The Evacuee War

by Katie King

  Peggy’s suddenly sombre mood seemed reflected at the rectory by the children being very affected by the news of a torpedo scuttling the SS City of Benares, which had been sailing with ninety evacuee children from Liverpool to Canada. Seventy-seven of the evacuees died in the attack, and people across the nation felt devastated to see so many young lives being cut down too soon. Prime Minister Winston Churchill immediately cancelled the Children Overseas Reception Board government-funded plan that had been to send 24,000 evacuated children abroad for the duration. Peggy wondered how many of these 24,000 children would now die or be badly hurt at Jerry’s hands on home soil.

  Roger, Mabel and Peggy were deeply saddened by the news of these poor evacuees, of course, although not so shaken as the children obviously were. They talked endlessly about it in awed voices, and these sessions usually made Angela sob uncontrollably, which made Peggy wonder if this was a result of the head injury she had sustained in a silly road accident when larking about in the blackout with the other children the previous Guy Fawkes night that had left the little girl in a wheelchair and made her very sensitive to any sort of bad news.

  The Tall Trees adults had to navigate several difficult conversations about death and dying that always seemed to take place when everyone was seated at mealtimes, and as this seemed to kill their appetites, soon Mabel had to ban any talk of the Benares when everyone sat down to eat. This helped, but the children remained quite subdued for days after they had heard the news report on the wireless.

  The adults wondered if the story had hit home with the youngsters especially because this was the first time the Tall Trees children had understood properly that others the same age as they might actually die or be horrifically maimed during the hostilities, while the fact the casualties were all evacuees had added an extra poignancy.

  Obviously the children had seen several very distressed parishioners arrive at Tall Trees at all hours needing to talk or to have Roger comfort them when a son had been lost or maimed when fighting abroad, but what those adults had experienced hadn’t really made much sense to the younger members of the household and so they hadn’t been anything other than mildly curious.

  And as Peggy knew from her own experience, it was remarkable how quickly she and the children had got used to living with a constant low level of anxiety about what might be going on back in London. It wasn’t that one wasn’t worried, but more that thoughts of the danger everyone back home was in quickly stopped being all-consuming because – as the Government encouraged – everyone just tried to carry on with ‘normal’ life as much as was possible as a collective show of defiance to Jerry.

  But what had happened with the Benares felt different. It was a shocking turn of events, and one immensely hard not to consumed by.

  Roger, Mabel and Peggy had agreed from the outset of the evacuees arriving that any bad news coming through in the BBC’s news broadcasts wouldn’t be sugar-coated for the children, as they were convinced that if they attempted this it would only make it harder in the long run for them to accept that unpleasant things could happen. They’d also agreed that they would always answer any of the kiddies’ questions honestly. But so preoccupied with the Benares story were the children, that Peggy began to wonder if, after all, they had taken the right decision as far as that was concerned, and it seemed Roger might be having similar thoughts.

  ‘I’m going to say special prayers on Sunday for those tragic Benares evacuees at the morning service, as I think this particular story will have touched a lot of the congregation deeply,’ he said as he sat with Peggy and Mabel as they enjoyed some cocoa at the kitchen table late one night and discussed the situation once the children were all safely in bed. ‘And I think I’ll write my sermon around the theme of evacuation, and how important it is that we all recognise that sacrifice comes in many shapes and forms, and we must all be very tolerant and understanding of that. And us adults must take care to speak to children in the right way about stories like this, whatever that is.’

  ‘I’m sure Tommy and his friends here will appreciate those words,’ said Peggy. ‘And Roger, if very casually, while you’re about it, you could mention something that could be applied to those evacuees from Hull that could help Jessie especially, I’m sure he’d find comfort in that. Those little thugs are probably missing their families and being at home, and perhaps their parents have lost their homes or maybe worse has happened to those lads, as Jerry is giving Hull a real battering. I’m sure those boys are feeling upset just as much as we all are here, even though it might not seem like it to judge by their brutish behaviour; and Jessie may well never have thought of that, as he probably can’t think beyond how big and bullying they can be. I am fairly certain he’s worried still about what those lads might do as he’s so down in the mouth at the moment, and wondering whether they will attack him again.’

