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

Mabel had no choice other than to walk around the kitchen, jiggling Holly in her arms as she showed her what was in the kitchen cabinets, and the eggs and potatoes in the pantry, in an effort to prevent her from returning to her full-blown wailing of a few minutes earlier.

Holly was surprisingly heavy for such a little thing and she obviously wasn’t very convinced that what was in the various cupboards was very much for Mabel to boast about, and so Mabel was relieved to hear the sound of those returning to Tall Trees heading across the back yard.

The baby immediately stopped grumbling, at last fully engaged in her surroundings, and quickly swung her head with interest towards the door from the back yard into the kitchen to see who might be about to come in.

Mabel could hear Aiden pulling the bolt to the stable door across and then encouraging Milburn inside as he told Larry where the hay and straw was, and she saw Tommy push Angela’s chair to the back door. Mabel noticed the Ross family huddled together as they gave Tommy room to help Angela inside.

For a moment Mabel wondered at Ted Ross allowing Tommy to push Angela what looked like all the way back from the station to judge by Tommy’s pink face, but then she thought that actually for Tommy to have a bit of responsibility and to do something for somebody else wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, the episode to do with his bullying and the orchard affair being still rather a raw memory for all the Braithwaites, although the other children never seemed to refer to it.

Barbara bustled into the kitchen, which was smelling deliciously of the barm cakes baking for their dinner and Barbara could see what looked like a giant mixing bowl with bread dough proving on a warm part of the range.

Connie and Jessie stayed out in the yard in order to tug Ted, once he had set all the luggage down, good-naturedly across the yard and over to see for himself where Milburn was housed. Barbara undid her headscarf with one hand as with the other she plonked the wicker basket full of small thank-you gifts for Mabel – some homemade biscuits, a couple of new tea towels, a vest for Tommy and some hankies, several pork chops, some juicy-looking carrots and a very late dark-green Savoy cabbage that the caterpillars had only had the merest chomp on the outside leaves of – down on the rather battered kitchen table that had obviously seen many years of faithful service.

She and Mabel smiled in greeting at one another, and then Barbara raised her eyebrows in a quiet query as to where her sister Peggy might be.

Mabel put a finger in front of her mouth to signal silence, and then with Holly still in her arms she edged over to her guest and then stage-whispered in Barbara’s ear, ‘She’ll be jiggered, Barbara. There’s jus’ been an awful ding-dong on the telephone not more than twenty or so minutes ago betwixt her an’ Bill. She’s ’avin’ a quiet moment jus’ at present in t’ study wi’ a cup o’ tea to set ’erself to rights, but there no denyin’ it were right bad. She’ll be glad yer ’ere.’

‘Oh my goodness!’ Barbara hissed quietly back. ‘That’s unlike them. Poor Peggy… I can guess what he’s done, I suppose.’

Mabel said she hadn’t asked Peggy what the row was about, but she thought she’d heard Peggy moan the name Maureen as she had sobbed in her arms in the aftermath of the argument.

Then the two women shook their head at the thought of what was happening to a lot of couples during their enforced separations. Many relationships were suffering badly, and both of them were pretty sure that Peggy wouldn’t be the only woman in the land who had just had a big barney with her husband over another woman, while many men away from home drove themselves to distraction with dark thoughts of what their wives might be getting up to back on the home front without them. It wasn’t an ideal situation, no matter how one tried to look at it.

Barbara then saw that Holly was looking curiously towards her aunty and waving an arm in her direction, opening and closing her fingers, and so Barbara whispered to Mabel, ‘May I?’

With a rather relieved smile Mabel promptly handed her over, and after deeply inhaling the familiar scent of the young baby and then gently touching Holly on the head with her lips in a feather-light caress of hello, Barbara clutched her affectionately to her chest and went to find her sister.

She was taken aback a moment later to see how large and black the pupils in Peggy’s eyes appeared, and how pale her face was.

Peggy was totally still as she gazed with unseeing eyes out of the study window and down towards the hen coops on the far side of the garden, with the undrunk cup of tea by her elbow, and she didn’t notice that it was her sister who had come into the study.

It was only when Barbara said gently, ‘Peggy, my darling, whatever’s happened?’ that Peggy turned to face her.

