Calvin’s eyes narrowed. ‘Have you got a stalker, Jess? Look, maybe I can help. I could sit in the layby, I’d let you know when I was coming over, I could keep an eye on the place for you.’
‘No, Calvin. Just stay away. Please.’
Calvin held up both hands, palms towards her. ‘Okay, okay, if you want to do things your own way.’
‘I always did want to, Calvin, but you thought you knew better. Look where that got you.’
Calvin dropped his hands. ‘Speaking of where things got me. Jess, I really do need your help. I’m not asking for forgiveness, not that I think I need forgiving for too much, but I’m really going to struggle to get the down payment on the flat in time for January. Do you think you could give me a sub. Just to pay the deposit. I’ve got regular, private tutoring work coming in now, and I think I’ve landed a job looking after the Comp school’s I.T. equipment next term. I just need a bit of help to see me through Christmas.’
‘No, Calvin. You’ve had all the favours you’re ever going to get from me. The last one, was not reporting you to the police after you attacked Sam.’
‘Attack, fending off, the truth is somewhere in between. You know that.’ He looked at her pleadingly. ‘Come on, Jess. I know you. You’re not a hard-hearted person. You wouldn’t see me on the streets, would you?’ He cocked his head to one side like an inquisitive puppy. ‘Could you spare a bit of charity, it’s almost the season for it.’
‘Ask your mother, Calvin. She’s got plenty.’ Jess turned away and took a few steps before turning back. ‘One last thing. Did you put any tracking software on my laptop when we were living in the flat?’
Calvin went a deep shade of red.
‘Spyware… Why would I? Honestly, Jess. I would never do that.’
‘Thanks for being so honest, Calvin. Just so you know though. I’m having the laptop cleaned up. So, the tracker won’t be there for much longer and, if I find out you’ve been spying on me via my computer, you’ll wish you’d never met me.’
Jess turned and stormed away, leaving Calvin standing, open mouthed, by the lychgate, his face, deathly pale.
Chapter 25
On Tuesday morning, Jess heard the sound of the council refuge lorry in the lane. Thirty seconds later, one of the bin men hammered a rat-a-tat on the door knocker.
‘Morning, love, do the scarecrows go with us or do you want to keep them?’
‘Take them away, please. They were someone’s idea of a joke.’
‘Ah, I wondered if your kids had made them. My little girl draws faces like that. She’s six.’
‘No, it was an adult, believe it or not. Art isn’t his niche subject. Thanks for taking them.’ Jess stepped back and began to close the door.
‘They should go in the brown bin, really. But I won’t tell if you don’t.’
The man smiled, then looked over to his colleagues who were loading the mattress onto the lorry.
Jess looked quizzically at the orange-clad man, wondering why he was still on her doorstep.
‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.
‘To be honest, there is. You only paid for the removal of four items. There are six items in your yard.’
‘Yes, but two of the items are made of straw, and weren’t there when I rang to book the collection.’ She looked towards the lane where two other council workers were loading the old spring base of the bed, onto the lorry. ‘Don’t you have enough room for them on the truck?’ She smiled at her little joke.
‘You pay per item, and there are extra items.’ The man stood his ground under Jess’s withering look.
‘Look, I’ll remember you at Christmas, but I really don’t expect to pay to remove what is, in essence, two, small piles of straw.’
The man looked disappointed and, turning away, he shook his head and walked back to the lorry with his thumbs pointed downwards. The three men climbed into the lorry and with a blaring siren, reversed onto the asphalt before pulling onto the lane, leaving the two miniature scarecrows propped up against the side of Jess’s car.
Jess clicked the door shut and sighing a deep sigh, walked through to the kitchen where she opened Alice’s memoir and turned to a clean page in her notebook.
November 1939
During September, Operation Pied Piper was put into action and over one and a half million children, and some mothers, were evacuated from London to save them from the enemy bombing that the government thought was about to begin.
