Tuppence To Spend (5 page)

‘Never said nothing about train,’ he said irritably. ‘
Chubbleduck
, I said. Got a
tree
.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Ruth said, her heart sinking as she wondered what he could be talking about. If he just accepted that she understood it would be all right, but if he required an answer it could lead to yet another of those long, frustrating muddles as she tried to work out what he meant and he kept repeating it, getting increasingly distressed.

Poor Dad, she thought sadly. It must be awful having to sit there day after day, unable to do a thing but watch other people and not even able to talk properly. It must be
like being trapped in a prison, the worst kind of prison. It was no wonder he got snappy and bad-tempered, and that must make him feel even worse.

‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ she said gently, deciding that honesty was the best policy. ‘I don’t really know what you mean. It’s not Ginger, is it?’

‘Train? Of course it’s not train.
Chubbleduck
.’ He could still use his left hand, and he raised it now and pointed across the green. ‘There.
Chubbleduck
.’

Ruth looked where he was pointing and saw Edna Corner coming out of the lane which led down to the farm where she and Reg, who was the farm stockman, had a cottage. She sighed with relief.

‘Oh, you mean Mrs Corner. Edna. Yes, she’s got an evacuee – two, actually. Two little boys.’

He nodded, his bad temper gone now that she understood. ‘Tree, yes. Two trees.’ He smiled, content now that he was understood. ‘Nice little trees.’

‘They do look nice little boys, yes.’ Ruth made a mental note that chubbleduck might now mean Edna Corner, as well as ginger cats, saucepans (which it had meant last Sunday) and the postman (a fortnight ago). Why he should have picked on that word, which he seemed to have made up, she had no idea, and why it was easier to say than ‘cat’, ‘saucepan’ or ‘postman’ was totally beyond her. But Dad had enough to put up with without her trying to teach him the correct words, as the nurse at the hospital had said she ought to do. She was the one who was still fit and well, and she was the one who had to make the effort.

‘I’ll go and make some tea, and talk to Silver for a bit,’ she said. ‘He’s been in the kitchen by himself all afternoon, he’ll be getting lonely.’

Silver was the big African grey parrot that Jack had brought her not long after they’d been married. He’d taught it to say all kinds of things and the parrot repeated
them all in Jack’s own voice. ‘It’ll be like having me here with you, Ruthie,’ Jack had said and indeed, when Silver murmured that he loved her or asked her to let him be her sweetheart, it was just like hearing Jack’s voice. But not, she thought wistfully, like having Jack with her.

Silver had learnt a good many other things during his seafaring days, most of them not fit to be repeated in polite society. Ruth usually covered him up when the vicar called in to see Dad. But she’d also taught him quite a lot herself, so he had a wide repertoire of nursery rhymes and sayings, and he picked up a lot of what other people said too, using their voices. It was quite embarrassing at times.

He was now learning Dad’s language and, Ruth suspected, making a better job of it than she was herself. But Dad couldn’t stand his squawking for too long, so for a lot of the time he was relegated to the kitchen.

She went through the door and Silver greeted her by dancing up and down on his stand, ducking his head and peering up at her flirtatiously.

‘Let me be your sweetheart,’ he cajoled her, in what still sounded uncannily like Jack’s voice, with half a bucket of gravel thrown in, and then in her father’s voice, ‘
Poor
old Joe.’ Dad had taught him that before he had his stroke. He went back to Jack’s soft tones. ‘I love you, Ruthie … You old bugger, you.’

Jack hadn’t taught him to say
that
, she could tell by the voice. It was one of the other sailors and Jack had been furious. But it always made Ruth smile to hear the sudden change and she scratched the bird affectionately under the chin.

‘It’s time you learnt some manners. It’s a good thing we’re not having an evacuee, if you’re going to use that sort of language.’

‘If you were the only girl in the world,’ he began, but Ruth was filling the kettle at the pump in the corner and
his voice was drowned by the squeaking. She set the kettle on the range and handed him a few seeds, saved from the sunflowers she grew in the garden. He cracked and nibbled at them, forgetting to make further conversation, and Ruth started to slice some bread and spread it with fish paste.

