by Katie King
KATIE KING lives in Kent, and has worked in publishing. She has a keen interest in twentieth-century history and this novel was inspired by a period spent living in south-east London. The Evacuee War is the third in the Evacuee series.
Also by Katie King
The Evacuee Summer
The Evacuee Christmas
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2021
Copyright © Katie King 2021
Katie King asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © July 2021 ISBN: 9780008257613
Version 2021-07-08
Note to Readers
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008257606
For Josie and Louis, always
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Acknowledgements
Extract
Chapter One
Chapter Two
About the Publisher
Chapter One
Husbands were a lottery, thought a grumpy Peggy quite early in the morning. Hers – Bill – had seemed a very good one for quite a few years. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t.
Of course it was easy to blame wartime, and rationing, and horrible news in the papers for Bill’s disgraceful behaviour.
But Peggy wasn’t having any of that.
She still could hardly believe that it had only taken a few short months of Bill being on his own at a military training camp near the East coast, where he worked as instructor, for him to forget his wedding vows.
While he was busy impregnating a NAAFI worker called Maureen, Peggy was heavily pregnant with their own much longed-for baby, Holly – a baby they’d had to wait a very long time for. At the same time Peggy had been trying, and not always succeeding, in getting used to new surroundings after being evacuated.
It had felt very strange leaving the familiar squashed-together terraces of the dark brick two-up two-downs in Bermondsey, with the oily River Thames and the busy docks only a stone’s throw away, and moving to the more sedate and genteel Harrogate, where they were, at first, awed by the spacious and very comfy rectory Tall Trees, with its solid stone walls and huge windows and lofty rooms.
For it was there that she and her ten-year-old twin nephew and niece, Jessie and Connie, had been billeted within days of war being declared in September 1939. Peggy had accompanied the twins and their class on the train northwards along with her other evacuated teacher colleagues, although once in Harrogate she had decided to find something else to do as she sat out the duration.
When Peggy went into labour a few months later it had been touch and go for a while, scaring everyone. But Peggy dug deep and, to the relief of all, baby Holly had been safely delivered on Christmas Eve, and since then Peggy had done the very best she could to carve out a new life for herself and her daughter.
A life that no longer involved Bill Delbert, or at least as much as that was feasible.
The problem was that Bill didn’t seem to want to take on board that everything had changed between him and his wife in the year since war had been declared with Germany, and that as far as Peggy was concerned, their marriage was kaput. There’d been begging telephone calls and letters, but Peggy was impervious to his silky words she’d once found seductive.
Of course, the months since Holly’s arrival had proved to be a rollercoaster of emotions for Peggy, although the handsome doctor, James, who’d saved her and Holly’s lives as the snow fell when Peggy went into unexpected labour, had certainly eased a little of the pain Bill’s behaviour had caused.
So now it was a bitter pill to swallow that, following many weeks of careful circling – neither sure if their obvious attraction was mutual and each too scared to lay their cards on the table – on the very night that Peggy and James shared their first proper kiss months after they met, Bill had done his very best to spoil the magic moment.
And he had bloody well succeeded!
Drunk and spoiling for a fight, even though he was supposed to be many miles away, Bill chose that moment to try and reclaim Peggy as his own.
What cheek. And what disastrous timing.
Peggy shuddered at the memory from the previous night of the sound of her husband’s boots pounding across the back yard to the rectory where Peggy and Holly and the twins lived with the kindly rector Roger and his wife Mabel.
But although this was difficult to think about, Bill and the fight didn’t have the power to diminish the exquisite sensation of the kiss and its lingering memory. Peggy couldn’t resist tracing a finger along her lips to help her relive the moment.
Then she recalled how Bill’s clothes were ragged and filthy, and he stank of alcohol; he had clearly been dosing himself with Dutch courage. Peggy felt ashamed at the very sight of him, shame that bubbled to fury as Bill turned on James. And then – even worse – James had given Bill as good as he got as the pair tussled each other to the ground, with Peggy screaming at them to stop, all too aware that James’s hands mustn’t be hurt. These were hands that saved people’s lives, Peggy thought in distress and fury as she heard
the dull pounding of fist hitting flesh, and saw a splatter of blood spraying upwards. The snarl on James’s face told her that although he’d never met this man, he knew exactly who he was, and he wasn’t going to step aside in the face of Bill’s unwarranted aggression.
