The Last Train Home

Chapter Fifteen

It took a month before I received another letter from Mum.

By then, the parcel containing the rest of my things had arrived and the work on the Goodwin farm had progressed. Since the weather had started to change, most of our work had moved inside the house and slowly it had all started to come to life. We had fixed the squeaky floorboards, the wobbly steps, the gap in the bannister and had started to make some headway on mending the kitchen cabinets. Mrs Goodwin said the house somehow managed to look worse when we were working.

After a month, Mrs Goodwin had warmed to me although not as much as her husband has, I never expected her to. At least she had stopped giving me strange looks and could tolerate me being in the same room as her for longer than a few minutes. I doubted she would ever truly warm up to me but I think we were both content doing our own thing without the other interfering. She didn't try and stop me from helping out with any of the work on the farm and I didn't get under her feet when she was doing something.

"How would your mum react if she saw you in those?" Enid asked, gesturing to the dark blue pair of slacks I was wearing.

"She'd kill me." I laughed.

"I don't know how I feel about them personally, they're rather revealing."

"Forty years ago showing your ankle was revealing," Eva said, turning around to look at us. She backed up and almost walked into a lamppost had Mark not pulled her to the side at the last second. "I think she suits them. That and it's probably easier to do carpentry in those than in a skirt."

"Definitely. My skirts are for church only now. These are a lot better."

"I don't think I'd ever wear them. They just don't look right."

Eva glanced at me and then quickly looked away to stop herself from laughing at the ridiculousness of Enid's comment. She had always been one to stick with tradition and sometimes we wonder if she would have preferred to wear the floor-length dress of the Victorian era.

We moved through the village, peering into shop windows but with none of us having any money to hand, we could just look at it. After a month of being out of London, we had finally managed to find time for the four of us to meet up and spend some time together. With the weather holding up rather well, albeit a little chilly, we had decided to spend the day exploring the village rather than cooped up inside and getting underfoot with our host families. There wasn't all that much to do other than peer into shop windows, but we always found something.

People were milling about the square, moving into shops and looking through shop windows just like we were. Some of the older people walking around gave us funny looks in response to us walking around. They no doubt viewed us as hooligans who were up to no good; not everyone had taken to having evacuees around. That didn't stop us, though, we used to get the same looks in London and it never put a damper on our day.

After looking in all the shops in the square, we sat down on a set of benches just off to the side of the main square. Mark draped himself over one of the benches and it took a sharp kick from Enid to get him to move, but he did so begrudgingly. Eva and I took the other bench with me stacking my feet on top of one another and Eva, having spent far too much time with Mrs Williams, tucked her ankles.

I stared out into the village square, watching the younger children dart in and out of their parents, begging for sweets or complaining that they had been walking for too long and wanted to go home. The trees that surrounded the square had started to turn orange with the changing season, leaves drifting to the ground and creating a fun crunching sound when stepped on. Dad and I used to go to Hyde Park in Autumn just to jump on the fallen leaves.