Edie's Home for Orphans

by Gracie Taylor

  Yes, it was nice to have young people about the place, she reflected. Being with the young kept you young yourself. Perhaps that was why this morning Prue had paused when she’d gone to put on her grey stuff dress and instead donned a light summer frock with a floral pattern, the one she knew Jack admired. Perhaps, too, it was why she had chosen not to comb her hair into the usual tight bun but instead to leave it loose around her shoulders, as she had been accustomed to wear it when she was a girl. After all, she was lucky enough to have very little grey, even though she would be fifty this July. Why shouldn’t she show off her one remaining beauty every once in a while?

  ‘So you lost your mother, did you?’ she said softly to the curious tom staring up at her.

  The kitten continued to stare, unblinking, while its siblings played rough-and-tumble games around it.

  Prue laughed. ‘A cat may look at a king, I suppose. Well, come here and let me see you properly.’

  She picked it up to examine it. It looked a healthy soul, although very young to be without its mother. She held it close to her chest and, seeming to appreciate the warmth, the tom snuggled against her. Prue felt its little body vibrate as it started to purr.

  ‘Now, don’t go getting too cosy, young man. You won’t be able to stay, you know.’ Still, she held the animal a little while longer, stroking its soft baby fur, before she put it back in its box.

  ‘Well then, kitties, let’s see what we can do for you,’ she said.

  She checked on Luca’s cheese tarts, which appeared to be cooked, turned off the oven and put some milk on the hotplate to warm. Then she threw a tea towel over the box of kittens and carried them out to where Jimmy and Aggie were helping – or hindering – Jack to build a coop for the chicks that would soon be joining them.

  Country air and outdoor life were working wonders for the children, just as they had for Edie. The evacuees no longer resembled the shoeless, malnourished urchins whose appearance had so shocked Prue when they’d shown up on her doorstep. There was colour in their cheeks now, and a full, healthy plumpness in their little limbs that made her glow to see. Really, the city was no place for children. The country was where they ought to be: wide open spaces where they could enjoy their innocent games and adventures, and be ruddy and healthy and free.

  It broke Prue’s heart to think of them going back to London and the dreadful so-called stepmother, Bet. She fully intended to see if anything could be done about that. This woman wasn’t a relative by blood or law, so she surely had no right to keep them. And if she was regularly hurting and starving them … it made Prue’s blood boil. Cruelty to children and animals was indefensible. Jimmy and Aggie would be far better in a children’s home, where they’d be fed and cared for, and where there was a chance for them to be adopted by a family who’d love them as children ought to be loved.

  Prue smiled as she watched Jack show Jimmy how to hammer in a nail, then handed the hammer to the boy so he could try it for himself. Jimmy’s tongue protruded from the corner of his mouth as he focused all his concentration on tapping it in.

  Jack, too, had been looking younger and healthier since the bairns had come. They did him good, and he them. What a wonderful father that man would have made!

  Life hadn’t worked out that way though. Prue had often wondered why. Why there’d never been any sweetheart, even before the last war when Jack was a young man with a healthy mind to go with what had undeniably been a healthy, handsome body – and was still, for a man of his years. Yes, Jack Graham could still turn female heads if he fancied sampling the delights of matrimony. But the gardener had always seemed satisfied with his lot here, working for his two old friends and playing uncle to Bertie, who of course adored him. He’d never expressed a wish to be anywhere else, and Prue, selfish as she knew it was, secretly harboured relief in her soul that no one had ever come along to tempt Jack away from the estate – away from her. She really couldn’t imagine life without him here. The day Jack wasn’t at Applefield Manor was the day it would stop feeling like her home.

  She watched Aggie go running up to him, Coco at her feet. Jack picked her up and swung her around in his arms, to the girl’s shrieking delight.

  Edie still kept on at Prue about reviving the treat days. She had resisted so far – the idea of filling the grounds with those sneering, snobbish folks from the village appalled her. But she had to admit, it would be a splendid thing for the children. She’d looked forward to the treats herself when she was their age. Perhaps … perhaps it might not be so bad if they planned it together, as a household. A family.

