The Evacuee Summer: Heart-warming historical fiction, perfect for summer reading

The next day arrived, which was Sunday, and the sense of excitement from the previous morning still held strong amongst the children, not least as there was due to be another arrival at Tall Trees.

Larry was moving back up to Yorkshire to take up residence with them once again, and everyone was looking forward to it as the atmosphere just hadn’t felt the same in the rectory since he had departed several months earlier.

Larry had attended Jessie and Connie’s school back in Bermondsey, and so the previous September he’d been evacuated up to Harrogate along with the twins, Angela, and indeed the rest of their school too.

Larry had had a chequered time in Harrogate, having been bullied at first and then later moving to Tall Trees where life settled for him a little. But with the Phoney War dragging on and on, his mother Susan had arrived at the end of January to take him with her, back to London.

Once Larry had been waved off on the train Jessie and Connie had been very subdued for the rest of that day. Although they suspected that Larry might be going back to a rocky situation inside his family home, as his father was known for being a lout, they couldn’t help but wish that they were also on the train heading south with the prospect of seeing their own mother, Barbara, and father, Ted, very soon and moving back into their two-up two-down in Jubilee Street in Bermondsey to be a proper family again. Harrogate and Tall Trees was fine as far as it went, the glum faces of the twins seemed to say when they were alone together, but despite all that Roger and Mabel did to make them feel settled, it just wasn’t their home, was it? And they did miss their parents terribly. Peggy knew what they meant – she had mixed feelings about their evacuation too.

Unfortunately for Larry, the situation he found back in London turned out to be every bit as unpleasant as he’d feared it would be. Peggy knew that Larry’s father, Trevor, had been banned several times from the Jolly, and other public houses too, but business was business and somebody such as Trevor did spend a lot of money, so a temporary ban was more a rap on the knuckles for poor behaviour rather than anything permanent.

Peggy had taught Larry back in Bermondsey, and she had once had a worrisome run-in with Trevor in the street a day after she had encouraged Larry to take a storybook home so that he could finish off the chapter he’d begun reading aloud in class and had been very taken with. A clearly tipsy Trevor had demanded aggressively, even going so far as to poke Peggy in the arm with a ragged-nailed nicotine-stained finger, to know if she could be so good as to explain why it was that she was wasting Larry’s time with something so pig-ugly useless as a piece of make-believe. Peggy tried to say that The Family from One-End Street had a lot to recommend it, and that Larry’s engagement was excellent news.

Trevor hadn’t been having any of it, with the result that the next day Peggy had had to say to Larry during morning playtime that perhaps it would be a good idea if he tried to get all his reading done in the classroom during the day and not take any storybooks home again. It was no surprise to Peggy that Larry never willingly picked up a storybook in her classroom again. She had always felt bad that she hadn’t stuck up for Larry more, but, although she would never admit this out loud to anyone, she had felt scared and intimidated by the gruff tones and beery stench of Larry’s father.

Once Larry was back in London Peggy suspected that, older and wiser, he’d be less tolerant of Trevor’s evil moods. Peggy’s intuition proved correct and Larry’s mother had telephoned Mabel from the Jolly – it was actually the first time Susan had ever made a telephone call off her own bat – when, clearly at the end of her tether, she had asked in a quavering voice if there were any way that Larry could come back to Tall Trees for a little while? Mabel confessed to Peggy that she’d thought she’d heard a muffled sob, before Larry’s mother added in a tight voice, ‘Only until things settle at ’ome, that is, you unnerstan’. I’m sure it’ll calm directly.’

Roger and Mabel had been very generous in welcoming a gaggle of strangers into their home, and after a sticky period where their good intentions had been tainted by son Tommy’s vindictive response to the arrival of a lot of strange-seeming children from London arriving at Tall Trees, eventually an easier equilibrium had been established. The atmosphere lightened further once Aiden Kell and Larry had moved in. And then Angela had arrived a couple of months later to make the ensemble complete, and although her wheelchair meant she couldn’t share Connie’s bedroom upstairs, she had fitted in with no trouble.

