The Evacuee War

by Katie King

  ‘You’re lookin’ very best bib an’ tucker,’ Mabel said. Clearly it had not gone unnoticed that Peggy had put a little more effort into her appearance than was usual before she set off for June’s tea shop.

  Peggy went a bit pink. ‘Do I look too much? I’ve written James a note of apology, but I don’t want to look silly if I were to run into him. Not that I’m expecting to, of course. Um, but, er, you know what I mean …’

  Peggy realised that what she had just said to Mabel was a fib.

  In fact she knew all too well that James should be arriving at the hospital about the time that she herself would be there too, provided that she didn’t dilly-dally too much longer at Tall Trees, and while she insisted to herself that she understood it was over between the two of them, Peggy ached for a final glimpse of the handsome doctor, as she didn’t want the memory of that furious grimace he had shot her to be the last one she had of him.

  ‘Go on wi’ yer!’ Mabel laughed. ‘Take advantage o’ t’ sunny weather, an’ that lovely figure o’ yours in that nice dress, an’ who knows ’ow it’ll turn oot?’

  Peggy pushed the perambulator down the road to the hospital, sharing less and less of Mabel’s optimism as they went along.

  There didn’t seem to be many comings and goings there from what she could see, and so she wondered whether maybe the staff rotas had been altered.

  There was a bench outside the entrance and Peggy felt she needed a moment, and so she lifted Holly out and sat them both down in a patch of sunlight. There was a gentle gust of wind, and Peggy felt her curls lift in the breeze. Holly insisted on wriggling her feet towards the ground, where she stood straight in her knitted bootees as she clutched Peggy’s knee for support while Peggy held her arm.

  ‘Who’s a clever girl?’ said Peggy, and Holly gurgled happily. Peggy felt an overwhelming rush of love. Holly certainly looked very sweet, with two small front teeth now and eminently kissable apple cheeks.

  Lost in the moment, Peggy leaned to her side and put her hand out to encourage Holly to move towards it, and Holly tottered several tiny steps on her own before she clasped her mother’s hand, and mother and daughter smiled at this achievement.

  A shadow fell, and Holly beamed gummily at something over her mother’s shoulder. Peggy looked up.

  Her heart gave an uncomfortable pitch upwards as she realised James had come out of the hospital’s entrance and was now nearby, staring awkwardly at Peggy with a scowl on his face, as if the unwelcome sight of her had completely halted him in his tracks. For a moment she remembered what his face was like when it was close up and laughing, but then this was pushed out of her mind by the memory of James’s eyes turning to anger as Bill swung him around by the shoulder and tried to land a punch on the doctor.

  James looked to Peggy as if the sight of herself and Holly had served only to remind him of Bill’s fury, and not in the slightest of the romantic moment they had shared.

  Holly kept on grinning because she really liked James, but for the very first time he didn’t reward her with any acknowledgement, although Peggy didn’t notice Holly’s happy expression becoming more puzzled, so intent on James was she.

  Peggy’s mouth became dry, and she felt a rush of heat throughout her body while her heart beat furiously.

  Now she was actually faced with James it wasn’t nearly as pleasant as she had imagined it might be.

  And then Peggy noticed with an almost overwhelming crush of her spirits that hovering immediately at his shoulder was an extremely attractive nurse.

  A nurse whom nobody would deny was younger and trimmer and more beautiful than Peggy. A nurse who looked as if she had washed her hair in actual shampoo, and had bathed using much more than a sliver of soap.

  A nurse who was regarding James in a manner that suggested to Peggy open admiration of the manly physician merely inches in front her.

  Then the nurse turned her gaze to follow James’s stony expression and it fell on the inelegantly seated Peggy, frozen in mid-twist and still leaning skew-whiff to one side with a hand awkwardly extended and Holly holding it with both of hers while, comically, the small girl stood on the toes of one foot as she lifted her other leg in the air looking for all the world as if she were a ballerina doing her exercises at the barre.

