War Orphans (3 page)

Susan, who had always feared Elspeth Ryan, backed away. Joanna was vaguely aware of her saying she would see her in school tomorrow.

She lunged towards the van, but firm hands dragged her backwards. Sharp nails dug into her shoulders. Her stepmother jerked her back before she could attempt to snatch the box from the man's hands.

‘Now now, young lady,' he said, his thin lips stretching into a lax smile. ‘It's all for the best. There's a war on and it ain't fair for animals to be in the city. Your cat will be fine.'

Elspeth smiled at the man and pressed more forcefully on Joanna's shoulders. ‘This gentleman represents the National Air Raid Precautions Animal Committee. It's his job to take animals to places where they'll settle away from the chance of being bombed.'

‘Can I go with her?'

Her stepmother gave her what was supposed to be an affectionate shake. ‘Of course not, silly.'

Joanna knew her stepmother well enough to know that she'd get more than a shaking of shoulders when they were indoors. Likely she'd be sent to bed with no chance of getting herself supper. But she didn't care. Not if Lottie wasn't there.

The doors slammed shut and the van eased away from the kerb.

Joanna sobbed as she saw the van carry on up The Vale, stopping to collect a dog here, a cat there, even a guinea pig from the Connor twins at the top of the hill.

‘Inside, young lady.'

Joanna almost tripped over the front step as she was pushed into the house. Once the door was closed she was spun roughly round to face her stepmother. Elspeth's eyes were narrowed and her teeth were showing between her bright red lips, a sure sign that she was very angry.

‘You will learn to do as you are told, young lady. Do you hear me?'

Elspeth shook her far more violently than she had outside the front door. Once they were in the house and without Joanna's father around, she was capable of doing anything.

‘I want Lottie!' Joanna cried out.

Her shoulders were gripped even harder, and there was a pleased smirk on her stepmother's face. ‘Well, you can't have her. Do you hear me? She's gone and that's that!'

‘I'll tell my daddy about you,' Joanna cried, her face wet with tears, her whole body shaking from the force of her sobs.

Elspeth pursed her red lips, her eyes blazing. ‘You do that, little miss, and you will rue the day you were born! Off to bed with you and no supper for a start.'

‘I don't want any supper!'

Elspeth let go of her shoulders and placed her fists on her hips.

‘Then go without. Now get out of this house.' She clouted Joanna's ear as she reached for the catch and opened the front door. ‘I don't want to see you until bedtime. And even then I don't want to see you. Straight to bed with you. Now get out of my sight.'

‘It's raining.'

‘I don't care.'

One more smack across the back of her head before Joanna gladly ran from the house, tears streaming down her cheeks.

She ran unseeing down The Vale, heedless of anyone who called out to her. She ran past the rank of shops at the bottom of the hill before skidding dizzily into Gibbs Lane and onto the stony path leading to the allotments bordering the railway line.

Lottie was gone! No longer would she snuggle up to the comforting furry bundle lying beside her. No longer would she hear her cat's satisfied purr as she whispered about her day at school or confided her fear and loathing for her stepmother and her sincere hope that the war would end and her father would be home soon.

Her rain-soaked hair flying out behind her, Joanna headed downhill past the allotments with their neat rows of vegetables and tall canes supporting the last plump runner beans of the year.
The path was steep and grew more slippery but she couldn't stop running

Stones slid out from beneath her feet and she was running so quickly only the fence bordering the railway line at the bottom of the slope stopped her from tumbling out onto the track.

A train hurtled past, steam billowing from beneath its wheels and out of its stack, its brakes hissing and clanking as it slowed on the approach to Bedminster Station.

Breathless and totally despondent, Joanna squatted down between the bushes that grew there and buried her head in her hands. Lottie, with her soft black-and-white fur, had been the only way she could bear life with her stepmother.

A sudden rustling of bushes and a sprinkling of water startled her. She looked up to see the cheeky grin and tousled hair of Paul Green.

He slid down beside her, wrapping his hands around his dirty knees. ‘What's up then, Jo?'

