Peggy shoved the brake on the pram down with her foot and gathered Holly into her arms, not noticing the delicate blanket hadn’t been grasped too as was usual, or that there was now a bootee amiss.
Holly didn’t appreciate not being the centre of her mother’s attention, and she gave a little cry just as a reminder that she was there and that she was looking forward to her lunchtime feed.
Peggy didn’t say the soothing ‘shush, poppet’ or ‘there’s my girl’ that Holly expected, or give her a jiggle to make her laugh, or swing her high into the air.
Instead her mother’s face remained stony as she clutched Holly a little tighter and concentrated on balancing her in her arms along with her handbag and a lentil ‘surprise’ in a tin pie-dish that she had bought from June for their supper later on, whilst also trying to open the kitchen door.
There was only one thing for it, and Holly filled her baby lungs to capacity so that she could produce the first in a rapidly escalating series of loud wails that no mother could ignore.
Laying her ears flat against her head, Milburn dipped her head back inside the box and dropped her nose down to inspect her empty bucket just in case she had missed a morsel. She couldn’t compete with that racket and she wasn’t going to try.
The next day arrived, which was Sunday, and the sense of excitement from the previous morning still held strong amongst the children, not least as there was due to be another arrival at Tall Trees.
Larry was moving back up to Yorkshire to take up residence with them once again, and everyone was looking forward to it as the atmosphere just hadn’t felt the same in the rectory since he had departed several months earlier.
Larry had attended Jessie and Connie’s school back in Bermondsey, and so the previous September he’d been evacuated up to Harrogate along with the twins, Angela, and indeed the rest of their school too.
Larry had had a chequered time in Harrogate, having been bullied at first and then later moving to Tall Trees where life settled for him a little. But with the Phoney War dragging on and on, his mother Susan had arrived at the end of January to take him with her, back to London.
Once Larry had been waved off on the train Jessie and Connie had been very subdued for the rest of that day. Although they suspected that Larry might be going back to a rocky situation inside his family home, as his father was known for being a lout, they couldn’t help but wish that they were also on the train heading south with the prospect of seeing their own mother, Barbara, and father, Ted, very soon and moving back into their two-up two-down in Jubilee Street in Bermondsey to be a proper family again. Harrogate and Tall Trees was fine as far as it went, the glum faces of the twins seemed to say when they were alone together, but despite all that Roger and Mabel did to make them feel settled, it just wasn’t their home, was it? And they did miss their parents terribly. Peggy knew what they meant – she had mixed feelings about their evacuation too.
Unfortunately for Larry, the situation he found back in London turned out to be every bit as unpleasant as he’d feared it would be. Peggy knew that Larry’s father, Trevor, had been banned several times from the Jolly, and other public houses too, but business was business and somebody such as Trevor did spend a lot of money, so a temporary ban was more a rap on the knuckles for poor behaviour rather than anything permanent.
Peggy had taught Larry back in Bermondsey, and she had once had a worrisome run-in with Trevor in the street a day after she had encouraged Larry to take a storybook home so that he could finish off the chapter he’d begun reading aloud in class and had been very taken with. A clearly tipsy Trevor had demanded aggressively, even going so far as to poke Peggy in the arm with a ragged-nailed nicotine-stained finger, to know if she could be so good as to explain why it was that she was wasting Larry’s time with something so pig-ugly useless as a piece of make-believe. Peggy tried to say that The Family from One-End Street had a lot to recommend it, and that Larry’s engagement was excellent news.
Trevor hadn’t been having any of it, with the result that the next day Peggy had had to say to Larry during morning playtime that perhaps it would be a good idea if he tried to get all his reading done in the classroom during the day and not take any storybooks home again. It was no surprise to Peggy that Larry never willingly picked up a storybook in her classroom again. She had always felt bad that she hadn’t stuck up for Larry more, but, although she would never admit this out loud to anyone, she had felt scared and intimidated by the gruff tones and beery stench of Larry’s father.
Once Larry was back in London Peggy suspected that, older and wiser, he’d be less tolerant of Trevor’s evil moods. Peggy’s intuition proved correct and Larry’s mother had telephoned Mabel from the Jolly – it was actually the first time Susan had ever made a telephone call off her own bat – when, clearly at the end of her tether, she had asked in a quavering voice if there were any way that Larry could come back to Tall Trees for a little while? Mabel confessed to Peggy that she’d thought she’d heard a muffled sob, before Larry’s mother added in a tight voice, ‘Only until things settle at ’ome, that is, you unnerstan’. I’m sure it’ll calm directly.’
Roger and Mabel had been very generous in welcoming a gaggle of strangers into their home, and after a sticky period where their good intentions had been tainted by son Tommy’s vindictive response to the arrival of a lot of strange-seeming children from London arriving at Tall Trees, eventually an easier equilibrium had been established. The atmosphere lightened further once Aiden Kell and Larry had moved in. And then Angela had arrived a couple of months later to make the ensemble complete, and although her wheelchair meant she couldn’t share Connie’s bedroom upstairs, she had fitted in with no trouble.
Tommy’s large bedroom had been made into a dorm for the four boys, and although they could be loud at times and the bedroom always looked fearsomely untidy, Mabel having to shut the door on it every time she walked by despite her high tolerance for clutter, there was something about the dynamic that made the lads all rub along together without too much ribbing or outright argument under the new regime, and so Larry had been missed when he had gone back to London.
Connie slept in her little box room at the far end of the corridor to the boys’ room, while Angela was in a snug on the ground floor, not far from the large kitchen.
The two bedrooms on the second floor, up above the other bedrooms and high in the eaves, had Peggy and Holly in one, with Gracie and baby Jack in the other. Having to navigate so many stairs obviously wasn’t ideal for the new mothers, but once they had moved into Tall Trees proper, across from their previous room above the stables during the cold weather, somehow they had never moved out of the main house and back into their old lodgings. As Gracie joked, all the stairs helped them get their figures back double-quick after the babies had arrived.
Tall Trees was definitely a full house these days, with or without Larry, and Peggy sometimes felt there were just too many people jammed together under the one roof, but then she would chastise herself for being so uppity as she knew that few evacuees had been welcomed the way they had by Roger and Mabel. There was a war on, after all, and there were many far worse places to be than in a large and trifle chaotic rectory, with chickens in the garden providing daily eggs, and constant fresh greens from a sizeable vegetable patch that they all took turns in digging out (Peggy thought that was the term) and planting up.
With a bit of luck they’d all be home for Christmas, Peggy sometimes sighed to herself when stuck in a queue for the bathroom. Then she would remember she had thought precisely the same thing the previous autumn; and look how that had worked out.
Anyway, nobody was thinking much about any of this as while Roger was taking his Sunday morning services at church, the atmosphere back at the rectory was one of excitement about Larry returning.
There were crisply ironed sheets on his bunk, and a clean folded towel on the pillow.
‘I