Child from Home (16 page)

One Sunday, the Artley family was walking down the lane from Levisham on their way back from church, when a young soldier suddenly jumped out from behind a bush and alarmed them. Pointing his rifle at them, he belligerently shouted, ‘Halt! Who goes there? Friend or foe? Advance and be recognised.' His gleaming, double-edged bayonet was fixed to the business end of his rifle leaving the empty, canvas frog dangling from his webbing belt. When they explained that they lived at the railway station he looked a bit sheepish and allowed them to continue. It seems he had only recently been posted to the area and was a little overenthusiastic. Kitty and Rosemary sometimes got bored on going all day without seeing anyone, so to break the monotony they used to pop over to the station house sitting room for a chat with the Artleys. Here they could share in the latest gossip over a nice cup of tea and listen to the latest war bulletins on their mahogany-encased wireless set.

We saw troop trains crammed with soldiers that clattered through without stopping as sparks flew from the wheels and the acrid smell of oil on hot iron hung in the air. The men leaned out of the carriage windows waving and shouting to us but what they said was blown away on the wind and drowned out by the train's roaring passage. We stood by the maroon and cream waiting room and vigorously waved back. Quite often the trains were hauling weapons and ammunition wagons, as apparently there were ammunition dumps located somewhere further up the line. When the tarpaulin covers of the clanking, flat-backed trucks blew back we sometimes caught a glimpse of a camouflaged tank or the protruding muzzle of a huge gun. Posters on the notice boards asked everyone to ‘Be like dad and keep mum', while others warned that ‘Careless talk costs lives', ‘Keep it under your hat' or ‘The walls have ears' which I never understood. In my mind I saw walls literally with ears sticking out of them. There was, at that time, a fear of imminent invasion as the victorious Germans now occupied the defeated countries on the other side of the Channel; nevertheless, we felt safe and secure here with all the soldiers and weapons around.

On our walks with Kitty during the nutting time of late summer and early autumn, the days were still warm and we crunched over the thick carpets of dark brown, bristly-cased beech mast that lay beneath the trees on the hillside. The nuts are only produced in large quantities during hot, dry summers and the deer (which we glimpsed from time to time), the squirrels, the blackbirds, the pheasants, the dormice and the badgers loved them. In the damper areas the boughs of the hazel shrubs were heavy with clusters of green-frilled cobnuts and the pockets of our smocks bulged as we crammed in as many as possible. The old gardener-handyman called them filberts. In the background we could hear the faint tinkling of trickling rills and the woods echoed to the knocking sounds of the tiny, stubby nuthatches. When collecting the nuts they take them to a convenient crevice, like those in the deeply fissured bark of the pine and oak trees, and wedge them in; they then proceed to hammer away at them with their small, straight beaks until the shell cracks and they can reach the kernel. Kitty said, ‘In Celtic times, the hazel was known as the tree of knowledge and its nuts were said to be the ultimate receptacles of wisdom.' Maybe we were gaining in wisdom, for we ate plenty of them.

As the lush fruitfulness of autumn crept on, the weather turned chilly, and thick, shifting mists often blotted out the hillsides. Locally, the potatoes and the harvest had been safely gathered in and the corn stubble had turned from burnished gold to a dull grey. Before the war it had been burned and the ashes had helped to enrich the soil, but now it had to be ploughed in due to the blackout regulations. Flocks of screaming gulls followed the team of horses, looking on from a distance, like tiny scraps of white paper blowing about in the wind. In the low autumn sunlight, the leaves of the deciduous trees stood out in various tints of gold, yellow, red and brown, contrasting sharply with the dark leaves of the evergreens. We saw red squirrels racing back and forth hastily gathering up the nuts before scurrying away to hide them before the winter set in.

On certain days the valley was shrouded in thick white swirling fog which lingered all day, and there was frost on the grass in the early mornings as the year moved inexorably on. The ripe crab apples, sloes and blackberries were picked and Dinner Lady used them to make delicious jams and jellies in huge bubbling, steaming pans. Eric and I, by this time, were having lessons with Miss Thorne as, by rights, we should have been starting school. We played with water, plasticine and sand, not realising that we were learning the basics of volume and measurement. Miss Thorne poured equal quantities of water into a short wide glass and a tall thin glass, saying, ‘Which glass has the most water in it?' We both thought that the tall glass held more than the other one as we were still too young to understand conservation of volume. She said, ‘The mind is a treasure house that should be kept well stocked and once knowledge is safely stored the world can never take it away.'

