The Girl With No Name (22 page)

As she looked round the station Lisa’s face floated into her mind and she forced it down again. She couldn’t cope with Lisa’s death, not yet, and until she could she wouldn’t allow it to confront her.

The raids continued night after night. There wasn’t a single night that the children at St Michael’s spent entirely in their beds. Each morning the new day would have to be faced and they would set off for school, often tired and bleary-eyed.

Charlotte had settled fairly well into the home. In a strange way she found the regular routine of the home comforting. She lived within its framework and had the security of knowing exactly what she was supposed to be doing and when. School was the same; the day was organised and broken into manageable sections by bells and break times. She was happy enough living with children who were also lost in some way. Molly, she learned, had been bombed out of her home in August when a bomber, driven back by the fighters, emptied its bomb bay over New Cross. None of her family had been killed but their home had become uninhabitable and the family dispersed among friends and relations. Molly, as the eldest child, was the one who had been placed at St Michael’s. Clare had been living with her grandmother. She didn’t remember her mother who had died when she was two and her father, in the navy, had been lost at sea. When her grandmother had been knocked down by a car in the blackout and killed, Clare, left alone in war-torn London, had been taken into St Michael’s. Every child had a story to tell and Charlotte began to realise that she wasn’t the only one living with loss.

‘At least you know who you are,’ she said despondently to Clare one evening as they sat together in the common room doing their homework. ‘I can’t remember anything before I woke up in hospital. Not my name. Not my home. Not my family.’

‘I know, but at least you’ve got a photo of them,’ Clare reminded her.

‘I’ve got a photo of... people. I don’t know them.’

‘Surely they must be your parents and your brother.’

‘Maybe,’ sighed Charlotte. ‘I hope I remember soon. It’s so stupid I can remember my tables but not my name!’

‘Come on,’ Clare said, anxious to change to a happier subject. ‘I think I’ve learned the poem now. Will you hear me?’ And for the next twenty minutes they recited the poem they been set to learn for homework.

Miss Morrison saw the budding friendship and was pleased. She still hoped that as she relaxed into her new surroundings, Charlotte would gradually recover her memory. Perhaps friendship with Clare, another courageous child, would aid that recovery.

It was one night in early November that everything was to change. The siren started its dismal wail and the children, practised into normality now, filed down the stairs and out to the shelter in the back garden. As had been established over the nightly exodus, Clare took Charlotte’s hand as they approached the shelter and gently led her inside. Miss Morrison allowed herself a weary smile as she saw the two girls sit down together on one of the mattresses. As the raid gathered force outside, she encouraged them all to lie down and try to go back to sleep. Obediently they curled up on the mattresses, but then came a tremendous crash somewhere close, shaking the shelter to its foundations. Everyone was jolted awake and little Polly Elliott, one of the younger girls, began to cry. Matron reached over and pulled her on to her lap, cuddling her against her shoulder and murmuring soothingly into her hair. Since there was little chance of anyone going back to sleep now, Miss Morrison started singing. One or two of the children joined in and before long they were all singing ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’ and ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’. The noise of the raid filled the world outside, but within the shelter they continued to sing. When at last they seemed to have run out of songs, a quiet voice began to sing a new song. No one joined in; the words were unintelligible. Charlotte was singing, and she was singing in German.
Grün, grün, grün sind alle meine Kleider
. They all turned to stare at her, but no one interrupted. Miss Morrison listened, fascinated. Clearly this song was coming from the recesses of Charlotte’s closed mind and Miss Morrison wondered if this was the breakthrough they’d been waiting for. When at last the song died away, she said, ‘That was lovely, Charlotte. Thank you.’

When the all-clear finally sounded and they emerged from the shelter, they found a world utterly changed. St Michael’s itself was still standing, but several houses in the street were on fire and two of them had been partially destroyed, leaving leaning walls, gaping windows and dangerously lop-sided roofs.

Miss Morrison hurried the children inside and sent them back to bed for a couple of hours’ sleep before they had to get up to face the new day, but she called the two other live-in staff to her sitting room for a meeting. She had been thinking hard as she been sitting with her fifteen children in the brick shelter, listening to the destruction of the world above, and she had made some decisions.

