‘Be careful!’ I yelped the words as pain shot through my knee. Pamela, unhurt, threw herself on the floor and began to wail.
‘Good grief, Mrs Parr!’ Elizabeth was standing in the doorway.
‘We’re all right.’ I levered myself upright. ‘My dear, take her into the kitchen. I must telephone.’
Sergeant Moore excused himself for eating his breakfast. His thin voice worked its way through crumbs. ‘I daresay you’d be unopposed in this scheme, madam.’
‘I’d hardly call it a scheme. Just a wish. Of course I have thought it over. Let’s say, a carefully considered wish …’
Loud screams issued from the kitchen. ‘No! No! Not porridge!’
‘Do you have other children, Mrs Parr?’
‘None of my own, but we’ve got three evacuees.’ I pressed the receiver against my ear. ‘We’re used to looking after young children. We could be—’
The kitchen door opened. ‘I! Am! Not! Eating! Nasty! Porridge!’ Pamela screamed, and thundered up the stairs.
‘– like a family to her!’ I shouted.
‘Just so,’ said the thin voice, with a little clearing of the throat, as Pamela thundered down again, giving a long, roaring bellow, as far as I could see for the simple pleasure of doing so.
When I went into the kitchen she was sitting on a chair with her knees up and the singlet pulled over them. Elizabeth was stirring a pan on the range. ‘I’m just making some more porridge, Mrs Parr.’
‘I gathered.’ We both smiled. ‘I’m taking Pamela with me to Waltham to get some clothes.’
‘Look, I’m in a bag. I’m a bag girl.’
‘Yes, Pamela. Elizabeth dear, can you knock back the bread dough later?’
Elizabeth nodded. ‘I can. But you’ll have to hurry if you’re to get the bus.’
‘Let’s go upstairs, Pamela, and get dressed.’ I made my way to the door but she remained on the chair, pulling the singlet over her toes. ‘You’re stretching the fabric now. Get up.’
‘Bag girl, bag girl. I want porridge.’
‘Oh. Now you want porridge. Well, you will have porridge, but you need to get dressed first.’
‘No, porridge now.’
‘It’s not ready. You must dress while it’s cooking. Do you want to go shopping?’
‘Yes, but after porridge.’
Elizabeth was laughing. She lifted the pan from the heat. ‘You do what Mrs Parr tells you, young lady, or I’ll feed this to the hens.’
Pamela got off the chair.
Upstairs she raced into the dressing room and out again, squeezed herself under our bed. Her laugh was rattling, hysterical. I persuaded her out after three minutes or so. I brushed her hair and she seized the brush from me, tried to brush the back of her hair with the back of the brush, refused to surrender it. I pulled her nightwear off her and she lay on the floor bicycling her legs until I caught one hard little foot and then the other and forced them into the leg-holes of her clean, dry knickers.
Now we had a bare ten minutes to get to the bus. And now she didn’t want to go shopping. I sat her on a kitchen stool; she jumped down. I pulled her back up onto the stool with my hands under her armpits and she went slack, as if boneless, flopping sideways.
‘Pamela, we’ll miss the bus!’
A spoon of porridge went in, and then I pulled the flour-sack tabard over her head. ‘I don’t want to go shopping,’ she growled, her face pasty with anger.
‘I will carry you if I have to,’ I vowed.
I did have to carry her. She dragged her feet, stumbled to her knees, squatted down, all the while yanking at my hand, until I was forced to hoist her into my arms. Just as I broke into a clumsy trot, my shopping basket bouncing against my hip, the bus to Waltham passed by the end of the lane on its way to the stop. I called out, ‘Wait! Wait!’ without the remotest chance of being heard. Perhaps a passenger was alighting: we might still make it. But the bus roared on, flashing through the gaps in the hedge, and I hurried the last few paces to the junction only to see it vanishing heedless into the dip at the bend of the road. I set Pamela on the ground, absolutely winded.
