“Maybe,” offered Colin. “We can write them and find out. So, Hugo, is the loo up here?”

  “The privy’s out back,” Hugo replied. “You have a loo back home? Inside your house?”

  “Yes. We do,” said Colin, pausing a moment to think about the additional considerations inherent when the privy is out of doors and not in.

  “The school has a loo,” said Hugo, with a measure of pride. “Inside. Mostly because of the boys who used to go outside to piss who wandered off. One lad made a regular habit of it. His father was a plumber. So, he built us an inside pot. We’re not so different from London, I’d say.”

  “Not at all,” mumbled Colin.

  Ivy climbed the stairs, laden with quilts and a pair of eiderdowns. “I’ll be putting the wee ones in my room for now,” she called, her use of the term “wee” sending the boys into a fit of laughter, any lingering awkwardness arising from their initial meeting now safely dissipated. Unsure of what prompted their snickers, Ivy was nevertheless pleased at their conspiring and the considerable energy Hugo seemed to be expending to welcome Colin and perhaps regain his mother’s trust. She continued, “I expect the girls will want to keep a close eye on us—and that cat—until they get their bearings.”

  Indeed, their endless fascination with the kitten, so silky and portable and so unlike Marty the dog who had been less cooperative with their games, helped mightily as Margaret and Patsy navigated the jolting transition to their new home. They were from Manchester, where their father oversaw the massive operation at the Avro aircraft factory. Tasked with producing as many Lancaster aircraft as possible, he was deferred from military service to essentially live at the plant and keep the lines moving. The factory was a prime target for German bombs aiming to cripple British aviation capacity, so he had dispatched his wife, infant son, and Marty the dog to extended family in Cardiff and the twins to Elsworth. It was the safest decision for them all, but being sent off from their mum and dad was not something little girls could easily understand. At night, they cuddled together face to face on a thin mattress heaped with a mound of old quilts, the soft eiderdown drawn under their chins, Marigold between them, tears dotting their smooth, round cheeks. To Marigold they whispered their deepest worries in their first months in Elsworth, confessing how much they missed mummy and daddy, which foods Ivy placed before them they didn’t really like, the pungent smells of the countryside that were unfamiliar and strange. Marigold listened intently except for the times she fell asleep.

  Ivy welcomed the chaos and demands the city children introduced to her household. The daily work of squeezing everyone successfully through dressing and bathing and meals and school lessons, the clamor of the boys racing down the steps each day and the quiet plotting as the girls worked to corner Marigold so they could put a bonnet on her head and place her in the old pram. A blessing, this, she thought to herself, a distraction for Hugo and for her, with Wills off somewhere learning how to preserve the Empire.

  Before his conscription, Wills was Elsworth’s butcher, sharing space with the greengrocer, a two-block walk from their house. They had come to Elsworth for the job, thinking that once he had some experience, they’d move someplace more interesting. That was ten years ago now. Wills had taken to the people and the work, learning their proclivities and exactly those cuts of meat each customer preferred. In the early days, some villagers accused him of selling low-quality meat that turned tough upon cooking, prompting Wills to do a bit of investigation around their cooking techniques. He ushered several chronic complainers into Ivy’s kitchen of a Saturday for simple cooking lessons he told her were necessary to prevent innocent rump roasts and tenderloins from becoming shoe leather—and to ensure he stayed in business. Indeed, under his gentle tutelage, his customers’ skills improved. The cooking lessons eventually turned into weekly dinners; attendees brought vegetables and breads and desserts to complement Will’s roast, which was always the admired centerpiece. To show their gratitude, the customers—now friends, really—showered the Hughes with fresh vegetables in season, eggs from their chicken coops, and biscuits and cakes every December to wish them a happy Christmas. Kind and dear—all of them—they had stood in the gap when Ivy, her own mother long dead, struggled to find her footing as a new mum. Dorothy Dowd, the vicar’s wife, arranged a little caravan of people who came to the house for several months to manage the laundry, get supper started, dust and clean a wee bit, and most importantly, take the baby for a stroll in the pram so Ivy could fall into the deep, restorative sleep her body required after a difficult pregnancy and protracted labor. When her stillborn daughter was born two years later, they swept in again to console Ivy and Wills in their heartbreak and assure them that life would go on. The villagers’ interest in Hugo remained avid as he grew, indulging him with small gifts and treats while steering him toward proper manners when he, as little boys are innately compelled, grew unruly. There were no Saturday cooking lessons now, with Wills gone, but there was plenty of activity with four children in the house. Ivy believed Elsworth had taught her to be open-hearted and grateful in a way she might not have been had they lived elsewhere. All those years of accumulated kindnesses fortified her now, as she navigated these days without the love and company of her husband.

  As fall turned to winter, the newly constituted and expanded, somewhat improvised Hughes family found a workable, shared rhythm. Vicar Dowd appeared at the door one afternoon, having walked over from Holy Trinity with a refurbished bicycle that at one time belonged to his grandson. The parish board did not entirely approve of the time he devoted to getting this and other cast-off bicycles in working order; the vicar knew displaced children needed more than the prayers of strangers to help them settle in, so he ignored the board and pressed on with the blessed ministry of bicycles. Margaret and Patsy were on the list to get theirs once they fulfilled the prerequisite of growing just a bit taller so their feet could reach the pedals.

