The Crown JEWELS

The war was over, but for Pearl and Ruby tensions still simmered

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Ruby Taylor, what have you been up to? You look like the wreck of the Hesperus.’ Pearl's voice as I emerged from the beer cellar was teasing and, for one glorious moment, I thought her mood had lifted. Then her gaze slid to Andy, coming up the steps behind me, and her expression changed.

‘Nothing,’ I said firmly, hoping to put a lid on things. Before our arrival at The Crown that morning, we hadn’t seen one another in six years, not since returning home at the end of the war. Yet here she was back in the old routine.

‘Really?’ Pearl said, squinting at my attire. ‘Because from where I’m standing, you look - how to put this delicately? - romantically dishevelled.’

She slid a puff sleeve back on to my shoulder and I hastily tucked my blouse back into my seersucker skirt. Andy’s crêpe-soled brothel creepers had a lot to answer for. He would never have been able to sneak up and tickle me without his silent footwear.

‘Hardly romantic,’ I scoffed. ‘He helped me change a barrel of Watney’s.’

Over her shoulder, I saw Andy walk with an exaggerated hobble towards the kitchen. I bit back a grin. I’d accidentally trodden on his instep when he’d made me jump, and he'd hopped about like a mad thing, pretending to be in agony while trying not to laugh.

‘If he tried to get fresh with you, you should tell Ted,’ said Pearl. ‘This is 1951, women shouldn't have to tolerate that sort of nonsense any more.’

‘There wasn’t any nonsense,’ I said, a bit exasperated now. ‘Andy’s not the boy you remember. He never was that boy.’

*****

Pearl and I had come to Lower Darton a dozen years ago, in 1939, part of the second wave of evacuees, just two of thousands of bewildered children uprooted from their homes and taken to the country. We'd been placed with Ted and Edna Coleman in their centuries-old, blackbeamed pub, The Crown.