Tommy’s large bedroom had been made into a dorm for the four boys, and although they could be loud at times and the bedroom always looked fearsomely untidy, Mabel having to shut the door on it every time she walked by despite her high tolerance for clutter, there was something about the dynamic that made the lads all rub along together without too much ribbing or outright argument under the new regime, and so Larry had been missed when he had gone back to London.

Connie slept in her little box room at the far end of the corridor to the boys’ room, while Angela was in a snug on the ground floor, not far from the large kitchen.

The two bedrooms on the second floor, up above the other bedrooms and high in the eaves, had Peggy and Holly in one, with Gracie and baby Jack in the other. Having to navigate so many stairs obviously wasn’t ideal for the new mothers, but once they had moved into Tall Trees proper, across from their previous room above the stables during the cold weather, somehow they had never moved out of the main house and back into their old lodgings. As Gracie joked, all the stairs helped them get their figures back double-quick after the babies had arrived.

Tall Trees was definitely a full house these days, with or without Larry, and Peggy sometimes felt there were just too many people jammed together under the one roof, but then she would chastise herself for being so uppity as she knew that few evacuees had been welcomed the way they had by Roger and Mabel. There was a war on, after all, and there were many far worse places to be than in a large and trifle chaotic rectory, with chickens in the garden providing daily eggs, and constant fresh greens from a sizeable vegetable patch that they all took turns in digging out (Peggy thought that was the term) and planting up.

With a bit of luck they’d all be home for Christmas, Peggy sometimes sighed to herself when stuck in a queue for the bathroom. Then she would remember she had thought precisely the same thing the previous autumn; and look how that had worked out.

Anyway, nobody was thinking much about any of this as while Roger was taking his Sunday morning services at church, the atmosphere back at the rectory was one of excitement about Larry returning.

There were crisply ironed sheets on his bunk, and a clean folded towel on the pillow.

‘I know, let’s put somethin’ in Larry’s bed ter gi’ ’im a surprise later,’ said Tommy to Jessie, once Aiden – who could be a bit of a killjoy, he was so sensible – had gone down to feed the hens along with Connie.

‘What about Connie’s hairbrush? Nice and bristly if you’re not expecting it.’ Jessie’s eyes twinkled at the thought.

‘Sweet,’ said Tommy, and then he kept watch on the landing corridor while Jessie crept into Connie’s bedroom to retrieve the brush.

Carefully, they pushed it down Larry’s bed with an old coat hanger so as not to disturb Mabel’s hospital corners of the sheets and blankets, making sure that the bristles were left pointing towards the pillow so that Larry’s toes would find it when he slipped into bed later. Finally, they covered the small mound it made with the towel.

‘A good job done. After all, Larry’d be upset if we didn’t do something like this to welcome him back,’ added Jessie gravely, as he and Tommy stood back to admire their work.

The children couldn’t wait to see what Larry would make of them having a real flesh-and-blood pony to hand. He was totally unused to animals, which naturally made Mabel’s cat Bucky, a giant black and white tom with ears carefully scalloped from his many presumably victorious fights, especially affectionate around him, much to Larry’s embarrassment. But Bucky was persistent, and even after Larry had gone to London had continued to wait for him, nestling on his bed each night with his forepaws turned towards each other and tucked under.

Eventually the greeting party for Larry assembled ready to walk over to the station, although Connie had made a bit of a fuss about being unable to brush her hair properly and Angela had had to lend Connie her hairbrush in order that they wouldn’t be late.

There had been a debate about whether Milburn could come with them to the station and the children had tossed a halfpenny. The vote had gone in Milburn’s favour and it wasn’t long before Jessie was standing in the back yard holding the hemp lead rope to Milburn’s halter as the pony carefully nosed his pockets, hoping a treat was there. Connie and Aiden stood alongside but they’d made sure they were out of harm’s way, just in case Milburn went to nip or kick, as although she’d been sweet enough when the pair of them had taken her out for an hour’s grazing earlier on some road verges, they didn’t yet fully trust the small mare.

A minute or two passed as they waited for Tommy to hoist Angela’s chair over the lip of the back-door step, so that they could all, Milburn included, head over to the station.

