Kisses on a Postcard (3 page)

C
hapter
T
wo

We were all up
early that morning,
13
June
1940
. Two little brown cases were already packed, sandwiches and pop at the top for easy access. Dad was first to leave, off to work. I don’t remember him hugging or kissing us; men didn’t go in for that in those days. He may have shaken our hands. What he did do, to demonstrate his authority and reassure us, was to tell us that he knew where we were going, but he could not tell us because it was a war secret – a heavy wink accompanied this – and we would like it there. It would be in the country, fun; perhaps even – dare we hope it? – the seaside. No, he wasn’t going to tell: wait and see. We were to be sure to look out on the left just after Wandsworth Road station as our train would go over his office, which was in the arches under the railway there, and he would wave. We knew then that we would be on a train that would leave Welling and cross south London, on to the Western Section, not a scheduled route of our Eastern Section suburban services to Waterloo, Charing Cross and Cannon Street. We knew our train would be special. We were railway children and proud of it and of our privileged knowledge. And if Dad knew we were taking that route he must be privy to the whole secret evacuation plan.

‘It’ll be a steam engine.’ Another clue that we were going well out of our electrified world, an impressively long journey. We knew the exact stations where electrification terminated in all directions.

‘Cor, what? A namer? What?’ we asked, excited. ‘Schools-class?’

‘Don’t think it’ll be a schools class,’ he said. ‘Not big enough for your journey: only a
4
-
4
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0
.’ He dismissed an engine which pulled the Dover boat trains and we loved, a compact modern design sitting on its four driving wheels and four bogies. We often saw them on trips up to Charing Cross on our Eastern Section of the railway, cosier than the bigger Western Section locomotives used for the longest routes out of Waterloo. ‘Could be a King Arthur.’ This was a
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0
express with three drivers a side. ‘Maybe even a Lord Nelson.’ Another
4
-
6
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0
, the biggest engine on the Southern Railway, only used for the West of England runs. We digested this with a sense of importance as he went off to work.

Mum had a tie-on label in her hand with my name and address on it in block capitals. ‘Here, let me put this on you,’ she said.

‘Ah, no. I know who I am.’

‘That’s in case the Germans capture you,’ said my knowing brother.

‘Honest?’ I was fascinated.

‘Don’t be silly, Jack. Come here.’ Mum was sharp. She had another label for him.

‘I haven’t got to wear one too, have I?’ Jack was disgusted.

‘Yes, both of you.’

The two labels also had our school, class and teacher on the reverse side. I was being evacuated with Jack’s school, Westwood, a large secondary school over a mile away, although I was still at Eastcote Road Primary, right opposite our house. Whoever had devised the evacuation scheme had the good sense to try to keep younger brothers and sisters with their older siblings.

While we objected, she tied them through the buttonholes in the lapels of our jackets. As I look now at all those old photos and films of vackies boarding trains and buses in their thousands in
1940
, it leaves a hole in my stomach to consider how our mothers felt, tying labels on the most precious things in their lives and sending them off like parcels to God knows where, with the threat of annihilation from the air or sea hanging over us all. But our mother showed no sign of worry. She had two serious points to remind us of. The previous night at bedtime she had drilled them into us.

‘Terry, you’ve got to do as Jack says. Do you hear me?’

‘Oh no.’

‘Oh yes. And you stay with him all the time. Got it? He’s older than you.’

‘Four years four months older,’ put in Jack. That was the precise difference, to the day, that we always pointed out.

‘I’m cleverest.’

She snapped at me. ‘Cleverer, Smart Alec, and you’re not. You do as he says. Always.’

She was on delicate ground and she knew it. Although I was so much younger, I was a far better reader, coming top of my class regularly in most subjects and regarded as a very bright child, especially by myself. Jack, on the other hand, although no fool, was a very slow starter. He not only had the nuisance of a younger brother to deal with, he also had the humiliation of constantly being bettered by me in lessons and hearing me held up as an example to all. I, as a consequence, was pretty cocky. Getting me safely under Jack’s wing must have been tricky for her.

‘He’s your big brother. You stay with him and do as he says. And you, Jack, you see that he does. All the time.’

Jack agreed, but the prospect of the pair of us being together the whole time, his albatross-little-brother round his neck, must have dismayed him as much as it did me. ‘Can I bash him?’

She silenced my protests. ‘There’s no need for that but don’t you stand any nonsense from him, Jack. And don’t you dare leave him.’

I was indignant. ‘I can look after myself.’

‘All right, all right. You look after each other. How’s that? You both look after each other.’

For Jack, the idea of being looked after by me, even partially, held no charm, but as he started to protest Mum threw in her final compromise. ‘Just until you get to where you’re going. Until you get there. Really there.’

‘Where?’

There was no answer to that so she introduced her second point, her game. ‘Now listen, both of you. Look what I’ve got here. It’s a postcard. And it’s in code. A secret code. Like the Secret Service. Only this is our code. Our own secret code. Read it, Jack.’

This was exciting stuff; the postcard was stamped and addressed to our parents. Jack started to stumble through it. ‘ “Dear Mum and Dad, Arr – arr – arrived safe and well.

Ev – ev – every—” ’

I snatched the postcard from him and rattled off, ‘ “Everything fine. Love, Jack and Terry.” ’

Mum was furious with me. ‘Give that back at once. I told Jack to read it, not you. He’s the older one, you do as he says. Always.’

‘I don’t see why—’

‘
Always
.’ The word was flung across the room at me, cutting through my disobedience, telling us both on a deeper level just how serious all this was. Jack completed the reading of the card, uninterrupted. There was a pause. Mum was getting hold of herself.

