The Evacuee War

by Katie King

  It had been a tricky time, Peggy remembered, and one that had spanned several long years for herself.

  At one point she and Barbara had even had a massive falling-out when she was only about a year older than Connie, over some boy called Desmond Smith, even though – it turned out later – neither girl had actually been that keen on him.

  Looking back now at this tiff, Peggy understood that it had been more the intoxicating feeling of taking a stand against anything – and it hadn’t much mattered what, or who, the stand was about – that had seemed to have felt so very overwhelming and compulsive at the time. Rather than her and Barbara’s behaviour making any proper sense to them then or now, so imperative had this sensation been of doing just something that ‘sense’ hadn’t mattered a jot to either of them.

  Desmond Smith had grown into a chubby young man with a receding hairline and womanly hips by his mid-twenties, with a penchant for continuously licking his overly pink, too-shiny lips, and Peggy and Barbara had often laughed since that such an unprepossessing physical specimen had led to much door-slamming, shouting and hair-pulling between the sisters when they were twelve and fourteen over who was more taken with him out of the pair of them, and who it was that he liked best.

  Neither, it had turned out, when they came across him behind the bike sheds enjoying a quick fumble with a girl from a class a year below Peggy who had been blessed with a very large chest. Years later they had decided they had chosen at the time to carry on their sisterly vendetta despite all evidence that Desmond preferred those of much fuller figures than they.

  Peggy decided now that she should talk firmly to her niece. ‘Well, speaking woman to woman, Connie, maybe you should bear in mind that we all have to live together here, and I really don’t want any more upset if Aiden and Jessie become cross with you, Aiden because he is fond of you although he might not be the type to say that directly to your face, and Jessie because Dave was one of those who attacked him. Connie, please consider that your behaviour could have repercussions, and that you should always remember what Roger and Mabel have had to put up with already over the fracas between Bill and James.’

  ‘Well, that was your problem and not mine. And I’m doing Jessie and Aiden a favour, one that they are just too dumb to see. They need to stop thinking about me, and concentrate instead on trying to impress the clever girls in their class.’ Connie’s tone was defiant.

  ‘Connie, I understand why you say that, but I don’t think you really mean it …’ said Peggy, intending to go on to say that Connie should treat everyone with kindness and in the manner that she would want herself to be treated.

  ‘DO MEAN IT!’ interrupted Connie in a shouty manner, and then she hurled the armful of towels she had been holding ready to pass to Peggy for pinning to the washing line back into the laundry basket and clomped furiously away, with Porky happily skittering at her side as if Connie were playing a game.

  Grumpily, Peggy watched her go. She tried to tell herself that Connie was still a young girl, and that perhaps she was struggling a bit more than Peggy had realised, what with being at a new school and having been publicly shown up as being less far able academically than the other children at Tall Trees, and with being an evacuee and not having her mother and father around.

  But all the same it was annoying and rude behaviour that in an ideal world would be nipped in the bud.

  Peggy was pretty certain that Connie wasn’t really particularly interested in Dave, but was simply keener on making a few ripples around her.

  Oh dear, Peggy sighed to herself. Youngsters of Connie’s age weren’t easy to understand, or to deal with.

  Let’s hope this damned war is over soon, she thought. The mere idea of all the other children catching up with Connie and then the whole group of them sharing the volatile years together, which would surely happen within a year or two, was a reminder that it would be hard going for Roger, Mabel and herself if everyone was still living together at Tall Trees at that point.

  Of course, the war might indeed be over by then, but a year previously the Government had promised everyone it would be over by Christmas, and look how that had turned out; it made it feel hard to be optimistic that they weren’t all in it for the long haul.

  Peggy tried to console herself that it would be a long time before Holly was at the ‘difficult’ stage, but that wasn’t much solace. She recalled how both she and Barbara had yelled out loud at times, and the way their father, recently returned from WW1, had hated it if either of them ever slammed a door in temper as this made him jump with what their mother called ‘his nerves’, following his time on the front in France.