  The nurse’s expression tightened for a moment around her mouth, Peggy fancied, before her whole visage relaxed into something that looked something more than a little like triumph, although others might have seen a smile.

  Damn and blast!

  Broodily, James ignored the nurse, but he continued to frown at Peggy and Holly through uncharacteristically narrowed eyes.

  The sun dappled his hair, and made the irises of his eyes very vivid. James was more heart-stoppingly handsome than Peggy remembered, even though it was only a few days since she had seen him last. She tried not to look at his lips. She didn’t want to be reminded of how she had thrilled to his kiss.

  Red-hot with embarrassment, Peggy couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him, and most certainly not in front of the pretty nurse who – irritatingly – clearly had decided she wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  Of course this was how it was going to be, Peggy immediately understood, and as her heart plummeted even further, she knew she’d been kidding herself if she’d hoped for even an instant that it might be any other way.

  What was unfurling before her eyes between the doctor and the nurse was always going to be the case, as any doctor would be spoiled for choice these days given the high number of women now working in hospitals. For James to find a new and very attractive companion would be akin to shooting fish in a barrel.

  To Peggy’s disappointment, there wasn’t a single spark of attraction ricocheting backwards and forwards between herself and him, nor the faintest glimmer of what they had almost shared.

  Peggy sighed as quietly as she could, although the flicker of the nurse’s victorious eyelashes told Peggy she’d failed to hide it.

  ‘I’m such a stupid, stupid chump,’ Peggy berated herself, ‘what a mug I am for having put on my best summer dress and having taken trouble with my hair.’ She tried not to focus on James’s strong hands and handsome face.

  A moment passed where Peggy felt a sob uncontrollably gathering and rising in her throat, and although she didn’t really believe in God, she silently blurted a quick private prayer to herself of ‘Please, God, don’t let me cry in front of them and make this worse than it already is’.

  God didn’t seem to be listening though, as Peggy felt the sure-fire prickle of tears.

  Looking down, Peggy blinked furiously as she groped under the pram’s blanket with trembling hands to find her handbag, from which she hastily snatched the envelope for James.

  She waved it in his direction, taking care not to look at his face again.

  James snatched it from her and stuffed it into his pocket without so much as a glance at it, although he managed a grunt of what Peggy hoped was thanks rather than irritation, and then he turned his back on Peggy and began saying something about bandages in an unnecessarily loud voice to the nurse.

  Peggy stood up abruptly at the same time as she made to swing Holly up and into the perambulator in a single movement. Holly felt heavier than Peggy remembered, and before she knew it she had dashed her daughter’s legs on the pram’s rim in a way that caused the springs supporting the cradle to squeak and wheeze in a parody of a merry tune.

  Ignoring Holly’s cry of indignation at being manhandled so curtly by her normally very gentle mother, Peggy marched away after a brief struggle with a foot brake that suddenly didn’t seem to want to release, although not before she risked a last peek towards James and the nurse.

  Pointedly, James still had his back to her, but the nurse was playing provocatively with her uniform’s nurse’s cap and smiling triumphantly over his shoulder with a slight curl of her lip in Peggy’s direction, she thought.

  Peggy assumed the nurse was touching her hat simply to draw Jame
s’s attention to the proximity of it to the perfect Cupid’s bow of her lips; Peggy told herself the young nurse was probably no better than she should be. She risked a second glance at the hand again and was pleased that the nurse looked to have short and quite thick fingers.

  Peggy shook her head in what she hoped looked like a devil-may-care gesture of defiance, but she could feel an unbecoming slash of crimson pulsing across each cheek that rather spoilt the effect.

  She marched away as quickly as she could, her back ramrod stiff with tension and the loss of dignity, knowing that if James did turn round to watch her retreat, her gait would look awkward and rigid as she stalked along, very much at odds with the gaiety of the summer dress.

  Peggy risked a sideways look under the guise of pushing Holly across the road to the shady side.

