Tuppence To Spend (3 page)

Sammy quite liked Granny Kinch, although he was half afraid she was a witch. She was old –
really
old, probably about a hundred years old, he thought – and she stood or sat on a chair at her front door all day, watching what went on up and down the street. She talked in a funny, mumbling voice as if her teeth might drop out at any minute, and she wore her hair in steel curlers under a faded scarf. But she always had a smile for the children and, better than that, she always had a few sweets too. Sometimes she would get all the boys and girls gathered round on the pavement and throw a handful of toffees over their heads for them to scramble for.

Granny Kinch lived with her daughter, Nancy Baxter, and Nancy’s children – Micky, who was a few years older than Sammy, and her baby Vera. Micky hadn’t been evacuated either. Sammy had seen him by the school, watching the buses depart. He’d looked half envious, half scornful, and when they’d gone he’d run off on his own, his face dark.

When the Hodges had first come to April Grove, Micky had quickly palled up with Sammy’s brother Gordon. They’d gone off together, playing truant from school and pinching things from shops. They’d got bolder, and in the end
they’d been caught pinching from Woolworths. Gordon, who had been in trouble when they lived at the pub in Old Portsmouth, had been put on probation, and Micky given a good telling-off. If they did anything else, the man at the court had told them, they’d be sent away to an approved school.

‘Don’t care,’ Micky had boasted afterwards. ‘Wish I
could
go away. Wish I could go to
London
.’

As Sammy hung around at the top of April Grove, watching Jess Budd go into Granny Kinch’s house, Micky himself came round the corner. He stopped when he saw Sammy, then came on more slowly.

‘What you doing here? Wouldn’t they let you be ’vacuated?’

‘Mum didn’t want me to go,’ Sammy said. ‘She’s poorly.’

Micky stared at him. ‘So you got to stop and look after her, then?’

‘Not all the time. I can play out as well.’ Sammy glanced up and down the street. ‘Only there’s not many people left to play with now.’

‘There’s me. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stop here and see the bombs.’

‘I’d like to have gone out to the country,’ Sammy said wistfully. ‘There’s trees and things out there, and fields to play in. I bet they’ll have a smashing time.’

‘Bet they won’t. Bet they’ll be fed up after a couple of days and wanting to come back to Pompey. Bet they’ll wish they hadn’t gone.’ Micky kicked at a stone. ‘Where’s your Gordon? S’pose he’s at work, is he?’

Dan Hodges had got Gordon a job down at Camber dock. He’d had his fourteenth birthday, so could leave school, and Dan said he’d got to bring some wages into the house. He’d keep an eye on him, see he didn’t get into any trouble.

Micky was disgruntled when he heard this. Gordon was
just that bit older and bolder, and Micky had looked forward to more lucrative mischief with him. But Gordon didn’t want to be bothered with him now he was working. There were all sorts of dodges at the docks, and a twelve-year-old boy wasn’t any good to him now.

Micky thought Sammy was a poor substitute for his brother, but he was all there was so he might as well make the best of it.

‘What shall we do now, then? Go over the allotments, see if there’s anything worth getting?’

‘I can’t. I’ve got to go in and see if Mum wants anything.’

Micky looked exasperated. ‘Well, when you’ve done that, then? There’s no school now, we can do what we like. Go down the harbour, do a bit of mudlarking. Go up the Lines and see if the soldiers’ll let us look at the guns. They’re putting up real big ones to shoot planes down. They might let us have a go.’

Sammy shook his head. He was nervous of Micky, who was much bigger than he was and not afraid to do things that could get him into trouble. The man at the court had told Micky that he and Gordon were lucky not to be going to an approved school. Sammy knew that next time Micky was caught he could easily be sent away and he didn’t want to find himself there as well. Besides, who would look after Mum?

He turned away. ‘I’ve got to go in now.’

Micky shrugged. ‘Don’t care, then. I can do better things on me own and I’ll keep whatever I get. Might go down Commercial Road and go in Woolworths. There’s always stuff you can pinch in there, off the counters.’ He sauntered off, whistling, and Sammy looked after him. He knew it was going to be lonely without the other children around and no school to go to, and he thought Micky was feeling miserable too. His best friends, Cyril Nash and Jimmy Cross, had gone as well, so there was
no one for him either. It would be good to play with him, but not to go pinching stuff from Woolworths or the allotments.