  Were all generations destined to have their lives tainted by war, or – Peggy was now thinking of the hunger marches in the 1930s – by financial depression and massive social upheaval?

  How sobering these thoughts were, but then Peggy reminded herself that she and Holly were well, the twins were growing up, Ted had been found and had no apparent lasting effects, and life at Tall Trees had opened all their eyes to different things from how it would have been if they had stayed in London. Okay, it wasn’t great around the Bill-James fiasco but, generally, things could be much, much worse. Her spirits rallied as the phrase the newspapers loved to bandy about – Bulldog spirit – came to mind.

  With a bit of luck, dealing with Connie and the others at this time would be good training for what would be to come with Holly, Peggy hoped.

  Meanwhile worrying news came from London, as both Larry and Angela’s homes had sustained bomb damage and so the children’s families had been placed in temporary accommodation. Peggy had telephone calls with both mothers who were allowed to call from a kindly woman’s house, although when she spoke to Larry’s mother, it was quite clear that her husband’s rowdy behaviour and routine drunkenness was causing her more than a few problems at the temporary housing they had been moved to, which was one room in a shared dilapidated house in Poplar with no inside sanitation nor a proper kitchen, where eight families had been squeezed in, a whole family per room.

  Peggy could well imagine how difficult this must be.

  She watered down the sorry truth though for Larry by saying to him that his family were all doing as well as could be expected, as this wasn’t exactly a fib.

  But the look Larry gave her back suggested he could guess all too well exactly what his mother was having to put up with, and it wasn’t good.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘Peggy. Peggy!’ shouted Roger late one afternoon. ‘Telephone for you. I’m just going to the garden to check on Porky and the chickens.’

  ‘Damn it,’ said an exasperated Peggy, as she got up from the kitchen table where she had been trying to snatch five minutes to herself to peruse a newspaper while keeping an eye on Holly who was overtired and grizzly as she alternated between walking and crawling around the none too clean flagstones of the kitchen floor.

  ‘Will you mind Holly, Tommy?’ Peggy said, as he had just meandered into the kitchen in the futile attempt of seeing if there was anything to eat despite Mabel’s insistence on the children not snacking between mealtimes. He did this every day, and Peggy always joked it was Tommy’s perpetual triumph of hope over experience.

  When he nodded that he would, she gave his shoulder a squeeze of thanks as she passed by on her way to Roger’s study.

  She sat at the desk and lifted the telephone receiver to her ear, saying a cautious (as it was extremely rare for anyone to call her), ‘Good afternoon, Peggy Delbert speaking.’

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said a woman’s voice that Peggy half recognised, but which she couldn’t immediately place. Her brow furrowed, and then she realised who it was on the other end of the telephone line.

  It was Maureen!

  ‘Peggy, please,’ said Peggy, glad to be sitting down already as a wave of anxiety engulfed her.

  She knew she had suggested that Maureen ring her, although now that Maureen actually had, Peggy wasn’t at all certain what to
say.

  Eventually Peggy concluded that honesty was the best policy, and so she admitted, ‘I’m sorry if I sound a bit surprised, but I wasn’t expecting you to telephone just at that moment and so I feel slightly caught on the hop. First things first, have you had the baby, and are you well?’

  To Peggy’s surprise, Maureen laughed. It sounded quite a cheerful laugh, and Peggy felt herself relax just a tiny bit.

  ‘Maureen please,’ she replied. ‘ I was surprised to get your letter, and I needed to think about it. I had the baby a fortnight ago, and all went as it should and so baby Peter and I are both doing well, although as he was nearly nine pounds it took a while for him to arrive.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Peggy, feeling a bit sorry for Maureen as even though Holly had been quite a lot smaller, Peggy had felt extremely sore for weeks afterwards. ‘A big boy then.’

  ‘To anybody else, I’d probably say he takes after his father,’ Maureen replied, ‘but to you I can say yes, Peter is a big boy with a big heart, while his father remains a toady little weasel of the lowest order throughout his body.’