Being so close to Gillingham, which evacuated many of its own children, our little town wasn’t chosen as a major centre for the evacuees, but following an administrative cock up at the same time, the Gillingham evacuees were being transported to small towns and villages around Sandwich and Dover. A train from London, loaded with over a hundred children, arrived at our railway station. Amazingly, instead of just turning the train around and sending it to where it should have been heading, the authorities made a decision to keep the kids in our area and an appeal was sent out by the council leader, begging locals to ‘do their bit’ by taking them in for a short time while their futures were sorted out.
The kids were marched up the road to the church hall where they were made to sit on the floor with their bag of sandwiches, gas mask boxes and tiny suitcases. Hanging around their necks were name tag labels which hopefully matched up with the cases sitting at their feet.
To their credit, a lot of local residents took a stroll up to the church hall to select a child they thought they would be able live with, though some of them, thinking of the ten shillings a week they would be paid for looking after the children, had more mercenary instincts.
Living out in the sticks, I didn’t get to hear about the call to arms until after all the children had been found places. I would have taken at least one, possibly two as I had a spare room at the farm. I had rented it out to one of Amy’s friends for a couple of months earlier in the year, and I had hoped to use it as bait when attempting to snare a temporary worker for the farm until our own lads came back from the war. As it was, the remaining workers could easily manage the reduced workload during the winter months, but come spring, with only eight men remaining, I would be in desperate need of more hands.
In mid-November, I received a call from my old schoolteacher asking me if I could find the room for a couple of ten-year-old kids who, she said, had been placed in haste and were in urgent need of rehoming. She had been offered places for them but it would have meant splitting them up, and she was very concerned about that.
I shouted Miriam in from the kitchen and we had a ten second chat before agreeing to take them. The teacher said she’d drop them off that very afternoon.
Many of the children who turned up on that train had gone back home again because the expected bombing raids hadn’t materialised, but these two kids had been unlucky. The same afternoon they arrived at Spinton their London home had been destroyed in a blast caused by a gas leak. Their parents, whilst unharmed, had to split up and live with relatives in a different part of the capital and there was, at the moment, no room for the children. The Council had told them they would be rehoused, but warned them that, because of the call up, the housing department had been left woefully short of manpower, and it might be months before a house in their area could be found.
The kids were called Stephen and Harriet. They arrived looking dishevelled, underfed and uncared for. They climbed out of the car at the front of the farm, each carrying a battered little case, looking frightened and anxious. To say their clothes had seen better days was a massive understatement. People used better quality clothes to cut up for rags.
Mother Hen, Miriam, immediately took charge of the situation and leaving me to sign their temporary placement papers, she threw an arm around each of the poor little mites and led them through the back door, into the kitchen. By the time I got there, carrying two tiny cases containing a change of clothes that were in an even worse state than the ones they were currently wearing, they were sitting in front of our
big pot-bellied stove, holding mugs of warm milk and hungrily eyeing up the sandwiches that Miriam had prepared for them earlier in the afternoon.
I took Martha out of her cot and sat her on my knee, she was fascinated by the new arrivals who took an almost equal interest in her.
‘This is Stephen and this is Harriet,’ I told her.
‘Ste-un an ‘arret,’ Martha repeated.
I looked at her in amazement. For a toddler that struggled, or stubbornly refused, to utter the word Mama, their names fairly tripped off her tongue.
After they finished eating their sandwiches, Miriam ran a hot bath and taking the pair by the hand, led them through the parlour to the bathroom I’d had installed the previous year. When they came out, wrapped in fluffy, white towels, their faces pink and sweating, blonde hair stuck to their heads, I sat them in front of the pot-bellied stove, and as their thin little bodies dried off, I brought out a book from under the stairs that my father had bought me when I was about their age. Sitting between them, so they could both see the wonderful E. H. Shepard illustrations, I read them the story of Winnie the Pooh and his friends from the hundred-acre wood. I had always felt an affinity with Pooh, as I lived on a one-hundred-acre farm, and in summer, I used to sit in the copse of maples just below Bessie’s stable and pretend that Pooh, Piglet and Kanga, were my friends, not Christopher Robin’s.