As she worked, she looked out through the kitchen window at the neat little garden, with its rows of vegetables and flowers, and its two or three old fruit trees. Dad had looked after it until his stroke, but Ruth managed it herself now. The late afternoon sun was slanting over the crest of the hills beyond and across the woods and fields. The cows were coming back from afternoon milking, lumbering across to their favourite spots, and she could hear a cackling from someone’s garden as one of her neighbours fed her hens and ducks. It all seemed very peaceful.

I wonder what those little evacuees are making of it all, she thought. Some of them have never even seen a cow, except in picture books. I hope they won’t be frightened when they hear the owls later on. They’ll be upset enough as it is, being taken away from their mums and dads like that.

Was there really going to be a war? It didn’t seem possible that the authorities would have gone to all this trouble if there wasn’t. Someone had said Mr Chamberlain was going to make a broadcast on the wireless on Sunday morning. It looked bad.

The kettle boiled and Ruth made a pot of tea. She finished making the sandwiches and put them on plates, together with a few buns kept back from the ones she’d baked to take to the village hall. She set the whole lot on a tin tray with a picture of a garden on it and carried it through to the front room.

Silver finished his sunflower seeds and looked up in time to see her disappearing through the door.

‘Oy!’ he cried in the voice Dad used to use when the boy next door had been in scrumping apples from the tree at the bottom of the garden. ‘You thieving little blighter! I
love
you, Ruthie.
Poor
old Joe …’

Ruth smiled and left the door open so that he could still see her. What with Dad and his chubbleducks, and Silver and his parrot talk, there wasn’t much chance of a sensible conversation in the cottage, but at least she was never going to be lonely.

All the same, she’d have welcomed an evacuee. It would be nice to have a bit of young life about the place.

The rest of the evacuees – the mothers and babies, and the blind people – arrived in the countryside next day. Jess Budd went to Mrs Greenberry’s, with Rose, and the two women took to each other immediately. One or two younger women from the September Street area of Copnor settled in with other families and old Mr Crouch from the top of March Street, who walked with a white stick, was put with the doctor. He seemed bewildered, groping his way around the unfamiliar house, tears seeping from his sightless eyes.

‘It’s a shame, that’s what,’ Mrs Mudge, the vicar’s housekeeper, told Mrs Greenberry when she dropped in for a cup of tea a few days later. ‘Poor old man, he doesn’t know where he is. Trying to find his way round that great house – it’s daft. He ought to be in a small place, like he’s used to. And doctor’s wife’s at her wits’ end, frightened to death he’ll hurt himself.’

‘I’ll call in and see him, if that’s all right,’ Jess Budd said. ‘He’s a funny old chap, but there’s no harm in him. He’s never been the same since he lost his sight and his wife went only last year, so he hasn’t properly got over that either.’

They sat for a few moments without speaking. Jess was thinking about poor old Mr Crouch, blind and bewildered in a strange place. It was strange enough for her, living in someone else’s house, away from her own home and husband, so it must be ten times worse for him. She stirred her tea and sighed.

‘So it’s war, then,’ Joan Greenberry said, echoing her sigh, and the other two women nodded. They’d all heard Mr Chamberlain’s broadcast on the wireless on Sunday morning. ‘I hoped right up to the last minute that they’d find some way of stopping it.’

‘They must have known they couldn’t do that,’ Jess said. ‘They’d never have gone to all the trouble and expense of sending us out here if they’d thought there was any chance … And then there was all those Andersons being delivered right back in July. The day my little Maureen was born, that’s when they brought ours, and I could have done without all that clatter, I can tell you! But they must have known then.
Months
before then.’

‘My Harold reckons they’ve known for years,’ Mrs Greenberry said. ‘They’ve been getting ready for it. Only trouble is, they weren’t as ready as the Germans.
They’ve
been getting ready ever since the last one, that’s what he says.’

The women sat in silence for a while. Jess was thinking about Frank, alone in the little house in April Grove. How was he going to manage without her? How was he going to get his meals, do his washing? And how long was she supposed to stop out here, miles away from him?