  ‘Poor Jessie – yes, that was atrocious behaviour on their part. I’ll see what I can do to mention this in a way that will be helpful but not too obvious,’ said Roger.

  Mabel nudged a notebook and pencil towards her husband’s elbow. Although there was a paper shortage, Roger had bought a whole box of notebooks just before the outbreak of war and so there rather a lot of them dotted around the rectory in strategic positions as Roger never quite knew when the muse for a good topic for a sermon was going to strike, and he lived in fear of forgetting what he had intended to note down if he had to fight too hard to find a piece of paper.

  ‘You scribble that down, Roger, and I’ll top up our cocoa,’ said Mabel helpfully, and Peggy smiled her thanks at both suggestions Mabel had made, and then at Roger for wanting to help Jessie just as much as he wanted to help the other members of his congregation.

  Lying in bed that night, Peggy was struck anew that all this upset might just be a foretaste of what was to come. Should the war stretch on interminably, then it was practically inconceivable that at least one of the inhabitants at Tall Trees wouldn’t be hit by some sort of personal tragedy. It hardly bore thinking about.

  Meanwhile, although this was out of sight of the adults, tensions escalated amongst all the Tall Trees children at Connie’s growing friendship with the boys from Hull.

  Now Connie was spending nearly all her breaks and lunchtimes at school with those three lads in her class, and it wasn’t long before the two third years from Hull joined those four every day as well.

  The Hull lads seemed to have dropped the overt vendetta that they had raged against the TT Muskets over the summer, and there was no repeat of any such gestures of aggressive fingers being run across throats as Jessie had seen on the day his parents went back to London.

  It seemed as if those boys had decided that the best way forward was to totally ignore everyone from Tall Trees other than Connie, as if to pretend they didn’t exist, or at any rate weren’t worth bothering with.

  But Aiden and Jessie agreed that this silence was ominous. Such passivity didn’t feel natural, and in itself it came to feel almost an act of aggression. It certainly didn’t suggest that any of the Tall Trees children were out of the woods yet. The pals dubbed the Hull lads’ attitude ‘the phoney snubbing’ and while normally they would have laughed together about this as both Aiden and Jessie enjoyed a bit of wordplay, to do so didn’t feel appropriate in this case.

  Tommy and Larry didn’t seem particularly bothered either way about Connie sneaking closer to the enemy, while Angela seemed intent only on trying to be alone with Tommy and so, as usual, she never took much notice of what anyone else was up to if it wasn’t him.

  By the time that Peggy began to twig that all might not be well, noticing that the twins were now sitting at opposite ends of the kitchen table for meals rather than beside each other as normal and Aiden was no longer glued to Connie’s side, she chose to probe Jessie, usually the more forthcoming twin, about how it was all going (she didn’t need to be specific what ‘all’ meant as it was obvious Jessie immediately understood what she was driving at).


  He shrugged in a despondent way, before he mumbled, ‘It’s quiet, Aunty Peggy. The Hull lads will talk to Connie, but they don’t say anything to the rest of us, and we don’t say anything to them. They don’t even look at us. But it seems as if they are waiting for a chance, or for us to crumble. I think them not doing anything is almost as bad as them doing something.’

  Peggy couldn’t think of anything to say that was particularly encouraging. She thought Jessie may well be right, and the other gang had decided to bide their time and await a good opportunity to strike.

  ‘Well, why don’t you concentrate on your schoolwork instead, and so this way you won’t have time to worry about other things?’ was the best Peggy could come up with. She felt it was something of a feeble response, and she could see Jessie did too.

  She tried to pull him close for a hug, but she felt him stiff-backed and tense when her arm was around his shoulders, and so she didn’t feel she had managed to soothe his concerns in the slightest.

