Tuppence To Spend

by Lilian Harry

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

A vivid wartime saga of colour and authenticity capturing both the harshness and the warmth of life during the dark days of the Second World War. Dan Hodges is devastated when his wife Nora dies during the early days of the war. Working long hours in a Portsmouth shipyard, how is he to look after his two sons, Gordon and Sammy? Then Gordon, something of a tearaway, is sent to an approved school, which leaves young Sammy alone in the house until neighbours in April Grove intervene and Sammy is evacuated to Bridge End, a village near Southampton. Ruth Purslow, a young childless widow, takes him in, her compassion aroused by his plight. Slowly, as they grow closer, Ruth begins to dread the time when Sammy must return to Portsmouth...

Release date: August 19, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 429

Sample

‘They’re sending you all away?’ Nora Hodges said, staring at the letter in her hand. ‘They’re sending all you kiddies out of Portsmouth to the country – this Friday? But why? I thought they were still trying to make Hitler stop it – I thought they didn’t want there to be a war.’

It was almost the end of August. Sammy had been given the letter at school and had almost forgotten about it, but his teacher had said that the letters must be given to the children’s mothers the minute they got home, so he fished it out of his pocket and handed it over, grubby, crumpled and sticky from a half-sucked bull’s-eye Tim Budd had given him in class. He pulled the sweet off the letter and started to pick off the fluff.

At first Nora had stared at the envelope, her heart sinking. Letters from school usually meant trouble – she’d had plenty of that sort from the school while Gordon was there. Or, more often, not there. Playing truant – being cheeky – tormenting little girls by sticking their pigtails into inkwells – and, worse, pinching things from the cloakroom. Gordon was always in trouble of some sort. Sammy hadn’t ever got into that sort of trouble before, but then he was only seven – there was plenty of time for him to follow in his brother’s footsteps.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’ve you done?’

Sammy had picked off most of the fluff and popped the bull’s-eye into his mouth. He sat down on the floor and began to stroke the tabby cat curled up on the mat. ‘I haven’t done nothing. It’s about the war. We all got one. We’re being sent away.’

‘The war?’ Her heart sank further. She’d hoped, tried hard to believe, that it wasn’t going to happen. Even with the Anderson shelters all delivered and standing like grey hillocks in all the back gardens, even with those horrible gas masks being handed out to everyone, even with the blackout and leaflets being dropped through the door almost every day, and men being trained for Air Raid Precautions, even after Sammy’s recall to school for rehearsals for the evacuation – she’d hoped and hoped that it wouldn’t really happen, that Hitler would back away and not invade Poland after all, that Mr Chamberlain would find some way of persuading him. He’d promised, hadn’t he? Peace in our time – that’s what he’d said when he came back from Munich, waving his ‘piece of paper’. Peace in our time.

‘When?’ she asked Sammy now, staring at the piece of paper in her own hand. ‘When are you going?’

Sammy took the bull’s-eye out of his mouth to examine it. He’d sucked off the rest of the fluff and it had reached the red layer now. With another few hard sucks it would turn yellow and then green, before reaching the hard little bit in the middle. ‘Friday,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to have our suitcases packed and go to school at seven o’clock. It says so in the letter. Have I got a suitcase, Mum?’

‘No, of course you haven’t! Where would we get the money to buy suitcases? Anyway, we never go anywhere to need them. I don’t know what we’re going to do.’ She looked at the envelope again and began to open it. ‘Oh, Sammy – I don’t want you to go away.’

Sammy got up and came to lean against her. He was small for his age and very like her, with fair hair that curled all over his head and large blue eyes. Gordon was dark and solidly built, like his father. He’d always been a handful, even as a toddler, able to climb almost as soon as he could walk and into everything – you couldn’t leave him alone for a minute. And as he’d grown up he’d followed his father everywhere, wanting nothing more than to do the things Dan did – going to football matches to see Pompey play at Fratton Park, working on the ships at Vosper’s, or at Camber dock. He hated school from the very first day, and made everyone’s life a misery until he finally reached his fourteenth birthday and left school to go to work at Camber.