Poor Milburn, the chubby chestnut pony in the stall right beside the fight, had been so panicked as the men grunted with the effort of landing blows on each other, their feet flailing noisily against the stable door, that somehow the little gelding had wriggled over the top of his half-door, and careened out to the road, causing a traffic accident. Now, the following morning, Milburn was still bleeding from his wounds and clearly in shock, a feeling that Peggy felt she shared.
The police had carted Bill away as was only to be expected.
James meanwhile had shot Peggy a daggered look she hoped never to see again. It shouted all too clearly that whatever had been on the cusp of happening between them was now Very Much Over.
Wife of a violent drunkard and mother of his child. James’s furrowed brow, unblinking gaze and total silence, insisted to Peggy as he stalked out of the yard that as far he was concerned, she simply wasn’t worth the trouble. Peggy had always accepted that, even in a perfect world, James’s job running a temporary recuperation hospital in Harrogate for wounded servicemen, meant he had other priorities brought about by the war effort that must be put before her; that was what saving lives meant, and it was one of the reasons she so admired the young doctor. But now he was washing his hands of her.
She’d felt in the past that as mother of Holly, she was never going to be a good option for a man like James, although then events had conspired to make her doubt this assumption.
But she had been right all along, Peggy thought sadly, and Bill’s behaviour had just driven that point home to James sooner rather than later.
It was heartbreaking. Absolutely heartbreaking.
And, now, just when Peggy didn’t think she could feel any worse, it turned out that Bill, still at the police station, had demanded that he see Peggy and Holly.
Peggy could have screamed in temper. She felt in a real bind. The sheer neck of her husband!
Once more she raised a hand to her lips, remembering the softness of James’s single kiss. A kiss that would never be repeated. There was a part of her that wanted to make Bill pay for taking that away from her.
Right at that moment, Peggy hated Bill with a passion, an absolute passion.
And then, with a deep sigh, she gathered her thoughts together and told herself that she must do the right thing. She didn’t want to, but if she didn’t, then she would feel worse in all likelihood. Peggy couldn’t ignore the fact that, like it or not, Bill was Holly’s father and in wartime when life and death lived side by side, did she really have the right to deny him a few minutes with his daughter?
Bill was a wretched sight when he shuffled into the interview room at the police station where Peggy and Holly were waiting, and while she hadn’t expected him to be the man she had fallen for, the decidedly forlorn sight of him quite took Peggy aback.
He had two black eyes, and his knuckles were split and weeping, although some of the smaller grazes looked to have scabbed over already. The skin all over his face looked dry and greyish, with the lines around his mouth and nose running very deep, while the flesh on his neck was wrinkled and as if it belonged to a much older man.
He kept cupping his jaw in his hand as he gingerly moved his chin from side to side, and Peggy fancied she could hear a quiet clicking noise as he did this. She guessed that at least one, if not more of James’s thumps had really hit home when he had socked Bill on the chin, and perhaps Bill’s jaw had been a whisker away from dislocation.
Bill’s shirt was frayed and ripped, and there was a hole in one knee of his trousers. His shoes were dusty and scuffed, and the raggedy laces were knotted and unevenly frayed at the ends, rather than tied in the neat bows that Peggy remembered the once dapper Bill favouring before the war.
He appeared thoroughly unkempt, almost like a homeless man without two pennies to rub together. Perhaps worst of all was that he looked demeaned and shamed to his very bones and a far cry from the smartly suited and booted man that Peggy had been proud to walk down the aisle towards almost a decade earlier.
While she wanted him to feel bad about his behaviour since her evacuation from Bermondsey, the depressing sight before her now looked humiliating for Bill, and this was a step too far for Peggy to be comfortable with.
The detestation she’d felt for him not long before dwindled to something worse: pity.
Bill shuffled tentatively across the room and then took a while to sit down, and to judge by the careful way he lowered himself onto the wooden seat, Peggy assumed that her husband had tender bruises all over his body she couldn’t see.
‘I’ll be right outside, madam, and so just you call me if you need to and I’ll be there in a jiffy.’ The policeman who’d escorted Bill to her spoke in a reassuring manner as he left the room, as if Bill were a dangerous criminal.
