Authors: Anne Bennett
Jenny knew nothing of Doris’s concerns but she was well aware of people pointing at them as they walked unaccompanied down to the school. She saw sympathy in people’s eyes and heard them say it was a shame, and one woman said Doris was a heartless bitch.
Jenny had the urge to turn round and agree with her. Her bottom was still stinging from the caning she had endured at Doris’s hands the day Meg left, for breaking a dish when washing up. Doris said she had done it deliberately and Jenny told her she hadn’t, it was an accident. She got her face slapped for talking back and then she had eleven strokes of the cane because she was eleven. She knew it would please Doris more if she cried out, and so she bit her lip till it bled to prevent her doing just that, and only gave way to tears in her bed at night when she muffled the sound of her sobs in a pillow.
Doris was never that harsh when their father was there, but it was no good appealing to him as Billy tried to do. He had two strokes of the cane when Doris claimed he hadn’t come straight in when she’d called him earlier the night before. So as Charlie was tucking him into bed, Billy told his father about it in a low voice. With his agreement, and because he had always left that kind of thing to Maeve, Doris had taken over the management and punishment of the children, whom she said they had been completely ruined under Meg’s care. And she stipulated firmly that he was not to undermine her efforts to put some manners on them.
Charlie had seldom come the heavy hand and he had no desire to do so now, so he was grateful to Doris and he smiled down at his indignant young son and said, ‘I believe Meg spoiled all of you, Billy, and Doris is just trying to undo the damage.’
‘Yes, but, Dad, she used the cane.’
Charlie disliked that but he had made a promise to Doris to give her a free hand, so he swallowed any distaste and said, ‘If she did you must have done something to deserve it.’
‘No, no, I never.’
‘Billy, you must have done. If you think hard you will realise that. Did you apologise?’
‘She didn’t give me the chance.’
‘So you would have apologised?’
Billy thought about that and then said, ‘Probably, if she’d told me what I’d done that got her so mad.’
‘I’m sure you know,’ Charlie said reprovingly. ‘But you don’t want to tell me in case I am angry with you too. I don’t want that, especially because shortly you are being evacuated and will be living with another family and I want to know that wherever you are you have good manners and know how to behave. Doris is correcting you for your own good, and I hope you realise that. Isn’t that the case, my dear?’ he said, seeing Doris framed in the doorway.
Billy shot around in panic. Doris had sneaked up the stairs and listened to his conversation with his father and, looking at her malevolent eyes, he knew that he would catch it for complaining. The next morning his father had just left for work when Doris grabbed Billy out of the bed and hauled him downstairs. Knowing he would holler blue murder, she stuffed his mouth with socks, held his hands behind his back so he couldn’t remove them, and administered six whistling strokes of the cane to his bottom.
Upstairs, Jenny lay almost too sore to move from her beating and though she heard the swish of the cane and knew the agony her little brother would be in, she could do nothing, for any interference by her could lead to Billy being punished more and she couldn’t risk that. Jenny knew they were on their own now, and she was counting the hours till she could leave the house.
That is what she told her younger siblings as they assembled in the school playground. She spurned those who might pity them and told Billy and Sally to hold their heads high. ‘Don’t you dare cry,’ she warned them. ‘Wherever we’re going, it’s got to be better than what we’ve left behind.’ And so the younger ones were dry-eyed as Jenny, with one either side of her, marched behind the headmaster as they made their way to Moor Street Station.
When Will, Meg and Joy arrived at Penkridge Lodge, it was almost deserted; the others – not trapped by the water as Joy and Meg had been – had all been taken to the designated farms. As it was, Rita Partridge was pleased to see them safe and sound.
‘We did send the lorry around to fetch the girls back,’ she told Will. ‘But some of the farm lanes they didn’t attempt, and yours was one of those. I knew that you would bring them back when it was safe to do so, but all the same it was a bit of a concern, given that I am responsible for the girls’ welfare.’
‘I can understand that,’ Will said. ‘That storm was certainly a ferocious one – even I’ve never seen the like. The thunder and lightning nearly drove the horse mad and I would imagine there’s some damage hereabouts.’
‘Sure to be,’ Rita said.
