But it was July, and the first bombs had dropped on England, though London, so far, had proved to be too much for the German planes to tackle. British Expeditionary Force had been evacuated from Dunkirk and even Mr Churchill had not stopped talking about the possibility of invasion.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender
. That was what Mr Chuchill had said the previous month, so if she, Peggy, got young Charlie sent home and there really was an invasion …
Well, I guess I’d rather have Charlie here, on our side, than penned up in London, Peggy told herself, preparing to stroll over to Margaret Rose to see how she – and the matches – were getting on. Anyway, what’s a kiss between two youngsters, even if one of them is the future Queen of England?
It was a hot and breathless afternoon. Nell had been pea-picking in the fields with an ancient straw hat on her head to protect her from the searing rays of the August sun. Now, the field stripped at last, she had wandered away from the Gullivers into the cool green depths of a little wood.
She was missing Snip terribly, but was coming to terms with being left behind. Snip had joined the Navy and was at a training school in Scotland; he talked of being a submariner, which made her shudder, but he wrote lovely long, if ill-spelt, letters and came back to whichever gaff they were on whenever he got leave.
He had not been back for several weeks though, so Nell wandered into the wood alone. It was nice in here; outside, flies buzzed, midges bit, and sweat channelled down the sides of her face whenever she moved. In the shelter of the trees there was a little stream, not much
more than a ditch really, tinkling along on a sandy bed. No doubt the sound of moving water was what made the wood seem cooler, as well as the dappling sunshine and shadow which fell through the leaves; whatever the reason, it was a haven of peace after the harsh heat of the harvest field.
And it wasn’t just the heat Nell was escaping from either; she was giving her mother the chance to be alone with Ugly Jack for an hour or so and, on a more personal note, she was escaping from one of the chaps, her friend Riggy.
Riggy Evans was a Welshman, small and sly, with a lively sense of humour and a habit of talking without moving his lips which Ugly Jack once said had most probably been learned in prison. He had dark, curly hair, a broken nose, almost black eyes, and enormous muscles; he was taciturn with the other chaps but he told Nell he had worked in the coal mines and that was the reason for the little blue scars all over his body. When your pick hit the wall tiny chips of coal flew out and embedded themselves in your flesh, he explained. You could always tell a miner by the scars.
No one knew what he was doing on the eastern side of the country, working the fairs, but Nell took to him at once because of his Welshness; it reminded her of the village, of Pengarth Castle, of all the good things from her dimly remembered early life. Riggy had been remote at first, but then she had addressed him in stumbling, half-remembered Welsh and they had become good friends, with Riggy returning her childish admiration in a pleasant and uncomplicated fashion. He had stolen books for her – well, he might have bought them, she supposed doubtfully, but Riggy was known to be light-fingered – and because he was illiterate she had taken to reading to him on quiet afternoons, out of the local paper usually, but occasionally from a story-book. Then he had brought her chocolates or sweets, a pretty piece of ribbon, a few early strawberries, and approved when
she shared them with Snip. She had been a child, after all, and children like nice things. Besides, Riggy could be amusing; the stories he told were often improbable but usually funny, and Hester sometimes asked him in for a meal and would talk, guardedly, about Rhyl and the inland villages, though she never told anyone directly about Pengarth or their lives in Wales.
Riggy was one of those chaps who went off in the winter, so they didn’t see him from December until around April. This year, when spring came round, he hadn’t turned up with the other chaps to start the season. Nell always had great difficulty with the age of anyone over fifteen, so she thought him probably youngish – did he not have dark hair without any white in it? – but not as young as the soldiers, sailors and airmen who thronged to the fair whenever they could. She imagined, therefore, that Riggy had gone into making munitions or working on the land, and when he tapped on the trailer door and walked in on a drizzly day in June she was just glad to see him, she didn’t wonder at all.
But Hester wondered. ‘Hello, Riggy, nice to see you,’ she had greeted him. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Dunkirk,’ came the laconic response. ‘Need a hand?’
‘Dunkirk? I say, were you one of the soldiers taken off the beaches? If so, how long have you got before they want you back in the army?’
‘Yeah, they got me but I’m not goin’ back; they’ve ‘ad enough of me, see? Like to look at me war wound?’
He heaved up a trouser leg; the knee-cap was crisscrossed with fresh scar tissue, you could even see the stitch marks. Hester gasped, a hand flying to her mouth.
