by Katie King
‘Then I’ll tell the others just what a sissy you are, not being able to deal with your sister or to keep hold of your towel, despite your sister not being thought good enough by you boys for whatever it is that you are all up to. And Aiden is just as bad, but I thought I’d get more out of ambushing you. And Peggy and Mabel would be very cross if I tried to pull away his towel,’ Connie went on.
Jessie knew that ‘very cross’ would hardly have come close to what Peggy and Mabel would have had to say about it, should Connie have ambushed Aiden in this way. Aiden would have been furious too, and Connie would never have risked that, seeing how sweet she was on him. In fact Peggy and Mabel wouldn’t be pleased either with what Connie was doing to Jessie, but he thought they’d put that down more to high jinx and sisters being sisters rather than anything malicious on Connie’s part. But none of this was of the slightest help to him right at the moment.
He had no doubt that Connie meant every word of what she said – he hadn’t been her twin for very nearly eleven years not to know that she wasn’t fond of joking around like this. She hadn’t seen him naked for three or four years, and that was fine with him and just how it should be, he thought. He hadn’t seen her naked either, as although the Ross family weren’t prudes, once the twins had got big enough that to bath them together was a bit more than the old small tin bath in front of the hearth on a Sunday evening could stand, they weren’t the sort of family to encourage the type of behaviour that was anything other than deeply respectful of one another’s privacy, and nudity definitely came under personal privacy. Indeed the thought of either his father, Ted, or his mother, Barbara, without their clothes on was simply impossible for him to imagine, and he suspected that Connie would feel similarly.
But only that very morning in the boys’ bedroom, Jessie and the three others had deepened their TT Musket vows by pricking their thumbs with one of baby Holly’s purloined curved safety pins, and then the four of them had stood close to each other as they took it in turns to nick a finger with the pin, forcing a drip of ruby blood onto the tip. They said a new promise to each other, which Tommy insisted was an oath and that they should repeat to each other every day to remind themselves of the enormity of their musketeer pledge to one another, and pressed their four bloodied fingers together. The new promise was, ‘TTs against the HBs; musketeers to the end’. HBs stood for Hull Boys, and the fact that they were musketeers meant that the others didn’t want girls in the TT Muskets, Jessie knew.
‘Um, er, um,’ stuttered Jessie before he ground to a halt in front of his infuriated sister, his eyes bright and looking ominously close to tears, and his hair still dripping from the final dunk he had given it in the bath water. Connie had never attempted to get him to do her bidding over anything important like this before, and so he wasn’t sure of the best way of handling it, nor what he should say to mollify her.
‘I’m warning you, Jessie…’ said Connie.
And then she gave a tug to the towel. It was a tug that was designed to be just sharp enough to worry Jessie more than actually to wrench the towel away wholeheartedly, but it was a reminder of what could happen to him if he kept the musketeers’ counsel and Connie followed through on her promise. The towel was worn and threadbare, and Connie’s fingers went right through the thinness of the material.
Rattled, Jessie groped around for what he could snatch to cover his modesty should Connie swipe the towel totally off him or rip the towel into an inconvenient hole that would expose him. He deeply regretted leaving his pyjamas on top of the pile of dirty clothing in the bathroom where on Peggy’s instructions the boys had piled everything that needed washing as she was going to get the washing copper going later.
All he could see nearby that might help him in his predicament was Connie’s black and white knitted panda Petunia, the sister to his grey bear Neville, but he thought that if he were to grab Petunia away from where she was nestled on Connie’s pillow and thrust it against his privates then that would really incense Connie and make her most unpredictable, with the real possibility that something even more horrible might happen than being chased naked back to his bedroom and called a sissy.
‘Jessie!’ Connie warned again, her voice now edged with a low throb of menace, and he tore his eyes away from Petunia in case this was to madden his sister further when she realised what he’d been staring at, and (horror!) why.
He looked at his sister. It was almost as if he were seeing her for the very first time.
Connie’s pupils were glinting from the light coming in from the window; they contained what looked like a starburst of excitement that was a shade too close to pleasure at his predicament for Jessie’s liking. The summer-lightened golden hues in her thick tawny hair, roughly tied back into a messy pigtail that had strands leaping from it willy-nilly, her purpled-flowered cotton dress tucked into an old pair of Tommy’s shorts with one of Roger’s belts wound twice around her waist to make sure the shorts didn’t fall down, a checked neckerchief knotted around her neck and a grubby pair of plimsolls worn without socks, all combined to give Connie a renegade, slightly pirate-like look. In fact, to Jessie’s mind, his sister’s practical, rather daring get-up embodied more of the sensibility of the TT Muskets than he could have imagined any of the boys achieving just by the way they dressed. Barbara would have thought her daughter to be scruffy if she could have seen Connie at that moment, but Connie was dressed for being able to do whatever the boys were doing, and with this in mind, it was a successful outfit.
Jessie dared to glance back at Connie’s face, and her bold, unfrightened eyes staring back at him with curiosity as to what he was going to do sealed it.
