Katie King - The Evacuee Christmas

Usually this duffing-up happened out of sight of any grown-ups and, ideally, Connie. But the times Barbara spied what was going on all she wanted to do was to run over and take Jessie in her arms to comfort him and promise him it would be all right, and then keep him close to her as she led him back inside their home at number five Jubilee Street. However, she knew that if she even once gave into this impulse, then kind and placid Jessie would never live it down, and he would remain the butt of everyone’s poor behaviour for the rest of his childhood.

Barbara loved Connie, of course, as what mother wouldn’t be proud of such a lively, proud, strong-minded daughter, with her distinctive and lustrous tawny hair, clear blue eyes and strawberry-coloured lips, and her constant stream of chatter? (Connie was well known in the Ross family for being rarely, if ever, caught short of something to say.)

Nevertheless, it was Jessie who seemed connected to the essence of Barbara’s inner being, right to the very centre of her. If Barbara felt tired or anxious, it wouldn’t be long before Jessie was at her side, shyly smiling up to comfort his mother with his warm, endearingly lopsided grin.

Barbara never really worried about Connie, who seemed pretty much to have been born with a slightly defiant jib to her chin, as if she already knew how to look after herself or how to get the best from just about any situation. But right from the start Jessie had been much slower to thrive and to walk, although he’d always been good with his sums and with reading, and he was very quick to pick up card games and puzzles.

If Barbara had to describe the twins, she would say that Connie was smart as a whip, but that Jessie was the real thinker of the family, with a curious mind underneath which still waters almost certainly ran very deep.

Unfortunately in Bermondsey during that dog-end of summer in 1939, the characteristics the other local children rated in one another were all to do with strength and cunning and stamina.

For the boys, being able to run faster than the girls when playing kiss chase was A Very Good Thing.

Jessie had never beaten any of the boys at running, and most of the girls could hare about faster than him too.

It was no surprise therefore, thought Barbara, that Jessie had these days to be more or less pushed out of the front door to go and play with the other children, while Connie would race to be the first of the gang outside and then she’d be amongst the last to return home in the evening.

Although only born five minutes apart, they were chalk and cheese, with Connie by far and away the best of any of the children at kiss chase, whether it be the hunting down of a likely target or the hurtling away from anyone brave enough to risk her wrath. Connie was also brilliant at two-ball, skipping, knock down ginger and hopscotch, and in fact just about any playground game anyone could suggest they play.

Jessie was better than Connie in one area – he excelled at conkers, him and Connie getting theirs from a special tree in Burgess Park that they had sworn each other to secrecy over and sealed with a blood pact, with the glossy brown conkers then being seasoned over a whole winter and spring above the kitchen range. Sadly, quite often Jessie would have to yield to bigger children who would demand with menace that his conkers be simply handed over to them, with or without the benefit of any sham game.

Ted never tried to stop Barbara being especially kind to Jessie within the privacy of their own home, provided the rest of the world had been firmly shut outside. But if – and this didn’t happen very often, as Barbara already knew what would be said – she wanted to talk to her husband about Jessie and his woes, and how difficult it was for him to make proper friends, Ted would reply that he felt differently about their son than she.

‘Barbara, love, it’s doing ’im no favours if yer try to fight ’is battles for ’im. I was little at ’is age, an’ yer jus’ look a’ me now’ – Ted was well over six foot with tightly corded muscles on his arms and torso, and Barbara never tired of running her hands over his well-sculpted body when they were tucked up in their bed at night with the curtains drawn tight and the twins asleep – ‘an’ our Jessie’ll be fine if we jus’ ’elp ’im deal with the bullies. Connie’s got the right idea, and in time ’e’ll learn from ’er too. An’ there’ll be a time when our Jessie’ll come into his own, jus’ yer see if I’m not proved correct, love.’

Barbara really hoped that her husband was right. But she doubted it was going to happen any time soon. And until then she knew that inevitably sweet and open-hearted Jessie would be enduring a pretty torrid time of it.

Still, on this pleasant evening in the first week of September, as a played-out and shamefully grubby Connie and Jessie headed back towards their slightly battered blue front door in Jubilee Street, the only thing a stranger might note about them to suggest they were twins was the way their long socks had bunched in similar concertinas above their ankles, and that they had very similar grey smudges on their knees from where they had been kneeling in the dust of the yard in front of where the local dairy stabled the horses that would pull the milk carts with their daily deliveries to streets around Bermondsey and Peckham.

As the twins walked side by side, their shoulders occasionally bumping and two sets of jacks making clinking sounds as they jumbled against each other in the pockets of Jessie’s grey twill shorts, the children agreed that their tea felt as if it had been a very long time ago. Although the bread and beef dripping yummily sprinkled with salt and pepper that they’d snaffled down before going out to play had been lovely, and despite Barbara having seemed quiet and snappy which was very unlike her, by now they were starving again and so they were hoping that they’d be allowed to have seconds when they got in.

They’d only been playing jacks this evening, but Connie had organised a knock-out tournament, and there’d been seven teams of four so it had turned into quite an epic battle. Connie had been the adjudicator and Jessie the scorekeeper, keeping his tally with a pencil-end scrounged from the dairy foreman who’d also then given Jessie a piece of paper to log the teams as Jessie had thanked him so nicely for the inch-long stub of pencil.

The reason the jacks tournament had turned into a hotly contested knock-out affair was that Connie had managed to cadge a bag of end-of-day broken biscuits from a kindly warehouseman at the Peek Freans biscuit factory over on Clements Road – the warehouseman being a regular at The Jolly Shoreman and therefore on nodding acquaintance with Ted and Big Jessie – as a prize for the winning team. These Connie had saved in their brown paper bag so that Jessie could present them to the winning four, who turned out to be the self-named Thames Tinkers German Bashers.

As the game of jacks had gone on, every time Jessie had peeked over at the paper bag containing the biscuits that his sister had squirrelled close to her side (once, he fancied that he even caught a whiff of the enticing sugary aroma), his mouth had watered even though he knew the warehouseman had only given them to Connie as they were going a bit stale and had missed the day’s run of broken biscuits being delivered to local shops so that thrifty, headscarved housewives would later be able to buy them at a knock-down rate.

Jessie knew that Connie had wanted him to present the biscuits to the winning team as a way of subtly ingratiating himself with the jacks players, without her having to say anything in support of her brother. She was a wonderful sister to have on one’s side, Jessie knew, and he would have felt even more lost and put upon if he didn’t have her in his corner.