For an instant Peggy’s brown eyebrows wrinkled in incomprehension and she looked confused as she gazed at Barbara.

And then she simply flung herself at her sister, leaving Barbara only a moment to move Holly out of the way. As Peggy broke once more into sobs, Barbara was able to feel hot tears on her neck as Peggy held her close in a vice-like grip. Barbara stood still as a rock and pulled her sister close.

The sisters didn’t say anything for a while, as Peggy was too upset to speak, and Barbara thought it best that this new wave of emotion be allowed to crest and then die of its own accord.

After a while Barbara contented herself with repeating ‘Sssssh, there now, there now. Sssssh, there now’ in the same way that she had comforted Jessie and Connie when they were colicky as babies.

Holly made some adorable snuffling noises and reached pudgy fingers towards her mother’s hair, but Peggy didn’t look at her and so Holly turned towards Barbara with a puzzled expression, causing Barbara to give her a jiggle of acknowledgement with her other arm and a smile, as she knew the baby would be feeling unsettled at these unfamiliar goings-on and the strange sounds coming from her mother.

When Peggy’s grip on her sister had reduced to less of a stranglehold, Barbara said, ‘Peggy, dear, we’ll have a long talk very soon, I promise. I want to hear all about it, really I do. But first why don’t you have a lie down and have a little rest? Take Holly up with you as to me she’s looking as if she still needs a bit more of a doze after her lunch, and then I’ll come and find you when I’ve got everyone else sorted and have caught up with Connie and Jessie. How does that sound, dear?’

Tiredly, Peggy untangled herself and then nodded a damp and exhausted smile of agreement, before she quietly slipped upstairs with her daughter cleaved tightly to her bosom. She felt done in, and now she could hear Connie and Jessie’s happy voices outside, she wanted to make sure that her tear-marked face wouldn’t dampen the party mood that was sweeping the rest of Tall Trees with Larry being back with them, and the pleasure of the unexpected visit from Barbara and Ted.

With a concerned expression, Barbara watched the sway of her sister’s disappearing world-weary steps with a tremendous pang of sympathy and trepidation, and then she sighed in empathy before she consciously made herself look happy as she turned to retrace her steps outside and find her husband and the twins.

Chapter Seven

Ted was full of surprises, it seemed.

‘Mother, you’ll never believe it,’ squeaked Connie breathily, her cheeks red with excitement as her mother joined her family. ‘But Father can drive a trap! And he’s going to teach us. He knows all about ponies, and he’s going to teach us everything!’

‘Oh, he can drive a trap, can he?’ Barbara raised an amused eyebrow in the direction of her husband, who winked in response. This was news to her, as was Connie’s use of the formal-sounding ‘mother’, but she supposed this was a sign of Connie getting older as perhaps ‘mama’ or ‘mummy’ seemed babyish, especially in front of the other children.

Ted grinned back at Barbara, causing her to shoot him a rueful, only half-amused grin in return. He’d never mentioned to his wife that as a child he had helped out at the local coal merchants, so much so that by the age of ten he had been allowed, after much begging, to take the reins on the delivery cart whenever he wasn’t at school.

Barbara prided herself on knowing all there was to know about Ted, and to learn this news so hot on the heels of discovering that something dire had happened with Bill that Peggy had had no idea about and therefore had been unprepared for, she felt now slightly peculiar and wrong-footed by Ted’s admission, harmless though it was.

The children were mightily impressed with Ted’s insouciant wink, however, to the extent that they were all pulling a variety of comical faces as they tried to outdo each other in the winking stakes, with Tommy and Larry trying the hardest, but Tommy getting the eventual thumbs-up from the others for a particularly showy double wink at the same time tipping his forefinger to his brow.

‘Okay, you lot,’ Barbara interrupted their fun, ‘let’s go in for some food as I believe Mabel is setting the table and has the kettle on, and then we’ll see if Roger minds Ted taking you all out later in the trap.’ Barbara sounded quite firm as she looked around at the children and pulled her best delicately scalloped beige cardigan together over her chest as if she meant business.

As one, Ted and the children all looked a bit crestfallen as they had clearly wanted to go out in the trap right away, but then they realised that Barbara wasn’t saying a firm no as such, but just that Roger had to give his seal of approval first.

