Maggie Lucas sat on her daughter’s bed and checked the haversack one last time against the instructions sent by the school: spare socks and a change of underwear; night clothes; two clean handkerchiefs; plimsolls to wear indoors; and a toothbrush, comb and towel. It wasn’t a difficult list, and she must have been through it a hundred times already, but she wanted to make sure that Angela had everything she needed when she went away. She fastened the bag with a sigh and adjusted the shoulder strap, wishing they had been able to afford the rucksack recommended in the letter, but this one would do the job well enough, and other children would be packed off with worse. Bad enough that she had to go at all.
If she had to go.
There it was again, the doubt that kept her awake at night and plagued her during the day. She and Bob had talked it through until they were blue in the face, but still she wasn’t sure if they were doing the right thing – and she could tell that her husband felt the same, even if he was better at hiding it. Every instinct she had said that surely, if war came, it would be better for families to stick together and not go breaking up their homes? But the advice had been persuasive, couched in that brown envelope that sat behind the clock on the mantelpiece until Bob got home from work: a better chance outside the towns, they said; no guarantees – they wouldn’t go that far – but safer for the kids than the homes they were leaving behind. Then came the meetings, sitting in the school hall with rows and rows of bewildered parents, listening to speeches about knockout blows and casualties per ton until you’d think that the bombs were already falling. She could scarcely believe that there was a time when the word ‘evacuation’ had never crossed their lips; it was all they talked about at home now, sucking the air from the room whenever they were together, and eventually the decision was made. Bob had stormed out to the pub that night, even though it was only a Monday, while she retreated to the kitchen to make the tea, banging the pans and plates about in case Angela could hear her crying.
The haversack felt absurdly light as she took it downstairs, absurdly inadequate to keep her child safe. Angela sat at the table, her breakfast untouched, and the smell of bacon that filled the small kitchen turned Maggie’s stomach; it had the air of a prisoner’s last meal about it, although she wasn’t entirely sure which one of them was condemned. ‘Come on, sweetheart, eat your breakfast,’ she said brightly, hating the false note in
