Blitz (38 page)

‘Damn it all to hell and back, would you believe I’d forgotten it? I shall just have to stink then, I suppose.’

‘Not if I have anything to do with it.’ Poppy was collecting his luggage from the rack. ‘I’ll blanket-bath you. I haven’t forgotten how.’

‘That sounds exciting.’ He gave her a lascivious leer and reached up and pinched her bottom and again she laughed, absurdly happy.

‘You’ve spent too much time with lustful sailors,’ she said. And he laughed too and began to haul himself to his feet.

It took them a long time to manoeuvre themselves along the crowded platform, because even with his crutches David found it difficult to walk, for his plaster was hip high and very heavy, and as they went she thought – I didn’t know how much I loved him. I thought I’d only ever felt real passion for Bobby, but it’s all right – I feel the same for David now, and he’s mine and I’m the luckiest woman in the world – and then felt a great
pang of guilt. How could she feel so light-hearted when Jessie was in hospital with her legs paralysed and her business a ruined, useless mess? But she couldn’t help it. She was happy, war or no war, injuries or no injuries. The people she loved were all alive. She couldn’t ask for more than that.

Goosey greeted them at the doorstep as they got out of the taxi, and with a great deal of exclaiming about how thin poor Mr David looked and her with nothing in the larder to build him up with and mind his poor leg, oh dear, oh dear, it must hurt something cruel, fussed round them so much that it took twice as long as it should have done to get David in and upstairs to the bedroom. Poppy was determined that that was where he was to go to start with, so that she could get him cleaned up and the doctor in to see him and, over his protests, that was where she took him, while Goosey kept getting in the way and trying to hiss something in her ear.

But at last he was there and Goosey was able to grab Poppy’s arm and tell her whatever it was that was clearly bursting out of her.

Poppy, only half listening, because she was thinking about what she’d need to get David comfortable and clean again, suddenly heard what she was saying and she stopped and stared at Goosey, her eyes wide and dark with shock.

‘What did you say?’

‘Oh, Mrs Poppy, hush do, you’ll upset poor Mr David –’ Goosey said, fluttering her hands, but Poppy ignored that.

‘Tell me what you said. I didn’t – disappeared? What are you talking about?’

Goosey shook her head and threw a look at David who was now regaining his breath – because despite his denials, getting up the stairs had been an enormous effort for him – and he said curiously, ‘What’s up, Goosey?’

She waved her hands around distractedly, not seeming to know what to do with them.

‘I wouldn’t have fretted you for the world.’

‘Out with it, ducks,’ David said firmly and Goosey, who had always behaved as though men were slightly alarming if beneficent gods, obeyed.

‘It’s Joshy, Mr David. Run away again – ’

David lit up. ‘That boy is too much – where is he?’

‘That’s the trouble, Mr David, that’s what I was trying to
tell Mrs Poppy without worrying you and – ’

‘How can he have
disappeared
, Goosey?’ Poppy demanded and made the old woman sit down in the small armchair beside the dressing table. ‘Short and sharp, for God’s sake. Tell me.’

Goosey looked up at her with swimming eyes. ‘He run to his grandma, you see, Mrs Poppy, on account you was annoyed with him last time, she said, and she sent him home sharpish and the taxi cab had a crash in the blackout and there was one of the drivers killed and the other one in the taxi with Joshy, he was unconscious and never came round to be asked and they found out Joshy was a runaway vaccie and set him off again – ’

‘They sent him back to Norfolk?’

‘If only they had! I’ve phoned up there, talked to my nephew –’ She swallowed and David reached a hand out to her and said, ‘That was brave of you Goosey,’ for everyone knew how terrified Goosey was of the phone.