It’s not just people like poor old Mr Crouch who don’t know what to make of it all, she thought ruefully, and went to fetch Maureen, who was starting to wake up and cry in her pram just outside the kitchen door.

With war now a reality, the two communities settled down uneasily together. It wasn’t easy for a small village to find itself suddenly twice the size and there were inevitable frictions. The children, sharing the small school – evacuees in the mornings, village children in the afternoons – eyed each other suspiciously; some of the village children who had evacuees in their own homes made friends with them, others treated them as enemies. The Portsmouth children
drifted together and there were quite a few squabbles between the two groups.

‘Those are
our
conkers! They’re not for you townies.’

‘Yah! Frightened of a few old cows! Didn’t even know where milk comes from!’

‘
I’m
going back to Pompey, soon as I can. There’s nothing to do out here. Nothing but trees and stuff. It’s stupid, the country is.’

Some of the children, like Tim and Keith Budd, treated it as one long holiday. They roamed the fields and woods, finding new games to play, and – once they had got over their shock at the size of cows – helped around the farms. There was plenty to do, and when you got fed up with it you could slip off and climb trees or make a den. With school for only half the day there was time for both work and play.

Women like Jess, accustomed to running their own home and looking after a family, found it more difficult. Jess naturally wanted to do her share around the house, but Mrs Greenberry had her own ways and even though the women had quickly made friends there were still occasional differences.

‘Oh! I thought I might do some baking—’

‘
Tuesday
’s my baking day. I get the range stoked up for it then, see, and then I can heat up the irons as well, to do the ironing while the baking’s in the oven. We don’t have gas stoves we can just turn up whenever we feel like it, not out here.’

Or: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I did my own washing? You don’t want to be bothering about my and Rose’s things.’

‘Best if they all go in the copper together, my dear, so we can get it all done the same day. But I’d be grateful if you could air the baby’s nappies somewhere else. My hubby does like to see the fire when he comes in after a day’s work.’

It was no easier for Mrs Greenberry, having a woman
and two children – one of them an eight-week-old baby – suddenly foisted on her. Jess, having to wash nappies every day, was almost at her wits’ end, trying to keep them out of the family’s way. She’d hung them round the range to start with, then in the big living room, then in the bedroom the three of them shared. But they never seemed to be properly aired unless they’d been either out on a line or in front of a fire. She worried about Maureen catching a cold and eventually decided she had to tackle Mrs Greenberry again.

‘Suppose I just put them round the range during the afternoon? I’ll take them away before Mr Greenberry comes in. I know it’s a nuisance, but Maureen did have that sniffle yesterday. And I really do need to boil at least twice a week.’

Mrs Greenberry looked at her, and her face softened. ‘I know you do, my dear. I’m sorry. Of course you can air the kiddy’s things and we’ll stoke the boiler up every other day for you. There’s no sense making things harder than they already are.’

Two women in the same kitchen was undeniably tricky. But with goodwill and understanding on both sides it was possible to shake down together and share a lot of the chores. It couldn’t ever be like having your own place, though, Jess thought as she wheeled Maureen’s pram through the village to visit the boys. And it seemed downright unnatural to be living in a different house from two of her own children.

‘They’re doing really well,’ Edna Corner reassured her. ‘You mustn’t worry about them at all. They’re smashing little boys and Reg is like a dog with two tails, having them to take around the farm.’

Somehow, that didn’t comfort Jess as much as it ought to have done. ‘It just feels so funny, not having them with me,’ she said. ‘I can see you’re looking after them properly, Mrs Corner, and I’m grateful, don’t think I’m not, but it ought to be
me
washing their clothes and tucking them into
bed at night.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know, everything seems to have turned upside down lately. And how long’s it going to go on? There hasn’t been a sniff of a bomb so far.’

There weren’t any bombs at all. The threatened air raids still hadn’t happened by Christmas and a lot of the children went back home to Portsmouth for the holiday. It was strange to be back among the narrow streets after the wide open fields and woods of the countryside, and they felt conspicuous and uneasy at first. Some of the few children who had stayed behind were curious to know what life as an evacuee was really like, while others were scornful of the ‘runaways’.