  What Jessie hadn’t confided to Peggy was that these days, and apparently with no effort, Connie appeared to all intents and purposes to be pretty much the ringleader of her new group of friends.

  Jessie had kept his opinion to himself as far as his aunt was concerned as the mere sight of Connie with her new cronies at school gave him a maelstrom of complex feelings. On the one hand he had to be grateful for not being picked on, but on the other it made him feel peculiar about his sister, to the point that Jessie tried not to think about her at all. This felt very strange, as all his life to this point he felt the fact that he and Connie were twins made them into a team with unbreakable bonds. Connie, it seemed, hadn’t felt similarly, and this was a very difficult thought to get used to.

  Aiden wasn’t happy either, a situation confirmed when one day Jessie heard his disgruntled friend mutter to himself as across the school yard Connie had the five boys standing in a semicircle before her, looking as if they were hanging on her every word. ‘Pah! like bees to a honeypot!’ he mumbled in a way that Jessie felt he hadn’t been supposed to hear; Jessie was shocked to hear himself respond by suggesting ‘goal practice, Aiden?’ as a distraction.

  Connie had an awful lot to answer for, Jessie thought, as he nursed a headache later that afternoon for having attempted his first header. In fact, more than that, it just wasn’t fair.

  Fortunately Connie seemed to reserve the Hull boys for a weekday friendship only.

  At weekends she appeared happy to spend time with her old buddies, although she didn’t seem to notice that arguably Jessie and Aiden weren’t quite as keen to spend Saturdays and Sundays with her as once they had been.

  Connie proved to be remarkably adept at sliding out of any references to the Hull gang, and she had an annoying knack of looking at anyone who dared to raise the subject with an unswerving look of wide-eyed innocence that dared further comments on the matter, and the result was that everyone took to avoiding the subject.

  All of this meant though that while Tommy, Angela and Larry looked on in a bemused way as this game of psychological musical chairs played out, Aiden and Jessie became increasingly withdrawn during the weekdays.

  The two boys each shied away from saying anything directly to Connie in private, not that she gave many opportunities for either Jessie or Aiden to catch her on their own.

  The boys told each other that this was because they weren’t sure how to handle it in a way that wouldn’t cause an argument that they guessed they were unlikely to win, and they also agreed that to make too much fuss about it would be the best way of making Connie spend even more time with Dave and, by association, his Hull cronies.

  But although they had declared this in a most emphatic manner, Jessie wasn’t really convinced, and he couldn’t help but wonder if they were both a little in awe of Connie’s boldness, and how much older and more assured than he and Aiden she seemed all of a sudden. Much more the age of the Hull boys, in fact, who were two years older.

  Still, whatever the reason for their reticence in tackling the matter, it didn’t prevent Aiden and Jessie spending a fair time shooting wounded glances in Connie’s direction, and she retaliated by spending a fair time studiously ignoring these looks.

  There was an awkward moment one Sunday afternoon when all the Tall Trees children had been grazing Milburn on a patch of scrub ground and, for once, Connie and Aiden were larking around together in the familiar way they once had. Then Aiden had frozen awkwardly when he had noticed Dave and the other four boys standing a distance away, blatantly staring at him and Connie.

  Aiden put a proprietorial arm around Connie’s shoulder, and while Connie didn’t shrug it off as such, neither did she do anything back to Aiden to suggest that she and he were a thoroughly united team, and so, after an awkward minute, Aiden removed his arm rather stiffly.

  Dave looked puzzled and, Jessie thought, so did Aiden. Jessie studied the half-smile on his sister’s face and found it very hard to read. He couldn’t tell who she was taunting and who she was encouraging, and he wondered if Connie knew either.

  One breaktime at school Jessie even risked inspecting Dave (from a distance), and he couldn’t see anything about the lad that would entice Connie’s attention so. He didn’t seem particularly funny or smart or strong.

  Jessie looked then towards Connie with the same scrutinising gaze. And although he had been meaning to see if she gave Dave the same sort of looks she’d previously reserved for Aiden, instead Jessie was thunderstruck by what he now saw as if for the first time.

