Holidays at Home Omnibus

by Wait Till Summer; Swingboats On the Sand; Waiting for Yesterday; Day Trippers; Unwise Promises; Street Parties (retail) (epub)

  She had hoped that after all these years the quarrelling would have ceased. Dadda losing the business left to him by his father had been a devastating blow. But it was years ago and life had moved on. Mam had been forced to find work and she, Eirlys, had given up hope of further education. Her father had worked cheerfully enough in the factory now making munitions and she had found a good position in the council offices, thanks to their determination. Paying for her to learn shorthand and typing had been a struggle and she was grateful to her parents for depriving themselves of other things to do so.

  She looked up, forgetting for a moment the blackout which enclosed the house and gave no clue to what was happening within. The boys would be in bed and fast asleep by this time. The euphoric mood expanded to remind her of how grateful she was for the way her parents had accepted Stanley, Harold and little Percival. Fortunately they had been very little trouble, apart from Percival’s refusal to eat proper meals, handing much of what he disliked to his brothers below the level of the table, in the hope of not being seen. Like Annie, she sometimes wondered how he managed to survive on the little he ate.

  A number of the evacuees in the town had already gone back home. There were others who had been giving problems to the families who had taken them in. Their three musketeers had settled well and for that she knew her parents could take most of the praise.

  Moving away from the house and its warring occupants, she walked back on to the pavement and stood for a while on the corner of Conroy Street allowing the quiet of the night to settle her before she went inside. She still savoured the happiness of the day out with Johnny and the resumption of their friendship, and was not yet ready for it to end.

  There was no moon, yet she gradually made out shapes and began to recognise buildings and even the lamp post into which several people had walked when the blackout had begun. A sound across the street disturbed her and a cat skidaddled across the road before disappearing into a hedge.

  A light shone brightly out of the side of a house opposite. She put a hand to her mouth in alarm, imagining a lone German plane with a beady-eyed pilot, circling around waiting for such an opportunity, then laughed at her stupidity. On tiptoe she crossed the road to investigate and saw, coming backwards out of a side window, a figure. A thief? Had she disturbed a thief? If so, what should she do?

  Fear of confronting a dangerous and angry burglar ran through her mind but she hurried towards him, still making hardly a sound. He was smaller than she expected, only a boy. Grabbing him around the shoulders as he touched the ground, she turned him and gasped in horror.

  ‘Stanley!’

  Four

  Stanley stood at the kitchen table red-faced and defiant, while Morgan and Annie threw question after question at him. He refused to answer, except to say, ‘Got plenty they have. They won’t even know they’ve gone!’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Annie said in exasperation. ‘It isn’t yours. And breaking into someone’s house and taking things belonging to them is a criminal act.’

  Threats of calling the police didn’t move him. Jaw tight, eyes defiant, he stared into space and told them he didn’t care. Threats of every kind of punishment had no visible effect. Sending him away from his brothers did.

  ‘If we call the police they will probably take you away from us and who will look after Harold and Percival if you aren’t here to look after them?’ Eirlys asked softly.

  Stanley’s head rose and he looked at her with questioning eyes.

  ‘Don’t let them take me away,’ he said, and Eirlys saw not a defiant thief but a very frightened young boy. She opened her arms and he clung to her while sobs racked his body.

  Annie turned away, affected more than she would have imagined by the little boy’s fear. She had tried to remain aloof from the evacuees, knowing their sojourn would be brief, but they were only children and had been taken away from everything familiar without fully understanding why. ‘I’ll make you some cocoa,’ she said, glad of the excuse to leave them and hide her own distress.

  Stanley eventually told them that the money they had found in his pockets had been in a rent book on a shelf and there were several shilling pieces he had taken from a pile stacked near the gas meter ready to feed it when needed.

  ‘We’ll sort it out,’ Eirlys murmured. ‘No one will take you anywhere. Dadda will find a way of getting the things back to their owner, won’t you, Dadda?’

