After the Cabaret by Hilary Bailey Page B

collect him. He hasn’t got any money. Potter said to stay where he was.’
    â€˜Oh, my God,’ said Vi. ‘What’s he doing there? He’s meant to be in the country.’
    â€˜He told Potter he didn’t like it so he ran away.’
    â€˜The little—’ exclaimed Vi. ‘I’ll go and collect him, I suppose.’
    She and Sally set off for King’s Cross. Some months before Jack Simcox had been evacuated to Lancaster with a small suitcase and a label bearing his name and address strung round his neck. Large numbers of London children had been sent away to be safe from the air-raids. However, it was not unusual for their parents to bring them back. Few, though, took the law into their own hands, as Jack apparently had, and returned alone.
    On the bus, Vi exclaimed, ‘Silly little fool. What’s he think he’s coming back to? A house with all the windows boarded up. No gas. Spending all night in a tube stationwell, these days Ted and me go into the Phillpots’ air-raid shelter up the road, but it’s horrible. You sit up all night because there’s no room to lie down. You have to run down the garden to the outside lav through the middle of a raid if you need to go. The baby cries. Jack was all right up north. He was living with a vicar, in a vicarage, for God’s sake. He had fresh milk, eggs, meat. My God, what wouldn’t I do for a good breakfast, with bacon and eggs and a bit of sausage? Now how am I going to manage? Even my gran’s disappeared – gone up to Scotland to plonk herself on an old admirer. Jack’ll have to go back, if they’ll still have him.’
    â€˜The vicar’s probably a bastard,’ observed Sally, lighting a cigarette.
    They found nine-year-old Jack on a seat in the busy station. He was talking to a soldier with a kit-bag at his feet. Jack had his gas mask with him and nothing else. His first words were ‘I didn’t like it there. Don’t send me back.’
    The soldier said to Vi, ‘It doesn’t sound any good there, miss, if you’ll pardon me putting my oar in.’
    â€˜Oh, I don’t know,’ said Vi. ‘Let’s get you home first, what’s left of it.’
    â€˜Did we get bombed?’ Jack asked keenly.
    â€˜Yes – weren’t we lucky?’
    â€˜Part of it was that he was worrying about you, see,’ the soldier explained helpfully. ‘He kept on thinking you and his brother were dead and no one was telling him.’
    â€˜All right, Jack,’ said Vi. ‘Stay here and live on grey bread and marge and spend all night in a shelter with the rest of us – I don’t care.’
    â€˜Thanks, Vi,’ Jack said, in heartfelt tones.
    Over tea and a bun in the station café he told her, ‘Mrs Rathbone, the vicar’s wife, kept shaking me. I thought my head would drop off.’
    â€˜What had you done?’ Vi asked suspiciously.
    â€˜Chased a few hens,’ he told her. ‘They weren’t hurt. She had no call to slam me up against a wall. I think she’s potty.’
    â€˜I’ll write a nasty letter to the billeting officer,’ Vi promised. ‘But what am I going to do with you? Your gran’s gone. You’ll have to go round to the Phillpots while I’m at the club. I can’t leave you alone in the middle of air-raids. I can’t even trust you not to disappear now you’ve apparently got the knack of taking long train journeys by yourself. Lancaster to London! You know our mum never left the East End in all her life – never even went up West once. Never went further than Aldgate.’ Vi made this sound like proof of virtue and respectability.
    â€˜I’ll take your turn tonight,’ Sally volunteered.

Chapter 22
    â€˜That evening Theo turned up at La Vie,’ Bruno reported in the steamy café. He mimicked a rather husky, upper-class voice, ‘“The only man