May's Boys

About the Author

Beryl P. Brown has won numerous prizes for her short stories. She graduated as a mature student in 2017 with a Master’s degree in creative writing.

After living for many years in rural Dorset, she, her husband and a large Dalmatian moved to a small 18th century cottage on the Suffolk/Essex border.

Beryl can be contacted at berylpbrown.uk

Author Note

Certain terms, which are unacceptable today, are used in the text purely to preserve the authenticity of the era.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Author Note

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

Acknowledgements

Coming next

For my mother, May,

whose name I have borrowed.

1927 - 1992

CHAPTER 1

May crouched over the handlebars; the night was as dark as the inside of a coal sack.

‘Who goes there?’

‘Watch out,’ she shouted, swinging sharply left. The bike nosedived into the bank, pitching May forward. She shot out a foot to stop herself from falling and barked her shin on the chain guard.

Rubbing her leg, she said, ‘Ephraim, what the heck are you doing in the middle of the lane?’

‘Friend or foe?’

He was such a pompous idiot. ‘You know exactly who I am.’

He switched on his shielded torch. ‘Can’t be too careful, May. WI meeting were it?’

He knew there had been a WI meeting; his wife never missed one.

‘We heard a bit of news. I’m sure Mrs Potts will tell you later but—’

‘Mrs Potts issen’ one for gossip.’

May covered a derisive snort with a cough. Ephraim and Isabella enjoyed making everyone’s war so much harder. What would the sanctimonious little twit do when ARP wardens were stood down? No doubt he’d find some other reason to strut around the village.

‘Ephraim, Dr Haskett is giving me a lift to Southampton tomorrow,’ she hesitated. ‘I’m worried. They’ve already had two doodlebug hits but there’s a rumour about a new kind of flying bomb. Silent, so you can’t hear it coming. Have—’

‘You’d do better to bide quiet, May Sheppard. Careless talk costs lives. Mr Churchill would tell folks if such a thing existed,’ he said. ‘You’d best get on – that lad needs a close eye kept on him.’

‘Ephraim, please stop using Cliff as a whipping boy. Yes, he caused a few problems when he was first evacuated five years ago. You’re like a cracked record.’ She wrenched the bike around, mounted and forced him to jump back as she pedalled off.

A barn owl floated soundlessly over her head as she pushed her bike up the garden path. She thought of the silent flying bombs and shuddered. At least Cliff had drawn the thick curtains, all she needed was another run-in with Ephraim. She heard his whiney voice in her head, ‘Put that light out, May Sheppard.’

The meagre beam of her torch was just enough to light her way around the cottage to the back door. Roll on the day when there was no need for blackouts and dim-outs.

Hanging up her coat, she let the warmth from the range envelope her after the cold of the October night. The smell of the onion and cheese pudding she’d left for Cliff to put in the oven made her mouth water.

‘Cliff?’

No reply. She opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and called again. Where was he? The terror she’d felt the night she thought he’d been caught in an air raid rekindled every time he was out after dark.

The brown metal pie dish held the remains of the onion pudding. Cliff had already eaten two-thirds – she encouraged him to take the lion’s share, letting him think she had a small appetite. She sat at the table and piled what was left on to a willow-patterned plate. Last night she’d caught sight of her jutting hipbones in the wardrobe mirror; the elastic of her knickers stretched like a rope bridge between two mountain peaks.

Despite the hardships and deprivations, life without Cliff was unimaginable. Had she made the right decision to work on her father-in-law’s farm rather than join up? Of course. If she’d been in the Forces, she wouldn’t have had the chance to provide a home for an evacuee. For Cliff. That had changed her life, and the decision they’d now made to apply for his adoption was what they both longed for.

As she emptied the kettle into the enamel washing-up bowl, her thoughts turned to the ordeal facing her the following day. Apart from the threat of flying bombs, there was the prospect of meeting Cliff’s mother, Lynette. How was she going to broach the subject of adoption? The woman might not take kindly to being asked to formally give up her son, notwithstanding that she hadn’t contacted him for four years. A sense of dread welled up at the thought of the scene that might follow.

The age-spotted clock over the range showed ten minutes to nine. Where was Cliff?

She turned the knurled knob on the wireless. Its window glowed amber as she waited for the set to warm up.

The announcer was reading the news headlines when the back door banged open. Bringing in a blast of cold air, Cliff bounced in, face radiant. ‘Auntie May,’ he said, ‘look what I’ve got us.’

She felt a surge of pleasure at his appearance, even as she noticed his muddy boots on the clean lino. She turned off the wireless.

With a flourish, Cliff brandished a brace of pheasants. Dead wings flapped open as he held up the birds by their clawed feet. She had an image of Ephraim’s face glowing with vindictive delight.

‘Where did you get them?’