  Jack smiled at her as she approached, casting an approving glance at her dress and the way her hair fell in shining curls over her shoulders. ‘Well, and who’s this pretty young lady? I didn’t know we had any film stars visiting.’

  ‘Oh, give up, you daft old man,’ she said, blushing slightly.

  She turned to the children, and felt a jolt of pain when she noticed how they recoiled; the wariness they displayed only to her. They loved Jack, and Edie, and Matilda, but they were afraid of her. Perhaps what hurt most of all was that Prue knew it was her own fault, with the ridiculous stiff manners she couldn’t help resorting to whenever she addressed them. She just wasn’t one of those people who was naturally good with children – she never would be.

  But Aggie’s wariness was only momentary. After hanging back a second, Prue was amazed when the child hurtled forward and hugged her around her middle.

  ‘Well! Whatever is this for, Aggie?’

  ‘For Coco,’ Aggie said. ‘Thank you, Mrs Hewitt, for letting him stay, and for saving his life when the bombs come.’

  ‘Oh, well … I should hate to see anything unpleasant happen to him.’ Prue tucked the box she was holding under one arm so she could awkwardly pat the girl’s head. ‘Now, now, get along with you. You’re a good child.’

  Aggie let her go and nodded to the box. ‘What’s that then? I mean, please what’s that then?’

  Prue put it down on the ground and removed the tea towel from the top. Aggie and Jimmy dropped to their knees so they could peer in.

  ‘Blimey, kittens!’ Aggie said in a hushed voice. ‘Are they coming to live here too?’

  ‘No, they’re just our guests for today until Edie finds a new home for them. Their mother was killed in the air raid last night.’

  ‘Aww, poor babies,’ Aggie whispered. Within seconds she and Jimmy both had a couple of kittens cuddled to their chests and were cooing over them while Coco eyed these new rivals for his humans’ affections resentfully.

  ‘Oh, don’t look at me like that,’ Prue said in an undertone to Jack as he smiled at her. ‘All right, so I’m a soft old lady who can’t learn how to say no. You knew that already.’

  ‘That’s our Cheggy.’ He squeezed her arm.

  ‘They’re hungry,’ Aggie said, looking up at her. ‘How do we feed ’em, Missus? I never fed a kitten before.’

  ‘I’ve some milk warming in the kitchen. Do you and Jimmy want to come in and help me give it to them? Your lunch is ready too. I’m sure Uncle Jack can finish building the coop without you.’

  Aggie glanced at Jack, who nodded his consent, and the two children skipped back to the house with their arms full of kittens.

  Chapter 29

  Edie knew as soon as she arrived home that her plan had worked. On entering the sitting room, she discovered the cosiest of scenes.

  Jack was dozing in one of the armchairs with Jimmy asleep in the crook of his arm. Coco, likewise asleep, was lying on the little boy’s chest. Open on his knee Jack had the Arabian Nights, which he’d been reading with Jimmy in an effort to help the boy learn his letters.

  On the floor in front of the blazing hearth were Prue, Aggie and the kittens. The humans had made a comfortable nest for them out of a soapbox and some tattered blankets. Aggie had a mug of warm milk by her, into which she was dipping the dropper from an old medicine bottle to feed the kittens. Soft chamber music played on the wireless. It
was the perfect picture of a happy little family.

  Aggie looked up in delight as the kitten she was attending to finished his meal then rubbed his ears against her hand, purring loudly.

  ‘Aunty Prue, look!’ she said. ‘He knows I’m his mum now, don’t he?’

  Prue smiled. ‘Yes indeed. I think we ought to give him a name, oughtn’t we?’

  Aggie thought for a moment.

  ‘Felix,’ she said at last. ‘Like the cartoon.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a good name. Felix means lucky, which is appropriate when he was lucky enough to find us to take care of him. You and Jimmy had better think about names for his sisters too.’ It seemed to have been established that Felix was the only tom in the litter.

  In celebration of his new name, Felix pounced on one of his siblings and started tugging on her ear with his baby teeth.

  Prue glanced up when she became aware of Edie in the doorway.

  ‘Oh, Edie, you’re home,’ she said, smiling warmly. ‘Come in, dear. You’ll catch cold standing in the draught like that.’

