by Betty Burton
He winked at them as he passed. ‘Morning, Girls.’
1939
Now August was well under way. The slow, comfortable pace of Markham appeared unaltered.
On Thursdays, carts rumbled through the narrow streets to the cattle-market. Horse-dung fell in the roads, and was quickly harvested in buckets by small boys who sold it for money to spend at the Picture House.
Dealers and farmers in breeches and gaiters crowded into town. In the stockyards they strutted carrying whippy sticks which appeared out of control, striking the backs of any and every animal. Having agreed a satisfactory deal, the weather-beaten men spat-and-slapped hands and went into pubs with all-day licences to tank up on enough pints to last them the week.
Downland-fattened sheep trotted and leaped into town, muddling their way from their peaceful fields to the riotous market pens, sometimes panicking wildly into front-gardens and up alleyways. Cattle moaned and pigs shrieked as soon as they sensed the slaughter-house behind the butcher’s shop.
Market Day in Markham, with the exception of the use of some mechanized transport, had stayed unchanged, over centuries.
But the self-satisfaction was beginning to crumble. In some back-gardens, little arches of corrugated iron which denoted an underground air-raid shelter appeared amongst the flowers. There were many fewer young men about. Although the school holidays had not ended, there was activity in classrooms. Piles of cardboard boxes containing gas-masks were being sorted. Buildings and rooms which had long been unused became offices from where ration-books, tokens, shrouds, coffins, vitamins and official information would be stored or issued.
As they had done twenty-five years ago, the people of Markham too scented the slaughter-house. National Socialism in Germany, which had at one time appeared no more threatening to civilization than the Scout Movement or British Communism, had grown terrifying and powerful. People like Sam and Vern Greenaway and Mrs Farr, who had yellow-jacketed Gollanczes in the living-room, and who had once been called Old Jonahs and prophets of doom for suggesting that Hitler meant trouble in Europe, were now asked when they thought the balloon would go up.
Not that Mrs Farr was asked often – for she was a separate, almost solitary woman. But rumour had it that she knew people who were now High-Ups. And she did know. Not only from men in the know who were old boys grown fat on her school spotted dicks but from letters direct from Germany where she had friends who were in danger.
On the last Thursday in August, Mrs Farr, having left her long, narrow house which faced the Abbey Walk, walked the hundred yards to what would be her new domain.
For some reason, which she suspected had to do with Mrs Hardy, the work had gone on apace. Those suspicions were only half correct: the other half was that Mrs Farr, in living so close to the Mission Hall, was better – or worse, depending – than a combined full-time Clerk of the Works, Foreman and designer.
When she arrived, Mrs Partridge was already at work scrubbing down behind the workmen.
‘That shouldn’t be your job, Mrs Partridge.’
Dolly Partridge did not stop creating spirals from the froth of soda and yellow-soap on the linoed floor as she smiled up at her new boss. ‘Ah well, it wanted doing. Those chaps have got no idea, no idea at all. Wouldn’t you think they’d done the distempering before the lino was laid?’
‘If I had not been away yesterday, they would have. At least we shall know that this is perfectly hygienic when you have been at it.’
‘You don’t have to call me Mrs Partridge.’
‘Thank you – it’s Dorothy isn’t it?’
‘Everybody calls me Dolly – but I really hate Dolly.’
‘Dorothy then? Mine’s Ursula.’
‘Yes, it’d be nice to be called by my proper name. Not much point having one, else… I dare say I won’t call you by yours, it don’t do.’
Dolly thought how blinking good it was going out to work, having somebody who appreciated that there was an art to scrubbing a floor. All the years that Dolly had spent on her knees at home, she had never once felt like humming, let alone singing in little snatches as she now did.
Mrs Farr and Dolly were, at the moment, the only two kitchen workers who were actually entered in Georgia’s wages book.
‘I had a letter from the Ministry this morning, Dorothy, which said in effect that we have got to have this place in working order by the end of the month. It’s where they will bring evacuees to be fed.’
