The Girls They Left Behind (11 page)

‘So what are we going to do about Tim and Keith?’ he asked.

Etna shrugged. ‘What can we do? You know how I feel about them, they’re smashing boys, I feel like they’re almost our own. But we can’t keep them here once the baby’s born. I don’t think I could manage it all, specially if you’re going to be away. And anyway —’

‘Mr Callaway won’t let you stop on,’ Reg finished for her. ‘Well, I daresay you’re right. I suppose we’d better let the billeting officer know.’

Edna looked miserable. ‘Not too soon, Reg. I don’t want to lose them yet.’

‘But it’s not fair on them, letting them settle in again and then get pushed on somewhere else. We ought to tell their mum and dad at least.’ He looked at her. He knew how fond of the two boys she had become. ‘Tell you what we’ll do, Edna. We’ll look out for somewhere for them ourselves. Somewhere we know they’ll be happy. And then we’ll tell Mrs Budd and the billeting officer.’ He put his arm round her and drew her close. ‘And now you’ve got to start thinking about

yourself and our own little one. I’m fond of the boys too, but you’re more important to me. You and our own baby. That’s what you’ve got to be thinking about.’

Edna smiled. But her heart was sore. Like Reg, she felt bitterly disappointed that things had turned out this way— that their first baby should be coming into such a world, with its father about to be sent off to war and their home taken from them.

It wasn’t fair. But the past year had taught everyone that you could no longer expect fairness.

Micky Baxter did not go to Bridge End. He had no wish to leave Portsmouth, and his mother Nancy didn’t bother to insist. She hardly looked on Micky as a child anyway; from an early age he had been allowed to fend for himself, running the streets, living by his fists, pinching the odd apple or orange from greengrocers’ displays, pocketing all sorts of oddments that it was best not to enquire about.

‘It was just left lyin’ about,’ he would explain. ‘There wasn’t no sense in just leavin’ it, was there?’

‘Funny,’ Nancy said, ‘last time I saw something like that it was lying on a counter in Woolies. You’d better watch yourself, Micky.’

‘Oh, leave the boy alone,’ Granny Kinch said. ‘All boys gets up to a bit o’ mischief. There ain’t no real harm in him.’

But even she had been shaken when Micky was taken to

court for the jeweller’s shop incident. At first, she’d refused to believe it had been Micky at all, and then she had tried to blame the boy who had given him the gun. Now she looked on it as a prank that had gone too far. ‘He’s learnt his lesson,’ she said. ‘He won’t do nothing like that again.’

Micky had no intention of doing anything like that again. He had learned that it was best not to let yourself be seen. Then no one could identify you. Instead of marching into small shops where twelve-year-old boys stood out like sore thumbs, he and the others skulked around Woolworths and British Home Stores. They filched things from barrows in Charlotte Street and slid purses off the top of careless

women’s shopping baskets. There was never much in the

purses but a few coppers soon mounted up.

Not that there was much to spend money on, not when you could pinch most of what you wanted. Even fags could be nicked when the tobacconist was looking for something you’d

asked for and he hadn’t got. And you could get into the pictures, three for the price of one, by sending one in on a ticket and then waiting by the fire exit.

‘We oughter have somewhere to keep the cash,’ Micky said. He knew that if he kept it at home his mother or grandmother was likely to find it, and that would be the last he saw of it. And he wasn’t prepared to let either of the other boys be treasurer. ‘We needs a den.’

‘We got a den,’ Cyril said. ‘Our garden shed. Nobody ever goes in it now Dad’s away.’

Micky shook his head. `Nah. There’s better’n that. You come with me.’

Jimmy had a tin money-box with a key that nearly always

worked. They put their loot into it — three and sevenpence three-farthings — and set off through the streets.

‘Are we going down the bomb sites?’ Cyril asked. ‘There’d be some good places there.’

Micky nodded but said nothing. He had been exploring the bombed houses several times since the raid and looked on

them as his territory. There’d been other boys about too, but he was fairly confident that the place he had discovered was

safe.

‘Here,’ he said, as they turned into the derelict street, ‘this is the place.’

The boys looked around them, still awed by the extent of the damage. Only a few houses were left standing, down at the other end, and most of those were damaged. Piles of bricks and rubble still filled gardens, and shattered rooms stood pen to the weather.