‘We’re in the front line here,’ she began without preamble. ‘We’re within a few miles of Croydon airport and that’s a definite target for the bombers. We have to move the children somewhere safer. Any of those bombs could have hit us and we’d all have been killed.’

‘You say move the children,’ said Matron, ‘but where? If they had anywhere else to go they wouldn’t be here.’

‘I realise that,’ Miss Morrison said, ‘but they’re in particular danger here and we have to get them moved somewhere. Now, I’ve had an idea which I hope will work. The best thing for them all would be to be evacuated to the country.’

‘Fair enough,’ agreed Mrs Downs, ‘but where? The government-sponsored evacuation seems to have finished. People are leaving of their own accord, of course, going to stay with people they know outside the towns, but who do we know who’d accept fifteen children all of a sudden?’

‘My sister, Avril,’ replied Miss Morrison.

‘Your sister?’ Matron echoed. ‘Where does she live? Has she got room for fifteen evacuees?’

‘She lives in Wynsdown, a village in Somerset, where her husband is the vicar. I’m sure if I ask her she’ll be able to find families prepared to take children who’ve been made homeless by the Blitz.’

‘It’s a big thing to ask,’ remarked Mrs Downs doubtfully.

‘I know,’ agreed Miss Morrison, ‘but I’m going to phone her this morning and ask if she can. I don’t think she’ll turn me down.’

When the children had left for school, Miss Morrison got on to trunks and managed to put a call through to her sister in Wynsdown. Avril Swanson answered.

‘St Mark’s Vicarage. Good morning.’

‘Av? It’s Caro.’

‘Caro?’ The delight at hearing her sister’s voice sounded in Avril’s. ‘Where are you? Are you coming down to see us? Do say you are!’

‘No, afraid not,’ answered Caro. ‘Look, I’ve only got three minutes. Can I send you the children from St Michael’s?’

‘What? Can you what?’

‘We were nearly bombed out last night, Av. Houses all round us have been damaged and I need to get the children out of London, away from the Blitz. It’s been every night since September.’

‘Yes, we’ve heard how bad it is,’ Avril said.

‘I’m sure you have,’ replied her sister, ‘but until you’ve actually lived through these raids, you can have no idea of just how bad. Half the street was destroyed last night. It’s a miracle St Michael’s is still standing. I have to get these children away, Avril, and I thought you might be able to help. There are only fifteen of them.’

‘Only!’ cried Avril. ‘Where am I going to put fifteen children, Caro? I know the vicarage is big, but it’s not that big!’

‘I didn’t mean just you,’ Caroline said with a shaky laugh. ‘I hoped you’d be able to spread them round the village.’

‘I can try, I suppose,’ said Avril. ‘We had some evacuees when war broke out, but almost all of them went back home before the first Christmas. Not sure how happy people here will be to have another lot descend on them.’

‘Would they be happier if fifteen kids were obliterated by high-explosive bombs, or incinerated by incendiaries?’

‘Don’t, Caro,’ cried Avril. ‘Of course not, but I’ll have to talk to David before I give you an answer. I’ll try to ring you back later.’

Caroline Morrison sighed. Her three minutes were almost up. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but don’t leave it too late, Av, or I shall be in the shelter with fifteen children, in the middle of an air raid.’

As she put down the receiver, Miss Morrison began to plan for the evacuation. She was sure Avril and her husband, David, would find places for her charges, but it might take time and after last night’s raid, she wasn’t sure how much time they’d got.

In Somerset, Avril Swanson put the phone down. She stared out of the kitchen window at the garden beyond. Gone were the lawn and herbaceous borders that had been her delight when they’d first come to the parish. Now there were neat rows of winter vegetables, beyond which was the hen house and its wire-fenced run. The vicarage was digging for victory and keeping chickens.

I should go out and feed them, she thought, we’re certainly going to need more eggs. The thought made her laugh out loud. If there was to be an influx of fifteen London children, they were going to need a darn sight more than extra eggs!

