Evie (10 page)

In the desk drawer in his bedroom Edward John had two ten-shilling notes tucked between the pages of his post office savings book. There was a half-crown and a sixpence in his blazer pocket. Before he left for school that evening his mother would give him the ten shillings that was his pocket money for the coming week.

With the notes and the half-crown in his trouser pocket, and a bar of Sunlight soap and a bath towel rolled up and stuffed into a paper bag, he left the higher farm, made his way on foot, down, through the fields, to Lower Post Stone, where he knocked on the door of Hester and Dave’s cottage.

Having first sworn them to secrecy, he told them of his
discovery of Evie and Giorgio and the dilemma that faced them. They stared at him as he laid his money, the bath towel and the bar of soap on their kitchen table and told them that Evie and Giorgio probably had enough food to get them through the next couple of days.

‘If you could get supplies up to them by Wednesday, I’ll go up on Saturday with some more. That’s all the money I’ve got; if you spend any more than that I’ll pay you back, I promise!’

‘No need for that, Edward John. Hes and I be glad to help out, bain’t we, love?’ Hester nodded.

‘What’s Evie doing for clean clothes?’ she wanted to know. ‘I’ll put together some things and Dave can take ’em up to ’er, can’t you, Dave?’

Dave pushed Edward John’s money back across the table towards him.

‘Us doesn’t need your pocket money, lad,’ he said but Edward John shook his head.

‘Buy food with it,’ he said. ‘Or whatever else you think they might need. But be careful not to let anyone know what you’re doing. We shan’t be able to keep it up for long but once the police catch Norman they’ll be safe.’

At midday, as Rose, Hester, Dave and Thurza settled down to eat stewed oxtail under Hester’s deliciously light piecrust, the conversation turned, as conversation tended to turn at that time, to the subject of Evie and Giorgio’s disappearance.

Rose Crocker’s reputation as the best-informed woman in the valley was based, largely, on her ability to recall everything of any significance that had ever happened there since her
earliest years, when she had sat, in a hand-me-down pram, in the village street, outside her parents cottage, watching. She watched at school. Absorbing the behaviour of the teacher, and the friendships, or not, between the other pupils. Then, as the years passed, she watched the courtships and the demeanour of the young men from whom she carefully chose William Arnold Crocker who, for as long as he lived, which, sadly, was not very long, proved to be an exemplary husband to her and father to her only child, Dave.

During the two years she had worked at the hostel, Rose had observed the land girls, knew who was ‘trouble’ and who was not, saw romance blossom between Christopher Bayliss and Georgina Webster and Annie and her Hector and between Marion and Sergeant Marvin Kinski – which had resulted in Marion becoming the farm’s one and only GI bride. She saw the relationship between Mrs Todd – the diffident warden, whose Christian name she had soon been invited to use – and Roger Bayliss, the austere widower who was their boss, slowly develop, through mutual respect, into attraction, affection and finally the strong feelings that had resulted in their recent marriage.

The war had seen Rose herself emerge from overprotective widow, to competent assistant to the hostel warden, into successful proprietor of her own small bakery and tea shop.

Hester and Dave’s cottage had, since the closing of the hostel, been the only inhabited building at the lower farm. Its distance from Ledburton village where Rose now lived above her tea shop, had become a problem for the Crocker family, it being too far for Hester to wheel Thurza in her pushchair
and too time-consuming and tiring for Rose to walk to and fro on a regular basis, often in wind and rain. Some weeks ago she’d heard of a car, on the market for twenty pounds, and after some tense negotiations, had bought it.

‘It’s been in the valley for years,’ she told her son. ‘You most probably seen it heaps of times. Big old brownish thing? First off Tom French had ’un, and t’weren’t new even then. When ’e got ’is next car he handed the old one down to ’is boys. Then, when the war come and they was called up, it got stood on blocks in ’is cart shed. Four years it must of bin, and it rusted terrible. Then, when the boys was demobbed, they got it going and drove ’un ’til they went off to college. Tom’s men’s bin usin’ ’un round the farm since, but he’s just got hold of some sort of ex-army truck thing and ’e don’t want the car no more. You’ll need to give the inside a good clean out afore you puts Hester and the baby in it, Dave, ’cos its bin used for all sorts lately. I’ve given Tom ’is money, so you can pick ’un up any time.’ It wasn’t the first time his mother’s unexpected decisions had left Dave gaping.

