The Evacuee Christmas

Chapter Six

Barbara was standing on the doorstep looking out for Peggy while polishing the brass door knocker, door handle and house number.

‘I’ve already told Mrs Truelove that I can’t go in today as I’ve got to get things organised, and she wasn’t thrilled but…’ Barbara’s voice drifted away as she’d already turned on her heel to stomp off towards the kitchen, her footsteps ringing out on the brown linoleum that floored the narrow hallway at number five Jubilee Street.

Peggy followed wearily in her younger sister’s wake (there was only the one year between them), very much looking forward to sitting down and enjoying a restorative cup of tea. It wasn’t yet half past eight but already Peggy was quite done in.

Half an hour later she felt much better, as Barbara had also made her eat some hot buttered toast while Barbara jotted down a long to-do list, and an equally lengthy shopping list.

‘Ted and I decided before we got out of bed this morning that we’re going to use our rainy-day money to send them away in new clothes. Let’s see how much is in the biscuit tin,’ said Barbara.

Peggy was surprised at this. Most families scrimped and saved to put a little by for emergencies, but now Barbara seemed happy to dip into this fund when actually, as far as Peggy could see, the children already had perfectly acceptable clothes that were always neatly pressed and mended, and that were nowhere near as threadbare as some that many other local children had no other option than to wear.

While Barbara and Peggy had been born and bred within the sound of church bells that they still lived within hearing distance of, their father had been a shopkeeper, and so they had grown up in relative comfort when compared to that of many of their contemporaries, Bermondsey being known throughout London as being a very poor borough. They had been allowed to stay at school past the age of fourteen, when a lot of their friends had been made to leave in order that they could go out to work to bring another wage in to add to the family’s housekeeping.

Peggy and Barbara’s mother had been very insistent that they had elocution lessons, and the result of this was that although without question they talked with a London accent, it wasn’t the broad cockney spoken by Ted and Bill, who joked that their wives were ‘very BBC’.

While this wasn’t strictly true as the received pronunciation of the broadcaster’s announcers was always distinctly more plummy (in fact, laughably so at times), nevertheless the sisters knew that their voices did sound posh when compared to most people in Bermondsey. Jessie and Connie had also been encouraged to speak properly by Barbara, another thing that hadn’t endeared Jessie to Larry, who had the slightest of stammers.

Barbara was always very set on keeping up family standards, and this required her taking good care of Jessie and Connie’s clothes, making sure they were always mended, clean and pressed, while Ted buffed and polished their leather T-bar sandals every evening. It gave both parents pleasure to see their children bathed and clean, and neatly turned out.

This sartorial attention was a whole lot more than many other local parents managed where either their children or themselves were concerned, although Peggy had some sympathy for why this might be as she could see it was very difficult for some families, who might have, perhaps, more than ten children to look after but with only a very scant income coming into the home each week.

Nevertheless, she suspected that when her and Bill’s baby arrived, she would find herself equally as keen to keep up the standards already heralded by Barbara.

Now Peggy watched with slight concern as Barbara climbed precariously up onto a stool to lift off the high mantelpiece above the kitchen hearth a slightly battered and dented metal biscuit barrel that commemorated King George V coming to the throne in 1910.

Peggy remembered this biscuit barrel with fond thoughts, as it had sat in their parents’ kitchen throughout her and Barbara’s childhood. Although Peggy was the oldest daughter, and therefore in theory should have had the first dibs on their parents’ possessions, when it came to closing up their house after they both died within months of each other, Peggy did a magnanimous act. It was just before Barbara and Ted’s marriage, which meant it was a year after Peggy and Bill’s own nuptials, when their mother succumbed to influenza and their father died not long after of, they liked to say, a broken heart. With only the slightest of pangs as she had always loved the biscuit barrel, Peggy had allowed her sister to stake, claim to the majority of their mother’s possessions, including the biscuit barrel, as Barbara was poised to set up her own home and Peggy had just about got herself and Bill comfortably fitted out by then.