‘Poor little souls. Can you imagine how they will feel, being carted off from their mothers and dumped down in a strange place?’
‘Well, yes I can. The ruling-classes do it all the time. I have seen a great deal of it… too much, in fact. Even so, it has given me a good insight into how to make the best of it. Children like familiar food… children who are brought up by nannies go on liking nursery puddings and suet duffs.’ She smiled.
Dolly said, ‘There is something comforting about a spotted dick with a bit of custard.’
‘I am sure that if you could see the menus at some Gentlemen’s Clubs in London, you would find that the most popular puddings are exactly the same as in public schools. So what you and I shall do, Dorothy, is to make sure the children from the East End of London who like shop-fried fish and chips will not have to stand having nourishing country broth thrust upon them. Time enough when they’ve learned to breathe the air.’
Dolly nodded. ‘That suits me, Mrs Farr. If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to make a good fritter and a good pancake.’
‘Splendid. And very nourishing too.’
Mrs Farr might be a single lady with no children of her own, but she understood about people. In all her years, Dolly had never suspected that work could be anything but a necessity. She was beginning to think differently, which was why she sang as she scrubbed.
Mrs Farr, as she inspected the altered appearance of the premises, thought it was a damned shame that it had taken a war to bring a retired building and a retired woman back into life and use again.
‘Young man, if you leave that protrusion of cement, it will collect dirt.’
The man touched his cap to the Old Battleaxe and got on with removing it, knowing that she would be back and he would have to do it in the end.
Mrs Farr wondered where the young man would be by Christmas.
1939
Saturday 2nd September
On the Friday when Britain made its British demand of Hitler that he withdraw from Poland, Dick Wiltshire, just as he was due to go to London and bring Little-Lena and Roy home, broke his leg and became immobilized.
His wife, whose reaction was to be irritable at anything that made waves on her calm domestic sea, said, ‘We should never have let them stop on to the last minute, Dick. What if the war starts and they are in London? It’s the first place the Germans will go to.’
Dick told her not to let it run away with her, that the Germans had got enough on their plates without starting on England. Even so, Mary Wiltshire was quite beside herself with worry, so much so that she swallowed her pride, took her courage in her hands and knocked on Mrs Kennedy’s door.
‘I feel really so awful coming like this, but I didn’t know where to turn.’
‘Of course I’ll go and fetch them.’
‘Dick will pay your expenses, of course.’
‘That’s not necessary. I shall be glad to do it. I don’t know why you didn’t tell me before.’
‘The thing is, I can’t really leave him all plastered up like that. The doctor says he mustn’t move, he can’t even go to the you-know without me there. I say they should have kept him in hospital, but there you are. People don’t know what Dick’s like. He’s a Wiltshire all right: if he says he won’t do a thing, then he won’t.’
‘It’s all right, Mrs Wiltshire. I shall enjoy going. I know it quite well, it’s not far from Putney. I did a week’s filing-system training there once.’
‘Oh that is a load off my mind. There’s all this on the wire
less about the train-loads of children ready to be evacuated from London, and I kept thinking, there’s them being sent away for safety and there’s Little-Lena and Roy there on holiday. Dick says Hitler’s got his hands too full to think about bombing London by surprise, but I shan’t feel they’re safe till they’re back. They won’t like it: they run wild when they’re with Dick’s mother, there are a lot of children for them to play with – not like round here. Well, actually, it is a council flat she lives in, very nice, all mod, cons, but still a council flat… and that always means children. The people that live there call it “Sleepy Valley”: you’ll probably find Little-Lena and Roy running around like gypsies.’ Having opened up Dick’s origins, Mrs Wiltshire gave Georgia fair warning of what she was letting herself in for.
Next morning was Saturday. Georgia took the first train and was in London for nine o’clock.
