Peggy Dickinson knew from last year’s photographs that Virginia had grown up. When she had been evacuated from England in 1940, she had been small and quiet, with spindly legs and milk-teeth, a far cry from the twelve-year-old girl who now stood in front of her, tall, robust and tanned, with thick long hair and intense green eyes.
Peggy let go of her hurriedly. ‘Did you have a good crossing?’ she asked awkwardly.
‘It was OK.’
‘Hey, Rusty!’ yelled a voice from behind.
A boy in the crowd who was being led away by his mother was waving. ‘So long,’ he yelled.
Rusty smiled and waved back.
‘Come on, Virginia,’ her mother said stiffly. ‘Let me take your suitcase.’
Rusty picked up her grip, duffel bag and coat, and followed.
She glanced aside at her. ‘I like your green hat,’ she said, looking up at the small-brimmed felt hat her mother was wearing.
‘Oh,’ said her mother. ‘Thank you.’
‘Did you choose the wine-coloured trimmings to match the sweater?’
‘Not exactly.’
Looking down at her mother’s lace-up shoes, she noticed that her legs were bare.
‘Hello there!’ said a woman’s voice.
By the entrance to the docks two women were serving tea and sandwiches from a mobile canteen. They waved. One of them was wearing green overalls with W.V.S. on it, the other an outfit identical to her mother’s.
A long queue was forming in front of the canteen.
‘I’d help if I could,’ called Peggy. ‘But I’ve just come to meet my daughter, and I’ve promised to pick up a furniture van at your headquarters.’
‘You stop there, Peggy,’ said the other woman. ‘We’re giving you a cup of tea before you start driving.’ She leaned over the counter and smiled at Rusty. ‘We have to watch your mother, you know. She’s a terror. Once, after an air-raid, she went to sleep on a door balanced on two milk churns in amongst all the rubble, using her coat as a blanket. When the milkman came to take them away at dawn, she stood there in the debris making stoves out of old bricks and a dustbin, and started making soup.’
‘Oh, go on with you,’ said Peggy, reddening. ‘We’re all trained to do that.’
‘Yes. But only a few are brave enough to stay out of their beds on a winter night.’
‘What do you mean, trained?’ said Rusty.
‘In the W.V.S.,’ said the woman.
‘That’s the Women’s Voluntary Service,’ added her mother. ‘This is our uniform.’
‘Oh, I get it,’ said Rusty. ‘The green outfit.’
Peggy Dickinson thrust a cup of hot liquid and a jam sandwich into Rusty’s hands. ‘Welcome back to England,’ she said.
Rusty sipped the weird brown liquid. It was no use. She was never going to get used to this stuff. It tasted awful.
‘If you don’t mind,’ said Rusty politely, putting the tea back on the counter, ‘I’m not too thirsty.’
‘I suppose you’re used to drinking coffee,’ said Peggy.
‘No. I drink milk, mostly.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said one of the women. ‘You’ll have to get used to our daily half-pint now.’
Rusty bit into the sandwich. The bread looked grey, as if someone had kicked it along the ground. It tasted grey, too.
‘Thanks for the tea,’ said Peggy, picking up Rusty’s case.
As they walked along the streets, Rusty couldn’t help being drawn to the empty spaces where buildings must have been. Old lamp posts, the kind she’d seen in Sherlock Holmes movies, were twisted violently into odd shapes. Gaping holes with broken wire fences surrounding them appeared at random amid all the brick and rubble. A large building with Odeon on it stood by itself in the crippled landscape.
Peggy Dickinson strode on. Usually people would yell after her to slow down, but when she checked to see if she was leaving her daughter behind, she discovered that Rusty was walking firmly beside her.
‘Why do they call you Rusty?’
‘On account of my hair. Uncle Bruno started it, and it sort of stuck. Say,’ she said suddenly, ‘look at that house there. It’s like a stage set.’
Peggy stopped to look.
It was a familiar sight. Half a house swept away, leaving the other half intact.
‘It reminds me of an Andrew Wyeth painting I’ve seen,’ whispered Rusty, stepping off the kerb and running across the road. ‘There’s this painting, see,’ she said, attempting to explain. ‘And it’s just a plate and a cup on a table, and out the back of the window you can see someone’s been sawing up wood. And it’s the wallpaper, see, it’s old and faded and peeling and the sun is shining through the window.’
Her mother looked puzzled.
‘I don’t see what there is to get excited about old faded wallpaper.’
‘Well, in the painting it’s a sort of parchment-yellow colour, and the sun makes it kind of alive and, oh, I don’t know.’ She swung around to look back at the building. One room on the upper floor, complete with floor, doorway, and a little staircase at the side, was suspended in mid-air. ‘It could be a terrific open-air theatre,’ she said. ‘And it’s raised, too. That means that the audience would be able to see what was going on. You could get chairs out here and …’
Virginia reminded Peggy so much of Harvey Lindon, it unnerved her. Suddenly she remembered him standing in Beatie’s garden, a broad grin on his face, his G.I. cap askew.
‘Impossible,’ she had said the first time he had suggested taking a picnic out in a boat. ‘You’ll never find one, and even if you did, it’d be full of holes.’
‘Difficult, yes; impossible, no,’ he had remarked. And within twenty-four hours, there they were drifting lazily up the river in a hired dinghy.
Peggy had insisted they turn back after an hour.
‘Your wish is my command,’ he had said, standing up and bowing, and the boat had immediately capsized. Luckily it had been near a wooded bank, but it had meant that Peggy was forced to relax in the sun until their clothes had dried.
Listening to her daughter’s voice brought it all back with disturbing clarity. Her accent sounded like a strange mixture of Katharine Hepburn and James Cagney. Peggy knew that Bruno Omsk was a New Yorker and that Hannah was a New Englander, but somehow she had not been prepared for her daughter to have picked up their accent.
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First published by William Heinemann Ltd 1974
Published in Jane Nissen Books 2004
Reissued in this edition 2016
Text copyright © Penelope Lively, 1974
Cover illustration by Alice Patullo
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978–0–141–36191–8
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