‘But – what’s the code?’ Jack ventured nervously.

‘When you get there,’ she continued, ‘you find out the address of the place where they take you. And you write it on the card there.’ She looked at us both. She had left a space. This was the really tricky bit. ‘Here, Jack. Here’s the pencil to write it with. You look after it. I’ll put it in your case. And when you know the address—’

Jack cut across her. ‘I’ll give the pencil to Terry and he can write it in there.’

Mum was momentarily taken aback. She wasn’t expecting such help. ‘That’s right, Jack. Good boy.’ I didn’t understand then why she gave him a hug that nearly stifled him when all he had done was to suggest the, to me, obvious solution. She continued to both of us, ‘Then you post it at once. All right? Now listen, I’ve only got one card so you’ve
got
to stay together or I won’t know where one of you is.’ It was her final shot on the other subject that was eating her.

‘But that’s not a proper code.’ We were disappointed.

‘No. Now
this
is the code. Our secret. You know how to write kisses, don’t you?’ We agreed with ‘eargh’, ‘yuck’ noises to brandish our distaste for such things. She waited for the ritual to subside. ‘You put one kiss if it’s horrible and I’ll come straight there and bring you back home. D’you see? You put two kisses if it’s all right. And three kisses if it’s nice. Really nice. Then I’ll know.’

In the anxiety and horror of this major crisis in her life – our lives – our mother, and perhaps our father too, had come up with something for them and us to cling to in the chaos. That night we slept soundly, perhaps dreaming of our code and the adventure to come.

She walked us under a canopy of barrage balloons to the
89
bus stop by the We Anchor In Hope pub at the foot of Shooters Hill. They were digging up the golf course to put in more anti-aircraft guns and searchlights. Welling, with the Thames and the docks a mile or two to the north, was on a direct route for bombers from the Continent heading for London. The water tower at the top of Shooters Hill was an outstanding landmark.

The narrow up-line platform of Welling station was packed with hundreds of excited, chattering, rampant, labelled children with their cases and their teachers and mothers. Four or five travellers on the down-line platform stood staring at the extraordinary sight opposite them. Teachers were ticking registers, two men were removing the station nameplates.

‘Why’re you doing that?’ asked a pushy bigger boy.

The man who answered him fancied himself as a comedian. ‘It’s so the Germans won’t know where they are when they get here.’

Our special train puffed round the bend into the station and the decibel-level rose sharply.

‘It’s an N-class,’ Jack and I saw with intense disappointment. ‘A manky old N. It hasn’t even got a name.’ We were clearly not as important as we thought, even though the N-class was a powerful
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, used for long-distance freight and passenger work. Suddenly we saw it was a corridor train and excitement again took over. Plenty of scope for fun: we could run from end to end of it, from compartment to compartment; lavatories to lock ourselves in; a guard’s van to explore.

I don’t remember seeing any tears on that platform but there must have been plenty. Jack and I stood at a window, waving and shouting at Mum, who stood in a crowd of waving, smiling mums. She mouthed, ‘Don’t forget the code,’ as though we could have. She told me years later that she went home and sobbed. Like all the other mums, I expect. I still cannot think of her inventiveness and bravery, even now nearly seventy years later, without my eyes filling. Mum and Dad, with her (their?) secret code and his man-to-man confidences about our route and locomotives, ensured that Jack and I left home without a qualm. Perhaps even her success, seeing us shrug them off with such ease, gave another twist to the knife. We have all heard the stories of frightened, unhappy vackies being torn from their parents and shipped off to the unknown, but not Jack and me. As far as either of us can recall we just thought it was an adventure with his classmates and teachers and friends, although I had no difficulty in obeying Mum’s instruction to stay close to my big brother. Perhaps I was more anxious than I realised. As one of the youngest I knew practically nobody there; I was the only representative of Eastcote Road Primary; my infant-schoolmates had been sent elsewhere, many of them with their mothers because they were too young to be separated. But Westwood Secondary School, situated too far from my home for me to know any of those children, was kept together, a gigantic school outing. In any case they were all, except the younger siblings like me, eleven or over – Jack had only just started there – so they were distant, godlike figures to a seven-year-old. None of that made any difference to my feelings; they were a seething, familiar-to-each-other crowd and I had Jack and was caught up in it all.

That manky old N-class puffed us off to our new lives and to my other childhood.

Our train left the usual route to Charing Cross at the Lewisham flyover, as Dad had forecast, and rumbled over the arched workshops, engine sheds (such excitement) and railway offices of south London. Jack and I disagreed about which side Dad had told us to look out of at Wandsworth Road. I looked left and he right. It seems that all south London was out there waving. Jack said he saw Dad in one place, I saw him in another. Dad later said he saw both of us, but all any bystander could see of that train was that it sprouted yelling, juvenile heads and waving arms from every aperture.

We passed from Victorian, industrial inner suburbs, via Clapham Junction, to Surbiton’s twentieth-century semis with gardens, very like where we had come from but posher. Gathering pace we sped by the huge flower gardens of Sutton’s seed factory near Woking. ‘A Blaze of Colour’ their seed packets used to proclaim, and it certainly was that day in high summer June. Then past Brookwood Cemetery, the London Necropolis, the largest cemetery in the country. It overwhelmed my imagination as so many graves sped past; all full, my morbid mind muttered to me. Jack and I knew that we were on the main West of England line; out beyond the far reaches of electrification; on through Andover Junction, Basingstoke, Salisbury; through a level crossing at Wilton, I think, over streams, under bridges; a wait or two on sidings while more important war traffic roared past (what could be more important to a country than its future?). And everywhere there were people waving, always waving. The whole country knew of the evacuation.