  Morgan looked at the things taken from Stanley’s pocket and wondered. Beside the one pound seven and sixpence, there was a small ashtray, a cut-glass posy jar and a wooden musical box, plus a bag containing some biscuits. ‘Were you going to sell them, Stanley?’ he asked. ‘Why? Is there something you want that we don’t give you? And why the biscuits? I mean, why take food?’

  ‘The biscuits were for the birds in the park,’ he explained. ‘Percival likes to feed the birds.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘They was for our mum. She ain’t got nothin’ like this. They got so much nice stuff they have it packed away in the back of a cupboard where no one can see ’em. Waste, that’s what that is!’

  ‘You still can’t take things that don’t belong to you,’ Eirlys admonished.

  Tired out with the shock of discovery and the questioning, Stanley yawned and Annie reappeared and told them she was putting him back to bed.

  ‘Now what?’ Morgan asked, rubbing his face with his hands in a kind of despair. ‘If they were mine I’d give them a wallop they wouldn’t forget, but how can I deal with someone else’s kids over something like this? Out of my depth here I am, Eirlys.’

  Eirlys was thinking and after a while she suggested a solution. ‘If we hide the stuff somewhere far away from this house, then tell the police we’d found it, they might find the owners and return it all.’

  ‘Where do you suggest?’ her father asked.

  ‘Well, there’s a barn on the field leading down to the stream. Cows gather there so there wouldn’t be any footprints to find. If we covered some of them with mud?’

  ‘Why that smelly old place?’

  ‘Because it’s a place people are unlikely to go.’

  ‘It might work,’ Morgan agreed.

  ‘I’ll take them on Saturday. Johnny will help.’

  The plans to hide the stolen items were delayed, however. Eirlys’s boss, Mr Johnston, called her into his office on Monday morning and told her he needed her to work on the following Saturday. They were expecting a visit of important dignitaries who would arrive on Friday evening and would attend a special meeting that would go on through lunch on Saturday. It was Eirlys’s responsibility to arrange hotel accommodation, organise drivers to ferry them about over the weekend, as they wished to travel around the area, and also to prepare luncheon for sixteen people at the office on Saturday. It was something she had never been asked to do before and was at once daunted by the importance of it. Mr Johnston hinted at promotion and she knew she couldn’t refuse.

  She felt guilty at letting Stanley down; they had hoped to have the whole unpleasant situation dealt with before Sunday. Yet she felt excitement too. She enjoyed her work and had ambitions to make progress, even though marriage to Johnny was her strongest desire. Or was it? Johnny, yes, but giving up her job was beginning to be a less attractive prospect. She realised then how difficult it could be to have Granny Moll insisting on making Piper’s the number one priority.

  She felt guilty at this new attitude to work as she remembered her declaration to Granny Moll of the importance of the family business. She might not have that commitment after all. Allowing her imagination to soar, she thought that she could even become manager of a whole section one day. Although those positions were usually held by men, with the outbreak of war and men being conscripted, she knew she had a better chance than ever before. That thought brought on more feelings of guilt. Perhaps being selfish was an essential part of success?

  In the office that morning she spent a lot of time on the telephone maki
ng bookings, then writing confirmations, besides running across the town to speak to people who had no telephone. She was exhausted when half past five came.

  The catering was in the hands of a firm who supplied cafés and hotels and, although costly, they were reliable and that, she had decided at the outset, was her number one priority for this special weekend.

  The culmination of a frantic week was a smooth-running weekend in which she acted as minutes secretary taking notes at the Saturday meeting. The main subjects under discussion were the delivery and erection of air raid shelters and other needs, beside ordering some of the many leaflets being distributed giving information and advice to the local people. It was the ARP and the WVS who figured large as these things were discussed, and Eirlys went home at three o’clock to tell her father all she had learned.