‘There,’ I said. ‘Look what you’ve done. We’ve missed the bus.’
‘I know.’ Her eyes were dancing and a delicious bloom had spread over her face.
My own eyes stung with frustrated tears. I watched the bus emerge from the dip and rush on up the hill, through the bare trees and away to Waltham.
‘I was going to get you warm clothes and new knickers, Pamela, but I can’t now. You’ll just have to sit naked while I wash your old ones. Uncomfortable, and cold.’
In response she started her nasty, rattling giggle.
‘Stop it!’ I shouted, but the giggling sharpened, accompanied now by a knowing leer.
I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and breathed right to the bottom of my lungs. ‘Pamela. Please.’
Her face crumpled and she started crying, high and strident as a lamb. I crouched down and put my arms around her.
‘Mummy’s not coming. Mummy’s not ever coming again.’
‘No. Darling, Mummy won’t come back.’
‘Never come back.’
‘No.’
‘Mummy’s gone.’
‘Yes.’
She pulled away from me, her wet eyes clear hazel, almost round.
‘She didn’t go with the candle man, did she. And she didn’t go to Aunt Margie where the grapes are either. Those are just tellings.’
‘That’s right, sweetheart.’
She leaned back into me, her breath whiffling through her nose. Then she spoke again, her lips moving against my neck. ‘I bet you’re going to say she’s gone to Heaven.’
I held her tight but without clinging. More to stop her falling. ‘Yes, Pamela, I am going to say that. Mummy’s gone to Heaven.’
Smack – her small palm hit me squarely on the cheek. She sprang backwards out of my arms. ‘Nasty lady!’ she cried, and ran off down the road towards the blind bend. There was something coming the other way. The thunder of a big engine, filling the air.
‘Pamela!’ I dashed after her. ‘Pamela!’ I shouted again, as a tractor rounded the corner, pulling a huge, spined harrow that seemed to fill the road. I ran harder, flung my arm out and grasped hold of the flour sack, tugging her onto the verge at the very instant the tractor roared past us, the harrow bouncing after it, missing us by a foot. Pamela and I both fell down, she under me, screaming like a child in a collapsing building. She flailed at me but I grabbed her hands. She screamed higher: her palms were grazed.
I heard a shout, turned my head. The tractor had slowed down and was pulling into the wide field gateway opposite the bus stop. Then the driver jumped down and ran back towards us. A small woman galumphing in wellingtons. As diminutive, sallow-faced, black-eyed as ever, and the black eyes just now furious.
‘Ellen Parr, what the bloody hell are you up to?’ bellowed Lucy Horne. ‘I nearly crushed that child!’
6
‘WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?’ I clung hard to Pamela, who was thrashing like a landed fish. ‘I’m trying to take care of her!’
‘You’re makin a bloody awful job of it!’
‘I’m aware of that!’ I cried.
She glared back, panting, her almost permanent wheeze audible after the mad dash and the telling-off. Then I let go of Pamela and put my face in my hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘We missed the bus.’
My cares came mounting one upon the other. It was the bus, and Pamela’s naughtiness, and her dead mother. It was the white flares over Southampton, and the smell of bombing in the people’s coats. And it was Lucy herself. I had no idea of the reason for her muteness, her ostentatiously blank stares, her turning of the shoulder at church or in the village hall. She’d been my bridesmaid, for goodness’ sake.
Well, she was certainly speaking to me now.
I took my hands away from my face. She was holding a dumbstruck Pamela by one hand, alternately frowning at me and squinting up the road towards the tractor. Then she gave an explosive sigh. ‘Bloody hell, Ellen.’
‘Yes.’ I got slowly to my feet and took Pamela’s other hand. The child, ash-pale, allowed it. ‘I won’t keep you, Lucy,’ I said. ‘I need to take Pamela home and get her warm.’
Lucy gave a short chuckle. ‘Darned if that’s not my old smock, under that flour sack.’
‘Yes.’