But Sammy had been much more his mother’s boy, content to be with her. Gordon sneered and called him a cissy, and Dan said the boy needed toughening up, but for once Nora took no notice of her husband. Sammy had come after three miscarriages, and it had been touch and go whether he’d survive, he’d been so tiny, but she’d tended him through those early weeks, keeping him literally wrapped in cottonwool, and now, even though he was still small he was strong enough and there was a bond between them that would never break. And just because he was close to her and had fair curls and big blue eyes didn’t mean he was a cissy, she told Dan. Sammy was every bit as much a boy as Gordon was – he was just a different kind of boy, that’s all.

‘I don’t want to go away either,’ Sammy said to her. ‘Couldn’t you come too? Some of the mothers are going, I heard Tim Budd say so. His mum’s going.’

‘That’s because she’s got a little baby,’ Nora said, putting her arm round him. ‘Maureen can’t go without her mother, can she? She’s only a few weeks old.’

Sammy looked at her. ‘So if we had a baby you could go as well and we could go together. Couldn’t we have a baby, Mum?’

Nora gave a short laugh. ‘A baby! No, Sammy, we couldn’t. It takes nearly a year to get a baby, and—’ Her voice broke suddenly and she rubbed the back of one wrist across her eyes. ‘Well, anyway, we can’t.’ She opened the envelope at last and pulled out the sheet of paper. ‘Seven o’clock Friday morning … But you don’t have to go. It says here, it’s just advising that you should.’

‘So can I stop home with you, then?’

‘I’ll talk to your dad about it,’ Nora said, folding up the sheet of paper again. ‘Tonight, when he comes home from work.’ She leant back in her chair, feeling a great wave of tiredness wash over her. The thought of finding Sammy a suitcase, collecting his clothes together and packing it, was almost too much for her.

I’m getting more and more tired these days, she thought. It’s all this talk about the war. It’s upsetting me, it’s upsetting everyone. I just feel I’m crawling through the days, and can’t hardly manage to do all my jobs. Getting the dinner ready’s about all I can do and even that’s a struggle.

Perhaps she would feel a bit better when they’d finally decided whether there was going to be a war or not. Perhaps everyone would feel better then, once they knew what they had to face. But then she thought of the bombing they’d been warned about, the possibility of the Germans invading Britain itself, and a sick fear gripped her body. Almost without realising it, she pulled Sammy against her. I can’t let him go, she thought. I can’t let him go without me, to strangers who wouldn’t understand him and might not be kind to him. I can’t.

‘Lay the table for me, Sammy, there’s a love,’ she said, leaning back in her chair and closing her eyes. ‘Your dad’ll be in soon, wanting his tea, and so will our Gordon. And I’ll have a talk with him later on. I don’t see why you’ve got to go away if you don’t want to, specially when we still don’t know that there’s going to be a war. It might not happen even now.’

Sammy spread the old tablecloth on the battered table in the middle of the room, and got knives and forks out of the sideboard drawer. They’d been brought from the pub when the family had left it to come to number 2 April Grove, along with a few other bits of furniture. The brewery had claimed a lot of it was theirs, but Dan had had a row with the man who came to oversee the move and told him they had to let the family have beds and tables and chairs, it was the law, and anyway a lot of the stuff had belonged to Nora’s parents and even her grandparents, and if the brewery tried to keep them it would be stealing and he’d go to law about it, see if he wouldn’t … And the man had looked at Dan, towering over him, big and dark and powerful, and backed away. They ought to send my Dan to talk to Hitler, Nora thought, remembering it. He’d soon sort the horrible man out!

But it didn’t seem as if anyone could sort out Hitler. And now the war, that had been looming for so long, had come terrifyingly close. The children were being sent away … She leant her head back again, feeling once more the wash of sickness and fatigue. I can’t manage it, she thought. I just can’t manage it. I’ll have to talk to Dan.

‘They’re taking all the kiddies away. Sammy brought the letter home today. They’ve got to go to school early on Friday morning, with sandwiches, and we don’t even know where they’ll be going.’ Her voice shook.

Dan pushed the tabby cat off his chair and sat down to unlace his boots. He was tired and frightened, though he could never admit that to Nora. He couldn’t even admit it to himself. But when he thought of the war he had known – the trenches, the mud, the endless noise, the crying and the screams, the dead men at his feet – he felt sick. He felt furiously, helplessly angry. It was coming again and there was nothing he or anyone else, it seemed, could do to stop it.

He scowled, his eyebrows drawing together in a thick black bar. ‘They’re bloody mad, the lot of ’em. Any tea on? I’m parched.’

