KATIE KING is a new voice to the saga market. She lives in Kent, and has worked in publishing. She has a keen interest in twentieth-century history and this novel was inspired by a period spent living in south-east London.

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2017

Copyright © Katie King 2017

Katie King asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008257552

Version: 2018-04-17

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Exclusive Short Story - Oranges

Dear Reader

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The shadows were starting to lengthen as twins Connie and Jessie made their way back home.

They felt quite grown up these days as a week earlier it had been their tenth birthday, and their mother Barbara had iced a cake and there’d been a raucous tea party at home for family and their close friends, with party games and paper hats. The party had ended in the parlour with Barbara bashing out songs on the old piano and everyone having a good old sing-song.

What a lot of fun it had been, even though by bedtime Connie felt queasy from eating too much cake, and Jessie had a sore throat the following morning from yelling out the words to ‘The Lambeth Walk’ with far too much vigour.

On the twins’ iced Victoria sponge Barbara had carefully piped Connie’s name in cerise icing with loopy lettering and delicately traced small yellow and baby-pink flowers above it.

Then Barbara had thoroughly washed out her metal icing gun and got to work writing Jessie’s name below his sister’s on the lower half of the cake.

This time Barbara chose to work in boxy dark blue capitals, with a sailboat on some choppy turquoise and deep-blue waves carefully worked in contrasting-coloured icing as the decoration below his name, Jessie being very sensitive about his name and the all-too-common assumption, for people who hadn’t met him but only knew him by the name ‘Jessie’, that he was a girl.

If she cared to think about it, which she tried not to, Barbara heartily regretted that Ted had talked her into giving their only son as his Christian name the Ross family name of Jessie which, as tradition would have it, was passed down to the firstborn male in each new generation of Rosses.

It wasn’t even spelt Jesse, as it usually was if naming a boy, because – Ross family tradition again – Jessie was on the earlier birth certificates of those other Jessies and in the family Bible that lay on the sideboard in the parlour at Ted’s elder brother’s house, and so Jessie was how it had to be for all the future Ross generations to come.

Ted had told Barbara what an honour it was to be called Jessie, and Barbara, still weak from the exertions of the birth, had allowed herself to be talked into believing her husband.

She must have still looked a little dubious, though, as then Ted pointed out that his own elder brother Jessie was a gruff-looking giant with huge arms and legs, and nobody had ever dared tease him about his name. It was going to be just the same for their newborn son, Ted promised.

Big Jessie (as Ted’s brother had become known since the birth of his nephew) was in charge of the maintenance of several riverboats on the River Thames, Ted working alongside him, and Big Jessie, with his massive bulk, could single-handedly fill virtually all of the kitchen hearth in his and his wife Val’s modest terraced house that backed on to the Bermondsey street where Ted and Barbara raised their children in their own, almost identical red-brick house.

Barbara could see why nobody in their right mind would mess with Big Jessie, even though those who knew him soon discovered that his bruiser looks belied his gentle nature as he was always mild of manner and slow to anger, with a surprisingly soft voice.

Sadly, it had proved to be a whole different story for young Jessie, who had turned out exactly as Barbara had suspected he would all those years ago when she lovingly gazed down at her newborn twins, with the hale and hearty Connie (named after Barbara’s mother Constance) dwarfing her more delicate-framed brother as they lay length to length with their toes almost touching and their heads away from each other in the beautifully crafted wooden crib Ted had made for the babies to sleep in.

These days, Barbara could hardly bear to see how cruelly it all played out on the grubby streets on which the Ross family lived. To say it fair broke Barbara’s heart was no exaggeration.

While Connie was tall, tomboyish and could easily pass for twelve, and very possibly older, Jessie was smaller and more introverted, often looking a lot younger than he was.

Barbara hated the way Jessie would shrink away from the bigger south-east London lads when they tussled him to the ground in their rough-house games. All the boys had their faces rubbed in the dirt by the other lads at one time or another – Barbara knew and readily accepted that that was part and parcel of a child’s life in the tangle of narrow and dingy streets they knew so well – but very few people had to endure quite the punishing that Jessie did with such depressing regularity.

Connie would confront the vindictive lads on her brother’s behalf, her chin stuck out defiantly as she dared them to take her on instead. If the boys didn’t immediately back away from Jessie, she blasted in their direction an impressive slew of swear words that she’d learnt by dint of hanging around on the docks when she took Ted his lunch in the school holidays. (It was universally agreed amongst all the local boys that when Connie was in a strop, it was wisest to do what she wanted, or else it was simply asking for trouble.)

Meanwhile, as Connie berated all and sundry, Jessie would freeze with a cowed expression on his face, and look as if he wished he were anywhere else but there. Needless to say, it was with a ferocious regularity that he found himself at the mercy of these bigger, stronger rowdies.

Usually this duffing-up happened out of sight of any grown-ups and, ideally, Connie. But the times Barbara spied what was going on all she wanted to do was to run over and take Jessie in her arms to comfort him and promise him it would be all right, and then keep him close to her as she led him back inside their home at number five Jubilee Street. However, she knew that if she even once gave into this impulse, then kind and placid Jessie would never live it down, and he would remain the butt of everyone’s poor behaviour for the rest of his childhood.

Barbara loved Connie, of course, as what mother wouldn’t be proud of such a lively, proud, strong-minded daughter, with her distinctive and lustrous tawny hair, clear blue eyes and strawberry-coloured lips, and her constant stream of chatter? (Connie was well known in the Ross family for being rarely, if ever, caught short of something to say.)

Nevertheless, it was Jessie who seemed connected to the essence of Barbara’s inner being, right to the very centre of her. If Barbara felt tired or anxious, it wouldn’t be long before Jessie was at her side, shyly smiling up to comfort his mother with his warm, endearingly lopsided grin.

Barbara never really worried about Connie, who seemed pretty much to have been born with a slightly defiant jib to her chin, as if she already knew how to look after herself or how to get the best from just about any situation. But right from the start Jessie had been much slower to thrive and to walk, although he’d always been good with his sums and with reading, and he was very quick to pick up card games and puzzles.

If Barbara had to describe the twins, she would say that Connie was smart as a whip, but that Jessie was the real thinker of the family, with a curious mind underneath which still waters almost certainly ran very deep.

Unfortunately in Bermondsey during that dog-end of summer in 1939, the characteristics the other local children rated in one another were all to do with strength and cunning and stamina.

For the boys, being able to run faster than the girls when playing kiss chase was A Very Good Thing.

Jessie had never beaten any of the boys at running, and most of the girls could hare about faster than him too.

It was no surprise therefore, thought Barbara, that Jessie had these days to be more or less pushed out of the front door to go and play with the other children, while Connie would race to be the first of the gang outside and then she’d be amongst the last to return home in the evening.

Although only born five minutes apart, they were chalk and cheese, with Connie by far and away the best of any of the children at kiss chase, whether it be the hunting down of a likely target or the hurtling away from anyone brave enough to risk her wrath. Connie was also brilliant at two-ball, skipping, knock down ginger and hopscotch, and in fact just about any playground game anyone could suggest they play.

Jessie was better than Connie in one area – he excelled at conkers, him and Connie getting theirs from a special tree in Burgess Park that they had sworn each other to secrecy over and sealed with a blood pact, with the glossy brown conkers then being seasoned over a whole winter and spring above the kitchen range. Sadly, quite often Jessie would have to yield to bigger children who would demand with menace that his conkers be simply handed over to them, with or without the benefit of any sham game.

Ted never tried to stop Barbara being especially kind to Jessie within the privacy of their own home, provided the rest of the world had been firmly shut outside. But if – and this didn’t happen very often, as Barbara already knew what would be said – she wanted to talk to her husband about Jessie and his woes, and how difficult it was for him to make proper friends, Ted would reply that he felt differently about their son than she.

‘Barbara, love, it’s doing ’im no favours if yer try to fight ’is battles for ’im. I was little at ’is age, an’ yer jus’ look a’ me now’ – Ted was well over six foot with tightly corded muscles on his arms and torso, and Barbara never tired of running her hands over his well-sculpted body when they were tucked up in their bed at night with the curtains drawn tight and the twins asleep – ‘an’ our Jessie’ll be fine if we jus’ ’elp ’im deal with the bullies. Connie’s got the right idea, and in time ’e’ll learn from ’er too. An’ there’ll be a time when our Jessie’ll come into his own, jus’ yer see if I’m not proved correct, love.’

Barbara really hoped that her husband was right. But she doubted it was going to happen any time soon. And until then she knew that inevitably sweet and open-hearted Jessie would be enduring a pretty torrid time of it.

Still, on this pleasant evening in the first week of September, as a played-out and shamefully grubby Connie and Jessie headed back towards their slightly battered blue front door in Jubilee Street, the only thing a stranger might note about them to suggest they were twins was the way their long socks had bunched in similar concertinas above their ankles, and that they had very similar grey smudges on their knees from where they had been kneeling in the dust of the yard in front of where the local dairy stabled the horses that would pull the milk carts with their daily deliveries to streets around Bermondsey and Peckham.

As the twins walked side by side, their shoulders occasionally bumping and two sets of jacks making clinking sounds as they jumbled against each other in the pockets of Jessie’s grey twill shorts, the children agreed that their tea felt as if it had been a very long time ago. Although the bread and beef dripping yummily sprinkled with salt and pepper that they’d snaffled down before going out to play had been lovely, and despite Barbara having seemed quiet and snappy which was very unlike her, by now they were starving again and so they were hoping that they’d be allowed to have seconds when they got in.

They’d only been playing jacks this evening, but Connie had organised a knock-out tournament, and there’d been seven teams of four so it had turned into quite an epic battle. Connie had been the adjudicator and Jessie the scorekeeper, keeping his tally with a pencil-end scrounged from the dairy foreman who’d also then given Jessie a piece of paper to log the teams as Jessie had thanked him so nicely for the inch-long stub of pencil.

The reason the jacks tournament had turned into a hotly contested knock-out affair was that Connie had managed to cadge a bag of end-of-day broken biscuits from a kindly warehouseman at the Peek Freans biscuit factory over on Clements Road – the warehouseman being a regular at The Jolly Shoreman and therefore on nodding acquaintance with Ted and Big Jessie – as a prize for the winning team. These Connie had saved in their brown paper bag so that Jessie could present them to the winning four, who turned out to be the self-named Thames Tinkers German Bashers.