Paul was her best friend. He wasn't the tidiest of boys, being from a family of seven children – six boys and one girl. He was the youngest boy, so the clothes he wore, hand-me-downs from his older brothers, had seen better days. His sister was a year younger. It was a tight squeeze in their three-bedroom council house.

Joanna sat with her arms slouched across her knees, her head bent forward. Paul's cheeky grin and freckled face were usually enough to make her smile, but not today.

Paul attempted to cheer her up. ‘Come on. It can't be that bad.'

Joanna rubbed at her eyes. Although she attempted to stifle her sobs, they kept coming. ‘Lottie's gone. A man came and took her.'

Paul's grin wavered then vanished. ‘Is that so?'

Joanna nodded. ‘He took Mrs Goodson's dog too. And Dandy.'

Paul's eyebrows rose in surprise. ‘Good riddance to Clarence, but Dandy?' He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Who would ever have thought it?'

‘The man said that he was taking them to the country to be rehomed.' She turned her tear-filled eyes on Paul. ‘Do you think they would let me visit her?'

Paul swallowed. Joanna wasn't to know it but when she turned her big eyes on him his insides turned to mush. She was the only girl in the street that he really liked. He'd do anything to make her smile again.

‘I knows where they takes them,' he said, his accent as careless as usual. ‘How about I go there and see about gettin' her back? I mean, she's yer cat, not yer stepmother's.'

Joanna managed to stifle a sob. Her eyes were wide with pleading.

‘Could you really do that? Do you really know where she is?'

Paul had only an inkling of where Lottie might be but he was desperate to help. ‘Leave it with me. I'm like a cat meself, you know. Can climb and go anywhere I please without anyone noticing.'

Paul's father was ‘away', as neighbours whispered to each other, and not in the army. Rumour was that he was a cat burglar, so to Joanna it followed as only natural that Paul should be following in his father's footsteps and rescuing a cat.

Despite the sorrow still gripping her heart, Joanna smiled through her tears. Paul had given her hope.

Victoria Park Junior School had been built at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a red-brick building surrounded by a large playground segregated into infants, junior boys and a separate school and playground for junior girls. Boys and girls were segregated once they reached eight years old.

The infants entered through the gate on Raymond Road. The entrance to the girls' junior school was on St John's Lane and the boy's entrance was further along.

Miss Sally Hadley had only been at the school for two years, but to her it was like coming home. She'd grown up around here and attended both the infants and junior schools before winning a scholarship to Colston's Girls' School. Having obtained a degree in English at Bristol University, followed by a teaching course at St Matthias Teacher Training College, she had completed a few student teacher assignments before acquiring the situation at her old school.

In some ways the school had remained the same as it had when Miss Hadley went there, and so had the children attending it. Some were very badly off and lived in the old Victorian terraces close by, some in the bay villas surrounding Victoria Park. The remainder lived in red-brick council houses built in the twenties and thirties on what had been a green hill.

It had been a long hard day in a long hard week, and although she firmly believed in keeping her worries at home separate from those in school, she didn't always succeed.

Worrying about her father was like a toothache, throbbing and untreatable. When would he be his old self again? Why couldn't he see how much she worried about him? She sighed. No matter how much she'd tried to help him, he just would not be helped. He would not adjust to life as it was now.

Her mother had died sixteen months ago. Grace Hadley had been a fine figure of a woman, very typical of the late Victorian and early Edwardian age in which she'd come to womanhood. And yet, her fine physique didn't stop her from collapsing on the street one day when she was out doing her shopping. It was instant, the doctors told Sally and her father, she would have been dead before she had even hit the ground.

She missed her mother a great deal, but had steeled herself to get on with life. Unfortunately, her father was still in deep mourning for his beloved wife. He barely spoke, ate little and sat staring into the distance, an unlit pipe in his mouth.

No matter what Sally did, she could not get him to snap out of his despair and get on with his life. He was retired and had no interests, nothing to fill his days.

Before her mother died he'd loved his garden and a piece of allotment down near the railway line. Seb and Grace Hadley had gardened together, growing the most beautiful flowers, enjoying the exercise and the effort, and working side by side.

