The Evacuee War

by Katie King

  Peggy was a pragmatist by nature, and once she was feeling a bit less angry (no one could have kept up that level of fury for too long!), she wiped the last vestiges of moisture away from beneath her eyes and smoothed Connie’s pillow from the angry thumps she had given it.

  Then Peggy looked at her sister with a wicked cast to her eye as she announced, ‘Well, maybe I’ll be able to rely on Maureen putting pressure on Bill to do the right thing by her and the baby, and eventually he’ll want to divorce me in order to keep the peace in Norfolk, and Maureen will make sure that he does the right thing by me in order to give her and her own baby a clean slate.’

  ‘Hold that thought, Peggy!’ said Barbara, clearly relieved that her sister’s spirits were starting to perk up, and she quickly stood up as if to go downstairs just in case Peggy would take on again should she hang around, although she did pause in the bedroom doorway to add, ‘You give yourself a wash and spruce-up, missus, and I’ll nip and get ready for our outing.’

  Peggy decided that even though an easy divorce might be a pipe dream, at least the knowledge of her position made her feel a little bit more in charge of her own life.

  She might not be able to alter some things, but she could alter how she felt about them.

  And so Peggy thought of Holly, and how lucky she was to have given birth to such a wonderful and perfect little girl. It might be a mess between herself and Bill, she thought, but Holly was certainly something they had managed to get right between them, very right indeed, and for that Peggy felt blessed across every cell in her body.

  Once the others had left on their outing, Peggy poked around in the small, rarely used parlour until she discovered the bottle of port that had been lurking in the sideboard for years.

  Peggy enjoyed her first glass so much that she ignored the Spam sandwich that Barbara had made her, instead pouring a second glass that she sipped as she looked at the newspaper. It was full of how the Royal Chapel in the South Wing at Buckingham Palace had taken a right battering from at least one bomb, and with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth being resident in the palace at the time. This upset and devastation at their home hadn’t stopped them being photographed later in the day visiting the East End to keep morale up of other people who had suffered through being bombed out.

  Peggy thought the reporting of this would be sure to bring those on home shores closer together, the precise opposite to what Jerry intended. If the King and Queen, and the princesses, could soldier on regardless as a wonderful example, then so everyone else would as well. And the stoicism of the royal family could be echoed by Peggy herself, now she knew how difficult it would be to get a divorce.

  By the fourth glass of port, Peggy’s mood had slipped to the maudlin as she declared to Fishy, ‘Those dear little princesses Elizabeth and Margaret – fancy them giving up their toy saucepans for the war effort to be melted down. They’ll have a fancy little kitchen somewhere with no pans to play with.’

  Fishy’s eyes seemed to reply crisply that really the princesses would have lots of other toys to play with, and the story was more about how the Palace wanted the general public to feel that the Royal family was just like the rest of the nation in having to make sacrifices, but to Peggy at that moment it seemed easier just to pour another glass of port than to grapple much more deeply with this thought.

  Peggy was hit by a wave of hiccups as she pulled the Spam from her uneaten sandwich to little pieces, which she threw to Fishy one by one. She felt bad for not eating it, as she knew Barbara would be offended – there were hungry children in Africa after all, and many others too who were starving probably much closer to home – but she really didn’t like tinned luncheon meat, although fortunately it was another one of Fishy’s favourites, not that she was allowed it these days.

  Peggy reached for the bottle of port again, and topped up her glass, before turning up some dance hall music on the wireless.

  She lifted Fishy up, and as the puss licked her whiskers after her unexpected treat, Peggy buried her face in Fishy’s soft fur and danced slowly around the room with her eyes shut.

  By the time the siren sounded that evening, Barbara and Ted and the twins had just come in from a lovely double bill at the pictures and were standing in the kitchen, staring at the slouched and sleeping form of Peggy slumped over the kitchen table with her head on folded arms, the now empty bottle of port at her elbow, clearly oblivious to the siren’s call.

  ‘Can you carry her into the shelter?’ Barbara said to Ted above the drone of the siren, ‘I’ll collect everything else.’

