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

There were crisply ironed sheets on his bunk, and a clean folded towel on the pillow.

‘I know, let’s put somethin’ in Larry’s bed ter gi’ ’im a surprise later,’ said Tommy to Jessie, once Aiden – who could be a bit of a killjoy, he was so sensible – had gone down to feed the hens along with Connie.

‘What about Connie’s hairbrush? Nice and bristly if you’re not expecting it.’ Jessie’s eyes twinkled at the thought.

‘Sweet,’ said Tommy, and then he kept watch on the landing corridor while Jessie crept into Connie’s bedroom to retrieve the brush.

Carefully, they pushed it down Larry’s bed with an old coat hanger so as not to disturb Mabel’s hospital corners of the sheets and blankets, making sure that the bristles were left pointing towards the pillow so that Larry’s toes would find it when he slipped into bed later. Finally, they covered the small mound it made with the towel.

‘A good job done. After all, Larry’d be upset if we didn’t do something like this to welcome him back,’ added Jessie gravely, as he and Tommy stood back to admire their work.

The children couldn’t wait to see what Larry would make of them having a real flesh-and-blood pony to hand. He was totally unused to animals, which naturally made Mabel’s cat Bucky, a giant black and white tom with ears carefully scalloped from his many presumably victorious fights, especially affectionate around him, much to Larry’s embarrassment. But Bucky was persistent, and even after Larry had gone to London had continued to wait for him, nestling on his bed each night with his forepaws turned towards each other and tucked under.

Eventually the greeting party for Larry assembled ready to walk over to the station, although Connie had made a bit of a fuss about being unable to brush her hair properly and Angela had had to lend Connie her hairbrush in order that they wouldn’t be late.

There had been a debate about whether Milburn could come with them to the station and the children had tossed a halfpenny. The vote had gone in Milburn’s favour and it wasn’t long before Jessie was standing in the back yard holding the hemp lead rope to Milburn’s halter as the pony carefully nosed his pockets, hoping a treat was there. Connie and Aiden stood alongside but they’d made sure they were out of harm’s way, just in case Milburn went to nip or kick, as although she’d been sweet enough when the pair of them had taken her out for an hour’s grazing earlier on some road verges, they didn’t yet fully trust the small mare.

A minute or two passed as they waited for Tommy to hoist Angela’s chair over the lip of the back-door step, so that they could all, Milburn included, head over to the station.

As the children trailed through the back yard Peggy was in the kitchen with a serious look on her face and, despite the heat of the day, was feeling cold and a bit shaky. Ten minutes or so earlier, she had put Holly down for a nap in a deep drawer that had once been the bottom one in a dark-wood chest, but which was now used by either Peggy or Gracie if their little ones needed a nap while their mothers were preparing food or sitting together to have a natter over a cuppa, and now Peggy was pensively sipping on a cup of tea, staring out the kitchen window. She felt tense as she waited for Bill to telephone her, and she had slept poorly. Nonetheless, it was impossible not to notice how well the kiddies looked and how brightly Milburn’s butterscotch coat shone in the sunlight.

Peggy’s squirm of apprehension went into wriggling overdrive with the posh-sounding ring of the telephone on the desk in Roger’s study, and she hurried to answer it.

She was almost certain it was Bill on the end of it, even though if it was, he was ringing earlier than she expected, but as she picked up the receiver she still didn’t know whether she was ready to hear what he might have to say.

Chapter Five (#ulink_8fb082a3-b9e1-5b57-9a3a-e6c3eb2f0728)

There was no getting around it. From the anticipatory clank of her husband dropping his large copper pennies into the money slot at the bottom of the apparatus in the public telephone box, something sounded off. There was a metal creak of a door hinge in need of an oil, and Bill’s very first word – a solitary but strangely formal ‘Peg’ – told Peggy that without a shadow of doubt something most unsavoury was about to be revealed.

Standing in front of Roger’s desk, Peggy had leant forward and pulled out his chair, but as she heard the delay that told her that Bill was taking his time feeding his pennies into the slot, she thought better of sitting down. She decided that with a bit of luck, if she stayed standing she might be braver facing whatever unpleasant news it was that she was about to learn.

It felt as if she might be teetering on the edge of a deep, dark abyss. Peggy wasn’t sure why this was, but she supposed she hadn’t been married to Bill for such a long time without knowing him inside and out. And there was something so off-key beckoning to her from that one word of greeting that a precipice seemed undoubtedly to be widening below her, calling her into its depths. She couldn’t say she was totally surprised, given the lack of love and kisses on the postcard that he’d sent her, but still…

The downbeat tone of his ‘Peg’ had cast aside any sign of his normal irrepressible cheeky cockney banter. If Peggy were honest, Bill had never been much of a looker but he’d always had the gift of the gab and had been the sort of chap who could charm the birds from the trees, and so Peggy had been seduced all those years ago by the extent to which he’d made her laugh much more than by his looks.

Now it was worrying that all echoes of this cheery repartee that she’d once loved so much had given way to something that sounded clamped down and oddly wary of her. In fact, such was the contrast, that if her husband hadn’t greeted Peggy by name, she doubted that she would have believed it was him.

‘Peg?’ she heard Bill say again into the pregnant silence between them, almost in a dry-throated whisper this time. ‘Are you there? Peggy?’

She took a fleeting instant to think of Holly, and the love and strong bond she had with her sister Barbara, and the kindness she had found since arriving in Harrogate at the rectory with Roger and Mabel, and with her new friend June. It was an emboldening moment.

‘I am here, Bill,’ Peggy composed herself and answered quietly with carefully enunciated words, and then she paused, once more allowing the silence to billow softly around her.