‘Well, that’s as may be. And he was that upset! They’ve been looking everywhere. It seems there was some trouble over some of the local boys picking on our Joshy and it all turned nasty, and well – ’

Now she was frankly weeping. ‘No one knows where he is. Your Ma, Mrs Poppy, she’s been that upset. On the phone ever since it happened, she’s been, talked to them at the rest centre and the office that looks after these evacuees and no one knows nothing. There was three trains going out of Liverpool Street that day and no one knows which one he was put on. They say they’re trying but it’s all right on account he’ll be safe being out of London and he’ll write home soon enough – but oh, I’m that upset – ’

Poppy was standing very still and then she turned and looked at David. ‘Darling – can you manage? I’ll go and phone Mama and see what she can say and then I’ll have to go and look for him, won’t I? I can’t just have him adrift somewhere and not know –’ She swallowed. ‘Please, can you cope if I – ’

‘Go on,’ he said at once. ‘Right now. Phone me when you can. You’ve got enough money on you?’

‘I’ve got enough.’ She ran over to kiss him and then shrugged back into her coat, which she’d only just got out of and headed for the door.

‘Look after him, Goosey,’ she called and was gone.

*

I never want to see another train as long as I live, she thought, staring out at the blank greenness outside the window. The train had been standing silent like this for over half an hour, and the crowded carriage was cold and foully stuffy at the same time. She was lucky to have a seat, and she knew it, but that didn’t make her feel any better. There ought to be a better way of finding him, there had to be, and temper rose in her until she almost shouted her fury aloud. But she controlled it and started to take deep slow even breaths to give herself something else to do until the train moved. Counting her own breaths was better than nothing.

But it didn’t help. All she could do was go over and over it all in her mind. The uselessness of the people at the air raid post who had salvaged Joshy from the Bayswater Road that night, and taken him to hospital; the officiousness of the Sister at the hospital who had told her the child had been handed over to the evacuation authorities as soon as he was fit enough to go, and she had no more news than that – all accompanied with the sort of accusing glare that made it clear how much she despised any woman whose child created so much trouble in wartime – and finally the sheer ineptitude of the woman in the office that had supposedly dealt with Joshy’s re-evacuation.

‘I can’t say, my dear, I’m sure,’ she had bleated. ‘I’ve told the boy’s grandmother that, and really what more can we do? The children who came back were so silly, yes silly, and now we have to get them all away again –’ And she had looked helplessly at Poppy as though the unhappiness of evacuees which drove them to abandon their safe country billets in order to get home again was all her fault, and again shook her head.

‘I’m sure he’ll get in touch with you and tell you where he is,’ she said. ‘Won’t he? I’m sure he’s a good boy and can write his own name, and knows his home address.’

‘Oh, of course he does, but I can’t wait until he’s able to get in touch – I have to find him
now
. He’s my son, for God’s sake. Can’t you understand?’

‘They’re all somebody’s child, Mrs Deveen,’ the woman said reproachfully. ‘I wish I could help, indeed I do, but I’ve no assistance here and all the paperwork that has to be done, it’s really too much for one person. I keep telling them that. Don’t worry, dear. I’m sure he’ll turn up somewhere and as long as he’s out of London he’ll be safe enough – ’

‘But can’t you see, you stupid creature!’ Poppy had blazed. ‘He ran away before when he was with his sister and with people he knew and who loved him. Don’t you see he’ll obviously run away again now he’s with strangers? And he’ll be frightened to come home because he thinks we’ll be angry, and anything could happen to him. He’s only ten – ’

The woman had gone glassy-eyed with affront at being called stupid and simply shrugged her shoulders. ‘Nothing else I can do,’ she’d said frostily and bent her head to her work with some ostentation, leaving Poppy to turn away, sick with frustration and fear.

At least she’d been able to find out the trains that had left at the same time from Liverpool Street that evening. They’d taken him to the office directly from the centre, barely half an hour after they’d received him from St Mary’s Hospital, she had been told, but no one could remember which of the trains he’d been put on. Yesterday she’d gone to Colchester and scoured the area with the help of a reasonably sensible billeting officer, but there had been no joy there. This morning it had been Sudbury where the billeting officer had been less helpful, but the local vicar was very concerned. She was sure he wasn’t there. Now, it had to be Bury St Edmunds, and after that – but after that there was only a blank. He had to be here, somewhere.