‘These places’ll make smashing dens,’ Cyril said.

‘You wait.’ Micky led them into the third house of the row. The front walls were still standing, though badly damaged, and the front door hung crookedly on its hinges. He pushed it open and a sour smell of food gone bad, excreta and cats, hit heir faces. Cyril wrinkled his nose.

‘Eugh! Something’s died in here.’

`Nah. It’s just cats’ muck.’ Micky scrambled over the fallen bricks and plaster. There was a cupboard under the stairs, its door propped shut with a brick. He moved the brick and the door fell open.

‘Coo!’

‘It’s a cellar,’ Micky said unnecessarily. ‘It’s just right for a den. Nobody else knows about it, I bin testing.’

Jimmy and Cyril gazed down into the black abyss. The steps were black and slimy, and the walls green with mould. The air was dank.

‘It’s smashing,’ Cyril said. ‘It’s the best place we ever found.’

Micky nodded. He produced a box of matches and a stub of candle and led the way down the grimy steps. By the flickering light, they could see that this had been a coal-cellar. There was no coal here now, except for a few lumps piled in one corner, but someone had brought down a rickety table and a couple of broken chairs. Micky touched them proudly.

‘See, we even got furniture. I fetched these down. And I left this, just to see if anyone else was nosin’ round.‘He picked up a battered Dinky car from the table. `They’d’ve took this, so that means no one’s bin here. It’s safe as houses.’

`S’pose it gets bombed again?’ Jimmy suggested, glancing at the crumbling walls.

Micky shook his head derisively. `Nah. They never hits the same place twice.’ He sat down in one of the chairs and put his feet on the table. `Better’n an old garden shed, eh?’

Jimmy put his tin money-box on the table. ‘Where we going to hide it?’

‘Over here.’ Micky swung his feet down and went over to the wall. The guttering candle threw deep shadows but he felt along until one of the bricks came out in his hand. ‘See, there’s a space here. We can put the tin there. No one’ll ever find it and we can come down here whenever we like and get some money, have a fag, whatever we want.’

‘We could bring some grub,’ Cyril said, his imagination taking flight. ‘We could light a fire — cook meals.’

‘We can do better’n that.’ Micky paused while the other

two gazed expectantly at him, then said slowly and dramatically, ‘We can keep a parachutist here.’

Jimmy and Cyril drew in their breath. They looked about them at the dark, clammy walls. ‘A parachutist? You mean a German?’

‘Well, we wouldn’t keep a British one down here, would we?’ Micky said impatiently. ‘But we could keep a Jerry for as long as we liked. Pile up stuff against the door so he couldn’t get out. Nobody’d hear him shout. He’d be our prisoner.’

Jimmy had a practical question. ‘Isn’t there a hatch, where they used to deliver coal? He could get out through that.’

`Nah. It’s all blocked up with bricks and stuff. I’ve looked.’

The candle was almost burnt out. Micky put the fin box into the hole and replaced the brick. He picked up the Dinky toy, hesitated, then put it back on the table.

‘I’ll leave that, just so we always know if anyone’s bin pokin’ about. And mind you don’t come down here without me.’ Jimmy and Cyril shook their heads. They went back up the steps, replaced the door and heaped rubbish against it. Then they went back outside and looked up at the sky.

They were almost disappointed not to see it filled with the

billowing umbrellas of German parachutes.

Betty Chapman was beginning to think that her application to

join the Land Army had been lost for ever, when she found herself opening a brown envelope one morning to find that she had been ordered ‘over the hill’ to Bishop’s Waltham, to work on a farm.

‘Bishop’s Waltham!’ she said in some disappointment. ‘Why, that’s no distance at all. I thought I’d be sent miles out into the country.’

‘There’s as good countryside at Bishop’s Waltham as you’d

find anywhere in England,’ her mother said with tome asperity. ‘Were you looking forward to getting away from us, then?’

‘No, of course not.’ Betty bit her lip. Nobody in the family had been keen on this idea of her going to work on the land and her father had been downright suspicious about it. Just as if she’d suggested doing something immoral, she thought indignantly. ‘I just thought I might get the chance to see a bit more of England, that’s all.’

