Daughters of the Mersey (17 page)

Amy nodded grimly and flattened herself against the cowshed wall to keep as far away as possible from Grumpy’s swishing tail. She watched Bessie pick up the heavy chain and fearlessly put both arms round Grumpy’s neck to clip the ends together. Grumpy stood still and let her do it.

‘They’re used to it, you see. Now let’s see you tie up Sunshine.’

They went to the next stall. Amy swallowed hard and made herself stretch her arms round the cow’s thick neck to do it. It seemed absolutely enormous and her cheek rubbed against Sunshine’s curly hide. Her tongue came out to lick the back of Amy’s hand; it felt like sandpaper and her breath smelled of new milk.

‘There, we’ll make a country girl of you yet.’ Auntie Bessie beamed at her as she turned to push a stool in position near Grumpy’s udder. ‘Would you like to learn to milk?’

‘No thank you.’ Amy fled back to the house. She was well pleased with what she’d achieved but couldn’t cope with more just yet. Not even Marmaduke
meowing for milk could make her stay.

Amy became aware that Grumpy was acting strangely and Auntie Bessie and Jack were concerned.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ she asked but they just shook their heads. One afternoon, Jack came home from work and told them he’d made arrangements for Grumpy to see the bull and asked Amy if she would like to help him and Fly walk the cow up to Llanhafod farm for this. It would be her job to run ahead and open gates.

A premium bull was kept at Llanhafod, the big farm near the school, and his services were provided to the local farmers for a modest sum as a means of improving the breeding quality of the local cattle. On the road just below the farm, Amy had noticed an almost new telephone kiosk, and she thought she might be able to use it to speak to her family.

‘We have a phone at home,’ she told Jack, ‘and Mum has one at the shop. I know how to use them, but this one is different. I lifted it up on the way home from school the other day but the operator didn’t ask for my number. It has buttons and things inside to make it work. Can you show me what to do?’

Uncle Jack opened the door of the kiosk as they came level with it to see what she was talking about. ‘No.’ He let the door swing back. ‘I know nothing about phones.’

‘I think I’ll have to put money in it, won’t I?’

‘I’ve never used one, I don’t know. Nobody has a phone here.’

The farmer came to greet Jack as soon they drove Grumpy into his farmyard. He let the bull out of
its stall to join Grumpy while Amy was closing the gates behind them. She was entranced with what Grumpy was doing when the farmer’s wife came out to join them.

She took Amy by the hand. ‘Come indoors and have a glass of lemonade,’ she invited. ‘Better, Jack, if I take her away. No point in her losing her innocence.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was asking me how the telephone works, can you tell her?’

Amy could see the recently erected sub-post office built of red zinc sheets against the side of the farmhouse, and was reminded that the farmer’s wife was also the postmistress.

‘We have a phone at home,’ Amy said, ‘and if I’m there Pa expects me to answer it when it rings, so I know how it works.’

‘Yes, bach, it would be nice for you to talk to your family.’ She took her into the sub-post office and picked up the phone.

‘It’s the one in the kiosk I want to know about.’

‘I can put you through from here.’

‘But I want to know how to use that one, so I can ring my Mum on the way home from school. She’s got a phone at her shop. It’s those buttons I want to know about and how to put the money in.’

‘Come on then and I’ll show you.’ They walked the fifty yards down the road to the kiosk. ‘You need two pennies to make it work.’

‘I haven’t brought any money with me,’ Amy said, embarrassed. ‘I thought perhaps tomorrow . . .’

‘No matter.’ The postmistress took a purse from her pocket and gave her twopence. ‘You can pay me back tomorrow when you come to school.’

‘I will,’ Amy said eager to try it now. She watched
carefully as the postmistress demonstrated how to operate the telephone and then did it under her supervision.

‘That’s right, bach.’

Amy felt excited as she heard the phone ringing in the hall at home.

