‘Come on,’ she said to Bobby. ‘Find me a bag to put all this money in. I’ve got to go and do some sums.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE money changed everything. Annie couldn’t believe how different it felt to know that she had all that amount at her command. Her confidence rose, she began to look ahead with pleasure and excitement, she even held herself straighter and walked with a spring in her step. As she had suspected, her mother looked on the hoard as one more thing to worry about, and was more than willing to let Annie deal with it. And deal with it she did. Together with Reggie, who came back to Wittlesham for the day, she went to see Mr Selby. He had consulted contacts at a bank and an estate agent and sorted out a fair price for Silver Sands. As soon as it was agreed, Reggie left. He couldn’t bear to stay in Wittlesham a moment longer.
Annie and Reggie hugged as they stood on the station platform.
‘I still can’t believe you’re doing this for me, Annie. All your nest egg!’
‘Not all of it. And anyway, I’m not doing it just for you—it’s what I want. I’ve always longed to own Silver Sands,’ Annie told him.
The guard blew his whistle. Reggie kissed Annie on the cheek.
‘Bless you, Annie. You’ve been a wonderful friend.’
‘You and Gwennie were the very best of friends to me. You stuck by me when nobody else did. Now, get on board. It’s about to go.’
Reggie climbed on to the train and leaned out of the window.
‘Best of luck, Annie. And thanks for everything!’
The engine tooted its whistle and started up with a snorting of black smoke. Annie stood and waved till she could not see Reggie any longer, then watched the back of the guard’s van pass out of sight. Tears ran down her face. Another part of her past was gone for ever.
‘Be happy again one day, Reggie,’ she whispered.
Her next task was to move back into Marsh Edge. She knew her mother would never even start to be herself again until she was in her own home. Since the Mrs Mop Brigade had left, she had been keeping the kitchen range going all the time so that room at least was nearly dried out. The solid old wooden furniture had survived its soaking, though the doors to the dresser were warped. Most of the crockery and utensils were all right. Most important of all, her mother’s sewing machine had been cleaned and oiled and pronounced none the worse for its ordeal. The ruined parlour furniture hardly mattered, since they never used the room anyway.
Edna wept as she entered the house. For all the efforts of Molly Selby and the clean-up gang, it still smelt damp and looked forlorn.
Annie fetched a heap of folded curtains and pushed it into her mother’s arms.
‘The Flood Committee gave us these, Mum. They’re very pretty, but they don’t fit our windows. Do you think you can do something with them?’
Reluctantly, Edna shook one out and held it up.
‘I suppose so,’ she said, ‘but—’
‘I’ve bought some matching thread, and the machine’s working perfectly. Why don’t you get going on them? It’s ages yet till we need to get a meal on.’
The task was just what Edna needed after the long days of inactivity at the hotel. She had always been if not happy, then content when working at her sewing.
Bobby was delighted to be back home, and with friends to play with at school now and no one making his life a misery at home, he was happier than he had ever been.
The greatly reduced dairy herd was brought back to the farm, though they had to be kept in pens in the yard as the fields were ruined. Chickens ran about clucking and scratching once more. Marsh Edge had come back to life. Annie looked at it with satisfaction, but knew that the money from the small amount of milk and a few eggs was not going to go anywhere near keeping them. If Silver Sands was to be their future, then she had to get it up and running ready for the summer season.
With the last of her money, she had the site cleared and bought two caravans.
‘That’s not going to be enough,’ she said to Bobby as they watched the men manoeuvre the vans into place.
‘You’ve got to get the swings back and the see-saw. And a slide too,’ Bobby told her.
‘You’re right,’ Annie agreed. ‘And that all takes money. We’ll have to go and borrow some.’
‘How do you do that?’ Bobby asked.
‘You go to a bank.’
It was easy enough to say, but a lot more difficult to do. On the morning of her appointment, Annie paraded in front of her mother.
‘Do I look all right?’
She was wearing an assortment of clothes. There was a sunray-pleated grey skirt and a navy jacket that had come from the Flood Relief Committee, a white blouse her mother had made some years ago and new navy court shoes she had bought herself. For an outfit of hand-me-downs, it really looked very good.
‘Very nice, dear.’
It was said in the same flat tone that her mother used for everything. Annie could see that she was trying to sound approving, but that the effort was just too much for her.
‘Do I need a hat and gloves? It doesn’t look complete without a hat and gloves, does it?’
‘Well—I suppose it doesn’t really matter.’
‘But it does matter, Mum. I’m going to see the bank manager. Our future depends on this!’
The all too familiar bewildered look came over her mother’s face. ‘Do you really think this is a good idea? All that money—’
Annie sighed. ‘It’s the only way, Mum.’
It was no use trying to make her see. The thought of borrowing money frightened her.
‘Well, it’ll have to do,’ Annie said, going back to the problem of her appearance. ‘I got to go, Mum. Wish me luck!’
