A Girl Can Dream (42 page)

‘She’s not married herself?’

The children all exchanged glances before Jenny said, ‘No … she’s a little … strange.’

‘Crazy?’

‘No, just strange.’

‘But kind,’ Billy said. ‘She didn’t even shout at me when I pulled all the flowers up in the garden thinking they was weeds. I mean, how was I expected to know the flipping difference?’

Billy’s indignation made Terry smile and he realised how much he had missed his little brother, missed them all.

‘She was kind,’ Jenny said. ‘And she had no one. All the servants left when she moved to the Lodge. I think she was just looking for a girl to train up because that’s what I would do: lay out her clothes and do her hair, help Sally to clean the place and cook her meals. She had never had to look after herself and didn’t know how to do it, and Billy would help now and again.’

‘You must have known that something was wrong?’

‘Yes, of course we did eventually,’ Jenny said. ‘But what could we do? We were miles away from everywhere and because no one had visited we assumed no one knew we were there. Whenever Lady Hammersmith had to go out we were locked in the barn and she would give us piles of books to read. We talked about escaping a lot but we’d nowhere to run to and were pretty sure that no one in the village would take three children on. And anyway, we all liked Lady Hammersmith and felt sorry for her.’

‘So what made you do it in the end?’

‘The food,’ Jenny said. ‘Or should I say lack of it. We’d see what she brought back from the shops and it was just a scrappy piece of cheese and meat and bacon and a tiny amount of marge, butter and sugar. Sometimes there would be a small bowl of eggs left, and that was always a good day, but most times we lived on bread and milk.’

‘That will be because of rationing,’

But of course they knew nothing of rationing and, Terry realised with a sinking heart, they didn’t know either that their father hadn’t returned from Dunkirk, nor about Ruth being sent to Ireland, and he badly needed Meg’s wisdom to know how to deal with it all.

Meg was in the field scything the hay when she saw the telegraph boy turn in the lane. Her heart flew to her mouth, especially when she saw the boy speak to Will, who was scything the area abutting the lane, and he pointed in her direction. Her mouth felt incredibly dry as she took it from the boy, and her hands shook so much she could barely rip it open, but when she did, she crushed the letter to her breast and tears spurted from her eyes. Enid and Joy, fearing bad news, were by Meg’s side immediately, their arms around her, and Stephen, sitting on the upturned barrow with his bad leg stretched out in front of him, lumbered to his feet and crossed the uneven hay field with difficulty.

But then they all realised that the tears Meg were shedding were tears of joy and she spluttered, ‘They’re alive, the children. They’re alive.’ She passed the telegram to them to read.

C
HILDREN RETURNED HOME.
S
AFE WITH
T
ERRY.
P
LEASE ADVISE.

‘I must go to them,’ Meg said, and as she spoke she looked around the hay field guiltily; she knew if she returned to Birmingham she was leaving Enid and Will in the lurch. But the welfare of the children had to come first.

‘Of course,’ Enid said.

‘Any answer?’ the telegraph boy asked, and Meg said there was, but Enid held up her hand.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I have an idea. Why don’t they come here, all of them, your brother Terry as well? The boys can bunk in the rooms we had made in the barn and we’ll get another bed into your room for the girls to share. Give them a wee bit of a holiday in the fresh air and good country food to build them up. You need to be together with all you have gone through.’

‘It’s a lovely idea,’ Meg said. ‘I don’t know whether Terry would get the time off.’

‘And you won’t know unless you ask him,’ Enid pointed out. ‘Look, the boy is here waiting for your answer.

The children were ecstatic that they were going to see Meg, but Terry didn’t think he could ask for time off for himself.

‘Why not?’ asked Nicholas, who thought – as Enid did – that the family needed to spend time together. ‘Someone has got to take the kids, anyway.’

‘I know,’ Terry said. ‘I wouldn’t like them to go anywhere unaccompanied again, even though they are resourceful. Fancy sneaking on to the guard’s van.’

‘Yeah,’ Nicholas said, for both of them had been impressed.

‘But I don’t want to put them at that sort of risk again.’

‘So what’re you going to do? Deliver them to Meg and hightail it back here?’

‘Something like that.’

