Tuppence To Spend (2 page)

But it didn’t seem as if anyone could sort out Hitler. And now the war, that had been looming for so long, had come terrifyingly close. The children were being sent away … She leant her head back again, feeling once more the wash of sickness and fatigue. I can’t manage it, she thought. I just can’t manage it. I’ll have to talk to Dan.

‘They’re taking all the kiddies away. Sammy brought the letter home today. They’ve got to go to school early on Friday morning, with sandwiches, and we don’t even know where they’ll be going.’ Her voice shook.

Dan pushed the tabby cat off his chair and sat down to unlace his boots. He was tired and frightened, though he could never admit that to Nora. He couldn’t even admit it to himself. But when he thought of the war he had known – the trenches, the mud, the endless noise, the crying and the screams, the dead men at his feet – he felt sick. He felt furiously, helplessly angry. It was coming again and there was nothing he or anyone else, it seemed, could do to stop it.

He scowled, his eyebrows drawing together in a thick
black bar. ‘They’re bloody mad, the lot of ’em. Any tea on? I’m parched.’

Nora heaved herself up from her chair and moved slowly across the little back room to the scullery. I’m so tired, she thought, but if I feel like this now, what’s it going to be like when the bombing starts? She caught a glimpse of herself in the bit of cracked and freckled mirror hung above the sink and wondered when her fair hair had started to go grey, and when its curls had turned into straggles.

She filled the tin kettle with water and set it on the gas stove. The tea packet stood on the cluttered cupboard top and she put three spoonfuls into the chipped brown teapot. While she waited for the kettle to boil, she took down two cups, adding milk from the meat safe outside the back door and sugar from the blue paper bag it had come in from the grocer’s.

Tibby had followed her into the scullery and was mewing for milk, so she poured some into an old saucer and watched him crouch over it. She made the tea, gave it a couple of minutes to brew, then poured it into the cups and carried them back into the living room. The effort of it all left her exhausted.

‘Dan, I don’t want our boys to go,’ she said, sinking back into her sagging armchair. ‘I don’t want them going out to the country, to strangers.’

‘Well, our Gordon won’t.’ Dan slurped his tea. ‘He’s out at work, he won’t be qualified to go.’

‘I don’t want Sammy to go either. He’s too little.’

‘He’s getting on for eight. They’re taking kids younger than that.’

‘Yes, but he’s so little for his age and he still needs me. And I need him, Dan. He helps me.’

‘Well, it don’t look much like it,’ Dan said, glancing round the bleak little room. ‘There’s dust you could grow potatoes in on that sideboard and there was mouldy bread
in the bin when I went there for me sandwiches this morning.’

‘I know, it’s the heat … But he does the shopping, and hangs out the washing and things. And I’ll miss him so much. I don’t want him to go, Dan, I don’t really.’ Tibby came back and jumped up on her lap. ‘And there’s the cat, too. He’d break his heart if he had to leave Tibby behind.’

Dan rubbed a hand across his forehead. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to think about the war at all. He looked at his wife, lying back in her chair, weary and white-faced, and wondered if she was ill in some way. The thought brought fresh fear and that, in turn, a fresh surge of irritation.

‘Well, what d’you want me to do about it? It’s for you to decide, you’re the boy’s mother. If you don’t want him to go, just tell ’em so. They can’t force you. It’ll save us some money anyway. They want five bob for each kid, you know. We can feed our Sam on less than that, he don’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive.’

Nora closed her eyes. ‘It’s just that all the other kiddies are going. The Budd boys and the Collinses, and those two from Atkinson’s, the greengrocer’s. I don’t want people to think I don’t care—’

‘I don’t give a toss what people think!’ Dan broke in. ‘Lot of snobs round here, think they’re better than anyone else. I passed that Mrs Glaister coming down the street just now and she turned her head away as if I smelt! And that Mrs Chapman, she ain’t no better.’

‘They’re all right when you get to know them. Jess Budd at number 14, she’s a nice little body, and I thought you got on all right with her hubby. It was him told us this house was up for rent.’