Grandmother Wiltshire lived in a flat, one of a dozen or more blocks the like of which had no parallel in Markham. ‘Sleepy Valley’ had no traffic, except vans selling fruit and groceries, and hokey-pokey carts: consequently the entire area was used as a playground. As Georgia’s Cuban heels clicked from the bus stop, she became aware of the noise of children. Scores of them playing, swinging, climbing. It seemed to Georgia that the tenants, this morning with doors open and radios playing, couldn’t help but live in one another’s pockets. No wonder Little-Lena and Roy would not want to go back to their quiet, tidy isolation in Station Avenue.
She found Dick Wiltshire’s mother outside her flat on the third floor, standing with a group of women who did not, as would Markham neighbours in the presence of a private letter and family business, move discreetly away, but who read Dick’s letter over Mrs Wiltshire’s shoulder and called Georgia Dearie.
‘Well, Dearie, I don’t blame Gertie’s son for taking the kids back.’
‘I cou’nt never understand what they want to come and stay up The Smoke for when there’s all open fields dahn South.’
‘We was just waiting now to see the coaches go by. All going South to the country.’
A rush of brown, untidy, grubby children raced one another up the stairwell to be the first to tell breathlessly, ‘They’re coming, they’re coming!’ It took Georgia a while to realize that two of the dirty faces were those of Little-Lena and Roy, browner and more animated and assertive than she had ever seen them in Markham. Little-Lena had a great doorstep of bread and jam, Roy’s face showed evidence of having already eaten his. Having brought the news, they all hurtled themselves back down the concrete stairs and raced to the end of the road and lined up as though to watch a carnival go by.
Then the coaches came.
Women in aprons and Dinky curlers came out of every flat and leaned over the balcony railings; then the men emerged in vests and braces and stood in doorways with folded arms. From the vantage-point on the third-floor top, Georgia got her first sight of the evacuation of some of the children of London. As she watched, it dawned upon her that, although war had not yet been declared, it had begun – not with gun-fire, but with separation, bewilderment and misery. And had started on the most vulnerable section of the population.
The council-flat children, with whom Little-Lena and Roy were standing, cheered and waved as coach after coach after coach went towards the Great West Road. Georgia Kennedy had never seen anything so awful and so moving as that endless parade of coaches and the cheering, happy, dirty, ‘Sleepy Valley’ children who, with the exception of Little-Lena and Roy, would within days themselves be hurtled away along the Great West Road or the Great North Road away from these rampant playgrounds surrounded by the open-doors which could no longer promise sanctuary or security. They would not understand who had betrayed them, or why.
She was as oblivious to her immediate surroundings as were the parents and grandparents amongst whom she now stood watching. Her throat was too stricken to swallow, tears welled and blurred her vision, brimmed and fell on to her smart, marina-blue crepe dress, staining it irretrievably. The children began to return to the asphalt areas as soon as they were sure that the show was over.
Somebody further along the third-floor balcony blew their nose and broke the spell, and Georgia realized that it was not only herself, not only the women whose eye-sockets were wet; men too were surreptitiously cuffing their eyes.
A child shouted up, ‘Dere was a ’undred firty-four.’
Whether she had counted correctly did not matter, Georgia thought, as she went into Gertie Wiltshire’s flat to pack the children’s things: even one coach-load of miserable, bewildered children leaving their homes because of war was too many.
* * *
At a Top-Secret location, known as Badger Island, just off the coast of Southern England, the afternoon of the Saturday when his wife was standing in a queue on Waterloo Station, Hugh Kennedy lay upon the narrow bed of a fellow officer, with his arms behind his head, waiting for the balloon to go up. Not a fellow Army officer, but a Naval type.
Hugh Kennedy was well and truly in the Army, and he loved it and thanked whatever god it was who had stirred up a war and then pointed at the ex-Terrie. If one compared the insignias on the two uniform jackets hanging behind the door, the rank of the Naval officer was a touch higher than Hugh’s. But, with the formation of the hush-hush combined-force Arsix ‘outfit’, neither rank nor service seemed to matter too much amongst the officer class: such divisions appeared to have melded or been thrown overboard in the cause of making themselves into an effective outfit.