As the children trailed through the back yard Peggy was in the kitchen with a serious look on her face and, despite the heat of the day, was feeling cold and a bit shaky. Ten minutes or so earlier, she had put Holly down for a nap in a deep drawer that had once been the bottom one in a dark-wood chest, but which was now used by either Peggy or Gracie if their little ones needed a nap while their mothers were preparing food or sitting together to have a natter over a cuppa, and now Peggy was pensively sipping on a cup of tea, staring out the kitchen window. She felt tense as she waited for Bill to telephone her, and she had slept poorly. Nonetheless, it was impossible not to notice how well the kiddies looked and how brightly Milburn’s butterscotch coat shone in the sunlight.

Peggy’s squirm of apprehension went into wriggling overdrive with the posh-sounding ring of the telephone on the desk in Roger’s study, and she hurried to answer it.

She was almost certain it was Bill on the end of it, even though if it was, he was ringing earlier than she expected, but as she picked up the receiver she still didn’t know whether she was ready to hear what he might have to say.

Chapter Five

There was no getting around it. From the anticipatory clank of her husband dropping his large copper pennies into the money slot at the bottom of the apparatus in the public telephone box, something sounded off. There was a metal creak of a door hinge in need of an oil, and Bill’s very first word – a solitary but strangely formal ‘Peg’ – told Peggy that without a shadow of doubt something most unsavoury was about to be revealed.

Standing in front of Roger’s desk, Peggy had leant forward and pulled out his chair, but as she heard the delay that told her that Bill was taking his time feeding his pennies into the slot, she thought better of sitting down. She decided that with a bit of luck, if she stayed standing she might be braver facing whatever unpleasant news it was that she was about to learn.

It felt as if she might be teetering on the edge of a deep, dark abyss. Peggy wasn’t sure why this was, but she supposed she hadn’t been married to Bill for such a long time without knowing him inside and out. And there was something so off-key beckoning to her from that one word of greeting that a precipice seemed undoubtedly to be widening below her, calling her into its depths. She couldn’t say she was totally surprised, given the lack of love and kisses on the postcard that he’d sent her, but still…

The downbeat tone of his ‘Peg’ had cast aside any sign of his normal irrepressible cheeky cockney banter. If Peggy were honest, Bill had never been much of a looker but he’d always had the gift of the gab and had been the sort of chap who could charm the birds from the trees, and so Peggy had been seduced all those years ago by the extent to which he’d made her laugh much more than by his looks.

Now it was worrying that all echoes of this cheery repartee that she’d once loved so much had given way to something that sounded clamped down and oddly wary of her. In fact, such was the contrast, that if her husband hadn’t greeted Peggy by name, she doubted that she would have believed it was him.

‘Peg?’ she heard Bill say again into the pregnant silence between them, almost in a dry-throated whisper this time. ‘Are you there? Peggy?’

She took a fleeting instant to think of Holly, and the love and strong bond she had with her sister Barbara, and the kindness she had found since arriving in Harrogate at the rectory with Roger and Mabel, and with her new friend June. It was an emboldening moment.

‘I am here, Bill,’ Peggy composed herself and answered quietly with carefully enunciated words, and then she paused, once more allowing the silence to billow softly around her.

She heard Bill swallow in reply, and for an instant she imagined the dip and rise of his prominent Adam’s apple giving a small punch under his shirt collar.

‘Holly and I have been waiting for your call,’ Peggy filled the quiet, deliberately mentioning Holly as she wanted to remind her husband that there were two of them up in Harrogate who were dependent upon whatever it was that he wanted to get off his chest.

She heard Bill take another mighty swallow and then the clink of him putting something made of glass down on something metal. His swallowing sounded round and deep, and it has been immediately preceded by a faint smacking noise almost as if his lips were retreating from a kiss, and it was a sound that told Peggy that he’d swigged directly from a bottle, and that he hadn’t poured whatever it was that he was drinking into a glass. For all the world it sounded as if the beverage were alcoholic, and so Peggy guessed Bill was dosing himself with Dutch courage.

This was out of character, as although Bill did enjoy a pint now and again he was actually normally only an extremely moderate drinker. In ten years of marriage Peggy had only seen him veer slightly towards what she and Barbara called merry on a couple of occasions. Never once had she seen him drunk or stumbling around through being in his cups, and nor had she ever spied him imbibing alcohol directly from any sort of bottle, as he could be a bit priggish at times as regards the proper way of doing things, looking down on this sort of what he would call ‘low’ behaviour.

