by Annie Murray
‘I’ve given Seamus your supper. Ernest and I didn’t consider that you deserved it tonight. And you’ll be staying here. We felt you should be punished.’
‘I want to come in . . . Don’t make me stay here!’ Margaret begged. But the door was already closing again.
At first she just sat, paralysed by terror. Every sound made her heart pound. There were scuttlings across the roof, whether of mice or birds or something more sinister she didn’t know. And it was cold: no snow or frost, but cold enough.
Eventually she wrapped the blanket right round her, and lay down, her head resting on her arm. The ground was so hard and cold. Through the night she slept and woke, longing for a drink of water. At last the sun came up.
Nora Paige appeared early in sludge-brown clothing, fed Margaret a meagre helping of salt porridge and made sure she was ready when Miss Cooper arrived.
‘If you tell anyone about your punishment, you’ll be in here every night, d’you understand? No sly words to the teachers. Not a one. Or remember where you’ll have to sleep.’
That day it was such a relief to be in the warm room at the back of the vicarage that, almost immediately, Margaret slumped forward on her arms at the table and fell asleep. No one woke her.
Twice more she had been banished to the shed, before this, the coldest night of the year so far. Nora Paige was eager to punish her for the least thing: lifting her plate to her face, desperate for the last lick of gravy, had been one offence. And she was giving Margaret less and less to eat in any case. Her stomach ached for food.
‘Are you feeling all right, Margaret?’ Miss Cooper asked her, more and more often it seemed. And their hostess, the birdlike vicar’s wife, Mrs Bodley-Fisher, also showed concern.
‘The child doesn’t seem to be quite all there, does she?’ Margaret heard her murmur to Miss Cooper. ‘Is this what she’s like normally, poor little soul?’
‘I don’t think so – I’m not sure,’ Miss Cooper replied. ‘She was Miss Peters’ charge, of course. Better keep an eye out, I think.’
Margaret felt distant and very sleepy through most of school, as if she wasn’t really there. She had no energy to join in anything. Even when Mrs Bodley-Fisher opened up the gramophone and put on some of her crackly seventy-eight records, which was Margaret’s favourite thing, she could barely keep awake.
And now the freezing dark seemed to fall on her, pressing her down as if it was made of iron. She couldn’t even think what it was that she was guilty of this time. Already that day her throat had been agonizingly sore and her head was throbbing. She scarcely knew where she was, was too poorly to feel afraid.
Wrapping herself up as usual, she curled up as tightly as she could, shaking with fever. Her throat felt closed, as though there was a hand gripped around it. The night was quiet, all the creatures tucked in the warmest places they could find, and in the deadly cold all Margaret could hear was the banging of her own blood in her ears.
All night she boiled and shivered, half-waking to feel the hardness of the ground against her hip or shoulder, then lapsing back into feverish dreams.
Outside, everything froze: water butts and ponds, grass and trees.
By morning Margaret was unconscious.
What had gone on that morning in the mind of that crazed woman, Mrs Nora Paige?
Miss Cooper arrived at the door to collect Margaret, as usual. The sludge-brown apparition appeared.
‘I’m afraid the little girl is no longer here,’ Mrs Paige announced with an almighty blink of her eyes.
Impatiently Miss Cooper asked what she meant.
‘She is no longer with us.’
Miss Cooper’s heart must have started to pound in extreme panic at this point.
‘Where is she? Let me see her.’
‘I’m afraid that isn’t possible,’ Nora Paige said. ‘She’s no longer in the house.’
‘Don’t be idiotic: what have you done with her?’ Miss Cooper’s red-haired temper began to flare. ‘Get out of my way – I insist on seeing my pupil.’
She pushed past Nora Paige’s slack body and passed through the bare front room. At the back there was no sign of Margaret.
‘Right,’ Miss Cooper declared. ‘Tell me where she is – now – or I’ll search the whole house.’
‘Don’t go upstairs!’ Nora Paige snarled, guarding the foot of the staircase. ‘She’s not up there, I can tell you that. Don’t you dare intrude on my privacy.’
Her face at that moment convinced Miss Rebecca Cooper that the woman was completely insane. However, this confirmation only made her more determined. She came up close, smelling Nora Paige’s oniony smell. ‘Tell me where she is, then.’