Peggy wasn’t remotely scared at the thought of her and Holly being left alone with Bill – it was clear that all her husband’s fight of the previous evening had evaporated, along with his drunkenness – but she could see that plenty of wives would be brimming with trepidation in her position and so she was grateful for the bobby’s words as she knew that not all men in the policeman’s position would have been so considerate of making her feel safe.
A chastened Bill ignored the retreating policeman, and instead he reached for Peggy’s hand, which she quickly snatched out of his reach.
‘I didn’t think you’d come, Peg, to be honest,’ he said.
‘I so nearly didn’t,’ Peggy replied. ‘But you put me in an impossible situation, Bill, as then I reminded myself that Holly is your daughter, and that if the worst were to happen and that you were to die at Jerry’s hands, I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I’d deprived my daughter of a final meeting with her father. It’s not her fault you’re a total dead loss, is it?’
Bill didn’t say anything, and Peggy watched him as he looked sadly down at Holly. Holly had taken two steps that morning – her very first steps, no less! – but Peggy didn’t tell Bill that. Instead she let the silence swirl between them, uncomfortable and loaded with angst.
Bill smelled still, an unpleasant mixture of sweat, grubby clothing and too much alcohol the previous day, and as Peggy shuffled her bottom back a little in the chair to bring some more space between them, she tried not to recoil too obviously. She didn’t want to make the meeting more awkward between them than it already was.
Holly was sitting on Peggy’s lap, and the puzzled frown on the little girl’s face as she beheld her father and then swung her head around to glance up at her mother said it all.
Holly very obviously had no idea who Bill was, and the fact that she didn’t much like what she could see before her was all too evident in her quizzical and clearly dumbfounded expression, and the way she angled her little body away from his.
Peggy could tell by the downcast expression in Bill’s eyes that he’d seen this too and had understood his daughter wasn’t impressed with the man in front of her.
‘May I hold her?’ he said to Peggy all the same.
It wasn’t going to help anyone if Holly started to scream the place down, which Peggy thought would be the likely outcome if she handed Holly across to him.
‘Let her get a bit more used to you, Bill,’ she said in what she hoped was a non-committal way.
They both looked at Holly again.
‘Peg, I’m sorry. Sorry about it all,’ Bill muttered after a while. He looked earnest, and so contrite that Peggy believed him. His voice was stronger as he continued, ‘I went too far last night, I understand that, my chicken, and I’ll always have to live with what a blighter I was. You and I both know that, but my blood boiled when I saw you and that man standing so close to you, when you were looking so pretty and as if you were my true love.
’
Peggy frowned to let Bill know this was a sensitive subject that she didn’t want to discuss further, and the silly sentimentality he was spouting absolutely wasn’t the way to win her over. On top of that she had never liked it when he’d called her chicken, and it irritated her that he’d forgotten this, as she thought that at that moment he was genuinely too remorseful to be trying to rile her.
Bill took the hint that there were some areas he shouldn’t stray into, and so he changed the subject slightly, saying in a confessional tone, ‘It’s obvious I’ve not been a good husband, nor a good father to our little Holly. She deserves better, and so do you. I should never have went with Maureen. Everything is my fault.’
Peggy had to try very hard not to snort in derision at the sound of Maureen’s name.
Bill didn’t notice, and instead he tried another smile towards his daughter, who promptly gave a whine and hid her face against Peggy’s chest, as Peggy realised that she herself felt rather surprised at Bill’s honesty.
He stared at his daughter shrinking away from him, and then added so quietly that Peggy had to strain to hear him, ‘She does you proud though, Peg.’
Peggy knew the ‘she’ was referring to their daughter.
‘Holly doesn’t recognise you, Bill. She has no idea who you are, and so you mustn’t hold that against her. I’m sure you know this already, but it bears saying again, and so just remember that from Holly’s point of view you are a stranger. Still, putting last night aside for the moment, I suppose that a lot of fathers are finding the same when they see their children these days. It’s not the kiddies’ fault their fathers can’t – or won’t – be with them. Any of the kiddies in your case …’ Peggy said. She knew that was a cheap shot, but it felt good all the same.
She saw a brief flash of something that could be ire flare in Bill’s eyes as he took Peggy’s words for the criticism they were meant to be in view of his childbearing peccadillo, but then her husband seemed to deflate somehow, his body folding in on itself, and Peggy could see that any final vestige of temper he might have had left in him had briefly blazed and, just as quickly, dissipated.