Jessie made his decision. The others wouldn’t be happy, but Connie would find out anyway at some point and they had all kidded themselves that they could keep the TT Muskets boys-only long-term, he told himself. Tommy and Larry would be cross, no doubt, but Jessie was pretty certain that Aiden would side with him, bearing in mind how much he liked Connie. Once Connie was subsumed into the gang, then of course there would be the question of Angela, who was much harder to make a case for as a musketeer, given her wheelchair, but Jessie supposed they would have to have her too, once Connie had been initiated into the TT Muskets as he was sure was going to happen now. He’d had too much bullying and being left out of things when he was at school in Bermondsey to want to wish on his worst enemy, let alone one of his best friends, that they were pushed into the outer reaches and left out of whatever larks were going on. Even if Angela were a girl.
‘We’re called the TT Muskets…’ Jessie began.
By the time he had explained everything to his sister about the posturing of the Hull evacuees, and had even confessed that it had been he who had led the voting regarding no girls, Jessie’s hair was almost dry.
‘You lot are twerps, complete and utter twerps,’ Connie cut in a strident tone, clearly having grasped the whole situation. ‘Girls are your assets, dummy, your assets!’
With that, Connie pushed the bedside table back to where it belonged and with her brother clutching his towel so tightly around his thin body that his knuckles showed white, she marched Jessie back to the bedroom that he shared with the others.
‘Right!’ she said firmly the moment she was inside the door, and Jessie could see by the looks on the faces of Aiden, Tommy and Larry that they all guessed immediately that the TT Muskets were about to have a new membership of two.
To Jessie’s surprise, no one seemed to mind very much about Connie and Angela joining their gang as not much of a fuss was kicked up – not that Angela knew anything about it yet. Nor did his friends dare laugh outright at Jessie’s predicament, having instead to content themselves with the odd unsympathetic chortle in his direction when they thought Connie wasn’t looking, which wasn’t nearly often enough as far as they were concerned, although distinctly too often for Jessie to be comfortable with as he shuffled himself into his clothes behind Connie’s back as she held the other three firmly
in her gimlet gaze.
Twenty minutes later Connie had them all out in the garden, with Angela sitting in her wheelchair alongside Connie, having been told to make detailed notes, as Larry described the moves that the Hull boys had made before them.
Connie walked to and from the pigpen that Roger was slowly constructing, her hands in her pockets and staring at the ground, being obviously deep in thought. At last she announced, ‘Right, you musketeers, this is how we’re going to do it’, and then she went to stand in front of the boys in order to give a demonstration of what she wanted.
With their babes in their arms, both Gracie and Peggy were standing next to each other watching what was going on below Peggy’s bedroom window, which overlooked the garden.
‘Whatever are they up to?’ wondered Gracie.
‘I’ve no idea. But it seems to be Connie’s show, and the boys are looking happy enough to go along with whatever it is that she is saying,’ answered Peggy, ‘especially Aiden.’
The women watched as Connie shamelessly bossed the boys into doing her binding and replicating her moves. She was very pernickety as to where their feet and hands had to be, and nobody seemed to be mastering precisely what Connie was asking very quickly.
‘Well, maybe “happy” was an exaggeration, but whatever it is Connie is demanding they are trying their best,’ Peggy added after a while. She had noticed the expressions on the boys’ faces, who were clearly struggling with the intricacy and the timing of the moves that Connie was forcing on them.
‘Bless ’em!’ said Gracie. And then the young mothers chuckled, before giving in to the sort of belly laughs that made both Jack and Holly laugh too as their mothers pointed out to the babies what was happening below and how silly it all was.
Chapter Twenty
It was just as well that Connie had muscled her and Angela’s way into the TT Muskets when she did, as the very next time that all six children were out together, as luck would have it they ran slap-bang into the Hull evacuees.
Or, to be more precise, the Hull contingent ran into them.
There was a muggy, overcast feel earlier that day as Milburn was tacked up and carefully backed into the trap ready for the children’s latest newspaper collection. It was going to be a biggie as this time they had a couple of new streets to go to, while Mabel had given them a longer list of people they needed to call on to run errands for too.
Angela was hoicked up onto the driving seat by Tommy and Aiden, who then jumped back down to the ground, after which they passed the reins and the driving whip up to her. Beside her on the seat was a clipboard with the various streets of their route, and a list of all the additional houses they had to call at and the other errands they had to run.
The boys had, daringly, taken a vote and then a leaf out of Connie’s book, and so they had copied the way she was dressing as far as they were able.
All six children were wearing grubby plimsolls with no socks and, for the boys, rather than having their shirt buttons done up right to the collar as was usual, they had all left several buttons open so the top of their chests and their scraggy collarbones were exposed. They had each tied rolled hankies (the brighter the better, Tommy’s being a particularly vivid orange) as neckerchiefs around their necks with the knots to the front. Their sleeves were folded up as high as they could go, and they each had their shirts tucked in on one side but not the other. Everyone was wearing the baggiest shirts they possibly could, Tommy having borrowed two of Roger’s tatty gardening shirts for him and Aiden to wear, with their usual shirts being passed on to Larry and Jessie, both of whom were quite a lot smaller.
