‘That was a right battle royal and if that old hatchet-faced biddy thought she was going to get the best of me she had another think coming.’
Aunt Jessie’s face was red. I was sorry for upsetting her and I cuddled her and kissed her cheek. ‘Thanks for sticking up for me,’ I said humbly.
Michael brought a tray with a brown pot on it and some cups and I thought I could see some rich tea biscuits on a plate and brightened up.
I stared at Michael: no one would take him for a German. Well, he was half Welsh or English or something but he
He was too young yet to go to war and, anyway, which army would he join? It was a strange thought and it gave me a bit of a pain in the middle of my tummy.
I ate most of the biscuits and Aunt Jessie wagged a finger at me. ‘I’ve got soup on for our tea, mind,’ she said sternly. ‘I don’t want you wasting good nourishment by filling yourself up with rubbish.’
She didn’t know what an appetite I had—my sister Hari called me a gannet and that’s a bird that eats everything in sight. When I thought of Hari I felt like crying again. I wanted to go home, to look out of the window and see lights, dimmed by the blackout curtains, but there behind the windows. I hated the endless darkness that was the countryside but then that’s why we were never bombed here, the Germans couldn’t see us. I’d stopped calling them ‘the Hun’ in respect for Michael.
I looked at him now, he was falling asleep, his long legs spread out before him, his toes reaching for the warmth of the fire. His hair was over his eyes and his mouth was open. He looked very handsome.
Aunt Jessie was dozing as well, her big hands idle for once in her lap. I felt the warmth and the comfort of the room, the coals falling in the grate and suddenly I was peaceful. If I couldn’t be home, here with Aunt Jessie and Michael was the best place to be in all the world.
I woke to the sound of voices and realized the awful Mrs Preston and her meek male assistant were back yet again. I pretended to be asleep and through the slit of my eyes I saw a policeman in uniform. He took off his hat and rubbed his hair into a mess as Aunt Jessie began arguing with the woman whose face was still kind but whose voice was that of a harpy, one of those ugly creatures, half woman, half bird, from a book I’d been given to read at school about the ancient Greeks. And then Mrs Forsythe made us read the Aeneid and I liked that, what I could understand of it. I know this Aeneas went off with Queen Dido but he went away and left her in the end. Did men always do that?
‘This is your introduction to the great Virgil, girls,’ Mrs Forsythe, our teacher, had told us. ‘We should read more of the classics—’ her tone was reverent—‘but perhaps this book is one of the best. Remember it well.’ I remembered ‘the classics’ now all right as the bird woman stared into my face.
I was grabbed then and pulled to my feet and the kind-faced lady, for once, had a scowl on her face. ‘Your mask has slipped,’ I said. She looked like she’d slap my face but too many people were watching.
‘Mrs Dixon has agreed to take you back,’ she said frostily. I was hustled out of the door and jammed into a black car and then we were bumping away down the lane and I looked back and saw Aunt Jessie with her hands over her face and Michael with his arm around her shoulder and it was as if I’d lost my only true friends in the whole world.
When I arrived at the Dixons’ house I was thrust unceremoniously from the car. And then I was inside with the Dixons, the front door locked and bolted. I was given bread and milk for supper and we ate in silence. Then Mrs Dixon nodded to Georgie and went outside.
George pushed me into the cold scullery and shut the door. ‘I’ll call your mother,’ I said fiercely, knowing what was coming.
‘Don’t bother, she’s out feeding the chickens.’
‘What? Arsenic? Or the acid from her tongue?’
He punched me suddenly and I fell back on the floor knocking my head against the wall. I was shocked more than hurt.
‘You big bully!’ I kicked out and caught him on the ankle. He immediately kicked me back and caught my knee cap. It hurt. Bad. I scrambled to my knees and bit his arm, his fist came down on the top of my head, again and again. I looked up at him and his fist smashed my nose, breaking it. In any case, I heard a crack and then it started to bleed. I sat back on the floor and wondered what to do. I rubbed my face all over his mother’s clean washed sheets folded nicely in a basket—that would at least give her a good day’s washing to do. I had no doubt she’d put George up to this, he hadn’t the brains or the guts to do it all by himself.
‘What’s the story?’ I said sliding against the wall to support myself.
‘Huh?’ He never was very quick.
‘How you going to explain all these cuts and bruises when I go to school?
His eyes glazed as he thought about it and for a moment it looked like my beating was over. Then he brightened. ‘We’ll tell people you fell, when you ran away.’ He started laying into me then, punching me wherever he could find a soft spot. And then he hit me on the head and I saw the earth and the skies explode around me in a load of coloured stars. I wished I could ‘blackout’, a word I’d heard a lot since the war started but I just lay there pressing my lips together to stop myself from crying.
He was breathless and fell back against the door gasping, sweat running down his face, his thick legs apart as though to support him to start another attack on me.
I saw it then, under the mangle, the iron bar kept for defence in case the Germans might come. I stealthily reached out and got it and with a mighty effort lunged forward, brought up the bar with as much force as I could muster right between his open legs.
He went down, screeching like a pig with its belly being opened. I pushed him aside and flung open the door and then I was out into the night gasping in the cold air.
In the distance I could see the tiny glimmer of a lamp down by the chicken coup, a sign that Mrs Dixon was still keeping out of the way. If she’d been in the town she’d have had the Home Guard yelling at her to put the light out; she didn’t even think that to German bombers a detour over the fields of Wales was nothing but a few minutes’ flight where they could unload bombs before heading home. I wished they would come and drop all they had on Mrs Dixon and her darling George.
I looked round and tried to get my bearings. Once I found the gate and was out on to the road I could be on my way. Not to Aunt Jessie, not this time, it was the first place they would look for me. I thought of Michael and willed him to come and find me again but he was probably in bed thinking me safe if unhappy at Mrs Dixon’s house.
Hunger bit a hole in my stomach, I’d no proper food for a few hours now and I was a girl who liked my food. To my friend Sally Bevan it was a mystery and a source of irritation that however much I ate, I stayed small and slim. Poor Sally was plump but nicely so with nicely shaped bosoms, not huge cushions like Aunt Jessie’s but round and soft and sticking through her blouse to taunt the boys. I noticed they all looked at Sally’s bosoms, even John Adams.
My legs were tired and my knee ached where George had kicked me. I sat down and picked at a glossy leaf of some plant or other and in the dark scratched John’s initials on it by memory and put it in my shoe. The idea was that if it turned black by morning, he loved you.
My sensible mind told me that stick any plant in a sweaty school shoe and it would go black but I put that out of my mind. I tried to think of John but instead saw Michael’s face. Hastily, I took the leaf out of my shoe and threw it away. John Adams was in the past after all. Michael was here and now.
Eight
Kate dressed carefully. The skirt of her dress was soft grey wool, made from a blanket; her blouse was an old one but was mock velvet and clung flatteringly to her slim figure. She regretted it looked shiny in parts as it was much washed but at least the colour suited her.
She was meeting Eddie again tonight and her heart fluttered, a tiny colourful butterfly caught in gossamer