‘Peg. Peggy,’ Bill repeated.

His slight slur on the ‘Peggy’ told her he was definitely was more than vaguely tipsy.

Oh dear, this wasn’t good at all.

‘Bill, is there something you can sit down on?’ Peggy was relieved that she sounded calm as she spoke these intentionally domestic-sounding, caring words, not that she felt particularly caring right at that minute, but she was starting to feel that for her to claim the moral high ground could only be to her advantage.

For the first time in their marriage she didn’t want her husband to know quite how she was feeling – which was rattling – even though she really had the most peculiar feeling cresting and then pulsing through her, and her hands and feet had become suddenly icy cold.

Peggy thought she heard a soft bump that she took to be Bill leaning back suddenly against the wall of the public telephone box. Just for a second she fancied she could smell the distinctive paint the telephone service used to paint their boxes and that always seemed to linger.

She gathered herself together. ‘What is it you want to say? Why don’t you just come out with it? I’m sure you’ll feel better afterwards, Bill.’

‘Peg, I’ve been a bloody fool. A right bloody fool, I’ve been.’ There was a further glugging noise, and a small belch. ‘She’s called Maureen, Peg. Maureen, she’s called’.

Peggy blinked in crossness at the way Bill kept repeating himself, rather than getting straight to the point, but she didn’t say anything – ‘’an she were right fun, an’ I were stupid an’ daft. An’ one thing led to another an’, well, er, yer know! Yer must know what I’m tryin’ ter say, Peg.’

‘I can’t say that I do know, Bill,’ replied a prudishly tight-lipped Peggy.

Heavens to Betsy! she thought to herself when Bill didn’t reply to her immediately. Not only was he breaking to her some pretty dreadful news she was now certain, but he was doing it in a really cack-handed manner.

‘Bill, why don’t you put it down to me having given birth to our baby not so long ago, that dear little baby girl that we so wanted and had to wait such a while for’ – Peggy paused deliberately for added drama – ‘and this means that my mind might not right now be as good or as sharp as it once was. And so, I’m afraid, my dear husband, that you’re going to need to spell it out to me, quite what it is that that you have been up to.’

She could hear Bill shift his weight around in the confined space almost as if the words she’d emphasised had kept pushing him in the chest. And then he made a strange noise as if he felt strangled. It was obvious that he wasn’t enjoying this conversation in the slightest. Good.

Peggy imagined Bill as clearly as if he were right before her, standing in the public telephone box with the telephone receiver wedged between chin and shoulder, and a bottle of beer in one hand while with the other he supported his weight by leaning on the metal that made the wall at the back of the box as he stared down in shame.

Well, at least abject shame was the look on his face that she hoped was there.

The foreboding silence grew and throbbed between them.

And then there was a damp croon.

With a start Peggy realised that her husband was sobbing.

Once, her heart would have gone out to him, but now she couldn’t believe these wet sounds to be anything other than mere crocodile tears. Any last shred of respect she had for him evaporated, as she felt Bill was crying only because he must have been caught out somehow, doing something he shouldn’t have been doing – surely this had to be the case given that he was ringing her yet only describing what had gone on with huge reluctance – and certainly not because he felt he’d made any sort of terrible mistake. It was likely he’d have been happy with the state of affairs if there hadn’t been some sort of incident or accident, Peggy told herself, and then she berated herself for thinking of the situation as in any way an accident. After all, there was absolutely nothing accidental about what Bill had been up to if he was having to apologise to his wife like this.

So Bill bloody well should be weeping, Peggy thought. She drew her shoulders back and noticed in a mirror hanging on Roger’s wall that the reflection of her normally generous lips revealed that they had unintentionally closed in on themselves, shrinking to a harsh line that was aging and distinctly unattractive. Peggy narrowed her eyes as she tried to think of the most hurtful retort she could make, and the mirror-Peggy frowned threateningly back. It wasn’t a pleasant sight.

