, Doreen,’ said Mr Waring.
The train slowed still further. Red-brick villas appeared outside the window.
‘It’s a town,’ said Roy Pursey. There was a spire visible above the rooftops.
‘City,’ corrected Mr Waring. ‘It’s St Albans.’
‘You’re not supposed to tell anyone, sir,’ said Roy Pursey. ‘A spy might be listening.’
‘And which of your comrades do you suspect of being in the pay of the Third Reich?’
‘It’s not me,’ said Harvey Madeley.
‘A classic double-bluff,’ said Mr Waring. ‘Harvey’s your spy.’
Roy shook his head and looked pointedly at Noel. ‘No, sir. It would be someone who started coming to our school out of nowhere six months ago, and who never speaks and when he does it’s posh and who writes everything down.’
‘We’re stopping at a station,’ said Doreen Ferris, excitedly. ‘We’re here!’
A big woman with a green hat and yellow teeth smiled brightly at them through the window.
‘Hello, little Londoners,’ she shouted. ‘Welcome to safety.’
Vee paused with a plate in her hand, and stared out of the kitchen window as the children straggled past.
‘Vaccies,’ she said. ‘Did I tell you, I saw them in town this morning? They were sending them into the Mason’s Hall and that councillor with all the yellow hair who was so bloody—so rude to me last week, he was standing by the door, patting their heads as they went up the steps. Anything to get his picture in the paper.’ And nits, with any luck.
The children had been fresh off the train, then, excited and shrill; now only a very few were left unclaimed. Vee watched them trudge along the lane. One of them was yawning, another scowling, a third stopped mid-stride and sneezed messily. The Seven Dwarfs, she thought – there was even a jug-eared simpleton, limping along in the rear. Only the billeting officer, thirty years too old and a yard too wide for Snow White, spoiled the illusion.
‘She’ll be trying Green End Cottages next,’ said Vee. ‘Irene Fletcher took three last year but they’ve all gone back to London. Not that I blame them – give me a choice between Irene Fletcher and a bomb and I know which I’d go for.’
From behind her rose a hum of eerie sweetness, like a musical saw, and Vee turned to see her mother at the table, pen poised above a half-written letter, her face tilted towards the wireless. She was wearing headphones, the wire drooping at knee-height across the kitchen.
‘Singing along, are you?’ asked Vee. ‘That’s nice.’
She turned back to the sink, spirits only briefly buoyed by the sight of the old dear enjoying herself. She was feeling irritated, and she knew why.
There were one or two people that Vee tried very hard not to think about: that blond councillor for a start, who’d been stopping people in the street, asking them to sign up for National Savings Week, and who had shouted out to Vee in front of everybody that she was being unpatriotic when she ran across Holywell Hill in order to avoid him. Savings. She could almost have laughed.
And that foreman at the Ballito factory, who made her wince with rage and humiliation every time she pictured him. And her current landlord, Mr Croxton of Croxton Scrap Metals, with his nasty comments (‘Can you inform your lump of a son, Mrs Sedge, that the words “regular patrol of the premises” don’t mean “sit on your arse for ten hours”’). And Ezra Rigg, who called himself a rates collector but was just a bully boy, plain and simple, and Vic Allerby and his ‘nice little jobs’ as if she
might actually enjoy shredding her fingers on cut-price fancy work, and Mrs Pilcher, who’d told Vee the bare-faced lie that she only needed some ‘light cleaning’ four times a week, and Mr Farrell the butcher (‘I am not a charity, Mrs Sedge’), and that customer at the scarves counter of Harpenden Woolworth’s who just couldn’t bring herself to mind her own business, and of course Irene Fletcher at Green End cottages. And now Irene had spilled into her thoughts and was fizzing away like a pinch of liver salts.
They’d bumped into each other on the platform at St Albans City station, the previous Thursday. ‘Ooh, fancy seeing you here again,’ Irene had said to her. ‘Back to visit your Uncle Clive in hospital, are you?’ Which was the excuse Vee had given when they’d met the week before, though she’d actually been on her way to Luton to see whether it might be the place to carry out a little money-spinning idea she’d had. ‘And don’t you look smart,’ Irene had added, fixing her with eyes like steel press-studs. ‘Lucky old Uncle Clive, that’s what I say. What did you tell me was wrong with him?’