  James wasn’t looking in her direction at all. Instead he had his head inclined towards the nurse, very much as if she were saying something to him that he was extremely interested in, and especially so now that she had his full attention.

  Peggy’s chest stabbed with pain, as this felt almost worse than if they had been staring at her with amusement.

  Peggy could have crept under a stone, and hidden from the world for ever. And, for the merest second, she hoped with all her heart that she and James would never set eyes on each other again.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Ah!’ said June twenty minutes later, once Peggy had finished describing her and Holly’s visit to the hospital. ‘So, dropping off your letter not an unbridled success then?’

  ‘On a scale of one to ten, with ten the best I could hope for, I’d say it was a big fat nothing,’ replied a morose Peggy.

  ‘Okay, exactly how lovely was she?’

  Peggy knew June well enough to know she meant the young nurse alongside James. ‘Extremely,’ said Peggy, and then she added a jokey snarly face to bring a little comic drama to the moment.

  ‘Oh dear. Pert, and shapely too, I bet?’

  ‘Very.’

  But Peggy’s eyes twinkled naughtily when she couldn’t resist adding then, ‘Stubby fingers though, if my eyes weren’t deceiving me.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  They laughed, and Peggy thought that this was what friends were for: to pull you up when you were down in the dumps and feeling sorry for yourself.

  ‘Anyway, I’m not going to think about James anymore,’ Peggy declared. ‘I need to conserve my energies for other things. And I’m definitely not wasting any more time on that nurse.’

  ‘That’s the ticket. You just keep on telling yourself that,’ June said, raising an ironic eyebrow, an eyebrow Peggy chose to ignore.

  It wasn’t long before they fell to talking about the horrifying BBC news reports on the weekend’s air raids that some had dubbed as Black Saturday, as more and more information had come to light on Jerry’s aerial offensive.

  The bombers that Peggy had seen once the back yard had fallen quiet following Bill and James’s fisticuffs had been merely the prelude to a much stronger aerial offensive. It was the first cohesive home attack deemed to be major by the press and the BBC, and each evening at Tall Trees, everybody knew they’d be gathering around to listen to the nightly news broadcast from Roger’s ancient wireless that would crackle out a string of woes.

  Across the country so far as many as 430 people looked to have been killed in that single night, with London coming in for a real drubbing, exactly as Ted predicted would happen. And if the papers were to be believed, the skies over strategic targets had continued to be lit up over the land each night since with tracer fire, spotlights arcing into the sky and flashes when bombs exploded.

  Gloomy depictions of the attacks when the aftermath of the raids could be properly assessed were already in the broadsheets, along with the occasional image of the damage wreaked revealed huge craters and spaces where buildings should be, sometimes with members of the public pictured as they stared downwards or upwards at the damage with bewildered and shaken expressions. London was taking a pasting, but it seemed that just about anywhere in the country was vulnerable.

  It felt like dark times indeed, and although it was disturbing, it could well be that they were likely to get darker, Peggy and June agreed, as they wondered if the Government was perhaps keeping back from the general public the very worst of what was going on, and they looked around the café to gauge if any of their regular customers were unexpectedly absent. It was a relief to see everyone sitting pretty much where they ordinarily did.

  And then these good friends nodded at each other as if in agreement.

  As one, they stood up and returned to their work with resolute and surprisingly calm expressions on their faces, each reflecting that this was what other people would be doing right at that very moment the length and the breadth of the land: everyone trying to keep working hard, exactly as usual, without any unnecessary fuss or palaver.

  Whether they be man, woman or child, all would be determined to show Jerry that those left at home in Blighty could, and would, pull together to keep life going on each and every day in as productive and as normal a way as possible, no matter how great the blows of catastrophe the country was suffering.

  Later in the morning, June put a piggy bank near the till so that any spare pennies given in change could be donated to the war effort.

  It was a small gesture of defiance, but it felt empowering to both Peggy and June.

