The Twisted Way Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Twisted Way

  Chapter 1 London 1940

  Chapter 2 The Evacuee

  Chapter 3 First Wedding 1945

  Chapter 4 John Lacey

  Chapter 5 The Letter 1952

  Chapter 6 Felicity Brown

  Chapter 7 The Return of the Evacuee 1995

  Chapter 8 Primrose House 2004

  Chapter 9 The Visitor

  Chapter 10 The Will

  Chapter 11 Peter Mace 2004

  Chapter 12 Doctor Alistair Anderson

  Chapter 13 The Tea Party

  Chapter 14 Christmas Eve 2004

  Chapter 15 An Accident March 2005

  Chapter 16 Enderly Bridge Club

  Chapter 17 New Friends and a Search

  Chapter 18 Ronald Brown

  Chapter 19 A Bridge Evening

  Chapter 20 Ronald ’s Second Visit

  Chapter 21 A Change of Heart

  Chapter 22 Reconciliations and a Second Wedding

  Chapter 23 Rosalie

  Chapter 24 Two Funerals

  Chapter 25 The Will Reading

  Chapter 26 The Guest

  Chapter 27 Settling In

  Chapter 28 June 2008

  List of Characters

  The Twisted Way

  Jean Hill

  The Twisted Way This book is dedicated to my husband Michael, with love and thanks for his encouragement and support.

  Also by Jean Hill

  The Knave of Hearts, AuthorHouse, 2007

  Copyright © 2009 by Jean Hill

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  The right of Jean Hill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2009 by Lower Moor Books

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author

  ISBN 978-0-9563419-1-4

  Produced by The Choir Press

  The Twisted Way

  The next time Peter visited Primrose House he clambered up the short metal staircase which led to the kitchen from the garden. He sometimes entered the house that way when he thought that Joyce Skillet would be there to let him in, though quite often the door was left unlocked if he was expected. Struggling with the icy conditions he clutched and held on, as well as he was able with bent old hands, to the slippery worn iron handrail in an effort to stop himself from falling, but his arthritic feet and legs were not helpful. On reaching the top he paused for a moment to catch his breath. The door swung open and, to his surprise, an arm shot out and hit him violently in the chest. Losing his grip on the rail he slid backwards. His legs buckled painfully beneath him as he plummeted downwards and landed with a sickening thud that resounded on the frozen earth. Peter struggled to open his eyes and saw someone holding a large stone above his head. He tried to cry out but could make no sound. Something akin to an electric crackle trickled across his brain accompanied by a bizarre and remote feeling of helplessness. Within seconds there was darkness.

  Chapter 1

  London 1940

  Tom Hands quivered with fear and covered his ears in an attempt to shut out the sound of the air-raid siren and penetrating whine from a plane’s engine. He was just five years old, and intelligent enough to understand that the home he had known for the whole of his short life was under threat but unaware of the full extent of the danger and the fact that he would soon be thrust into a strange and bewildering future.

  ‘C’mon boy, get a move on, we ’ave to go down to the shelter.’ His mother Ruth’s voice was high and shrill with anxiety as she tried to prod him into action. ‘Those bloomin’ benches in the shelter may be ’ard but it’s safer there than our beds, wors’ luck. Our thick blankets will keep us warm, ducks. Come on luv!’ Her voice softened. ‘I’ve got a flask of nice warm tea and some of your favourite biscuits.’

  Tom stood rigid and afraid. His muscles felt frozen and moving seemed almost impossible. The last thing he wanted was a mug of tea and sugary biscuits. His stomach churned with rebellion and his hands felt clammy.

  His young mother placed her slim arms gently around his shoulders as she urged him forward. ‘Down the steps with yer me lad. Grab the torch, luv, ’urry ...’ urry ...’ He clung to her to gain some comfort and to steady his thin reluctant legs as she dragged him along with her.

  Tom’s nervousness had intensified as the London Blitz continued night after night without a break. The final months of 1940 developed into a nightmare for both mother and child and this night was as miserable as any they had experienced before. Tom, although not fully aware of the full force of the peril that encircled them, would ask with peevish and bewildered repetition: ‘Why, Mum? Why? Wot they doing it for?’

