These had appeared as an act of God apparently without human agency; their names did not appear on any list; they carried no credentials; no one was responsible for them. They were found lurking under the seats of a carriage when the train was emptied on the evening of the first influx. They had been dragged out and stood on the platform where everyone denied knowledge of them, and since they could not be left there, they were included in the party that was being sent by bus to Malfrey village. From that moment they were on the list; they had been given official existence and their destiny was inextricably involved with that of Malfrey.
Nothing was ever discovered about the Connollies’ parentage. When they could be threatened or cajoled into speaking of their antecedents they spoke, with distaste, of an “Auntie.” To this woman, it seemed, the war had come as a Godsent release. She had taken her dependents to the railway station, propelled them into the crowd of milling adolescence, and hastily covered her tracks by decamping from home. Enquiry by the police in the street where the Connollies professed to have lived produced no other information than that the woman had been there and was not there any longer. She owed a little for milk; otherwise she had left no memorial on that rather unimpressionable district.
There was Doris, ripely pubescent, aged by her own varied accounts anything from ten years to eighteen. An early and ingenious attempt to have her certified as an adult was frustrated by an inspecting doctor who put her at about fifteen. Doris had dark, black bobbed hair, a large mouth and dark pig’s eyes. There was something of the Eskimo about her head but her colouring was ruddy and her manner more vivacious than is common among that respectable race. Her figure was stocky, her bust prodigious, and her gait, derived from the cinematograph, was designed to be alluring.
Micky, her junior by the length of a rather stiff sentence for housebreaking, was of lighter build; a scrawny, scowling little boy; a child of few words and those, for the most part, foul.
Marlene was presumed to be a year younger. But for Micky’s violent denials she might have been taken for his twin. She was the offspring of unusually prolonged coincident periods of liberty in the lives of her parents, which the sociologist must deplore, for Marlene was simple. An appeal to have her certified imbecile was disallowed by the same inspecting doctor, who expressed an opinion that country life might work wonders with the child.
There the three had stood, on the eve of the war, in Malfrey Parish Hall, one leering, one lowering, and one drooling, as unprepossessing a family as could be found in the kingdom. Barbara took one look at them, looked again to see that her weary eyes were not playing tricks with her, and consigned them to the Mudges of Upper Lamstock, a tough farming family on a remote homestead.
Within a week Mr. Mudge was at the park, with the three children in the back of his milk truck. “It’s not for myself, Mrs. Sothill; I’m out and about all day and in the evenings I’m sleepy, and being with animals so much I don’t take on so. But it’s my old woman. She do take on and she won’t stand for it. She’ve locked herself in upstairs and she won’t come down till they’ve gone and when she do say that she means of it, Mrs. Sothill. We’re willing to do anything in reason to help the war, but these brats aren’t to be borne and that’s flat.”
“Oh dear, Mr. Mudge, which of them is giving trouble?”
“Why it’s all of ‘em, ma’am. There’s the boy was the best of ‘em at first though you can’t understand what he do say, speaking as they do where he come from. Nasty, unfriendly ways he had but he didn’t do much that you could call harm not till he’d seen me kill the goose. I took him out to watch to cheer him up like, and uncommon interested he was and I thought I’ll make a country lad of you yet. I gave him the head to play with and he seemed quite pleased. Then no sooner was I off down to the root field, than blessed if he didn’t get hold of a knife and when I came back supper-time there was six of my ducks dead and the old cat. Yes, mum, blessed if he hadn’t had the head off of our old yellow cat. Then the little un, she’s a dirty girl begging your pardon, mum. It’s not only her wetting the bed; she’ve wetted everywhere, chairs, floor and not only wetting, mum. Never seem to have been taught to be in a house where she comes from.”
“But doesn’t the elder girl do anything to help?”
“If you ask me, mum, she’s the worst of the lot. My old woman would stick it but for her, but it’s that Doris makes her take on like she do. Soft about the men, she is, mum. Why she even comes making up to me and I’m getting on to be her grandf’er. She won’t leave our Willie alone not for a minute, and he’s a bashful boy our Willie and he can’t get on with the work, her always coming after him. So there it is, mum. I’m sorry not to oblige but I’ve promised my old woman I won’t come back with ‘em and I dusn’t go back on what I’ve said.”
Mr. Mudge was the first of a succession of hosts. The longest that the Connollies stayed, in any place was ten days; the shortest was an hour and a quarter. In six weeks they had become a legend far beyond the parish. When influential old men at the Turf in London put their heads together and said, “The whole scheme has been a mistake. I was hearing last night some examples of the way some of the evacués are behaving…” the chances were that the scandal originated with the Connollies. They were cited in the House of Commons; there were paragraphs about them in official reports.
Barbara tried separating them, but in their first night apart Doris climbed out of her window and was lost for two days, to be found in a barn eight miles away, stupefied with cider; she gave no coherent account of her adventure. On the same evening Micky bit the wife of the roadman on whom he was quartered, so that the district nurse had to be called in; while Marlene had a species of seizure which aroused unfulfilled hopes that she might be dead. Everyone agreed that the only place for the Connollies was “an institution”; and at last, just before Christmas, after formalities complicated by the obscurity of their origins, to an institution they were sent; and Malfrey settled back to entertain its guests with a Christmas tree and a conjuror, with an air of relief which could be sensed for miles around. It was as though the All Clear had sounded after a night of terror. And now the Connollies were back.
“What’s happened, Mrs. Fremlin? Surely the Home can’t send them away.”
“It’s being evacuated. All the children are being sent back to the places they came from. Malfrey was the only address they had for the Connollies, so here they are. The Welfare Woman brought them to the Parish Hall. I was there with the Guides so I said I’d bring them up to you.”