  On their bicycles, Hugo and Colin explored the village, bumping across the cobbled streets and pedaling through the countryside that was transforming before their eyes into runways and tarmac. On Saturday mornings, Ivy packed them a pair of hard-boiled eggs, a bit of fruit, and some cheese so they could ride out beyond the schoolhouse and sit under the trees and watch. Their bellies full, the boys would lie back in the meadow, the sun warming their bones, and discuss England’s plight and that of their own families. Their fathers would return soon, they decided, since things over in France seemed stalemated. Soon, the armies would want to go home. And when Colin returned home after that, the boys vowed they’d become pen-pals because they’d discovered there was nothing like having a close friend your own age—“We’re more like brothers, really” Hugo said more than once—with whom to chew things over. These meadow mornings were Colin’s favorite times—free of adults, apart from the raucous rush of the city in which he’d been raised—and he was sad when the weather turned too cold to linger outside.

  Colin, Ivy observed, tended to grow pensive at the close of the day, the shadow of worry for his mum and dad ever present. So, she spoke frequently of Colin’s mother, inquiring as to her habits and routines to replicate what she could, reminding Colin to post a letter or card to her because surely Mrs. Clarke awaited the postman every day to bring news of him. As the calendar turned to 1940, Margaret and Patsy matriculated into school, having turned five and needing something beyond cat-chasing and games with one another to occupy them. They were a bit young, but they were smart and schoolmistress Helms abridged the longstanding rules to allow them and other evacuees their age to enroll in the January term. It was but one of the formerly hard and fast rules amended in Elsworth because circumstances demanded it. Ivy found the girls’ anxiety lessened when they spent the day in the company of other children.

  By spring, talk of the children returning to the cities gave way to whispers of imminent invasion. The German advance had not been stopped by the uncles and fathers and big brothers of the British Expeditionary Force, despite the confident pronouncements of the children on the train six months earlier. France was imperiled, and the English were scrambling, feverishly building airfields for the fighting men of the Royal Air Force who were, even now, taking to the skies over the French coast in a futile effort to stanch Germany’s advance. Perhaps with the new prime minister, England’s fortunes would improve.

  As Colin’s father was marched toward a POW camp inside the Reich, the War Office notified Ivy that Second Lieutenant William Hughes was missing. Despite repeated inquiries, the War Office had failed to locate his body and could not confirm his presence in a POW camp. They knew only that he had not been evacuated at Dunkirk but was believed to have survived the fall of Calais.

  Haywood Dowd volunteered for the Home Guard and once he received his uniform in late summer, he wore it almost exclusively, even under his clerical robes every Sunday. It was the least he could do, he explained from the pulpit, what with two grandsons in the war—one in the RAF and the other serving in an artillery unit. His parishioners quietly remarked to one another that he was preaching as well as he ever had, less stale and stuffy and more inspired than in previous years, one even making such a comment—obliquely—to Mrs. Dowd. But it wasn’t that her husband had suddenly developed new powers of oration, she knew. It wasn’t longer nights spent in his study, more carefully crafting messages for each Sunday’s worship. It was simply that now, when he urged the congregation to pray; when he read aloud the Psalms of David that lamented unjust conflict waged by cruel aggressors that, in the end, God would set to right; when he preached of painful sacrifice and ultimate trust in God, they heard and believed because this was the truth, the hope, to which they now staked their lives.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States,

  including all that we have known and cared for,

  will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister…

  Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that,

  if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years,

  men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

  –Winston Churchill

  London—as the Blitz begins

  Beryl moved through the quiet flat, gathering the things necessary for her workday—her gloves, her pocketbook, the apple and crackers that would suffice for a meal—crossing and recrossing the worn floorboards, unconsciously delaying her departure. She stood under the dim light in the hallway, placing her nurse’s cap just so over her dark curly hair, wondering when the purplish circles had become so pronounced beneath her eyes. The cat rubbed at her calves, his aloofness having evaporated soon after Gordon, then Colin had left. It was hard to remain remote when there were so few people around to notice it. Even cats of great reserve sought human contact now and again.

  It had been a year since Beryl had sent her son out of the city, the right decision not only for Colin’s safety, but because she now spent nearly all her waking hours at Grove Park Hospital, working from the early evening until the sun rose. The volume of patients was intensifying—alarmingly. For months, the Germans had directed their firepower at the ports and airfields: now bombs fell day and night across London. The government warned invasion was imminent, but what does one do with that kind of information? Short of catching a boat to America—across seas humming with U-boats and laden with mines—what were the options? One simply continued to do one’s duty, going to work each day, offering service to others, protecting what one could—both human life and, to a lesser extent, one’s belongings.