  She could not provide any rational reply and tried to comfort him as best she could.

  ‘Don’t fret, luv,’ she whispered in her distinct soft cockney voice. ‘If you can hear those bombs whistlin’ down they ain’t going to land on you and if you don’t hear ’em well …’ We’ll not know anything about it anyway, she thought. ‘Keep yer pecker up, ducks.’ This piece of advice failed to reassure him.

  ‘C-can hear that one, Mum,’ he stammered; his legs threatened to fold beneath him and his bottom lip quivered.

  ‘Don’t worry my pet, the searchlights will show our gunners where the enemy planes are. You go to sleep now.’

  ‘All clear, Mum,’ the boy piped up in his thin childish voice as soon as the unwavering raucous note of the siren blared forth to signal the end of the raid. He had been curled up as usual on one of the thin hard benches with eyes squeezed shut, feigning sleep for what seemed an eternity, but it was only an hour before he heard that shrill continuous sound. He had placed his hands together under his blanket in the way he had been taught by his mother. Please God come on and help us will yer, passed continuously through his mind until the all clear sounded, which was music to his ears.

  ‘That was a short’un, fank goodness that’s over,’ he uttered and sighed with relief.

  Mother and son heard the clanging bells of fire engines, ambulances and police cars rushing to aid injured people, many of whom needed urgent hospital treatment. To Tom the sounds were exciting because he had no understanding of the extent of the carnage.

  ‘Where are they all going, Mum?’ There was no satisfactory reply and Ruth could only shrug and change the subject. The sight of dead and dying being dug from the crumbling ruins of buildings became commonplace but she made a tenacious, almost desperate, effort to protect her son from seeing them. The bloomin’ situation was bad enough without foisting memories like those upon the poor little devil, she thought. The smell of burning blowing across the backyard became too frequent for comfort and for her a stark reminder that their turn could be next. Up to now they had been lucky but luck was something in which she had almost no faith. Ruth had not had her fair share of luck during her short life.

  Tom recognized the sounds of the different aeroplane engines. ‘That’s a German bomber, it’s got three engines Mum, hear the mmm mmm mmm?’ or ‘That’s an English night fighter,’ he would inform her.

  ‘Abs’lutely right,’ his mother responded with exaggerated pride. She accepted that the boy was more knowledgeable than she was. She had not excelled in any way at school and accepted that she was not very clever but she believed Tom was exceptional. His teacher had described h
im as a ‘gifted child’. He should go a long way, Ruth told herself, this ghastly war permitting. I’ll keep me fingers crossed. But hopes for the rosy future of which she dreamed for her beloved child began to disintegrate. She could see no end to the misery and feared that quite soon they would die in agony in a pile of rubble.

  On most evenings they trudged to the damp and unwelcoming Anderson shelter, a monstrosity that had been hastily built in their small backyard from thick grey sheets of ugly corrugated steel bolted together to make a curved roof, set several feet into the ground with one small door in the front. Ruth thought it was an intrusion that overpowered the small backyard but it did look sturdy though a direct hit would be a different matter. Tom loathed the shelter so sometimes, as a special treat, in spite of food shortages, his mother would produce some lemonade and a few sweets in addition to the biscuits and ubiquitous flask of tea. She continued to make light of the situation but the oppressive interior of the shelter frightened the child more than whistling bombs. An insidious smell of damp and decay pervaded and Tom imagined he was a mouse caught in a trap. He longed to escape from the shelter’s claustrophobic musty atmosphere.

  ‘There are rats out there Mum,’ he said after seeing one scuttling at the bottom of the backyard one afternoon. ‘They are horrible things with dirty feet and greasy tails. Do you fink one could get in the shelter?’

