A Child in Burracombe

Book 12: Burracombe Village

by Lilian Harry

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

Devon, 1943. In the village of Burracombe, "Dig for Victory" is more than just a wartime slogan. While the young men are away, everyone at home knows the war effort needs them too. When the Barton is requisitioned as a children's home, all of Burracombe rallies round to welcome their newest arrivals, particularly little Maddy Simmons. Still reeling from losing her mother and brother in the Plymouth blitz, and her father being killed at sea, Maddy has been sent to a different children's home to her beloved sister. As Maddy explores the village and makes new friends, she begins to feel settled. Could this be somewhere she could finally call home?

Release date: August 24, 2017

Publisher: Soundings

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter One

April Grove, Portsmouth, February 1943

‘But that’s awful!’ Jess Budd exclaimed in dismay. ‘Two little sisters, taken away from where they were settled and sent to separate children’s homes! Why ever have the billeting people done that? I thought they must have decided to leave them with you after all.’

‘I hoped so too. It’s several months now since their father’s ship was lost, and as I’d heard nothing else …’ The telephone line crackled and a train steamed by, drowning Mr Beckett’s words. Jess tutted in exasperation, but she knew she was lucky to be able to ring up the billet in the village of Bridge End, near Southampton, where her son Keith had been evacuated, to speak to him once a week. Most parents back in Portsmouth had to rely on hastily scribbled letters or postcards to know how their children were faring out in the country.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Beckett, I didn’t hear that,’ she said when the train had passed. ‘You’d think the Post Office would have more sense than to put a telephone kiosk right beside the railway in the middle of Portsmouth! It’s bad enough that we’re on a main road … What were you saying about Stella and Muriel? Have they actually gone?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ he said, his voice sounding thin and wispy over the crackling line. ‘A woman came from the billeting office and told me to have everything ready for them, and she took them away yesterday. I tried my very best to persuade her to leave them with me but it was useless. She said it was “unsuitable”.’

‘Unsuitable?’ Jess repeated. ‘But how could it be? It was suitable enough before their father, poor Mr Simmons, was drowned. And they’d been with you for eighteen months before that.’

‘She said the situation is different now they’re orphans. Until then, their father had the last word in what happened to them, but now … they come under a different authority, you see.’ He sounded dejected, and Jess felt suddenly sorry for him. Poor old man, she thought, living alone in that great rambling vicarage all these years with no one but his housekeeper for company … Having evacuees to stay had given him a new lease of life, you could see that. First her own boys, Tim and Keith, who had grumbled loudly at having to go and live with a vicar (‘We’ll have to go to church every Sunday. Probably twice’), and then poor Kathy Simmons’s two little girls, after Kathy and their baby brother had been killed in a bombing raid.

A lot of elderly men would have been completely at a loss at having a ready-made family of youngsters foisted upon them. But Mr Beckett, a thin, spidery man who could be seen every day pedalling his old bicycle around the village, had received them with joy, becoming a kind of honorary boy and organising games of cricket in the garden in summer or building snowmen in winter. Church had come into it too, of course it had – you couldn’t expect it not to, Jess had told her sons, and it wasn’t as if they didn’t go regularly when they were at home – but they hadn’t minded once they realised it didn’t also mean prayers all day and every day at home. Apart from grace at meals, and ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’ when they went to bed, they would hardly have known he was a vicar.

‘But why couldn’t the girls stay with you?’ she asked. ‘Even if it’s a different authority, surely anyone could see they had a good home with you and Mrs Mudge. It was obvious they were happy – well, as happy as they could be in such terrible circumstances. Taking them away, sending them to a strange place with more strange people – and separating them, too – why, it’s cruel.’

‘I feel that myself,’ he said miserably. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t say so, but … Apparently it will help them get over their loss more easily. They’ll forget, you see. Especially little Muriel – she’s barely nine.’ He didn’t sound as if he believed a word of it, and Jess’s heart ached for him as well as for the little girls.

‘And there’s really nothing you can do?’ she asked. ‘I’d offer to have them back here, but now that Tim’s here again after all that muddle with the school, and with Rose back because she never really settled away from home, and baby Maureen who’s got to be with me, and us only having two bedrooms …’

‘They wouldn’t allow it anyway. The authorities, I mean. If they won’t let them stay at Bridge End, where they knew so many people and had so many friends, they’re not likely to let them go back to Portsmouth … Little Sammy Hodges, who thought the world of Muriel, is quite distraught, and I’ve had a stream of people coming to the door offering to have them, but it’s useless. They’ve gone, and that’s all there is to it.’

