“Well, that’s just it, sir. We don’t know anything about it just yet. DCI Banks wanted to know how many doctors and dentists lived in Hobb’s End, and if anyone who used to live there lives here now.”
Harmond scratched his temple. “I can answer your last question easily enough,” he said. “You remember Mrs. Kettering, the one whose budgie escaped that time she was having a new three-piece suite delivered?”
“How could I forget?” It had been one of Annie’s first cases in Harkside.
Inspector Harmond smiled. “She lived in Hobb’s End. I don’t know exactly when or for how long, but I know she lived there. She must be pushing ninety if she’s a day.”
“Anyone else?”
“Not that I can think of. Not offhand, at any rate. Leave it with me, I’ll ask around. Remember where she lives?”
“Up on The Edge, isn’t it? The corner house with the big garden?”
The Edge was what the locals called the fifty-foot embankment that ran along the south side of Harksmere Reservoir, the road that used to lead over the packhorse bridge to Hobb’s End. Its real name was Harksmere View, and it didn’t lead anywhere now. Only one row of cottages overlooked the water, separated from the rest of Harkside village by about half a mile of open countryside.
“What about doctors and dentists?” Annie asked.
“That’s a bit trickier,” Harmond said. “There must have been a few over the years, but Lord knows what’s happened to them. Seeing as the village cleared out after the war, they’re probably all dead now. Remember, lass, I’m not that old. I was still a lad myself when the place emptied out. As far as I remember, there wasn’t any village bobby, either. Too small. Hobb’s End was part of the Harkside beat.”
“How many schools were there?”
Inspector Harmond scratched his head. “Just infants and junior, I think. Grammar school and secondary modern were here in Harkside.”
“Any idea where the old records would be?”
“Local education authority, most likely. Unless they were destroyed somehow. A lot of records got destroyed back then, after the war and all. Is there anything else?”
Annie sipped some coffee and stood up. “Not right now, sir.”
“You’ll keep me informed?”
“I will.”
“And, Annie?”
“Yes, sir?”
Harmond scratched the side of his nose. “This DCI Banks. I’ve never met him myself, but I’ve heard a bit about him. What’s he like?”
Annie paused at the door and frowned as she thought. “Do you know, sir,” she said finally, “I haven’t got a clue.”
“Bit of an enigma, then, eh?”
“Yes,” Annie said, “a bit of an enigma. I suppose you could say that.”
“Better watch yourself, then, lass,” she heard him say as she turned to leave.
Before I tell you what happened next, let me tell you a little about myself and my village. My name, as you already know, is Gwen Shackleton, which is short for Gwynneth, not for Gwendolyn. I know this sounds Welsh, but my family has lived in Hobb’s End, Yorkshire, for at least two generations. My father, God bless his soul, died of cancer three years before the war began, and by 1940 my mother was an invalid, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. Sometimes she was able to help out in the shop, but not often, so the brunt of the work fell to me.
Matthew helped me as much as he could, but university kept him busy most of the week and the Home Guard took up his weekends. He was twenty-one, but despite the call-up, the Ministry was encouraging him to finish the third year of his engineering degree at the University of Leeds. They believed, I suppose, that his training would come in useful in the forces.
Our little shop was a newsagent’s-cum-general store about halfway along the High Street, near the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s, and we lived above it. We didn’t sell perishable goods, just things like newspapers, sweets, cigarettes, stationery, jam and other odds and ends, tea and tinned goods – depending, of course, on what was available at the time. I was especially proud of the little lending library I had built up. Because paper was getting scarce and books were in short supply, I rented them out for tuppence a week. I kept a good selection of World’s Classic editions: Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in particular. I also stocked a number of the more sensational novels, Agatha Christie and the Mills and Boon romances, for those who liked such things – unfortunately, the majority of my customers!
Though most of the able-bodied men in the village had joined up and put on one uniform or another, the place had never seemed busier. The old flax mill was operating at full strength again and most of the married women worked there. Before the war, it had practically come to a standstill, but now the military wanted flax to make webbing for parachute harnesses and other things where a tough fiber was needed, like gun tarpaulins and fire hoses.
There was also a big RAF base about a mile or so away through Rowan Woods, and the High Street was often busy with Jeeps and lorries honking their horns and trying to pass one another in the narrow space. The airmen sometimes came to the village pubs – the Shoulder of Mutton just down the High Street, and the Duke of Wellington over the river – except when they went to Harkside, where there was much more to do. We didn’t even have one cinema in Hobb’s End, for example, but there were three in Harkside.
These things aside, though, it remains difficult to say exactly how much the war affected us in Hobb’s End. I think that at first it impinged upon us very little. For those of us left behind, daily life went on much as normal. The first wave of evacuees came in September 1939, but when nothing happened for ages, they all started drifting home again, and we didn’t get any more until the bombing started the following August.
Even with rationing, our diets didn’t change as much as those of the city folks, for we had always been used to eating plenty of vegetables, and in the country there were always eggs, butter and milk. Our neighbor, Mr. Halliwell, the butcher, was probably the most popular man in town, so we were occasionally able to swap any tea and sugar we might put aside for an extra piece of mutton or pork.
Apart from the feeling of waiting, the sense that normal life was suspended until all this was over, perhaps the hardest thing to get used to was the blackout. But even in that we were more fortunate than many, as Hobb’s End had no streetlights to begin with, and the countryside is dark enough at the best of times. Still, that pinprick of light on the distant hillside was often the only thing to guide you home.
In the blackout, we had to tape up our windows to prevent damage from broken glass, and we also had to hang up the heavy blackout curtains. Every night, Mother used to send me outside to check that not a sliver of light showed because our local ARP man was a real stickler. I remember the whole village laughing the day we heard Mrs. Darnley got a visit from him for blacking out only the front of her house, but not the back windows. “Don’t be so daft,” she told him. “If the Germans come to bomb Hobb’s End, young lad, they’ll come from the east, won’t they, not by Grassington way. Stands to reason.”
On moonlit nights, especially if there was a full moon, the effect could be spectacular: the hills were dusted with silver powder, the stars glittered like cut diamonds on black velvet, and the whole landscape looked like one of those black-and-white engravings or woodcuts you see in old books. But on cloudy or moonless nights, which seemed far more frequent, people bumped into trees and even cycled into the river with alarming regularity. You could use a torch if you wrapped the light with several layers of tissue paper, but batteries were scarce. All car and bicycle lights had to be hooded and masked with a variety of gadgets that let the light through only in muddied, useless slits. Needless to say, there were a lot of car accidents, too, until petrol became too scarce and nobody drove anymore except on business.
Several events made the war more personal for us, such as the Spinner’s Inn fire, or the Jowett boy getting killed at Dunkirk, but the day before Gloria Stringer arrived, something hit even closer to home: Matthew got his call-up papers. He was due to report for his medical in Leeds in two weeks.