Tuppence To Spend Read Online Free

pinching stuff from Woolworths or the allotments.
    He went down the back alley and up the narrow garden, passing the sheets of corrugated iron that were supposed to be made into an Anderson shelter. Everyone else had got theirs up but Sammy’s father hadn’t even got the hole properly dug yet. He said he was going to wait until he knew for certain there was going to be a war. It was daft, doing all this before you even knew it was going to happen.
    Dan and Gordon had already left for work at the Camber dock, and Nora was downstairs, washing up the dishes that had been left the previous night. She was half leaning on the sink, working slowly, and her pale face had a yellowish tinge to it. She looked round as Sammy came through the back door and gave him a wan smile.
    ‘There you are, love. Did you see your mates off? Go off all right, did they?’
    He nodded and picked up a grubby tea towel to start drying. ‘They went on buses. Then they were going to go on trains, but nobody knows where they’re going. It’s a secret.’
    ‘I know, love. Can’t see why it should be, I must say. The blooming Germans aren’t going to be worried about a lot of nippers.’ She gave him an anxious glance. ‘Did you wish you could be going too?’
    Sammy looked at her. His mother had changed a lot in the past year. He could remember when she was lively and pretty, playing games or singing to him. She used to sing old songs and nursery rhymes, and she had one favourite that she’d sung to him ever since he was a baby:
    ‘Sammy, Sammy, shine a light,
Ain’t you playing out tonight?’
    The song was part of a game, a sort of hide-and-seek after dark in which half the children ran off to hide and the rest searched for them. If you thought you knew where a hider was, you had to call out the rhyme and then the hider must show his light – a torch, if he possessed one, or a candle in a jam jar, hidden under his jacket – and if he was caught he had to join the chasers. Sammy’s mother, who had lived out in the country with her granny for a while when she was a little girl, said it was best played among the trees and fields, but Pompey children thought the streets and alleyways of the town were best, and they didn’t call out ‘Sammy’. Their word was ‘Dick’ and Micky Baxter had sneered at Sammy when he’d first played the game.
    ‘Well, it was Sammy where my mum lived,’ he’d retorted, and Micky had stepped forward, his fists raised pugnaciously before Tim Budd stepped in.
    ‘Leave him alone, Micky. It don’t matter what name we use so long as we get on with the game. My candle’s not going to last all that long, I could only get a bit of a stub.’
    Nora still sang to him occasionally, but her voice was weak and tired now, and when she sang the ‘shine a light’ rhyme her eyes would fill with tears.
    She’d started to get ill after Sammy’s whooping cough and not long before Gordon had got into trouble, but it wasn’t anything you’d go to the doctor for, she said. Just feeling tired and sick and having headaches, or even aching all over. Doctors couldn’t do much about that sort of thing and besides, she and Dan didn’t have the money. Not for just feeling tired. She’d be better soon anyway.
    But she hadn’t got any better, some days she didn’t get up at all. Sammy could do some of the jobs she couldn’t manage, but on the whole most of them were left undone. Getting meals was the only thing that really had to bedone, and even then their dinner often consisted of no more than a few pennyworth of chips from the shop in September Street.
    He thought about the green fields and trees where the others were going today. He’d watched them getting on the buses; some, like Tim Budd, had been as excited as if they were going on holiday, but others had cried and clung to their mothers.
    ‘I’d rather stop here with you and Tibby,’ he said. He leant against his mother, feeling the sharpness of her bones.
    She