Nora heaved herself up from her chair and moved slowly across the little back room to the scullery. I’m so tired, she thought, but if I feel like this now, what’s it going to be like when the bombing starts? She caught a glimpse of herself in the bit of cracked and freckled mirror hung above the sink and wondered when her fair hair had started to go grey, and when its curls had turned into straggles.

She filled the tin kettle with water and set it on the gas stove. The tea packet stood on the cluttered cupboard top and she put three spoonfuls into the chipped brown teapot. While she waited for the kettle to boil, she took down two cups, adding milk from the meat safe outside the back door and sugar from the blue paper bag it had come in from the grocer’s.

Tibby had followed her into the scullery and was mewing for milk, so she poured some into an old saucer and watched him crouch over it. She made the tea, gave it a couple of minutes to brew, then poured it into the cups and carried them back into the living room. The effort of it all left her exhausted.

‘Dan, I don’t want our boys to go,’ she said, sinking back into her sagging armchair. ‘I don’t want them going out to the country, to strangers.’

‘Well, our Gordon won’t.’ Dan slurped his tea. ‘He’s out at work, he won’t be qualified to go.’

‘I don’t want Sammy to go either. He’s too little.’

‘He’s getting on for eight. They’re taking kids younger than that.’

‘Yes, but he’s so little for his age and he still needs me. And I need him, Dan. He helps me.’

‘Well, it don’t look much like it,’ Dan said, glancing round the bleak little room. ‘There’s dust you could grow potatoes in on that sideboard and there was mouldy bread in the bin when I went there for me sandwiches this morning.’

‘I know, it’s the heat … But he does the shopping, and hangs out the washing and things. And I’ll miss him so much. I don’t want him to go, Dan, I don’t really.’ Tibby came back and jumped up on her lap. ‘And there’s the cat, too. He’d break his heart if he had to leave Tibby behind.’

Dan rubbed a hand across his forehead. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to think about the war at all. He looked at his wife, lying back in her chair, weary and white-faced, and wondered if she was ill in some way. The thought brought fresh fear and that, in turn, a fresh surge of irritation.

‘Well, what d’you want me to do about it? It’s for you to decide, you’re the boy’s mother. If you don’t want him to go, just tell ’em so. They can’t force you. It’ll save us some money anyway. They want five bob for each kid, you know. We can feed our Sam on less than that, he don’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive.’

Nora closed her eyes. ‘It’s just that all the other kiddies are going. The Budd boys and the Collinses, and those two from Atkinson’s, the greengrocer’s. I don’t want people to think I don’t care—’

‘I don’t give a toss what people think!’ Dan broke in. ‘Lot of snobs round here, think they’re better than anyone else. I passed that Mrs Glaister coming down the street just now and she turned her head away as if I smelt! And that Mrs Chapman, she ain’t no better.’

‘They’re all right when you get to know them. Jess Budd at number 14, she’s a nice little body, and I thought you got on all right with her hubby. It was him told us this house was up for rent.’

‘Yes, well, Frank Budd’s all right; he went through the last lot with me. But he’s so strait-laced he’s not human! Won’t go to the pub, won’t have a drink – and he was just the same in the Army, the blokes used to go on at him to have a pint and he never would, no matter what they said or did.’ He was silent for a moment, struggling with unwanted memories. ‘Had to put his fists up more than once – good job he’s a big bloke.’

There was a short silence. Then Nora said, ‘It’s all right, then, if I tell the teacher Sammy ain’t going? Only there won’t be no school here for him to go to, see, there’ll be no teachers left. They want all the kiddies to go.’

Dan looked at her, unsure for a moment what she was talking about. He had retreated briefly into that dark place in his mind that he tried to avoid. The familiar anger gripped him and he stood up quickly, knocking over his tea. The cat leapt down from Nora’s lap and fled from the room.

‘Now look at that! Bloody tea wasted … Well, if that boy’s going to stop home he can make himself a bit more useful about the place. He can clear this up for a start. Sammy!’ he roared, knowing that his younger son must be upstairs. ‘Come down here! There’s a job for you!’

Nora closed her eyes again. I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, she thought as she heard Sammy’s timid footsteps on the stairs. Perhaps it would be better for him to go away after all. It couldn’t be worse than being at home …

But she knew that she could not let him go. Sammy was her companion. If he went away, she felt, she might never see him again. Whether there was bombing or not, he might be lost to her for ever. And Dan did think a lot of the kiddy really, she knew he did, it was just that he didn’t know how to show it. It wasn’t Dan’s fault he was the way he was.

