And two days after Jim came home on leave at last, Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, just as Mr Cooper had predicted. There was no opposition. How could there be? Six days later he was telling Poland he wanted Danzig and the Polish Corridor.
Now everybody in England knew it was just a matter of time.
CHAPTER 22
‘Now you make good an’ sure you send the kids off,’ Sid Owen said, hoisting his kitbag onto his shoulder. ‘The minute they’re sent for, you send ’em.’
‘Yes, well all right,’ Joan said unwillingly.
‘Never mind yes well all right,’ Sid said. ‘You do it. You want to go, don’t yer, kids?’
Yvonne and Norman stood dubiously before him on the kitchen hearth-rug. Neither of them wanted to be ‘sent off’ but they couldn’t say so, partly because they weren’t quite sure what being ‘sent off’ really meant, but mostly because he was so dead set on it whatever it was. Breakfast was over and another peculiar day had begun and things had a way of happening whether or not you wanted them to. So Yvonne said, ‘Yes, Dad’, and tried to sound as though she meant it.
‘Good gel,’ he approved, buttoning his fags into the breast pocket of his tunic. ‘You got yer bags packed aintcher?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Righto then, give us a kiss. Be good kids. Do as yer mum says when I’m gone.’
‘Couldn’t we just wait an’ see before we send them?’ Joan tried. The thought of this evacuation was making her feel sick.
He wouldn’t even allow the suggestion. ‘Don’t start that again,’ he warned. ‘You’ve give your word, so let’s have no more of it. If I say they’re to go, that’s it, they’re to go. You don’t want ’em here to be bombed, do yer? OK, then. You send ’em. If I come home an’ find ’em still here you’ll know about it.’ He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, ticking the tinny seconds away. ‘Time I was off. Look after yourself, old girl.’
It was all unreal, Joan thought. Just when they were happy together again he’d got to go to Salisbury Plain as if he was a proper soldier. And the kids had got to be evacuated. It was more than she could bear to think about.
‘Give us a kiss then,’ he instructed, daring her with those bold dark eyes. And when she kissed him briefly, ‘Gaw dearie me. Is that the best you can do?’
She kissed him again, more passionately this time, but the passion made her feel how wrong this was, all of it. Ever since he’d joined the territorials he’d been such a rewarding, insistent lover, quite his old dashing self again. They’d been really contented with one another, hardly rowing at all, and now they were going to be parted, and he’d be sent off to France, she knew it in her bones, and then what would happen to them?
‘Remember what you promised,’ he said, heading for the door. ‘You’re to send ’em. No turning back, eh?’
There’s no turning back for any of us now, Joan thought bleakly as she listened to his boots descending the stairs. ‘Come to the window,’ she said to Yvey and Norman, ‘and we’ll wave him goodbye.’
It was Friday, the first day of September 1939, and the news was grim. The British and German governments had been exchanging notes for more than a week, while the German army massed all along the Polish frontier, and at dawn that morning German troops had finally carried out their long-threatened invasion. In England the army and navy were mobilized. Every window in London was hung with black-out curtains of one kind or another, and many of them had been crisscrossed with brown paper too as a precaution against flying glass, because everyone knew the air raids would start as soon as war was declared. That was always the pattern. There were gangs of council workmen in the streets busily painting white patches along the kerbs and white lines around the base of everything and anything protruding from the pavement, like trees and telephone boxes and pillar boxes, and there were sandbags heaped against the windows of every building in the High Street. Some of the local schools had been evacuated already and the rest were waiting to be called. It was a very vain hope indeed to say, ‘It might not come to it.’
Yvonne and Norman’s school rang the bell to announce their evacuation half an hour after their father left. And while it was still ringing, a boy on a bicycle came pedalling furiously up the High Street to augment the summons by knocking on doors.
He was in a most enjoyable and dramatic hurry, powering along the middle of the street with his body bent forward urgently over the handlebars. He barely allowed himself time to stop when he rang the doorbells. He simply stood astride the bike and knocked and rang. And at every house his doleful message was the same.
‘They’re going, missus! They’re going!’
All along his route sash-cord windows were creaked open, anxious faces appeared to acknowledge him.
But Joan was quicker than he was. She’d sped down the stairs and opened the side door before he had time to take his finger from the bell.
‘Where to?’ she panted. ‘Where they going?’
‘New Cross Gate,’ the boy called back to her, already on his way to the next shop. ‘They’re going missus!’
It was as though he was crying the end of the world.
‘Get yer bags,’ Joan said briskly. ‘You got a clean hanky, Norman? There’s a bar a’ chocolate each. Put it in your pockets. Better go to the lavvy just to be on the safe side.’
‘I don’t want to go to the lavvy,’ Norman protested as she pushed him towards the bathroom door. ‘Can I take my gingerbread man?’
‘Try,’ she urged him. ‘See if you can squeeze some out. Then you can take your gingerbread man. Where’s yer gasmasks?’
She jollied them all along, being cheerful as much to keep her own spirits up as to help them. The street was full of mothers and children running down towards the school.
‘Where are we going?’ Norman asked as they jogged along.