  ‘She’s only a little thing, but she’s ’eavier than she looks,’ said a red-faced Ted a minute later, once he’d lugged the comatose Peggy down into the Anderson and heaved her onto a bench, ‘A lot ’eavier, it ’as to be said.’

  ‘Sssh, Ted, don’t you dare let Peggy hear you say that, for goodness’ sake, else we’ll never hear the end of it,’ said Barbara, although she couldn’t stop a twinkle of merriment seeping into her expression. ‘And I’ll be betting that tomorrow, Peggy will be saying she must have picked up a bug as she feels so queer, conveniently ignoring the fact that she single-handedly drank almost a whole bottle of port. I don’t know whether to be impressed with her or cross! I know I couldn’t drink that much, no matter what the provocation.’

  Fortunately there was much less aerial activity this second night, and it wasn’t long before Ted, with a fair amount of huffing and puffing and ‘who needs this late at night?’, carted a still lifeless Peggy up the stairs to Connie and Jessie’s bedroom and deposited her ungracefully onto Connie’s bed, whereupon Barbara slipped off her shoes and then pulled an eiderdown over her.

  The twins thought Peggy’s obliviousness to be one of the funniest things they had ever seen, although Barbara made them solemnly swear that they must never let on to anyone how Peggy had behaved once they were back at Tall Trees.

  And as sure as eggs were eggs, the next morning Peggy was convinced she was coming down with something as she felt riven with aches and a bad head, and she must have picked up a bug when she was over in Borough seeing Mr Ainsworth.

  Ted and Barbara and the twins had to stare at their breakfast plates for quite a while not to laugh out loud as they exchanged amused raised eyebrows over their morning toast.

  Peggy perked up enough a while later to go with Barbara to the East Street outdoor market off the Walworth Road, while Ted walked with the twins over to their old primary school, to see if it had sustained any obvious bomb damage.

  At the market Peggy was able to buy a bundle of secondhand comics for the children, a small wooden jigsaw for Holly, and some home-made marrow and blackberry jam for Roger and Mabel, and a second pot for Barbara and Ted.

  On the way back to Jubilee Street, a spiv came up to Barbara and Peggy, and hissed ‘Lipstick?’ out of the corner of his mouth as he stood near to them while he pretended he had stopped in order to light a cigarette.

  Barbara looked very disapproving, but Peggy inched closer to him, and said quietly, aping the way he was speaking out of the corner of her mouth, ‘Are they new?’

  The spiv nodded.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Five bob.’

  ‘Daylight robbery,’ Peggy answered. ‘Four bob.’

  ‘Four and ninepence. I’ve got five kiddies to feed.’

  ‘Rubbish. Don’t listen to him, Peggy, he’s just trying to fob you off,’ hissed Barbara disapprovingly.

  Peggy ignored her sister, who was now glancing anxiously up and down the street in case there was a policeman nearby, as black market trading was illegal.

  But as far as Peggy was concerned she had already bought the two pots of jam illegally, and now felt she might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and she didn’t care a jot if a bobby came upon her mid-transaction.

  ‘Five children is excessive. Four and three,’ countered a prim Peggy, although her eyes twinkled in merriment.

  ‘You’d take the clothes from my back, miss
us. Four and six?’

  ‘Done.’

  And with that the spiv held open one side of his moth-eaten jacket, and Peggy laughed to see inside, each in a tiny fold of fabric looped in a line from one side to the other, a long row of brand-new lipsticks, all Auxiliary Red from Cyclax. Goodness knows how the spiv had come by them but, my, they did look tempting!

  Quickly Peggy chose two lipsticks, and handed over a ten-shilling note. But she shook her head when the spiv said ‘Powder?’ and quickly flourished the other side of his jacket open to display a selection of white cardboard circular boxes of face powder ready to be decanted into the metal powder compacts that most women owned, as if this would change her mind.

  Peggy shook her head again. Reluctantly he dug about in his trouser pocket for a while and then dolefully he handed her back a shilling, before he and Peggy parted with a ‘Nice doing business with you’ and an answering ‘And you’.

