Tuppence To Spend (39 page)

‘But there must be someone who could help,’ Ruth persisted, trying to keep to the thread of the argument. ‘Your neighbours … Doesn’t Mrs Budd live in April Grove? She was out here for a while, we all liked her.’

‘Down the other end,’ he said. ‘And she’s got her own man to think of, and that girl of hers and the baby. Freda Vickers that lives next door used to give an eye to Sammy, but I don’t want people poking round the house when I’m out. I’d rather shift for meself.’

‘Mrs Vickers is a nice lady,’ Sammy said. He was sitting at the table too, eating a fresh helping of bread and milk, and drinking cocoa. He wiped a moustache of cocoa from his lips in exact imitation of his father. ‘She used to give me dinners.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s as maybe,’ Dan said shortly. ‘She’s all right and Tom’s a good mate but that still don’t mean I want them round the house. A bloke’s got to have a bit of privacy in his own home.’

He glanced up at the kitchen clock. ‘I’ll have to go. It’ll be dark before I gets home and likely as not there’ll be another raid. I’m a fire watcher, got to be on duty.’ He looked at Sammy and hesitated, as if he didn’t know what to say. ‘So you’re all right here, are you?’

Sammy glanced at Ruth and nodded a little uncertainly. ‘So long as Auntie Ruth’s not cross with me.’

‘Cross with you?’ Dan shot a dark look at Ruth. ‘She is treating you right, ain’t she?’

‘Of course I am,’ Ruth said firmly. ‘And I’m not often cross with Sammy. It’s just that this afternoon—’

‘If you been a bad boy—’ Dan began and Sammy shrank away from him.

‘I didn’t mean to be. But I wanted to go on the picnic, and Muriel said—’

‘Muriel? Who’s Muriel?’

‘It’s just a silly bit of mischief,’ Ruth cut in. ‘There’s no harm done and Sammy won’t do it again, I’m sure. He
really hasn’t been any problem, Mr Hodges, and I’m sure he’s happy here. He’s welcome to stay as long as he likes.’

Dan looked at her. ‘As long as he likes? And what about if it’s years, like you said? Are you really willing to have my boy here with you for years? Till he’s fourteen – fifteen – going out to work?’

Ruth took a breath. ‘Sammy could stay here for the rest of his life, if he wanted to. He’s like a son to me. You don’t have to worry about him, Mr Hodges, you really don’t.’

Dan stared at her. His brows came together in the frown that was already becoming familiar to her. He seemed about to speak; then he shook his head and got up from the table.

‘It seems like everything’s being took away these days. But I can’t stop here talking about it. I got to get back to Pompey …’ He looked down at his son. ‘I’ll come out again, soon as I can. You be a good boy now. Do what Mrs Purslow tells you, see, and no more mischief.’

‘No, Dad,’ Sammy whispered. His blue eyes were enormous as he looked up at his father. They stared at each other for a moment, the big man and the small boy, one so dark, the other so fair, and despite the differences between them Ruth felt a little catch at her heart at the likeness – that hint of sadness, of vulnerability, a reaching out from one to the other. Neither of them could make the first move, she thought, neither of them could break the glass barrier that seemed to stand between them. If only …

Then Dan Hodges moved abruptly and the moment was gone. He put his hand briefly on Sammy’s shoulder and turned away.

‘I s’pose I should say thanks for looking after the boy,’ he said gruffly to Ruth and held out his hand.

She took it, feeling the warmth and the size of it, and looked up into his dark face. ‘There’s no need to thank me. I’m glad to do whatever I can for Sammy. I told you that.’

He nodded, then moved towards the door. ‘Yeah. I
know. Well, I’d better get on. Don’t want to be riding too far in the blackout. I’ll come out again, some time.’

Ruth nodded in turn and watched him go down the garden path. He lifted his bike away from the hedge and glanced back to give a wave. She lifted her hand and turned to make sure that Sammy waved his own farewell. Then Dan Hodges cycled away and disappeared round the corner of the lane.

Ruth and Sammy looked at each other and went indoors.

‘Well,’ Ruth said brightly, ‘that was nice, wasn’t it? What a lovely surprise, seeing your dad like that. I expect you were really pleased, weren’t you?’

Sammy looked up at her.

‘Was it true, what you said? Can I really stop here for years and years, and be your boy?’ He went into the living room and stared at Silver, who was waking up in his cage and stretching out his claws. ‘Can I be here with you and Silver for ever and ever?’