‘She’ll be up to her eyes haymaking now,’ Nicholas said. ‘And not able to give that much time to them straight away. I’m sure she expected you to stay a bit.’

‘Well I can’t.’

‘So Meg is going to tell them about the loss of their father and little Ruth being sent to those awful people on her own?’

‘It isn’t a nice thing to do, you know.’

‘Well, I’m glad you recognise that at least,’ Nicholas said, and added, ‘I really think that you should step up to the mark; be a proper big brother and a support for Meg.’

Terry was furious and glared at Nicholas. ‘You have no right to say that.’ But even as the words were leaving his mouth, he knew Nicholas was right. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to square it with Mr Drummond.’

‘I have already spoken to him,’ Nicholas said.

‘You have? Why?’

‘I’ve offered to take your place if I could persuade you to go with your brother and sisters. He thinks you should, by the way, so he agreed.’

After two days of searching Rugeley, calling on farmers to check their outbuildings and combing fields, Sergeant Newbury put a call through to the police station in Steelhouse Lane and filled the desk sergeant in on the whole story. ‘I think they’ve made for home and are probably there already.’

‘I’ll get someone check it out now,’ the desk sergeant promised.

That same day he was able to report that he had seen and spoken with the children; they were safely back in Birmingham but would shortly be spending the summer on a farm near Penkridge with their sister who worked there as a land girl.

‘Oh, that is good news,’ Sergeant Newbury said. ‘I can rest easy now.’

‘They seemed quite concerned about Lady Hammersmith,’ the desk sergeant continued. ‘They know she did wrong but they don’t want her punished for it. They say she never meant to harm them and she was always kind.’

Sergeant Newbury recalled the last time he had seen Lady Hammersmith, her eyes vacant and her mind elsewhere, but what he said was, ‘Tell them not to worry. Lady Hammersmith is in a lovely comfortable home where there are people to look after her and care for her.’

‘Oh, that is good news, sir,’ the desk sergeant said. ‘I will make sure that is passed on.’

He made a point of visiting the children again to tell them and, as Jenny said, ‘We can really look forward to our holiday now. Lady Hammersmith was on my conscience a bit.’

They weren’t the only ones looking forward to the holiday. Meg was ecstatic that the children would be coming to the farm, and Stephen saw her true radiance shining out of her. More than ever he realised the cloud she had been living under. For Meg, though, there was still deep concern about Ruth, but if she allowed herself to think of that small child’s future, it hurt her unbearably, so for the sake of her own sanity she had to push it to the back of her mind. She had to put on a happy front for the children, as Aunt Rosie had told her how they had also suffered.

So she was there to meet to meet them at Penkridge Station, and thought her heart would burst with happiness as she hugged them all tight. Back in the farmhouse, Enid exclaimed at their pasty complexions and remarked on how thin they were, and Joy and Meg smiled at one another over the children’s heads, knowing Enid would see it as her bounden duty to feed them up.

Meg always believed in meeting trouble head-on, and the same went for unpalatable news, and so straight after a delicious roast chicken dinner followed by apple crumble and custard, Meg took the children up to the room she shared with Joy. Terry, mindful of Nicholas’s censure, followed her. Meg sat on the bed, and with Jenny one side and Sally the other, the boys standing in front of her, told them gently of their father’s death.

There were tears, but not the outpouring of grief she had half expected, and it saddened her a little that the children had become so distanced from their father.

‘It doesn’t seem real yet,’ Jenny said thoughtfully. ‘’Cos he’s still away and that. Maybe we might feel it more when the war is over and all the other dads come home.’

‘I dunno,’ Billy said. ‘I wish he wasn’t dead, but I didn’t much like him as a dad when he was with Doris.’

Meg thought about censuring Billy for saying that, but realised that it was so similar to what she had said to her father before his marriage that she hardly had the right, especially with Jenny and Sally nodding vigorously in agreement with their young brother.

‘You can hardly blame them feeling that way about Dad, Meg,’ Terry said to Meg later as she showed him around the farm. ‘He brought it upon himself. And if you want the truth, though I didn’t want him to die either, he was so besotted about that Doris that it’s maybe better he died with the memory of her intact than to come back to see what she is reduced to. She’s moved back into the flat she had in Bristol Street permanently now. And there is a man living with her. Tell you something else as well: Richard Flatterly is a fairly regular visitor.’

