Under the Apple Tree Read Online Free Page B

Grove by sight and from Alice’s talk.
    ‘Who’s been killed, Dad?’
    ‘I’m not sure if you knew her,’ Alice said. She looked
    down at the black and white cat on her knee, stroking his
    head. ‘She’d only been here a few months - bombed out in
    the first big raid she was, and came to live in March Street.
    Kathy Simmons - had two little girls and a baby boy.’
    ‘I remember you talking about her.’ Judy stared at her
    grandmother. ‘Wasn’t the baby born in the shelter? Don’t
    say she’s been killed? Was that her house I saw this
    morning, bombed flat?’
    ‘That’s the one. Olive Chapman as was - you know, she
    married Derek Harker from the builder’s - had just gone
    over to fetch her to their shelter but Kathy went back
    indoors to boil some water for her Thermos flask, apparently,
    just as the bomb fell.’ Alice shook her head. Her face
    creased with sadness. ‘They said she couldn’t have known
    anything about it - but still, it’s cruel, a young mother like
    that killed for no reason.’
    ‘Oh, how awful.’ Judy put both hands to her face. ‘What
    about the children? Those little girls - and the baby?’
    Cissie took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. ‘Olive
    had the girls with her, out in the street. They were blown halfway up the road by the blast, but they weren’t hurt, not
    as such. But the baby - he was with his mummy, poor little
    scrap.’ She stopped, her mouth working. ‘Only six months
    old. It don’t bear thinking of.’
    Polly put her hand on her sister’s arm. ‘Don’t upset
    yourself all over again, Cis. It’s terrible, I know, but like
    Mum says, they couldn’t have known anything about it.’
    ‘But it’s their lives gone, isn’t it!’ Cissie cried. ‘That little baby, with his whole life ahead of him - he never even had
    the chance to learn to crawl! As for those two girls, they’ve
    lost their mother. And they’re not the only ones, are they?
    There’s you, Polly, with your Johnny gone, and poor Olive
    Chapman lost her baby that she was expecting, and others,
    hundreds and hundreds of others. What was Mrs Shaw
    along the road telling you about her Gladys, driving that
    ambulance last night? Went down a cellar she did, and
    found a whole family dead down there, all except one little
    girl. How’s that poor little soul ever going to get over it?
    How are any of them ever going to get over it? And this is
    just the beginning!’ She pulled her apron up over her face
    and began to cry. ‘I don’t think I can stand it any more!’ she
    said in a muffled voice. ‘I just don’t think I can stand it!’
    The others gazed at her and then looked at each other
    miserably in the glow of the fire. There didn’t seem to be
    anything anyone could say, Judy thought. They all felt
    pretty much the same. But you couldn’t give in. You just
    couldn’t.
    ‘Come on, Mum,’ she said gently. ‘We all depend on you,
    you know. You’re the one that keeps us all going.’
    ‘Well, I’m not much use to you now,’ Cissie said bitterly.
    ‘I’m not much use to no one. I’ve just had enough, that’s all.
    We’ve been having raids for months, and there’s been all
    those terrible things happening in London and Coventry and
    the rest, and now it’s our turn, and they’re just bashing us to pieces, to pieces — and what can we do about it, eh? Tell me
    that. Oh, I know we can bomb them too, but what good’s that going to do? It just means a whole lot more people get killed
    in their own homes, people like us who never wanted a war in
    the first place. How’s it ever going to end?’
    ‘We can’t just let them ride roughshod over us,’ Judy
    said. ‘You know what they’ve done in Poland and all those
    other countries. We can’t let that happen here.’
    ‘So it’s better to be bombed to bits, is it? It’s better to
    have everything smashed to pieces around us and have little
    babies killed?’ Cissie took the apron from her face and stared
    at them.