Now, Barbara clunked the barrel down and onto the table, the number of large pennies in it adding considerably to its apparently hefty weight. She loosened the lid with her nails until she was able to work it off, before tipping the contents onto the maroon chenille tablecloth that adorned the kitchen table.

Peggy had long teased Barbara about her beloved tablecloth that had to be removed whenever the family ate, or when anything mucky was being done on the table. Barbara could be very stubborn if she chose, and so she resolutely refused to accept the tablecloth, with its extravagant fringing, was anything less than practical. Now, at long last, it came into its own as it turned out to be a good place to sort the pile of money that had been in the tin as the chenille prevented the coins rolling around too much, and it cushioned too the several notes that had tumbled from the biscuit barrel.

Barbara counted out five pounds and replaced them in the barrel.

Then she totted up what was left. It was a small fortune: a whole £37 15s. 7½d. With a raise of her eyebrows Barbara put another £20 back in the kitty, and then a handful of silver half-crowns and florins, and then she clambered laboriously back onto the stool to return the biscuit barrel to its home on the mantelpiece.

‘Goodness,’ said Peggy enviously, as her and Bill’s rainy day money had never broken the £10 barrier. ‘I had no idea.’

‘Ted’s been doing overtime, and of course I always try and put away all of my wages. But I won’t deny that a lot of scrimping and saving has gone into that blessed tin,’ said Barbara. ‘We’ve been saving extra hard ever since the children started school and we had even been wondering about a proper holiday next year, and a mangle for the washing and a new bed for Jessie. But now I want Connie and Jessie to be evacuated looking as if they are loved and cared for, and as if we think nothing of sending them away in new clothes. I think that might help them get a better class of family at the other end, don’t you think?’

Peggy wasn’t certain that would be the case, but she decided to keep quiet.

Some Bermondsey families would be hard-pressed even to give their kiddies a bath or to send them off in clean clothes, she knew, and so it could be that some of the host families would take pity and choose those clearly less advantaged first. She knew too that some of the children were persistent bed-wetters, and so she hoped that wasn’t going to cause too many problems further down the line.

Peggy made a decision not to ponder any further on this just then, as it seemed too loaded with opportunity for fraught outcomes. Although, of course, she hoped that Barbara’s view was the correct one, rather than hers.

After one last cup of tea and a final peruse of Barbara’s list, the sisters decided they would head up to Elephant and Castle to see what they could buy.

Barbara carefully placed her to-do list in one pocket and her shopping list in the corresponding pocket on the other side of her coat front, and then she tucked her purse away out of sight at the bottom of her basket, hidden under a folded scarf.

Peggy took the opportunity to spend a final penny before slipping into her lightweight mackintosh, as these days with the baby pressing on her bladder she needed to go as often as possible.

And then the sisters left for the bus stop so that they could make the shortish ride to Elephant, as the area was known locally.

At school meanwhile, Susanne Pinkly was experiencing a rather trying first lesson of the day.

Understandably, none of the children had their minds on their timetabled lesson for first thing on a Friday, which was arithmetic; even at the best of times that was never an especially pleasant start to the final school day of the week.

This particular morning, all the whole school wanted to do was talk about the evacuation, and what their mothers and fathers had told them about it.

Susanne could completely understand this desire, but she wasn’t utterly sure what she should say to the children as she didn’t want to make a delicate situation worse, or to make any timid pupils feel even more fearful about the future than they would be already.

Susanne always kept an eye out at playtime for Jessie Ross, as she knew the bigger boys could be mean to him. She had a soft spot for Jessie as he was one of the few children who patently enjoyed their lessons (very obviously much more than his sister did, at any rate) and who would try very hard to please his teacher.

Jessie was lucky to have a sister like Connie to stand up for him, Susanne thought, although just before the Easter holidays Ted had requested to headmaster Mr Jones that Connie be moved to the other class for their forthcoming senior year at St Mark’s as he and Barbara felt that Jessie was coming to depend too much on his twin sister fighting his battles for him.