  ‘That’s nonsense my pet. We’re lucky, it’s safe in there,’ his mother reassured him whilst she stroked his soft baby-fine fair hair and settled him on his bench for the night. She would cover him with a bright striped woollen blanket that had been his from when he was a baby, a gesture of reassurance, defiance and determination on her part. The blanket had been her first attempt at knitting and displayed bands of garish colours – orange, green and blue, bumpy and uneven –because she had used odd leftover balls of wool given to her by friends and customers at work. An old doubled-up eiderdown filled with goose feathers served as a mattress. Its faded green shot-silk cover was worn and tattered but it was familiar and comfortable. Tom had seen it on his mother’s bed and he had always liked it. ‘It’s pure silk,’ she told him with inordinate pride, ‘really posh, ducks. ’Twas given to me by a real lady. She used to buy choc’lates in the shop I once worked in.’ Tom stroked it and wound the soft frayed edges around his fingers, deriving a vestige of pleasure from the familiar texture.

  Ruth was a plucky individual but her fear for the safety of her young son verged upon panic as the nightly raids continued. Since her husband had been drafted into the army she felt an increasing feeling of abandonment. She had waved goodbye to him at the local railway station some months earlier, and the fact that most of her friends and neighbours were in the same position did not provide any comfort. She had lived in the old red brick terraced house following her marriage before the outbreak of war in 1939. The poorly furnished rooms had, until her husband’s departure, echoed with laughter, good companionship and a shared pride in their small son. They had been happy. She thought that her Robert was a lovely fellow and this damned war and the wretched Nazis had ruined everything. It wasn’t fair.

  ‘Those Jerries won’t knock our home down in a hurry. It’s built to last,’ she told Tom when they heard bombs whistling down around them. Although not religious, she prayed that their home would not be destroyed. The blast from bombs had shaken the walls a few times and blown out two windows which had now been boarded up, and the sound of bricks clattering down and breaking glass nearby was commonplace. A deep uneven crack developed in a wall at the back of the house, a long and invasive tendril that reached from just below an upstairs window to the ground floor. Tom poked small inquisitive fingers into it and surveyed the fine red dust with interest as it crumbled, clung to his hands and crept under his fingernails.

  ‘Mum, I need the lav,’ Tom’s small voice would prompt her when they were in the shelter and a raid continued for a long time. As tension mounted his need to relieve himself would increase and sleep become elusive.

  ‘Use the bucket, ducks …’ She pointed to the white enamelled bucket in which wet washing was once placed. It now served as an emergency toilet and was covered by a dirty chipped lid.

  ‘I’ll wait a bit Mum, I ’ate buckets. Smelly ol’ things. That one ’as ruff edges and it’s not private eiver,’ was his usual reply which made Ruth sigh with frustration although she was sympathetic and felt the same repulsion.

  Tom staggered out of the shelter as soon as he could to go to the cold and unwelcoming outside toilet, which was rough bricked and coated with peeling white paint, smelly and neglected, but anything was better than crouching in that Anderson shelter to relieve himself in a bucket. The pipes in the toilet were often frozen, in spite of his mother’s stoical efforts to wrap them with old rags, but he was glad the bog, as they called it, was there. He knew the way without a torch, though there was one to hand if they had any batteries.

  Their kitchen had a small range that needed regular coating with black lead polish that was applied with stubby brushes. His greatest pleasure was making toast on winter evenings when his mother would open the small door in the front of the range. Tom would sit on a small three-legged stool and hold an old brass toasting fork with a thick slice of bread speared upon it as close as he could manage to the red embers. A large Victorian coal scuttle housed lumps of shiny black coal and a bent iron fender served as his foot rest.

  ‘Take care luv, don’t get too close, you could burn yerself,’ Ruth would caution him.

  ‘Cors not, I ain’t daft,’ he would respond. ‘Fink I’m silly?’ ‘There’s not much butter with this ’ere rationing but there’s some dripping from that scrap of a joint, a bit of salt on that should be good, I think,’ his mother said and they savoured the companionship of eating together even if Tom did sometimes singe the toast. Charred edges did not worry them as a good scraping with a kitchen knife was all that was required to make the bread edible and that was part of the enjoyment.