‘To the country,’ Joan said, trying to encourage them. ‘You know, where it’s all fields and there are cows and sheep and chickens. You’ll like that, won’t you?’
‘No,’ the little boy said stoutly. ‘I shan’t. Why can’t we stay here with you?’
‘It won’t be for long,’ Joan said. ‘You’ll soon be back, you’ll see.’
‘How soon?’ Yvey asked. She was very near tears, her bottom lip trembling.
‘No time at all,’ Joan said.
‘A week?’ They were very near the school gate. She could see the teachers walking about and the kids forming lines like they did to march in of a morning.
‘Run in quick,’ Joan said. ‘Mustn’t keep them waiting. Make sure you don’t get parted, Yvey. You keep tight hold of Yvonne’s hand won’t you, Norman?’ The anguish of this parting was tearing at her throat. ‘Go on. Quick.’
They kissed her hurriedly and ran into the playground, and for a few seconds they were lost to sight in the crowd of small figures trotting and running to the assembly point. Then she could see them both standing in line, and one of the teachers was checking the labels they had pinned to their coats and opening their gasmask cases presumably to see that the gasmasks were inside.
‘You going home, Mrs Owen?’ her next-door neighbour asked.
‘No fear,’ she said. ‘I’m going with them as far as ever I can. I’d go all the way if only they’d let me.’
It seemed a very long time before the lines were all in order and the headmaster blew his whistle for silence. From the pavement the little crowd of mums couldn’t hear what he was saying to their children, but presently one of the teachers came out of the building with a banner on which a big letter T was painted. She handed it to two of the older boys at the head of the first line and after a last minute glance at her anxious pupils, she led the crocodile out of the gate.
There was no sound in the street at all except for the tread of all those little boots and shoes. Not a child spoke, not even when they passed their mothers. They crossed the road meekly, clutching their luggage, with their gasmasks bumping against their legs. Some of the boys h
ad remembered to wear their school caps and some of the girls wore berets, but most of them were bareheaded, neatly brushed and combed like Yvonne or tousle-headed like her brother. They looked very young and very small and horribly vulnerable walking obediently away in the summer sunshine.
Their mothers followed along behind them, uncertain but determined, and the crocodile straggled through the streets to New Cross Gate and up the incline to the entrance, where they had to wait while the school before them was led down to the platforms. The entrance was blocked with children and they could hear the trains steaming below them.
‘Now!’ the headmaster called and the crocodile shuffled forward, small pale faces looking anxiously over laden shoulders for one last glimpse of their mothers, small pale hands waving unnaturally like flowers in a storm-force wind. They crossed the entrance hall far too quickly and began the descent of the steps. Joan watched with anguish as her two little ones gradually disappeared, first their luggage, then their hunched shoulders, then their two poor little strained faces, then their pretty heads, until all she could see of them was their waving fingers, Norman’s still clutching his gingerbread man. It was as though they were being torn into strips and removed from her piece by piece. And all round her mothers were keening to their children with one voice. ‘Goodbye darling! Goodbye! Goodbye! Oh my darling!’ Then they were gone.
Joan found that she was weeping without control, the tears brimming out of her eyes so fast that she could hardly see, and her neighbour was crying too, sobbing aloud. The two of them hung on to each other for support until another crocodile arrived and nudged them out of the way.
‘Come home an’ have a cup a’ tea,’ Joan suggested.
‘I’m supposed ter be at work,’ her neighbour said, but she accepted the tea just the same. ‘You need company at a time like this.’ Over in Madame Aimee’s High Class Haberdashery, the Chief Warden was talking seriously to Peggy and Mr MacFarlane.
‘Once the balloon goes up,’ he was saying, ‘we shall need a lot more full-timers. I thought of you two straight away.’
‘Aye, well, you could have our Peggy I dare say,’ said Mr MacFarlane. ‘I’ve no wish tae lose the girrrl, but as you say … As to mysel’, who’d keep the shop if I were to agree to ’t?’
‘Madame Aimee?’ Charlie Goodall suggested.
‘Aye well, mebbe,’ Mr MacFarlane said doubtfully. ‘We’ll see.’
‘Start tomorrow,’ the Chief Warden said to Peggy. ‘Eight o’clock at the flats.’
‘Yes,’ Peggy agreed quietly. It was only to be expected. Somebody would have to look after the black-out, and sound the alarms, and be on duty when the air raids began. But she was only giving him part of her attention, because she was thinking of Yvey and Norman and wondering where they were and how they were getting on. The Greenwich streets had been full of departing children all morning, so they must have gone.
Yvonne was sitting in the middle of a six-seater compartment that was now accommodating eleven children and a teacher. She had her coat wrapped tightly round her knees and she was thinking what an awful journey it was. Katy Burnett had eaten her sandwiches as soon as the train pulled out of the station, even though Sir said she wasn’t to, and then, of course, she started sicking up. She would. Sir held her head out of the window but the sick blew back inside and went all over everything, and everybody yelled and said Yuk! and Ergh! and tried to clean themselves up with their hankies. And then Norman said he felt sick too and Sir held him out of the window and such a long way out that Yvonne was terrified a train would come along and knock his head off the way Mum had always said it would.