As she clip-clopped down the track in the new shoes, part of her could hardly believe that this was happening. She, Annie Cross, was the owner of a business and going to see a bank manager. It was exciting and terrifying. She held tight on to her handbag, where she had the notebook in which she had worked out all the figures. It was a bright May morning, but here in the fields there was still little sign of life. The salt no longer sparkled on the surface, but it had penetrated the soil. The only things that were growing were salt-loving marsh plants whose seeds had been left behind by the floodwater. There were government plans for rehabilitating the ruined land, but it was all going to take years. Annie hardly cared about that now. She had her eyes on a better scheme.
She had only been inside the bank once before—when she’d made the appointment to see the manager. It had not been a pleasant experience, having a snotty clerk question her about why she wanted to speak to the great Mr Everard. She looked up at the stone-faced building with its heavy oak doors, determined not to be intimidated. She had as much right as anyone else to be here, she told herself. She took a deep breath and walked in.
She spoke to a different clerk this time, a chubby young man with a severe short-back-and-sides. He gave her a look of veiled surprise when she said she had an appointment to see Mr Everard.
‘Really? If you would just wait a moment, I’ll go and enquire.’
He was soon back. ‘If you would like to come this way, Miss Cross.’
There was a faint but definite emphasis on the ‘Miss’. Annie clenched her teeth. Wittlesham was such a small town. Sometimes she felt as if she had a placard round her neck saying ‘Unmarried Mother’.
She was left to wait on an uncomfortable chair in a lobby outside the manager’s office. It was all right, she told herself. She had spoken to a solicitor so she could speak to a bank manager. There was nothing to it.
The clerk reappeared, knocked on the door and opened it.
‘Miss Cross to see you, sir.’
Annie walked in.
Mr Everard was not like nice Mr Selby. He did not smile encouragingly or tell her she was doing splendidly or give her good advice. He was a stony faced man with a shiny bald head and a belly that strained beneath his waistcoat. Instantly and instinctively, Annie
disliked him. His eyes flicked over her as she entered the room and registered faint disapproval. He nodded at the straight-backed chair set in front of his big oak desk.
‘Sit down, please, Miss Cross.’
Annie sat. He made the nerves all down the back of her spine tense. If she had been a dog, her hair would have been standing on end.
‘And you are—a hairdresser? A dressmaker?’
He did not sound particularly interested in either possibility.
Annie looked steadily back at him. ‘I own the Silver Sands Holiday Park,’ she told him. It came out rather more loudly than was necessary.
‘ Indeed?’ Mr Everard looked as if he did not quite believe her. ‘And why do you wish to see me?’
Battling with the feeling that she was on to a loser before she had even started, Annie launched into her prepared speech. Mr Everard sat staring at a point somewhere beyond her shoulder, appearing to be hardly bothering to listen to her ideas. He nodded vaguely when she said she wanted to start small and expand a bit each year, but she was sure he did not take in a word about her wanting to give the holiday-makers everything they needed without stirring outside the site. He hardly glanced at the figures she’d slaved over for so long. Annie felt as if she were talking to a mattress. She wanted to smack his hand like her schoolteachers used to do, to wake him up and make him take notice of her.
When she finished, he put down the pencil he had been fiddling with and folded his hands over his paunch.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Cross, but it’s absolutely out of the question.’
He did not sound sorry, just bored.
Annie could not believe he had said that. She glared at him. ‘But why?’
Mr Everard gave a sigh. He spoke with exaggerated patience. ‘Miss Cross, this bank is here to provide financial support to viable businesses, not to pipedreams.’
That was it. Annie snapped.
‘But it’s not a pipedream! I can do it, I know I can! I just need a bit more money to get it all going.’
‘I don’t think so, Miss Cross. Now, if you don’t mind, I do have other clients to see—’
He reached for the bell on his desk.
Annie could see everything slipping away. It was so unfair.
‘I bet if it was Mr Smith what used to own it sitting here, you wouldn’t say that. You’d listen to him.’
Mr Everard was unmoved. ‘I don’t think so, Miss Cross,’ he repeated.
The clerk came in, summoned by the bell. He stood with the door open, waiting for her to leave. Annie ignored him. She took a deep breath, trying to steady the shaking inside, trying to control the impotent fury. She leaned forward, concentrating all her efforts on the manager.
‘But don’t you see, it was starting to be a success last summer. Mr Smith was making a go of it. He was going to expand this year. He only left because his wife was drowned in the floods.’
‘That was last year, Miss Cross, before the floods and when the site had six vans on it. Things are very different now. I’m afraid that is all I have to say on the matter. Good day.’
Annie was furious. Tears of anger and disappointment stung her eyes. She blinked them back. She was not going to let this horrible man and his sidekick see her cry. She jumped up.
‘You’ll eat your words one day, just you wait and see!’ she shouted, and marched out of the office and out of the bank.
Behind her, she could feel them casting their eyes up to heaven, then dismissing her from their minds. She was just a silly young woman. Emotional. Not to be regarded.
Annie stumped the length of the High Street, blind and deaf to everything in her path. She came to a stop at the sea front and thumped both fists on the iron railings.
