Orphans of War. Leah Fleming
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Название: Orphans of War
Автор: Leah Fleming
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Контркультура
isbn: 9780008184070
isbn:
‘I can speak French too,’ Maddy added. ‘We did French and Latin at St Hilda’s but I hate Latin.’
‘Speak when you’re spoken to, girl,’ said the old woman. ‘Go and find Ilse and send her off with a torch. This is most inconvenient!’
Maddy wondered if they were expected to bob a curtsy like the maids did, but decided against it. She raced across through the baize door into a warren of passages, Gloria clinging on to her, into the kitchen where they found two women sipping tea.
‘We need the doctor for a little boy. Please can someone go to the nearest phone?’
The women jumped up and put on their coats.
‘Just the one of you, I think,’ Maddy ordered, but the girls shook their heads.
‘I not go in the dark. There be ghosts in the lane and soldiers. We go in twos together, please,’ pleaded the brown-eyed girl with her hair all scraped into a plait around her head.
What sort of place was this house, where servants were afraid and Mrs Belfield lived all alone? No wonder Daddy never spoke of it and his horrid mother, who was a snob. Why had no one told her that the Belfields lived in a castle with big sweeping stairs and stone floors that smelled of old smoke?
Tomorrow she would ask Aunt Plum if she could join the evacuees in the village. Gloria could stay here with Sid and be petted, but she didn’t want to spend another night in this horrible place where she wasn’t wanted.
Later, when the doctor came to examine Sidney and pronounced that he’d burst his eardrum and needed bed rest and medicine, the two girls were tucked up in a huge four-poster bed with curtains round the posts. The room smelled of lavender and damp.
Ilse had warmed the sheets with a big copper warming pan and made a fuss of the pair. Gloria was made to stand in a tub and be sponged down by Aunt Plum to see if she had fleas. Her underclothes were thin, clean and she wasn’t wrapped in brown paper like some of the vaccies were supposed to be. She was enjoying every minute of the fuss.
Maddy had never undressed for bed with a stranger before. She wanted to be on her own, but not in this barn of a bedroom. She wondered about all the people who’d died in that bed. Were their ghosts still haunting the place?
What a strange day! The only nice thing about it was meeting Aunt Plum, but they never got time on their own to talk over what had happened. Everyone expected Maddy to look after the other two.
She wished she’d never gone to the washroom on the train, never seen the mother shove those two into her hands, but she had. Then she thought of her relief when Greg had limped down the platform to rescue them. Perhaps there was one friend after all who would look out for her–even if he were a boy.
December 1940
‘Can you pick up my knitting, dear?’ gasped Great-aunt Julia as she struggled with her two sticks across the hallway of Brooklyn Hall. Maddy wasn’t used to going at tortoise pace but she loved being useful to the old ladies in the drawing room who, wrapped in ancient fur wraps and shawls to keep out the draughts, were busy knitting for the Sowerthwaite Comforts fund. Everyone took it in turns to sit up close to Uncle Algie’s battery-operated wireless to catch the news as best they could.
Maddy couldn’t believe it was nearly Christmas, nearly three whole months since that arrival at Brooklyn Hall, when Sid had had his fit and Grandma had eyed her up and down with disappointment.
‘It’s hotting up in Greece,’ shouted Great-uncle Algernon across the room, resting his half a leg on a leather buffet as he strained to catch the bulletin. ‘Metaxas has said “No” to Mussolini and there’ll be trouble in the Balkans, mark my words…Oh, and Liverpool and Manchester had another visit from the Luftwaffe last night. Three of our planes are missing.’
‘Don’t believe a word of it, girls,’ shouted Grandma, looking up from her letter writing. ‘It’s all lies and propaganda. I don’t know why you want to depress us with such news.’
Maddy was glued to the six o’clock news every night. She had heard enemy bombers droning overhead at night on their deadly route across the moors, hoping that the searchlight on the field battery would be torching their path for the ack-ack guns.
Her parents were on their way back from Egypt, hinting in their letter that they were going the long route round Africa and there was fighting in the Mediterranean. They were coming home for Christmas, but Maddy would rather they stayed put if there was danger.
It was such an age since she’d seen them and so much had happened, so much to tell them about her new school and friends. How the Brooklyn seemed like a hotel full of shuffling old people, who played endless games of patience and bridge, who quarrelled and fussed over Ilse’s cooking and fought to get the best corner by the huge fireplace.
Besides Uncle Algie and Aunt Julia and her companion, Miss Betts, there was a distant cousin Rhoda Rennison and her sister, Flo. It was easy to lump them all together somehow in their grey cardigans and baggy skirts, darned lisle stockings and tweed slippers. Around them wafted a tincture of eau de cologne that almost masked a more acidic smell. The oldies melted into the walls of the Brooklyn between meals along with their ear trumpets, stringy knitting in carpet bags and shawls. Then when the dinner gong rang they appeared from the far recesses of the house, back to the table like clucking hens at the trough, pecking at their plates, too busy to talk to Maddy
Aunt Plum was worried about Uncle Gerald, who was waiting in barracks down south to be sent abroad soon. When she was upset she smiled with sad eyes and went for long walks over the hills with her dogs, when she wasn’t on duty at the Old Vic Hostel.
Maddy walked to the village school each morning with the two Conleys, who now lived in Huntsman’s Cottage with Mr and Mrs Batty. It was a funny arrangement: normal school lessons in the morning, mixing with the local children at St Peter’s C of E School, and then lessons in the village hall, crushed in with a gang of evacuee kids from Leeds, who were living the other side of Sowerthwaite. It was all very noisy and they didn’t do much work, just copying from the board until hometime. There weren’t enough teachers to go round.
It was not like St Hilda’s at all, and the first thing she’d done was to lose her elocution accent in favour of a Yorkshire one, flattening her ’a’s so she didn’t get teased, though it made Grandma Belfield furious if she said bath instead of baath.
‘The sooner Arthur comes and puts you in a half-decent school…You’re turning into a right little Yorkshire tyke. It’s no good Plum letting you mix so much with that village lot. They’re teaching you nothing but bad habits. I hear they’ve been up to their old tricks again on the High Street,’ Grandma sighed, looking up at Maddy’s glasses and then turning back to her letter writing.
Maddy smiled to herself as she sat with her arms out so Aunt Julia could unravel a jumper that smelled of mothballs. Peggy, Greg and Enid knew all the best wheezes. It was Enid’s idea to fill the cig packet with dirt and СКАЧАТЬ