Jess felt his hopelessness reach out to her across the miles and tears came to her eyes. She brushed them away and said, ‘Well, we can at least write to them. We can keep in touch, and perhaps when things have settled down a bit we can—’

‘I’m afraid we can’t even do that,’ the vicar said desolately. ‘The billeting officer said it was best to sever all ties. She refused to give me an address or any hint as to where they might be going – she said it was none of my business’ – his voice rose to a squeak – ‘and when I asked if letters might be forwarded, she said most definitely not. A clean break, she said, and then she shut her mouth as if it were a trap and marched the two poor little souls away.’ He stopped and sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have spoken like that. I’m rather upset.’

‘I should think you are!’ Jess said roundly. ‘So am I, and so will everyone else be that knew them. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And like I’ve already said, it’s cruel.’

‘Yes,’ he said in a quiet, despairing tone. ‘And the worst of it is, there’s nothing we can do about it. Nothing at all.’

There was a short silence. Then Mr Beckett spoke again. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Budd. You really rang up to speak to Keith. He’s here, waiting for you. And how is Tim getting along? Such a fine little lad – they both are. Sons to be proud of, both of them.’

Jess murmured something, and he said goodbye and handed the receiver to her younger son, who was now, since Tim had come home a few months earlier, the only child left in the vicarage. He must be feeling rather lonely, she thought as she heard his voice saying hello. But not as lonely as those two poor little girls, orphaned and then separated and sent to live with strangers, and allowed no contact at all with those who had loved and looked after them.

What were the authorities, whoever they were, thinking of, to do this to helpless children who had lost so much? And what were the little girls themselves thinking now? Did they believe they had been abandoned?

Nothing we can do about it? she muttered to herself as she finished talking to her son and left the kiosk for the next person in the queue. Surely there’s something. There must be something we can do …



‘I don’t know as there is,’ Jess’s husband, Frank, said when she’d finished telling him the story. ‘We knew it was on the cards, after all. The vicar told us they might be took away when we went out to talk to him about our Tim that time, back before Christmas. You know what the authorities are – what they say goes, especially in wartime. Look how they can take over big houses, never mind who lives there, and just turn the owners out for the duration. And that’s people with money, people with a position. What chance have people like us got?’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘It’s not even as if the girls are any relation to us. We don’t have any right to a say in what happens to them.’

‘We’ve got a right to say if we think it’s wrong, though,’ Jess argued. ‘Those two poor little mites lived here with us before they went out to Bridge End. We know them better than anyone. And I know they’ll hate being separated. Look how Stella looked after her sister – a little mother, she was, just like our Rose here with Maureen.’

Rose made a face. She had been twelve when her own little sister had been born, and at first she had indeed been a little mother, doing everything for her bar change nappies, which she flatly refused to do. But as Maureen grew into an inquisitive toddler, with her nose and fingers into everything, Rose hadn’t been so enthusiastic, and she certainly wasn’t keen on having to share the front room downstairs with her.

‘We’re not having them back here,’ she said quickly. ‘There’s not room. Me and Maureen are having to sleep on the bed settee as it is, so that Tim can have the bedroom. Just because he’s a boy,’ she added sulkily.

‘And very pleased I am to have him here,’ Jess said sharply. ‘You know you missed him when he was out at Bridge End. Now, if only we could have Keith back as well …’

‘Keith’s all right where he is,’ Frank said. ‘And there’s no question of us having the Simmons girls here, Rose. If the authorities won’t even tell Mr Beckett where they’ve been taken, they’re not likely to tell us. And they certainly won’t let the kiddies come back to Pompey. There’s still a war on, even if there don’t seem to be so much bombing at the moment.’

There was a brief silence. Jess picked up the sailor’s square-rig collar she had been sewing as part of her war work. Everyone had to do something; even Rose was knitting socks with thick khaki wool for soldiers. Frank’s job, apart from working on ship repairs in Portsmouth Dockyard, was fire watching when there was an air raid. While the rest of the family was down in the Anderson shelter he had dug at the bottom of the garden, he stood in the darkness, his fire extinguisher close at hand, scanning the sky for incendiary bombs falling from the planes high overhead, or watching out for parachutes.