The smile left Cliff’s face to be replaced with that guarded look she hadn’t seen for a long time; that look he’d had when he first came to the village. Although he was often up to mischief – climbing over fences, scrumping apples and building dens with precious firewood – he was accused by Ephraim of being behind everything from water leaks to fuel thefts. How the weaselly warden would relish adding poaching to Cliff’s misdemeanours.

She felt a tightness in her chest; her job could be in jeopardy if he’d poached from the farm, but she shouldn’t have snapped. She should have waited for him to explain. The sound of the crackling fire and the ticking of the old clock filled the silence.

‘Well?’

‘I din’t poach ’em.’ He always reverted to his backstreet accent when he was upset.

Damn. ‘I didn’t say you did. But where did they come from?’

‘A friend.’ He dumped the birds on the table, kicked off his boots and walked to the stairs door. ‘I thought you’d be pleased. I’m goin’ to bed.’

‘Cliff—’

The door slammed. The stairs creaked as he climbed them.

She was as bad as Ephraim. Picking up the birds, she wiped a smear of blood from the table and carried their dead weight to the icy scullery.

CHAPTER 2

Cliff kicked the bedroom door shut. After all the talks she’d given him, telling him it was a bad thing to take what didn’t belong to you, how could she think he’d pinched the pheasants? She thought he hadn’t learned anything. Maybe he’d be better off with his mum.

Auntie May had stood up for him in the beginning, when Old Potty had threatened to call the coppers after he’d pinched his apples. Potty’d said he’d been going to win a cup with them, and he wanted Cliff to pay.

He had nothing. His mum would have killed him if he’d been sent back to Southampton owing money. He’d been really scared, but Auntie May told the old misery guts that he’d never seen fruit on trees before and hadn’t known they belonged to someone.

She’d shamed Old Potty. Said how bad he’d look trying to get money from an evacuee. In the end he’d piped down, but, now, she thought he’d nicked something. He knew you couldn’t just take things. Especially when stuff was rationed and there wasn’t enough to go round.

The room was icy. He ripped off his clothes and dragged on his pyjamas. The springs twanged as he leapt into bed still buttoning his pyjama jacket. He slid his feet between the sheets. The warm sheets. He wriggled his toes into the fluffy jumper wrapped around the stone hot water bottle.

Auntie May had put a bottle in his bed. He hadn’t even washed. He would have done, and he would have told her about the pheasants, if she hadn’t decided he’d been poaching.

His mum never checked that he’d washed or cleaned his teeth, even on the nights she wasn’t out when he went to bed.

He heard the clatter of the latch as Auntie May closed the scullery door. He shouldn’t have slammed out on her. He liked it that she was always there; it was a snuggly feeling, like the hot water bottle.

Sometimes, back in the city, he’d wet the bed rather than go out to the privy in the dark. The shouts from the street scared him as much as the black shadows in the yard and more than the thought of the clip round the ear he’d get when his mum found the wet sheets.

Auntie May hadn’t got cross when he’d wet the bed. She got a rubber sheet and gave him a guzzunder to pee in, but he wasn’t scared here and, after the first week, never needed it. Some evacuees had to wash their own sheets if they peed the bed. One boy was thrashed.

He turned over and wriggled down the bed. He was never scared here. He closed his eyes and remembered the night he’d heard his mum talking to a man in the front room as he crept downstairs to the privy. He was passing the living room door when the man opened it and grabbed his arm.

‘What d’yer think you’re doin’ yer little devil?’

He was terrified and couldn’t speak. His arm hurt and he’d stretched his toes down to try to reach the lino as he was hauled upward. The man smelt of beer and cigarettes and he had crusty patches under the grey stubble on his chin.

His mum hurtled from the front room. She dragged the man off, looking like the cat he’d found hissing and spitting in a corner of the yard.

‘Leave him be,’ she snarled, pulling the man back into the room.

She jerked her head in the direction of the back door. ‘Go,’ she mouthed to Cliff.

He ran across the yard, his pyjama trousers slapping wetly around his thighs.

He should have told Auntie May about the pheasants. The story would have been easy then. Now it was like a huge mountain he had to get over: saying sorry, making her believe he wasn’t a poacher. He tugged the eiderdown up to his chin and wrapped his feet around the jumper. Maybe she wouldn’t ask about them again.

CHAPTER 3

From the minute the desolate Western Docks came into view, May was certain she’d made the journey in vain. How could anyone be traced among these wastelands?

It was after eleven by the time the doctor dropped her off. The journey to Southampton had been a nightmare of hold-ups, with military vehicles and British and American Army ambulances all having priority over civilian traffic.

The street where Lynette Erwin lived at the beginning of the war was a scene of destruction. Shards of homes stood as stark one-dimensional monuments to life before the first bombs fell on the city.