The woman gave a convulsive blink. ‘Out the back.’
A few moments later Margaret, barely conscious, was lifted into Miss Cooper’s arms. The teacher, stuttering with rage, said to Nora Paige, ‘I’m going to get the police onto you.’
There was a period of weeks while Margaret recovered in the vicarage, on a little put-you-up bed, which felt comfortable and secure. The Bodley-Fishers were already hosting three other evacuees, but they made Margaret welcome over Christmas while she recuperated.
Mrs Nora Paige was reported to the police. Eventually she was fined five pounds. Later still she was taken away to a local asylum.
Margaret was amazed by the days of Christmas. Though still weak, she gazed at the decorated tree and was able to go into the church with the other children, see the crib and hear the carols being sung. It was the most lovely thing she had ever seen. Mrs Bodley-Fisher, a darting woman with china-blue eyes, fed her plenty of milk and was kind to her. She gave Margaret a handmade teddy bear as a Christmas present. It was made of brown felt and was wearing a red scarf. Margaret loved him immediately and called him Tommy.
When she told Mrs Bodley-Fisher that her brother was called Tommy, and that she didn’t know where he was, Mr Bodley-Fisher, a fleshy-faced, cheerful man, made enquiries. He found Tommy on a far-flung farm, said he was happy there and that one day he would come and see his sister. This cheered Margaret up no end.
And then Margaret was told that a new home had been found for her, in another village five miles away called Buckley. Soon after the New Year she was collected by horse and trap, travelling well wrapped up through a freezing morning to meet the two sisters and the two other evacuees they had already taken in. After the bite of the cold air on her face throughout the journey, Margaret always remembered walking into the parlour of Orchard House in Buckley and feeling the delicious warmth of the fire.
That day, she had walked into heaven.
Seventeen
As Margaret gradually allowed herself to remember the past, of her years in Buckley she could only recall happy, blissful things. In reality there must have been dull days – wet, cold, boring days – the way real life was. But all the memories glowed in her mind like the leaves, every autumn at the end of the paddock at Orchard House filling the eye with yellow and copper brightness.
These thoughts would fill her with such an ache of longing that she would try to force them from her mind before they were snatched away from her somehow, the way Buckley and Orchard House had been snatched away.
For more than four years she had lived in this wonderful place. It was the family home of the Clairmonts, who ran an agricultural supplies business in Worcester. Miss Jenny Clairmont had stayed on in the house with her parents until each of them passed away, only to be joined soon afterwards by her elder sister, Mrs Lucy Higgins, recently widowed.
Now the household consisted of the two sisters – Lucy Higgins’ two sons were both away in the navy – a younger woman, Emily, who had stayed on as maid to help run the house, and the two other evacuees, ten-year-old twins, the children of a cousin who lived in Birmingham. There was also an elderly man, known as Sissons, who lived in a cottage nearby and attended to the outside things: garden, paddock, stable and hen coops. It was Sissons, the smoke from his pipe trailing sweetly into Marga
ret’s nostrils, who had brought her to Buckley.
The morning she first set foot in the house, eyes watering from the bracing journey, Margaret was still convalescent, numbed by all the changes that had happened to her. Her feet, still in Tommy’s old Mail boots, clomped across the crimson patterned rugs covering the uneven brick floor of the hall, into the main parlour with its bright log fire in the inglenook, its rugs and comfortable chairs. She found her knees being sniffed by the moist nose of a brown-and-white dog.
‘It’s all right, she won’t hurt you!’ said a tall, angular person. ‘Now now, Dotty, leave our little friend alone.’
The dog wagged its feathery tail.
There were people, all waiting for her: the tall, angular person was Miss Jenny Clairmont, and there was small, barrel-shaped Mrs Lucy Higgins – were two sisters ever more different? – and pink-faced Emily, in her apron. On each of the ‘warm-boxes’ at either end of the fender, which held sticks and kindling, sat a blond child. They had remarkably similar strong-featured faces with full lips, large, straight noses and blue eyes. But one had his hair cut short back and sides, while the other’s was bobbed in a no-nonsense way round her ears, parted at one side and with a pale-blue ribbon tied at the other. Among this sea of faces there was not one that was not smiling. Even the dog, which was now lying by the fender, was panting in a smiley way.
