Elizabeth Elgin - The Willow Pool

‘Go-to-beds, I used to call them. Y’know – how many more go-to-beds before Father Christmas comes.’

‘Then it’s four go-to-beds, and your Davie’ll be here and you’ll be wondering why you worried! Now chuck them pillows over, will you?’

‘Meg – don’t ever leave, will you?’

‘I won’t. And that’s a promise!’ A promise, she thought as she stuffed pillows into cases, she would do her utmost to keep. ‘Had you thought,’ she smiled, ‘that this rain will do the strawberries a whole lot of good – make them swell?’

‘So it will. You’re getting to be quite a country girl, Meg Blundell! Mind, enough is enough. If it rains too much they’ll rot, then Mr Potter will hit the roof. All our work wasted. Now, let’s get these rooms seen to, then we’ll have a chat with Gran. Being in bed watching it rain must be awful, and cold wet weather makes her joints ache more.’

‘Then we’ll try to cheer her up a bit.’ Meg liked Mrs Kenworthy, who was so grateful for even the smallest attention and hardly ever tugged on the bell pull at her bedside. And the old lady had remembered Ma, so it was almost certain she knew what had happened to her and even, Meg brooded, who the feller was. Yet Meg had insisted her mother’s name was Hilda and that her father died at sea, because she’d known instinctively the time had not been right for questions. Nor for answers either, because the Kenworthys might want to forget what had happened under their own roof twenty years ago, and all the upset it must have caused. ‘We’ve neglected her these last few days, what with the haymakin’, an’ all.’

‘Mm. But I enjoyed it, Meg. It was great stealing our own hay, and getting away with it, didn’t you think?’

‘Yes, an’ serve London right for nicking your ’ouse without a by-your-leave. We’ll do it again next year, eh?’

If she were still here, that was. If National Service didn’t catch up with her. If They said that helping to look after two old ladies and working sometimes in the kitchen garden to dig for victory wasn’t enough, and she had to go into the armed forces or get herself back to Liverpool to work in munitions. Big money to be earned there, but she didn’t want big money. A pound a week suited her very nicely and she wanted nothing to change.

‘Hey! You were miles away! Bet you were thinking about Mark!’

‘No, I wasn’t! I was thinkin’ about when I’m twenty and have to register. I don’t want to, you know.’

‘Nor me. When is your birthday, Meg?’

‘August the twenty-ninth.’

‘Goodness! And mine’s on the twenty-eighth, would you believe! Sometimes I wish I knew where I was born, but Mummy always says she was never told, that they got me from the Church of England Adoption Society, and they wouldn’t say. They don’t, you know. Where were you born, Meg?’

‘Lyra Street, Liverpool 3.’ The lie came easily to her tongue. ‘Mrs Shaw – the neighbour I’ve told you about – was there, helping the midwife, I believe.’

Lies, which led to more lies, and all the time wanting to say she had been born here at Candlefold.

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