Not that Peggy could do much thinking on what June had said just at the moment, as the truth of it was that she had too much else to worry about.
Normally, when Peggy pushed her daughter along, she felt consumed with love for her, as well as a very, very lucky mother indeed. Every few paces she would look down at Holly and make a funny face or say her name, and then the two would smile gaily at each other. Holly’s unexpected arrival on a snowy Christmas Eve had been traumatic to say the least, and indeed it was only the quick thinking of the children at Tall Trees that had saved both Peggy and Holly’s lives. Over a month in hospital under the watchful eye of the wonderfully sympathetic young doctor, James Legard, had meant that Peggy left the hospital feeling recovered and much stronger than she had felt when she had gone in, and with an always peckish although still tiny baby in her arms. But this was understandable as Holly had arrived dangerously early.
Not a day went by when Peggy didn’t remember what a very close call it had turned out to be for both of them, or the many ways in which she would be forever grateful to all concerned. Connie and Jessie, her niece and nephew, had been wonderful, and Peggy felt she might not be around today if they, and their friends, hadn’t acted so quickly and in such a grown-up way when they found her collapsed.
She knew too that her husband Bill was delighted to have a daughter, especially as they had had to wait many long years before, out of the blue, Peggy fell pregnant. They had been so thrilled with the news of Peggy’s pregnancy, as this had seemed to cement the cracks that had been starting to enter the marriage, cracks of frustration and thwarted hopes at their childlessness.
Bill had only been able to get away to pay them just the one visit since Christmas (and it was now spring moving into summer), catching a coach and then a train up to Harrogate one frosty morning in mid-January. After they had hugged and he had chucked Holly under the chin, he had commented on the several evacuees and their parents on the station waiting to catch the train out of the town to return home as more and more parents from the big towns and cities were coming forward to reclaim their kiddies.
But Peggy had hardly taken in what he was saying about the evacuees, so wrapped up was she in the precious sight of Holly’s tiny hand firmly clasping one of Bill’s giant fingers, the gold signet ring on his pinky glinting to remind him and Peggy of their marriage, and the salt tears slipping down Bill’s cheeks as he gazed lovingly down at his daughter.
Just that one perfect memory of a daughter reaching for a father’s finger had been worth a thousand hours of letter-writing and longings for her husband to be by her side. Peggy had allowed her own tears of joy and gratitude to well up as Bill had put his arm around her and pulled her close, kissing her brow and telling Peggy tearfully in a voice choked with gratitude what a clever, clever girl she was to have produced such a beautiful baby, and how lucky Holly was to have Peggy for a mother. It had felt a wonderful moment.
Now, Holly was lying on her back in the bulky black perambulator, looking for all the world as if she was trying to catch her mother’s eye in order to give her a gummy grin.
She tried waving her small pink fists in the air and then putting one hand in her mouth, and when that didn’t work, a spot of further kicking that was so energetic that her thin crocheted pram blanket slipped completely askew. The silken bow that tied on a white bootee that Aunty Barbara had knitted loosened, and Holly did her best to work it off as she was sure Peggy wouldn’t be able to ignore that.
But Holly’s efforts, no matter how determined the baby was, were destined to fail, as Peggy’s brow remained wrinkled and her dark eyes anxious, as she stared unseeing into the distance while huffing and puffing the perambulator up the hill.
The reason for Peggy’s pensive expression and clenched jaw this sunny May day was because first thing that morning she had received a cryptic card from Bill, who was still located somewhere in the UK (she thought, although Bill had never been exactly specific as to quite what he was up to) as he had intimated he was now training tank drivers somewhere near the coast of Suffolk. Or might it be Norfolk?
Peggy had felt unsettled since the moment she’d laid eyes on the card. Somehow even before she picked it up to read, it seemed to beckon menacingly at her, driving thoughts asunder of the new pony and trap she could hear the children talking about, or Gracie wanting to have use of the perambulator in the afternoon. And reading Bill’s scribbled words had given Peggy no reassurance at all.
Before he’d been called up from Bermondsey for his military training, Bill had been a bus conductor on the number 12 bus that went from south-east London to the West End, or occasionally he was put on the number 63, and he’d hugely enjoyed the daily banter with his passengers. Sometimes, if the depot was short of drivers, he’d not put up a fuss if he’d been asked to get behind the steering wheel instead, even though Bill had often said to Peggy that it was nowhere near as much of a hoot driving a double-decker as it was dealing with all and sundry as he stood in his smart conductor’s uniform ready to take their fares. Once war had been declared and it became obvious to the authorities what his previous job had been, it made sense therefore to all that Bill turned his experience into helping less experienced drivers gain the knowhow of manhandling heavy vehicles. And that really was all that Peggy knew about what he did these days.
Bill was no letter-writer at the best of times, and so for Peggy to receive a card from him, the second in a week, was unusual to say the least. In fact it had never happened before.
The card merely said: ‘Peggy, we need to have a word – I will telephone you on Sunday, Bill’.
In fact it was so out of character for Bill to contact her again so soon after the last missive that now she was unable to dispel a niggle of worry that had multiplied and grown over the morning so it was now a seething mass squirming uncomfortably just beneath her ribcage, increasing in intensity with every passing hour. She couldn’t stop chewing over the fact that on Bill’s card there had been etched no ‘love’, ‘fondest wishes’ or ‘missing you’, or even ‘thinking about our dear Holly’, the last of which was a given in his communications these days. Most concerning though was that there hadn’t been the whiff of even one ‘X’ either, not to her, and – unbelievably – not to Holly.
Something was up, Peggy knew as surely as eggs were eggs.
And she was just as certain that whatever it was that had provoked Bill to contact her so soon after his last card (which had arrived only on the previous Monday and had been gaily filled with casual chatter about card games and japes to do with the NAAFI, before sending love to her and Holly, with a multitude of kisses) was likely to be something that she wasn’t going to like in the slightest.
Peggy rarely experienced the sensation of a twinge of piercing worry as she was naturally quite a calm and resourceful person, but whenever she had had such a stab of anxiety in the past, it had always proved to be the precursor of something extremely trying at best, and downright infuriating at worst.
As she manoeuvred the perambulator into the drive at Tall Trees and headed toward the back yard (they all tended to use the back door to enter the house through the kitchen rather than the imposing front door that scraped heavily across the stone flags of the hall), Peggy was so deep in her thoughts that she didn’t even notice the upended trap in the corner of the back yard, its wooden shafts pointing up to the sky as if to announce it was keeping its own special lookout for enemy aircraft high above them in the endless blue sky. She and Holly had left Tall Trees to head for June’s teashop that morning before the children had come down to breakfast, and since then she had completely forgotten about the new arrival.
The small chestnut mare, only just big enough to be able to angle her head upwards so that she could look over the rather high half-door (clearly made for a creature larger than she), thoughtfully watched Peggy bounce the pram across the bumpy yard.
She almost