As the game of jacks had gone on, every time Jessie had peeked over at the paper bag containing the biscuits that his sister had squirrelled close to her side (once, he fancied that he even caught a whiff of the enticing sugary aroma), his mouth had watered even though he knew the warehouseman had only given them to Connie as they were going a bit stale and had missed the day’s run of broken biscuits being delivered to local shops so that thrifty, headscarved housewives would later be able to buy them at a knock-down rate.

Jessie knew that Connie had wanted him to present the biscuits to the winning team as a way of subtly ingratiating himself with the jacks players, without her having to say anything in support of her brother. She was a wonderful sister to have on one’s side, Jessie knew, and he would have felt even more lost and put upon if he didn’t have her in his corner.

Still, it had only been a couple of days since he had begged Connie to keep quiet on his behalf from now on, following an exceptionally unpleasant few minutes in the boys’ lavatories at school when he had been taunted mercilessly by Larry, one of the biggest pupils in his class, who’d called Jessie a scaredy-cat and then some much worse names for letting his sister speak out for him.

Larry had then started to push Jessie about a bit, although Jessie had quite literally been saved by the bell. It had rung to signal the end of morning playtime and so with a final, well-aimed shove, Larry had screwed his face into a silent snarl to show his reluctance to stop his torment just at that moment, and at last he let Jessie go.

Jessie was left panting softly as he watched an indignant Larry leave, his dull-blond cowlick sticking up just as crossly as Larry was stomping away.

To comfort himself Jessie had remembered for a moment the time his father had spoken to him quietly but with a tremendous sense of purpose, looking deep into Jessie’s eyes and speaking to him with the earnest tone that suggested he could almost be a grown-up. ‘Son, you’re a great lad, and I really mean it. Yer mam an’ Connie know that too, and all three o’ us can’t be wrong, now, can we? And so all you’s got to do now is believe it yerself, and those lads’ll then quit their blatherin’. An’ I promise you – I absolutely promise you – that’ll be all it takes.’

Jessie had peered back at his father with a serious expression. He wanted to believe him, really he did. But it was very difficult and he couldn’t ever seem able to work out quite what he should do or say to make things better.

Back at number five Jubilee Street following the jacks tournament, the twins wolfed down their second tea, egg-in-a-cup with buttered bread this time, and then Barbara told them to have a strip wash to deal with their filthy knees and grime-embedded knuckles.

Although she made sure their ablutions were up to scratch, Barbara was nowhere near as bright and breezy as she usually was.

Even Connie, not as a matter of course massively observant of what her parents were up to, noticed that their mother seemed preoccupied and not as chatty as usual, and so more than once the twins caught the other’s eye and shrugged or nodded almost imperceptibly at one another.

An hour later Connie’s deep breathing from her bed on the other side of the small bedroom the twins shared let Jessie know that his sister had fallen asleep, and Jessie tried to allow his tense muscles to relax enough so that he could rest too, but the scary and dark feeling that was currently softly snarling deep down beneath his ribcage wouldn’t quite be quelled.

He had this feeling a lot of the time, and sometimes it was so bad that he wouldn’t be able to eat his breakfast or his dinner.

However, this particular bedtime Jessie wasn’t quite sure why he felt so strongly like this, as actually he’d had a good day, with none of the lads cornering him or seeming to notice him much (which was fine with Jessie), and the game of jacks ended up being quite fun as he’d been able to make the odd pun that had made everyone laugh when he had come to read out the team names.

As he tried willing himself to sleep – counting sheep never having worked for him – Jessie could hear Ted and Barbara talking downstairs in low voices, and they sounded unusually serious even though Jessie could only hear the hum of their conversation rather than what they were actually saying.

Try as he might, Jessie couldn’t pick out any mention of his own name, and so he guessed that for once his parents weren’t talking about him and how useless he had turned out to be at standing up for himself. He supposed that this was all to the good, and after what seemed like an age he was able to let go of his usual worries so that at long last he could drift off.

Chapter Two

When the children had been smaller, Ted and Big Jessie had met a charismatic firebrand of a left-wing rabble-rouser called David, and eventually he had talked the brothers into going to several political meetings in the East End aimed at convincing the audience of the need for working-class men to band together to form a socialist uprising. A lot of the talk had been of fascists, and the political situation in Spain and Germany.

It wasn’t long before Ted and Big Jessie had been persuaded to go with members of the group to protest against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts’ march through Cable Street in Whitechapel, although the brothers had retreated when the mood turned nasty and rocks were pelted about and there were running battles between the left- and right-wing supporters and the police.

Ted, naturally an easy-going sort, hadn’t gone to another meeting of the socialists, and within a few months David had left to go to Spain to fight on the side of the Republicans.

Still, his tolerant nature didn’t mean that Ted would always nod along down at The Jolly Shoreman whenever (and this had been happening quite often in recent months) a patron seven sheets to wind would suggest that any fascist supporters should be strung up high. He didn’t like what fascists believed in but, deep down, Ted believed they were people too, and who really had the right to insist how other people thought?

But in recent weeks Ted had had to think more seriously about what he believed in, and how far he might be prepared to go to protect his beliefs, and his family.

As he was a docker, working alongside Big Jessie on the riverboats that spent a lot of their time moving cargo locally between the various docks and warehouses on either side of the Thames, Ted had witnessed first-hand that the government had been preparing for war for a while.

He’d seen an obvious stockpiling of munitions and other things a country going to war might need, such as medical supplies and various sorts of tinned or non-perishable foodstuffs that were now stacked waiting in warehouses. There’d also been a steady increase in new or reconditioned ships that were arriving at the docks and leaving soon afterwards with a variety of cargo.

And recently Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had taken to the BBC radio to announce hostilities against Germany had been declared following their attack on Poland. His words had been followed within minutes by air-raid sirens sounding across London, causing an involuntary bolt of panic to shoot through ordinary Londoners. It was a false alarm but a timely suggestion of what was to come.

Understandably, the dark mood of desperation and foreboding as to what might be going to happen was hard to shake off, and during the evening of the day of Chamberlain’s broadcast Ted and Barbara had knelt on the floor and clasped hands as they prayed together.

Scandalously, in these days when most people counted themselves as Church of England believers (or, as London was increasingly cosmopolitan, possibly of Jewish or Roman Catholic faiths), neither Ted nor Barbara, despite marrying in church and having had the twins christened when they were only a few months old, were regular churchgoers, and they had never done anything like this in their lives before.

But these were desperate times, and desperate measures were called for.

As they clambered up from their knees feeling as if the sound of the air-raid siren was still ringing in their ears, they took the decision not, just yet, to be wholly honest if either Connie or Jessie asked them a direct question about why all the grown-ups around them were looking so worried. They wouldn’t yet disturb the children with talk of war and what that might mean.

The next day, when Connie mentioned the air-raid siren, Barbara explained away the sound of it by saying she wasn’t absolutely certain but she thought it was almost definitely a dummy run for practising how to warn other boats to be careful if a large cargo ship ran aground on the tidal banks of the Thames, to which Connie nodded as if that was indeed very likely the case. Jessie didn’t look so easily convinced but Barbara distracted him quickly by saying she wanted his help with a difficult crossword clue she’d not been able to fathom.

Although naturally both Ted and Barbara were very honest people, they could remember the Great War all too clearly, even though they had only been children when that war had been declared in 1914, and they could still recall vividly the terrible toll that had exacted on everyone, both those who had gone to fight and those who had remained at home.

This meant they felt that even though it would only be a matter of days, or maybe mere hours, before the twins had to be made aware of what was going on, the longer the innocence of childhood could be preserved for Connie and Jessie, as far as their parents were concerned, the kinder this would be.

Once Ted and Barbara started to speak with the children about Britain being at war, they knew there would be no going back.

Now that time was here.

Just before the children had arrived home from school, things had come to a head.

For schoolteacher Miss Pinkly had called at number five to deliver a typewritten note to Barbara and Ted from the headmaster at St Mark’s Primary School.

When Barbara saw Susanne Pinkly at her door, immediately she felt an overpowering sense of despair.

Without the young woman having to say a word, Barbara knew precisely what was about to happen.

By the time that Ted came in after the twins had gone to bed – Barbara not bringing up the topic of evacuation with Connie and Jessie beforehand as she wanted the children to be told only when Ted was present – Barbara was almost beside herself, having worked herself up into a real state.

Ted had just left a group of dockers carousing at The Jolly Shoreman. Ted wasn’t much of a drinker, but he had gone over with Big Jessie for their usual two pints of best, which was a Thursday night ritual at ‘the Jolly’ for the brothers and their fellow dockers as the end of their hard-working week drew near.

Now that Ted saw Barbara standing lost and forlorn, looking whey-faced and somehow strangely pinched around the mouth, he felt sorry he hadn’t headed home straight after he’d moored the last boat. No beer was worth more than being with his wife in a time of crisis, and to look at Barbara’s tight shoulders, a crisis there was.

Barbara was standing in front of the kitchen sink slowly wrapping and unwrapping a damp tea towel around her left fist as she stared unseeing out of the window.

The debris of a half-prepared meal for her husband was strewn around the kitchen table, and it was the very first time in their married lives that Ted could ever remember Barbara not having cleared the table from the children’s tea and then cooking him the proverbial meat and two veg that would be waiting ready for her to dish up the moment he got home. Normally Barbara would shuffle whatever she’d prepared onto a plate for him as he soaped and dried his hands, so that exactly as he came to sit down at the kitchen table she’d be placing his plate before him in a routine that had become well choreographed over the years since they had married.

‘Barbara, love, whatever is the matter?’ Ted said as he swiftly crossed the kitchen to stand by his wife. He tried to sound strong and calm, and very much as if he were the reliable backbone of the family, the sort of man that Barbara and the twins could depend on, no matter what.

Barbara’s voice dissolved in pieces as she turned to look at her husband with quickly brimming eyes, and she croaked, ‘Ted, read this,’ as she waved in his direction the piece of paper that Miss Pinkly had left.

At least, that was what Ted thought she had said to him but Barbara’s voice had been so faint and croaky that he wasn’t completely sure.

Ted stared at it for a while before he was able to take in all that it said.

Dear Parent(s),

Please have your child(s) luggage ready Monday morning, fully labelled. If you live more than 15 minutes from the school, (s)he must bring his case with him/her on Monday morning.