A weak sun glinted off the barrage balloons that floated above the city like a school of silver whales. She shaded her eyes, looking up and remembering the threat of flying bombs. Did the blimps protect against doodlebugs, or the new silent weapons if they existed?

She trudged up the road, wishing she’d worn her other shoes. Her navy leather courts were already spattered red with brick dust. Both her pairs of shoes had been repaired many times and, because she used most of her own coupons for Cliff’s clothes, she had no hope of replacing them.

She approached an end wall from which the rest of the house had been ripped away. A ragged ledge was all that remained of the upstairs floorboards. Above it, an intact mirror hung by one corner, reflecting the open sky. As she moved past, she was startled to see the adjoining house seemingly undamaged. She banged on the door and a shower of powdery green paint flaked off. The woman who tugged the door open was probably in her mid-forties but looked a decade older. Her complexion was sallow beneath the paisley-patterned turban that covered her hair. She wore a faded wraparound overall.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs erm…’

‘Wallbanks.’

‘Mrs Wallbanks, I’m trying to find Lynette Erwin. She used to live at number eleven.’

The woman looked her up and down. Everything May had on was pre-war, patched and mended over and over again but, compared with this woman, she looked like a fashion plate. The one time she’d met Lynette, the peroxide hair and red lipstick had labelled her what she was: a docks prostitute. She’d turned up, on a whim, at May’s cottage. She wanted to take Cliff home, saying he was a city boy and needed to be back there with his mother.

The reason she’d wanted her son was obvious. To send him out stealing – the only way of life he’d known before the evacuation.

Looking at Lynette’s former neighbour, May realised she would have been wise to have dressed down if she hoped to get help from anyone here.

She tried a different tack. ‘I’m May Sheppard. Mrs Erwin’s son is fostered with me in Crompton Parva.’

Mrs Wallbanks’s frown retreated and her eyes lit up with eagerness. ‘Cliff? Is he all right?’

May explained that they hadn’t heard from Cliff’s mother since she’d told them she’d been bombed out of this street. A scribbled note and a half crown had come at Christmas 1940. They were the last things the lad had received from his mother.

‘Mrs Erwin didn’t let us know where she’d moved to. Have you any idea how I might find her?’

Mrs Wallbanks put a hand on the doorknob. ‘I heard she’d gone up Millbrook – or was it Shirley? Up that side a Soton, anyway. I ain’t seen her for years.’ Her lip curled. ‘She got quite partial to the Yanks.’

She began to pull the door shut but then added, ‘You could try the Rest Centre. A lot went there after the Blitz.’ She closed the door.

May stared at the peeling paint. Mrs Wallbanks hadn’t said where the Rest Centre was but she didn’t dare disturb her again. She continued walking along the ruined street. Lynette Erwin had clearly not changed her occupation and didn’t seem very particular where she sold her favours. What had made her take to that kind of life? Seth had been May’s first love and her experience of sex began and ended within their all too brief marriage.

At the end of the street she turned right towards the docks. A hand-painted sign on the door of a redbrick hall read WVS Canteen.

Inside, she bought a cup of tea from the volunteer behind the makeshift counter.

As she drew a rickety chair across the bare wooden floor, the grey-haired assistant left her urn to come and wipe the table. She said, ‘Waiting for your fella? On a ship is he, dear?’

May hated telling people whose families were giving their lives for their country that her husband had died in a freak farming accident before the war. It made her feel as if she had no claim to grief.

‘I’m a widow,’ she said, lifting the thick white beaker. ‘I’m trying to find someone from here who was bombed out in November 1940.’

The woman finished her wiping, ignoring the greasy streaks the cloth had left on the ringed table. ‘Not an easy job.’

Standing in the doorway as the woman pointed out the way to the Rest Centre, May heard the sound she dreaded: the wail of an air raid siren.

The woman sprang into action. ‘The shelter’s this way,’ she said, slamming the door and grabbing May’s arm. ‘If it’s a doodlebug, it’ll likely get there before us.’

May ran alongside her. Could she hear the tell-tale engine of a V1?

At a road junction a group of people were staring at the sky, nervously asking questions they clearly did not expect to be answered.

‘Can you hear it yet?’

‘Where is it?’

‘Is it still running?’

May waited as the WVS woman instructed the watchers to get to the shelter across the road.

‘No point, love, it’s here. Look,’ said a man squinting into the sun. ‘Just pray the noise don’t stop.’

Everybody fell silent as the bomb flew almost overhead, silhouetted like a black crucifix against the sky. May held her breath, praying the engine wouldn’t cut out and cause the thing to come down nearby. The droning ran on. There was a communal sigh, like a sharp breeze, as the plane continued inland.

‘Looks like Salisbury’s in for it,’ someone said.

May thought of the people who would hear the motor cut and have only fifteen seconds before they knew their fate.