Tommy summed up their thoughts with, ‘Let’s go in an’ see Pa – ’e’s always ready for ’is dinner, and I’ll bet ’e’ll like a bit of teachin’ too ’ow t’ ’andle t’ trap proper.’

And indeed when Roger learned that Ted had some experience with horses and would be very happy to spend a bit of time showing them what to do with Milburn, there was an unmistakable sigh of relief bubbling up from below his white dog collar. He’d not yet tried to go out in the trap on his own, not least as he wasn’t sure he could quite remember how to put the harness on Milburn or how to attach the trap to all the harness gubbins, although these were admissions that he didn’t particularly care to make in front of all the children.

Dinner was eaten hastily, with no one mentioning anything about Peggy and Holly not being there, most probably because it was only Barbara and Ted who noticed, and they contented themselves with acknowledging the absence of the two Delberts with the exchange of silent but nonetheless telling looks.

There was a scrag end of mutton stew Peggy had prepared the evening before, that was surprisingly tasty as she was picking up some good tips for flavoursome food over at June Blenkinsop’s, and Mabel had eked it out to make sure there was enough as of course she couldn’t say to Peggy that her sister and Ted would be joining them, seeing as this was a surprise. It was served along with fluffy dumplings and the unexpected gift of the Savoy cabbage to go with the runner beans that Roger was very proud he’d grown.

Once everyone had wiped their plates clean with a still-warm barm cake and sat back replete, Barbara announced that she wasn’t going to partake of the pony and trap session, which made the twins put on deliberately dejected faces in an attempt to get their mother to change her mind. But Barbara held firm, although she tried to sweeten the pill by saying that for this meal, as a special treat, the children could be let off their table-clearing and washing-up duties as she would put the kitchen to rights and everyone else could go out into the yard to practise tacking up Milburn. ‘Go on, out you scoot, and leave me to it,’ she said, waving a tea towel around as if to scurry them outside.

‘Please come and watch Daddy with us,’ said Jessie. Barbara noticed the ‘daddy’.

‘Oh, we so wanted to show you Milburn,’ Connie wheedled.

Barbara wavered for a moment but then she thought of Peggy, and held firm, their pleas being to no avail.

‘I’ve seen her and she’s a very eye-catching pony, right enough, and I’ll be there tomorrow when no doubt you will want to repeat it all again. I’m sure Milburn won’t mind if I watch you then. And I promise that tomorrow I will even let you drive me along in the trap, if it’s still sunny and Ted thinks you know what you’re doing,’ said Barbara. ‘But right now, there is something else that I really need to see to instead, and so you all vamoose.’

The children knew that Barbara never reneged on a promise and so they decided to make the best of it as it was really good to have Ted there to spend some time with. Mabel stepped in to ease the moment further with a vigorous call of ‘last one out there’s a sissy’ ringing in their ears as she bolted out of the back door before the children, with Roger hot on her heels. The children all scampered off happily enough to watch, along with Milburn’s quizzical expression, Ted untangle the harness as he muttered that they must hang it up properly when not being used, and not leave it in a heap like they had as to do so was to risk the leather perishing, before reminding them how it should be put on the pony.

When she had sorted out the kitchen to her satisfaction, which was a much tidier and cleaner satisfaction than Mabel, or even Peggy, would have deemed acceptable, Barbara made a fresh pot of tea that she placed on a doily-covered tray along with two cups and a small jug of milk. She put a couple of plain biscuits that Gracie had made on a side plate and popped that on the tray too.

As Barbara carried the tray out of the kitchen she could hear her twins laughing out in the yard as Roger attempted but failed to get Milburn to open her mouth so that he could put the bridle on. The familiar sound of them enjoying themselves brought a rush of happiness to Barbara’s chest.

Barbara climbed the stairs right to the top of the house and tapped on Peggy’s door, and was greeted with a husky ‘come in’.

Holly was sound asleep in a large but battered crib that looked as if it had had the pleasure of nursing many children from babyhood through to them being ready for a ‘big’ bed.