‘Well, as you can see, no harm came to the girls,’ Will said. ‘And they helped me save a sizeable amount of hay and have taken to the milking like they’ve been doing it all their lives. The missus has even had them learning how to make butter and cheese with the excess milk when we couldn’t get the churns to the head of the lane. All in all, they have turned out a treat and we would like to keep them, but I didn’t know whether they had been assigned to someone else.’
‘Oh, no, Mr Heppleswaite,’ Rita said. ‘It isn’t as organised as all that. You were assigned two girls and if you want these two to train up, they needn’t go anywhere else. In fact, yours is a good farm for teaching them all aspects of farm work because you do arable as well as dairy, don’t you?’
Will nodded. ‘And I keep chickens and pigs.’
‘And the girls can live in?’
‘Oh, yes. We have plenty of room.’
‘That suit you?’ Rita asked Meg and Joy, and both girls nodded eagerly.
‘Well, that seems to cover everything,’ Rita said. ‘I shouldn’t think you had that much time to unpack when you arrived, but get your things together and I will give out the rest of your uniforms and then you are set. You know where to come if you have any problems, but I will come out to see you by and by anyway.’
A little later, as they were stuffing the few possessions – the civilian clothes they had removed on their arrival – back into their cases, Meg said, ‘Yes, I’m glad to be going to the Heppleswaites because I really like them, but won’t you miss living in this big house? You seemed very impressed when we arrived.’
‘Oh, it’s true that I was a bit awed by the size of the place,’ Joy said. ‘But I’ve been thinking about it since. None of us land girls will be living in the lap of luxury, it seems to me. Instead we will be toiling at physically hard and dirty work. This hostel might have mod cons in the shape of baths, and so on, but anyone staying here will not have much time to use them – they’ll have to be up earlier than we will be in order to reach the farms they are working on, and they will get home later, too shattered to do anything but fall into bed, I should think. What about you?’
‘I never wanted to stay here,’ Meg said. ‘I would have felt like a fish out of water.’
‘Good job it worked out the way it did, then.’
‘I’ll say,’ Meg said, picking up her case and giving the room a cursory glance. ‘You ready?’
‘I’m ready.’ Joy said.
Penkridge soon came into view as the road was a long straight one, and Will said, ‘Now, although lots of people call this a village, it is in fact a small market town and holds a market twice a week, Wednesday and Saturday.’
‘Pretty enough place, though, for all that,’ Stephen said as the cart rumbled along the cobbled streets. ‘You’ll soon see that for yourselves.’
Will pulled the horse to a stop in Market Street. ‘I have to take Will for his hospital appointment, leave the accumulator at the garage, and it will take a few hours to charge, and then I have a few errands of my own to do, including fetching gas masks for us all.’
‘Gas masks!’ repeated the girls, looking askance.
‘Yes, well, the Germans used mustard gas in the Great War,’ Stephen said. ‘It’s only a precaution.’
‘But also the law,’ Will said. ‘Everyone has to have a gas mask. There’s no choice in the matter. Though let’s hope we never have to use them. So why don’t you forget all about gas masks for now and, while I’m busy, take a turn about the town and get to know your way round a bit? When all my business is attended to, you will find me and Stephen at the Boat Inn on the canal side. Join me there when you have finished your jaunting. Anyone will tell you where it is.’
The girls were pleased enough by that suggestion and quickly clambered from the cart outside the garage and set off, coming first upon a train station. It was small and very basic, but a few passengers sat on one of the benches on the platform and a porter wheeled parcels about on a trolley and looked very important.
‘Didn’t know there was a railway station here,’ Meg said. ‘Wonder where it goes to?’
‘Be great if it went all the way to Birmingham, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ Meg said. ‘If we ever get time off, we might be able to go home – not that I am in a great hurry to see Doris.’
‘We’ll ask Will and Enid,’ Joy said. ‘They are bound to know, but no chance of much time off yet, I’d say, so let’s go and look at the rest of Penkridge.’
Stephen was right, it was a pretty place, with many old timbered and half-timbered houses both big and small. Some had thatched roofs and some of the larger ones had mullioned windows similar to the ones at the hostel. ‘These must be really old,’ Joy said. ‘See, some of the beams are quite crooked.’