As he watched his fellow Arsix officer getting dressed, Hugh Kennedy thought that he had never been so satisfied with life. So absolutely… satisfied – there was no other word for it – in his entire life.
It had been a revelation to him.
There was something about being confined on this small island that seemed to break down barriers: not so far broken that the officers mixed entirely with the other ranks but, even here, there was a certain feeling of ‘all in this together’ – saluting had become little more than ‘Hi there’ with the fingers. Only the top brass and the boffins knew what Arsix was and what eventually would be going on here. Top brass kept well away and the boffins hadn’t arrived yet.
For the present, it was life in God’s Own Army for Hugh. Smiling and watching, and smoking a cigarette, he pondered upon the good fortune and the amazing sift-out of statistics that had brought him here. ‘One thing I’ve never been, and that’s a snob. No cricketer could ever be a snob. I’ve always been a good mixer. You have to be, all banged up together on a place like “Badger”.’
He stretched luxuriously, pleased that he was in his prime. The Naval type smiled at the great sigh Hugh let out and went on dressing quietly. Where else, except on Badger Island, would one ever find an off-duty Army captain lying back on an August afternoon on the bed of a Naval officer whilst watching amazingly dark underarm hair disappear within the armhole of an immaculate white Naval shirt – and drinking whisky-soda.
‘What used you to do on a Saturday afternoon? In the days before you became a lay-about Army Nabob?’
For a second, Hugh’s conscience threatened to spoil the perfection of the day with thoughts of Georgia having to struggle with the lawn-mower whilst he was swanning around drinking whisky and wearing nothing but his tan. But the strange ambience of Badger Island – and the impression when he was over there of being beyond any life that was being lived, or had ever been lived; beyond where the sea broke on the South Coast, broke on the shores of England; that limbo, where there was as yet no war or XJ-R6 Establishment – salved any qualms of guilt that might otherwise have concerned Hugh.
‘Play cricket… rugger.’
‘You still play rugger?’
‘I’m not that old.’
Hugh watched the Naval type rolling neat shirt sleeves to just above the elbow. ‘If it hadn’t been for being in the Terries, I think I should have liked the Navy.’
‘What you mean is that you would have liked wearing the uniform. It
is rather good.’ Hugh envied the cut-glass, upper-class voice that spoke of breeding and money. As well as having achieved his ambition of becoming a timeserving Army officer, Hugh was in his seventh heaven living in such close and familiar proximity to this sort of class – actually rumpling its sheets, drinking its booze.
‘I don’t deny it. I’m very fond of white cotton shirts: always love going out for cricket or tennis in freshly pressed whites.’
‘Puritanism and erotic suggestion of virginity. Powerful aphrodisiacs.’
He thought, with a little bit of regret, of the years he had wasted with Georgia, wasted because of his puritanical upbringing. The fault of having an inexperienced girl as a wife, an old man for a father, an old vicar, who would have been happier if little boys could have had their flies sewn up. The times he had brushed aside Georgia’s tentative erotic suggestions because he had felt so embarrassed… so bloody guilty. God, how different it all seemed now that he had got away.
The Naval officer, now immaculately uniformed, came to Hugh and whipped the thin sheet away from his loins.
‘Up, Kennedy. God, just look at the state of you! Have you no shame, lying there in full sail fifteen minutes before you are due on parade? Get yourself a cold shower.’
Looking at his state, Captain Kennedy grinned, and was not visited by his father – as he might have been had he not been on Badger Island where things were different. Where he had learned how the other half lived – and loved.
He reached out and put his hand up her skirt.
‘Tut, tut, Wren Officer St John, you could find yourself on a charge of going on duty improperly dressed. As my mother would have said, What would people think if you were in an accident?’