At nine, I gave them both a hug and a kiss on the forehead, and Miriam took them up to the spare room. Martha, who should have been fast asleep by that time, but stubbornly refused to close her eyes, waved her hand to them as they went up. ‘Ni-night,’ she said.
The next day, we made what was to them, a wildly exciting trip into town in my rickety old truck, to buy new clothes from Woolworths. We also dropped into the thrift shop and picked up a couple of good quality, second hand dresses, a pair of knee length shorts, a few thick, winter jumpers and two pairs of wellingtons for them to wear when playing in the farm yard, which wasn’t the cleanest of places at the best of times.
After lunch, I introduced them to the pigs and let them use the stiff yard brush to scratch the backs of my prize boars, Horace and Hector. Martha, who loved the boars as much as I did, giggled as they snorted and stuck their wet snouts through the bars of the pen.
That evening, Mr Starcher, who worked for the local council, dropped by to see how the children had settled in. They both hid under the table when they saw him walk into the kitchen. I coaxed them out with the promise of a slice of Miriam’s famous jam sponge and the pair stood together holding hands, looking as though the bottom had just fallen out of their world.
‘Don’t let him take us away again, Auntie Alice,’ said a sobbing Harriet.
I assured them that Mr Starcher wasn’t about to do any such thing, and rubbing her eyes with her fist, she backed away towards Miriam, who swept them both up in her comforting arms.
Mr Starcher, it turned out, had reluctantly allowed a couple from Upper Middle Street to take the siblings home on the night that they had first arrived in the town.
‘It was against my better judgement, Mrs Mollison, but they were a pair and no one wanted to take two of them on. The Ropers looked a bit rough, I’ll admit, and I was sure it was the eighteen shillings and sixpence a week they’d be paid from the government that attracted them, rather than the moral desire to help children in need. But, as it was, they were the last kids in the church hall and the Ropers were they only prospective guardians, so I had to let them go. I said I’d look in on them once they’d had time to settle in but I got rather busy, what with all the new wartime regulations and what have you.’
Mr Starcher unbuttoned his thick overcoat and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. It was always very warm in our kitchen.
‘Anyway. I managed to find an hour yesterday and thought I’d nip over and see how they were getting along together. I had thought about them during the past six weeks, but there always seemed to be something more urgent to attend to.’
He looked down at his boots.
‘The Ropers wouldn’t let me in to begin with. When I finally threatened them with the police, Mrs Roper opened the kitchen door and allowed me to enter. The place was awash with empty beer bottles and old fish and chip wrappings. As I stepped inside, Mr Roper appeared from upstairs wearing just his vest and long johns. The kids, as I soon found out, were locked in a cupboard under the stairs.
‘Mrs Roper bleated that they had to lock them in because they kept trying to run away.
‘Mr Roper was far more concerned with losing the weekly allowance than losing the children. He wanted to know if he’d still be paid the week’s money they were owed, as they had ‘expenses’ to consider. The kids didn’t look like they’d been fed in days. They were wearing the clothes they’d arrived in, their hands and faces were filthy, they even had bits of cobweb hanging off them. They’d been in that cupboard a good while because they were blinking and holding their hands in front of their eyes when they came out.
‘I got them away from there as fast as I could. We got their cases back but Mr Roper had sold their gas masks, so they will need to be issued with new ones. I telephoned Mrs Hopkins, the school head who had been with me the night the children arrived, and asked her if she knew of anyone trustworthy who might take the kids on for a short time while we found them a permanent placing. She said she’d ask you; she thought the farm would be the perfect place for them to get over their recent experiences.’
He tugged at the sleeve of his overcoat, not able to look me in the eye.