‘But … Does it go?’ was his first question.

‘Course it goes! What do you take me for!’

‘But … I bain’t got a licence, Ma!’

‘What d’you want a licence for, round ’ere!’

Within days Dave Crocker had been in possession of his first car. His familiarity with the internal combustion engine had developed from a long and close association with the first of the farm tractors. During his war years in the catering corps he had driven trucks and lorries and been licensed by the army to do so. The obtaining of a civilian driving licence
was only a formality. Soon the car was proving its worth, transporting his family between the village and the lower farm without them becoming drenched in the autumn rains.

Apart from her watchfulness and her familiarity with almost everyone and everything that happened in the valley, Rose’s perceptions had, historically, become alerted by meticulous observation which, backed by immediate scrutiny, almost always resulted in an uncanny ability to identify an irregularity. Even the smallest clues had the effect of focusing her attention and sharpening her powers of observation and deduction. And so it was that as she enjoyed her oxtail stew that Sunday and complimented her daughter-in-law on the excellence of her pastry, she picked up unexpected traces of tension in both her and Dave when the subject of Evie and Giorgio’s disappearance was raised.

‘No fresh news of the runaways, then?’ she asked innocently and knew at once, when both Hester and Dave chorused ‘No! Nothing new! No …’ that they were lying. For a while the only sound was the baby, happily striking her dinner plate with her spoon.

‘I notice you’ve made another pie, Hester, dear,’ Rose said, conversationally. She was referring to the smaller version of the large pie the four of them were eating, which Hester had taken from her oven and set at the back of her range. ‘Who be that ’un for, then?’ As the colour flooded into Hester’s cheeks, Dave, with his mouth full, leapt into the breach.

‘’Tis for us, Mother. Hes of ’en cooks two meals in the same oven and then heats one up, later in the week.’

‘And that little apple pie on the side there? Be that for
“later in the week” too? Mmm?’ Rose looked sharply from her son’s face to his wife’s and back again. ‘You know some’at, you two! You can’t fool me! It’s Giorgio and Evie, bain’t it! You knows where they be to! You should be ashamed, David William Crocker! Lying to the woman as brought you into this world and taught you to be a good and upstanding citizen!’

‘We’re not lying, Mum, honest!’

‘Honest? Honest? Don’t you “honest” me, boy!’ Rose looked and sounded like an angry hen. If she had feathers they would have been ruffled. She squawked, blushed and blustered and almost choked on a piece of piecrust.

If there was one thing that Rose Crocker hated more than another it was not being the first to know of a really good, significant and preferably slightly scandalous, piece of news.

‘We’re sworn to secrecy, Ma!’ Dave said, almost pleading for her understanding, if not her forgiveness.

‘We promised Edward John!’ Hester announced and then covered her mouth with her hand.

‘Edward John?’ Rose exclaimed. ‘Edward John? What’s he got to do with it?’

So they told her. She listened attentively, absorbing all the facts and then allowing herself to be sworn to secrecy too, because if there was one thing Rose enjoyed almost as much as being first with the news, it was a good, solid secret.

‘I ’asn’t touched me umbrella nor me galoshes for weeks!’ Rose would inform anyone who cared to listen, since the family’s acquisition of motor transport. These days, when it had been Hester’s turn to cook the family Sunday dinner,
and the dishes were washed and dried, a pot of tea brewed and a slice of fruit cake consumed, Dave would bring his car as close to his door as he could and Rose, replete with Hester’s good food plus the latest news and well satisfied on every score, would pick her way round the puddles and arrange herself in its passenger seat.

‘Bye-bye, Hester dear! Bye-bye, Thurzie.’