The door opened and Sammy came slowly into the room, small and pale, his blue eyes and fair, curly hair a mirror image of her own at that age. His thumb was stuck firmly in his mouth and his eyes, huge with anxiety, went straight to her face, and she gave him a tremulous smile.

‘It’s all right, Sammy. You ain’t done nothing. Your dad’s just spilt his tea, see, and wants you to wipe it up. Bring him another cup, there’s a good boy, there’s some in the pot.’ She held out her hand to him. ‘And guess what, he says you can stop at home with me, instead of being evacuated.’

Sammy stared at her and then at his father.

Dan gave him a reluctant nod. ‘That’s right,’ he growled. ‘Your mother don’t want you to go, so that’s it. But you got to be a proper help to her, mind. You’re not going to be on your holidays. And take that everlasting thumb out of your mouth!’

Sammy nodded, then slipped across the room to his mother and buried his face against her thin chest. Nora held him for a moment before pushing him gently away.

‘Get your dad his tea now,’ she whispered, aware that Dan’s irritation could break out again at any moment. ‘Go and fill up his cup and don’t forget the sugar.’

A wave of dizziness swept over her and she lay back again, waiting for it to pass. It always did, after a few minutes. It was just the worry of it all, she told herself, the worry of the war and whether she would lose Sammy. But at least she didn’t have to think about that any more. Sammy was going to stay with her.

None of the children of April Grove had ever been at school by seven in the morning before. If they’d been told a few weeks ago that they would do it, they’d have laughed themselves silly. Go to school early? You must be crackers.

Yet here they were, up at dawn to collect their things together – their little cardboard suitcases of clothes, their gas-mask boxes, their paper bags of sandwiches to see them through the day. And where would they be when the day ended? They didn’t know. Even their mums didn’t know.

Even though he wasn’t going, Sammy got up early and went along to the playground as well. He had an obscure feeling that he had to, and anyway it might be the last time he would see the other boys and girls for months. Years, even. Already feeling abandoned and lonely, he wandered among the milling throng and came face to face with Tim Budd, arguing fruitlessly with the teacher about having to wear a luggage label on his lapel. Tim stared at the smaller boy.

‘Here, why haven’t you got a label on? And you haven’t got your gas mask neither, nor your sandwiches. Aren’t you coming on the train with the rest of us?’

Sammy shook his head. Since the Hodges family had only come to live in April Grove a few months ago, he’d been ill with whooping cough and didn’t know any of the children well. The Budd brothers, from the other end of April Grove, were friendly enough, though, and while he didn’t see much of them at school, being a few years younger, they had sometimes let him join in a game of cowboys and Indians, or in kicking Tim’s old football along the road. He wished they weren’t going away. He would have liked to be real friends with them.

‘My mum doesn’t want me to go away. She’s poorly.’

‘Your mum’s always poorly,’ Tim observed dispassionately. ‘My mum says she’s—’

What Jess Budd said about Nora Hodges was lost in the shriek of Miss Langrish’s whistle as she marshalled the children together in the playground. In the road outside a fleet of buses waited to take them to the railway station and as soon as the children could be got into their lines, class by class, they would climb aboard them. There was a flurry of last-minute kisses and admonitions to be good, and mind you send that postcard the minute you arrive so I know where you are. Suddenly panic-stricken, children began to cry and cling tightly to their mothers, so that their fingers had to be prised away, while mothers found the tears streaming down their faces as they watched their children climb aboard the buses, wondering when they would see them again, wondering who would put them to bed that night and whether they would be kind to them and make them wash properly and eat their greens.

‘I’ve heard they don’t even have proper lavvies out in the country,’ a woman standing near Sammy said. ‘Just buckets full of dirt, down the bottom of the garden. My Wendy won’t never be able to bring herself to use something like that.’

Sammy Hodges knew most of the women standing there. There was Wendy and Alan Atkinson’s mum from the greengrocer’s shop, and Martin Baker’s from October Street, nearly frantic over her Martin. And there were one or two dads as well – Brian Collins’s dad, who worked shifts, and Mr Cullen, the milkman, who’d had to bring his Susan because Mrs Cullen had died a few days ago of TB and was being buried this very day. He looked as if he’d been crying and Susan’s pigtails looked like rats’ tails, as if he hadn’t been able to do them properly.