‘What about seeing if Dan Hodges can find anything out?’ she asked. ‘His Sammy’s out at Bridge End, and Dan’s started to go out to see him now the weather’s better, so Tommy Vickers told me. Sammy used to knock about a bit with Keith and our Tim so he’d have known the girls as well. The vicar said he and Muriel were quite thick. In fact, now I come to think of it, they got into some sort of scrape with Sammy’s foster mother’s parrot – took it out on a picnic or something.’

‘Dan told me about that,’ Frank said. ‘Mrs Purslow was in a right old stew about it, and Dan walked in right in the middle of the row and found young Sam crying into a bowl of bread and milk. He near as a toucher brought the boy home straight away.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t have been much better off back here,’ Jess said wryly. ‘You know what a state Dan Hodges has been living in since poor Nora died. And I’m sure Ruth Purslow wasn’t ill-treating Sammy. I knew her when I was at Bridge End, at the beginning of the war. She’s a nice little soul, and a nurse too. I expect she was just cross over the parrot. Everyone gets cross with boys now and then.’ She went on sewing for a few minutes, then asked, ‘So you don’t think there’s anything at all we can do to help them?’

Frank heard the despondency in her voice and looked at her, feeling his heart soften.

‘I’m sorry, love, I don’t think there is. I know they’ve had a bad time, but they’ll be looked after. And even if they’re separated now, they won’t forget. Kiddies don’t forget that easy. They’ll find each other one day, when they’re grown up, you’ll see.’

Jess laid down her sewing and stared at it. The tears burned her eyes and one dripped on to the navy serge.

‘I don’t think it’ll be that easy, Frank,’ she said sadly. ‘It’ll be years before they’re old enough to do that, and who knows what might have happened in the meantime? And even if they do, they’ll have missed all those years together. They’ll never be little girls again, growing up as sisters should.’













Chapter Two

Bridge End

The two little girls had been even more bewildered than the adults when they were first told, back in November, that they would be leaving the vicarage, where they had been looked after for the past few months. They stood in the drawing room in front of the wood fire and Mr Beckett, the old vicar, drew them both close to his bony knees and held their hands.

‘I’ve got some news for you, my dears, and I want you both to be very brave about it.’

‘It’s bad news, then,’ Stella said instantly, and he sighed in self-reproach. He had tried so hard to find the right words, discarding phrases like I’m afraid or bad so as not to upset them, and he’d failed with the first sentence. Who would ask children to be brave about good news?

‘You may not like it to begin with,’ he said carefully, ‘but I’m sure as time goes on you’ll settle down happily and see that it’s all for the best. Mrs Mudge and I will miss you very much, of course, but—’

‘We’re being sent away!’ Stella butted in, and he could have kicked himself. He was going about this in entirely the wrong way. He should have left it to his housekeeper, who would have known how to talk to the two orphaned children. Even Keith Budd or Sammy Hodges would have made a better job of it than he.

‘You’re sending us away,’ Stella repeated, and stared at him accusingly. ‘I suppose it’s because we’re girls and you like boys best.’

‘No!’ The denial burst from him and he caught himself up. It would do no good to let himself get upset – any more than he already was, anyway. He forced himself to speak more calmly. ‘No, indeed it isn’t, Stella. You know how welcome you are here. I’d like nothing better than for you to stay for as long as the war lasts. For as long as you want to stay. But it isn’t up to me to say.’

‘Who is it up to, then?’ Stella demanded, looking as if she meant to go straight off and have a word with whoever had made this decision. And she would too, he thought, gazing at the fierce little face. She’d probably even get her way. But who was going to listen to an eleven-year-old girl, even if she was the one most affected?

‘It’s up to the authorities,’ he said, thinking what a vague term that was. ‘The ones who decide where children are to be billeted. You’ve seen Mrs Tupper. Well, when—’

‘She’s a horrible lady,’ Stella said decisively. ‘Nobody likes her. Keith says she looks like that old settee in the doctor’s waiting room.’

‘Yes, she does rather,’ the vicar agreed, thinking of the broad-beamed woman in her brown tweed suit, carrying her folder of documents. ‘But that isn’t the point. The thing is, she billeted you here to begin with when everything was all right, but now things have changed.’

‘You mean Daddy’s died. I don’t see what difference that makes. It was all right for us to be here when Mummy and Thomas were killed, so why not now?’

I’d like the answer to that question myself, Mr Beckett thought, but he knew what the difference was, although he had hoped he might not have to explain it.

‘It’s because your daddy agreed that you could come here. But now he – he can’t agree any more, so the authorities have to decide. And they think you would be better in a children’s home.’