Connie was wearing the same outfit as on the day of ‘Jessie and the towel’ as it was now known to the children and, exactly like Connie, Angela had also tucked her dress into an old pair of baggy shorts, this time ones that Tommy had played football in (and although Mabel had said they were clean, the previous evening Angela had given them a good scrub as they had looked a bit mucky to her still, and then she’d left them on the soap rack on the bath to dry), and she’d tied her hair back like Connie’s. Angela had wondered aloud to her friend that wouldn’t it be more sensible for them to just wear their blouses with the shorts rather than their dresses? Connie was persuasive though when she insisted that it gave them extra opportunities for employing different identities should they need to follow anyone, as they could quickly untuck their skirts to reveal they were wearing a dress, and if they tugged their hair free from their pigtails too they could dupe whoever it was they were tracking into believing that they were several different people. Still, Angela doubted that anyone would be fooled by her having a variety of identities, no matter how dim they were, seeing as she would be sitting in the trap, or on Milburn, or else in her wheelchair. But Connie was clearly excited by the whole thing, and Angela didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm and so she didn’t say anything.
In fact Connie had had a brainwave a day or two earlier. She had been determined that all six of them would wear something that was identical to identify them easily as members of the TT Muskets, and so one afternoon early in the summer holidays she humped Angela along in the wheelchair, with Angela complaining that Connie was nearly tipping her out at the kerbs, so bumpy was the journey, but Connie insisted she needed Angela’s opinion. With a new respect for Tommy who would usually push Angela, Connie’s face was florid from the effort of dealing with the chair by the time that she and Angela let themselves, in secret, into the dank and slightly musty-smelling room at the back of the church hall where Roger was storing all the jumble that parishioners had delivered for the next fundraising rummage sale, as Connie was convinced that she could come up with something there.
It took some rooting around, and quite a lot of delving into the piles of clothes and whatnot on Connie’s part as Angela kept watch from the doorway back to the empty hall to make sure the coast was clear, as both girls knew that Roger – while he wouldn’t have exactly told them off should he have discovered what they were up to, even if they had offered to pay for anything they took – would nevertheless have looked at them with the put-upon, slightly wounded expression he’d employ in situations like this. It was a look that all the children hated to see on his face and which would always make them promise to themselves that they wouldn’t do again whatever it was that had caused Roger to look this way, or at least until they forgot that he had looked at them like this.
‘Hallelujah!’ cried Connie after what seemed an age, at which Angela beamed and then said an echo ‘Hallelujah!’ before she and Connie both clapped a hand to their mouths, in case they’d been blasphemous. The hall wasn’t exactly church, but it was church property and the jumble stashed there was there for church purposes, while they were, in the technical sense, stealing, even though Connie had made a spirited argument that in fact what they were doing wasn’t exactly theft, but was more ‘working towards the greater good’. Angela hadn’t been quite convinced, but she already knew that she was going to do Connie’s bidding, and so in the grand scheme of things, their precise level of wrongdoing was somewhat academic as it wasn’t going to stop either of them anyway.
What Connie had found were four lengthy ropes of thick twisted-silk cord, with two hefty thistle-shaped tassels on one end of two of the ropes. They were extravagant and luxurious curtain ties that must have held back huge heavy curtains to judge by the weight of the cord (very heavy) and its length (extremely long, certainly long enough to make into six belts to unite the TT Muskets).
‘I wonder what big house this all came from,’ said Angela rather dreamily as she ran the tips of her fingers along the slippery surface of the cord’s silk, but then the more practical Connie took it from Angela’s hands and wound the ruby-coloured cord into four skeins which then she hung on the back of the wheelchair.
‘No idea, but let’s skedaddle before anybody finds us,’ said Connie as she quickly pushed Angela back through the hall and out onto the street where they headed home in what they hoped was
as insouciant a manner as possible.
Later that day, Connie borrowed (without his knowledge) Roger’s Stanley knife to cut the cord, which was as thick as her thumb, into appropriate lengths so that everyone had matching belts.
The next morning, each of the Muskets then wrapped the cord twice around his or her waist and used Roger’s book of knots to decide what the most appropriate knot would be (sheet knots turned out to give the least trouble), or it was wound round just once in the case of Tommy’s middle, as he had a bit of a tummy. As the only girls, Angela and Connie were allowed to add the thistle-shaped tassels as adornment to their belts.
Mabel had stared at them when they came down for breakfast for a few long seconds, although she contented herself with a mere ‘um, a very, er, casual look, I must say’, and then she went back to doling out boiled eggs to everyone without further comment. She clearly thought the children were playing some sort of game, which was fine with the Muskets, and so they all tried to keep their faces as innocent as possible in order to not arouse further suspicion.
Peggy was more direct. ‘Why are you dressed like that? You look like urchins.’
Luckily the children were saved from having to lie outright by Holly getting a bad case of hiccups and giving such a wail of discomfort that Peggy had to attend to her immediately and so she wasn’t paying much attention to Connie’s fudged answer and just nodded along without listening, after which the children wolfed down their eggs, bread and margarine as quickly as they could and then made themselves scarce pronto as they rushed off to get Milburn ready for their newspaper-collection round.