‘Be a man, Bill. You owe me that at least, surely? No true man would keep me guessing at anything else you need to say to me.’

It wasn’t very strong as insults go, but it was the best that Peggy could come up with at that moment.

Peggy would never have believed even a few minutes ago, before she picked up the telephone to Bill, that she could experience such an emotional chasm stretching and growing between them, or that it could feel so treacherous or so cavernous.

It was hard to credit how once they had been so very close that Peggy had occasionally felt as if one took in a breath, then it would be the other one who would expel it.

There had been hiccups between them in recent years but probably not more so than most couples had to endure, Peggy had told herself on more than one occasion. But with her much longed-for pregnancy, she had wholeheartedly believed that she and Bill had safely navigated choppy waters.

Bill rallied. ‘Maureen works, er, worked, at the NAAFI as a volunteer, an’ we’d ’ave the odd drink an’ then that became mebbe a bit o’ a laugh on the odd evening in the local pub. I didn’t see any ’arm in it at first, ’onest I didn’t, Peg – yer ’ave ter believe that.’

With a vehement shake of her head, Peggy didn’t think she did have to believe that at all.

Bill couldn’t see her reaction, of course, and so he ploughed on. ‘But one day ’er sister were away an’, er, well, I took the opportunity of mitchin’ off camp an’ then – an’ I still don’t know how it really ’appened – I found myself stayin’ over wi’ ’er as she was very persuasive,’ he said very quickly in a voice now higher pitched than was usual.

‘When was this?’ Peggy made sure her words remained low and slow, and she fancied she could feel Bill’s answering wince racketing down the telephone cord straight to the old-fashioned Bakelite handset she was grasping so tightly. She felt compelled to know all the sordid details of what Bill had been up to.

‘She were fun, an’ ’er ’air reminded me of yours, Peg. An’ she fair set ’er cap at me, all the lads ’ere said so. It were first on Bonfire Night that we, er, um, um, yer know, Peg … yer know! An’ I suppose that I then jus’ kept on seein’ her as mebbe I thought I could get away wi’ it as I were missin’ you right badly. But it were only if I could wrangle time away from the camp – yer know wot I mean – an’ she were ’ere and you weren’t, an’ yer know that I never liked sleepin’ alone.’ Bill had to feed some more pennies in at this point, and Peggy took the opportunity to wipe under her eyes.

His voice rang out again, ‘I didn’t want to as such— ’ Peggy snorted with contempt at this point ‘but she were insistent, although when I got back from ’ers on Christmas morning to find that yours an’ my little love ’olly had been born, and you’d ’ad such a fright, I thought enough’s enough, an’ I didn’t wan’ ter see ’er any more, an’ I told ’er so. But Maureen wouldn’t let me go, an’ then she threatened ter telephone you “to put you right”, an’ so then it were easier ter go along with it fer a while at least, while I made up my mind what to do. Er, you weren’t there an’ anyways I thought you’d never find out.’ Bill sighed dramatically as if he was in physical pain, and as if by mere chance life had dealt him a bad set of playing cards.

And then finally he confessed in a very small voice, ‘An’ now she’s ’avin’ my baby.’

If Peggy had thought the news of Bill having sexual relations with another woman was the worst thing she could hear, it was now hideous to discover that with the news of his forthcoming bastard offspring came a new depth of hurt and despair. She couldn’t believe that Bill could have been so stupid or so cruel.

Suddenly Peggy felt even hotter than she had before, and then deathly cold. Her belly slid icily lower, and for a fleeting but nonetheless terrible moment her mouth flooded with saliva and she thought she might vomit. She struggled to regain her equilibrium.

This was the worse of all possible outcomes.

Of course she had grasped already that sexual relations with another woman was what Bill had been up to. But to hear him actually put into words that he had made another woman – his floozy! – pregnant provoked a totally animal response from somewhere deep within her that was unlike anything Peggy had ever experienced.

She thought about what her husband had just told her, and then she realised with a huge jolt so powerful that it was as if she had just stuck one of her fingers straight into a live electric plug socket, that she and Bill had only been apart for a mere two months before he had given into temptation despite the wedding vows they had solemnly made to each other, vows she had always been proud to hold dear.