‘Richard Flatterly? What’s he doing there?’

‘Well,’ said Terry. ‘Maybe he is a lover of the white powder himself or perhaps he’s a lover of Doris’s wares?’

‘Ugh,’ Meg said. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me about Flatterly, anyway. He’s a horrible slimy toad. I can’t understand what Kate Carmichael sees in him but they are definitely in some sort of relationship.’

‘Are they? Bet she wouldn’t like to hear that he had been visiting our Doris then.’

‘Maybe not, but how do you know?’

‘Uncle Robert told me.’

‘And how does he know?’

‘He’s keeping tabs on him.’

Meg was surprised by that. ‘Why?’

Terry shrugged. ‘He won’t tell me,’ he said. ‘All he would say is that he is nearly ready to make his move and I will know all then.’

‘I hate people who just tell you half of a thing.’

‘Me too’

Meg gave a sigh. ‘Come on, we best go in.’

‘Are you sure you should tell the others about Ruth as well as Dad today?’

‘Well, if they’d have been really upset about Dad I might have waited a bit, but they weren’t that bothered, were they?’

‘No,’ Terry conceded.

‘So let’s get all the bad news out of the way,’ Meg said. ‘I’ll tell them after tea.’

Jenny was no fool, and when Ruth had been taken to the orphanage, she had known that they probably wouldn’t be able to get her out again. So she wasn’t as surprised as Billy and Sally when Meg said that someone had offered to adopt Ruth, although she felt a deep sense of loss because she had loved her little sister dearly. But she told herself that if someone wanted to adopt her they would look after her well, and she imagined a young couple unable to have children of their own, perhaps, and visiting the orphanage and falling in love with Ruth’s winning smile.

That mental image shattered into a million pieces when Meg told them who the adoptive parents were. Her lips curled back, and Sally and Billy, who had almost been taken to Ireland with Liam and Sarah Mulligan, began to scream and shriek. And when Meg attempted to hold them they lashed out with hands and feet as tears cascaded down their cheeks.

The sounds of their distress brought Will and Enid to see if they could help, but it was some time before the children were in any way calmer. When Enid heard what it was about she asked, ‘Is there nothing can be done to stop this adoption?’

Meg shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘This is dreadful, Meg, my dear girl,’ Enid said. ‘Simply dreadful.’

Meg knew to her cost that there was nothing to be gained by constantly talking about it and keeping it in the forefront of everyone’s mind. The children had to learn to cope – as she did – with the loss of their little sister.

They were subdued for a few days and she was very gentle with them, but the rhythm of the farm helped them recover as it had helped Meg. She watched Will teaching them how to build a haystack as he’d taught her and Joy when they had arrived on the farm a year ago. She saw her sisters bringing the solid old horse up the lane to load the trailer, and they would fetch the eggs in the morning. They all had a go at milking, too, Terry and Jenny being not bad at all. Billy and Sally played endlessly with the dogs. They were not at all used to getting such constant attention, and Will said they would have both dogs ruined, but he said it with a twinkle in his eye so they knew he wasn’t really cross.

All in all the children fitted into living on the farm as if they’d always lived on one; they seemed to grow taller with sun-kissed cheeks and brown legs and arms, and Meg saw the tension seeping out of them. So Meg should have been happy and content, but she wasn’t because she was missing the closeness and time with Stephen. She hadn’t been aware there was anything wrong at first because her time had been taken up with her brothers and sisters; then she wondered if that was it – that he was jealous of the time she was spending with them.

But he seemed fine with the children. Terry thought him a fine fellow and Stephen seemed to have endless patience with the younger ones, and when he teased them sometimes it was always gentle teasing. But for her there seemed to be barely a glance any more, and little conversation. He had been to the hospital and had his plaster removed not long after the children arrived. He’d always discussed what the doctor had said in the past but not this time, and when she’d asked him how it had gone his answer had been a shrug and a muttered, ‘S’all right.’ She was concerned, but with so many in the house, and the farm being so busy, finding any time alone to ask him what was wrong was almost impossible.