Sure enough, at the start of this autumn term the twins had been separated and now were no longer taught in the same class. Susanne had suggested she keep Connie, and that Jessie would be moved in order that he could be taken out of Larry’s daily orbit, but Mr Jones said that he thought that might make Jessie’s weakness too obvious for all to see, and that the likely result would be that Larry’s bullying would simply be replaced by another pupil becoming equally foul to Jessie.

Generally, the teachers didn’t think Larry was an out-and-out bad lad as such, because when he forgot to act the Big I Am, he seemed perfectly able to get on well with the other children, Connie having been seen playing quite amiably with him on several occasions. The teachers believed that he had a troubled home life, as his park keeper father was well known for being a bit handy with his fists when he was in his cups, while Larry’s mother bent over backward to pretend all was well, despite the occasional painful bruise suggesting otherwise. The days Larry came in to school looking a bit battered and with dried tear tracks under his eyes was when he was prone to go picking on someone smaller than him. It was rumoured that Larry’s father had been dismissed from his job the previous spring, and Susanne was sorry to note that there had been a corresponding worsening of Larry’s behaviour since then.

Having just spoken with Peggy made Susanne think afresh of Jessie, as she knew Peggy adored her niece and nephew, but that Peggy always wished that Jessie had an easier time in the playtimes and lunch breaks at school than in fact he did.

So Susanne had been intending to pay special attention today to see how he was faring now that he would be getting used to not having his sister nearby at all times. But now Susanne had to put that thought to the back of her mind as she had just had a brainwave.

She would acknowledge the forthcoming evacuation but in a more oblique way than discussing it openly. She would do this by talking about some London words and sayings that might not make much sense to people who came from outside the confines of Bermondsey.

After making sure Larry was sitting at his desk directly in her eyeline so that she could keep tabs on him, Susanne got up from her seat behind her desk at the front of the class, smoothing her second-best wool skirt over her generous hips and checking the buttons to her pretty floral blouse were correctly fastened (to her embarrassment, she’d had a mishap with a button slipping undone the day before, and had the chagrin of catching a smirking Larry and several others trying to sneak a sly glimpse of her petty).

Going to stand in front of the blackboard, Susanne began, ‘Who knows what the word “slang” means?’

A bespectacled small girl called Angela Kennedy who sometimes played with Connie after school put her hand up in the air, and when Susanne nodded in her direction, she answered, ‘Miss, is it a special word fer sumfin’ that’s all familiar, like?’

‘Sort of, Angela. Well done,’ said Susanne. ‘Slang can vary from city to town to village, and might be different whether you live in the town or the country, or whether you are a lord or a lady, or you are just like us. Slang words are those that quite often people like us might use in everyday life, rather than when we could choose the more formal word we would find in the dictionary. And I know that following our lesson last week on dictionaries, you all know very well exactly how a dictionary is organised and all the special information you can find there!’

There were a few small titters from the pupils who didn’t have the same confidence in their ability to find their way around a dictionary that their teacher apparently had in them.

Ignoring the sniggerers, Susanne went on, ‘Now, can anybody here tell me an example of a word that is said around where we live in Bermondsey, but which might not be understood over in Buckingham Palace, say, which I’m sure we’d all agree is a whole world away from what you and I know in our everyday lives, even though the palace itself is close enough that we could all bicycle there if we wanted to?’

‘Geezer,’ yelled a boyish voice from the back of the class.

‘Okay, geezer it is,’ said Susanne. ‘So, has anyone got another perhaps more polite or proper-sounding word that might be the same as geezer but that wherever you lived in the British Isles you would know that everybody who heard you say it would understand what you were talking about?’

She was hoping one of her pupils would have the nous to say ‘man’.

‘Bloke,’ said Larry.

‘Chap.’

‘Guy.’

‘Guv’ner.’

‘Guv.’

‘Anything else?’ asked Susanne.

‘Cove,’ said Jessie thoughtfully, ‘although I prefer dandy.’

Somebody gave a bark of laughter.

Jessie really didn’t help himself sometimes, Susanne thought.

‘Nancy boy,’ Larry yelled as he wriggled in his chair, trying to turn around to look at Jessie. ‘That’s you, Jessie, er, Je… Jessica Ro—’