Looking distinctly bleary, a blinking Peggy watched her sister put the tray on top of a chest of drawers, and then a bit reluctantly it seemed, she pulled herself up to sitting position and gratefully accepted the cup of tea that Barbara poured for her.

Barbara tried not to look too obviously at the darkly shadowed puffy bags under Peggy’s eyes, or her dry and cracked lips, her rumpled cotton summer dress that was hanging too loosely on her slender frame, or the constant twitching of a muscle in one of her eyelids that was punching out a tiny SOS of distress. Peggy did look a mess and a wretched sight but her sister thought it kinder not to say.

‘Peggy dear, I’m so very sorry to hear that you’ve been through the wars today,’ said Barbara sympathetically in the sort of voice that she knew her sister would take as an invitation to talk about what had caused such a ringing disagreement between husband and wife. She perched on the edge of the bed with her own cup of tea in her hand as she looked towards Peggy with her eyebrows raised in encouragement.

‘It was horrible, just horrible,’ said Peggy, as she stared without focusing at Barbara’s face before turning to look mournfully down at the tea softly swirling in her cup.

‘Another woman?’ Barbara said softly. What else could it be, she thought, to cause such a maelstrom of emotion in the normally so level-headed Peggy.

‘Another woman,’ her sister agreed morosely.

Barbara wasn’t sure what to say. She’d always found Bill to be pleasant enough company although, try as she might (and she had tried very hard over the years), she had never believed him to be quite good enough for her sister.

Once or twice Barbara had thought Bill had looked as if he’d had a roving eye, and just before he and Peggy had married all those years previously, bolstered by two port and lemons one Saturday night at the Jolly, Barbara had even been so bold as to say outright to him, ‘I do very much hope you’re going to be true to Peggy, Bill; she deserves the best, and she absolutely doesn’t need some dog of a husband who’s going to be hard to keep on the doorstep.’

Bill had replied in such an earnest voice that Barbara found herself somewhat mollified, saying that he knew he wasn’t worthy of someone such as Peggy, but if she would deign to marry him then he’d never so much as even look at another woman or do anything at all in Christendom to make her unhappy, God strike him down dead if ever he did.

Thinking about it later, Barbara hadn’t quite been placated but she had allowed the matter to lie, and over the ensuing years a lot of time had passed without any obvious shenanigans on Bill’s behalf and so gradually she had done her level best to think well of him.

Then, when Bill and Peggy hadn’t easily been able to have their own children, Barbara had started wondering about him again, fuelled at this point by Ted telling her that there had been the odd rumour heard in the Jolly about Bill and a fancy-woman flying around the docks.

Still, Peggy and Bill had seemed to weather that particular storm, helped no doubt by the announcement of Peggy’s unexpected pregnancy with Holly after ten barren years of marriage. And at the time Barbara was pleased that she had kept quiet, at Ted’s advising, over Bill’s reported peccadillo. She thought he might have well overstepped the mark once or twice although not necessarily in a really serious manner, and therefore she hadn’t want to upset Peggy with no firm evidence to back up the allegations. And once the pregnancy had been announced Peggy had seemed so full of happiness that it would have been a desperate shame to ruin her unadulterated joy, and although Barbara had scrutinised Bill carefully, he never gave so much as a hint that he wasn’t just as thoroughly delighted that he and Peggy were going to be parents.

However, this time around, Barbara thought now, the cat seemed to have been well and truly set amongst the pigeons.

‘Why don’t you get it all off your chest, Peggy? I’m sure you’ll feel better if you do,’ Barbara cajoled. She still had no idea precisely what it was that Bill had done, and she was keen to know more.

‘I feel a fool, Barbara, such a total fool. While I’ve been stuck up here, away from you and Ted, and far from home and all that I know, looking after our dear Holly and washing and feeding her, and bringing in some money working at June Blenkinsop’s, and trying to do the right thing by your two as well, and never suspecting a thing about what Bill might be up to, he’s clearly been living the life of Riley.’ Peggy’s sentences jumbled into one another, but she didn’t seem to care although Barbara wished she’d get to the point. Then Peggy sighed dramatically and took a sip of her tea, before adding with a sarcastic tinge to her words, ‘She’s called Maureen, and she was working in the NAAFI, he told me. And he’s been seeing her since November, although apparently he wanted to end it at Christmas, although somehow he never did. And now she’s having his baby, and only has three months to go.’

