Authors: Lilian Harry
‘I dunno,’ he said listlessly, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
‘Yes, you do. You had some last night, with your baked beans. Look, I’ll just cut a slice of bread and put it on this fork –’ she picked up the brass toasting fork he’d been teasing Silver with ‘– and hold it out to the fire, and it’ll be done in no time. Didn’t you ever do this at home?’
He shook his head. ‘Won’t it burn?’
‘It’ll toast. Look, it’s turning brown already. We’ll take it off and put it on the other way round, see, and do that side. You can have a go in a minute if you like.’
How can a child grow to eight years old and not know how to make toast, she wondered, spreading it with
margarine and putting a smear of Marmite on top. She put it on a plate and handed it to him, and he sniffed it dubiously.
‘Smells funny.’
‘It’s nice. Try it. It’s good for you.’ She watched as he nibbled the edges, and then went upstairs to collect the wet sheets. Poor little chap, she thought, gathering them up, I suppose he gets smacked for this at home. As if he can help it! As if any child would want to wet the bed deliberately.
A sudden scream nearly made her jump out of her skin. She dropped the sheets and hurried down the narrow stairs, almost falling down them as she smelt burning. She pushed open the door to the little staircase and gasped. The room was full of smoke and Sammy was holding a blazing toasting fork, waving it about wildly and screaming at the top of his voice. Silver was squawking with terror and trying to get back in his cage. At any moment, she thought in panic, the flames were going to catch on the curtains and the whole house go up.
‘Let me have it! Give it to me!
Sammy
!’ She snatched the fork away from him and dunked the flaming mess into the bath, where it hissed virulently before going out. ‘Goodness me, child, whatever were you doing?’
‘I was trying to make toast,’ he sobbed between his coughs. ‘I wanted to make you some toast.’ He collapsed on to the floor and lay there shaking with sobs. ‘I told you I was bad! I told you! You’ll hit me now, you’ll have to!’ His voice rose to a scream. ‘The house is burning down! The house is burning down!’
‘Nonsense. It was only a bit of toast.’ Ruth opened the window and went through the scullery to open the back door as well. ‘I’m sorry about the cold, but we’ve got to get this smoke blown out. It’s bad for Silver … Now get up, Sammy, and stop crying. Are you all right? You haven’t hurt yourself?’
She picked up the trembling boy and set him on his feet.
He shook and shuddered in her hands. He’s really frightened, she thought, he’s terrified.
‘It’s all right,’ she said soothingly. ‘It’s all over now and nothing bad has happened. Ssh, now, you can stop crying, no one’s cross with you. Everything’s all right. You’re not hurt, are you?’
‘I got a bit of blood on the bread,’ he said, snivelling and showing her a nick in his finger. ‘The knife’s sharp. But it don’t hurt,’ he added bravely.
‘You cut the bread?’ She looked at the loaf with its ragged edge, and at the thick, uneven doorstep that was floating in the bathwater. ‘Sammy, you mustn’t do that. You mustn’t do anything until I’ve told you it’s all right, do you understand? Not until I know what you’re capable of.’ She looked at him through the last wisps of smoke. ‘Now let’s make sure Silver’s all right, shall we? He’s not used to all this excitement.’
Together they looked at the parrot, who was sitting on his perch again looking distinctly ruffled. Ruth stroked his feathers down and spoke to him as soothingly as she had spoken to Sammy. ‘Poor old chap. Poor old Silver. What a morning, eh? And you haven’t had your breakfast yet, have you? You haven’t even had one single sunflower seed. Poor old boy.’
‘Poor old Joe,’ Silver agreed mournfully. His hoarse voice softened. ‘I love you, Ruthie.’
Ruth felt a lump in her throat. Jack’s voice was speaking to her again, as he’d spoken to her during those long nights at sea when he’d been bringing Silver home. So long ago, she thought, and yet hearing his voice coming from the parrot’s beak made it seem like yesterday. If he’d lived they might have had their own little boy like Sammy. Only he would never have been as timid and frightened as Sammy seemed to be.
She looked down at the boy at her side. His sobs were
quietening and he was gazing up at Silver with wonder. She thought of the soaked sheets upstairs and the blazing toast.
Having an evacuee wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d thought. But already she was committed to making it a success. She and Silver together.