EQUIPMENT (apart from clothes worn)

• Washing things – soap, towel

• Older clothes – trousers/skirt or dress

• Gym vest, shorts/skirt and plimsolls

• 6 stamped postcards

• Socks or stockings

• Card games

• Gas mask

• School hymn book

• Shirts/blouse

• Pyjamas, nightdress or nightshirt

• Pullover/cardigan

• Strong walking shoes

• Story or reading book

• Blanket

ALL TO BE PROPERLY MARKED

FOOD (for 1 or 2 days)

• ¼lb cooked meat

• 2 hard-boiled eggs

• ¼lb biscuits (wholemeal)

• Butter (in container)

• Knife, fork, spoon

• ¼lb chocolate

• ¼lb raisins

• 12 prunes

• Apples, oranges

• Mug (unbreakable)

Yours sincerely,

DAVID W. JONES

Headmaster, St Mark’s Primary School, Bermondsey

The whole of Connie and Jessie’s school was to be evacuated, and this looked set to happen in only four days’ time.

Her voice stronger, Barbara added glumly, ‘I see they’ve forgotten to put toothbrush on the list.’

After a pause, she said, ‘Susanne Pinkly told me that not even the headmaster knows where they will all be going yet, although it looks as if the school will be kept together as much as possible. Some of the teachers are going – those with no relatives anyway – but Mr Jones isn’t, apparently, as St Mark’s will have to share a school and it’s unlikely they’ll want two headmasters, and Miss Pinkly’s not going to go with them either as her mother is in hospital with some sort of hernia and so Susanne needs to look after the family bakery in her mother’s absence now that her brother Reece has already been given his papers.

‘But the dratted woman kept saying again and again that all the parents are strongly advised to evacuate their children, and I couldn’t think of anything to say back to her. I know she’s probably right, but I don’t want to be parted from our Connie and Jessie. Susanne Pinkly had with her a bundle of posters she’s to put up in the windows of the local shops saying MOTHERS – SEND THEM OUT OF LONDON, and she waved them at me, and so I had to take a couple to give to Mrs Truelove for her to put up in the window and on the shop door. While the talk in the shop a couple of days ago made me realise that a mass evacuation was likely, now that it’s here it feels bad, and I don’t like it at all.’

Ted drew Barbara close to him, and with his mouth close to her ear said gently, ‘I think we ’ave to let ’em go. The talk in the Jolly was that it’s not goin’ to be a picnic ’ere, and we ’ave to remember that we’re right where those Germans are likely to want to bomb because the docks will be – as our Big Jessie says – “strategic”.’

They were quiet for a few moments while they thought about the implications of ‘strategic’.

‘I know,’ said Barbara eventually in a very small voice. ‘You’re right.’

Ted grasped her to him more tightly.

They listened to the tick-tocking of the old wooden kitchen clock on the mantelpiece for an age, each lost in their own thoughts.

And then Ted said resolutely, ‘We’ll tell our Connie and Jessie at breakfast in the mornin’. They need to hear it from us an’ not from their classmates, an’ so we’ll need to get ’em up a bit earlier. We must look on the bright side – to let them go will keep them safe, and with a bit of luck it’ll all be over by Christmas and we can ’ave them ’ome with us again. ’Ome in Jubilee Street, right beside us, where they belong.’

Barbara hugged Ted back and then pulled the top half of her body away a little so that she could look at her husband’s dear and familiar face. ‘There is one good thing, which is that as you work on the river, you’re not going to have to go away and leave me, although I daresay they’ll move you to working on the tugs seeing how much you know about the tides.’

There was another pause, and then Barbara leant against his chest once more, adding in a voice so faint that it was little more than the merest of murmurs, ‘I’m scared, Ted, I’m really scared.’

‘We all are, Barbara love, an’ anyone who says they ain’t is a damned liar,’ Ted said with conviction, as he drew her more tightly against him.

Chapter Three

Three streets away Barbara’s elder sister Peggy was having an equally dispiriting evening. Her husband Bill, a bus driver, had received his call-up papers earlier in the week, and he had to leave first thing in the morning.

All Bill knew so far was that Susanne Pinkly’s brother Reece was going the same morning as he, and that after Bill and his fellow recruits gathered at the local church hall, all the conscripts would be taken to Victoria station and from there they would be allocated to various training camps in other parts of Britain, after which at some point he and the rest of them would leave Blighty for who knew where.

Bill was packed and ready to go, but he was worried about Peggy, who was four months pregnant and was having a pretty bad time of it, and so Bill wanted her to hotfoot it out of London as soon as she was able as part of the evacuation programme, as pregnant women as well as mothers with babies and/or toddlers were amongst the adults that the government advised to leave London.

‘It’s daft, you riskin’ it ’ere in the interestin’ condition you’re in,’ he told her.

‘Interesting condition’ was how they had taken to describing Peggy’s pregnancy as they thought it quaintly old-fashioned and therefore a phrase full of charm.

‘I want to go and fight for King and Country knowin’ my little lad or lassie is out of ’arm’s way, an’ ’ow can I do that if I know you’re still stuck ’ere in Bermondsey? Those docks will be a prime target for the Germans, you mark my words, Peg,’ Bill added.

Deep down Peggy knew there was sound sense to Bill’s argument. They had been childhood sweethearts and had married at twenty, and then had had to wait ten agonisingly long years before Barbara pointed out to her big sister that Peggy wasn’t getting plump as she had just been complaining about, and that the fact that her waistband on her favourite skirt – a slender twenty-four inches – would no longer do up as easily as it once had was very likely because Peggy had in fact fallen pregnant.

Peggy was dumbfounded, and then thrilled.

A fortnight later Bill actually passed out, bumping his head quite badly, when Peggy showed him a chitty from the doctor that confirmed what they had spent so many years longing for, and which they – or Peggy at least – had completely given up hope of ever happening.

Until the doctor had confirmed all was well to Peggy, she hadn’t dared say anything to Bill, knowing how many times he’d been cut to the quick when a missing or late period, or Peggy having a slight bulge in her normally flat tummy, hadn’t gone on to lead to a baby. Perhaps now they could get their marriage back to the happy place it had once been.

Understandably, their relationship had struggled as the childless years had mounted, and as everyone around them had seemed to be able to have a baby every year with depressing ease. Peggy had often had to bite back bitter tears in public when she’d heard a woman complaining about being pregnant again.

She would have given anything to be pregnant just once, while Bill had sought solace in the bookies or the pub, and occasionally over the last year or two, Barbara had begun to wonder if he hadn’t taken comfort in the arms of another, not that she ever dared raise the issue.

Being barren was bad enough, Peggy felt, but to be barren and alone, which could well be an inevitable consequence if Bill had found himself seeking a refuge from their worries elsewhere, was more than she felt she could cope with.

The doctor’s confirmation that, as he put it, ‘a happy event is in the pipeline’, had felt to Peggy very much like the strong glue the couple needed to stick things back together again between them, and Bill had seemed to agree, not that he had ever said as much.

But this sense of optimism hadn’t prevented Peggy’s pregnancy being full of problems and worries, as she had continued to menstruate as if she weren’t pregnant, she’d had terrible sickness from around virtually the very moment that Barbara had made the quip about the skirt waistband and more or less constantly since, until perhaps only a week or so previously.

This endless nausea had led to her losing a lot of weight, and so one day when Peggy was looking particularly blue, Barbara had echoed the doctor with, ‘That baby is going to take everything he or she needs from you – they are clever like that. And so although the very last thing you might feel like doing is eating or drinking, that is precisely what you must do, as you really do need to keep your strength up.’

Peggy was inclined to agree with her sister about the baby being quite selfish in getting what it needed. Right from the start her stomach had become very rounded – much more so, she was convinced, than other mothers-to-be she met who were roughly at the same stage as she – while her breasts were tender, with darkened and extended nipples that couldn’t bear being touched.

While the baby seemed quite happy tucked away inside Peggy, the rapid weight loss from his or her mother’s arms and legs and face had made her look very weary and drawn, while her extended belly and puffy ankles and fingers suggested that Peggy might be a lot less happy health-wise than her baby.

In fact, she had recently had to take off her wedding ring as her fingers had become too bloated for wearing it to be comfortable any longer. Now she wore the ring on a filigree gold chain around her neck that Bill had got from a jeweller’s in Aldgate, Peggy saying that this was an even more special way for her to wear the ring as it held the precious wedding ring as close to her heart as it could possibly be.

The posters going up around London suggested it was going to be downright dangerous to stay in the city. Peggy knew that Ted would be needed on the river and this meant that Barbara would stay by his side, no matter what.

‘Peggy, I can’t stay ’ere as I’ve got my papers,’ Bill said as he sat on the other side of the kitchen table to her, ‘an’ I think you know that’s true for you too, as it’s likely that round ’ere it’ll all be bombed to smithereens an’ back.’

Peggy’s breath juddered. Bill was right, but his blunt words rattled her, in part as she immediately thought of what Barbara and Ted might be going to have to face.

Bill’s words were simple, but these were such big things he was saying. Of course she knew that she had a treasured new life growing inside – made all the more precious by the long time that she and Bill had had to wait for such a wondrous thing to occur – and so when push came to shove she would do what was best for their much-longed-for baby. And now that Bill had voiced his concerns about how dangerous London was very likely to be, she didn’t want him to worry about her and the baby when he would have quite enough to fret about just looking out for himself while he was away fighting.

She would go, of course she would.

But she wasn’t happy about it. She had never spent time away from Bermondsey before; it was a modest area, but it was home.

In terms of what needed to be done in order for her to go, it wasn’t too bad. Peggy and Bill rented their house and it had been let to them along with the furniture they used. They didn’t have many possessions and very few clothes, and so Peggy knew that with Bill away she could easily make use of Barbara’s offer of storage space in the eaves of her and Ted’s roof, which was reached through a small trapdoor on their tiny landing, for Peggy to put their spare clothes and some of their wedding present crockery and so forth, if she did decide to be evacuated herself.

Peggy was sure that if she supervised the packing then Ted would actually do it for her, as she got so tired these days she couldn’t face the idea of putting things in tea crates (of which Ted could get a ready supply at the docks) herself, and then Ted would borrow a handcart to lug everything over to his so that it could be safely stowed away.

‘Go,’ Bill urged once more, cutting across her thoughts. ‘Go and stay somewhere that’s safer – you’ll be doing it for our baby, remember.’

