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

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      Next, Mabel made the gang swish the tail end of a bar of red Lifebuoy carbolic soap about in piping-hot water from the kettle on the hob that had been poured into a couple of metal pails until the water looked opaque and medicinal. Then the children happily sloshed it about in the stall to thoroughly disinfect the floor, before using a stiff broom to swoosh the dirtied water outside. Then they neatly piled some bales of straw and hay, which had arrived while they were at school, into the stall next door, all the boys except Jessie trying to show how strong they were for the benefit of the girls.

      The two buckets they’d used had been scrubbed and rinsed to within an inch of their lives to remove any smell of the Lifebuoy, after which Connie and Aiden chased each other around with the buckets half-filled with clean water trying to splash each other. Once the children were worn out, the buckets had been allowed to air-dry, as had an old zinc dustbin with a tightly fitting lid that had also been disinfected and would keep vermin out so the pony’s hard feed could be kept clean and dry. Afterwards, even Mabel couldn’t bring to mind anything else that needed doing.

      This wasn’t like Mabel at all, and so it wasn’t a surprise to anybody that she put her thinking cap on and looked around for other jobs to do. Eventually, Mabel found, in an old lean-to near the chicken coops, some ancient and rather cobwebby items of grooming kit that looked as if they dated from well before the last war, in fact prior to 1910 was likely – which was the last time the stables had been occupied by horses instead of only mice and spiders – and so these elderly brushes and a currycomb had to be washed and disinfected too, and then left in a patch of bright sunlight to dry.

      None of the evacuees had ever done any feeding or grooming of horses or ponies, although Connie and Jessie had sometimes helped the milkman, with his horse-drawn milk cart, to deliver the glass bottles of creamy milk to houses in Jubilee Street if they were up early enough on Saturdays (which wasn’t often as the milkman and his horse with his muffled hooves did plod along the twins’ home street very early in order to be in time for as many breakfasts as possible).

      ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Roger, ‘but I don’t think we should worry too much about our lack of equine knowledge. I can always speak to the pony’s owner if there’s anything we’re uncertain about, and I’m sure that as long as the pony has its scran and nobody is ever too loud, or mean, or boisterous near him, then everything will be dandy.’

      The only girl evacuee, besides Connie, at Tall Trees was Angela, who had been in Connie and Jessie’s class at school back at home in south-east London. Sadly, Angela was in a wheelchair following an unfortunate run-in the previous Halloween with a car driving without headlights in the blackout. All the same, Angela was determined to pull her weight as far as the pony was concerned, and after she heard Roger say that he didn’t know much about ponies, she persuaded Tommy – the strongest of the children, as there were a lot of kerbs and inclines to navigate – to push her in her wheelchair over to the library so that she could bone up on horse care.

      Angela was very thorough in her research, despite Tommy’s recurring refrain of ‘I’m bored’ whispered to her in ever-shortening intervals between his stints of messing about in the road outside the library, despite the stern ‘shush’ hissed in his direction by the librarian. Angela made careful and copious notes on feeding and how to rub down and what the various parts of a pony’s feet were called, feeling this was the least she could do as she had had to watch from her chair as the others worked to clean out the stable, knowing that Tommy’s suggestion that she be gaffer was just to make her feel less of a sore thumb.

      Shyly, Angela showed Peggy her jotter once they were home that evening. Peggy had been her schoolteacher a while back, and she was impressed by the diligent way that Angela had written her notes. ‘Goodness me, that looks useful,’ Peggy said, and Angela allowed herself to smile when she added, ‘That pony is going to have a lot to thank you for, and you are going to be kept busy checking that the others are doing everything properly. Well done, Angela, really well done.’

      The night they had arrived in Harrogate, nearly nine months earlier, Jessie had named his new grey teddy Neville in honour of Prime Minister Chamberlain. Jessie’s Neville was the brother bear to Connie’s black and white panda Petunia, the knitted bears being a surprise, hidden by their mother in their luggage as a treat for them to find when they came to unpack their belongings in their new billets.

      Jessie wondered if they would be allowed to give the pony a new name when he arrived. ‘If so, we could call him Winston maybe?’ he asked, seeing as Winston Churchill had recently become Prime Minister.

      Connie used her most strident voice to butt in quickly, ‘Gi’ over, Jessie, Winston’s a terrible name, and you know it. What about Winnie? Much better.’

      Jessie shook his head in disagreement, and so did Tommy, the two boys then doing such a dramatic thumbs-down in unison that, predictably, it had Connie leaning over to aim a swipe at them.

      But she grinned coyly when Aiden weighed in on her side with, ‘Clever, very clever, Connie. Winnie is Churchill’s nickname, to which you’re adding the sound a horse makes, and so it works two ways.’

      Peggy hid her own smile as she could see that Jessie was the only one who knew for definite that Connie’s momentarily perplexed expression, quickly turning into something more self-congratulatory, concealed her surprise at Aiden’s suggestion that Winnie was a clever melding of meanings. To those in the know, it was nothing more than a happy accident, as Jessie would have safely bet his favourite sixer conker that his sister would never have heard the word ‘whinny’ before. Connie’s pursed lips and immediate widened eyes back at her brother, flashing the signal to keep quiet, instantly confirmed this to her family, and probably most of the others also if they cared to think about it.

      To cover up Connie’s uncharacteristic failure to say something smart-aleck, Aiden went on quickly, ‘I like Raffy, after t’ RAF, but Shrapnel’s mint too.’

      ‘Spitfire!’ yelled Tommy, a bit too enthusiastically, ‘or Hawker, or Hurricane. I know, Trigger!’

      ‘Well,’ said Angela, ‘ I think we should wait until the horse arrives and then we can come up with the best name that suits him.’

      But everyone else had been too busy thinking up names to hear Angela and to let the subject rest as she suggested.

      The boys’ thumbs-down appeared in quick succession for the suggestions of Brown Jack (in honour of the famous racehorse – Roger’s idea), Dobbin (Mabel’s, said as a joke, although she then reminded everybody that the pony might already have a name and therefore wouldn’t answer to anything else, and perhaps they should consider the old wives’ tale that it was unlucky to rename a horse), and Sugar (Connie’s second-favourite name, apparently, reasoning that since rationing, sugar was never far from anyone’s thoughts and horses were known for liking sugar lumps).

      The children were becoming overexcited by now, which was usually the fast track to somebody ending up with their nose out of joint, and sometimes even in tears. A little reluctantly, Peggy called an end to the debate, declaring it was time for the children to clear the table and do the washing-up, otherwise there’d be no ponies for them at all.

      With deliberately loud sighs to show they weren’t happy, nonetheless the youngsters obediently began to see to their chores, with only one under-the-breath whisper from someone of ‘Sugar? That’s a dog’s mess name,’ to which Peggy had to quickly say ‘Connie, that discussion is over now, remember?’ to stop her niece seizing the moment to defend her suggestion and thereby almost definitely extending the conversation on the blessed names until it degenerated into a right old ding-dong of a squabble.

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