‘A children’s home?’ Stella echoed. ‘You mean an orphanage?’

He nodded unhappily. ‘They’re perfectly nice places, Stella. They’re just like a school that you live in all the time instead of going home each night. They—’

‘Like in Enid Blyton?’ Muriel piped up. It was the first time she had spoken; she had just stood there, gripping his hand with one of hers, the other holding her doll close to her chest. ‘I read a book about girls at a boarding school. They had midnight feasts and—’

‘No,’ Stella cut in. ‘It won’t be like that. That’s where rich children go. It’ll be more like the workhouse in Oliver Twist. There won’t even be feasts during the day.’

Muriel stared at her and looked as if she were about to cry. Mr Beckett intervened hastily.

‘Children’s homes aren’t quite like either of those places; they’re certainly not like the workhouse in Oliver Twist.’ He thought of the workhouse in Southampton that he had visited occasionally and wondered if there was really that much difference. But it wouldn’t do to let the girls know he had doubts. ‘They’re places for children to go to who have no other homes or people to look after them.’

‘But we’ve got you,’ Muriel said. ‘You look after us. Well, Mrs Mudge looks after us, but you play with us. So we don’t need to be sent away and you can tell Mrs Tupper next time she comes, and everything will be all right.’ She gave him a smile of such radiant confidence that he felt his heart come close to breaking.

‘I’m sorry, Muriel, my dear,’ he said gently. ‘It really isn’t as easy as that. It’s as if I’ve only been allowed to borrow you, you see, and now I have to give you back—’

‘Like a library book,’ Stella commented.

‘Well, not quite like a library book, perhaps, but—’

‘Brian Collins had a library book,’ Muriel said. ‘It was about boxers and he didn’t want to take it back so he told them he’d lost it. But they said he’d have to pay two shillings for it so he took it back and said he’d found it again. They still made him pay a penny for keeping it out too long, though,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Would they let you keep us if you said you’d lost us and then found us again? I know we’d cost more than a penny, but I’ve got one and fourpence I was saving up for Sammy’s birthday. I don’t think he’d mind if I gave you that. And there’s our sugar money too, you could keep that, and—’

‘Oh Muriel!’ her sister exclaimed. ‘Be quiet! It’s nothing like that at all.’ She looked at the vicar again. ‘But I still don’t understand why we’ve got to go away when we’re all right here.’

Mr Beckett sighed again. ‘It’s because now that you don’t have parents, you come under a different authority. Mrs Tupper looks after children who are evacuated from their own homes and have parents who say what is to happen to them. But now that you – well, as you are on your own now’ – oh dear, this was so difficult – ‘and don’t even have any other relatives to look after you, a different authority has to take you over. And they’ve decided that you must go to a children’s home.’

‘I still don’t see why we can’t stay here,’ Stella objected. ‘Can’t this new authority say we could do that?’

‘I’ve asked them,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid they just say no. It isn’t suitable, you see, for two little girls to stay in a house with just an old man to look after them.’

‘Why isn’t it?’ Before he could think of an answer to that one, she went on, ‘Daddy didn’t mind, so why should they? Anyway, we haven’t just got an old man, we’ve got Mrs Mudge as well, and she’s the one who does all the washing and cooking.’

‘But Mrs Mudge is my housekeeper, you see – an employee. She might leave. They don’t really count her in law.’

Stella stared at him, and for a moment he thought she was going to refer to Oliver Twist again and say that in that case, the law was an ass. He felt inclined to agree, although he knew that there were perfectly valid reasons why two small girls could not be left with an old man. Nevertheless, it was heartbreaking to see his little family broken up like this, and he had not yet told them the worst.

‘So this place we’re being sent to,’ Stella said ungraciously. ‘This orphanage. Where is it? Will we still be able to come and see you?’

‘We could come to tea,’ Muriel said. ‘Sunday tea, because there are cakes then. Or on Wednesdays, when Mrs Mudge does sausages.’

Mr Beckett gazed at them and shook his head. This was, he thought, the worst task he had ever had to undertake.

‘I don’t think you will be able to come to see us, I’m afraid. You see, I don’t know where you will be taken, and Mrs Tupper said they won’t tell me. They won’t tell anyone.’

There was a stunned silence. Then Stella echoed incredulously, ‘Won’t tell anyone? Not anyone at all? Not even you and Mrs Mudge?’

‘Not Keith or Sammy?’ Muriel asked, her voice rising as she named her two heroes. ‘Not even our teacher?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not.’