Peggy understood what he was saying, but she could feel the ties of community entwined around her very tightly, and so she and Bill had to talk long into the night before she could find any sense of peace, and it was only after he had held her snugly for an hour once they had gone to bed that she was able properly to rest.

Chapter Four

The next morning at just gone seven Peggy kissed Bill long and hard in the privacy of their home, and then, after he’d swung his heavy canvas kitbag up and onto his shoulder, she walked at his side to the church hall, where there was already a heaving group of raw recruits and their loved ones saying goodbye as uniformed officers and civilian officials walked around and about with clipboards and organised those leaving into groups designated for particular buses to Victoria station.

During her pregnancy Peggy had discovered that tears were never far away, and this Friday morning was no exception. She also felt a bit dizzy after just a couple of minutes, standing on the edge of the melee alongside Bill, as there were so many people bustling this way and that that it made for the sort of constantly changing vista that led to travel sickness.

Bill smiled at her and said, ‘Peg, don’t wait around. You ’ead on to your Barbara’s for a cup of tea. There’s no point you stayin’ ’ere just to wear yerself out. We said our goodbyes earlier and now your work is to look after our babbie. I see Reece Pinkly over there and so I’ll ’ave someone to look after me, don’t you fear, my love.’

It was too much for Peggy, and she found herself violently sobbing on Bill’s shoulder.

Just for a moment, she wished she wasn’t an expectant mother. It felt too much responsibility, and in any case, just what sort of world was it going to be that in a very few months she would be bringing a poor defenceless baby into? How would she be able to manage? What if the future were very dark for them all? There was no guarantee that the Germans wouldn’t end the war victorious, and then where would they all be?

Bill held her close for a minute and then he took a step back and looked at her seriously. ‘Peggy, it’s time for you to go,’ he said softly but firmly, and he stepped forward to give her back a final rub. ‘I’d say I’ll write, but you know that’s not my strong point… Still, I’ll do my best, Peg.’

With great reluctance Peggy edged away from him, not daring to look back as she knew that if she did, she wouldn’t be able to let him leave.

Peggy made her way slowly out of the church hall and crossed the street to stand with some other wives as they gathered on the pavement outside the meeting point.

She was unable to say for certain if she had managed to grab a final glimpse of Bill as she craned her head this way and that to look through the open door to the church hall, trying to pick him out from the constantly moving mass of people. Unfortunately the men all looked similar in their dark wool suits and Homburg hats (most of them having dressed in their best clothes to go), while more and more wives and children were now cramming the pavements around her, squeezing close, and suddenly Peggy felt nauseous and unbearably oppressed.

She staggered slightly for the first few steps as she headed in the direction of her sister’s house but then she felt calmer and a little more certain of herself as she moved along the pavement.

There was a thrumming engine noise behind her, and a horn blasted out as a gaily painted charabanc that looked so hideously at odds with Peggy’s dark mood began to inch by.

With a whump of her heart, Peggy saw Bill standing up in front of his seat, with his face pressed sideways to the narrow sliding bit at the top of the window, and he was waving frantically at his wife. Peggy could see the shadow of Reece Pinkly alongside.

‘Peggy Delbert, I love you!’ was a shout Peggy thought she heard above the din as now some wives and kiddies were pushing past her to run right beside the moving vehicle, some even banging the charabanc’s sides as it edged its way through the grimy street.

She hoped she had caught Bill’s words – he clearly had been saying something to her – but she couldn’t prevent a slither of concern that perhaps some little mite would take a fall as he or she ran beside the bus, slipping to a heinous end under the rear wheels, and so she felt thoroughly discombobulated, quite done in with her undulating feelings. Bill’s declaration of what she hoped was love now felt tainted somehow by the worry of the children running beside the large vehicle.

‘Bill, I’ll look after our baby, I will, I will,’ she shouted back, her hands either side of her mouth in an attempt to make her voice as loud as possible. She hoped against hope that her husband could feel the strength and resolution in her cry, even though she knew he was already out of earshot.

She hoped also that he knew she was feeling the pain of his absence almost as sharply as if she had lost one of her own limbs. She had married him for better or for worse, and they had had the ‘for worse’ for too long – she was now determined on the ‘for better’.

Evacuation simply had to be for the better. Didn’t it?

Chapter Five

‘Yer better give Barbara ten minutes on ’er own with our Jessie and Connie,’ advised Ted, when he ran into Peggy as she was trudging towards her sister’s house just a couple of minutes later. ‘We’ve jus’ told ’em they’re to be evacuated on Monday mornin’ along with the rest of their school an’ it didn’t go down well.’

Peggy couldn’t fail but notice how deep were etched the lines on the face of her brother-in-law all of a sudden. He was only in his early thirties, but just at that moment, as he stood half in a weak shaft of early-morning sunlight and half in heavy shadow, she could see exactly how Ted would look at age sixty. Then she hoped that he would make it to such advancing years, and not be cut down in his prime as many people would inevitably be during the war.

‘How did they take it, the poor little mites?’ she asked, swallowing her sad feelings down and trying to concentrate instead on Connie and Jessie. ‘I really feel for them as they’ll hate being apart from you and Barbara. And I’ve promised my Bill that I’m going to go out of London too. I don’t really want to, but if I stay and something happens to the baby, then I’ll never forgive myself, and he won’t either.’

Ted nodded to show his approval of Peggy’s decision, and then he confessed that it had been very hard for him and Barbara to find the right words to break the news of the forthcoming evacuation to the children.

They had found it a difficult line to tread, he explained, as they wanted to make it sound as positive an experience as possible for Jessie and Connie, without there being any option for them not to go, but with it all being couched in a manner that wouldn’t make the children worry too much once they had gone to their billets about Ted and Barbara remaining in London to face whatever might be going to happen.

‘Connie seemed the most taken aback, which were a shock, but that could be because we’re more used to seeing Jessie lookin’ bothered an’ so we didn’t really notice it so much on ’im. Still, it were a few minutes I don’t care to repeat any time soon, and Barbara were lookin’ right tearful by the time I ’ad to go to work and so she’ll be glad to ’ave you there, I’m sure,’ Ted confided to his sister-in-law.

Peggy went to touch Ted on the arm in comfort, but then thought better of it. He looked too tightly wound for such an easy platitude.

She contented herself instead by saying she was sure that he and Barbara were doing the best thing and that they would have broken the news of evacuation to the children in exactly the right way.

Nearly everyone, she’d heard, was going to evacuate their children out of London and so it wouldn’t be much fun for those that didn’t go, she added, as they wouldn’t have any playmates, while schooling would be a problem, too as the government was going to try and make sure that all state schooling was taken out of the city.

Peggy thought she saw the glint of a tear in the corner of one of Ted’s eyes as she spoke, but then he cleared his throat sharply as he averted his head, and added quickly that he had to go or else his pay would be docked, and with that he walked away curtly before she could say anything else or bid him farewell.

Peggy remained where she was standing, wondering if Barbara had had long enough on her own with the children, or if she could go and call on her now. She felt she had been on her feet for quite some time already that morning and over the last few days she had grown a bit too large not to be having regular sit-downs.

Then she saw Susanne Pinkly hurrying in her direction, with a cheery sounding, ‘Peggy, I need to talk to you but I’m late for school – can you walk over to St Mark’s with me? I was going to come and see you at lunchtime, but this will save me an errand if you can spare me a couple of minutes now?’

Peggy and Susanne Pinkly were good friends, having been at school together from the age of five, and later in the same intake at teacher’s training college before they finally simultaneously landed jobs at the local primary school where they had once been willing pupils.

They’d also spent an inordinate amount of time during their teenage years discussing the merits of various local lads and how they imagined their first kiss would be. Susanne was fun to be with, and was never short of admirers who were drawn to her open face and joyful laugh. Peggy had often envied Susanne her bubbly nature that had the men flocking, as Peggy was naturally more serious and introverted, and so when Bill had made it clear he thought her a bit of all right, it was a huge relief as she had been fast coming to the conclusion that the opposite sex were hard to attract.

Although some schools wouldn’t let married teachers work, fortunately this hadn’t been the case at St Mark’s Primary School. While Susanne was still an old maid, being positively spinsterish now at thirty-one, Peggy had married Bill just a term into her first job without much thought as to what this might mean for her in the working world. Luckily St Mark’s didn’t have a hard and fast policy as regards making married female employees give up work, as some schools did, which Peggy found herself very pleased about, and increasingly so when she didn’t become pregnant for such a long time. She couldn’t have borne being stuck at home on her own and without anything to do – she would have felt such a failure, she knew.

However, when she fell at last with the baby, Peggy had had to stop working at the end of the summer term as her nausea had got so bad, and since then she very much missed her lively pupils and the joshing camaraderie of the staffroom. Bill spent long hours at the bus depot, and he was rather fond of a tipple with the lads on a Friday and a Saturday night if he wasn’t rostered on the weekend shifts. Barbara’s time was taken every weekday by her job at the haberdashery, and so quite often the days felt to Peggy as if they were dragging by. She discovered all too quickly that there was only so much layette knitting an expectant mother could enjoy doing.

It was still up in the air whether Peggy would ever be able to return to work following the birth of the baby, as most employers didn’t want a mother as an employee, and Peggy knew that if in time she did want to return to her classroom – after the war with Germany was over, of course – then she would have to make a special plea to the local education authority that she be allowed to go back to work.

Before that could happen, she and Bill would have to decide between themselves that she should resume her job, and then they would need to sort out somebody to look after the baby during the day, which might not be so easy to do.

Bill didn’t earn much as a bus driver (his route was the busy number 12 between Peckham and Oxford Circus), and aside from the fact that Peggy missed her pupils, and she knew she had been a good teacher, she suspected too that one day she and Bill might well feel very happy if she could start to add once again to the family pot by bringing in a second wage.

Peggy turned around and, linking arms with her friend, she walked along with Susanne, who wanted to see if Peggy was going to evacuate herself.

When Peggy nodded, Susanne cried perhaps a trifle too gaily, ‘Music to my ears! I’m having to stay behind to work at the bakery, as you know Ma’s been taken poorly and Reece is leaving today with your Bill. But if you’re choosing to be evacuated and are planning on going on Monday as most people round here seem to be, then St Mark’s needs another responsible adult to help escort the children to wherever they are being sent to, and I couldn’t help but think of you! So far there’s Miss Crabbe and old Mr Hegarty to look after them – well, Mr Jones is going too, but he won’t want to be bothered with the nitty-gritty, as it were, and in any case, he’s coming back just about the next day. One-Eye Braxton will be there and the kiddies run rings round him – and so I thought you would be the perfect person to go and keep an eye on both pupils and teachers.’