Time passed. Between them, Edward John and Dave Crocker managed to augment the rabbits Giorgio was snaring and the eggs he was stealing, with a modest supply of available foodstuffs. Although meat, bacon, tea, sugar, butter and cheese were impossible, because they could only be purchased on the production of a ration book, the odd loaf of bread, found its way up onto The Tops together with plenty of potatoes, eggs, carrots, swedes and windfalls from the apple orchard. Rose donated pasties. Hester made extra apple pies and baked more bread than her small family needed, she raided the airing cupboard in the hostel which still contained the few towels and blankets that had been overlooked when the place was cleared. Dave invented a reason to take the small farm cart up to The Tops and delivered a significant load of appropriate supplies to Evie and Giorgio, whose first question was always the same one. ‘Have they caught Norman yet?’

‘Not yet. But they will,’ Edward John or Dave would assure them. But they all knew that with the days getting shorter and the nights colder, the situation could not continue indefinitely.

Georgina’s letters, both to the Bayliss family and her own parents, had become full of excited approval of Christopher’s posting.

‘Dearest Alice, Father-in-Law and Edward John,’ she would begin, the next pages full of detailed and enthusiastic descriptions of the small cottage they were to live in for the next twelve months.

A thought that lodged in Edward John’s mind.

The daily struggle to keep themselves fed, reasonably clean and warm enough to prevent their teeth from chattering was
beginning to tell on the runaways. They had to range further and further afield for firewood. When it failed to rain for a week, the cattle trough contained more slime than drinking water.

‘What I’d give for a hot bath!’ Evie sighed. ‘’nd to think I used to moan ’cos I had to share one with the other girls at the hostel! Goodness, how we used to fight over that bathroom! Fisticuffs it almost came to, many a time! Mrs Todd used to shout up to us from the kitchen to behave ourselves! Oh, Giorgio … Will we ever get away from ’ere? Will they ever catch Norman?’ Giorgio would wrap another frayed blanket around her, hold her in his arms and rock her until she fell into a light sleep.

Alice, watching her son, was convinced that whatever it was that had been causing his preoccupation remained unresolved. He had asked for extra pocket money and given her a vague and unconvincing reason for needing it.

‘Oh … It’s just this project thing we’re doing at school. I need more glue and stuff from the model shop, that’s all. So can I have a fiver?’

‘I might be stupid, Edward John!’ Eileen told him in a hoarse whisper, catching him in the linney when, for a second weekend, he had taken food from her pantry. ‘But I knows as you’ve been takin’ food and I also knows you don’t go short here, nor at your school so it’s not hard to guess who it’s for. It’s Evie and her Eyetie, bain’t it? You know’s where they’m to, don’t you? Be they in the woodman’s cottage?’

‘No! No they’re not!’ He was relieved she had not guessed correctly.

‘Where, then?’ she persisted.

‘I can’t tell you!’ Edward John whispered, desperately. ‘I swore I wouldn’t! If I do they’ll disappear again! And they’ve nowhere to go, except up onto the moor! And they’d die up there! Oh please, Eileen! It’s only ’til the police catch Norman! They’ll be safe then! Please don’t tell anyone!’ She looked at him for a long moment.

‘Well … Just for now, I won’t,’ she said at last. ‘But you need to tell your ma and Mr Bayliss, Edward John. They’d know what to do. They’d take charge. Somebody’s gotta do some’at or the lord only knows what’ll become of ’em. I’ll hold my tongue for one more week. Then, either you tell your folks or I shall. It’s up to you. D’you understand me?’

‘Yes, Eileen,’ he said.

It was mid afternoon on the second Sunday since Edward John’s discovery at the byre. He was in the stable, curry-combing Tosca’s glossy hindquarters. He had ridden up to The Tops earlier in the day with a supply of groceries he’d bought in Exeter using the five pounds his mother had given him. She joined him in the stable and stood, leaning on the framing of the stall, watching him. She held an apple on her open palm. Tosca swung round, her velvet lips enveloping the apple as she crunched it.