  Although she was very tired she went to the barn with Johnny as promised, late in the afternoon, as darkness was falling. To add to the gloom it was raining when they set off, Johnny carrying Stanley’s stolen treasures: heavy relentless rain that seemed set to continue for hours, with gusts of wind to add to the torrent. They felt the cold immediately, carrying boxes in their arms and being unable to swing them to keep warm. Wearing wellingtons and heavy raincoats they walked with heads bent against the driven rain and were relieved to see that a dozen Hereford cows were standing near the entrance to the barn.

  ‘Good. They’ll mess up our footprints within minutes,’ Eirlys said and they went into the barn, their boots squelching in the deeply churned mud and sometimes becoming lodged so that Johnny needed to pull her free. They messed up the objects a little then left them and made their way back to the slightly less soggy grass.

  As they were about to turn for home, Eirlys hesitated. ‘I wonder if that was the first time Stanley had broken into houses and stolen things?’ she mused. ‘It might be worth a look in the treehouse in case he’s hidden other stuff there.’

  Johnny agreed and after wiping the worst of the smelly mud and manure from their boots they headed for the oak tree not far from Mr Gregory’s smallholding.

  The walk through the dark countryside was neither pleasant nor romantic. They talked a little, mostly about Stanley who, at ten, had taken responsibility for his brothers and even tried to help his mother with beautiful gifts.

  ‘He’s such a mixture of adult and child,’ Eirlys said. ‘He’s lost the chance of a normal happy childhood, hasn’t he, having to grow up so fast?’

  ‘Perhaps, but people aren’t all the same. Living in a flat in London, he wouldn’t have had the same values or expectations as the children around here. He probably thinks we’re deprived.’

  He waited to help her climb the gate into Sally Gough’s field where Mr Gregory sometimes kept his donkeys. Taking her arm as she clambered down, he didn’t let go when they were both safely over. ‘It’s very dark,’ he explained. ‘A torch is useless and I don’t want you to fall over this hummocky grass.’

  ‘I can’t see a thing,’ she laughed, holding him tightly. He guided her to where the branches of the oak tree were just visible in the dark night.

  ‘I’ll go up,’ Johnny offered and, feeling rather than seeing, he took the rope-ladder from its hiding place, shinnied up and went inside and carefully used his torch. ‘Eirlys! Come and look at this lot!’

  With difficulty, holding the rope and occasionally a branch, she managed to reach the four-by-three-foot building set in a wide fork of the old tree. The floor was made from wooden planking and the sides had three narrow windows and a doorway through which to enter. As she crawled in there was very little light from Johnny’s torch and it took a while for her eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness and the thin beam. Johnny was standing bending over on the far side and between them was a piece of old carpet. Moving it he revealed an assortment of household objects: a teapot and silver-and-glass sugar bowl and matching jug, a few plates and a picture of some children playing on the sands. There also were two books, one of which was about Orlando the Marmalade Cat and had a small stick as a bookmark showing the reader was half-way through.

  ‘Stanley is probably reading it to Harold and Percival,’ Eirlys whispered. ‘He tries to make a life for the boys that’s separate from us. He knows this life is a temporary one and constantly reminds his young brothers that their home is not with us, not to forget the life they left behind when there were only the three of them and their mother.’

  A cardboard box was underneath the rest and while Johnny shone a torch, Eirlys opened it. Wrapped carefully in layer after layer of newspaper was a delicate porcelain cup and saucer. In lustre, with a wide top and an ornate handle, it was a very pretty object.

  ‘The boy has an eye, I’ll give him that,’ Johnny whispered. ‘He doesn’t steal rubbish.’

  ‘Why hasn’t it been missed?’

  ‘Because they’re someone’s treasures, stacked away for safety and probably only used on very special occasions. My mam has stuff like that, hasn’t yours?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Eirlys agreed wryly. ‘In fact, I recognise the teapot!’

  The rain continued to fall around them like a curtain and although there was no warmth and hardly room to move, they settled themselves as comfortably as they could to discuss what they should do.

  ‘Funny that your father chose this tree,’ Johnny mused. ‘I wonder why?’

  ‘He said the other was too far from the house in case of air raids.’

  ‘Yet this one isn’t any closer, is it?’