  At first, Beryl had tended to the terrible, shredding wounds of evacuated soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, but now civilians filled the wards. Women whose homes betrayed them, collapsing into ruin around them, heavy wooden beams issuing lethal blows. Children who should have been sent to the countryside a year ago, buried under mounds of brick that moments before formed the sturdy wall of a schoolhouse that had stood for three hundred years. The pain of watching Colin pull away on that train, pain that had hollowed her out and left her bereft and breathless had been erased and replaced with something else entirely: whenever she thought of him, miles away in Elsworth under another family’s roof, out of her influence and care, she was overcome with a gratitude that quieted her twirling thoughts and affirmed that her decision to live apart from her beloved little boy was righteous and generous. “Children are safer in the country,” posters on public walls in every English city read. “Leave them there.” She had expected her parents to take him, given the space and resources of their estate. In fact, they had room for perhaps six or eight children, but at the eleventh hour, her mother had rejected Beryl’s request, saying at her age, she couldn’t possibly keep up with a little boy, war or no war.

  Beryl had managed to travel to see Colin four times now, finding herself both glad and alarmed at how easily he had assimilated to village life, so much simpler and slower-paced. He would have academic ground to make up, surely, when he returned to London. If he returned to London. As Beryl followed this curlicue of thought, the best educational path to ensure Colin an expansive future, a shroud of shame settled over her. “God, forgive me,” she breathed, knowing that on this night, like the others, she would surely encounter mothers whose only hope would be that their children would live.

  With her colleagues at the hospital, her neighbors on the street, the news agent she chatted with on the odd afternoon as she picked up the latest newspaper, she shared the unspoken commitment to survive the next twenty-four hours with her chin up. Just this day. To get through the immediate challenge, solve the next urgent problem, obediently follow the newest directives of Prime Minister Churchill’s government. No musing or second-guessing. No public positing of theories on how long the battering might continue. Was it cowardice or courage? Was it wise to project ahead, to decipher telltale signs or read between the lines, to consider if the battle was already lost? No. All of England had collectively decided, apparently, to trust, to pray, to summon the resolve to follow through with one’s obligations and duties, despite the possibility that the next wooden beam careening from the ceiling might have your name on it. That was the shared sense of things—at least the sense that people would acknowledge to one another. We’re in this together—doubters not wanted. But in her own head, alone in her flat or out back in the garden under the Anderson shelter Gordon had fixed before he reported for duty—her thoughts spun and collided. She wondered if her cloistered life was the only way to live amidst the terror. Because that’s what the constant bombing created—abject terror as one street corner after another was hit, scarring her beloved city and the psyches of its residents. If the end of the world was at hand—or at least, the end of a free world—Beryl wondered if she’d regret spending these days like this. Despite dutiful, solemn examples around her—the Prime Minister first and foremost—she heard rumor there were some in London approaching the crisis differently. Like those in the Bible who believed Jesus’ return was right around the corner, so they stopped being earnest and dutiful. They’d had parties. Sex and drunkenness and all that. And there was talk that the very same thing was happening at some of London’s finest hotels. Was that wrong? Or was she wrong, with her spartan life, working to the point of exhaustion, living alone, and missing those she loved? It seemed all pleasure was gone for now, squeezed from daily living, as husbands left wives to take up arms, families fractured through loss and relocation. As she flattened herself out under the garden shelter, bombs whistling through the air and dropping dangerously close by, Beryl ruminated.

  Their life together had been sweet, hers and Gordon’s, even when it grew complicated, Beryl bending toward modernity in ways Gordon had not anticipated. He had studied architecture, his drafting table now her preferred place to sit and sip her tea. They had met when she was nineteen at a summer party at the country estate of her parents’ friends. He’d arrived late (on purpose, she always believed, impossible to miss), so they had not been properly introduced. Once she saw him, she was transfixed and tracked him like prey. He was a head taller than most men there, his face lean and sculpted under a blonde head of hair. His alert blue eyes betrayed uncertainty as to whether he wished to engage fully with this particular party and its assorted female guests. Beryl intercepted him at the punch bowl where they commiserated over the fact no invigorating spirits had yet been added. “Perhaps we should do so,” she’d offered, eyes twinkling, earning Gordon’s immediate interest and admiration. Much to the dismay of the other girls at the party, they had departed together and had not been apart since.

  Over her parents’ objections, they’d married young, Colin arriving less than a year later and quickly enchanting his grandparents, erasing any notion that Gordon and Beryl had not formed the most perfect family in the most brilliant way. A family trust ensured Beryl could afford help, but after those first sleepless, colicky months, Beryl released the nanny, much preferring to manage her baby on her own. When Gordon completed his studies, they moved from her family’s estate to London where Gordon’s parents lived, a decision Beryl’s mother protested vigorously given that Beryl’s older sister still lived at home. But Beryl wanted to enter nursing school, not because she intended to become a nurse but because science had always interested her and she found women with educations mildly subversive and most intriguing. To her surprise, her curiosity intensified with each class and clinical instruction. She discovered broad fields of inquiry opening to her that formerly she had not known existed. The miraculous beauty of the human organism became her fascination, its intricate chemistry and the ongoing mystery of its persistent functioning and ability to heal itself. It amused her to think of how small her world had been before, the notion that one might pursue education not to enhance one’s mind and capabilities, but to reposition oneself in society, in the eyes of others. It saddened her, actually, because she was quite sure most women still saw it exactly that way, most assuredly her own mother.