Sammy wondered what it was like to have your mum die. His own was often poorly and had to stay in bed a lot, but she wasn’t going to die. He hoped not, anyway. He didn’t like thinking about what it would be like at home if she did. There’d be only Tibby to love him then.

‘Aren’t you and Gordon going, Sammy?’ Mrs Budd asked him and he shook his head again.

‘Mum doesn’t want us to.’

She gazed at him with a funny look on her face, as if she was trying not to cry. That was because she was sending her own boys and her girl, Rose, off to the country. But Sammy had heard Martin Baker’s mum say that Mrs Budd would be going herself next day, with the baby Maureen, so there wasn’t really anything to cry about. She looked as if she was about to say something else, but Sammy didn’t want to answer any more questions. He ducked away and slipped between two other mothers to stand at the back of the crowd.

The buses trundled away and some of the mothers followed them, hoping to catch another glimpse of the children before they got on the train at Portsmouth Town Station. Jess Budd turned in the opposite direction and began to push Maureen’s pram, and Sammy followed at a little distance, shuffling his feet along the gutter in his broken shoes.

He didn’t really understand why the others were going away. It had all been explained to them at school, but he felt they hadn’t been told the whole story. There was something about a war which might start soon, and that was why they’d all been given the tin Anderson shelters to build in their gardens and the gas masks in their brown cardboard boxes. People said there would be bombs dropping on places like Portsmouth that had a harbour and a naval dockyard, so children and people who were blind or couldn’t look after themselves were going to live in the country, where it was safe. But nobody had told them why there was going to be a war.

‘There just is, once every twenty years,’ Tim Budd had told him. ‘The last one finished in 1918, see, so this one’s a bit late, but that’s because Mr Chamberlain went to Germany to see Hitler last year and got a piece of paper saying they wouldn’t have one this time. Only Hitler’s broken his promise, see, so we’re going to kill all the Germans.’

‘But why do we have to go away, then?’ Sammy had asked. ‘If we’re going over there to kill them, how can they come and drop bombs on us?’

‘Because it’s a war,’ Tim said. ‘You can’t have a proper war without fighting, can you?’

Sammy drifted home, still trying to work it out, then he gave up. Grown-ups did a lot of things you couldn’t understand. Like his mum always being poorly and his dad always being in a bad temper, as if it was Sammy’s fault.

It was only a few streets to April Grove. You went down October Street, or March Street, from September, and there it was, running along the bottom of them both. There were allotments at the back, almost like real country, and up at one end, where Sammy lived, they came right down to the road. Mrs Budd went down October Street, still with Sammy following at a safe distance, and stopped to talk to Granny Kinch, who was standing at her front door.

Sammy quite liked Granny Kinch, although he was half afraid she was a witch. She was old – really old, probably about a hundred years old, he thought – and she stood or sat on a chair at her front door all day, watching what went on up and down the street. She talked in a funny, mumbling voice as if her teeth might drop out at any minute, and she wore her hair in steel curlers under a faded scarf. But she always had a smile for the children and, better than that, she always had a few sweets too. Sometimes she would get all the boys and girls gathered round on the pavement and throw a handful of toffees over their heads for them to scramble for.

Granny Kinch lived with her daughter, Nancy Baxter, and Nancy’s children – Micky, who was a few years older than Sammy, and her baby Vera. Micky hadn’t been evacuated either. Sammy had seen him by the school, watching the buses depart. He’d looked half envious, half scornful, and when they’d gone he’d run off on his own, his face dark.

When the Hodges had first come to April Grove, Micky had quickly palled up with Sammy’s brother Gordon. They’d gone off together, playing truant from school and pinching things from shops. They’d got bolder, and in the end they’d been caught pinching from Woolworths. Gordon, who had been in trouble when they lived at the pub in Old Portsmouth, had been put on probation, and Micky given a good telling-off. If they did anything else, the man at the court had told them, they’d be sent away to an approved school.

‘Don’t care,’ Micky had boasted afterwards. ‘Wish I could go away. Wish I could go to London.’

As Sammy hung around at the top of April Grove, watching Jess Budd go into Granny Kinch’s house, Micky himself came round the corner. He stopped when he saw Sammy, then came on more slowly.