He still went down to the shed down there. She'd assumed he would resume his gardening, looking after it as well as he had done so when her mother was still alive. Hoping it would be so, and keen to encourage him, she'd taken him some sandwiches and a Thermos flask. To her profound disappointment she'd seen nothing had been done. Where once brightly coloured blooms had grown there were now only straggly plants, their flowering long over, their leaves brown and tangled with woodbine. Other weeds besides woodbine grew in profusion, thistles and nettles thrusting and spreading between rotting flower stems. The allotment hadn't been touched for a very long time and nature was claiming it back as its own.

Yesterday, she'd gone down there because he hadn't been home for his dinner – brisket, roast potatoes, cabbage, carrots and parsnips followed by rice pudding.

‘Dad, I've got dinner on the table. Are you coming now?'

‘I'll be right there once I've finished this.'

He was sitting on an upturned water butt pretending to read the paper, which he was holding upside down, his mind obviously elsewhere.

Sally tried to blank out the fact that all the other allotments were already devoid of flowers and turned over for the sowing of seedlings. Potatoes, cabbage, beans, carrots and onion were in far more demand than flowers.

She was aware that a few of the other allotment holders were glaring in her father's direction.

‘When you going to get rid of them flowers and grow something useful?' one of them shouted out.

‘And do some weeding,' shouted another. ‘One year's seed is seven years' weed! When you going to do some weeding, eh?'

‘When hell freezes over,' muttered her grim-faced father without looking in the direction of the speaker.

Something else shouted was drowned out by the piercing whistle of a passing train.

Sally sighed. ‘I'll wait until you've finished,' she said.

Her father grunted something inaudible then looked up at her. She noticed his eyes were red-rimmed.

‘Your mother loved these flowers. I can't rip them up until she's ready to let me.'

Every week when her mother was alive he had carefully dug around each of his flowerbeds, where dahlias, moon daisies and chrysanthemums grew in ordered glory. His flowers had won prizes, and despite the urging of government to turn all available land to the growing of vegetables, he'd held out. They were his Grace's choice. She'd helped him plant them and he saw them as the last link with her and with the happy times they'd had together.

A lump in Sally's throat drowned any chance of retorting. She hurried away. If her mother had still been alive she would have insisted that they dug up the ground to plant vegetables. But her father refused to move on, at least for now. All Sally could do was hope and pray that he'd return to his old self before very long, though she had no way of knowing when that would be.

And she had someone else to be worried about now. Joanna Ryan loved reading and always put her hand up to be the next to read out loud. Today she did not and had seemed quite distracted all day.

Sally had harboured misgivings, but every child could have an off day. What happened next confirmed that something was indeed very wrong.

‘Please, miss.' Susan Crawford, a pink-cheeked girl with dark hair, looked at pointedly at Joanna sitting beside her. ‘Jo's crying. The man in the black van came and took her cat.'

The four o'clock bell rang announcing that school was at an end for the day.

Sally dismissed the rest of the class but before Joanna could leave, she walked between the desks and laid her hand on Joanna's shoulder.

‘Stay a moment, Joanna. I want to talk to you.

The sound of slamming desk lids was followed by that of scrabbling feet and excited chatter as the children fled the classroom and headed home.

Joanna had remained sitting at her desk, her head in her hands. Even though her face was half hidden, Sally could see it was wet with tears.

Joanna's friend Susan lingered, shifting from one foot to the other in her leather sandals and baggy socks, settled in wrinkles around her ankles. Sally told her to go outside and wait for her friend there.

Silence reigned in the big square room, the smell of ink and chalk hanging in the air. The classroom was full of light. One wall was occupied by a series of tall windows. Dominating the
rear wall was a map of the world, upon which the countries belonging to the British Empire were shaded in red: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa and many more. The map was surrounded by pictures painted by the children and diagrams of fractions, shapes and the whole sequence of times tables, all the way from two to the twelve times table. A huge radiator occupied the wall nearest the door, and the blackboard the other wall behind Sally's desk.