  ‘No, I’d better change before I get comfy. I just wanted to let you know I was back.’

  ‘Well, there’s food in the pantry: I kept some of Luca’s cheese tart for you, and there are cold boiled potatoes to have with it. I must say, the tarts tasted a lot better than I’d feared. One hears such dire things about foreign food.’ She gave one of Aggie’s pigtails an affectionate flick. ‘I only barely saved your portion from The Human Dustbin here.’

  Aggie giggled.

  Jack blinked himself awake.

  ‘Time for ye two to be in bed,’ he said with a yawn. ‘Jimmy’s fast asleep already, look.’

  ‘Just quarter of an hour more while we finish giving the kitties their supper,’ Prue said as Aggie filled the dropper. She glanced at Edie. ‘I suppose we ought to take it in turns to do the night feeds. They can sleep in my room tonight.’

  Edie nodded. ‘If you don’t mind. I can have them tomorrow.’

  Nothing was said about finding new homes for the kittens, and Edie knew nothing ever would be said about it. She had been banking on the fact that Prue was too soft-hearted to spend all day with the animals without succumbing to those big, pleading eyes, and she’d been right. Princess’s kittens were here to stay.

  Edie was glad. There must be so many homeless animals in need of sanctuary. Applefield Manor could be that sanctuary, if Prue could only be persuaded to open her heart to them, and it looked as though Princess’s babies had managed to break through the widening chink in her armour.

  The kittens had achieved something else too, something that neither Edie, Tilly nor Jack had been able to do – finally breaking down the awkward reserve Prue always displayed with the children. She and Aggie looked for all the world like grandmother and granddaughter as they sat by the fire, feeding the new arrivals. Edie had always suspected the problem wasn’t that Prue disliked children, or animals either: only that she had too little experience of both to behave naturally around them. All it had taken was something to bind them together.

  In her bedroom, Edie began the painful process of changing out of her dungarees and into her civilian clothes. It had been an even busier afternoon than usual at the farm, with a morning’s work to catch up on and two farmhands missing, not to mention dealing with the aftermath of the air raid. Sam said they had got off lightly, but many of the sheep were suffering with their own ovine version of shellshock. Several were off their food and there had been a number of early births, with, sadly, more than the usual number of dead lambs. Edie suspected that at Larkstone Farm they would be feeling the effects of the lone plane that had wrought havoc on Applefield for many weeks to come.

  They had been so busy that she’d barely seen anything of Sam: it had been every man for himself as they’d dashed around tending to the distressed sheep. Edie didn’t know if she felt relieved or disappointed. If he tried to kiss her again, or asked her for a date … what would she say, now she knew all that she knew? Every time she reflected on his kindness to Tilly and Luca, she found herself smiling.

  Not being all that hungry – they’d barely had time to breathe on the farm today, let alone eat, and it had been after five when she’d finally caught a minute to bolt down her sandwiches – Edie went back to the sitting room to say goodnight to the children before Prue took them off to bed.

  ‘Have you had your food, dear?’ Prue asked.

  ‘No, I’ll have it as a supper with my cocoa later,’ Edie said as she claimed a chair. ‘I only had my sandwiches a few hours ago. It’s been a demon of a day.’

  Prue got to her feet. ‘Come on then, children, to bed with you. It’s back to school tomorrow, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘Aww,’ Aggie groaned. ‘But we need to stay and look after the kittens.’

  Prue smiled. ‘Nice try, young lady. Jack and I can take care of the kittens until you come home. It would be a shame for Jimmy to fall behind on his reading and writing when he’s been doing so well, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘S’pose,’ Aggie muttered. ‘Come on, Coco.’

  Coco, immediately alert at the sound of his mistress’s voice, leaped off Jimmy’s chest. Jack lowered the little boy, blinking with sleep, to the floor.

  ‘Bedtime now, son,’ he said in the gentlest of tones, ruffling his hair. ‘You’ll find a softer mattress than me waiting for you upstairs.’

  Aggie ran over and flung herself at Jack for a goodnight hug.

  ‘Night night, Uncle Jack.’ She picked up a kitten and put it on his lap. ‘Here you are. Felix can play with you till it’s your bedtime too.’

