September 1939
‘A boy. We can’t take a boy.’
‘You’ll have to, Mrs Bailey. If you’d come down earlier there were several girls, but other families took them in and this one here is all that’s left.’
‘If I’d known, I’d never have agreed. I’m not having a boy.’
Sarah, who had just changed out of her gardening clothes, came downstairs to find her mother gazing down horrified at a skinny little lad who looked back at her from the open door with the expression of a cornered rabbit. His mid-brown hair was cut at an angle across his forehead above a pair of bewildered hazel eyes in a pale, freckled face. The sleeves of his jacket were too short, exposing bony wrists. There was a luggage label pinned to his collar and the canvas bag lying at his feet was pitifully small. She wanted to bear him away at once to soothe and feed him, but if her mother had her way he wouldn’t get further than the doormat where he stood listening to the harassed balding man he’d come with arguing with the posh lady who wanted to send him on his way.
‘Please, M’am,’ the official was saying. ‘Yours is the only home left on my list.’
The boy’s expression of frightened despair was more than Sarah could stand. She took the last few steps down to the hall and, ducking down before him, smiled and asked him his name.
His lips moved, but no sound came.
‘May I see your label?’ She reached out a gentle hand. It read ‘Derek Jenkins’, but the rest of the writing was smudged, perhaps by tears.
‘And how old are you, Derek?’
A whispered, ‘Nine ’alf.’
Sarah was surprised. He appeared younger.
Her mother and the official had stopped arguing to stare down at them. Mrs Bailey’s arms were crossed in that pose which Sarah knew from experience brooked no opposition.
Sarah rose to her feet. ‘Mummy,’ she said fiercely. ‘You can’t turn him away. Suppose this was me or Diane?’
‘But it’s not, is it? It’s a boy.’
‘He’s a good boy, I’m sure, aren’t you, son? If handled firmly he shouldn’t give you any trouble.’ The official was sounding desperate.
‘I can’t look after a boy,’ Mrs Bailey whispered to Sarah, her voice pleading. ‘Not again.’
Sarah saw with amazement that the fear of noise and naughtiness was not the reason. Her mother was anxious. And she thought she understood. A boy in the house would remind her of the one she’d lost. Peter. But this child’s need was greater than her mother’s tamped-down grief.
‘Will you allow us a moment, please.’ She steered her mother into the drawing room, shut the door and leaned against it.
‘We have to take him, Mummy, don’t you see. We’ve all got to do things we don’t want to do. He is lost without his parents. We cannot be so cruel as to turn him away.’
‘I would have had a girl.’
‘I know, but we’ve been given what we’ve been given. Father would have taken him.’ It was a cheap shot, but it worked. Her mother flushed, whether with guilt or anger, Sarah couldn’t tell.
‘Yes, your father would have. Whatever else he was, your father was a good man.’
There was a silence, then Mrs Bailey tossed her proud head. ‘Very well,’ she snapped. ‘But if it all goes wrong I’m not taking the blame.’
Sarah opened the door and followed her mother out.
‘Right,’ Mrs Bailey sighed. ‘We’ll take him.’
‘He’s a good boy,’ the official repeated with obvious relief, and blew his nose. ‘Goodbye, son, behave yourself.’
Derek didn’t even nod. He looked at his feet and his shoulders shook with silent sobs.
‘Come along now,’ Sarah said, taking his hand. ‘I’ll introduce you to our cook, Mrs Allman. She may have a biscuit for you. I expect you’re hungry, aren’t you?’
Derek was very shy and quiet at first and those deep-set brown eyes troubled the household. He was frightened by the tiger-skin rug with its snarling head on the floor of the drawing room, but to everyone’s surprise Mrs Bailey declared that she hated it, too, and rolled it up and gave it to Major Richards, who had always admired it.
Derek felt the pain of separation from his mother, they could all see that, though Nora Jenkins did write every week, short notes on lined paper about how she hoped he wasn’t giving any trouble. Once, to the boy’s excitement, she came down to visit; a short, stocky woman with a palely pretty face and the same shy manner as her son. She stared round Flint Cottage in delight, and declared to him that he’d fallen on his feet here all right. She was ‘a nice woman with sensible values, though common as muck, of course,’ Mrs Bailey said to Sarah later, but Derek cried so hard after she left that it was decided that she shouldn’t come again. He’d only been with the Baileys for six weeks, though, before she came and fetched him away. Some of the other evacuee children went home, too. After all, there had been no sign of bombardment in London and what had the government been making such a fuss about?
The story didn’t stop there, though. At the County Record Office Briony listened to the whole interview and thought how the war must have changed the course of Derek Jenkins’ life.
Later that evening at home she felt triumphant when she found Derek’s name mentioned in one of Sarah’s letters to Paul. It was dated May 1940. The war had been going on for a whole eight or nine months and this letter had been sent to an address in Liverpool. What had Paul been doing up there?