Wynsdown was a small village crouched on the Mendip Hills. Its cottages and one or two larger houses radiated out from a small village green. This was definitely the centre of village life. The church and vicarage stood on one side with the tiny church hall close by; the pub, the Magpie, faced them from across the green and on a third side were the low stone buildings of the village school. The post office and general store, standing either side of the Magpie, completed the hub. The bus to Cheddar came through, morning and evening, to take people to work, but most of the families in Wynsdown were employed on the land. Children from outlying farms came to the village school, sometimes hitching a lift on a tractor, but more often walking the two or three miles from home and back again in the afternoon.

Avril loved it here. She had thought she’d feel cut off when they first moved, it was so far and so different from the sort of town where, until now, she’d spent her life, but it wasn’t long before she knew that this was where she felt at home. She loved the feeling of community and of being an integral part of it. David, as the vicar, soon got to know most of his parishioners and had been tentatively welcomed as a younger replacement for the retiring vicar, Gerald Parker. He had been careful to institute any changes slowly, gradually bringing in new ideas, but without antagonising the inhabitants who had lived there all their lives and regarded anything ‘new-fangled’ with suspicion. The Swansons had been here for four years now and were accepted by most as part of the village. When the previous batch of evacuees had descended on Wynsdown, they had found homes for all the children, though many had now returned to the cities when the expected bombing didn’t materialise.

Can we do it again? Avril wondered as she went out into the garden, basking in the pale winter sunshine, to feed her hens. It all looked so peaceful; no sign of the destruction being faced elsewhere. Could they go through all the upheaval again? She gave a sigh and, as she’d promised Caro, went in search of her husband to discuss the idea with him.

She found him in the church talking to Marjorie Bellinger, the squire’s wife. The squire, Major Peter Bellinger, had served in Flanders in the Great War and, anxious to do something positive for the war effort, was working hard to ensure that every inch of his land was productive. Marjorie was a stalwart of the church, organising the flower rota, church cleaning and parish magazine deliveries. She was a tall woman in her late fifties, with permed grey hair and serious grey eyes. Conscious of her position in the village as wife of the squire, with its attendant responsibilities, she was always ready to step forward to take a lead in village affairs. Their son, Felix, was a pilot in the RAF, flying with Fighter Command. They, more than anyone in Wynsdown, knew the horrors of the Blitz, fearing for their son each and every night. She was cleaning the brass now, rubbing energetically at the memorial tablet for those from the village who had given their lives in the last war, as she discussed the idea of a Christmas Bazaar with David.

‘If we give people enough warning, vicar...’ she was saying, but broke off when Avril came running into the church.

They both looked up in surprise and David said, ‘My dear, you look flustered. Something happened?’

‘Just had Caro on the phone from London.’

‘That’s nice,’ said David, ‘is she coming to see us?’

‘She wants to send fifteen children from St Michael’s down here, to us!’

‘Fifteen!’ exclaimed Marjorie.

‘That’s what
I
said,’ replied Avril, ‘but she says there was a dreadful air raid last night and they were lucky not to be bombed out. She says the children
have
to be moved.’

‘Where does she think we’re going to put them?’ wondered the squire’s wife.

‘Let’s go back to the vicarage for a cup of tea,’ suggested the vicar, ‘and work it out.’

They walked out into the winter sunshine and across the churchyard to the vicarage gate. It was hard to imagine the Blitz bursting upon them every night for weeks as it had in London. They had heard the occasional plane fly over, but usually too high for them to identify, and so far their nights had remained undisturbed.

‘I suppose we’d better reconvene the evacuation committee,’ Avril said as they sat round the large scrubbed table in the vicarage kitchen.

Since the outbreak of war this room had become the heart of the house. A large kitchen with a scullery on the side, it looked out over the vicarage garden. The old, solid-fuel range provided an oasis of warmth in the otherwise unheated, sprawling vicarage. David had brought two armchairs in from the chilly drawing room and it had become the place where they ate their meals, sat in the evening listening to the wireless, discussed the worries of the parish and talked through the events of each day. David had his study for seeing parishioners and dealing with parish matters, but very often he brought those, too, into the warm kitchen. It was to the kitchen that they naturally repaired when there were problems to be solved.