‘I tell you,’ Dan said, lifting his tankard, ‘I dunno properly what to make of it. The nipper was upset, anyone with half an eye could see that. He’d been crying his eyes out. And he was sat at the table with nothing but a bowl of bread and water in front of him, what looked as if it had been made for hours. And then she had the cheek to give me a lecture on what kids need. Said she’d got to be a mother and father to him – I mean, what sort of talk’s that? Put some decent grub into his belly and make sure he goes to school, that’s all she got to do. And it’s not as if she didn’t have any food in the place. Give me an
egg
, she did, and fried spuds and onions and all. My Sam wasn’t getting any of that, though. Bread and water, that’s all he was getting – though she did put some milk on the second lot, and give him a cup of cocoa, but I reckon she was just trying to put it on a bit, get round me, like.’

‘But what was the idea?’ Tommy Vickers asked. He’d
taken to dropping into the pub with Dan once or twice a week, whenever Hitler would let them. Dan wasn’t such a bad bloke after all, once you got talking to him, he’d told Freda, and he seemed to need someone to chew the fat with. And now he’d been to Nora’s grave, and cycled out to see Sammy, he seemed to be more human, somehow. ‘Why should she want to get round you?’

‘Well, she wouldn’t want me complaining to the authorities about her, would she? Like that other widow woman what treated the Baker kiddy so bad, and those two sisters that had the Atkinsons. I mean, for all Jess Budd says about how well her boys have got on out at Bridge End, they ain’t all saints in the country. I don’t want my Sam treated bad.’

Tommy looked at him. It would be difficult, he thought, for Sammy to be treated much worse than he’d been at home, although that had been mostly neglect because Nora had been so ill and poor old Dan just didn’t know how to manage without her.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘however he’s being treated, he’s better off out there than back in Pompey, with all the raids we’re getting. I mean, I know it’s a week or so between them now, but we still don’t know when they’re coming. And it’s not just the dockyard they’re after, it’s right in our own backyards too. They nearly got Hilsea gasworks the other night, and the railway line, that was blocked for hours till they cleared them unexploded bombs, and there was all them houses smashed. You can’t feel safe. I wouldn’t advise you to bring young Sammy home again, not with things as they are. It’s not a fit place for youngsters. Look at what happened to that Cyril Nash, and young Jimmy Cross.’ He didn’t add what he’d said to Freda, that if Micky Baxter had been sent away when Gordon was, none of that would have happened. Cyril Nash would still be alive and Jimmy Cross would still have both his legs.

Dan was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘It’s not just
that, Tom. I get the feeling that if I don’t get him back here I’m going to lose him for ever. She wants to keep him. She as good as said so. Told me he could stay as long as he liked. Told me she looked on him as her own son.’ He stared at Tommy across the little beer-streaked table. ‘What I think is, this war’s going to go on for a few more years yet. It’s got to. There’s too much of it, all over the world, to stop it any sooner. And by the time it’s all over my Sam’ll be a grown lad, out at work. He’ll probably get farm work or something like that. He’ll be a country boy, Tom. He won’t want to come back to Pompey, and he won’t want to leave that Ruth Purslow and come back to me.’ He looked down again at the table. ‘We won’t have nothing in common any more. He’ll have forgot all about me.’

Tommy looked at him. Everything Dan said made sense. Even if the boy wasn’t being treated right, he wouldn’t want to come back home – he’d never been treated right there, either, especially since his mother had died. And he would be used to the country, to country ways. He would have grown up with them.

‘Well, I dunno,’ he said at last. ‘I know it seems a bit queer, Dan, but would it be so bad if he did? Not forget you, I don’t mean that, but – well, make his life out in the country? If it’s what he’s used to by then? So long as he has a good life – isn’t that what’s important? And you’ll still have your Gordon, when he comes home again.’

Dan raised his head and his eyes met Tommy’s. They were dark, half-hooded by the black brows drawn tight across them. But deep within them Tommy caught a brief glimpse of the loneliness of Dan Hodges’ heart and soul.

‘What’s important to me,’ he said, ‘is that Sam’s all I got left of my Nora. Gordon – well, he’s like me. He’s tough. He’ll make his own way and he’ll always come back, when it suits him. But Sam’s different. He’s his mother all over again and I never realised it properly, not till I saw him out
there.’ He drew in his breath. ‘I can’t let him go – not as well as her. I just can’t.’