‘Yes, well, Frank Budd’s all right; he went through the last lot with me. But he’s so strait-laced he’s not human! Won’t go to the pub, won’t have a drink – and he was just the same in the Army, the blokes used to go on at him to
have a pint and he never would, no matter what they said or did.’ He was silent for a moment, struggling with unwanted memories. ‘Had to put his fists up more than once – good job he’s a big bloke.’

There was a short silence. Then Nora said, ‘It’s all right, then, if I tell the teacher Sammy ain’t going? Only there won’t be no school here for him to go to, see, there’ll be no teachers left. They want all the kiddies to go.’

Dan looked at her, unsure for a moment what she was talking about. He had retreated briefly into that dark place in his mind that he tried to avoid. The familiar anger gripped him and he stood up quickly, knocking over his tea. The cat leapt down from Nora’s lap and fled from the room.

‘Now look at that! Bloody tea wasted … Well, if that boy’s going to stop home he can make himself a bit more useful about the place. He can clear this up for a start.
Sammy
!’ he roared, knowing that his younger son must be upstairs. ‘Come down here! There’s a job for you!’

Nora closed her eyes again. I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, she thought as she heard Sammy’s timid footsteps on the stairs. Perhaps it would be better for him to go away after all. It couldn’t be worse than being at home …

But she knew that she could not let him go. Sammy was her companion. If he went away, she felt, she might never see him again. Whether there was bombing or not, he might be lost to her for ever. And Dan did think a lot of the kiddy really, she knew he did, it was just that he didn’t know how to show it. It wasn’t Dan’s fault he was the way he was.

The door opened and Sammy came slowly into the room, small and pale, his blue eyes and fair, curly hair a mirror image of her own at that age. His thumb was stuck firmly in his mouth and his eyes, huge with anxiety, went straight to her face, and she gave him a tremulous smile.

‘It’s all right, Sammy. You ain’t done nothing. Your dad’s just spilt his tea, see, and wants you to wipe it up. Bring him another cup, there’s a good boy, there’s some in the pot.’ She held out her hand to him. ‘And guess what, he says you can stop at home with me, instead of being evacuated.’

Sammy stared at her and then at his father.

Dan gave him a reluctant nod. ‘That’s right,’ he growled. ‘Your mother don’t want you to go, so that’s it. But you got to be a proper help to her, mind. You’re not going to be on your holidays. And take that everlasting thumb out of your mouth!’

Sammy nodded, then slipped across the room to his mother and buried his face against her thin chest. Nora held him for a moment before pushing him gently away.

‘Get your dad his tea now,’ she whispered, aware that Dan’s irritation could break out again at any moment. ‘Go and fill up his cup and don’t forget the sugar.’

A wave of dizziness swept over her and she lay back again, waiting for it to pass. It always did, after a few minutes. It was just the worry of it all, she told herself, the worry of the war and whether she would lose Sammy. But at least she didn’t have to think about that any more. Sammy was going to stay with her.

None of the children of April Grove had ever been at school by seven in the morning before. If they’d been told a few weeks ago that they would do it, they’d have laughed themselves silly. Go to school early? You must be crackers.

Yet here they were, up at dawn to collect their things together – their little cardboard suitcases of clothes, their gas-mask boxes, their paper bags of sandwiches to see them through the day. And where would they be when the day ended? They didn’t know. Even their mums didn’t know.

Even though he wasn’t going, Sammy got up early and went along to the playground as well. He had an obscure feeling that he had to, and anyway it might be the last time he would see the other boys and girls for months. Years, even. Already feeling abandoned and lonely, he wandered among the milling throng and came face to face with Tim Budd, arguing fruitlessly with the teacher about having to wear a luggage label on his lapel. Tim stared at the smaller boy.

‘Here, why haven’t you got a label on? And you haven’t got your gas mask neither, nor your sandwiches. Aren’t you coming on the train with the rest of us?’

Sammy shook his head. Since the Hodges family had only come to live in April Grove a few months ago, he’d been ill with whooping cough and didn’t know any of the children well. The Budd brothers, from the other end of April Grove, were friendly enough, though, and while he didn’t see much of them at school, being a few years younger, they had sometimes let him join in a game of cowboys and Indians, or in kicking Tim’s old football along the road. He wished they weren’t going away. He would have liked to be real friends with them.

‘My mum doesn’t want me to go away. She’s poorly.’

