Katie King - The Evacuee Summer - Heart-warming historical fiction, perfect for summer reading

She stood head bowed and statue-still at first. But it wasn’t long before Peggy started to sway from side to side, and she had to grab hold of the edge of the desk to steady herself, as wave after wave of fresh emotion swept over her, and then washed back through what felt like every fibre of her very being.

And then with a long clamped-down shriek of what felt like agony Peggy picked up the closest thing to her, which was the leather desk tidy in which Roger kept the pencils that he used to draft his sermons, and she hurled the whole lot with as much force as she could muster against the wall, the pencils cascading to the ground and then bouncing merrily around, with Roger’s carefully sharpened lead points shearing off the pencils as they smashed against the stone flags of the floor.

The crash was a surprisingly loud noise that cut across the calm of Tall Trees and wrecked the peace.

But Peggy couldn’t hear anything now, such was the rushing of blood in her ears. Keening desperately, she continued to rock both left and right.

She picked up the pile of scrap paper on which Roger would write and she rent it this way and that, virtually growling with the effort of ripping it into tiny unusable squares, and then with a final shove of her elbow she cast the telephone and handset off the desk, the loud crash and the strange hawk of the telephone’s ring of surprise at such harsh treatment finally quelling Peggy’s temper.

Exhausted, she sank down onto Roger’s desk chair, with the chaos of his desk settling askew on the floor around her, and bitter sobs shuddering her slim shoulders and setting her curls a-quiver as she leant forward on her folded arms and howled, wishing herself to be any place but where she was.

Roger and Mabel, who had been inspecting the vegetable patches on their way back from church and had only just come through the kitchen door, came running, their faces panicked at the unusual sounds erupting from within the study.

However, when Roger saw the state Peggy was in, he stayed on the other side of the door and stood aside to make way for his wife, as he beckoned Mabel forward in place of himself.

He knew Mabel would be much better at the helm of this situation than he.

As the older woman crouched down to clasp an exhausted Peggy to her breast without saying a word, Peggy gave into ugly, animal noises and a fresh avalanche of tears.

A worry-faced Roger was left to creep into the office as silently as he could, stepping behind the women so that he could replace the receiver on the telephone as he always felt panicky at the thought of a parishioner in distress being unable to reach him, although he left the telephone on the floor, after which, without catching the eye of either woman, he hotfooted it to the kitchen in order to deal with baby Holly.

She had been rudely woken by all the kerfuffle in the study and was keen to let everybody know this, bellowing with all the strength she could muster in her little lungs in tandem with the throaty blubs of her distraught mother just across the passageway.

Chapter Six

Over at the train station Jessie and Angela remained outside with a bored-looking Milburn, while the other children headed onto the platform to wait for Larry.

After Jessie had gently teased Angela that he and Connie thought that maybe Tommy had a bit of a soft spot for her, Angela went very pink, leaving Jessie to guess whether she might reciprocate these feelings.

Angela noticed Jessie’s expression reveal all too clearly that he was pondering what she and Tommy thought about each other, and so as a distraction she quickly reminded Jessie again of lots of the things she had learnt in the library about ponies, which seemed to make much more sense now that they had Milburn standing in front of them

When she had run out of useful titbits to share, she was relieved to see her tactic had worked, as Jessie said that he wondered if Milburn was well behaved when ridden, as he rather fancied a go.

At this Milburn gave Jessie what seemed like such a look of disgust, followed by a shake of her head that jangled the metal bit in her mouth and set her springy mane and forelock bouncing as if to say No-o-o-o at the very thought, and both children couldn’t do anything but laugh.

‘She’s good, isn’t she?’ said Angela, and Milburn nodded.

‘Yes, she seems to be,’ Jessie agreed, although the moment was immediately somewhat spoilt as Milburn swiftly dipped her nose into the wicker basket of a passing woman and nimbly lifted out a greaseproof-paper-wrapped sandwich, much to the ire of the woman and the embarrassment of the children.

Jessie wrestled the package from Milburn’s mouth, and then he offered it back to its owner, who took one look at the slobbered paper and the indent of the pony’s teeth and said crossly, ‘Those were fer my Bert, but ’e won’t want them now, will ’e? An wot’ll he ’ave fer his dinner now, an’ ’e’s on blackout checkin’ after? T’ pony had better have ’em, I s’ppose, an’ mind you keep more control of ’im in future. There’s a war on, you know.’

The affronted woman stalked away, and Jessie and Angela exchanged glances and then as one they looked accusingly at Milburn, who was concentrating very hard on the package in Jessie’s hand.

‘I suppose I ought to have paid more attention to Milburn,’ admitted Jessie, sounding a little guilty.

‘Poor Burt,’ said Angela, and the mere mention of him made the children hoot.

Jessie unwrapped the sandwiches, which had reconstituted egg as the filling. He and Angela gave the top one to Milburn, who snaffled it greedily, but they decided the bottom one wasn’t too squished for themselves to eat and so they shared it quickly, keen to finish before the others came back.

They talked then of the posters they could see up, seeing the irony of a poster urging a visit to the Yorkshire dales smack bang alongside a poster of a British Tommy questioning ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ Angela angled her chair slightly differently so that she could see the other side of the station’s entrance, where there was another poster urging people to bring their own cups and glasses to railway refreshment rooms as they were often running short, but the children couldn’t find much to interest them or to joke about in this last poster.

After what seemed hours, there was the sound of an ancient puffing billy chugging slowly into the station, at which Milburn held her head very high, her small ears so pointed towards where she could hear the unfamiliar sound coming from, that their darker tips looked to be almost touching.

As the sound of the final burst of steam from the train’s engine gave way to the noise of doors opening and the passengers alighting, Angela started to say, ‘It won’t be long before Lar—’ when Connie’s unmistakeable voice rang out in a loud and high-pitched yelp that sounded as heartfelt as it was hard to interpret.

It was such an unexpected outburst that Jessie immediately felt queasy as these days, like so many other people, he tended to overreact to any unexpected shock, knowing that it could herald bad news, and he swung towards Angela, whereupon the children stared at each other with worried faces.

Then Jessie sprang forward as he dropped the lead rope to Milburn’s halter so that it dangled in the road. Uncaring and with his thoughts of paying more attention to the pony completely forgotten, he fairly pelted towards the station platform to run to his twin’s aid.

Angela apprehensively watched him go, and then as he raced inside and turned towards the platforms she saw him halt suddenly, his mouth open in obvious shock. Her heart lurched more stomach-churningly than before, and a rising panicky feeling made her tingly and jittery.