  Without him noticing, it was undeniable that Connie had started to look quite well-developed in her chest area; and that evening he noticed she was taller than him by at least a couple of inches.

  How had that snuck up on her, and him? Jessie wondered. And how had she changed from a sister he felt close to into somebody he hardly recognised?

  ‘Jessie, people grow up, and as they do, they change in lots of ways, and so you mustn’t take it personally,’ said Peggy in a careful manner, after she had asked Jessie to help her put Porky to bed as she had noticed the way he couldn’t stop staring as if he were inspecting his sister.

  Peggy had been spurred by a comment made to her by June earlier in the day; she had overheard Larry say something about Connie’s antics at school to Aiden while they were clearing tables and washing up one day, which caused Aiden to give only a pained grunt in reply.

  ‘And I doubt that Connie wants to be mean to anyone, although sometimes it might feel as if she does,’ Peggy added.

  After Peggy had spoken, Jessie thought he’d worked all that out for himself, and that Peggy had let him down rather.

  ‘Hmmm,’ was all he could reply, but Peggy failed to see that she had disappointed him.

  Peggy tried to speak to Connie woman to woman a day or two later.

  ‘Connie, dear, I might be wrong, but you and Aiden don’t seem to be quite the buddies you were,’ she said casually as she and Connie pegged out damp washing on the line in the garden while Porky rooted around at their feet.

  ‘We are,’ said Connie in a firm manner, as if nothing could be further from the truth than Peggy’s comment.

  Peggy looked at Connie, and similarly to the way that Jessie had been, she was struck by how much Connie had changed in the last year. She appeared by far the oldest of all the children now, quite the young woman in fact. Connie was nearly as tall as Peggy, and had all the makings of a womanly figure starting to fill out her clothes.

  Peggy tried again. ‘Connie, a little bird tells me that you are becoming pally with David, one of those lads who hurt Jessie. Would Barbara and Ted approve of that if they knew?’

  ‘You can tell your little bird that Dave’s not so bad when you get to know him. And Mother and Father aren’t here, are they, and so I’m not thinking about them.’

  ‘I don’t believe that for a moment, Connie,’ said Peggy, who been taken aback by her niece’s waspish tone, and Connie had the grace to look sheepish for a second or two.<
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  Peggy didn’t want to let Connie off the hook, and so she persisted with her grilling. ‘Have you asked Jessie, or the others, what they think about your new friendship?’ Peggy tried to keep her voice as non-confrontational as possible.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t need to ask permission from anyone who I’m going to be friends with, Peggy, and that includes you!’ Peggy noticed that Connie had dropped the ‘aunt’ or ‘aunty’ before her name, which she most definitely would have used during the summer holidays.

  Connie’s tone now moved from the petulant to the provocative as she added with a distinct note of challenge, ‘After all, if I don’t make friends with those in my class, school is going to be even more of a pain in the backside for me than it is already. I am in a class on my own, remember.’

  ‘Connie!’ said Peggy at the vehemence of Connie’s response. Peggy knew Barbara most certainly would not approve of Connie using a phrase such as ‘pain in the backside’.

  They might come from a poor part of London, but Peggy and Barbara had endured hours of elocution lessons when they were teenagers, and Barbara particularly was a stickler for polite and proper speech.

  Peggy remembered Connie saying after her first day at this new school that although it wasn’t nice being put in the lowest stream, nonetheless she felt the school might offer her some ‘opportunities’. At the time Peggy had taken this as a good sign, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  She wondered if instead Connie had decided to play up to the low expectations the school had placed on her, and that the friendship with Dave had become part of that, designed to show everyone that if they expected Connie to be stupid, then she darn well would behave in such a way to prove them right.

  Peggy also thought Connie’s bolshie attitude might be something to do with her age and with the shift of leaving childhood and moving into that uncomfortable phase rife with uncertainty of the way adulthood should be embraced.