Free Return to Fourwinds by Elisabeth Gifford Page B

priest,’ he said.
    He didn’t know why he’d said it. He didn’t like Father David who came to school to do catechism, and slapped their hands if they didn’t know the long second commandment. But he liked his Sunday role as serving boy, saying the magic Latin prayers with the nice old priest who was frail as paper. Everyone watched to see if the old man would make it up the ladder to fetch down the golden monstrance with its sunburst of gold rays and the body of Our Lord suddenly there inside it when the silver bell rang. At the grammar he could find out what the Latin prayers meant.

CHAPTER 8
    Manchester, 1939
    Music hummed through the kitchen, the windows open to the summer, Tommy Dorsey and his band, ‘The Way you Look Tonight’, Kitty dancing around with the tea towel to ‘Begin the Beguine’, knocking over the cups. Not even Dad cross. The wireless sat up on the kitchen shelf. It was Peter’s job to go and get the big batteries topped up at the shop. Peter might look skinny, but he could shift all right, that’s what Dad said.
    They were all sitting round that radio on the day Chamberlain said in his grave and sorrowful and posh voice that they were now at war with Germany.
    His dad went out to the backyard. Peter went out after him. Dad was standing up in the corner away from the house, his shoulders shaking, wiping his face. He said, ‘Not again.’ Kept saying the same two words.
    Ma came out and sat on the doorstep and looked very thin, squinting up at them in the sun like some beaky bird as she told Peter and Bill they were down to be evacuated. Every bone in her arms in her legs, thin as sticks: she couldn’t breathe again and wasn’t getting better. You heard her coughing, coughing at night. Dad, who wouldn’t ever admit to being slowed down by his scarred lungs – though he wheezed if he walked even a little fast – turned his eyes away from ma when she had a coughing spasm. The war had donefor his lungs, and now the Manchester air was thickening up inside Ma’s. Asthma or TB maybe; the doctor couldn’t rightly say. So Dad fixed his damaged eyes on a stain at the top of the wall when her shoulders shook, Ma trying to cough quietly, his gaze hopeless and angry and clouded. Waited for her to stop.
    Ma put sandwiches in their bags and made sure they had clean underwear. She didn’t want people to think that they came from a dirty family. They didn’t have any pyjamas to pack. Peter’s boots needed mending again but it couldn’t be helped. Dad cut a cardboard shape and fitted it inside. She walked with them down to the schoolyard where a woman with a clipboard was fastening labels onto buttons or pinning them onto cardigans. When the ragged crocodile of children set off, Ma walked with them to the train station, clasped the boys into a hard, thin hug.
    She stood there gathered up into herself, smiling and waving as the train jerked and then pulled away, holding her coat together even though it wasn’t cold. She waved till the steam blocked her out and the train curved away round a bend in the line.
    They’d be home soon enough, she’d told them.

    The bus that collected them from the station had blue paper over the windows to stop Jerry from using the light of the bus as a guide for his bombs, Bill said. The holiday mood and any sandwiches were long gone. No water to drink. The night air was cold, a damp warmth evaporating from the children, their breath condensing on the glass of the windows and soaking into the blue paper. The little boy in the seat in front of them had wet himself adding a salty smell to the fug. Someone was crying, exhausted and resigned.
    In the church hall there was cake and hot tea. Women in coats or pinnies got them all fed, and one by one the children were picked outby couples – people with ‘making the best of a bad bargain’ written all over their faces.
    The little