There was definitely a logic to this despite the chirpy tone of Susanne’s words, Peggy could see, as she was familiar with the children and they with her, and she knew the quite often crotchety Miss Crabbe (‘Crabbe by name, and Crabby by nature’ was Peggy and Susanne’s private joke about her) and the ancient Mr Hegarty (who was increasingly doddery these days after teaching for over forty years) would make for dour overseers for the evacuation journey for the children, and with headmaster Mr Jones planning on not sticking around…

And if Peggy went with the children of St Mark’s, then it would probably mean that she would end up being billeted near where Jessie and Connie would be, and this would be reassuring for Barbara and Ted; and for herself too, it had to be said.

They’d reached the school gates, and Susanne nodded and then smiled encouragement at Peggy, obviously willing her to say yes.

‘Let me think about it overnight, and I’ll let you know first thing in the morning as I’m not quite certain about the other options for the evacuation of expectant mothers,’ Peggy said, trying to look resigned and as if she shouldn’t be taken for granted, but failing to keep the corners of her mouth from turning up into the tiniest of smiles.

Then Peggy caught Susanne looking pointedly at her expanded girth so she added, ‘I think it’s probably fine for me to come with your lot, but I just want to consider it for a while as I don’t want to promise you anything I can’t actually do.’

Susanne was already nipping across the playground towards the steps up to the girls’ entrance as she called over her shoulder, ‘Honestly, Peggy, it’s just to make sure they don’t get up to too much mischief on the train – and that’s just the teachers! And Mrs Ayres will be there too, and Mr Braxton, and so you won’t be too heavily outnumbered by the kiddies.’

This latest comment wasn’t necessarily as hugely reassuring to Peggy as Susanne probably meant it to be, because although as sweet-natured a widow as Mrs Ayres undoubtedly was, she was a gentle soul, and even the youngest children could boss her around with absolutely no trouble, while Mr Braxton, who had had such a severe facial injury in the Great War that meant he’d lost an eye and part of a cheekbone, and who now wore a not very convincing prosthetic contraption that attached to his spectacles, also had problems in keeping the children in line, in large part as they didn’t really like looking directly at him.

Peggy sighed. She could already imagine how this was very probably going to work out for her.

Several minutes later, as Peggy made her way at long last over to Barbara’s, Jessie and Connie were walking along the street to school in the opposite direction, and they were so deep in conversation that they didn’t notice their auntie until they were almost level with her.

Peggy thought they both looked wan and anxious – the news of leaving their mother and father to head for pastures new with their classmates had obviously hit them hard.

‘Hello, you two. You’d better look sharp or else you’re going to be late,’ she said. ‘But first, I’ll tell you a secret. If it helps cheer you up, I think I might be coming on the train with you and your fellow school pupils on Monday. Won’t that be fun?’

They stared at each other with intent, serious expressions, and then they all laughed as Peggy had to add, ‘Well, maybe “fun” is the wrong word, but I daresay you know what I mean. If I can get a billet near to you, then you’ll know there’s always me to come to if either of you feel a bit miserable. And I shall be able to come to you if I’m feeling a bit sad about being away from home too. Is that a deal?’

Judging by their nods, it looked as if a pact had been made.

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—’

‘Behave yourself, Larry, and keep your eyes turned to the front of the classroom at all times. Ahem. What I was hoping was that someone might say “man”,’ Susanne interrupted very sharply without pausing between her admonishment of Larry and voicing what the word was that she had been wishing a pupil would say. ‘Now, what about one of you coming up with another slang word that you can think of where several others can be used?’

‘Bog.’

‘Thank you, Larry,’ said Susanne in the sort of voice designed to shut Larry up, but that at the same time indicated to both Larry and the rest of the class that Larry wasn’t really being thanked at all and that really it was high time that he buttoned his lip.

‘Lavvy,’ somebody shouted out before Susanne could say anything else to get the lesson back to where she wanted it to be.

The class was waking up now to what Susanne was wanting from them. Almost.

‘Crapper.’

‘WC.’

‘Jakes.’

‘Karzi!’

Susanne tried not to think of what any of the posher billets might think to language such as this as she attempted and failed to conceal a smile, although she supposed they would most likely all have to ask their way to the outhouse or the toilet in their new homes at some time or other.

‘A polite term, children, remember,’ she said encouragingly.

The following silence told Susanne that ‘polite’ was quite a hurdle for some to overcome.

‘Pissoir,’ Jessie called eventually, looking down quickly, although not quickly enough that Susanne couldn’t see a cheeky cast to his eyes.

Their teacher had to turn to write on the blackboard so that her class couldn’t see the lift of her eyebrows that indicated she was suppressing a feeling lying smack bang in the centre of exasperation and humour.

East Street market was only a ten-minute stroll from Elephant along the Walworth Road, and when Elephant failed to come up to Barbara’s expectations as to the shopping opportunities, and as Peggy felt that she had a second wind as walking around was making her feel better, they decided to head towards Camberwell so that they could go to the market.

One purchase had been searched for in Elephant without success. Ted already had from his and Barbara’s honeymoon a long time ago a smallish cardboard suitcase that had long been holding Jessie’s large collection of painted lead soldiers in their colourful garb of Crimean War uniform (the softness of the metal having meant that Ted was forever straightening bent rifles or skew-whiff feather hackles on the headwear of the tiny fighters). Barbara had decided that Jessie could be sent off with his possessions carefully stowed in that suitcase, with the soldiers left behind in a drawer in his bedroom ready and waiting for him to play with after he returned from evacuation.

A second suitcase was needed, this time for Connie, as on the bus to Elephant Barbara had realised as she and Peggy talked about the evacuation that there wasn’t a guarantee that both children would be kept together and so each child needed to be catered for and packed for quite separately.

There had already been a run on all the small cases, though, as presumably other parents had been quick to snap them up for the evacuation, and this meant that only the big cases were left and they were all too large for even Peggy to lug about.

Barbara cursed roundly when she realised this, and then Peggy sat down on a step to wait as Barbara darted in and out of several shops just to be certain, before she returned empty-handed and announced that they would have to head along the Walworth Road in the direction of Camberwell in order that they could go to East Street market.

‘Barbara, I’ve been thinking,’ said Peggy as they walked along. ‘I’ve a spare cardi that Connie can take – it’ll be a bit big, I know, but it’s practically brand new, and she can roll up the cuffs, and actually she’s grown so much over the summer holidays that I don’t think it will totally swamp her. It’s that one with the little buttons on that you liked when we took the children egg-hunting in the park at Easter.’

Her sister smiled her thanks, and promised that, her treat, they would stop for a bun and a hot drink after they had finished their shopping.

At the knitting shop, Barbara went to choose some four-ply to knit Jessie a pullover – she was a very fast knitter, and although she didn’t think she’d have enough time before the children left on Monday to finish the sleeves to make Jessie a long-sleeved winter jumper, she thought she could manage a pullover in the time she had.

‘Peg, help me choose the colour that is closest to that of the cardi you’re thinking of for our Connie,’ asked Barbara.

When Peggy said it was quite a bright green, Barbara then put down the skein of pale grey wool she had been holding, and chose the one that most approximated the green of the cardi for Jessie’s woolly, so that the twins’ new knitwear would more or less match.

Peggy bought some dark yellow wool, as she thought she could make Connie a woollen hat, as if they were going to be out in the far reaches of a country area where they’d be exposed to the elements, it would be perishingly cold in a couple of months, and Peggy knew for a fact (although she doubted Barbara did) that Connie’s hat from the previous winter was lying somewhere on top of one of the warehouse roofs on the docks. Peggy knew this because she had seen Connie throw it up there when she was showing off to Larry and his chums as to her hurling prowess on the last day of the spring term just after the school had broken up for the holidays.

When Connie realised her aunt had seen her wondrous overarm lob, Connie begged Peggy not to say anything to her mother, and Peggy had agreed, as Connie’s hat had had a tough winter, having often been used to carry marbles and all sorts of other things, many of them filthy and sharply barbed, and it had got distinctly scruffy to the point that it wouldn’t in any case meet Barbara’s exacting standards as to what ‘would do’ for another winter.

Peggy knew that Jessie had a grey worsted peaked cap that she didn’t doubt that he would be taking on his evacuation. It wouldn’t be of very much use in the keeping-warm sense when the harsh winter weather really set in, but she couldn’t imagine him wearing anything else that might be cosier (i.e., anything knitted) in case this led to a new and possibly more vicious spate of teasing.

As they were about to leave the wool shop, Barbara saw some homemade knitted toys that were piled in a large wicker basket close to the shop door, and so she chose a small grey teddy for Jessie and a black and white panda for Connie. ‘I know they’re too big really for toys like this, but if they’re homesick they can take these into their beds for a quick cuddle,’ Barbara explained.

‘That’s a good idea. And why don’t you give the toys a dab of your best scent too and wrap them tightly in paper to keep the pong in, and then there’ll be a smell of you when they unwrap them?’ said Peggy, to which her sister nodded agreement.

Then she reminded Barbara that the children would need new scarves and so Barbara bought some thick navy wool to knit them some, and some thinner wool in the same colour to make them both some gloves, saying luckily the weather was still summery and so she could get to this knitting once the children had left, as she was sure they’d love to receive a parcel from home.

Just then Peggy spied a machine in the corner, clattering away nineteen to the dozen – she knew what it was: a name-tape maker.

The headmaster had requested that all the children’s clothing was labelled with their names, and although at first the shopkeeper said his wife was too busy with other children’s names, he then looked at all that Peggy and Barbara were just about to buy from him and, with a sigh of defeat, he said that as a special favour the name tapes could be ready first thing in the morning if Barbara wanted to pay the ‘premium rate’ for a special service.

For a moment Barbara baulked as she didn’t approve of anyone taking advantage of a situation where a customer had no choice, simply for a shopkeeper to earn themselves an extra few pennies when they had their customers over a barrel. But then she relented as the name tapes would save her so much time, otherwise she would have to embroider the children’s initials on each garment.

With only the smallest discernible huff of irritation, Barbara looked the shopkeeper in the eye and said she would be happy to pay the premium rate, at which point Peggy turned her head sharply towards her sister as an indication of how unusual an acquiescence this was. The shopkeeper had the grace to look a bit uncomfortable in the glare of Barbara’s unnerving stare as carefully he jotted down the names of Jessie and Connie. Peggy didn’t like to think what would happen if he made a mistake in the spelling.