Luckily, Ruth’s duty didn’t start until ten and she was able to clear up the house, get the washing done and even slip along the lane to her friend Joyce Moore to borrow a few bits of clothing for Sammy.
Joyce was sympathetic and helpful. With four boys of her own there were enough spare clothes to put together an outfit of sorts for Sammy, and she gathered them on the table and found a bag to put them in.
‘Couple of pairs of underpants, those old flannel shorts of our Johnny’s, Joe’s shirt and Fair Isle pullover what are too tight for him now, and some socks. I can’t do nothing about a coat, I’m afraid. Will you be able to manage with this?’
‘He’s got a coat. He says he was given some clothes from the mayor’s fund, whatever that is, but he left them on the train. Perhaps that Mrs Tupper will bring him a few more things when she comes. I mean, they can’t expect the families to turn round and start kitting the kiddies out, can they? With the best will in the world …’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know what sort of a home he’s come from, Joyce. He doesn’t seem to have ever been washed properly, let alone had a bath, and he eats with his fingers as much as with a knife and fork. Come to that, I haven’t seen him pick up a knife yet, except to cut bread, and then he nearly took his finger off.’ She leaned closer and whispered, aware of the boys squabbling over some Meccano in the corner of the room, ‘If you ask me, he’s probably been knocked about a bit. He more or less
told
me I should smack him when he wet the bed.’
‘Knocked about?’ Joyce whispered back. ‘Poor little
tacker. Still, perhaps he deserved it. He seems to have set your place by the ears. I know what boys can be like.’
Ruth shook her head. ‘He’s not bad, Joyce, just a bit unlucky. He was only trying to help when he set the toast on fire.’ She gathered the clothes up quickly, wondering suddenly what Sammy might be doing now. ‘I’d better get back to him. Goodness knows what I’m going to do with him while I’m on duty.’
‘Send him down here,’ Joyce said. ‘One more or less don’t make no difference to us. So long as he don’t set
our
house on fire.’
‘He won’t do that. Thanks, Joyce. It’ll be better when he can go to school, or I can take him over to the hospital with me. He can make himself useful there. But I don’t like to do that, not till we’ve got a bit more used to each other.’
She set off along the narrow lane, carrying her bundle of clothes. It was good of Joyce to let her have these; with four boys money was tight and everything was handed down in the end to the youngest, Billy, who was only three. Mentally, she ran through a list of other bits he’d need. Gloves – you couldn’t expect a kiddy to go out in this weather without gloves – and a couple of warm vests to replace that brown paper. She could alter another of Jack’s warm working shirts, but he really needed some more trousers. Those he’d arrived in were nothing more than rags and although the pair Joyce had lent were infinitely better, they were still old.
I’ll see Mrs Tupper as soon as I can, she thought. I’ll pin a note to the door when I go on duty, so she’ll know she can come over to the hospital. We’ve got to get a few things sorted out – like why he starts to cry every time I ask him about his mum and where that brother of his has been sent. And why they’re not together, for heaven’s sake. Brothers ought to be kept together.
Joyce’s husband Olly was a farmworker, like Reg Corner, and the cottage they lived in was a little way along the lane
from the middle of the village. The rooms were tiny, with uneven stone-flagged floors. It always seemed crowded in there with the four boys, but warm and cheerful too. It would do Sammy good to go there, she thought, and be part of a family.
Back at the house, Sammy was huddled in the armchair where she’d left him, with Silver on his perch cracking sunflower seeds and muttering to himself. Ruth dumped the parcel on the table and gave him a smile. ‘There. That’s a few more clothes for you to wear. See – a new pair of trousers, a nice shirt and this lovely pullover, that’ll keep you warm.’ She held it up for him to see. ‘What do you think of that?’
Sammy stared at it. ‘It’s all different colours. Didn’t they have enough wool?’
Ruth laughed. ‘It’s meant to be all different colours! It’s Fair Isle. Ever so hard to knit. I tell you what, this blue will look lovely with your eyes and fair hair.’ She regarded him. ‘It’s gone curly! Why, you’re a really nice-looking little boy.’
‘I look like a bleeding girl,’ he said, putting his hand up to the fair curls. ‘A bleeding sissy, Dad says.’
Ruth found that she disliked Sammy’s father more every time she heard his name mentioned. ‘Well,
I
don’t think you look like a girl,’ she said firmly. ‘I think you look like a very nice little boy. Though I think it would be better if you said “blinking” instead of “bleeding”. It isn’t good for Silver to pick up any more swear words … Now, you’re going to spend today with some other boys at my friend’s house, while I’m at work. They’ve got some Meccano.’
