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

Chapter Three

Several streets away, Peggy was making heavy weather of heaving the battered old perambulator she shared with Gracie back towards Tall Trees, despite it being such a lovely day and the sunlight showing the golden tones in Peggy’s shiny hair to best effect. Her green-sprigged cotton summer dress felt looser than it had even a few days before but Peggy barely noticed, although once upon a time she had been very proud of her trim figure, her tiny waist being the envy of sister, Barbara.

While Peggy had slimmed right down since her pregnancy, baby Holly, now a lively five and a half months, had at last almost caught up with other babies of her age, despite being born two months early. Now, as Peggy pushed her through the sun-dappled shade of the tree-lined street, Holly was cheerfully kicking her crocheted blanket away from her now plumply dimpled legs.

Peggy had been helping out at June Blenkinsop’s teashop, as she did most days. She and June had been talking only that morning about the rapid increase in customers now that the toasted teacakes and pots of tea that June had been serving in a colourful array of delicate china teapots had just about totally given way, due in no small part to Peggy’s staunch encouragement, to a menu of simple but filling hot meals of the meat-and-two-veg variety, and tea served in small metal utilitarian teapots to workers from six in the morning until gone ten at night. Such was the demand from people who were often juggling paid shift work alongside voluntary but nonetheless crucial war roles, that June’s business was thriving. As if to prove the saying that every cloud has a silver lining, the outbreak of war had turned June’s café into a rapidly expanding business, with a growing rota of cooks and Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) helpers, that meant it was going from strength to strength.

And now it looked as if the business could expand even further as Peggy was in midst of looking into setting up at least one, although ideally two, mobile canteens that could be driven from place to place. After nearly nine months of almost no bombs dropping over England since the war had begun, the newspapers were increasingly claiming the long-expected German aerial offensive must at last be drawing near, and so if the anticipated bombs were about to rain down on them all then mobile canteens would be a godsend in fortifying those who had to deal with the aftermath of such terrible events, and this had got Peggy pondering.

‘June, I’ve thought more about the mobile canteens as you wanted, and I think we could make it work. I’ve totted up some rough figures, we could use the café’s kitchen for the prep and we’d need to sort some metal mugs and plates, but I think we’d get these through the NAAFI suppliers. I think we’d get an old vehicle donated from somewhere like the railways. James…’ Peggy had said to her friend earlier as they sat at a table with cups of tea during a swift twenty minutes after the morning rush and before lunchtime really got going. ‘Yes, you can take that look off your face! James said that if we got a van or something bigger, he thought some of the recuperating men at the hospital could help convert it to a canteen.’

June ignored Peggy’s mention of the handsome young doctor at the new field hospital as she said that, actually for the plates and the vehicle and so forth, it might be sensible if she had a word with the people at the authorities she’d be dealing with over expanding her business. ‘They’ll maybe have a stock of old vehicles set aside that they’ve requisitioned for this sort of thing,’ June added, ‘and I think too, if we get this off the ground, then the WVS and maybe the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) will step in with volunteers.’

‘I was talking about it the other day and Gracie said she was keen to be involved, especially if she can drive the canteen,’ Peggy mentioned.

June and Peggy thought a little further on what Peggy had just said, before they shared a raised-eyebrow look even though they were both very fond of Gracie, a young single mother who also lodged at Tall Trees along with baby Jack, after which Peggy added, ‘Seeing how Gracie rattles that pram around with poor Jack inside, we’d definitely better have metal plates and mugs if she’s going to be driving.’

Peggy and June talked through a few potentially profitable fundraising ideas and the discussion had ended with June suggesting that Peggy might like to consider going into a formal arrangement with June as regards the café. This would mean that rather than Peggy simply manning the café’s till as she did at present, perhaps the two women could arrange something as bold as a proper partnership, with legal papers drawn up as to each woman’s responsibility. June had even gone as far as suggesting they rename the business, with ‘Blenkinsop and Delbert’ being the obvious choice.

Peggy had been so taken aback at June’s generous offer that she hadn’t known what to say, and had been left gawping with her mouth open and closed like a fish. The offer also implied that Peggy would be in Harrogate for some time to come, and while she understood this in the intellectual sense, in practical terms she always felt as if it wouldn’t be long until she and Holly and the twins were back in the crammed streets of south-east London that were so close to her heart, and she could go to see Barbara for a pep talk whenever she was feeling a bit down, which had sometimes happened since Holly’s arrival.

When, after a while, Peggy still hadn’t said anything, June had had to suggest that Peggy think about it for a while and then they could talk about it again when she didn’t feel to be quite so much on the back foot.

‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, Peggy,’ June added as she stood up and adjusted her apron ready to go back to the café’s kitchen, ‘but you don’t seem quite yourself today…’

June Blenkinsop had hit the nail on the head. Peggy absolutely wasn’t herself. No, not at all. The partnership discussion with June had been very flattering, naturally, and it had given Peggy a lot to mull over as she had never thought of herself as any sort of businesswoman. But she’d been a schoolteacher in Bermondsey for nearly a decade and so it was hard for her to think of herself as anything else.

Not that Peggy could do much thinking on what June had said just at the moment, as the truth of it was that she had too much else to worry about.

Normally, when Peggy pushed her daughter along, she felt consumed with love for her, as well as a very, very lucky mother indeed. Every few paces she would look down at Holly and make a funny face or say her name, and then the two would smile gaily at each other. Holly’s unexpected arrival on a snowy Christmas Eve had been traumatic to say the least, and indeed it was only the quick thinking of the children at Tall Trees that had saved both Peggy and Holly’s lives. Over a month in hospital under the watchful eye of the wonderfully sympathetic young doctor, James Legard, had meant that Peggy left the hospital feeling recovered and much stronger than she had felt when she had gone in, and with an always peckish although still tiny baby in her arms. But this was understandable as Holly had arrived dangerously early.

Not a day went by when Peggy didn’t remember what a very close call it had turned out to be for both of them, or the many ways in which she would be forever grateful to all concerned. Connie and Jessie, her niece and nephew, had been wonderful, and Peggy felt she might not be around today if they, and their friends, hadn’t acted so quickly and in such a grown-up way when they found her collapsed.

She knew too that her husband Bill was delighted to have a daughter, especially as they had had to wait many long years before, out of the blue, Peggy fell pregnant. They had been so thrilled with the news of Peggy’s pregnancy, as this had seemed to cement the cracks that had been starting to enter the marriage, cracks of frustration and thwarted hopes at their childlessness.

Bill had only been able to get away to pay them just the one visit since Christmas (and it was now spring moving into summer), catching a coach and then a train up to Harrogate one frosty morning in mid-January. After they had hugged and he had chucked Holly under the chin, he had commented on the several evacuees and their parents on the station waiting to catch the train out of the town to return home as more and more parents from the big towns and cities were coming forward to reclaim their kiddies.

But Peggy had hardly taken in what he was saying about the evacuees, so wrapped up was she in the precious sight of Holly’s tiny hand firmly clasping one of Bill’s giant fingers, the gold signet ring on his pinky glinting to remind him and Peggy of their marriage, and the salt tears slipping down Bill’s cheeks as he gazed lovingly down at his daughter.

Just that one perfect memory of a daughter reaching for a father’s finger had been worth a thousand hours of letter-writing and longings for her husband to be by her side. Peggy had allowed her own tears of joy and gratitude to well up as Bill had put his arm around her and pulled her close, kissing her brow and telling Peggy tearfully in a voice choked with gratitude what a clever, clever girl she was to have produced such a beautiful baby, and how lucky Holly was to have Peggy for a mother. It had felt a wonderful moment.

Now, Holly was lying on her back in the bulky black perambulator, looking for all the world as if she was trying to catch her mother’s eye in order to give her a gummy grin.

She tried waving her small pink fists in the air and then putting one hand in her mouth, and when that didn’t work, a spot of further kicking that was so energetic that her thin crocheted pram blanket slipped completely askew. The silken bow that tied on a white bootee that Aunty Barbara had knitted loosened, and Holly did her best to work it off as she was sure Peggy wouldn’t be able to ignore that.

But Holly’s efforts, no matter how determined the baby was, were destined to fail, as Peggy’s brow remained wrinkled and her dark eyes anxious, as she stared unseeing into the distance while huffing and puffing the perambulator up the hill.

The reason for Peggy’s pensive expression and clenched jaw this sunny May day was because first thing that morning she had received a cryptic card from Bill, who was still located somewhere in the UK (she thought, although Bill had never been exactly specific as to quite what he was up to) as he had intimated he was now training tank drivers somewhere near the coast of Suffolk. Or might it be Norfolk?

Peggy had felt unsettled since the moment she’d laid eyes on the card. Somehow even before she picked it up to read, it seemed to beckon menacingly at her, driving thoughts asunder of the new pony and trap she could hear the children talking about, or Gracie wanting to have use of the perambulator in the afternoon. And reading Bill’s scribbled words had given Peggy no reassurance at all.

Before he’d been called up from Bermondsey for his military training, Bill had been a bus conductor on the number 12 bus that went from south-east London to the West End, or occasionally he was put on the number 63, and he’d hugely enjoyed the daily banter with his passengers. Sometimes, if the depot was short of drivers, he’d not put up a fuss if he’d been asked to get behind the steering wheel instead, even though Bill had often said to Peggy that it was nowhere near as much of a hoot driving a double-decker as it was dealing with all and sundry 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