‘What you doing here? Wouldn’t they let you be ’vacuated?’

‘Mum didn’t want me to go,’ Sammy said. ‘She’s poorly.’

Micky stared at him. ‘So you got to stop and look after her, then?’

‘Not all the time. I can play out as well.’ Sammy glanced up and down the street. ‘Only there’s not many people left to play with now.’

‘There’s me. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stop here and see the bombs.’

‘I’d like to have gone out to the country,’ Sammy said wistfully. ‘There’s trees and things out there, and fields to play in. I bet they’ll have a smashing time.’

‘Bet they won’t. Bet they’ll be fed up after a couple of days and wanting to come back to Pompey. Bet they’ll wish they hadn’t gone.’ Micky kicked at a stone. ‘Where’s your Gordon? S’pose he’s at work, is he?’

Dan Hodges had got Gordon a job down at Camber dock. He’d had his fourteenth birthday, so could leave school, and Dan said he’d got to bring some wages into the house. He’d keep an eye on him, see he didn’t get into any trouble.

Micky was disgruntled when he heard this. Gordon was just that bit older and bolder, and Micky had looked forward to more lucrative mischief with him. But Gordon didn’t want to be bothered with him now he was working. There were all sorts of dodges at the docks, and a twelve-year-old boy wasn’t any good to him now.

Micky thought Sammy was a poor substitute for his brother, but he was all there was so he might as well make the best of it.

‘What shall we do now, then? Go over the allotments, see if there’s anything worth getting?’

‘I can’t. I’ve got to go in and see if Mum wants anything.’

Micky looked exasperated. ‘Well, when you’ve done that, then? There’s no school now, we can do what we like. Go down the harbour, do a bit of mudlarking. Go up the Lines and see if the soldiers’ll let us look at the guns. They’re putting up real big ones to shoot planes down. They might let us have a go.’

Sammy shook his head. He was nervous of Micky, who was much bigger than he was and not afraid to do things that could get him into trouble. The man at the court had told Micky that he and Gordon were lucky not to be going to an approved school. Sammy knew that next time Micky was caught he could easily be sent away and he didn’t want to find himself there as well. Besides, who would look after Mum?

He turned away. ‘I’ve got to go in now.’

Micky shrugged. ‘Don’t care, then. I can do better things on me own and I’ll keep whatever I get. Might go down Commercial Road and go in Woolworths. There’s always stuff you can pinch in there, off the counters.’ He sauntered off, whistling, and Sammy looked after him. He knew it was going to be lonely without the other children around and no school to go to, and he thought Micky was feeling miserable too. His best friends, Cyril Nash and Jimmy Cross, had gone as well, so there was no one for him either. It would be good to play with him, but not to go pinching stuff from Woolworths or the allotments.

He went down the back alley and up the narrow garden, passing the sheets of corrugated iron that were supposed to be made into an Anderson shelter. Everyone else had got theirs up but Sammy’s father hadn’t even got the hole properly dug yet. He said he was going to wait until he knew for certain there was going to be a war. It was daft, doing all this before you even knew it was going to happen.

Dan and Gordon had already left for work at the Camber dock, and Nora was downstairs, washing up the dishes that had been left the previous night. She was half leaning on the sink, working slowly, and her pale face had a yellowish tinge to it. She looked round as Sammy came through the back door and gave him a wan smile.

‘There you are, love. Did you see your mates off? Go off all right, did they?’

He nodded and picked up a grubby tea towel to start drying. ‘They went on buses. Then they were going to go on trains, but nobody knows where they’re going. It’s a secret.’

‘I know, love. Can’t see why it should be, I must say. The blooming Germans aren’t going to be worried about a lot of nippers.’ She gave him an anxious glance. ‘Did you wish you could be going too?’

Sammy looked at her. His mother had changed a lot in the past year. He could remember when she was lively and pretty, playing games or singing to him. She used to sing old songs and nursery rhymes, and she had one favourite that she’d sung to him ever since he was a baby:

‘Sammy, Sammy, shine a light, Ain’t you playing out tonight?’

The song was part of a game, a sort of hide-and-seek after dark in which half the children ran off to hide and the rest searched for them. If you thought you knew where a hider was, you had to call out the rhyme and then the hider must show his light – a torch, if he possessed one, or a candle in a jam jar, hidden