‘Ulcers.’
‘Oh, not a bladder stone like last week then?’
‘All sorts,’ Vee had said, rather wildly. When the train had arrived, she’d locked herself in the third-class lavatory and stayed there all the way to Luton. And once there, she’d still felt so shaken that she’d ended up taking a nip at the Bird in Hand, opposite the station. Which had meant that she hadn’t been in a fit state of mind to carry out her plan of knocking on doors to ask for contributions, and the whole morning had been wasted.
The only comfort was that Irene had obviously jumped to the wrong conclusion, and had assumed that Vee was off to meet a man. Which wasn’t illegal, after all. It could have been someone quite respectable, or even a soldier. So there was nothing to worry about on that score.
Perhaps, though, she ought to learn from the encounter and start making notes when she talked to people. She could keep an old envelope and a pencil in her bag:
Uncle Clive, bladder stone, Ward 4, Luton General Hospital. Told to Irene F., 14th June 1940.
That would do. And, while she thought of it:
I’ve always loved small dogs. Had a brown-and-white Jack Russell terrier called ‘Happy’ when I was a girl. Told to Mrs Fillimore, 20th June.
And, come to mention it:
Was at school with a girl who lives in California now, called Eileen, she married a salesman and did very well for herself, and she sends us parcels with more silk scarves than we know what to do with. Told to policewoman with red hair after Woolworth’s incident. Second half of May.
And:
Have bilious stomach, can’t come to the door, we’ve all come down with it, will pay it off next week. Note left on door for Ezra Rigg, 22nd June.
An exercise book, rather than an envelope, perhaps.
Her mother was humming again, a different tune this time. ‘Gold and Silver Waltz,’ said Vee. ‘Is that right, Mum? Gold and Silver Waltz?’
There was no response. The previous letter had been folded and stuck in an envelope, and her mother had started on another, her pen sprinting across the paper. In spite of her double vision, she had lovely handwriting, put Vee’s own to shame.
‘Who’s that one to, Mum?’ she asked. In lieu of an answer, she peered at the addresses on the envelopes. It was the usual mixture of domestic and official – Cousin Harold, ex-neighbour Phyllis Gladney, the Archbishop of Canterbury, President Roosevelt. Harold’s envelope was the thickest; he had a vixen of a wife, and a daughter who’d run off to live with a Scotchman, and was much in need of the words of encouragement and Christian comfort her mother offered.
‘Cup of tea, Mum? Piece of toast?’
Her mother looked up and nodded. As Vee lit the grill, the electric clock made a noise like a cup hit with a teaspoon; half past five. It was nearly time to wake Donald for work.
Her son was lying with the eiderdown over his face when she went into the room. She laid the tray on the bedside table, and opened the curtains.
‘It’s a lovely evening,’ she said. ‘Proper summer.’ The low sun had gilded the edge of a pile of hub caps in the yard below, and turned a dented zinc bath into a crimson shell. ‘And I’ve made you a nice rarebit,’ she added. ‘Oh, and you’ve got three letters.’
Donald drew the quilt from his face and reached out a hand. Vee had checked the postmarks earlier, and they were the usual puzzling collection; one from Wembley, another from Luton, a third from Leicester. Two were cheap yellow envelopes, one was expensive, the paper as thick as card. All had masculine handwriting.
‘Friends of yours?’ she asked, brightly.
Donald said nothing, but gestured for the tray, and she waited for him to sit up before placing it on his lap. It often took him a few minutes after waking before he could speak. He’d been that way since childhood, and year after year she’d chivvied and nagged him, thinking it was just laziness, and then he’d gone for his call-up medical and the doctor had found a heart murmur. It was a leaky valve, he’d said, and every beat sent some of the blood back the wrong way, so that Donald wasn’t getting the goodness out of it that he ought to be. He’d been born that way, probably. Every heartbeat, thought Vee, for nineteen years . . .
Donald had been brave about it, had only remarked that he knew now why he was so tired all the time, but the guilt that Vee felt was so awful that it seemed to call for some type of Biblical atonement: rending of garments, beating of breasts, the cleaving of something-or-other in twain. The best she could do was to give him her egg and cheese ration, for strength, and her chocolate, for love.
