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CHAPTER 8

Manchester, 1939

Music hummed through the kitchen, the windows open to the summer, Tommy Dorsey and his band, ‘The Way you Look Tonight', Kitty dancing around with the tea towel to ‘Begin the Beguine', knocking over the cups. Not even Dad cross. The wireless sat up on the kitchen shelf. It was Peter's job to go and get the big batteries topped up at the shop. Peter might look skinny, but he could shift all right, that's what Dad said.

They were all sitting round that radio on the day Chamberlain said in his grave and sorrowful and posh voice that they were now at war with Germany.

His dad went out to the backyard. Peter went out after him. Dad was standing up in the corner away from the house, his shoulders shaking, wiping his face. He said, ‘Not again.' Kept saying the same two words.

Ma came out and sat on the doorstep and looked very thin, squinting up at them in the sun like some beaky bird as she told Peter and Bill they were down to be evacuated. Every bone in her arms in her legs, thin as sticks: she couldn't breathe again and wasn't getting better. You heard her coughing, coughing at night. Dad, who wouldn't ever admit to being slowed down by his scarred lungs – though he wheezed if he walked even a little fast – turned his eyes away from ma when she had a coughing spasm. The war had done
for his lungs, and now the Manchester air was thickening up inside Ma's. Asthma or TB maybe; the doctor couldn't rightly say. So Dad fixed his damaged eyes on a stain at the top of the wall when her shoulders shook, Ma trying to cough quietly, his gaze hopeless and angry and clouded. Waited for her to stop.

Ma put sandwiches in their bags and made sure they had clean underwear. She didn't want people to think that they came from a dirty family. They didn't have any pyjamas to pack. Peter's boots needed mending again but it couldn't be helped. Dad cut a cardboard shape and fitted it inside. She walked with them down to the schoolyard where a woman with a clipboard was fastening labels onto buttons or pinning them onto cardigans. When the ragged crocodile of children set off, Ma walked with them to the train station, clasped the boys into a hard, thin hug.

She stood there gathered up into herself, smiling and waving as the train jerked and then pulled away, holding her coat together even though it wasn't cold. She waved till the steam blocked her out and the train curved away round a bend in the line.

They'd be home soon enough, she'd told them.

The bus that collected them from the station had blue paper over the windows to stop Jerry from using the light of the bus as a guide for his bombs, Bill said. The holiday mood and any sandwiches were long gone. No water to drink. The night air was cold, a damp warmth evaporating from the children, their breath condensing on the glass of the windows and soaking into the blue paper. The little boy in the seat in front of them had wet himself adding a salty smell to the fug. Someone was crying, exhausted and resigned.

In the church hall there was cake and hot tea. Women in coats or pinnies got them all fed, and one by one the children were picked out
by couples – people with ‘making the best of a bad bargain' written all over their faces.

The little ones went first. Then all the girls were gone. The trestle table was cleared and packed away. Bill at thirteen was the oldest. Nobody wanted a big lad, causing trouble, eating you out of house and home.

The woman with the notebook had been writing down names as the children left with their new families. She glanced over to Bill and Peter, came towards them with a frown on her face, but at the same moment the green double doors swung open and a man entered. He wore a long camel coat, a trilby hat and small spectacles with gold rims, large teeth that glinted under the electric light bulbs.

The effect on the woman with the notebook was immediate. She snapped her head up, best behaviour, darted over to intercept him.

‘Just the one, May' he said, still moving across the room. ‘Dilys won't hear of taking two. Is this all you've got left?'

He stopped in front of the boys. He carried the smell of cologne and cigar smoke and cold air on his clothes. ‘A bit old, aren't they?'

May looked at their labels. ‘This one's all but fourteen, so he won't be here long. ‘And this one's—'

‘Ten and a half,' said Peter. ‘And I'll be eleven in a few months.'

‘Will you indeed?' He didn't look pleased. ‘She had in mind a girl, about six.'

‘It would be so good of you to take them, or one of them. I said to Joan over there, if Mr Hanbury is taking one of them when he's so busy, then we've no right to complain.'

The man nodded and started to leave. ‘You come with me,' he said to Peter. Not him,' as Bill started to follow. Peter gave Bill a look of alarm.

‘Go,' Bill told him. ‘Get yourself gone.'

There was a car waiting outside the church hall, a sleek black Ford, its shape drawn in glinting lines from an autumn moon rising huge behind the church. Dark shapes of trees in the churchyard loomed around them, moving in the wind. ‘Needs must in a war,' he told Peter. ‘Bloody chauffeur's been called up.'

Grunting, Mr Hanbury hitched his trousers up over his knees and bent down at the front of the car. The cigar clamped between his teeth, he cranked the starting handle with two hefty rotations. The car juddered. He jumped into the driving seat and slammed the door.

‘Well, are you coming then?'

Peter shivered, got the back door open and somehow climbed up. He had to lean out a long way to pull the door shut. He felt the car already moving away as he managed to slam it.

Mr Hanbury drove slowly, no light except for the moon. After a while he seemed to find this tedious and Peter felt the car accelerate through the dark banks of lanes. Mr Hanbury kept the window down in spite of the cold, his elbow on the ledge, singing a song under his breath. Peter recognised the song from the radio, one that Kitty liked. Tears made his eyes itch, but he held his face up to the cold air coming in from the window.