  Peggy had to smile. Indeed, she was rather warming to this different version of Maureen to the one she had dealt with in the summer, who had been very pregnant then and presumably awash with anger-making hormones. And so Peggy said, ‘Well, the last time I saw Bill, it was in a police station after he had been arrested for causing a fight here in Harrogate, and he did look rather woebegone in a shrunken sense …’

  ‘Can’t say that I’m surprised, although I didn’t know he’d been to Harrogate. That’s more than I have seen of him, then,’ said Maureen. ‘He knows Peter is here, but he hasn’t been to visit us. To spite Bill, I’ve put his name on the birth certificate.’

  Peggy thought she’d file that away for future reference; it might be useful to her further down the line. To her surprise, the news of Bill being named on another woman’s birth certificate didn’t give her the slightest pang. The pangs Peggy had once experienced to do with her husband seemed to belong to a Peggy from the past, and not the Peggy she felt she was now.

  ‘Well, maybe he has been very busy at the camp,’ said Peggy in a magnanimous tone, rather hoping that this was true, and it wasn’t that Bill had spent all his free time in a public house that had prevented him from visiting his newborn son. Or – heaven forbid – he was now gallivanting around with another woman. Or two.

  ‘Possibly,’ agreed Maureen.

  There was a long silence, and Peggy realised that neither woman believed for a moment that this was why Bill hadn’t made any effort to see his son.

  ‘Poor Bill, he’s so transparent,’ Peggy said at last. ‘And I’ve had my fill. He caused trouble here, and since then I’ve returned several of his letters unopened. If it were anything serious that I really needed to know, such as him being injured, I’m sure his commander would be in touch with me. But right now I don’t need or want any direct contact with him.’

  Maureen gave a bark that managed to convey both a mix of hollow irony along with the heavy sense of hopes being dashed to smithereens. ‘You’ve been doing better than me then,’ she added after a pause, and Peggy guessed that Maureen had been avoided by Bill altogether.

  Peggy thought that now would be a good opportunity to clarify once again her own position.

  ‘Look, Maureen, as far I am concerned my marriage to Bill is well and truly over, all bar the shouting, and actually I think we’ve done enough of that now, as I find it too upsetting afterwards.’ Peggy heard Maureen give something that sounded like a faint groan, maybe a groan of recognition of shared feeling.

  Peggy went on, ‘I have been to London to see a solicitor who specialises in divorces, and unfortunately it seems not so easy for me to instigate a divorce as I had hoped. At some point I will need to speak to Bill about this, and I can’t say how he will react. He does know already, however, that an ending at some point to our union is what I want, as I said this to him at the police station. And so it will be inevitable, in one way or another.

  ‘In the interim, if you still want Bill, and you think there is any chance of you two being able to make a go of things together, then I would not stand in your way if you wanted to cohabit or you wanted to try to get him to start divorce proceedings, although I wouldn’t go along with fabricating any evidence of my infidelity as, well, there hasn’t been any behaviour of that ilk on my part.

  ‘Bill might say otherwise to you, that of course I would say that seeing as I have a fancy man, but that is not the truth, and Bill has simply got a bee in his bonnet over nothing. There was a time when I had hopes in that direction, I admit, but Bill’s visit to Harrogate put the kibosh well and truly on that happening. It’s more that I am realistic, and while I don’t want Bill for myself, I don’t feel there is any reason that anyone else shouldn’t have him. If they want him, that is …’ Peggy’s words faltered at this point.

  ‘That sounds honest, although I’m not sure what I feel,’ said Maureen. ‘I am very up and down about it all.’