‘I’ve spent the entire day phoning people I thought might be willing to help, but as yet, I’ve had no concrete offers. There have been a couple of maybes, and a possibly, but that’s it. I’m sorry to have dumped them on you like this, but do you think you could keep them for another week or so? There’s a lady in Gillingham that might be interested but, as Gillingham has had a lot of its own children evacuated, I don’t think it’s a viable option, really.’
I put my hand on his arm.
‘Mr Starcher. I don’t mind if the children stay with me until the day the war is over. They’re very welcome here. They’ve enjoyed their first day with us and they seem very keen to learn about farm life. They want to help me feed the animals tomorrow. They have nice warm clothes and as I promised them last night, they will never, ever, feel hungry again, not while they are under my roof.’
A tear dropped down the council official’s cheek. He sniffled as he wiped it away.
‘I felt so guilty. The poor little things… I sent them there.’
I stepped forward and gave him a hug.
‘It wasn’t your fault. You had no choice.’
‘I should have checked on them.’
‘You were busy and… well, look at them. They’re absolutely fine now. They didn’t come to any real harm, distressing as their circumstances were.’
I pulled out a seat and Mr Starcher sat down. Looking across the kitchen, I held out my hand to the two seats opposite.
‘Harriet, Stephen, sit down, please. It’s going to be all right.’
Reluctantly, the children sat down at the table, looking at each other, me, Miriam, anywhere but at Mr Starcher. Miriam placed a reassuring hand on each of their shoulders and I poured the seemingly, ever-boiling kettle over fresh tea leaves.
‘Now, Harriet, Stephen. There is a question I have to ask before I go.’ Mr Starcher bit his lip and swallowed a huge lump in his throat. When he spoke again his voice was cracked and emotional. ‘Firstly, I want to say how sorry I am for sending you to those people. I honestly didn’t know that you’d be treated in that manner.’ He looked down at the table before speaking again. ‘However, Mrs Mollison has agreed to let you stay here while we try to find you a permanent home. What do you say? Would you like to stay at the farm?’
‘We don’t want to leave,’ said Harriet.
‘Can’t we just stay here until it’s safe to go home again?’ Stephen looked at me, his face full of hope.
Miriam didn’t give me a chance to say a word.
‘You’re going nowhere,’ she said, presenting them with a kiss on the top of their heads. ‘You’re part of our family now.’
Stephen looked at me, I smiled and nodded encouragingly. He leapt off his seat and threw himself into my arms. Harriet, still uncertain, fixed Mr Starcher with a stern look.
‘Is it true? You won’t take us away again?’
Mr Starcher shook his head. ‘No, this is your home now and I’m sure you’ll be very happy here. Believe me, my child. No one… no one except your mum and dad, that is, will ever ask you to leave.’
He smiled at them in turn, then got to his feet.
‘I’ll drop the placement papers in during the week. I’ll just post them through the letter box, I won’t show my face again in case they think I’ve come to take them away.’
He walked to the door, stepped out onto the top step then turned back.
‘Be happy,’ he said.
Chapter 26
On Tuesday evening, Jess showered while a pan of Balsamic rice simmered on the hob. Her own recipe vegetarian chilli mix, had already been cooked and just needed a warm through before serving.
After choosing a green, mid-thigh length button through dress from her wardrobe, she slipped it on and stood in front of the dressing table mirror, turning this way and that, looking critically at the way the dress hung.
Finally satisfied, she brushed her hair and fastened one of Alice’s long chain pendants around her neck. Not happy with the way it looked, she undid the top button of the dress to allow the enamel heart to hang over what she considered to be an acceptable amount of cleavage.
Back in the kitchen, Jess pulled on Alice’s full front apron and checking the clock, took a bottle of Pinot Grigio from the fridge and sat it on the white linen tablecloth she had stretched across the big old table. She had just taken the lid from the steaming rice and lit the gas under the chilli, when she heard a knock at the door.
The Legacy: Trouble Comes Disguised As Family (Unspoken Book 2) Page 17