He went down the back alley and up the narrow garden, passing the sheets of corrugated iron that were supposed to be made into an Anderson shelter. Everyone else had got theirs up but Sammy’s father hadn’t even got the hole properly dug yet. He said he was going to wait until he knew for certain there was going to be a war. It was daft, doing all this before you even knew it was going to happen.

Dan and Gordon had already left for work at the Camber dock, and Nora was downstairs, washing up the dishes that had been left the previous night. She was half leaning on the sink, working slowly, and her pale face had a yellowish tinge to it. She looked round as Sammy came through the back door and gave him a wan smile.

‘There you are, love. Did you see your mates off? Go off all right, did they?’

He nodded and picked up a grubby tea towel to start drying. ‘They went on buses. Then they were going to go on trains, but nobody knows where they’re going. It’s a secret.’

‘I know, love. Can’t see why it should be, I must say. The blooming Germans aren’t going to be worried about a lot of nippers.’ She gave him an anxious glance. ‘Did you wish you could be going too?’

Sammy looked at her. His mother had changed a lot in the past year. He could remember when she was lively and pretty, playing games or singing to him. She used to sing old songs and nursery rhymes, and she had one favourite that she’d sung to him ever since he was a baby:

‘Sammy, Sammy, shine a light,
Ain’t you playing out tonight?’

The song was part of a game, a sort of hide-and-seek after dark in which half the children ran off to hide and the rest searched for them. If you thought you knew where a hider was, you had to call out the rhyme and then the hider must show his light – a torch, if he possessed one, or a candle in a jam jar, hidden under his jacket – and if he was caught he had to join the chasers. Sammy’s mother, who had lived out in the country with her granny for a while when she was a little girl, said it was best played among the trees and fields, but Pompey children thought the streets and alleyways of the town were best, and they didn’t call out ‘Sammy’. Their word was ‘Dick’ and Micky Baxter had sneered at Sammy when he’d first played the game.

‘Well, it was Sammy where my mum lived,’ he’d retorted, and Micky had stepped forward, his fists raised pugnaciously before Tim Budd stepped in.

‘Leave him alone, Micky. It don’t matter what name we use so long as we get on with the game. My candle’s not going to last all that long, I could only get a bit of a stub.’

Nora still sang to him occasionally, but her voice was weak and tired now, and when she sang the ‘shine a light’ rhyme her eyes would fill with tears.

She’d started to get ill after Sammy’s whooping cough and not long before Gordon had got into trouble, but it wasn’t anything you’d go to the doctor for, she said. Just feeling tired and sick and having headaches, or even aching all over. Doctors couldn’t do much about that sort of thing and besides, she and Dan didn’t have the money. Not for just feeling tired. She’d be better soon anyway.

But she hadn’t got any better, some days she didn’t get up at all. Sammy could do some of the jobs she couldn’t manage, but on the whole most of them were left undone. Getting meals was the only thing that really had to be
done, and even then their dinner often consisted of no more than a few pennyworth of chips from the shop in September Street.

He thought about the green fields and trees where the others were going today. He’d watched them getting on the buses; some, like Tim Budd, had been as excited as if they were going on holiday, but others had cried and clung to their mothers.

‘I’d rather stop here with you and Tibby,’ he said. He leant against his mother, feeling the sharpness of her bones.

She looked down at the dishes. ‘I can’t finish this now. I’m going to go and sit down for a bit. You do the rest, Sammy, there’s a love.’

She went into the back room and lay down in the old armchair they’d brought from the pub when they came to April Grove. She looked worn out and when she closed her eyes the lids looked blue, as if the colour was showing through. There was a small bruise on her cheek that he hadn’t noticed before and Sammy looked at it anxiously, wondering where it had come from, before covering her gently with an old blanket.

There was some tea in the pot, left over from Dad’s when he went to work. It was a bit cool but Sammy poured some into a cup and added milk. He took it in and gave it to his mother, then went back to the scullery and looked at the scummy water in the sink.

There were only a few cups and plates to wash, and he swished them about a bit with the dishcloth and put them on the wooden draining board. The teacloth was too wet to dry them properly and left greasy marks, but he put them in the cupboard and tipped away the water. It gurgled very slowly down the drain.