‘I’ve told you before,’ Ted Chapman told her curtly, ‘this war ain’t no holiday camp. If you go and work on a farm you’ll have to work. It won’t be doing the odd bit of weeding and picking a few blackberries for a pie. It’ll be getting up at five in the morning, summer and winter, to milk cows, spending all day slaving at some other job and then milking half the evening as well. If you ask me, they’re mad to take you on, a bit of a thing like you, and that doctor who gave you your certificate wants his head looking at.’

‘Well, it’s either that or the Services. They’re going to want

all us girls, Dad. I might as well start now as wait to be called up and find myself somewhere I don’t want to be.’

Ted grunted and didn’t answer. He felt increasingly bewildered these days, as if his head was full of cotton-wool, and he no longer felt in control of his own life, let alone those of his family. He was dismayed by the way his daughters had so suddenly grown up. There was Olive, married before she was twenty-one, which was something he’d always declared he wouldn’t allow. And now Betty leaving home to go and live out in the wilds. Well, Bishop’s Waltham wasn’t exactly the wilds, but it was country, wasn’t it, and there was nobody there he knew. In Pompey he knew hundreds of people, people he’d grown up with, people he’d known since they were nippers. And country folk could be funny, there was no saying they couldn’t. Look at some of the tales you heard about the way evacuees got treated.

But parents were the last people to be consulted about their

children these days. Girls could do whatever they pleased now and treated their mums and dads as if they were something out of the Ark, as if they knew nothing. And the Government was aiding and abetting them.

‘She ought to have gone and got a job at Airspeed,’ he said to Annie. ‘She’d have been in a reserved occupation then and earned good money too. They’re making planes hand over fist up there, and can’t get ‘em out fast enough.’

‘And no wonder, the way they’re being shot out of the sky,’ Annie observed. ‘And she wouldn’t be any safer there, would she? Airspeed got hit themselves the other day, and if it hadn’t been after working hours any amount of people would’ve been killed.’ But she didn’t argue back too much. She knew how Ted’s nights were filled with bad dreams, how the things he had seen at Dunkirk still haunted his mind.

. There were still plenty of air-raid warnings, though no more bombs had fallen on Portsmouth in the weeks that followed the July attack. And the city was fighting back — two days later, the Evening News had launched a ‘Buy a Spitfire’ appeal, and they had collected the six thousand pounds needed in only a fortnight.

And they certainly needed planes. Every day now, aircraft

could be seen in the sky, dodging and swooping crazily as they fired at each other. You could stand and watch the ‘dogfights’ as they were called, almost as if they were some kind of aerial circus, a spectacle laid on for entertainment.

But the entertainment was a deadly one. The newspapers were full now of reports of the battle which was being waged in the skies. Twenty-Eight Raiders Shot Down, the headlines announced on 26 July and, a few days later, Fighters’ Fine Work Over Portsmouth with a detailed report of the Spitfires which had met a hundred and fifty enemy bombers coming in from the south. Aided by Hurricanes and Defiants, they drove off the German Heinkels and Messerschmitts, shooting down several which fell either into the sea or in open countryside.

One was reported as having dived nose-first down a

disused well on the Isle of Wight, only its tail sticking up above the ground with the swastika to prove its nationality. Another crashed into a field, its pilot and navigator captured by a local milkman. A third, flying over in the early hours of the morning, managed to penetrate the barrage and dropped three bombs on a farm, with a total casualty rate of fifty chickens and a rabbit.

‘And you reckon our Betty’ll be safer, out at Bishop’s Waltham!’ Ted commented sarcastically, but Annie just shook her head at him. She was beginning to come round to the idea of Betty’s going away. Always more down-to-earth than her husband, she accepted the fact that the war had changed everything and you couldn’t expect anything to turn out the way you’d thought it would. The best you could hope for was that everyone would get through it alive, however long it lasted — and how long would that be? A year? Two years? — and that the German invasion would be kept at bay. The thought of enemy soldiers marching down September Street made her shudder.

She looked at the photographs in Picture Post. Millions of French people, fleeing from Paris and other big cities, carrying whatever possessions they had been able to snatch up in their panic as their Government capitulated. Old men and women, small children and babies in prams, trudging bewildered along endless roads, with no idea of where they