She heard Bill swallow in reply, and for an instant she imagined the dip and rise of his prominent Adam’s apple giving a small punch under his shirt collar.

‘Holly and I have been waiting for your call,’ Peggy filled the quiet, deliberately mentioning Holly as she wanted to remind her husband that there were two of them up in Harrogate who were dependent upon whatever it was that he wanted to get off his chest.

She heard Bill take another mighty swallow and then the clink of him putting something made of glass down on something metal. His swallowing sounded round and deep, and it has been immediately preceded by a faint smacking noise almost as if his lips were retreating from a kiss, and it was a sound that told Peggy that he’d swigged directly from a bottle, and that he hadn’t poured whatever it was that he was drinking into a glass. For all the world it sounded as if the beverage were alcoholic, and so Peggy guessed Bill was dosing himself with Dutch courage.

This was out of character, as although Bill did enjoy a pint now and again he was actually normally only an extremely moderate drinker. In ten years of marriage Peggy had only seen him veer slightly towards what she and Barbara called merry on a couple of occasions. Never once had she seen him drunk or stumbling around through being in his cups, and nor had she ever spied him imbibing alcohol directly from any sort of bottle, as he could be a bit priggish at times as regards the proper way of doing things, looking down on this sort of what he would call ‘low’ behaviour.

‘Peg. Peggy,’ Bill repeated.

His slight slur on the ‘Peggy’ told her he was definitely was more than vaguely tipsy.

Oh dear, this wasn’t good at all.

‘Bill, is there something you can sit down on?’ Peggy was relieved that she sounded calm as she spoke these intentionally domestic-sounding, caring words, not that she felt particularly caring right at that minute, but she was starting to feel that for her to claim the moral high ground could only be to her advantage.

For the first time in their marriage she didn’t want her husband to know quite how she was feeling – which was rattling – even though she really had the most peculiar feeling cresting and then pulsing through her, and her hands and feet had become suddenly icy cold.

Peggy thought she heard a soft bump that she took to be Bill leaning back suddenly against the wall of the public telephone box. Just for a second she fancied she could smell the distinctive paint the telephone service used to paint their boxes and that always seemed to linger.

She gathered herself together. ‘What is it you want to say? Why don’t you just come out with it? I’m sure you’ll feel better afterwards, Bill.’

‘Peg, I’ve been a bloody fool. A right bloody fool, I’ve been.’ There was a further glugging noise, and a small belch. ‘She’s called Maureen, Peg. Maureen, she’s called’.

Peggy blinked in crossness at the way Bill kept repeating himself, rather than getting straight to the point, but she didn’t say anything – ‘’an she were right fun, an’ I were stupid an’ daft. An’ one thing led to another an’, well, er, yer know! Yer must know what I’m tryin’ ter say, Peg.’

‘I can’t say that I do know, Bill,’ replied a prudishly tight-lipped Peggy.

Heavens to Betsy! she thought to herself when Bill didn’t reply to her immediately. Not only was he breaking to her some pretty dreadful news she was now certain, but he was doing it in a really cack-handed manner.

‘Bill, why don’t you put it down to me having given birth to our baby not so long ago, that dear little baby girl that we so wanted and had to wait such a while for’ – Peggy paused deliberately for added drama – ‘and this means that my mind might not right now be as good or as sharp as it once was. And so, I’m afraid, my dear husband, that you’re going to need to spell it out to me, quite what it is that that you have been up to.’

She could hear Bill shift his weight around in the confined space almost as if the words she’d emphasised had kept pushing him in the chest. And then he made a strange noise as if he felt strangled. It was obvious that he wasn’t enjoying this conversation in the slightest. Good.

Peggy imagined Bill as clearly as if he were right before her, standing in the public telephone box with the telephone receiver wedged between chin and shoulder, and a bottle of beer in one hand while with the other he supported his weight by leaning on the metal that made the wall at the back of the box as he stared down in shame.

Well, at least abject shame was the look on his face that she hoped was there.

The foreboding silence grew and throbbed between them.

And then there was a damp croon.

With a start Peggy realised that her husband was sobbing.

Once, her heart would have gone out to him, but now she couldn’t believe these wet sounds to be anything other than mere crocodile tears. Any last shred of respect she had for him evaporated, as she felt Bill was crying only because he must have been caught out somehow, doing something he shouldn’t have been doing – surely this had to be the case given that he was ringing her yet only describing what had gone on with huge reluctance – and certainly not because he felt he’d made any sort of terrible mistake. It was likely he’d have been happy with the state of affairs if there hadn’t been some sort of incident or accident, Peggy told herself, and then she berated herself for thinking of the situation as in any way an accident. After all, there was absolutely nothing accidental about what Bill had been up to if he was having to apologise to his wife like this.

So Bill bloody well should be weeping, Peggy thought. She drew her shoulders back and noticed in a mirror hanging on Roger’s wall that the reflection of her normally generous lips revealed that they had unintentionally closed in on themselves, shrinking to a harsh line that was aging and distinctly unattractive. Peggy narrowed her eyes as she tried to think of the most hurtful retort she could make, and the mirror-Peggy frowned threateningly back. It wasn’t a pleasant sight.

‘Be a man, Bill. You owe me that at least, surely? No true man would keep me guessing at anything else you need to say to me.’

It wasn’t very strong as insults go, but it was the best that Peggy could come up with at that moment.

Peggy would never have believed even a few minutes ago, before she picked up the telephone to Bill, that she could experience such an emotional chasm stretching and growing between them, or that it could feel so treacherous or so cavernous.

It was hard to credit how once they had been so very close that Peggy had occasionally felt as if one took in a breath, then it would be the other one who would expel it.