‘But then how will you ever be able to find us? How will you be able to write to us? How will Sammy be able to tell me about Silver?’ The reality seemed to have hit Muriel at last. She turned frantically to her sister. ‘And Auntie Jess, in Portsmouth – how will she know where we are? We went there for Christmas. She said we could go again.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ the vicar said. ‘I’m afraid nobody will know.’

‘We’ll write to you,’ Muriel said with decision. ‘We know your address. We’ll write to everybody and tell them. We won’t be taken away!’

Stella pulled her hand away from the vicar’s knee. She turned to her sister and, taking the younger girl by the shoulders, looked at the frantic little face and said in tones of angry desperation, ‘It’s no good, Muriel. Don’t you understand? We’re being taken away so nobody knows where we are, and we won’t be allowed to go out on our own any more, we won’t be able to write to people or even send them Christmas cards. It’s going to be like being in a prison. We’re orphans now, and nobody can do anything to help us.’



The news struck at everyone in Bridge End just as it had those in April Grove.

Sammy Hodges, who had lived in April Grove before coming to Bridge End, was more upset than Ruth Purslow had ever seen him. He sat beside Silver’s stand, his face creased with misery, pouring out his troubles to the parrot as he often did, but it seemed that this time nothing even Silver could say would comfort him.

‘They’re sending her away,’ he said, bewildered by the unfairness of it. ‘And Stella, as well. Just because their father died. It wasn’t their fault, Silver. It wasn’t their fault he had to go to sea in his ship and got torpedoed by the Germans. Why should they be sent away because of that?’

‘Dip, dip, dip, my little ship,’ said Silver, who seemed to have an uncanny knack of finding the appropriate words for any occasion. ‘Sails across the water, like a cup and saucer. Time for tea. I’m a little teapot, short and stout …’

‘And Stella was supposed to be going up to the Big School after the summer,’ Sammy went on, ignoring the parrot’s comments for probably the first time ever. ‘Do you think they’ll know that, where she’s going?’ He turned as Ruth came in, carrying two plates of beans on toast. ‘Auntie Ruth, do you think they’ll know that Stella’s supposed to go up to the Big School after the summer? Suppose she gets left behind, like Tim Budd?’

‘Well, that was a mistake about his age.’ She set the plates on the table. ‘I don’t think it’s likely to happen to Stella. Wherever the girls go, they’ll get a proper education.’ She looked at the woebegone little face. ‘I know it’s a shame and we’re all upset, but there’s really nothing we can do about it. And you’ll still have Keith and the other children to play with.’

‘But not Muriel,’ he said sadly, laying his head against the parrot’s grey feathers. ‘Muriel was my special friend.’

Ruth sighed. She knew this was true, and she understood how precious a ‘special’ friend had been to Sammy, who had seemed so friendless when he had first arrived here. This war was very hard on children, she thought. Torn away from their homes, losing their friends and all too often their families as well. Did the people who started these things ever think about that? Did they have any idea at all what they are doing to a whole generation – a generation that was going to inherit the consequences of the havoc they were wreaking now?

‘Come and eat your supper, Sammy,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s beans on toast – your favourite.’

He gave the parrot’s head a last rub and got up to come to the table. But she could see that even beans on toast wasn’t going to compensate for the loss of his special friend, and her heart grieved both for Sammy and for the two homeless girls who soon would not even have each other.













Chapter Three

The vicar had not had the heart to tell the girls that they were to be separated as well as being taken away from Bridge End.

‘You’ll have to break the news soon,’ Mrs Mudge told him, busily knitting khaki socks as they sat beside the open range in the kitchen. ‘Didn’t that Mrs Tupper say they’d be moved in the next few days?’

He nodded. ‘It could be almost any day now. I know I have to tell them, but it seemed cruel when they were so upset already.’

‘They need to spend time together before they’re taken. They’ve got to be able to say a proper goodbye.’

‘Do you really think so? Such young children …’

‘They’ve lost enough people already that they couldn’t say goodbye to. Their mother and baby brother, killed in their own kitchen, their father lost at sea … They’ve got to have time with each other, even if they don’t properly understand it.’ She concentrated for a moment on turning a heel. ‘They can’t just be torn apart without knowing what’s happening. It’s cruel.’

‘I know,’ he said sadly. ‘You’re right.’ He sat gazing despondently into the flames for a few minutes, then said, almost to himself, ‘I was so pleased. . .