  ‘Rats,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The area near the old barn is infested with rats, or so he said. Although perhaps this tree was an easier one in which to build.’

  ‘Fond of the boys, isn’t he? Wants to do what he can to make them feel wanted. Everyone needs to be wanted.’

  His voice was low and intimate, their bodies were touching in the most exciting way and he seemed hesitant to move.

  Eirlys began to feel tense, wondering whether Johnny felt as aware of her closeness as she did of his. Then a mundane remark made her realise she had been alone in her thinking.

  ‘We ought to take this and put it with the rest of the stuff, in the barn,’ Johnny said.

  ‘Except the teapot,’ she laughed. ‘Little devil. He told us he wanted to take all his loot back for his mother.’

  ‘Strange that he stole from you.’

  ‘He thought anything hidden away had no value.’ She chuckled. ‘He’d have had a job getting all this into the little case he brought with him!’

  Eirlys wondered when Johnny would suggest leaving their uncomfortable perch. She didn’t want to. In spite of the discomfort of soggy clothes and mud-covered hands and boots that felt as though they were encased in lead, she could have stayed close to him all night without complaint.

  Struggling in the confined place, Johnny put an arm around Eirlys’s shoulders and she was glad of the warmth of him. She snuggled closer and they stared unseeing out of the entrance, their wet cheeks touching, listening to the gentle hissing of the rain through the leaves above them. It was a cosy sound and if only they had been dry it would have been heaven. Now and then a gust of wind stronger than the others seemed to move the weaker branches of the sturdy tree and they clung closer.

  The kiss when it came was sweet and gentle and Eirlys thought she had never felt greater happiness than this reunion with Johnny in the peculiar hideaway in the oak tree surrounded by the spoils of a child’s robbery.

  They were both reluctant to leave but knew that if they were to transport the items from the tree and put them in the barn, they had to get it done soon, in case another lone walker took shelter and discovered the items already left there.

  Carefully rewrapping the teapot, the cup and saucer and the rest, they carried them down and set off to retrace their steps to the barn where the patient cows stood exactly where they had left them.

  ‘I hope they shiggle about a bit after we’ve gone,’ Johnny said. ‘We don’t want ou
r footmarks to be seen.’

  ‘Hardly a problem; we’re going to tell the police we found them while sheltering, aren’t we?’

  Johnny went back with her and they explained to her parents about the extra items. Harold and Percival were listening while Stanley read to them out of the most recent Beano comic, which had been first issued a few months before. Harold laughed at Stanley’s ad libs and his interpretation of the drawings but Percival was stony-faced, as usual refusing to be amused.

  When Johnny and Eirlys explained to Annie and Morgan about removing the treasures to the barn, their explanations reached Stanley’s ears and he handed the comic to his brothers. ‘Now, I’ve started you off, and you got to see how much you can work out for yerselves.’

  On being confronted with the teapot he looked, shame-faced, at Annie and explained, ‘I took it ages ago, when we first came, and I thought we was going ’ome the next day. I’ve been tryin’ to get it back without you knowin’.’ He was shouting and Eirlys knew he was close to tears.

  As Annie turned to place the teapot on a shelf, he suddenly grabbed a mac from the back of the kitchen door and ran from the house.

  It was Johnny who ran after him, talked him into calming down and brought him back to the house. Johnny said nothing but secretly admired the boy for doing what he could to take care of his family in a situation for which nothing could have prepared him. Stanley was only a child himself, although to hear him talk you’d imagine he was an old man, he thought with a chuckle.

  * * *

  The police called and listened to Eirlys’s explanations about finding the stolen goods when she and Johnny were sheltering from the rain.

  ‘Sheltering from the rain? Wasn’t it raining when you set off, then?’ the constable teased. ‘I don’t know, what it is to be young, eh, Mr Price?’

  Eirlys’s father grinned and winked at Johnny. ‘I reckon that’s why half of us get married, because there’s nowhere to go for a bit of a kiss and cuddle, don’t you, constable?’