  ‘You idiot,’ said Barbara a hundred or so yards down the road. ‘He saw you coming, you ninny.’

  ‘You’ll be laughing out of the other side of your face! One of those lipsticks is for you, as a thank you,’ said Peggy.

  ‘In that case, what a bargain you struck.’

  Three hours later Peggy and the twins were on the train heading back to Leeds. They hadn’t been going fifteen minutes when all three were firmly asleep following an inconclusive discussion on what more they could do to help the war effort as they were all a little shaken by the obvious signs of bombing they had seen, Jessie and Connie each resting their head on one of Peggy’s shoulders.

  As the train rattled along on its way northwards, it felt to all of them as if it were taking them home.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘How was it this morning, Connie?’ said Aiden at breaktime a few days later as they huddled outside the main building of the school trying to get into the lee of an unpleasantly nippy wind.

  Jessie and Connie’s trip to London was already old news at Tall Trees, although all the children were still enjoying reading the comics that Peggy had bought them at the market there.

  ‘All right, I suppose,’ said Connie, ‘although the teacher had problems making everyone be quiet in the second period. It turns out though that three of those Hull lads have just been moved back to the same class as me – I think they’ve been held back a year, or it might even be two, as they’re having problems with reading. One of them tried to trip me up when I went up to help the teacher make the blackboard higher—’

  ‘No!’ cried Jessie, the crack in his voice more a sign that he was imagining the humiliation of one the Hull lot trying to trip him up than indicating concern for his sister.

  ‘He did!’ said Connie, not noticing that Jessie might not have been wholly thinking of her. ‘And right under the teacher’s nose too. But I don’t think Sir’s eyesight is too good, or otherwise he’d have seen the way that Hull lad looked at me and drew a finger across his throat to mime cutting mine with a knife.’

  Jessie felt quite faint for a second, and as if his knees were knocking together in fear. This sounded exactly like the gesture he’d seen one of the Hull boys make the day after Milburn had been hurt in the road accident.

  Connie was undaunted. ‘Well, that lad’s got me very wrong if he thinks I give two hoots for such a babyish threat.’

  It hadn’t looked a babyish threat to Jessie when he had seen it, but he didn’t say anything. Connie went on, ‘And so a little while later I put my hand up to be excused so that I could go and spend a penny, which Sir allowed although he said it would only be this once. And on the way back I jabbed the Hull twerp really hard in the ribs with my thumb as I went by as Sir was writing something on the blackboard and had his back to the class. The one who tripped me is called David, and the other two are Hugh and Stuart, by the way.’

  Jessie and Aiden looked at each other as if to say that they didn’t give two hoots what the Hull boys’ names were.

  Connie took no notice as she added, ‘And what’s really bad is that right before break the four of us were then told that we had to sit for all of our lessons in a line together, as apparently our reading is the worst in the whole school – and I’m not even allowed to be at the end of the four of us in the row! Then, when those boys tried to rile me, I pointed out they are getting on for two years older than me, and are now having to sit with a girl, which means the joke’s on them and not me. But at this, David said to me that I’d missed out a word, which was “stupid” before girl, which was a nerve, the damn cheek of it, don’t you think?’

  Jessie thought David was taking a big chance by calling Connie stupid.

  ‘And the other two are Jared and Sam, I think it is, and they are already in 3E,’ Connie finished.

  ‘You should be a spy, Connie,’ said Aiden, as if he were trying to lift her spirits, although to judge by the quite jolly expression on her face, he wasn’t too sure that her spirits had been dented in the slightest. ‘You’re very good at getting information, you know,’ he added, and Connie nodded her agreement in a way that showed it was obvious that everyone should naturally accept she would make a brilliant spy and be a wonderful interrogator.

  ‘It’s not difficult when they’re so stupid, and—’ But whatever Connie had been going to say was drowned out by the bell ringing to announce the end of breaktime.

  Ninety minutes later, after lessons had broken for lunchtime, it looked to be a slightly different story unfolding as for the very first time Connie didn’t seek out her brother or Aiden.