Peggy swallowed, making a strange swigging noise in her throat that caused her to pause what she was saying, and despondently she looked down at her cup and saucer once more. Barbara rubbed Peggy’s arm that was closest to her in sisterly support, expecting a fresh outburst of sobs.

The forthcoming baby would be the clincher that Bill had passed a point of no return as far as her sister was concerned, Barbara knew.

Peggy remained dry-eyed to her sister’s surprise, although her voice was quieter when she was able to continue, ‘Barbara, I’m ashamed to say I more or less told him to go to hell, and then I said to him that he’d never see Holly again.’

‘Of course that was what you said at this news, Peggy! Any woman would have told him that. I would have, make no mistake, and then probably gone a whole lot further as well.’

‘But who’s going to suffer, Barbara? Not Bill, as he’ll be back in MaureenFromTheNAAFI’s bed quicker than a rat can get up a drainpipe, I’ve no doubt, as he’s not the sort to stay on his own if he can help it, and I’m pretty certainly he’ll have found a way to sneak off camp to be with her whenever he can. She’s obviously keen on him, and so his nest is already feathered, even if it doesn’t feel like that to him just at the minute. And I’ll get over him – I’ll make sure of that as otherwise I’ll let his actions punish me every day and I refuse to do that. Obviously my heart feels shattered to smithereens, and I despise him for what he has done to me and Holly. But the thought we meant so little to him will help, and so I think if ever I waver I’ll remember how little he cared about us and so I’ll hold firm,’ said Peggy.

‘No, it’s little Holly who’ll pay the price, don’t you think?’ she went on. ‘The poor little mite is going to grow up knowing that while many brave and honest men will die in this war, a louse like her father is very probably going to come through it unscathed and end up living with some other family that he’ll have had after her, and with him completely forgetting that he already has a daughter. I’m old-fashioned as I do think a child needs both parents, but it’s not going to be the case for Holly as he’s a canker that needs to be removed from our lives, and so the poor dear thing will never know what it’s like to be loved and cherished by her very own father. That breaks my heart more than anything Bill Delbert could ever do to me, I’ll tell you that for nothing, Barbara.’

Now the tears arrived, and in torrents.

Her sister shuffled a little further up the bed and put both her arms around Peggy, who leant her head down and sobbed so violently against her that Barbara felt the bounce of her sister’s head against her breastbone. ‘It’s not fair, Peggy, you’re quite right. It’s not fair. But you will be able to give Holly enough love for two parents, I know you will, and with you by her side she couldn’t ask for better,’ Barbara said as reassuringly as she could. ‘And Ted and I, and Connie and Jessie, will never be far away, you know.’

After a while the sisters drew apart to stare dolefully at one another, and then in perfect unison they turned to look over at the old crib holding the peacefully sleeping baby girl who looked as if the only care in the world that she had right at that minute was whether to nap with her white knitted bootees on or off.

Chapter Eight

Milburn had a distinctly put-upon expression on her long face by the time Roger had been fully tutored by Ted in the proper way of putting her harness on and then how to connect the trap to the harness.

The children tried to help Roger by exuberantly calling out instructions (many right, but some unintentionally wrong), but this only further confused him, especially when Mabel tried to say what she thought he should do too, with the result that he kept getting in a pickle, and inevitably would do the various leather straps up either too loosely, too tightly, or in the wrong way. And once Roger had finally got the harness on, only a bit askew, he then had difficulty in backing Milburn into the trap’s traces as he kept walking her backwards as if around a corner rather than keeping her moving in a straight line.

But Ted was very patient, as was Milburn, and suddenly the penny dropped, much to everyone’s delight, and Milburn wrinkled her velvety nostrils with what looked like relief.

Understandably, the children had started to become bored while Roger fiddled about and so they had started to do things like trying to push each other in the back of the knees, so that – if the timing were right – the unlucky recipient would be plunged forward and, if the timing was perfect, right down to the ground. As the boys were wearing short trousers and Connie a cotton summer dress Gracie had adapted for her from one of her own, it was likely that there’d be an array of bruises on the back of their legs that the children would be able to compare next morning.