‘Oh, Riggy, whatever did that?’
‘Landmine. Trod on it, bloody near. Lucky to be alive,’ Riggy said, lowering his trouser leg. ‘But I can work; need another chap?’
‘Well, you can try,’ Hester said doubtfully. ‘See Jack,
when he comes in presently. In the meantime, take a seat, I’ll make you a cuppa.’
‘I’ll make it,’ Nell had said, jumping to her feet. She had read all about Dunkirk and the BEF in the papers; now they had a Dunkirk hero in their trailer. What stories Riggy would be able to tell, what tales of heroism and tragedy!
It was then that the trouble started, if you could call it trouble.
‘Ello, young Nell,’ Riggy began, then stopped abruptly. As Nell unfolded herself from the bench he took in, in one startled glance, all the changes that had happened to Nell in his absence. She felt his eyes roam over her budding breasts, the little waist, the curve of her hips, and for the first time she became aware of her own body, of the changes which were turning her from child to woman.
Nell didn’t like it. Riggy, her friend, had become like one of the flatties, staring, assessing. Snip accepted her as she was, he never made her feel uncomfortable even when he remarked on some change in her, but Riggy did. She had recently told Hester that she would no longer wear the raffia skirt and the frill, or paint up with Cherry Blossom boot polish. She was too old, she said, feeling her cheeks go hot at the thought of those staring, knowing flatties, sizing her up, thinking things. But even when Hester, after a shrewd glance, had agreed that she was too old for the raffia skirt, she had not known exactly why she felt the way she did.
Until now; until she saw Riggy, her old friend, look at her with a sort of hunger. But that had been two months ago, and she had grown accustomed to the looks and the fact that flatties who would normally have ignored her and ogled Hester, now tried to get into conversation with her, suggested she might like to go to the flicks or take a walk after the show. She refused them all, of course, turned them down flat. Even the soldiers, sailors
and airmen in their fascinating uniforms with their tired eyes and nervous movements. In a way they needed her companionship, she sensed it, but she still turned them down, turned away. She was Nell Makerfield, she was her own person, she didn’t want all the giggling, nudging nonsense the older girls indulged in whenever someone caught their fancy, whenever a brawny soldier whacked the peg with the mallet and sent the striker soaring up to the high bell. The triumphant
ting
sent them into some sort of silly ecstasy, Nell thought scornfully, so that they competed for the attention of the man whose strength had rung the bell without pausing to consider whether he had a brain in his head or was kind to animals, both attributes of considerable importance to Nell.
But now, in the cool greenness of the little wood, Nell felt at peace with the world. Her mother and Ugly Jack seemed to have entered a new phase in their relationship recently; she acknowledged the fact without understanding why this was, and she was happy for them both. When their hands touched, a wave of colour would rise to Hester’s forehead and Ugly Jack would grit his teeth so tightly that a muscle jumped in his cheek. They exchanged glances, not the sickly ones of the fair girls but quick, loving looks in which tenderness and something else mingled. Nell thought they liked to be alone sometimes, too, so she tried to be out of the trailer for a good bit of the day and was happy enough, at this time of year, not to return to the trailer until the evening was well advanced.
‘Have you ever caught them at it?’ her friend Babe Ellis asked, when Nell had tried to explain why she stayed out of the trailer so much. ‘Does they kiss an’ cuddle much?’
‘Kiss and cuddle? No, of course not, they aren’t a couple of youngsters,’ Nell had said indignantly. ‘It’s just, oh I dunno.’
‘They must
do
it, livin’ in the same trailer and bein’
so friendly together,’ Babe said thoughtfully. ‘Us could sneak back one evenin’, tek a look through the winder at ’em.’
‘Look through the window and see them doing what?’ Nell asked suspiciously. ‘You don’t mean what the jukels do, do you – what made Prick-ears have those puppies?’
‘That’s it, gel,’ Babe agreed. She was fifteen months older than Nell. ‘Only if they does it, they won’t ’ave puppies, exac’ly.’
‘I know that, stupid,’ Nell said, nevertheless relieved to hear it. She knew very little about the workings of people or animals, only knew about the jukels because she had been woken as day dawned one dewy June morning by Sinda and Prick-ears thumping into the trailer as they bounced, untidily attached, round and round the van. She had roused Hester and told her that the jukels had somehow got welded to each other.