Nora was asleep. Tibby was asleep too, on a pile of crumpled washing dumped in the other chair. Sammy lifted him off and pushed the washing aside to sit
down with the cat on his knee, watching his mother. After a while he got up and wandered outside, still holding the cat.

The street was empty. Even Granny Kinch had gone indoors. There was no sign of Micky and all the other children must be on the train by now, on their way to the countryside.

Sammy put his thumb in his mouth. He sat down on the doorstep, with Tibby beside him, and waited for the long day to pass.

In the village of Bridge End, Ruth Purslow had been busy all morning, baking rock cakes and making a big jug of lemonade for the new arrivals. She put them all into a shopping basket, covered them with a clean teacloth, then got ready, washing at the kitchen sink and putting on her grey frock and the green cardigan her niece Lizzie had knitted her for Christmas. It was just the colour of her eyes, she thought, looking in the mirror to brush her soft auburn hair. Over the top she put on her second-best coat and her little green hat with the pheasant’s feather in, then popped her head through the living-room door to say goodbye to her father.

‘I’m just going down to help with the evacuees, Dad. They’ll be arriving this afternoon.’

He looked up from his chair by the window and nodded. ‘Evacuees.’

‘That’s right,’ Ruth said, pleased that he had understood the word. ‘They’re coming from Portsmouth, because of the war. I’ve made some lemonade and buns.’ She straightened the crochet blanket over his knees. ‘I shan’t be long.’

There was a group of women already in the village hall when she reached it, laying out buns and cups of lemonade on the long trestle tables. Lizzie was near the door, talking to her friend Edna Corner. They’d grown up together, skipping down the lane to the village school and playing by the stream and, later on, dawdling by the bridge on summer evenings to flirt with the boys. Boys
and girls must have met on that old bridge for hundreds of years, Ruth thought, casting her mind back to her own courting days.

She’d met Jack there – well, she’d known him for years, of course, all the youngsters knew each other, but when you got to about fourteen or fifteen and started going down to the bridge it seemed different, somehow. Jack, who’d always been just another boy, kicking a ball about and running after girls to pull their pigtails, had suddenly become a tall young man with shy eyes and a nice smile. He was three years older than her and had got an apprenticeship at one of the shipyards in Southampton. When that finished, he’d told her, he was going to join the Merchant Navy as an engineer.

‘I want to see the world,’ he said, his dark eyes glowing. ‘I want to see all these places you read about or see at the pictures. America – Australia – China. I want to see them for myself.’

Ruth had been fascinated. She listened for hours as he talked about the places he would see, wishing she could go too. But girls didn’t do that kind of thing. Girls stayed at home and looked after the family, and waited for their sailor husbands to come rolling back from overseas.

‘You will wait for me, won’t you, Ruthie?’ Jack had whispered the night before he went away on his first voyage. He’d got a position as sixth engineer on a cargo ship. It was going to Africa to collect bananas and he was so excited he could hardly wait. Ruth would have felt left out and abandoned if he had not already told her how much he loved her, and how he wanted to find her waiting for him when he came home.

‘I wish we could get engaged …’

‘Dad wouldn’t let us,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m only seventeen. He won’t let me get engaged for at least another two years.’

‘He let your Jane, didn’t he? She couldn’t have been
much more than nineteen when she and George got married.’

‘I know, but that was because …’ Ruth blushed. Jane’s first baby had been born embarrassingly soon after the wedding – a fine, lusty child for a seven-months baby. Ruth, who had been only nine at the time, hadn’t been supposed to know about it but there hadn’t been any way of concealing the family row that had shaken the little cottage, leaving Jane and her mother in tears while George Warren, not much older, looked white and shaken. The wedding had taken place less than a month later. They’d gone to live in one of the tiny farm cottages and a few months later Ruth had found herself with a niece only ten years younger than herself – the same age difference as there was between her and her sister.

All that had been forgotten by the time Ruth and Jack were courting. Jane had had two more babies, Terry and Ben, and George was hoping to take over as farm foreman when old Simon retired. There had been sadness when Jane’s and Ruth’s mother, Florence, had died soon after young Ben’s birth, and after that Ruth and her father lived alone in the cottage. And that, she knew, was half the trouble.