  Instead, she spent a long while talking outside with the three Hull lads in her class, even laughing with them at one point, almost as if she was having a good time.

  Worse was the fact that all three boys then guffawed back at whatever it was that Connie had just said, Jessie and Aiden agreed as they watched from the other side of the playground.

  Jessie wasn’t sure what he thought about his sister’s brazen behaviour. It seemed strange. He did know that he wasn’t happy about it, but he knew already he probably would wait for her to tell him what she was up to rather than asking her outright what she was about.

  Aiden stared at Connie in silence, and Jessie thought that, to judge by his grim expression, he wasn’t taken by this turn of events either.

  ‘Let’s make sure we get Connie away from them as soon as we can, I mean generally, and not just today,’ said Jessie, wanting to give Aiden something else to think about other than whether Connie might be flirting outrageously with the enemy.

  Jessie didn’t think Connie seemed as if she was giving the Hull lads the glad eye as such, but he knew he was very inexperienced in these things which meant he couldn’t be sure, and so he added, ‘Why is it that she is in the lowest class, do you think?’

  With narrowed eyes, a stern-looking Aiden ignored Jessie’s question, saying instead, ‘Jessie, I don’t want to talk about Connie.’

  Jessie tried again with, ‘Well, what shall we do about marking Gracie and Kelvin’s wedding then?’

  ‘Ugh, I can’t be bothered to think about that either,’ said Aiden in a more grumpy way than was usual for him, as normally he was a boy who seemed always cheerful. Then Aiden added in the sort of voice that suggested he was making a huge effort, ‘Look, shall we see if we can join in that game of football over there?’

  If there was one thing that Jessie disliked more than the Hull lads, it was football.

  But although Jessie cast an eye around for his other Tall Trees pals so that he would have a good reason not to play, unfortunately Larry, Tommy and Angela were nowhere to be seen, and this meant to Jessie that the fear of being stuck on his own, which might make him an easy target in the eyes of Jared and Sam and the others, became stronger than his aversion to football.

  ‘Good plan, Aiden. Let’s,’ Jessie heard himself say. He didn’t know if he or Aiden was the more shocked at his apparent desire to play football.

  Aiden gave Jessie a sideways look at these words, as to show even the sli
ghtest enthusiasm for something sporty wasn’t like Jessie at all.

  Then Aiden shrugged, and called ‘Over here!’ to the footballers as he ran towards them.

  And with nothing more than that, the two boys from Tall Trees were quickly swallowed up in the kickabout, Jessie (to his huge surprise) even scoring a screamer of a goal when Aiden flipped the ball his way.

  It was his very first goal ever, but although Jessie felt inordinately proud of himself for a moment or two, he realised immediately after that his foot was stinging uncomfortably from hoofing the ball too hard between the two woollies that had been bunched on the ground to signify the goalposts, and he hoped that football wasn’t going to be a regular occurrence every lunchtime at this new school as he didn’t think he could stand the pain.

  Gallingly, Connie meanwhile didn’t even seem to notice that Jessie and Aiden were playing football, or that Jessie had scored a goal.

  But both Jessie and Aiden heard her tinkling laughter ring out and David’s deeper answering guffaw just as the bell rang for them all to head back to their classrooms.

  They looked at each other, but didn’t say anything. They had never thought they would have to listen to Connie fraternising with the enemy.

  There didn’t seem to be the words to describe what they felt.

  Chapter Nineteen

  That same afternoon, after leaving June’s at the end of her stint, an incredibly unsettled and restless Peggy had to push Holly’s perambulator smartly up and down the steep hills of Harrogate in an attempt to wear herself out.

  She’d felt flustered ever since returning from London, but she found this physical exertion did little to alleviate matters.

  A surprised and uncertain Holly stared seriously at Peggy as she was bounced about, as if this were very strange behaviour indeed on her mother’s part, after which Peggy slowed down a little as it did feel a little demeaning to be so openly judged by her daughter who wasn’t yet a year old.