A little further down the market, there was a luggage stall that had lots of bags and cases piled up. It too had run out of the small cardboard suitcases that Barbara really wanted, but fortunately it did have a wide collection of holdalls and so Barbara chose a sturdy blue one for Connie’s things to be stowed away inside.

Another stall was selling children’s clothing and from here Barbara bought the children new vests, pants and socks, and a couple of shirts for Jessie (one grey and one blue) and a pretty sky-blue checked dress for Connie as well as a smart woollen red herringbone coat for her too.

‘Jessie had a new mackintosh last year that’s still got plenty of room for him, and although this red coat is going to be big on Connie, at least she’ll be able to grow into it,’ said Barbara, as she asked the stallholder to wrap the coat in brown paper, which he tied up with string, while all the other new purchases were carefully folded and placed in the holdall after it had had a good shake-out upside down with its zip opened, just to make sure there was no dust lurking inside. ‘And they have their school blazers that they can wear under their coats if it gets frosty or snowy. We’re so lucky being able to make sure they go with everything they need – I know some families are having to penny-pinch to send them away with even one decent set of clothes, let alone enough to keep them warm if they are away long enough for the bad winter weather to come.’

Peggy looked up at the clear and sunny sky that had only the smallest and fluffiest of clouds dotted here and there, and thought it was very hard to imagine that it might be snowing before too long.

Before she could get too lost in her thoughts, Peggy made herself rally and concentrate on what extra she might need to take for her own needs. She bought herself some new underwear, three pairs of natural tan fully fashioned Du Pont stockings (her favourite) and a pair of smart new gloves, and these too were placed into Connie’s holdall. Luckily it turned out to be a very forgiving bag as it seemed able to contain much more than it looked as if it could, which was just as well considering that Peggy had forgotten her own shopping basket, she had been so caught up in the drama of seeing Bill off.

The sisters felt as if they had earned their toasted teacake and Camp coffee, and so they went into a small café on the way to the bus stop.

As they sat down, Peggy felt once more that she was about to cry.

Barbara saw immediately that it had all got a bit much for her, and so she said, ‘Let it out, Peg, nobody’s going to mind. It must have been very difficult for you to watch Bill go off.’

Being given permission to have a quick sob did the trick, Peggy realised a minute later, as she’d been able after all to keep her tears in check.

In fact, she was now smiling as she told Barbara for the second time how daft Bill had looked as he had angled his head so that he could shout to her as he was driven by in the charabanc with Reece Pinkly chuckling along beside him.

There was a call from behind the counter, and as Barbara stood up to go and get their teacakes, she opened her handbag to retrieve something, and then pushed a small white paper bag in her sister’s direction. This was a surprise to Peggy, and she couldn’t prevent a cry of pleasure when inside she saw a brand-new Coty lipstick in her favourite Cardinal Red.

‘I nipped into the chemist’s while you were having a rest on that step at Elephant,’ said Barbara as she passed Peggy her teacake. ‘Pregnant or not, we can’t have you letting the side down outside London, and showing them we don’t know how to make ourselves presentable, now, can we?’

Chapter Seven

The hours raced by over the weekend as everybody did their best to get ready for Monday morning.

Connie had to be drafted in to help Barbara sew the last few name tapes in discreet places on the various items of clothing for herself and her brother as this turned out to be a much more fiddly job than anyone had anticipated, or at least it was at the speed they were trying to attach them.

Barbara, while a good knitter, was impatient when sewing at the best of times, which wasn’t helpful in a situation like this when they were working against the clock.

Often when standing behind the counter at Mrs Truelove’s haberdasher’s, when local women were asking advice on the merits of one thread over another for particular fabrics, she could barely withhold a private ironic grimace at the thought of her not practising what she preached, which was nearly always ‘feel your way into it, and go slowly until you are used to how much the thread and the fabric like one another’.

Luckily Connie wasn’t a bad seamstress in spite of being so young. In fact, for the previous Christmas, she had designed and made Barbara a cloth carry-all that had various pockets and compartments for her mother to keep her knitting needles and patterns tidy in. The quality of both the design and the stitching was so good that Barbara felt a sudden flip of envy as she knew her daughter’s skills with cotton and needle had now surpassed her own by far, and Connie was very quick and rhythmical too in her sewing, which meant that all the stitches were a uniform size that already looked to be verging on the professional.

The men of the Ross family weren’t getting away with sitting around idly either over the weekend, Barbara was making sure, as from the Friday afternoon there seemed a never-ending list of things that she wanted either Ted or Jessie, or sometimes both, to go and get from the shops or round about.

It was the first time the children had gone a whole weekend without being let out to play, and they felt very grown up.

They also wanted to stay close to Ted and Barbara, now that it was beginning to sink in that they really were going to be evacuated first thing on Monday morning, and by that evening they would be spending their very first night in beds other than at number five Jubilee Street.

When the twins caught a moment together they couldn’t help but try to guess what it might be like, wherever they were going. Connie said she rather hoped their billet would have a dog for them to play with, while Jessie said he wished there’d be lots of food and not too many rules. Then they’d grow quiet, thinking of all the things they loved about their home and Bermondsey.

According to Barbara, the purchases of the various things they needed to buy were to be allocated as follows:

Toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste for each child: Jessie

Soap, ditto: Jessie

Shoe polish, plus soft yellow dusters to shine the shoes, ditto (they hadn’t been asked to take this, but Barbara insisted a shoe-cleaning kit was ‘an essential’): Jessie

Notebooks and pencils, ditto (again, not on the list, but Barbara was firm): Ted

New combs, ditto: Jessie

Postcards and stamps, ditto: Ted

Knives, forks, spoons and tin mugs, ditto: Ted and Jessie

Raisins and prunes, ditto: Ted and Jessie

Large labels with string for their names and schools to be written on, along with their destination, ditto: Connie

Two containers for the butter, ditto: Connie

And so on, with Barbara’s list ending up quite possibly four times as long.

Barbara and Ted, and Connie and Jessie were heartily sick and tired of it all well before they had sorted everything out that needed doing.

Barbara and Ted felt especially snappish and worn out, although they tried very hard to mask this and to put on a cheerful and brave face for the children, so that the twins would have nice memories of their last weekend in Jubilee Street.

Barbara was tetchy because she had been up well into the small hours on the Friday evening as she tried to finish knitting Jessie’s green pullover, which was a hideous colour to knit with by electric light, she’d been irked to discover, and so she regretted not getting after all the dove-grey wool as that would have been much easier on her eyes.

Even later that Friday night, after stowing her knitting needles away in Connie’s Christmas present, Barbara didn’t go straight to bed but instead she spent a while agonising over writing a note for whoever would be taking in Connie and Jessie, as she set down a little about each child, with their likes and dislikes, and giving her and Ted’s fulsome thanks to the unknown hosts for the billeting of their children.

As she finally lay down in bed, Ted’s soft snores not breaking their rhythm, she had worn him out so with her myriad errands, she could hear the first chirps of the wild birds’ dawn chorus and see a faint lightening of the sky over to the east of the city, and Barbara realised the last time this had happened to her was when she was still breastfeeding the twins. The pang in her chest was for the hopes she had had as she nursed her babies, and the loss of innocence that Jessie and Connie were almost definitely about to face.

Ted was just as frazzled when he woke up, although probably a bit better-tempered about it than his wife, as he found it very difficult to get cross or frustrated about anything, being one of those perpetually sunny and even-tempered sort of chaps, a trait that Barbara found could be most infuriating if she were feeling niggled herself and all Ted could do was smile about whatever was aggravating her.

Anyway, once poor Ted had finished doing all of Barbara’s not inconsiderable bidding, he then had to trot over to Peggy’s house early on the Saturday afternoon to do all that she wanted as regards what should be packed up of her and Bill’s possessions for storage, and what should be put to one side for her to take away for her own evacuation, as well as what should be given away to those more needy.

Peggy looked tired and jowly, with dry skin and a heavy footfall, and so once he saw her diminished state, Ted was eager to help her as much as possible. However, he could have done without forgetting the large suitcase he’d asked to borrow from Big Jessie to pack some of the bits and pieces into, and so no sooner had he arrived at Peggy’s than he had to leave immediately in order to head over to Big Jessie’s to collect the case. All the houses were almost within spitting distance of one another, but still…

Worse came a little over thirty minutes later, just when Ted was looking forward fervently to the time when he could have a few minutes to relax after he had completed his tasks. He longed for the moment he would sink into his favourite chair and put his feet up for a quiet hour (accompanied by a glass of stout from the hole in the wall at the Jolly, he fantasised).

It was just at this moment that Peggy reminded her brother-in-law he needed to rustle up a handcart from somewhere to transport all the stuff over to his and Barbara’s, and also that he had to make a further trip to the church hall as the local vicar was making a collection of bric-a-brac to keep in case people got bombed out and needed things when their houses came tumbling down, and so she had put aside a pile of possessions that needed to be transported over there too.

Ted groaned; after his silly schoolboy error with his memory failure concerning Big Jessie’s big suitcase, he could barely credit it that he’d also forgotten about the damn handcart. He blamed Barbara for his oversight, although he thought this prudent not to share with Peggy, as he knew how close the sisters were. Barbara had most surely sent him on too many errands, Ted decided, and his day had been so busy that now he could hardly remember where his backside and his elbow were.

Then, the moment he had done the running hither and thither – and he had worked up quite a sweat getting all of Peggy and Bill’s stuff for storage piled in the parlour at Jubilee Street, after which he had to return the handcart to its owner (who, Ted discovered, had a couple of people standing outside the yard where the handcart was kept as they were waiting to borrow it too, as Peggy wasn’t the only local resident busy packing up a house for the duration and who needed various possessions moving around) – he set off on his return home clutching his longed-for jug of stout only to find Barbara insisting that before he sat down, Ted should take all of Peggy’s possessions for storage upstairs as she couldn’t have them cluttering up the (rarely used) parlour for a moment longer.

Somehow the stack of Peggy and Bill’s possessions seemed to have multiplied in size, Ted thought, as he plodded up and down the stairs, and then, with Jessie’s help, hoicked everything up the stepladder and from there hoisted it all into the spot in the roof space where (Barbara’s instructions again) it had to be stacked neatly and finally covered with an old sheet tucked in all around to keep the dust off.