‘Stupid, stupid, stupid man! I hate him! Why can’t he see—? I could make a success of it, I know I could—’
Somehow, she would show him. She’d make him eat his words. She imagined him in ten years’ time, looking at her holiday camp with its rows of gleaming caravans and its café and play area and swimming pool and clubhouse, looking at the hundreds of people there spending their money.
‘You were right, Miss Cross,’ he’d be saying. ‘You were right and I was wrong, so wrong. This is the most successful camp in Essex. It’s even bigger than Butlins.’
And then he’d say how he’d been sacked and he was desperate for a job, and would she consider him for anything, anything at all, even toilet cleaning? For several happy minutes, Annie debated whether it would be more satisfying to turn him away or give him a truly horrible job and watch him having to be grateful to her day after day. She decided on the latter.
In the meantime, she realised she was shaking with cold and anger. She needed a cup of tea. She found a café already bravely open and sat down in a window-seat and ordered. She put three spoons of sugar into her tea and stirred fit to wear the cup away. But as she sipped her hot brew, her fury subsided, leaving room for bleak reality. By the time she had finished it, she had to face the next problem. What was she going to do now? She had a caravan park with two vans on it, a farmhouse that was still not fully dried out, fields of ruined grassland and no income. There was the compensation money … Annie leaned her elbows on the table and stared out at the sea. It looked blue and friendly today, sparkling in the spring sunshine. People from cities would love to be here today, staying in her caravans, strolling by that sea. The compensation money was supposed to be for supporting farmers until their land was productive again, but if she spent it on getting more caravans, surely that was a better use for it?
She pondered over the idea for a long time. Mr Everard’s dismissal of her ideas as pipedreams undermined her. Supposing he was right? He was a man, a bank manager, he was supposed to be an expert in business matters. What did she know, after all? She always had imagined things. Stupid things—kid’s dreams. Bobby Joe, he’d been a dream, or rather the idea of being married to him and living in America had been. Her vision of how Silver Sands was going to be seemed so real, but was that all pie in the sky too? If only there was someone she could talk it over with. She thought of the women of the Mrs Mop Brigade, secure in their homes with their husbands to support them. Why wasn’t there someone for her? It seemed as if she had always been alone—an only child and now an unmarried mother. Perhaps she should give up on Silver Sands before she threw all their precious money away.
She paid for the tea and went outside. A short way along the clifftop was the hotel they had stayed in after the flood. They’d survived that, and gone back home. Down the coast, where the land dipped down to sea level, she could see Silver Sands and her brave new caravans, all two of them.
‘Blow you, Mr High-and-Mighty Everard,’ she said out loud. ‘I’m going to do it if it kills me. Reggie thought he could make a success of it, and so do I.’
The decision refuelled her fighting spirit. She squared her shoulders and took several deep breaths of sea air. She would use the compensation money to buy more vans. Right. But in the meantime, how was she going to support her family?
The hard truth was that she was not qualified for anything. She knew about farming and she could keep house, and that was just about it. She had to get something that gave her time to look after her mum and Bobby, and see to the caravans, so it was no good going for a shop job or something at Sutton’s. There was only one thing for it. It had to be a cleaning job.
By the time she went home she had three jobs lined up. It wasn’t at all what she had hoped for when she’d set out that morning, but it had served to focus her purpose. She was going to make a success of Silver Sands, come what may.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
EVERY morning as she cycled through the entrance, Annie looked at the new sign: Silver Sands Holiday Park—Wittlesham-on-Sea—Prop. A and E Cross. Every morning without fail her heart lifted with pride. Her holiday park. Her baby. There wasn’t much to it yet, but with the compensation money she had been able to buy three more vans. Now there were five caravans, a toilet and was
hing block and a couple of swings and a slide, but it was hers, proof that she was Somebody, not just an Unmarried Mother from a poor farm.
It was September and the last week of the school holidays. Next week she was only half booked, but now all five vans were occupied. She looked at the bathing suits hung out on the lines outside the vans, at the balls and buckets and spades abandoned by the steps and was glad that the holiday-makers were having such good weather. She loved seeing pale city children arrive, looking as if they had never seen the sun, and brown, tousled children leaving with precious stones and shells and paper flags to remind them of their happy time at Silver Sands.
She was halfway through cleaning the toilets when a very pregnant young woman came in with a howling toddler. She looked apologetic when she saw Annie.
‘Oh, dear, you haven’t finished, have you? I’m ever so sorry, I don’t want to mess it all up again, but he’s got the runs—’
Annie assured her it was quite all right to use the toilets, that was what they were there for.
‘Oh, that is nice of you. There’s no rest when you’ve got little uns, is there? On the go all the time. But at least they can run about here and get dirty and it don’t matter. We went to this boarding house last year and the landlady fussed about the mess all the time. I don’t think she liked children …’
She chattered on as she saw to the smelly child and left trailing a dripping nappy. Annie cleaned up after her. Years of living with her father had trained her to listen, look polite and keep her thoughts to herself. If the young mother felt really welcome here, she might be back next year, she might recommend Silver Sands to her friends. Annie finished off the floor, packed away the cleaning things and made a mental note to mow the grass that afternoon.
We'll Meet Again Page 28