  Most days, when he was not in school, Tom would trundle round the rough grey concreted backyard on a rusty old second-hand scooter his mother had bought for the princely sum of three pence from a friend who was glad to get rid of it. With the shelter placed in the centre his route was now limited but he did not care. It was his road and in his imagination he was in a car speeding along. He forgot the horrors of war for a short time as he hooted and tooted or sang to himself.

  ‘Concrete is better for kids to play on,’ the landlord had pontificated on the day they that moved in, but did not admit that the maintenance for him would be simpler. Small borders of stiff London clay clung to the edges of the concrete yard. Tom’s mother filled these with dahlias, stocks and marigolds in the summer but now that the Anderson shelter had been erected they were overshadowed. The roof of the shelter was covered with earth, ugly and bare, spurned even by weeds. Tom longed for a green lawn, soft and comfortable to play on, and he promised himself he would have one when he was grown up and he had a house of his own. He looked forward to that. Tom grazed his knees on the rough spiky concrete and had numerous pale pink scars as a result.

  Robert had built a small rectangular concrete fish pond in a corner of one of the borders in which resided Tom’s only pet, a fat shiny goldfish named Cecil, which was chosen with care in a local pet shop and carried home with pride in a jam jar. It was coveted by Tiger, a wily old tabby cat that lived next door, but the fish was a survivor, defying air raids, local cats and the chemicals from the concrete that could have killed him. His gold shiny scales would glint in the hazy sunshine, that is on the days when the rays managed to penetrate the London smog. The only tree, a common purple lilac, small and stunted, occupied a space next to the pond and Tiger would perch precariously on one of the lower branches and watch with feline patience for any activity, his green slanted eyes glittering with animosity and grey striped hunter’s body poised for action. His long tail would twitch as he savoured the idea of a delicious fish treat.

>   ‘Wretched ol’ cat, who does he think he is?’ Tom would grumble. ‘Clear off you rotten old moggy.’ Tiger hissed and sometimes moved up a branch or two but refused to abandon his post. He could wait.

  Tom dipped his fingers in the small pond to touch the fish but the swift and slippery body always eluded him. He had planted seeds in the soil that bordered the pond, tipping them out of small paper packets before covering them lovingly with stiff lumps of dark reddish brown London clay. A few of his favourites, tobacco plants and purple and pink stocks, did straggle, thin and weak, along the edge of the pond during the summer months. The conditions were miserable but they lifted bright heads towards the grey sky and basked in any sunshine that penetrated it. Smog from factory chimneys and coal fires was at its most troublesome during the winter months when a swirl of moisture-laden wind bamboozled its way through their clothes and crept with insidious determination into their bones.

  ‘Mum,’ Tom urged many times in a begging tone that petered into a whine, ‘can my fish go into a bowl and come into the shelter with us? It can’t be nice in that dark slimy ol’ pond when a raid’s on.’

  ‘No ducks, ’e’s better off where he is,’ his mother retorted. ‘No room for blessed fish bowls in that there shelter.’

  After further months of heavy raids and whole nights spent in the Anderson shelter Tom emerged one morning to find the small pond littered with pieces of dark grey metal shrapnel. His beloved fish was floating on his back with eyes wide, glazed and lifeless.

  ‘Wot a rotten war,’ he cried out, fighting back his tears. ‘When I’m grown up I’ll be a soldier and fight. I’ll pay those Germans back.’

  His mother found it difficult to comment on his outburst. The only thing she longed for was peace, not retribution. She heaved a long sigh and subconsciously rubbed the small silver crucifix that hung on a slender chain round her slim neck. She was not a religious woman but wearing the cross gave her some comfort. Her mother had given it to her when she was about five years old. She couldn’t remember much about her mother but she did recall her placing the crucifix around her neck, the cool silver links pressing against her skin, and the feel of her mother’s soft face as she kissed her cheek. She recalled too looking into gentle deep-set hazel eyes, pools of mottled brown, just like her own. Ruth was orphaned when she was just six years old and until she was fourteen lived in a council care home where she suffered a strict routine, harsh words, tatty cast-off clothing and a complete lack of affection.