She must have looked such a pathetic thing, even in her new hand-me-downs from the vicarage, with her wonky eye, toes pointing in like a pigeon’s, a finger stuck in her mouth.
Mrs Higgins came and knelt by her, reached for her hand and drew her close.
‘Hello, my dear.’ Margaret looked into kindly grey eyes. Mrs Higgins was wearing a cardigan of moss-coloured bobbly wool. ‘Do you like to be called Margaret? Or should we call you Maggie?’
Margaret nodded. She liked being called ‘Maggie’. Tommy had sometimes called her that. She also liked being given the choice.
‘So, Maggie it is. Now, you must meet your new friends. This is John . . .’ The blond boy got to his feet. ‘And this is his twin sister, Patty.’
They came over and Margaret felt herself shrinking inside. Would they be horrible to her?
John had his hands pushed down into the pockets of his long shorts and one of his socks was riding at half-mast. He put his head on one side and said, ‘Hello, Maggie’ in a gruff, but amiable way.
Patty came straight up and took Margaret’s hand like a little mother.
‘C’mon, Maggie – come and sit on the warm-box. It’s where we sit a lot ’cause it’s nice in the cold. And Mrs Higgins says, as a special treat ’cause you’ve come, we can have buttered toast. Emily’s going to make it.’
Patty delivered Margaret to the box, and Margaret could feel warmth coming from it, though it was nothing compared to the fierce heat of the fire on her face. She looked at the shiny brass handles of the fire-tongs and poker and felt the warmth start to tingle through her hands. For some reason Patty knelt behind her and thought it a good idea to rub Margaret’s back. She didn’t mind. She found it comforting, as was the sound of John and Patty’s Birmingham accents.
Soon Emily carried in a plateful of thick slices of bread, which she toasted with a fork on the fire and spread with butter. It was the most delicious thing Margaret had ever tasted.
Jenny Clairmont had worked for many years as an elementary-school teacher, so Orchard House had become an additional school for the evacuees. Much later, when more and more evacuees (including John and Patty) had trickled back home, the remaining few were fitted into the village school. At the beginning of 1940, though, this was where the evacuees gathered.
Those years merged now, were distilled into a collection of images. After the ride in the trap, past frozen furrows and icy trees, the bliss of that singed toast (with more butter than most of the rationed country could have, as they kept cows and could make their own), all Margaret could remember was kindness. And there was the excitement of living in the countryside, of tree climbs and birds’ nests and the sight of lambs, chicks and ducklings in spring.
In the paddock, between the orchard and kitchen garden and the copse, the sisters kept two Guernsey cows, Poppy and Mildred, and the Shetland pony called Rags, which pulled the trap. There were chickens with less definite names, which were just called The Fowls. On Starveall Farm nearby there were also sheep.
Helped by a combination of good food, fresh air and kindness, Margaret thrived as never before. There were rides round the paddock on Rags while Sissons, or sometimes Patty, held the leading rein. They played endless games in the garden. A lot of the time it was just with Patty, who loved having a younger child to mother and boss.
‘I’m going to be a teacher like my father when I grow up,’ she would declare. ‘So I’d better get into practice.’
But when John joined in there was often the best fun. They made a see-saw one summer day, with a plank balanced across a metal bucket. The plank kept slipping and John stood on it to counterbalance the unequal weight of the girls on each end, moving from foot to foot and yelling, ‘See-saw Marjorie Daw . . . Bet you’re going to fall off first!’ Margaret could remember clinging to the jolting plank and laughing so much that she could hardly breathe.
Sometimes she allowed her mind to linger on the memories. There were so many riches. Sitting round the table with bread and butter, ham and cakes. Patty doing her hair, bending over her, her blue eyes stern with concentration: ‘Sit still, Maggie. If you want plaits you have to be patient . . .’ Learning to read and write and do sums. Miss Clairmont reading A Christmas Carol to them by the fire, or other stories under one of the pear trees in summer. Patty loved to read to Margaret too, sitting her on her lap, teaching her.