  Edie smiled, remembering how Luca had earnestly entrusted Jack to the girl’s care and she’d sworn to make him well again with happy memories.

  Jack laughed. ‘Well, thank you. Go with Cheggy now, child, or you’ll be grumpy in the morning.’

  Edie submitted to a kiss from each of the children, then Prue took them up to bed. All was quiet apart from the music on the wireless, the crackle of the fire and the soft purrs of fed kittens.

  ‘Little hurricanes,’ Jack said, slumping back in his chair. ‘They’ve tired me out today. Until the kittens turned up to distract her, I had Aggie following me all over the grounds. I’ll be glad when they’re back at school tomorrow.’

  ‘She’s been worrying about you,’ Edie said softly. ‘She heard, you know. Last night, when you … when the bombs started falling.’

  Jack looked down at Felix trying to climb up his shirt front and lowered him gently to the floor. ‘Well. She’s a grand little lass.’

  ‘Jack, can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Depends what it is, don’t it?’

  ‘What does Cheggy mean? Is it short for something?’

  He laughed. ‘Is that all? Round these parts it’s an old word for a horse chestnut. That’s a conker to you.’

  ‘What have conkers got to do with Prue?’

  ‘Oh, something from when we were nippers.’ His eyes clouded with memories. ‘Soon as autumn came round she had the glossiest, plumpest beast of a cheggy you ever saw on the end of a string. She was like a monkey, shinning up trees for the best ones, and she managed to lick me and Bert every bloody year. Embarrassing, it was. Mind you, she was gracious enough not to tell the village lads we’d had our cheggies smashed to pieces by a girl.’

  ‘You’re in love with her.’

  Edie bit her tongue almost as the words left her lips. Good heavens, what had possessed her to say that? Jack didn’t look offended, however. He just smiled sadly and stared into the fire.

  ‘That obvious, is it?’ he said. ‘Aye. Thirty-five years and still going strong.’

  ‘Jack, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what made me say that.’

  ‘Well, it’s not much of a secret, I reckon. I never was any good at hiding it.’

  ‘That’s why you never married.’

  ‘Suppose it is. Never had much interest in women, since I couldn’t have the one I wanted.’


  ‘Prue doesn’t know though, does she?’

  ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Sometimes I think she don’t see it because she don’t want to.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell her?’

  ‘Edie, Bert Hewitt was about the best friend I ever had. But when he came to me one day and told me his great secret – that he’d made up his mind he was going to marry our Cheggy – well, I could’ve thumped him. Eighteen, we were: me apprentice to my old dad in the gardens here and Bert getting ready to go up to Oxford. I knew that meant the end of any hope I might’ve had with her.’

  ‘Did you thump him?’

  ‘Course I didn’t, we were pals. Anyhow, he didn’t know how I felt – no one did.’ His brow knit into a fierce frown. ‘But I couldn’t help resenting him for it. She never was meant for him! He was the squire’s boy, he could’ve chosen anyone. When it comes to marriage, people are better off keeping to their own kind.’

  ‘That’s rather an old-fashioned notion, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean they should know their place,’ Jack said. ‘If I ever believed there was some sort of God-given social order, the war cured me of it – the last war, I mean. We had some proper posh lads in our platoon, heirs to castles and titles, fighting shoulder to shoulder with dustmen and miners, and all of them the same sacks of meat and bone at the end of the day. Fodder for Jerry’s machine guns, as we all were.’

  His eyes once again held the haunted look that made Edie shudder.

  ‘Well, what do you mean?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘It only brings pain when we try to change how things are. People don’t like it, and they won’t accept it. Prudence would’ve been happier with her own sort: them that could see her for who she was and not what she was.’

  ‘People like you,’ Edie said softly.

  Jack stared gloomily into the fire. ‘Once. Not now.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she’s mistress and I’m the sodding gardener, aren’t I?’ he burst out, slamming his fist down on the arm of the chair. ‘I couldn’t compete with Bert when we were boys, with all that he had to offer her – his house and his money and his place in society – so I never spoke up. And now … he didn’t just beat me to her; he went and bloody elevated her. Took her out of my class so even after he’s dead I’ve got no hope.’