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

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СКАЧАТЬ as he stood in his smart conductor’s uniform ready to take their fares. Once war had been declared and it became obvious to the authorities what his previous job had been, it made sense therefore to all that Bill turned his experience into helping less experienced drivers gain the knowhow of manhandling heavy vehicles. And that really was all that Peggy knew about what he did these days.

      Bill was no letter-writer at the best of times, and so for Peggy to receive a card from him, the second in a week, was unusual to say the least. In fact it had never happened before.

      The card merely said: ‘Peggy, we need to have a word – I will telephone you on Sunday, Bill’.

      In fact it was so out of character for Bill to contact her again so soon after the last missive that now she was unable to dispel a niggle of worry that had multiplied and grown over the morning so it was now a seething mass squirming uncomfortably just beneath her ribcage, increasing in intensity with every passing hour. She couldn’t stop chewing over the fact that on Bill’s card there had been etched no ‘love’, ‘fondest wishes’ or ‘missing you’, or even ‘thinking about our dear Holly’, the last of which was a given in his communications these days. Most concerning though was that there hadn’t been the whiff of even one ‘X’ either, not to her, and – unbelievably – not to Holly.

      Something was up, Peggy knew as surely as eggs were eggs.

      And she was just as certain that whatever it was that had provoked Bill to contact her so soon after his last card (which had arrived only on the previous Monday and had been gaily filled with casual chatter about card games and japes to do with the NAAFI, before sending love to her and Holly, with a multitude of kisses) was likely to be something that she wasn’t going to like in the slightest.

      Peggy rarely experienced the sensation of a twinge of piercing worry as she was naturally quite a calm and resourceful person, but whenever she had had such a stab of anxiety in the past, it had always proved to be the precursor of something extremely trying at best, and downright infuriating at worst.

      As she manoeuvred the perambulator into the drive at Tall Trees and headed toward the back yard (they all tended to use the back door to enter the house through the kitchen rather than the imposing front door that scraped heavily across the stone flags of the hall), Peggy was so deep in her thoughts that she didn’t even notice the upended trap in the corner of the back yard, its wooden shafts pointing up to the sky as if to announce it was keeping its own special lookout for enemy aircraft high above them in the endless blue sky. She and Holly had left Tall Trees to head for June’s teashop that morning before the children had come down to breakfast, and since then she had completely forgotten about the new arrival.

      The small chestnut mare, only just big enough to be able to angle her head upwards so that she could look over the rather high half-door (clearly made for a creature larger than she), thoughtfully watched Peggy bounce the pram across the bumpy yard.

      She almost let out a neigh just in case Peggy had a stray carrot lurking in her pocket, but there was something so distracted about Peggy’s demeanour that the whip-smart pony quickly divined it wasn’t worth bothering.

      Peggy shoved the brake on the pram down with her foot and gathered Holly into her arms, not noticing the delicate blanket hadn’t been grasped too as was usual, or that there was now a bootee amiss.

      Holly didn’t appreciate not being the centre of her mother’s attention, and she gave a little cry just as a reminder that she was there and that she was looking forward to her lunchtime feed.

      Peggy didn’t say the soothing ‘shush, poppet’ or ‘there’s my girl’ that Holly expected, or give her a jiggle to make her laugh, or swing her high into the air.

      Instead her mother’s face remained stony as she clutched Holly a little tighter and concentrated on balancing her in her arms along with her handbag and a lentil ‘surprise’ in a tin pie-dish that she had bought from June for their supper later on, whilst also trying to open the kitchen door.

      There was only one thing for it, and Holly filled her baby lungs to capacity so that she could produce the first in a rapidly escalating series of loud wails that no mother could ignore.

      Laying her ears flat against her head, Milburn dipped her head back inside the box and dropped her nose down to inspect her empty bucket just in case she had missed a morsel. She couldn’t compete with that racket and she wasn’t going to try.

Chapter Four

      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 СКАЧАТЬ