There were all the animals: the scuttling hens; Dotty stealing people’s shoes and hiding them in the orchard; the grassy breath and slow stare of the two cows; and Rags the pony’s mischievous ways. And the dray horses, with their big fringed hooves clopping along the village lanes, pulling carts that brought coal and salt and milk to the houses. She’d loved the passing seasons, the green buds and grass in spring, the vegetable garden bursting full in summer, the autumn’s frisking leaves, then snow, seeming to seal them into the house and village, muffling everything in a magical white.
As Margaret grew and changed, blossoming under the kindness of the two sisters, she was only really aware of the war because of them talking about it: the ration books, their worries about John and Patty’s parents in Sparkhill when the bombs were falling on Birmingham. And then – and hardly at any other time – she wondered about home, and how her mother was; about Tommy and her half-sister Elsie; and all of it seemed very far away.
One day Tommy came.
It was during that first summer of 1940, before the bombs began falling on the cities.
‘It seems only right that you should see your brother,’ Mrs Higgins said. ‘He is some way away, but I could probably arrange for Sissons to collect him and have him here for an afternoon. Would you like that?’
Margaret beamed at her. ‘Oh, yes please, Mrs Higgins!’
Tommy! It was an age since she’d seen him – in fact nearly nine months. Most of the time now she was so caught up in everything at Orchard House that she didn’t think about her family. When she had first arrived, the sisters had asked her if she thought her parents intended to visit her. Margaret had just shrugged. Nothing happened, and the question was not raised again. But now the idea of Tommy coming here was so exciting.
The night before, Margaret lay in bed wide awake for ages, willing time to pass. The next day, after lessons were over, she, John and Patty waited by the gate for the trap to appear. It was a breezy day with racing clouds. Margaret had on a green pinafore dress and T-bar sandals, which the sisters had given her. Would Tommy like her new clothes, she wondered? Impatiently she scuffed at the road with her shoes. It seemed an age before they heard Rags’ hooves and the trap came into view with someone perched up at the back.
&
nbsp; John and Patty stared with great curiosity as Sissons halted Rags. Margaret looked hungrily up at the back of the trap and saw inside what to her appeared like a little man whom she could barely recognize. Tommy jumped down in one athletic leap and stood in front of her. He was eight now, but he had always been big for his age and he had grown and filled out. He seemed huge to her, with his broad shoulders. His dark hair was also longer than she’d ever seen it and quite unruly, and he was swarthy from being outdoors.
‘’Ello, Sis,’ Tommy said.
‘’Ello, Tommy.’ She wanted to put her arms round him, but when she went to do so he shook her off.
‘None of that,’ he said with a swagger.
He was wearing a very large pair of trousers cut down for him and belted in at the waist, and a brown shirt that also looked too big, so that he had enormous rolls of sleeve up each arm. On his feet were a pair of muddy black boots, and there were smears of muck and mud all over his trousers. Margaret was in awe of him, and a bit frightened.
‘So, this is where you are.’ He looked at the house with a direct gaze. ‘Looks very nice.’
‘It is,’ Margaret said. ‘And this is John and Patty.’
Though they were older than him, Tommy looked them up and down with a slight air of disdain. Margaret could see that he considered himself a man now, and all of them children.
‘D’you want to have a look round?’ John asked. He had been pleased there was another boy coming.
‘All right,’ Tommy said as if he was doing them a favour. His voice sounded loud and rough compared with John’s.
They showed him round the orchard and garden, then the paddock. While they were walking down there, Margaret tried to keep close to Tommy. She wanted to be near him. ‘Have you seen our mom?’ she asked him.
Tommy turned in an irritated way. ‘How d’you think I’d’ve seen ’er? She ain’t gunna come out ’ere, is ’ er?’
They showed him round everywhere, though of all things Tommy seemed most at home in the paddock with the cows. The sisters had arranged a nice tea, and he sat at the table with them and certainly ate his fill. He talked about the farm where he was billeted, about milking cows, and about barns and hay and straw and chickens. He talked about his hosts, Mr and Mrs Wilkins. Once Margaret heard him refer to them as Mom and Dad. Inside, she could smell his clothes too.