In early autumn, a ten-year-old girl called Anne-Marie Calvert had entered our lives. She had been evacuated to Levisham village with her mother and her brother Richard after their house was damaged in a raid on York in early August. The anxiety and worry caused her mother to bring her and her brother to this relatively safe, secluded spot.

One day as dew lay on the grass, Anne-Marie came along the lane beside the nursery school. Seeing George and me playing close to the gate, she came in and said, ‘Mother has made a lovely stew with lots of fresh vegetables from our garden. Would you like to come over and try some?' Being a growing lad and always hungry, I didn't take much persuading. The stew was simmering away in a black pot that looked to me like a witch's cauldron, and there was an iron bar fixed to the wall, which was hinged and could be swung out over the open fire. It was called a ‘reckon' in these parts and the stew pot was suspended from it. ‘Sit yerself down luv,' Mrs Calvert said, as she ladled out the stew. It was delicious but there were lots of tiny bones in it as it was wood pigeon stew. On the stone-flagged floor of the kitchen lay several peg rugs, which the family had made from strips of old clothing that they pushed through a piece of hessian sacking with a wooden prodder; my favourite rug had the shape of a Spitfire worked into it. A glass-shaded paraffin lamp hung from a hook in the ceiling.

Anne-Marie said, ‘When the soldiers are down by the beck training they sometimes come to the kitchen and say “Any chance of a drop of tea missus?” They bring their tin mugs and Mum fills them up but if their sergeant appears they quickly chuck it away.'

We would sometimes see her near Grove House picking bunches of wild flowers to take to school. Each day, when the mail train came through, the incoming mailbag was passed out to Mr Artley or Jack Pickering who, between them, worked half a day on and half a day off. The bag of outgoing mail was collected from the platform by the guard. Jack worked the signals and issued the tickets and whenever a train came through he would collect a large metal hoop, beneath which hung a leather pouch containing the tablet. The train driver would lean out and place this hoop over the arm of the man on duty, and this important safety procedure ensured that no two trains could be on our stretch of line at the same time. The tablet was then placed into a device in the signal box, which caused the signals to change, thus reducing the chances of an accident. The tablet was replaced when the next train came through.

The busiest day was Monday, when Mr Artley scuttled here and there in his shiny-peaked black cap and black waistcoat, regularly pulling out his large Hunter watch on its gold chain to check that everything was on time and running smoothly. The platform was all hustle and bustle as it was market day in Pickering and there were large numbers of local people going there. The farmhands and the women of Levisham and the various outlying farmsteads eagerly looked forward to these weekly shopping trips into town.

When he was not too busy, Jack would sometimes get a few of us older children together and take us into the signal box, saying, ‘Yer can 'elp me ter change t'points if yer like.' As he pulled back one of the ten shiny metal levers, we ‘helped' by holding on to it with him. We loved to look out of the windows as a great hissing black steam train thundered past making the box tremble under our feet.

One Monday Kitty took a few of us on the six-mile journey to Pickering and Eric and I were delighted to be part of this special treat. The track south of Levisham station beyond the two tall signal posts became single track, and it ran straight as far as the hamlet of Farwath. After that it was all bends with the line crossing and re-crossing the beck as it passed the lovely mixed woodland that clothed the steep slopes on either side.

At that time steam trains still ran from Pickering to all four cardinal points of the compass. Kitty had handed over our tickets to be clicked by a man in a black uniform and took us out of the station. We joined the hustle and bustle of the crowds in the market place that milled around under the brightly striped awnings of the stalls, gazing in wonder at the clothes, crockery, vegetables and sundry items that could still be bought in spite of the increasing shortages. We stayed close to Kitty as she moved amid the myriad sights and smells, including odours of wet fish fresh from Whitby. It was a new and exciting experience and we stared in wonder at the hundreds of brightly coloured goodies on display. Many of the little shops lining the street had tiny, old-world, glass-bottle windowpanes that distorted the things on the other side.