It was two o’clock when May arrived at the heavily sandbagged police station. Her feet were sore and her legs ached from scrambling along rubble-strewn pavements and backtracking after finding roads closed off.

Tracing Cliff’s mother was becoming an endless quest. Someone at the Rest Centre remembered Lynette and thought she’d moved to a flat in Millbrook. It was a part of Southampton May’s rudimentary knowledge didn’t include. She was asking directions when an off-duty ARP warden interrupted. He told her the only flats he knew of in that area had received a direct hit from a parachute mine.

The Rest Centre staff gave her a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich and the warden suggested she make enquiries at the police station. ‘Old Bill Wicks has been a copper around here for donkey’s years. He may remember her.’

At the desk, she asked whether PC Wicks was on duty. She was told to wait, and sat on a hard bench opposite a wall plastered with dog-eared posters. The sulphurous reek of cooked cabbage was thick in the air. After some minutes, a rotund policeman appeared, dabbing at his mouth.

‘Apologies, madam, we just got a delivery of bully beef and I’d missed my break.’ He pushed his thick glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘What can I do for you?’

May explained she wanted to locate Cliff’s mother.

‘I haven’t seen Lynette Erwin for years. I heard she got a bad name for herself with the other girls because she’d only fraternise with the Yanks. Not that that would bother Lynette. She always had her eye on the main chance and the Yanks are pretty free with their money.’

May asked whether he knew where she’d been living when he’d last seen her.

‘We’ll have it on record from the last time we pulled her in. I’d have to check the files and they’re in underground storage. Give me your address, and I’ll drop you a line. I think it may have been down where the flats got the parachute mine. If so, very few were pulled out alive.’

May stared at a faded poster, Join the Wrens and Free a Man for the Fleet. If she’d taken that option, she wouldn’t be facing the possibility of telling an eleven-year-old boy that his mother had been killed.

CHAPTER 4

When May opened the door, she instantly knew the house was empty. The warmth of the kitchen wasn’t enough to ward off the chill of the car journey and she shivered as she wondered where Cliff could be.

It’s only six o’clock. Stop panicking and stop making assumptions, she told herself. She began banging around pots and pans. Cliff should have been here, waiting for news of her trip. Disappointment vied with relief that she didn’t have to decide how much to tell him right away.

She checked the bread crock. The heel of a loaf and a few saved crusts. Maybe make a bread and date pudding if she could stretch the remaining sugar ration? It would mean resorting to the foul saccharine in their tea.

She was weighing out the pudding ingredients when she heard the click of the latch. Her stomach lurched. How was she going to handle this? She had to support him over Lynette’s disappearance but, if they had a battle over the pheasants, it would make that so much harder. Parenting clearly wasn’t all picnics by the river on a sunny day, and she was halfway to signing up for a lifetime’s commitment. Alone.

Cliff seemed to be taking an age to come in, and, with a heavy heart, May swung open the door. On one leg, a boot half off, he was struggling to steady the three eggs he was holding in his cap.

‘I wasn’t sure when you’d be back, so I helped Mr Arrowsmith with the hens. He gave me these.’ He looked at her uncertainly. He had straw in his hair, the tattered jacket he wore was too short in the sleeves and he smelt of the henhouse. He’s like a scarecrow, she thought, taking the eggs from him.

‘Come here.’ She put an arm around his shoulders in a lop-sided hug. ‘Thank you. I know Mr Arrowsmith will be grateful. He finds it hard to fit in my work when I’m away.’

He’d helped Tom of his own volition. The curmudgeonly old devil wouldn’t be able to find fault with that.

She put the eggs on the dresser. ‘I’ll use one of these for the bread pudding.’

They sat at the table with steaming cups of tea. Cliff looked down, running a nail along the pattern on the oilcloth. ‘Did you find her?’

May told him about the journey on roads clogged with military vehicles. Usually he was eager to hear what she’d seen, but this time he just nodded.

‘I met Mrs Wallbanks—’

‘Did you see my house?’

Hell. The houses were just heaps of matchwood and it was impossible to identify individual homes.

‘Mrs Wallbanks’s house was the only one that seemed unharmed.’

His face fell.

‘Is Mrs W all right?’ he asked. ‘She used to look after me sometimes when Mum was out.’

Before May could reply he went on, ‘Didn’t she know where Mum was? She always knew everything – Mum called her a nosy ol’ biddy.’

‘She wasn’t sure, but she sent her love to you.’ She felt her face flush at the lie and dipped her head to sip the hot tea. ‘While I was in the city, a doodlebug flew over.’

Cliff stared at her, eyes wide. ‘Did you see it? Did the engine stop?’

‘It flew on, thank goodness.’

‘Was it scary?’

‘A bit. But there wasn’t time to be frightened – it was like a