  All the same, it was a thoughtful day for a whole variety of reasons for Peggy, as she described later that night when she wrote to her sister.

  Dear Barbara,

  I hope that you and Ted got back to Jubilee Street from Harrogate without problem, and there weren’t any delays (or not for too long) on your train, nor disrupting bomb damage to the roads on the bus down from the station, and that if there has been destruction that you’ve seen, it’s not been too horrid in dear old Bermondsey.

  What blighters flying those aeroplanes that night, and since!

  There have been some simply terrible pictures printed of the carnage wreaked, and I confess the sight of it makes my blood run cold, and customers at June’s café haven’t been able to talk about much else.

  Bad as this is for us though, I’m sure too that those responsible are just acting on command and they probably don’t harbour a personal animosity towards us as such.

  That’s what I’d like to think anyway, as anything else seems intolerable. If this is indeed true, I hope it’s the same for our boys over on manoeuvres across the Channel or up in the skies on the continent or on our ships at sea, as I just can’t bring myself to believe that it is ever good for our spirits deep inside that we start to think of anyone in the world, German or no, with pure hatred. It seems so against logic and honest human decency, although I suppose that for those who have lost their homes in the bombings, or loved ones, it might feel in the heat of anger and sadness a very different state of affairs.

  I’m hoping too that the fact that you haven’t telephoned to say you are back safely in Jubilee Street is because you both are well and there hasn’t been a disaster, and that Fishy is safe and happy too, keeping up with catching lots of mice and doing all the things that a good puss should do.

  It was lovely having you here in Yorkshire, simply lovely!

  I can’t tell you how much we all enjoyed spending time with you and Ted, even if the visit didn’t end quite as planned. I am supposing that you both hadn’t expected ringside seats for a brawl between two grown men, or that you’d spend ages sitting with me waiting for the vet (pony doing well, by the by). Still, the less said about all of that, the better, I daresay!

  Connie and Jessie are well and the new school begun at last, but Connie is most vexed by the teachers not putting her in any of the same classes as the other children from the rectory, although she did say she quite liked the look of the school itself as it felt more grown-up than their last school and she could see it might offer ‘opportuni
ties’. But she is definitely down in the mouth about not being with her chums, and I had to remind her at teatime today that she’s only just started there, and if she applies herself and works hard, then it might not be too long before she is back up with Tommy and Angela at least, as they are in the form that is immediately above hers; and even Larry, who nobody (not even he!) would claim to be the brightest spark in a box of matches, is in 1D too.

  To spare Connie’s feelings, Jessie is trying not to look too pleased that he and Aiden are in the top form, but I think he must be proud of himself. I do hope so anyway, as Jessie is a bright lad who works hard, and as he is by nature very unassuming and always happy to take a back seat in a crowd, I’m sure it’s good for him to see recognised what a clever boy he is, as it might help bolster his confidence. He looks a bit tired tonight though, but it’s not long since he was in hospital after his run-in with those nasty lads, and so I’ve made sure he’s had an early night.

  More generally, I think Hull might have taken a bit of a drubbing from Jerry since you left if the Yorkshire Post is to be believed, but so far it’s continued to be quiet here at Tall Trees even though Harrogate is probably only sixty miles or so from the coast, and so please don’t worry about any of us as everything and everyone is bearing an equal strain.

  Naturally I’ve found myself dwelling on what happened between Bill and James, and it still feels awful. In fact it’s almost as if I have a newsreel of the fight playing in my head again and again, never coming up with the result I’d like to have happened, which is that Bill had just stayed put in East Anglia.

  To which end, I took the bull by the horns and wrote a note of apology to James, and went by the hospital on the way to June’s teashop with Holly this morning. I bumped into James in the road outside as it turns out, but it was incredibly awkward, and I wished very quickly that I hadn’t gone as I saw him and a pretty nurse hanging on every word the other was saying. I could have howled in pique and envy.

  Goodness, what a mess it all is.