At the top end of the market stood The Vaults where we had our hair cut. Nearby stood an old antique shop that had once been a cinema, where a strange box-like structure hung out over the pavement; apparently this had been part of the projectionist's room. There was a row of old railway cottages; a tobacconist's hut and some wooden benches under a low stone wall where we sat and rested for a while.

We were taken to see a Punch and Judy show and, although a bit shocked and frightened, we were fascinated and totally absorbed at the same time. The actions of the hook-nosed, long-chinned, hunchbacked Mr Punch were dreadful. He murdered his baby by banging its head on the walls and floor because it cried; he then bludgeoned his wife to death when she disapproved and he hurled their bodies out of the window. The policeman put him in jail and he was sentenced to death by hanging, but he throttled the hangman with his own noose and escaped. The show gave us a glimpse of a cruel and savage time in England's history, but, on reflection, was it any worse than what was happening in war-torn Europe? Brutal Nazis were slaughtering weak and vulnerable people on a vast scale, and like Mr Punch they seemed to have thrown all decent human values out of the window.

We were then taken for tea in a café near the old Memorial Hall and had pikelets thickly spread with real, deep yellow, farm-produced butter. A year later the café was to become one of the many British restaurants that the government was setting up all over the country. Churchill had suggested setting up these canteen-like communal feeding centres during the Blitz so that nutritious, three-course meals would be available for under a shilling. They were to be non-profit making and were to be staffed by the WVS who would produce nourishing meals from non-rationed foods. With the pootering tunes of a nearby steam organ still ringing in our ears, we were treated to scrumptious curd tarts; then tired out but happy we boarded the train to return to the warm, loving atmosphere of Grove House. It was crowded with heavily laden country dwellers heading back after a good day out.

On a warm October day of hazy sunshine, an elderly gentleman from The Settlement led us out onto the verandah by the play room to have our photographs taken. The picture was made into a postcard and sent to all the parents and I still treasure that fading black and white picture.

Soon afterwards we were gathered together and sat cross-legged around the wooden-cased wireless set in the dining room. We knew that it must be for something special. We were to hear the fourteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth make her debut broadcast in which she said to all evacuees, ‘my sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you, as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most. To you living in new surroundings we send a message of true sympathy …' The bombing of London went on continuously for fifty-seven days and Buckingham Palace had been bombed twice in the five weeks prior to the broadcast but, luckily, the Royal Family had been staying at Windsor Castle overnight. These tragic events did not really register with us at the time as our age and lack of understanding must have protected us. To us the war seemed very exciting.

A few days later, as the days grew cooler and the nights were drawing in, Kitty celebrated her twenty-first birthday; an important ‘coming of age' occasion in those days. At twenty-one a person was deemed to be an adult and no longer subject to parental control. As the remains of the day gave way to dusk, a small party was held in the cosy warmth and brightness of the dining room. We were already warmly tucked up in our beds and a fire burned brightly in the grate as a nice get together of Kitty's friends took place. Alan Brown, her fiancé, had been brought over on the motorbike of a friend. Generally his fingers were intertwined with Kitty's or he had his arm around her waist. Tommy Gibson, the jolly farmer from Cropton, was there and it was said that he was keen on the attractive Rosemary Waters. The constantly smiling and cheerful Artleys came over from the station house to join the party.

Plainly wrapped presents (patterned paper was very scarce by then) were brought and given, and Mrs Ruonne had baked Kitty a big, two-layered sponge cake with damson jam in the middle. She had iced it, put candles on it and decorated it with a ‘21' and the ‘key of the door'. They enjoyed open sandwiches made with crusty farmhouse bread topped with tasty egg, ham, corned beef or cheese, followed by homemade fairy cakes, cream slices and, as a special treat, a sherry trifle. The room resounded with laughter and happy voices as they exchanged light-hearted anecdotes. Later they gathered round the piano to sing the popular songs of the time. To break the ice a few glasses of port and sherry were drunk while the men had beer. Kitty was young, in love and very happy.