Ted closed the trapdoor to the roof space with a sigh of relief… after which Barbara pointed out that he had to return the suitcase to Big Jessie as his brother had promised the loan of it to somebody else and that if Ted had had his wits about him he’d have taken it with him when he took the handcart back.

Just for a second Ted felt the mildest of swear words almost bubble up, but he bit it back down, telling himself that his stout was going to be extra special when he could finally sit down to sup it.

All in all, it was a very tiresome weekend at number five – nobody could remember a more trying couple of days, not even when Barbara’s parents had died. In fact, all of the Rosses were all kept so busy that Ted bought them fish and chips on both Friday and Saturday teatimes, which also had never happened before, although Barbara was quick to remind Jessie and Connie that this out-of-character behaviour was for a special treat only, and they weren’t to get used to this sort of extravagance.

Chapter Eight

On the Saturday teatime, Peggy arrived just before they sat down to eat, with droplets of perspiration beading her top lip as she clunked her hand case down in the hallway, but luckily Ted had already got in an extra portion of fish and chips for her, as well as some raw fish scraps for somebody else.

This ‘somebody else’ was Peggy and Bill’s tabby puss Fishy, now unhappily corralled into a sturdy cat basket Barbara had borrowed from a neighbour. Fishy was frankly livid about the whole thing and she arrived at Jubilee Street making her presence felt by creating the devil of a racket, mewling loudly as she clawed at the opening to the cat basket that Peggy had lovingly placed her in.

Fishy was being evacuated too, although in nothing like as drastic a manner as Peggy and the children. She was going to be seeing the war out billeted with Ted and Barbara.

The government had requested recently that pet owners have their dogs, cats and other animals put to sleep, and the London vets had been furiously busy since the edict as their waiting rooms had been crammed with tearful owners not wanting to destroy their beloved pets but feeling they were in an impossible situation and that this was the only thing they could do.

Although it was Bill who was the real softie where cats were concerned, in recent months Peggy had become very fond of Fishy, the more so since Fishy would alternate some squeaky upper tones with deep bass purrs as on the marital bed they snuggled close together during their afternoon naps once Peggy had stopped work.

Peggy had made Ted and Barbara promise that they would do all that they could to avoid such an unnecessary end for the little tabby as she couldn’t bear the thought of putting down such a healthy animal so long before her natural time, and especially when she was such an affectionate creature as well as being an exceptionally good mouser.

‘Don’t worry, Peggy, we’ll look after ’er fer yer. An’ if anyone official asks about ’er, I’ll take ’er with me to the docks, as they always need ratters and mousers at the warehouses, and she can ’ave a fine ol’ time there as a working cat. I’ll do my best for ’er,’ Ted promised, ‘and it’ll be our way of thanking you for keepin’ an eye out for our Jessie and Connie.’

Peggy found Ted’s words very comforting.

She was worn out. Once Ted had lugged away the stuff for storage or passing on, Peggy had spent the rest of the Saturday afternoon cleaning the house that Bill and she had rented from top to bottom, making sure everything was left spick and span and so clean that any new tenant could quite literally have eaten their food straight off the floor if they were so inclined. Then Peggy had to deliver the keys back to her and Bill’s landlord before returning to collect Fishy who was basketed up and waiting on the doorstep to go to Jubilee Street, with Peggy’s packed hand case alongside.

And so by the time the Ross family was pulling up chairs to Barbara’s kitchen table on the Saturday teatime, with slices of bread already buttered and large pieces of hot battered cod and chips in newspaper waiting to be divvied up between them, Peggy was feeling tuckered out and pretty much at the end of her tether.

She was going to spend the Saturday and Sunday nights in Jessie’s bed, while across the bedroom Jessie was going to top-and-tail with his sister. Peggy urged Barbara not to bother about putting clean sheets on Jessie’s bed for her just for the two nights, but Barbara insisted and Peggy felt too exhausted to argue about it any further, and the moment she had given Fishy the fish scraps for supper she had an early night.

Fishy proved to be an excellent distraction for Connie and Jessie, who were growing increasingly fretful and tense as the enormity of what was about to happen to them – separation from all that they knew – was feeling very real now.

Ted tied some feathers to a bit of twine and showed the children how to get Fishy chasing after it. Fishy seemed to have boundless energy and was quite happy to play for a long while, the children encouraging her to run up and down the stairs with them. It proved a very good way for them all to let off steam, although possibly quite noisy for Peggy and her early night, and the result was the twins went to bed feeling a whole lot better than they had done before Fishy arrived, with the puss proving to have strong nerves after having had the chance to explore everywhere at number five.

Try as they might, Jessie and Connie couldn’t remember anyone ever sleeping over in their house, and once they were in their bedroom it felt very strange having somebody else under their roof for the night, even though of course they knew their Aunt Peggy well already.

The twins agreed, though, that it wasn’t as much fun as they had hoped it would be, as Barbara had strictly forbidden the twins from talking to each other in their bedroom, saying that Peggy needed her sleep and they were to wake her on pain of death only, and so they had to content themselves with making a great show of creeping about as they got ready to climb into bed.

They couldn’t help pressing their feet on each other’s when Fishy, now snuggled into Peggy’s back and feeling content with a full belly of the fish scraps that Ted had brought back for her, began to purr her squeaky purr more loudly than some people could snore.

In the morning, Jessie found Fishy sitting on his pillow staring intently at his face, presumably willing him to wake up.

Jessie looked back in silence at the tabby, and then carefully lifted in invitation the sheet and blanket that were covering him, to which Fishy gave Jessie a look as if to say, At last – I was really wondering what I was going to have to do to make you understand The Rules! as she sidled off the pillow and past his face to sneak under the bedclothes to nestle in a furry curl against Jessie’s ribcage, before they both fell asleep once more.

Just as Jessie drifted off he thought that it was like having a small and very comforting hot-water bottle pressed close to his chest.

In fact, everyone was still so all-in that by the time Monday morning came around every single person at number five Jubilee Street overslept. Such a thing had never happened before.

‘Barbara. Barbara! ’Ave you seen the time?’ said Ted in a muffled, dozy voice. The sun was already quite a way up, and the birds’ dawn chorus had quietened down to little more than an occasional chirp.

It was the clink of the glass milk bottles being delivered and the sound of the muffled feet of the horse pulling the milk cart that had roused Ted from his sound sleep.

His wife had been snoozing very deeply and clearly she hadn’t fully come to as she inched closer to Ted under the protective arm he had over her.

Ted thought about putting the war on hold and letting them all sleep in; it was very tempting.

But then he realised that if he allowed that to happen, Barbara would never forgive him, and so he whispered, ‘Barbara, it’s getting on – it’s not far off seven thirty.’

Seven thirty! A whole hour later than when Barbara had planned she would get up.

With a start of comical proportions, Barbara catapulted herself out of bed and ran from the room to bang loudly on the other bedroom door. ‘We’re late. WE’RE LATE!!’ she shouted.

Fishy was terrified by the unexpected cacophony in a still-strange environment, and she shot out of the bedcovers at the opposite end of the bed to where she had gone in, which unfortunately was right beside Connie’s face, as she sought refuge hiding in the furthest and darkest corner under the bed.

Connie felt a surge of panic and she heard herself giving an anguished squeal at the sight of something furry, grey and stripy shooting out of her bed at the rate of knots a mere inch or so in front of her nose.

Jessie sat bolt upright, and it took him a second or two to work out why, while it clearly was his familiar bedroom, it all looked so different and a bit like looking at something in reverse in a mirror, before he remembered that he was sleeping for the very first time across the room from where he normally slept, in Connie’s bed. He felt for Fishy beside him, and then he realised that perhaps it was Fishy’s hasty exit that had led to Connie making such a noise.

The twins looked at each other and then across at Peggy, but she didn’t so much as break the rhythm of her stentorious breathing, she was still so soundly asleep.

So much for he and Connie having to creep around in case they woke her unnecessarily, Jessie thought as he sat up, stretched loudly and wildly, and then slipped his feet to the floor.

Barbara had planned a lavish breakfast spread of bacon, eggs and fried bread for everyone so that at least she knew they’d all be well set up for the day.

Needless to say, their late start meant that by the time everyone was dressed and downstairs, and Fishy was giving a cry that was definitely announcing it was high time for her breakfast, it was already ten to eight. And so the best Barbara could hurriedly prepare was tea and toast, and as they ate she made everyone cheese and pickle sandwiches for lunch that she hurriedly slapped together before she wrapped the sandwiches more carefully in waxed paper. Then they all got ready to walk together over to St Mark’s Primary School, Ted announcing that he’d go to work once he had seen the children were safely delivered to the school and had everything they needed.

‘And you’ve got to say goodbye to us, Daddy,’ Connie reminded him, her small voice a far cry from how she spoke ordinarily; it made both of her parents recall when she had been a tiny girl. Connie added, ‘We couldn’t go away with the school if you hadn’t said goodbye to us properly, could we, Jessie?’

Both Ted and Barbara felt a lump rising to their throats. Connie had inadvertently touched a raw nerve.

‘Look sharp, you two – but before we leave, let’s go through Mr Jones’s list one last time,’ said Peggy to the twins as they all put on their coats, seeing their parents needed a moment or two to compose themselves.

Ted meanwhile pressed on Peggy two £5 notes, so that she could dole out some pocket money to the children if she found herself billeted near to them, plus, he said, she’d have plenty over if they – or Peggy – needed anything that nobody so far had thought of, Peggy promising without being asked that she would keep a detailed account of what she spent on Jessie and Connie, and that she would return the money unspent if she were billeted somewhere else that was too far from the children for her to have much contact. This really was a significant sum and Peggy knew that Ted and Barbara could ill afford to waste it.

At last the little cavalcade was ready to set off, with Fishy keeping watch on them from an upstairs window. Everyone was clutching their gas masks in their brand-new cardboard boxes that had twine attached ready for the mask’s owner to loop over a shoulder, and after a little tussle with Peggy, Ted and Barbara manhandling between them the three items of luggage along the road.

As Jessie and Connie headed down Jubilee Street in the direction of school, the twins were reminded forcibly that it might be quite some time before they saw these familiar houses again.

Connie briefly slid her hand into Jessie’s, and announced, ‘I can’t believe it but I feel homesick already, when I haven’t yet gone. They are ugly old houses, I’m sure, but I know every one.’

