Orphans of War. Leah Fleming

to whitewash throughout the building so it smelled fresh and clean and looked brighter. To everyone’s amazement, they installed a big bath and flushing toilet at the top end of the staircase. Most of the residents of the village had to make do with outside brick privies in the yard and zinc tubs.

      ‘It’s a right rum do giving strangers fancy plumbing. The Owd Vic’s gone up in the world. It were allus a spit’n’sawdust place afore,’ laughed one of the decorators as he sloshed the distemper over the bumpy walls. ‘Ah could tell you some right tales about this…but not for ladies’ ears, happen…There was a murder here once in the olden days. One of them navvies building the railway line threw some gelignite on the fire and near on blew the place up! They say there’s a ghost as—’

      ‘But why’s it called the Victory Tree?’ Plum was curious.

      The old man shook his head. ‘Summat to do with the army recruits. Happen they mustered them up here,’ he said. ‘Before the last war, though. The Sowerthwaite Pals, they were called. Fifty bonny lads went out but you can count on yer hand the ones as came back. I was a farmer’s lad and never got to go…Lost a lot of my school mates. Her ladyship took it bad with losing Captain Julian, and then Arthur Belfield got a blighty…Never see him up here, do we?’

      Old man Handby was fishing for information to take back to his cronies in the Black Horse but Plum’s lips were sealed. Even she didn’t know the full story of why Pleasance had dismissed her son with such venom.

      ‘Where’s the Victory Tree then?’ asked Miss Blunt, looking across the green to the stocks and the duck pond, expecting to see some big elm commemorating Waterloo or Balaclava.

      ‘Now there you’ve got me, lady. The only trees we have are those up the lane to Brooklyn planted by her ladyship in her grief. The big one at the top of the yard has allus been there…Dunno why it’s called the Victory Tree.’

      Plum spotted some local children peeping through the windows to see what was going on. Once word got round the town that the evacuees were coming, she wondered just what reception the new arrivals would get when they turned up at the local school.

      The world of children was a mystery to her. She hoped the man from the town hall was right and it was just a matter of training, obedience and praise. So far she’d been more a tennis court sort of gal, she smiled, driving a fast car with her dogs hanging out, a deb with not enough education and experience to be doing what she was doing now.

      It had been a baptism of fire, sorting out beds and linen and fresh clothes for some of the sad little tykes who turned up at the station with their escort. Some, like Ruby, were pinched and cowed and eager to please; others, like Betty and Bryan, could be cocky and defiant, with wary eyes. There were still six more to arrive.

      These were the rejects from other billets, each with a case history in a file, some nervy and sickly so perhaps it would be like running a kennels for the sort of puppies that were disobedient and poorly trained. In her book there was no such thing as a bad horse or hound, just a poor owner, so perhaps her experience might come handy after all.

      Plum was to be in charge of ordering provisions, book-keeping and returning a full account to the Town Hall in Sowerthwaite, who were overseeing the evacuation and footing the bills.

      Miss Blunt was a former school matron at a boy’s preparatory school near York, specially selected to control unruly children, and she wore a nurse’s uniform at all times to remind her charges that she would stand no nonsense. It was unfortunate that, to cover her thinning hair, she had chosen a rust-coloured wig, which shifted up and down when she was agitated. Plum could see trouble ahead for the poor soul if she kept up the pretence.

      As the children picked bowls of blackberries in the autumn sunshine, Plum saw to her horror that their cotton shirts and dresses were stained purple and lips were dyed blue. There’d not been a peep out of any of them when she told them that every berry they picked was one in the eye for Hitler!

      ‘Miss, miss, the cow with handle bars’s got Bryan!’ yelled Ruby and Betty in unison, pointing to the boy who was pinned against the stone wall. For once, all his bravado had crumpled.

      ‘Don’t scream and don’t move. He’s just an old softie really,’ she lied. ‘He’s just curious.’

      ‘What if he tosses ’m over his head and kills ’im, miss?’

      ‘Look him in the eye, Bryan, and just hold out your bowl, let him sniff the berries and place it out of reach. Then run like the wind!’ she whispered. Hamish was a glutton for titbits and sniffed the bowl with interest, giving the lad the chance to make for the gate. She’d never seen a boy run faster, and he flung himself over the bars, tearing his shorts in the process. ‘It’s like the cowboys in the Wild West, miss, this country lark,’ he panted. ‘Sorry about the berries. The Rug’ll give me hell for tearing me pants,’ he added. ‘Sorry, miss.’

      ‘The Rug?’ She looked up as the children giggled. Then she realised it was a nickname–no guesses who the name belonged to. She had to stifle a smile. ‘I’ll say it was an accident in the cause of duty. I reckon we’ve got enough for ten jars of jelly out of this.’

      When they returned Matron was waiting at the door, grim-faced. ‘Look at the state of them! Oh, and there’s a message from the Hall. You’ve to go at once, Mrs Belfield says, at once.’

      Why did Avis Blunt make her feel like a naughty schoolgirl? It was probably nothing but just in case there was news from Gerald Plum scurried up the line of poplars along the avenue, each one in memory of one of the fallen in Sowerthwaite in the Great War. The war to end all wars had robbed the Belfields of their eldest son, Julian, and injured their second son, Arthur.

      Ilsa, the refugee cook, stood in the hallway looking worried. ‘Madam’s not well. Come.’

      Pleasance was sitting in the drawing room with her feet up sipping brandy, flourishing a telegram, and Plum went cold and faint.

      ‘No, it’s not Gerry. It’s from Arthur…the one abroad…I thought I told him never to contact me again…He made his choice. Now he begs me to take in his brat, blitzed somewhere near Manchester, would you believe. Dolly’s mother got herself killed. Nowhere else to go and he asks me to come to the rescue. The cheek of it, after all these years. As if I care what happens…’

      ‘Mother, he’s abroad. He can’t get to his child…You have to do your duty, it’s your granddaughter.’

      Plum was shocked by the coldness of this selfish spoiled woman, who had cut herself off from her second son just because he had defied her and married a showgirl for love. Why, the very aristocracy of England was strengthened by the blood of many a Gibson girl and film starlet.

      Gerald was the baby of the family and indulged as such. He dismissed his older brother as a fool. ‘He could have kept Dolly as a mistress and kept Mama happy,’ which was what he himself had done until recently. Sometimes Plum feared he’d only married her for her wider connections in the County, while keeping his Lillie Langtry in town, until the poor girl made a fuss and demanded he marry her. That’s when she disappeared and he came home repentant, bearing expensive gifts. Life was good when they were posted abroad for a while, but on leaving the army Gerald had grown restless back in Yorkshire, running the small estate. They’d meant to buy something for themselves but it seemed sensible to live at Brooklyn with his widowed mother.

      Plum’s parents were dead and her brother, Tim, was in the air force, stationed in Singapore. They weren’t close and she’d never told him much about her marriage. She’d just gone along with the idea, thinking she’d fill the big house with children and life, but it hadn’t turned out that way. Now things were strained. However, divorce was out of the question–even Gerald knew that. He had no plans to be disinherited.

      Plum had stayed up in the country, hurt and ready to make her own plans, then war had broken out and Gerald was called back into the regiment, and they sort of made things up again. Now the thought of one of their own abandoned in all that terror just like the evacuees troubled her.

      ‘She