The Evacuee Christmas. Katie King

Delbert, I love you!’ was a shout Peggy thought she heard above the din as now some wives and kiddies were pushing past her to run right beside the moving vehicle, some even banging the charabanc’s sides as it edged its way through the grimy street.

      She hoped she had caught Bill’s words – he clearly had been saying something to her – but she couldn’t prevent a slither of concern that perhaps some little mite would take a fall as he or she ran beside the bus, slipping to a heinous end under the rear wheels, and so she felt thoroughly discombobulated, quite done in with her undulating feelings. Bill’s declaration of what she hoped was love now felt tainted somehow by the worry of the children running beside the large vehicle.

      ‘Bill, I’ll look after our baby, I will, I will,’ she shouted back, her hands either side of her mouth in an attempt to make her voice as loud as possible. She hoped against hope that her husband could feel the strength and resolution in her cry, even though she knew he was already out of earshot.

      She hoped also that he knew she was feeling the pain of his absence almost as sharply as if she had lost one of her own limbs. She had married him for better or for worse, and they had had the ‘for worse’ for too long – she was now determined on the ‘for better’.

      Evacuation simply had to be for the better. Didn’t it?

Chapter Five

      ‘Yer better give Barbara ten minutes on ’er own with our Jessie and Connie,’ advised Ted, when he ran into Peggy as she was trudging towards her sister’s house just a couple of minutes later. ‘We’ve jus’ told ’em they’re to be evacuated on Monday mornin’ along with the rest of their school an’ it didn’t go down well.’

      Peggy couldn’t fail but notice how deep were etched the lines on the face of her brother-in-law all of a sudden. He was only in his early thirties, but just at that moment, as he stood half in a weak shaft of early-morning sunlight and half in heavy shadow, she could see exactly how Ted would look at age sixty. Then she hoped that he would make it to such advancing years, and not be cut down in his prime as many people would inevitably be during the war.

      ‘How did they take it, the poor little mites?’ she asked, swallowing her sad feelings down and trying to concentrate instead on Connie and Jessie. ‘I really feel for them as they’ll hate being apart from you and Barbara. And I’ve promised my Bill that I’m going to go out of London too. I don’t really want to, but if I stay and something happens to the baby, then I’ll never forgive myself, and he won’t either.’

      Ted nodded to show his approval of Peggy’s decision, and then he confessed that it had been very hard for him and Barbara to find the right words to break the news of the forthcoming evacuation to the children.

      They had found it a difficult line to tread, he explained, as they wanted to make it sound as positive an experience as possible for Jessie and Connie, without there being any option for them not to go, but with it all being couched in a manner that wouldn’t make the children worry too much once they had gone to their billets about Ted and Barbara remaining in London to face whatever might be going to happen.

      ‘Connie seemed the most taken aback, which were a shock, but that could be because we’re more used to seeing Jessie lookin’ bothered an’ so we didn’t really notice it so much on ’im. Still, it were a few minutes I don’t care to repeat any time soon, and Barbara were lookin’ right tearful by the time I ’ad to go to work and so she’ll be glad to ’ave you there, I’m sure,’ Ted confided to his sister-in-law.

      Peggy went to touch Ted on the arm in comfort, but then thought better of it. He looked too tightly wound for such an easy platitude.

      She contented herself instead by saying she was sure that he and Barbara were doing the best thing and that they would have broken the news of evacuation to the children in exactly the right way.

      Nearly everyone, she’d heard, was going to evacuate their children out of London and so it wouldn’t be much fun for those that didn’t go, she added, as they wouldn’t have any playmates, while schooling would be a problem, too as the government was going to try and make sure that all state schooling was taken out of the city.

      Peggy thought she saw the glint of a tear in the corner of one of Ted’s eyes as she spoke, but then he cleared his throat sharply as he averted his head, and added quickly that he had to go or else his pay would be docked, and with that he walked away curtly before she could say anything else or bid him farewell.

      Peggy remained where she was standing, wondering if Barbara had had long enough on her own with the children, or if she could go and call on her now. She felt she had been on her feet for quite some time already that morning and over the last few days she had grown a bit too large not to be having regular sit-downs.

      Then she saw Susanne Pinkly hurrying in her direction, with a cheery sounding, ‘Peggy, I need to talk to you but I’m late for school – can you walk over to St Mark’s with me? I was going to come and see you at lunchtime, but this will save me an errand if you can spare me a couple of minutes now?’

      Peggy and Susanne Pinkly were good friends, having been at school together from the age of five, and later in the same intake at teacher’s training college before they finally simultaneously landed jobs at the local primary school where they had once been willing pupils.

      They’d also spent an inordinate amount of time during their teenage years discussing the merits of various local lads and how they imagined their first kiss would be. Susanne was fun to be with, and was never short of admirers who were drawn to her open face and joyful laugh. Peggy had often envied Susanne her bubbly nature that had the men flocking, as Peggy was naturally more serious and introverted, and so when Bill had made it clear he thought her a bit of all right, it was a huge relief as she had been fast coming to the conclusion that the opposite sex were hard to attract.

      Although some schools wouldn’t let married teachers work, fortunately this hadn’t been the case at St Mark’s Primary School. While Susanne was still an old maid, being positively spinsterish now at thirty-one, Peggy had married Bill just a term into her first job without much thought as to what this might mean for her in the working world. Luckily St Mark’s didn’t have a hard and fast policy as regards making married female employees give up work, as some schools did, which Peggy found herself very pleased about, and increasingly so when she didn’t become pregnant for such a long time. She couldn’t have borne being stuck at home on her own and without anything to do – she would have felt such a failure, she knew.

      However, when she fell at last with the baby, Peggy had had to stop working at the end of the summer term as her nausea had got so bad, and since then she very much missed her lively pupils and the joshing camaraderie of the staffroom. Bill spent long hours at the bus depot, and he was rather fond of a tipple with the lads on a Friday and a Saturday night if he wasn’t rostered on the weekend shifts. Barbara’s time was taken every weekday by her job at the haberdashery, and so quite often the days felt to Peggy as if they were dragging by. She discovered all too quickly that there was only so much layette knitting an expectant mother could enjoy doing.

      It was still up in the air whether Peggy would ever be able to return to work following the birth of the baby, as most employers didn’t want a mother as an employee, and Peggy knew that if in time she did want to return to her classroom – after the war with Germany was over, of course – then she would have to make a special plea to the local education authority that she be allowed to go back to work.

      Before that could happen, she and Bill would have to decide between themselves that she should resume her job, and then they would need to sort out somebody to look after the baby during the day, which might not be so easy to do.

      Bill didn’t earn much as a bus driver (his route was the busy number 12 between Peckham and Oxford Circus), and aside from the fact that Peggy missed her pupils, and she knew she had been a good teacher, she suspected too that one day she and Bill might well feel very happy if she could start to add once again to the family pot by bringing in a second