Meg nodded. ‘But they are lovely, aren’t they? I mean, I have seen pictures in books of houses like these, but never thought I would see the real thing.’
And whether Penkridge was regarded as a village or a town, it did have a proper village green with shops grouped around it, which the girls were delighted to find. They discovered the river overhung with weeping willows, babbling over its stony bed, the sun glinting on the ripples.
Eventually, though, they went back into the town and came upon a large and imposing old church. It stood in its own grounds through small, wrought-iron gates with a little graveyard beyond that. The stained glass in the large arched window facing them sparkled in a myriad of colours in the early autumn sun, and there was a castellated turret above the main body of the church with a clock on the side of it.
‘Looks very grand, don’t you think?’ Meg said.
‘I’ll say,’ Joy agreed. ‘And it’s got a fancy name that fits it somehow, St Michael and All Angels.’
‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ Meg said. ‘That will be the parish church – Anglican, you know.’
‘You looking for a Catholic one?’
‘Well, as we’re here, I thought I would have a look,’ Meg said. ‘I mean, as the Heppleswaites are Catholic too, it makes life easier for me, and Enid said they usually go to nine o’clock Mass on Sunday morning in Penkridge, so I’d like to have a dekko at it.’
St Mary’s, the Roman Catholic church, was on the edge of town and, after the splendour of the Anglican church, Meg was rather disappointed by its square block construction Even the stained-glass looked not a patch on the beautiful windows of St Michael’s. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Joy said when Meg said this. ‘It’s got a lovely entrance. Anyway, does it really matter what it looks like? I thought it was what went on inside it that was more important than the building.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Meg said. ‘Just now, though, we had better find this pub and Will and Stephen, ’cos we’ve been ages and they might be waiting for us.’
‘Yes,’ said Joy. ‘I saw a gleam of water as we were making for the church. That’ll be the canal.’
It was, and they walked along the towpath towards the town, watching the brightly coloured barges ploughing their way slowly through the water.
‘At least it looks cleanish here, not like the dirty, oily canals in Brum,’ Joy said. ‘My brother learned to swim in the canal and my mother was always saying it was a wonder he had never caught anything. She never told him off much or anything for all the scrapes he got into. All our growing up she was fond of saying, “Boys will be boys”, and that seemed to give my brother licence to do what he wanted.’
‘I know,’ Meg said. ‘It’s not fair, is it?’
‘When we are older and in charge we’ll have to change things round a bit,’ Joy said.
‘We will,’ Meg agreed, and then suddenly said, ‘Oh, look, there’s Stephen waving.’ They hurried towards him.
‘Have you been waiting long?’ Joy asked. ‘I think we got a bit carried away looking round.’
‘No worries,’ Stephen said. ‘I had a pretty long wait at the hospital for all I had an appointment, and now I’m stood here with a pint watching the world go round, and there is no better way to spend a Friday morning. Anyway, Dad says charging the accumulator takes some time.’
‘Did you get the gas masks?’ Meg asked Will when he came to join them.
‘I did,’ he said. ‘Each one comes in its own little box. We’ll examine them when we get home, and that is all I’m going to say about the gas masks now. I have a much better thing to ask you,’ he went on, consulting his watch. ‘There’s time enough for another drink. Would you girls like a glass of lemonade?’
‘Oh, yes please,’ Meg said, for she had seldom drunk it and thought it one of the nicest drinks she had ever had.
Later, as they climbed into the cart to go home, Will said, ‘Hope you like fish because I’ve got us some nice haddock for tonight. You’ll find Enid can do a mean fish pie.’
‘I eat most things,’ Joy said. ‘Though I must admit I’ve never had much fish, but I will eat it. I always find it doesn’t pay to be fussy.’
‘Well, you’re right there,’ Will said approvingly. ‘And if I hadn’t got hold of any fish today, we’d only have had eggs for the meal because we can’t eat meat, see, with it being a Friday.’ And he said to Meg, ‘We’d best rattle through the milking Sunday morning then, because we’ll all be going to nine o’clock Mass. And what about you?’ he said to Joy. ‘Are you a churchgoer?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Well, whether you are or not in the general way of things, I would go to some church this Sunday,’ Will told her. ‘And, once there, pray like you have never prayed before, because I believe that is only divine intervention that will stop this war now.’