For a few days after Dan’s visit Sammy was subdued and quiet. He seemed almost to have gone back into the shell he’d been in when he first arrived, Ruth thought, and wondered what had upset him most – the business over Silver, or his father’s arrival. The way the two of them had been together was certainly a bit queer – not at all like a father and son who hadn’t seen each other for a few months. They’d been more like strangers.

Silver, however, had recovered completely from his adventure and was even more vociferous than usual. His gravelly voice filled the cottage, declaiming every nursery rhyme, sea shanty, swear word and comment that he’d ever learned. He was quiet only when Ruth put on the wireless and she suspected that this was only because he was busy learning new words.

‘It’s
Workers’ Playtime
!’ he shouted, in the exact tones of Bill Gates, the announcer, after only the second time the programme had been broadcast. It was put on at dinner time, coming each time from a ‘factory somewhere in England’. You never knew in advance where it would be, or who would be on it, and even the factory workers themselves weren’t told until the day. It must be lovely to go to work and find that you’d be entertained in your canteen by someone like Arthur Askey or Max Wall, Ruth thought. The sort of people you’d never expect to see, unless you went to a proper theatre.

She and Sammy were listening to it as they had their dinner a week or so after Dan Hodges had been to Bridge End, when the back door opened and Jane came in. She put a paper bag on the table and looked at Ruth. ‘I thought you might like a few eggs. The hens are laying well, we had some to spare.’

‘Oh, thank you, Jane. That’s nice of you.’ The two
sisters looked at each other uncertainly. They hadn’t spoken since the day of the picnic. Ruth knew that she ought to have gone to the farm to patch things up, but the hurt of being told she couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be a mother had bitten deep and she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. I will tomorrow, she’d kept telling herself. We can’t be bad friends, me and Jane. But tomorrow had never come and now Jane was here.

‘Look, Ruth, I’m sorry about what I said,’ Jane said, all in a rush. ‘I wasn’t thinking – I was so upset over Terry, and our Lizzie being in Southampton, and even Ben having to register for war work. But I’d no call to take it out on you.’

‘Oh,
Jane
.’ Ruth got up and put her arms round her sister. ‘You don’t have to be sorry. It was me, taking offence where none was intended. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.’

‘It’s just such a
worry
.’ Jane sat down at the kitchen table, while Ruth took two cups and saucers from the dresser and moved the kettle to the hot part of the range. ‘I mean, the news is so awful. It’s spreading everywhere. Those terrible raids still carrying on – they say there’s been thousands killed in Liverpool and London, all over again – I mean, there’ll be nothing left,
nothing
. And I’ve just heard that the Germans have started to bomb Crete, and I
know
that’s where Terry is. They’ve got all the men out of Greece itself now, so he must be. That’s where they’ve taken most of them. And then I heard on the news that two transport ships had been sunk. Suppose he was on one of them? I just can’t stop thinking about it, Ruth, I can’t stop thinking about my Terry, drifting about at sea miles from anywhere … I can’t
bear
to think about it, but I just can’t
stop
.’ She buried her head in her hands.

‘Oh,
Jane
.’ Ruth bent over her again, cradling her sister’s head against her breast. ‘I don’t know what to say. I’ve been so selfish … Look, I’m sure he must be all right, they’d
have let you know if he wasn’t. And if he’s gone to Crete he’ll be safe, they wouldn’t have taken them there else. They’ll bring them back again soon, they’re bound to. Our Terry’ll be all right.’

The kettle began to whistle and she moved away to make the tea, while Jane found her hanky and sniffed into it. ‘I’m sorry, Ruth. I never meant to break down like that. It’s just that I’ve been keeping it bottled up inside of me, and when I started to talk about it …’

‘I know.’ Ruth poured boiling water into the teapot. ‘One spoon per person and
none
for the pot,’ she said ruefully. ‘It’ll be a bit weak, but we’ll just have to get used to it …’ She turned and caught Sammy’s expression. He was gazing round-eyed at Jane, his face white. ‘It’s all right, Sammy, there’s nothing for you to worry about. It’s time you were off to school. Go along now and be a good boy.’ She bent to give him a kiss and he scurried out of the door. ‘They’re on afternoons this week and so am I, so I’ll have to be going soon … Oh Jane, it
is
good to see you again and I’m really sorry you’re so worried over Terry.’

Jane was still dabbing her eyes. ‘Thanks, Ruth. Let’s talk about something else … I heard you’ve had Sammy’s dad here?’