‘What about him?’ Sammy, asked, looking at Silver.
‘He comes with me, while it’s so cold. I don’t usually light the fire in the mornings, see. Coal’s getting so short, with the roads being as bad as they are and even the trains can’t get through half the time.’
‘We gets our coal in an old pram,’ Sammy said. ‘Mum
used to go up the station yard …’ His voice faded and to Ruth’s dismay she saw the tears begin to form again. Poor little fellow, he’s missing his mum dreadfully, she thought, and hastened to distract him.
‘Let’s get you into some of these clothes and then you can help me wring out the washing before we go out. I don’t think we’ll get your sheets dry today, but at least I’ve got a change of them for tonight. And I’ll borrow a rubber sheet and a draw-sheet from the hospital to save the mattress. Matron won’t mind.’
The Cottage Hospital was small, with only two wards, and the atmosphere there was more relaxed than in a big city hospital. Matron was a plump, homely woman who ran a tight ship but knew all her staff personally and took an understanding view of domestic problems. It was nothing unusual to see small children rolling bandages in the office or pushing a meal trolley round the wards, and often one of the patients would be the child’s own mother or father. Children were not, of course, allowed by hospital regulations to visit, but nothing had ever been laid down about their helping the nurses, and if Matron chose to decide that there was therefore no rule against it nobody was going to argue with her.
However, Matron would not tolerate any bad behaviour and Ruth knew that she must be sure of Sammy before taking him to work with her. She could not risk any accidents such as they had already had at home.
She went out into the backyard and set up the mangle, then took the zinc bath into the wash-house and piled the wet sheets into it from the copper. Rinsing was hard and heavy work, and her fingers were frozen before she decided that the soap had been thoroughly washed out. She dragged the bath out into the yard and began to feed the sheets through the rollers of the mangle.
Sammy appeared in the doorway, arrayed in his new clothes.
‘Oh my, you do look smart,’ Ruth told him, panting. ‘I knew that colour would suit you. I’ll just button the shirt up properly – see, you’ve got an extra button at the top and an extra buttonhole at the bottom! How do you suppose that happened, I wonder.’
‘I dunno,’ Sammy said, looking down. ‘I thought it’d been made wrong.’
Ruth smiled. ‘Well, it’s easy to put right, see … Now you can help me. Lift the sheet up from the bath and just let it go through the mangle, while I turn the handle. But don’t let your fingers go with it!’ she added hastily, remembering how accident-prone he seemed to be. ‘We don’t want you coming over to the hospital with me as a patient.’
‘It’s squeezing all the water out,’ Sammy said, fascinated.
‘That’s right. It helps the washing dry quicker, see, and we can hang it up indoors round the fire on wet days. We couldn’t do that if it was still dripping, could we. Doesn’t your mum—’ She remembered the tears that formed whenever his mother was mentioned and stopped herself. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a mangle before?’
He shook his head. ‘We don’t wash sheets much.’
I don’t suppose they’ve even got any, Ruth thought pityingly. She had heard about the London slums but never realised that the same depth of poverty existed in Portsmouth as well. She finished her work in silence, speaking only to encourage Sammy in his efforts to help.
He really is a dear little boy, she thought as they carried the damp sheets indoors and arranged them on the wooden clothes horse around the dying fire.
Wicked little bleeder, indeed! I know who the wicked bleeder was in
that
house and it wasn’t little Sammy.
Lizzie Travers was feeling restless. The raids on South-ampton and her anxiety over Alec had made the war seem very close and very real. She had given up working in the shop and went out into the fields every day with her father, pulling carrots from the frozen ground or piling up wurzels for the animals’ feed, but it still didn’t seem to be enough.
‘I wish I could join one of the women’s Services,’ she said to her mother as they sat in front of the fire one evening, knitting navy-blue balaclavas. ‘I feel as if I’m skiving, just stopping at home.’
‘Of course you’re not skiving. You work as hard as any man and your father needs you. If you weren’t here, Mr Knight would have to apply for another Land Girl, so what use would it be to the war effort, you joining something else?’
‘They probably wouldn’t let me anyway,’ Lizzie said gloomily. ‘They’d say the same as you, I’ve got to stop where I am.’