‘How are you feeling this evening, Donny?’ she asked, after he laid down his knife and fork, and was dabbing at the remaining crumbs with a finger.
‘Not so bad, Mum. Bit tired.’
He looked quite like his father when he smiled. More well-built, of course, and with thicker hair. And he was trying to grow a moustache, she noticed. Earlier in the year he’d grown a beard, but had shaved it off. And last month he’d changed his parting again. He’d spent a lot of time, lately, looking in the mirror. There was a girl somewhere, Vee thought.
‘I’m making a nice pie for your supper,’ she said. ‘Mince.’ Donald was busy opening one of his letters. She glimpsed a scant half-page of writing, and a puzzling string of numbers, before he looked up and caught her eye.
‘I’ll just go and get your snack ready, then,’ she said, and he nodded. He was reaching for his pocket diary when she left the room.
Five minutes later, putting Donald’s sandwiches into a tin, Vee glanced out of the window. The view – one of only two good things about the flat – was of fields of green barley, and the meandering grass-edged course of Pollard Lane. The surface was unmetalled, a mire in winter and a ribbon of dust in summer, but from the kitchen you could see fifty yards along it, in either direction. It was a view that allowed unwelcome visitors to be spotted early on and ensured that neighbours could be avoided or deliberately encountered, depending on circumstance. The only visible building was Mrs Fillimore’s slate-roofed farmhouse, but Green End Cottages and their nosy occupants were only just around the corner, the smoke from the chimneys hanging permanently above a clump of elders.
For a moment Vee thought that the lane was empty, and then she spotted Mrs Fillimore out on her constitutional, hauling her little black dog behind her. Vee watched the woman for a while, noting, with disbelief, the vigour of her walk. Eighty-seven. Mrs Fillimore was eighty-seven. How long was she going to go on for? When would it all end? Threescore years and ten, it said in Psalm 90, ‘and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow’. Well phooey to that. In December, shortly after they’d moved into the flat, Vee had discovered Mrs Fillimore lying in a heap on the lane, seemingly breathing her last. The doctor had shaken his head. The vicar had been summoned. A bed had been found at the cottage hospital. Then Mrs Fillimore had rallied and made a recovery that the doctor called ‘temporary�
�� and Vee had paid a visit to the offices of Firebrand Insurance, and taken out a life policy on her neighbour. It was only a shilling a week and all fully legal; the man at the office hadn’t even raised an eyebrow.
Since then she’d popped in regularly to see how the old so-and-so was doing, and every single time, Mrs Fillimore had found a task for her (‘You won’t mind giving Binky-Boy his worming tablets, will you? I know how much you love pets . . .’) and on every visit she’d looked in better health and spirits.
That was what happened when you tried to do something straight: the world simply laughed at you. Like the job she’d taken in the packing room of Ballito Hosiery just after the war started: ‘You’ll love it here, we’re one big family, all our girls have a grand time’ – fifty minutes’ walk each way, standing for the whole shift, no time to get to the shops, no air with all the windows boarded up for blackout, bloody great boxes to lift. After a fortnight, her legs felt as if she’d borrowed them from her mother, and she took one day off, one day, and had turned up on the dot the next morning only to be told she’d been sacked (‘The point is, Mrs Sedge, you’re either a member of our Ballito family, or you’re not’). On her way out of the factory she’d stumbled across one or two items of water-damaged stock that were going to be discarded anyway, and had just popped them in her bag, and the next thing she knew, the foreman was threatening to call the police.
In the end, she’d persuaded him not to. Ugly, stringy little man. Hairy too.
It wasn’t something she liked to remember.
Outside, Mrs Fillimore performed a smart about-turn, and dragged her dog back to the farmhouse. Briefly, the lane was empty again, and then there was the sound of a slamming door, and Mr Croxton walked into the middle of the lane, looked directly up at Vee, and mouthed ‘He is late.’ For added emphasis, he held up the keys to the yard, and gave them a shake.
Vee nodded and smiled, and held up five fingers.
Mr Croxton shook his head and held up a single finger.