‘Your mum’s always poorly,’ Tim observed dispassionately. ‘My mum says she’s—’

What Jess Budd said about Nora Hodges was lost in the shriek of Miss Langrish’s whistle as she marshalled the children together in the playground. In the road outside a fleet of buses waited to take them to the railway station and as soon as the children could be got into their lines, class by class, they would climb aboard them. There was a flurry of last-minute kisses and admonitions to be good, and mind you send that postcard the minute you arrive so I know where you are. Suddenly panic-stricken, children began to cry and cling tightly to their mothers, so that their fingers had to be prised away, while mothers found
the tears streaming down their faces as they watched their children climb aboard the buses, wondering when they would see them again, wondering who would put them to bed that night and whether they would be kind to them and make them wash properly and eat their greens.

‘I’ve heard they don’t even have proper lavvies out in the country,’ a woman standing near Sammy said. ‘Just buckets full of dirt, down the bottom of the garden. My Wendy won’t never be able to bring herself to use something like that.’

Sammy Hodges knew most of the women standing there. There was Wendy and Alan Atkinson’s mum from the greengrocer’s shop, and Martin Baker’s from October Street, nearly frantic over her Martin. And there were one or two dads as well – Brian Collins’s dad, who worked shifts, and Mr Cullen, the milkman, who’d had to bring his Susan because Mrs Cullen had died a few days ago of TB and was being buried this very day. He looked as if he’d been crying and Susan’s pigtails looked like rats’ tails, as if he hadn’t been able to do them properly.

Sammy wondered what it was like to have your mum die. His own was often poorly and had to stay in bed a lot, but she wasn’t going to
die
. He hoped not, anyway. He didn’t like thinking about what it would be like at home if she did. There’d be only Tibby to love him then.

‘Aren’t you and Gordon going, Sammy?’ Mrs Budd asked him and he shook his head again.

‘Mum doesn’t want us to.’

She gazed at him with a funny look on her face, as if she was trying not to cry. That was because she was sending her own boys and her girl, Rose, off to the country. But Sammy had heard Martin Baker’s mum say that Mrs Budd would be going herself next day, with the baby Maureen, so there wasn’t really anything to cry about. She looked as if she was about to say something
else, but Sammy didn’t want to answer any more questions. He ducked away and slipped between two other mothers to stand at the back of the crowd.

The buses trundled away and some of the mothers followed them, hoping to catch another glimpse of the children before they got on the train at Portsmouth Town Station. Jess Budd turned in the opposite direction and began to push Maureen’s pram, and Sammy followed at a little distance, shuffling his feet along the gutter in his broken shoes.

He didn’t really understand why the others were going away. It had all been explained to them at school, but he felt they hadn’t been told the whole story. There was something about a war which might start soon, and that was why they’d all been given the tin Anderson shelters to build in their gardens and the gas masks in their brown cardboard boxes. People said there would be bombs dropping on places like Portsmouth that had a harbour and a naval dockyard, so children and people who were blind or couldn’t look after themselves were going to live in the country, where it was safe. But nobody had told them
why
there was going to be a war.

‘There just
is
, once every twenty years,’ Tim Budd had told him. ‘The last one finished in 1918, see, so this one’s a bit late, but that’s because Mr Chamberlain went to Germany to see Hitler last year and got a piece of paper saying they wouldn’t have one this time. Only Hitler’s broken his promise, see, so we’re going to kill all the Germans.’

‘But why do
we
have to go away, then?’ Sammy had asked. ‘If we’re going over there to kill them, how can they come and drop bombs on us?’

‘Because it’s a
war
,’ Tim said. ‘You can’t have a proper war without fighting, can you?’

Sammy drifted home, still trying to work it out, then he gave up. Grown-ups did a lot of things you couldn’t
understand. Like his mum always being poorly and his dad always being in a bad temper, as if it was Sammy’s fault.

It was only a few streets to April Grove. You went down October Street, or March Street, from September, and there it was, running along the bottom of them both. There were allotments at the back, almost like real country, and up at one end, where Sammy lived, they came right down to the road. Mrs Budd went down October Street, still with Sammy following at a safe distance, and stopped to talk to Granny Kinch, who was standing at her front door.