‘Oh, they’re dog-locked,’ Hester said sleepily, peering through the side of the curtain at the two dogs, circling unhappily, seemingly as worried over their sudden attachment as Nell had been. ‘It’s all right, sweetheart, it happens to dogs when they … when they make puppies. In a while they’ll come unstuck.’
She had giggled, given Nell a quick embarrassed glance, and curled down under the covers again. Later, she had got a book out of the village library and tried to explain things, but Nell had blocked her ears and run out, crying that she didn’t care, she didn’t want to know. Jack told Hester the kid was too young for all that stuff, and advised her to leave the book around for a week or two so that Nell could read what she wanted for herself. Nell had been strongly inclined to give the book a wide berth, but curiosity won and she and Babe spent a frustrating afternoon in the hayfield, looking at diagrams – at least one upside down – and puzzling over the wordy but inconclusive text. The book had explained that only
married people indulged in these strange acts – they had not been specific about jukels – so obviously Hester and Ugly Jack did not, which was a relief. It seemed, from what she had read, to be a strange, athletic sort of exercise and one she could not imagine any of the married people she knew undertaking.
No, Nell had decided, putting the book back in a prominent position on the window-shelf, there must be another way to procreate, and fair people, who lived in trailers and were short of space, must have discovered it. The thought gave her a good deal of quiet satisfaction.
She was thinking about Hester and Jack and trying to decide whether Hester would like her help in preparing tea or if it would be better to stay out a little longer when she heard a twig crack. Someone else was in the wood then – Babe? Or Hester, come to call her in to give a hand?
She looked behind her, then stepped quietly into a small hazel copse, out of the main part of the wood. What if it were Riggy? She felt instinctively that it was not wise to be alone with him though he had reverted, almost, to his old casual friendship with her. Almost, but not quite; perhaps it wasn’t possible for them to share that carefree relationship again. It was a pity, but if it was Riggy walking along under the trees she would prefer he did not know she was there.
It was a man, anyway. Dark-haired. Probably Riggy. He looked as though he was searching for someone, peering to right and left as he walked. She could see the silhouette of a turning head against the bright patches of sunlight though she still could not see who it was. Best be off, then, Nell decided. Quietly, taking care, she slid out of the shelter of the hazel copse and made for the farther side of the wood. Suddenly the wood seemed too dark, too cool. She would be happier under the brilliant blue of the sky.
She made very little noise and gained the edge of the wood without being conscious of pursuit, but as she emerged from the trees the flies found her. She stepped into the waist-high bracken and they attacked her, buzzing in a column a foot above her head, touching, settling, horrible. Still, she was in the sunshine, out of the dubious shelter of the wood. She might as well go back to the trailer now, she could help Hester with the tea. There were peas; what could be nicer than a big pan of fresh peas, and there had been talk of a piece of boiling bacon …
She turned towards the gaff and saw the man break out of the wood, hesitate, look around. It was not Riggy or any one else from the fair; it was a flattie. When he saw her, he grinned, showing very white, pointed teeth. He had a narrow face, slicked-back black hair, and round, protruding eyes which seemed to glisten when he saw her. He reminded her of the ferrets the village boys carried round, showing them off to the girls to make them jump and squeak. Ferrets were dangerous, they could kill a rabbit twice their size, and she found she did not want the man anywhere near her, anywhere at all.
The trouble was, the stranger was between her and the fairground and even as she hesitated he began to push his way through the bracken towards her. Immediately she turned in the opposite direction and began to run, panic lending her wings. The flies buzzed around, following her relentlessly; as relentlessly as the man, for he was definitely following her, coming fast, she could hear the rustle of his progress far too well. She looked back and saw that he was no more than five yards behind and he, too, had a buzzing column of flies over his head. Her heart bumping unpleasantly hard and sweat trickling down between her breasts, Nell tried to run faster, realising that though she was leaving the gaff behind she was approaching the village, albeit indirectly.
It crossed her mind that she might be making too much of it, perhaps if she stopped the man would stop too, pass the time of day, go ahead of her, disappear. But instinct knew more than Nell knew herself, and it was telling her to keep running, to escape from her pursuer; she obeyed, though her chest was aching and the heat prickling all over her body as fresh runnels of perspiration began to trickle across her skin.