‘Amy!’ Her mother was laughing with excitement and pleasure. ‘You’ve found a phone! Lovely to hear you like this. How are you?’ Amy laughed with her. ‘Everybody is well here and missing you. Pat and her mother came into the shop today. She’s going to be a bridesmaid to her cousin. I’m to make her a dress in lavender satin. Pat’s fine, she asked about you.’

The sound of her mother’s voice made the distance disappear. ‘No, everything is fine here. No, no bombs, no gas attack and not a German in sight.’

Amy heard the pips denoting that her the time was up. ‘Goodbye,’ she said as the line went dead. She was left alone in the kiosk feeling homesick, and wishing she had more pennies to ring her mother again and tell her how much she wanted to come back to her family and friends.

Autumn was advancing and everybody was trying to help the war effort. At school, the children were told the Germans would stop the ships bringing any more oranges to Britain. They were taken out of school and along the lanes to pick rose hips from the hedges.

‘Rose hips are full of vitamin C,’ Miss Cosgrove told them. ‘They will be made into rose-hip syrup for babies.’ She also encouraged them to take sixpence to school on Fridays to buy a
National Savings stamp. Two pupils walked to the sub-post office at the farm to buy them. These they stuck into the book provided, until they had the fifteen shillings needed to buy a Savings Certificate. Amy understood they were doing their bit, lending their money to the government to spend on tanks and guns to fight the enemy.

In the following weeks, the population was issued with ration books and identity cards, but everybody was amazed there were so few practical signs that Britain was at war. People had been told they must always carry their gas masks with them because a gas attack could come at any moment, but they soon gave up.

Amy’s classmates began to drift back to Merseyside because it was just as quiet there. Miss Cosgrove packed up and went and the evacuees that were left were absorbed into the body of the school.

Amy wrote to her mother and told her all this, and put it to her that she should return too. ‘
I would like to
,’ she wrote. ‘
Here I have nobody to play with once I leave school. The farms and cottages are too spread out
.’

She waited for a reply, fully expecting to be home and playing with Pat before much longer. It took Mum longer than usual to reply and when she did the answer was no.

Amy felt pangs of disappointment but she
got over it and began to settle down. Soon she was the only evacuee left and was put into the main class at school, with boys and girls ranging in age from seven to fourteen. They left to start work once they turned fourteen.

Amy sat at a well-scarred desk that accommodated four pupils. There were two open fires in the classroom that were lit from October to April. The boys were responsible for collecting morning sticks from the woods behind the chapel and also for bringing in the coal.

She was being taught now by Mrs Myfanwy Roberts, the schoolmistress in charge, who had her desk directly in front of one fire. She was well past middle age, a widow with two grown-up children who no longer lived at home. She wore printed smocks over dresses that Mum would consider smart. She was a good-looking woman with strong features and iron-grey hair drawn into a bun at the back of her neck. Behind her rimless glasses her dark eyes were as sharp as needles and missed nothing.

A position close to the other fire in the corner was highly prized by the girls who were grouped together on that side of the room. The best places went to the oldest and strongest, but they all put their sauce bottles full of milk close to the fire to warm by mid-morning.

Mrs Roberts was a disciplinarian, she bustled rather than walked and her Cuban heels beat a loud tattoo on the wooden floor. She had zero tolerance for talking in class, passing notes, or eating sweets. A biblical picture hung over her fireplace and she kept a cane tucked behind it with the handle in full view. Any sign of restlessness in class and the cane would be taken out in readiness and
the slightest whisper after that would cause Mrs Roberts to rap it impatiently on her desk. It took very little more for the perpetrator to be called forward to receive punishment. One slap across each hand was considered the lighter sentence; it could be several strokes across the legs.

There wasn’t a child in the school who wasn’t in awe of her. Amy was terrified of her. As one of the youngest, her place in class was in the front row very near to Mrs Roberts and to avoid her wrath Amy concentrated hard and jumped to follow all her instructions. Bessie said Mrs Roberts had the reputation of being a good teacher and of being very caring of her pupils.