Not one of them could think of what they should say back to Connie and so nobody said anything for a while, although Barbara made sure that she smiled comfortingly at Jessie to let him know that she realised that he’d also be finding the whole experience very strange even though he was keeping quiet.

As they walked along they saw families similarly heading to the school, although with none of the boisterous behaviour or whoops of laughter that normally denoted south-east London family outings. The children gave minute half-smiles in the direction of their pals, while the adults accompanying them nodded sombrely at their opposite numbers.

When they got close to St Mark’s, it was to see the unusual sight of four single-decker coaches already parked up in the road outside the playground, the drivers wearing matching peaked caps and standing together as they chatted, all the while taking deep drags on Senior Service unfiltered cigarettes.

‘Peggy, you go and report to Susanne, who’ll be most pleased to see you I don’t doubt, seeing the scrum that’s here already, and I’ll look after your handbag and suitcase while you sort yourself out,’ said Barbara, as she looked at those milling across the playground, and then indicated to her sister where she and Ted would be waiting with the children.

It wasn’t long before Peggy threaded her way back to her sister across the now-heaving playground as in the time she had been gone the mass of people gathered squashily in its confines had doubled.

Peggy reported that she and Connie and Jessie were all designated to the final coach, and this meant that they weren’t due to leave the school until eleven o’clock.

‘Mr Jones is going to ask all the parents to go in a minute as he thinks the children will start getting upset if their mothers and fathers stay too long,’ she told Barbara and Ted, followed by, ‘and Ted, you need to put our luggage over by the wall where that “4” has been chalked as this is the mark for those going in the last bus. It means our luggage will go on the same bus to the station that we also travel on. Then you both had better start saying your goodbyes, and after that the teachers and me shall take it from there.’

The schoolchildren of St Mark’s, in general, whether they be small five-year-olds or old-timers of eleven years of age, took the actual leave-taking in a much more stoical manner than many of the parents managed, as they said their goodbyes and took their final hugs (or, in the case of some of the sons and fathers, contented themselves merely with a brusque downwards pump of the hand). Most mothers and one or two of the fathers too had hankies out, and many weren’t at all embarrassed to be seen allowing the tears to flow freely.

Jessie and Connie kept the proverbial stiff upper lip, as Barbara leant down to tie to their coat buttonholes big parcel labels that matched the labels already attached to their luggage that had in large capital letters their name, their London address and the name of their school, and then she made sure that they each had a pencil stub in their pocket so that once they knew where they were going they could write that too in the space below Barbara’s writing.

‘Now, you take care of each other, an’ remember to be ’onest and polite to the people you are going to meet,’ said Ted. ‘An’ work ’ard at school, and don’t shirk on any errands or odd jobs around the ’ouse the people lookin’ after yer ask of yer both. Eat up everything they give you – there’s to be no leavin’ of anyfing or sayin’ yer don’t like it, mind.’

‘Send us a note the very minute you know where you are, and me and your dad will write back,’ added Barbara. ‘And do try to stick together in order that you are billeted together, remember. Hold hands when people come in to look at you, and try very hard not to take no for an answer if anyone tries to say that you can’t stay together. Have you understood, Connie and Jessie? It really is very important that you do.’

Connie and Jessie each gave their mother a look which implied that Barbara’s last instruction would obviously go without saying.

‘And remember that I’ve written letters for whoever takes you in, so don’t forget to hand those over,’ Barbara went on huskily, as she dabbed now beneath her eyes with a pressed and folded hanky.

The children were hugged tightly, as was Peggy, and when Barbara and Ted turned just before they headed out the school gate to the playground to give a final wave, it was to the reassuring sight that the twins were standing side by side, looking united and determined, their auntie standing behind them as she rested a hand on each of their shoulders.

‘Look after Fishy,’ called Connie. ‘She can do our errands for you with us gone!’

‘Do you think our Jessie has grown a little?’ said Barbara, once she and Ted had got to the end of the street, and she had dried her eyes and put her handkerchief back in her handbag. ‘For a moment, I fancied he was looking as if he has.’

Ted still didn’t trust himself to speak, but he nodded and then crept a comforting arm around Barbara’s waist for a few paces.

Chapter Nine

As it turned out, the children and teachers were squeezed onto one or other of the four coaches by about ten o’clock, following a lively debate between the drivers as to the best bridge to drive across the River Thames – New London Bridge or Tower Bridge – a decision made more complicated by the drivers discussing the likely amount of traffic on the other side. The vehicles belted out black exhaust fumes as they were then driven away from Bermondsey in what turned out to be an achingly slow convoy.

It seemed to Peggy as if all of London was jam-packed with traffic as the St Mark’s buses crawled over Tower Bridge and northwards up to King’s Cross railway station.

At the massive London terminus there was then a tremendous kerfuffle going on already as, quite literally, chaos was reigning.

There were thousands of people milling hither and thither, with those from various evacuation centres and the ordinary fare-paying passengers rubbing shoulders with one another as they attempted to find out where they were supposed to be and which platform was the one that they needed.

Amongst them bustled all manner of people in uniform, some of whom were walking around with clipboards as they tried to organise those awaiting evacuation (these clipboard-holders were the people looking most harassed), while others shouted instructions and directions to various parts of the station through handheld megaphones. There were crackling announcements over the station tannoy too, but it appeared that nobody could decipher anything that was being said by these announcers.

One of the first things that Connie saw was a rotund woman in an expensive fur-collared tweedy two-piece suit that was at least a size too small for her, but who looked nevertheless like an imperious head of an exclusive girls’ school. She was standing on an upturned wooden beer crate while her quaking voice was veering towards the tone that the twins associated with an oncoming tantrum.

Grown-ups were feeling out of their depth, clearly, and tempers were being frayed in the noisy hubbub of the station. Connie whispered to Jessie with a nod towards the portly woman on the wooden box, whose cheeks were quickly taking on puce undertones, ‘King’s Cross… And it don’t look as if the Queen’s too happy either!’

Of course, everybody from St Mark’s needed now to go to the toilet, and there was an almighty queue for the gents and a spectacularly huge one for the ladies that was snaking to and fro in great loops.

Miss Pinkly had come to King’s Cross to help with making sure no one got lost at the station, although once they’d chugged out of the station finally she would be going home later by hopping on a number 63 bus. Connie heard her and Peggy joke to one another that at this rate the children could go to the lavatory and then rejoin the queue at the back, as by the time they’d get to the front once more it would be time for them to relieve themselves again. At least Connie thought they were making a joke, but after spending thirty minutes edging forward a couple of inches at a time and still not having made it into a cubicle, she wasn’t so sure.

St Mark’s headmaster Mr Jones huffed with obvious disapproval at the chaos and promptly disappeared into an office marked Evacuation Orders for what seemed an age. When, finally, he returned with his bristly moustache quivering in indignation to where the pupils and teachers were standing with their luggage, he announced that they were to get the next train that would come in at the furthermost platform on the far side of the station. The train had been specially commissioned and they would see B:71 in the driver’s window at the end of the train closest to where they would get onto the platform; this meant, apparently, it wouldn’t have any ordinary passengers, as some of the other school evacuee trains did.

It was going to take them to Leeds, after which they would be transferred to another train that would take them on to Harrogate which was, apparently, where the powers that be had decided the schoolchildren of St Mark’s, and Peggy too, would be billeted.

At this news, Peggy’s heart sank. She’d hoped they’d be heading for somewhere within – at the most – an hour of London by train. Kent, possibly, or Hertfordshire or Berkshire, or even, at a stretch, Bedfordshire.

Harrogate seemed without doubt a ridiculously long way for them all to go. It had to be close on two hundred miles between the two places.

In addition, it was already past one o’clock, and so with the best will in the world it would be late afternoon by the time they got to Leeds, and then they’d still have another train to take before their journey would be completed and before they would end up presumably at some sort of reception centre, and only at that point would they finally be allocated their billets.

It was hard to think that there wouldn’t be tears before bedtime from most of the children, as this was a punishing timetable for them, and Peggy wondered too if she might also be faced with her own sobs before the day was out. Her ankles felt uncomfortable, and the baby seemed to have picked up on her own anxiety as now and then she had a stab beneath her skirt waistband of something that felt not too far away from pain.

However, the children were being told right now to make sure they had the right suitcase or bag, and that they should get into pairs and then form an orderly line, all of which was easier said than done on such a busy day at the station.

Peggy and Susanne embraced and said farewell. Then Peggy tried to concentrate on making sure she and the pupils were as organised as they could be rather than allowing herself to think of how peaky she was feeling personally.

Then, once some sort of order had been established, a nice woman with a megaphone and a small triangular red pennant held aloft on a bamboo stick walked with them to the platform they needed, with Miss Crabbe saying repeatedly, ‘Children, follow that red flag and look sharp about it – no stragglers.’

When the party from St Mark’s got to the right platform they discovered they were to share the train with a school from Camden that was apparently destined for somewhere over near Sheffield or Leeds. Apparently there was confusion as to where that school was going and so everyone from this other school had been told to go to Leeds and the local officials could sort it out from there.

Oh well, thought Peggy, thank heavens for small mercies, I suppose. At least we know what town we are destined for, which is more than can be said for those poor pupils and teachers from Camden.

Once the St Mark’s group had shuffled past the other school to the far end of the platform as the lady with the flag had directed, and then put their cases and bags and gas masks down on the platform to wait for the train, which was being brought to them from a rail siding nearby, Peggy clapped her hands for attention.

‘Right, St Mark’s school pupils, please go and stand with your own classmates. And when we get on the train and have sat down, there will be a headcount and your names will be ticked off against each class register. While the teachers do that, I want you all to eat your packed lunches and then try to have a nap. It’s going to be quite late by the time we get to Harrogate, and you will feel tired, and so you will definitely find it of benefit to have a snooze on the train if you can.’

‘Do yer know where we’re going, miss?’

‘’Ave yer been there yerself, miss?’

‘Is it in the country, miss?’

‘Is ’Arrowgate posh, miss?’ were the questions the children wanted to know.

‘All I know is that we are definitely going to Harrogate as that is what Mr Jones said to us just now,’ said Peggy, ‘and I don’t know much about Harrogate other than that it is famous for its water spas and it was very popular with Victorian visitors, and that it is in Yorkshire. Aside from that, you all know as much as me, which isn’t very much, is it? Won’t it be fun having a whole new town to explore and find out about?’

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