All The Days of My Life by Hilary Bailey

not asking for an egg, not even demanding a dribble of golden syrup, in the shape of an M, across her porridge. Mrs Gates disliked it when she asked for favours. Also, she had found out that many children in the village were not as lucky as she. On the whole, though, she felt very secure, more secure, in fact, with the imperturbable Mrs Gates than she had ever felt with Ivy Waterhouse, whose nervy London ways often led to a quick smack when she least expected one, or a sudden hug where a blow might have been much more appropriate.
    By and large Lady Allaun, too, had coped calmly with the arrival of this grubby child, with her whining cockney voice – a child who had never slept in a bed, let alone a room, by herself, who had never owned a toothbrush, had never seen any bath other than the kitchen sink, or eaten, it seemed to her, anything but fish and chips, egg and chips or pie and chips, all washed down with cups of tea. But Mary, Lady Allaun recognized early on, was pretty, bright, adaptable and fairly quiet. The house was large and Mrs Gates was fond of the child and very capable. So Lady Allaun was content that she had set the necessary example in taking in one of London’s threatened children and had not made too bad a bargain in doing so.
    At Twining’s farm Mary’s brother Jack and his friend Ian worked like dogs but ate like hogs, slept in the beds belonging to the two Twining boys, who had both been conscripted, and one killed, and grew strong and healthy. They even helped to bring Mrs Twining, whose Donald’s bones lay at the bottom of the Channel in the carcase of a Spitfire, back to the normal world.
    Jim and Win Hodges, too, stepped into the places of the dead, for the Becketts, who ran a market garden a mile from the village, had lost two of their three children from diphtheria the previous winter. Thebrother and sister became slow and ruddy, in the country style, as they worked between the rows of onions and sprouts in winter and culled the apples in the orchard in summer. Their sharp voices and quick city glances had gone. Like the boys at Twining’s farm, they were soon children of the house.
    Mannie Frankel, who had also taken to his new life, sleeping in the postman’s loft and helping with the mail every day, was wrenched suddenly from a pleasant life by his brother Ben, who arrived while Mannie was hanging over the garden gate and dreaming quietly into the street, and took him immediately back to London. The family had come to the conclusion that with the Germans a bare forty miles away on the coast of Normandy, Mannie was in more danger at Framlingham than he would be in London, if there were an invasion. In London, they reasoned, they could move from place to place more easily and Mannie’s distinctively Jewish looks would be less obvious than they were in Framlingham, where the rest of the population had a solid, Saxon appearance.
    But as the other London children settled down, or were taken back by their parents for one reason or another, things went from bad to worse for Cissie Messiter and Peggy Jones at the Rectory. Cissie grew paler and thinner. Peggy became slower and slower, and more irritating to Mrs Templeton, who, herself, grew thinner.
    Perhaps, out of all the evacuees at Framlingham, Mary Waterhouse was the happiest. She was the youngest, so that her earlier memories erased themselves faster. Her beloved Jack was just a short walk across the fields from her. She had the best conditions – she was, after all, the squire’s evacuee. The Allaun fields, including those of the tenant farmers on either side, were hers to play in. There she walked in the late summer among rows of stiff and yellow wheat, plucking off the ears and rubbing them between her fingers, chewing on the hard grains. There were the meadows in spring. The sweet grass was hers to lie in and gaze up at the blue sky. The poppies in the summer cornfields were hers to pick, the shady copses