Some of the children in the class lived on the other side of the hill and had a long way to walk, as there was no proper road and no taxi on that route. If it rained and they arrived in wet clothes, Mrs Roberts would take them next door to School House and have them take off their sodden garments. She dressed them from a box of clothing she kept for the purpose. Wet shoes and socks would be dried off in her airing cupboard and returned at the end of the day.

She also made sure that every child had a mug of hot soup at lunchtime to augment their sandwiches. She bought bones in town and grew vegetables in her garden. The older girls were responsible for making soup in a fish kettle that covered two burners on a paraffin oil stove in the girls’ cloakroom. Like the other young ones, Amy was pressed into service to peel onions and carrots.

She soon saw that the oil stove frequently gave off clouds of black smoke that could fill the cloakroom and snake under the door into the classroom. It was a question of getting the wicks adjusted to burn off the paraffin correctly. On days when the stove was
acting up, they left the door to the cloakroom open so that Mrs Roberts could keep an eye on it from her desk. If for some reason the stove had gone out, and the soup wasn’t ready, they were given a cup of hot cocoa instead. They each took twopence a week to pay for this nourishment.

Both Auntie Bessie and Uncle Jack had attended that school, though back then they’d had a different teacher. Bessie said the leaving age had been twelve in her day and she’d gone straight into service on a big farm on the other side of town. She was only allowed home one Sunday a month. But Jack had been kept home so often to help his family on their farm that he’d never learned to read and write. Even now, at harvest time, the number of children attending school fell away because they were needed to help at home.

Amy was pleased to be getting more letters. Milo wrote her a long letter about being a soldier and said he didn’t like it. She knew he was in France but he said he wasn’t allowed to tell her how the fighting was going. He enclosed a five shilling postal order. Amy felt quite rich.

June wrote too about her new life as a nurse, telling her she had to get up early and have breakfast with the rest of the nursing staff and then go to a ward for old men to make their beds, help serve their breakfast and get them washed. She thought that was more like domestic work than nursing, but she had a very nice uniform and everybody called her Nurse. At nine o’clock she went to the nursing school and spent the rest of the day in class there.

Amy’s friend Pat sent her a postcard with a picture of Thurstaston cliffs and beach. She was back at school now but she’d again spent two weeks in a holiday cabin there and they’d had a lovely time. That made Amy homesick
again because last year Pat’s family had taken her and June with them. She bought a postcard in town for Pat with a view of the valley and asked her to send her telephone number because she might be able to ring her.

The following week she had Pat’s reply and was able to make contact. Amy thought it was marvellous to tell her all her news and wished Pat had come with her, but she was making friends with the local children.

When school was over for the day she walked down the road with them rather than wait for the taxi to return. Glenys had a fairy cycle and sometimes came to school on that. She would walk home with them and let them take turns to ride her bike. Amy longed for one just like it. She remembered being with Pat and peering into a bike shop on the New Chester Road. They had both admired a fairy cycle they’d seen there.

C
HRISTMAS WAS DRAWING CLOSER,
and
Leonie received a letter from Amy asking if she might come home to spend it with them. She was filled with sorrow and guilt as she told her daughter it wouldn’t be possible.

All Leonie’s children had left home that year, and although June was near enough to pay them occasional visits, the house seemed very quiet and dull without them.

When Leonie received a note from Amy’s old school telling her that a coach would run on alternate Sundays into Wales so that parents might visit their evacuated children, she was delighted. She’d thought of making her own way there but Sunday was the only day she was free to go, and the trains ran a Sunday service which made it almost impossible.

Leonie longed to meet the people looking after Amy and see for herself where she was living. When June came home on her day off, she asked her if she’d like to go with her.

‘Yes,’ June said. ‘In her letters poor Amy seems a bit lost, but it’ll have to be soon. While I’m in preliminary nursing school I have every Sunday off, but once I start working on the wards I won’t.’

Leonie arranged it for the last full Sunday that June would have free, which also happened to be the last Sunday before Christmas. She wrote
to Amy and her hostess to tell them.