The train shuddered, jerked forwards a few yards and stopped again, but at least it had moved, and she closed her eyes and began to beg it to move, staring into the pinkly tinged darkness behind her lids and knowing she was behaving like a frightened child. As if her desires could have any effect on inanimate objects –

But they did, for the train started to move, sluggishly, but at least it was going forwards and she opened her eyes and stared out at the telegraph poles with their wires swooping oh so slowly down to be caught again by the next telegraph pole, and felt a sudden surge of hope. He had to be here. It was logical he should be. She’d find him, somehow –

The town was cold and wet, with a little snow lurking in the gutters of the narrow streets and across the broad expanse of Angel Square, and she walked over to the hotel, knowing that there at least would be a place where people would have information. They’d know the identity of the local billeting officer for evacuees if anyone did. And full of hope and tension, she
took herself into the slightly dusty wood-smoke-scented interior and across to the reception desk.

The very young girl sitting there looked up blankly when she asked to be directed to the billeting officer responsible for the town’s evacuees, and then scuttled off to bring someone else, and the tall man who came towards her with polite enquiry on his face looked as old as the girl had been young. No ordinary middling people left anywhere, she thought then. All the vigorous ones gone to fight and the country run by the children and the decrepit.

But he was far from decrepit when he spoke and her spirits began to lift.

‘You want our billeting officer? A problem with your foster children, madam? Or perhaps you feel able to take some more? We have a great many in Bury who – ’

She shook her head. ‘I’m not – I don’t live here,’ she said hastily. ‘I’ve come up from London. It’s – my little boy –’ And suddenly she couldn’t go on. The fatigue of the past few weeks, from the night that Jessie’s had been bombed until now, overwhelmed her. She had hardly slept for days, had travelled hundreds of miles, first to settle Jessie in her country hospital and then to Liverpool to fetch David – and those two journeys had been quite horrendous – and for the past two days she had been criss-crossing Essex and Suffolk like a thing demented, sleeping in hotels where she could find one and all the time praying and worrying about Joshy. She had managed to phone home only once, and knew that at least David was all right, but now she could do no more. She just stood there with her face white and her eyes blank, and the thin old man behind the reception desk said, ‘Tsk, tsk – poor lady, I think you need a nice cup of tea.’

At which point Poppy couldn’t help it. She started to laugh. A cup of tea. That cure for all ills, a cup of tea – and the laughter built and increased and then ran over into tears and she was sobbing miserably on the old man’s shoulder as he half dragged her, half led her to a sofa in the adjoining lounge, the little girl from reception staring round-eyed all the time.

‘Tea, Ellie,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Hot and strong, and bring two cups. I wouldn’t mind one myself.’

He settled Poppy on a sofa in front of the fire and then bent to throw a log on it, and the flames leapt cheerfully and she
thought – they looked like that on Jessie’s roof – and took another deep breath to try to control her tears.

She managed it eventually, and when the tea came took it gratefully and sipped its over-sweetened strongness without complaint. It wasn’t the delicate China tea she much preferred but it was warming and sustaining and she needed it.

‘Well now,’ he said comfortably. ‘I think perhaps you’d better tell me all about it.’

‘Oh, I can’t bother you!’ she said, filled with embarrassment. ‘I’ve used up enough of your time already, and been a fearful nuisance – ’

‘But you said you wanted to see the billeting officer,’ he said mildly.

‘Well, so I do. If you could just direct me.’

His smile widened and she thought – he’s not so very old after all. Or if he is, he doesn’t let it stop him at all. And again she thought of Jessie and had to take a deep breath to push her distress down where it belonged, under control.

‘I don’t need to. I’m Jeremy Markham. I’m the senior billeting officer. I have two or three assistants, you know, but I am the one who does all the paperwork. So if – ’

She almost dropped her cup in her excitement, and set it down on the table beside the sofa with a little clatter and leaned towards him with her eyes wide and hopeful.

‘It’s never occurred to me I’d find you here – I – ’

He smiled. ‘We aren’t full-time billeting officers, you know! It’s our bit of war work and we do it in our own time. Otherwise we’re busy earning a living, you see. I’m the book-keeper here at the hotel and so it’s convenient for me to be in charge. They all come in and out of town and I’m nice and central. And of course I have a phone here. Not everyone does, in the country – ’

‘Yes – yes,’ she said. ‘Well now, let me tell you what happened –’ And she told him as succinctly and as quickly as she could, watching his face all the time.