  ‘Of course you are, Maureen. It’s only days since you had little Peter, after all, and so you are going to feel very emotional for a while longer yet. Look, as far as you and Bill are concerned, whatever you decide is your decision, and as long as Holly and I are treated fairly, your decision won’t be one I’m going to argue with. I think the most important thing for both my Holly and your Peter is that they have a daddy in their lives. A man who remembers Christmases and birthdays, and who pays for their upkeep, even if he isn’t romantically tied to either mother. He might not always be much of a daddy, but he is the best those little ones have right now.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope Bill takes on board the enormity of what he has done, and that there will no danger of a third mother joining us.’ Maureen’s tone was incredibly salty, and Peggy rather liked that.

  ‘Maureen, you and I don’t have to be friends,’ said Peggy, ‘but it has to be to the advantage of our children, who are after all brother and sister now, if we both present a united front. I have said to Bill I would expect him to provide for your child, as well as for mine. And I suppose this means that if he chooses to have a child with somebody else, he will have to live with those consequences, or at least he will in my book.’

  ‘Peggy, I think you are a bigger woman than I, as I’m not sure, were I in your position, I could find it in myself to be so big-hearted,’ said Maureen.

  Peggy laughed. ‘Actually, I’m surprised at myself. But every time I look at Holly, I am determined to do the best I can for her, and so to antagonise either Bill or you after all this water has passed under the bridge isn’t helpful to either of us up here in Harrogate. And I don’t love Bill any longer, and because of this I find it hard to be angry with you. I wonder if you should make a move towards him, as you could be waiting a long time for Bill to get in touch otherwise?’

  The sound of Maureen giving a gulping sob came through the telephone receiver, and then Peggy had to move it away from her ear as Maureen gave a loud trumpet as she blew her nose.

  To lighten the mood, Peggy added, ‘Maybe a bit less of you reminding me of being the “bigger woman” though, perhaps?’

  Maureen made a sound that was perfectly balanced between laughing and a strangled sob, and Peggy could remember feeling exactly the same herself quite often in the weeks immediately after Holly was born.

  She said they should stop talking now as Tommy had probably been in charge of Holly for long enough, but both she and Maureen could think about what had been said in the conversation and they could pick it up another time.

  Peggy sounded quite cheerful as she made her goodbyes to Maureen, and then she sat in Roger’s chair in which he always polished up his sermons, thinking about how far she – and Holly – had come in the months since Holly’s dramatic and traumatic birth.

  For, as she had been ending the call, Peggy had felt the germ of an idea forming.

  She smiled, just as Holly toddled through the doorway to R
oger’s office, beaming a toothily gummy smile at the delight at finding where her mother was,

  Peggy nodded to Tommy, who was standing behind Holly to make sure she didn’t hurt herself should she take a tumble, that he could go back to whatever it was that he had been doing, and then Peggy put back her head and laughed out loud.

  It was a good idea that she had had, a very good idea indeed. And she could hardly wait to put it into action. She felt flooded with a renewed sense of energy, and it felt amazing.

  But there was something important that Peggy needed to do first.

  She rummaged on Roger’s desk until she found one of his notebooks. She tore out the bottom half of a page of precious paper, and began.

  Bill,

  Maureen and I have just spoken on the telephone. Our conversation was pleasant, and I am sure we will speak again soon. I am pleased that your son Peter has arrived safely. You and I need to have a sensible discussion at some point. However, it may be a bit too soon after you were here in Harrogate for that, and so I think Maureen and Peter would appreciate a visit from you in the meantime.

  Peggy

  PS Holly is well. She is now walking almost properly, and she has four front teeth, two at the top and two at the bottom. If I can find someone with a camera, I will get a photograph of her to send you.

  The note was to the point but Peggy felt it said all it needed to.

  She looked at Holly, standing beside her now with a grubby hand on Peggy’s knee.

  She said to her daughter, ‘How about I find a stamp and envelope to send this to your daddy, and then you and I stroll to the postbox to wear you out a little, poppet? And you and I need to go to Granny Nora’s.’

  Holly clapped her hands as if she were thrilled at the prospect, and gave a burble of baby talk.

  ‘Clearly you’ve not yet met Granny Nora,’ Peggy told her daughter. ‘But, to be fair, neither have I, and so I may well be doing the poor woman down.’