Being reminded of her mother was the most painful thing about the journey. While she could talk to her friends and tell Norman off and read her comic, she was more or less all right, but thinking of Mum made her want to cry. Sir tried to make them sing and they did sing, for quite a long time. ‘Whistle while you work, Adolf Hitler is a twerp’ and ‘Run rabbit run’, but they didn’t know all the words and Sir had to keep stopping to hold people out of the window so it wasn’t a success.
But at last, after hours and hours and hours the train chuffed to a halt, brakes squealing, and they were all allowed out of their stinking compartment and found themselves standing on a wooden platform right out in the country.
Sir said they were to stand in a line while the train emptied and then he’d go and see what was what. So they stood in the sunshine, clutching their luggage, and waited. Yvonne was glad that she and Norman had suitcases, because some of the kids only had brown paper parcels and they were all coming undone.
‘This way,’ Sir said. ‘They’ve got us a coach.’
It was a jolly old-fashioned coach, with tiny little windows and scratchy seats and it bounced along the road as though it was made of rubber, throwing them all from side to side and jolting them into the air. But fortunately it didn’t have to go far. After rattling them along between hedges it suddenly stopped alongside a wooden hut. There were two women in green uniform standing on the step and they came down at once and bustled all the kids into the hut and told them they could eat their dinner if they wanted to.
‘Please Miss,’ Yvonne asked, as politely as she could, ‘Please, Miss, where are we?’
‘You’re in Sussex, my dear,’ the woman said. ‘Eat your sandwiches up nicely and then you’ll be taken to your new homes.’
So they ate their sandwiches as nicely as they could when they were sitting on the floor, and Norman said he was thirsty, and Katy Burnett said she wanted to go to the lavvy. And they waited.
Presently people began to arrive, peering in through the door at them as if they were animals in a zoo. And after a while a woman walked into the hut, strolled about, looked them all over, and said, ‘Two strong boys’ as though she was ordering two pounds of sugar. And two of the big boys were told to stand up and go with her. The next lady said she wanted, ‘A clean little girl.’ And after her five or six women came in together and there was quite a bustle of movement and leave-taking.
‘You won’t let me go on my own, will you Yvey?’ Norman asked, his little round face puckered with anxiety.
‘Course not,’ Yvonne assured him, even though she had no idea how such a thing was to be done.
‘These are just the ones,’ Sir said coming to stand beside them. ‘Yvonne is a very good needlewoman, aren’t you, Yvonne?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Yvonne agreed, her heart thumping most unpleasantly. There was an ugly man standing with Sir and he was looking straight at her and Norman. Oh a horribly ugly man, a great fat lumpy man with a face like one of those bloodhound dogs, with a long fleshy nose and watery green eyes and great big yellow false teeth.
‘This is Mr Ray,’ Sir said. ‘He’s going to take you home.’
‘Back to London?’ Norman said hopefully.
Mr Ray cleared his throat by coughing in a bubbling sort of way. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said to Norman. Then he turned to the lady with the list. ‘I don’t think I want the boy. He’s a bit on the small side. ’Aven’t you got another gel?’
‘He’ll grow,’ the lady promised. ‘Brother and sister you know. Less trouble. She’ll look after him, won’t you, um?’
Yvonne assured them both that she would, of course she would. And Norman clung to her hand and scuffed his shoes along the floor.
‘Oh all right then,’ Mr Ray said. ‘Come on.’
So they picked up their cases and followed him, walking several paces behind him as that felt safer and seemed to be what he wanted. They went past several tatty cottages, one roofed in straw which was really amazing, and a church which seemed to be hiding behind a lot of trees and then on downhill for quite a long way until they came to a glass-fronted shop standing all by itself at a bend in the road.
There was nothing in the window except a white urn full of flowers standing on a shelf covered with a black-out curtain, but there was an explanatory sign above the window that said ‘W Ray Undertakers and Funeral Directors
.’
‘Here we are,’ Mr Ray said, and he led them round the side of the shop and through an open door into a very dark passageway. ‘I’m back, Mother,’ he called. ‘Any messages?’
‘No,’ a voice said. ‘It’s been as quiet as the grave.’ And then it laughed in a gloating sort of way and Mr Ray laughed too as he led them into a dark room where a long thin lady was sitting sewing a piece of bright pink satin.
If Mr Ray was bad, Mrs Ray was worse. She was tall and straight-spined and formidable, with thin grey hair, small pale eyes and a nose like a spoon. And she didn’t like either of the children one little bit. They knew instinctively. And they were right, as children usually are in such circumstances.
The Rays had married late in life and had consequently avoided the nuisance of having children. They had taken over the funeral parlour from Mr Ray’s father after his own demise, and were known locally as ‘Rays the Dead’, but in a village as small as Myrtlebury there was too little trade for them to make ‘a living out of dying’ as they jokingly put it. For as they frequently told one another, ‘If people don’t die in the natural course of events we can hardly go round killing them off to make business.’ So when the government announced that people in the reception areas for evacuation would be paid eight shillings and sixpence a week for every evacuee they took into their homes, Mrs Ray saw at once that this was an excellent way to supplement their income.
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