Mr Hanbury didn't speak, seemed to have forgotten he was there. Peter watched him throw his cigar out of the window with a trail of red sparks. Mr Hanbury searched in his breast pocket and held the wheel with his knees while he unscrewed the lid from a silver flask and took a few sips. He held it out to Peter in the back of the car. He shook his head.

Mr Hanbury laughed. ‘Good lad, well done.' He took another sip before putting it back in his pocket.

The car turned through iron gates and jolted along a narrow track between banks of glossy leaves. He heard the scrunch of gravel as the car pulled up in front of a building with no lights
showing. A tall bulk against a black and watery sky, made even taller by being set on the rise of a hill. Mr Hanbury led the way up a series of brick steps. Still whistling under his breath he turned a handle set into the porch. Somewhere inside the house Peter heard a bell jangling.

A wide woman in a brown pinafore answered, hair in a bun. Mr Hanbury steered him in front of her.

‘It's a lad,' she said.

‘Aye, needed a place to stay.'

‘But what will she say?'

‘What will she say about what, Maudey?'

A lady in a brightly coloured wrap, long grey hair in a plait down one shoulder, was coming down the wide staircase across the hall.

‘Let me see our little guest.'

She stopped on the bottom step. Looked at Peter with disbelief, then distaste. ‘Oh William, how could you?'

‘Come on now, Dilys. It was just this boy left there, waiting for someone to take him in when I got there. Do our duty, eh? It's for the war effort. Go shake hands now.'

Peter felt his shoulder shoved firmly and staggered a step nearer to the woman on the staircase. He walked towards her, holding out his hand. Hoped it wasn't sticky. ‘Pleased to meet yer, missis.'

Her shoulders and arms flinched away. ‘Well, put him in a back bedroom then, under the eaves. Not the blue room.'

She turned, and with a sound of rustling material, hurried back up the stairs.

‘Maybe we can get him put up at Thompson's farm.' Maudey looked at him doubtfully. ‘They always want hands there, once the potato picking starts.' She shook her head. ‘Well, it's a good job I put the copper on in the scullery. This one looks like he's in need of a good bath before he goes anywhere near the sheets.'

Maudey put a zinc hipbath in front of a large fireplace and filled it with steaming water. She draped a towel over a clothes horse that stood round it and handed Peter a bar of yellow coal tar soap.

‘I want all your clothes there in a pile, and you're to scrub every inch of you with this. Every inch, mind.'

She left a man's shirt with no collar on the clothes horse. All his clothes had gone. The bath finished, he put the shirt on.

‘At least someone's cut your hair short.' She ran her finger over his scalp, searching for something – nits no doubt – but satisfied that he was clean she gave a little push to the side of his head.

‘There, you'd best eat that up.'

Over on the table was a bowl of hot milk, soft white bread steeped in it, small yellow beads of butter swimming on top. There was sugar in it. It was gone in moments.

She led the way upstairs, not up the staircase with dark wooden balustrades where Peter had seen the lady coming down earlier, but up a smaller, back staircase with shut-in walls.

Three flights up and Maudey opened a door and switched on the light. A room with one wall sloping down to the floor, a small iron bed, a sink in one corner, a chest of drawers. She pointed out the pot under the bed.

‘And when I switch this light off you don't put it back on.'

She took a box of matches from her apron pocket and struck one. Bending over the side table she lit a night light in a saucer.

‘It's always nice to have a light when you're away from home, eh? Well, in you get.'

The bed had stiffly ironed sheets, cold and smooth as water. She switched off the electric and shut the door. The room wobbled to and fro in the yellow shadows. He kept very still in the sheets, afraid he might leave a mark. He'd never had a bed all to himself before. He was used to sharp kicks from Bill turning in his sleep, John snoring
in the narrow bed under the window. Through the thin wall there'd be the sounds of Doris and Kitty and the murmur of them talking together in the small room, which was just about big enough for two single beds side by side. The house was always crammed full of the people who were an unquestioned part of himself, like his own hands and arms.

He hoped Kitty would take Ma some hot water with a drop of Friar's Balsam if she started up with her coughing.

He was caught at the top of the stairs again, trying to tell Dad about Bill's boot, waiting for Dad to come up with his leather belt.

He opened his eyes and looked up at the sloping ceiling, bright sunlight. Relief that it had been a dream. Somewhere downstairs he could hear music.

He opened the curtains. Below, a series of large houses with steeply pitched roofs covered the hillside, each secluded by tall trees and fat hedges. The Hanbury's house stood right at the top of the hill.

His stomach growled. He couldn't see any sign of his own clothes. He quietly retraced his steps down the stairs still wearing the old shirt.

After opening a couple of wrong doors along a back corridor he found the kitchen. His clothes were on a clothes horse in front of an iron range, the red coals glowing behind bars.

‘They'll be dry now,' Maudey shouted from the scullery. The fabric felt stiff, the holes in his shorts had blossomed wider, a tangle of threads round the gaps like autumn burrs. ‘Happen Mrs Hanbury'll find something that's not falling to bits,' she said, ladling porridge into a bowl and setting it down with a bang. She put a spoon of jam on the porridge, poured a glass of creamy milk. No one but him to eat it all, at a big table set into a window alcove that looked out onto the shady well of the garden. Banks of flowerbeds and stone steps climbed
up to the top lawn and a rose trellis, the flowers batting against the wood in the wind.