We Must Be Brave
Frances Liardet
A woman; a war; a child that changed everything. Spanning the sweep of the twentieth century, We Must Be Brave is a luminous and profoundly moving novel about the people we rescue and the ways in which they rescue us back.She was fast asleep on the back seat of the bus. Curled up, thumb in mouth. Four, maybe five years old. I turned around. The last few passengers were shuffling away from me down the aisle to the doors. ‘Whose is this child?’ I called. Nobody looked back.December, 1940. As German bombs fall on Southampton, the city’s residents flee to the surrounding villages. In Upton village, amid the chaos, newly-married Ellen Parr finds a girl sleeping, unclaimed at the back of an empty bus. Little Pamela, it seems, is entirely alone.Ellen has always believed she does not want children, but when she takes Pamela into her home the child cracks open the past Ellen thought she had escaped and the future she and her husband Selwyn had dreamed for themselves. As the war rages on, love grows where it was least expected, surprising them all. But with the end of the fighting comes the realization that Pamela was never theirs to keep…A story of courage and kindness, hardship and friendship, We Must be Brave explores the fierce love we feel for our children and the astonishing power of that love to endure.
Copyright (#ue818c9f7-78d2-5093-b188-b2a489380ddc)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Frances Liardet 2019
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Frances Liardet asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008280130
Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008280161
Version: 2019-01-08
Dedication (#ue818c9f7-78d2-5093-b188-b2a489380ddc)
For Betty, Brendan, Bill and Joan
… and Juliet
Contents
Cover (#u28027b63-6855-5478-802e-23be6b28fd5a)
Title Page (#udbabea3c-15ae-5874-90f5-79dca93ef9b3)
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note (#u84393807-67e3-536e-b2fa-af125e4e4903)
One (#u15ea25ad-6e14-5fcf-b30f-b160e2bf64ad)
Ellen: December 1940 (#u711e1551-975c-5ff5-a46c-f7ac996c3bd0)
Chapter 1 (#u22dba478-3e19-5c8c-805f-6c4207f45b2f)
Chapter 2 (#udb391f42-eebb-50c2-a3e3-bc518a556bdc)
Chapter 3 (#u9bfeaf69-9e42-55f4-bafb-d27bf428b630)
Chapter 4 (#u9edd3d75-f1a0-5778-b483-9aeb411a8d6e)
Chapter 5 (#u1e05a5eb-043f-53e0-b576-38e35d82165e)
Chapter 6 (#u80a38bca-9c22-5960-9f73-0787bc09fd60)
Chapter 7 (#udac785c6-c40f-596e-8784-c2f9dd967d4a)
Ellen: 1932–1935 (#u1ca36ba6-4fec-5618-bc17-98a5b13f9a9e)
Chapter 8 (#u73f97ffd-ba73-5814-a545-23d62f178ce5)
Chapter 9 (#u0fcd858d-6d8b-52c4-aa14-9e1f17853d2d)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Ellen: Early March, 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Ellen: 1939 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Ellen: Late March, 1944 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Ellen: 1944–1973 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Ellen: 1974 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Pamela: 2010 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Frances Liardet (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_9c839b4b-cc85-52bf-8707-cfe49412decd)
Unlike the village of Upton in Hampshire, the Upton of We Must Be Brave is an imaginary place, as is the town of Waltham – and, for that matter, the hamlet of Barrow End. Southampton, of course, is real, as are its well-documented sufferings during the Second World War. While the global events described in the book are factual, the people described in the novel, and their joys and tribulations, are works of fiction.
ONE (#ulink_01935160-c425-5a01-af35-9b8f071c58ef)
Ellen (#ulink_08a4abad-f3c0-553d-b21e-bff42c862a24)
1 (#ulink_7f064184-626a-576a-9fbd-8d251f1733f1)
SHE WAS FAST ASLEEP on the back seat of the bus. Curled up, thumb in mouth. Four, maybe five years old.
I turned round. The last few passengers were shuffling away from me down the aisle to the doors. ‘Whose is this child?’ I called.
Nobody looked back. Perhaps the bombing had deafened them. Or maybe they simply didn’t want to hear.
‘Please. Someone’s left a child!’
But they were gone, making their way down the steps and joining the line of people straggling towards the village hall.
It was lucky I was there, checking every bus. Otherwise this small girl might have gone all the way back to Southampton. Everybody knew the city was still on fire. We’d seen the smoke from Beacon Hill.
She hadn’t stirred, in spite of my calling. She lay senseless, a gossamer net of light-brown hair clinging to her forehead. Her puff-sleeved dress was a dusty mid-blue, the colour of the endpapers in the board books of my childhood. No coat or cardigan, despite it being the first day of December. Just a grimy white blanket tangled round her legs, the kind mothers wrapped their babies in, a special knit honeycombed with little holes.
I shook her small round shoulder. ‘Wake up, little one. Wake up.’
Her thumb fell out of her mouth, but she didn’t open her eyes. I stroked back her hair. Her skin was warm and slightly damp. Her tongue was ticking against the roof of her mouth. Thumb or no thumb, she was still sucking.
Suppose she started crying when I woke her? I had no great experience of tearful children. Perhaps I should simply carry her into the village hall, and never mind if she was asleep. I took off my new brooch, a silver bar with a pearl, and put it in my pocket. I didn’t want it to scrape the child’s face.
I slid my hands against her hot sides, into her hotter armpits, and pulled her towards me. She was amazingly solid, made of denser stuff than the rest of the world. I got one arm round her back and the other under her bottom, and hoisted her up. Her head rocked back as far as it could go, forward again to bump against my collarbone. Then her whole body gave a series of jerks, as if a faulty electrical current was running through her. Perhaps she’d been hit on the head during the air raid. I should get her to the doctor.
The dirty blanket fell down over my feet and I kicked it away and walked with a strange swinging tread down the aisle of the bus. You had to walk this way, I realised, with a child in your arms. There was a powerful odour of Jeyes Fluid in the bus but she smelled warm, salty, of new-baked bread.
Deirdre Harper came out of the village hall, forearms red to the elbow and dripping suds.
‘Deirdre, is anyone missing a girl?’
She wiped her hands on her apron and delved in the pocket to produce a single wrinkled cigarette. ‘You’re having me on, Mrs Parr. Now I’ve seen it all. They can’t even remember their own kiddies.’
‘I’m sure it’s not like that. Everyone’s in shock …’
Deirdre lit up and exhaled smoke with a wide, down-curving smile of contempt. ‘In a funk, more like. Funk is all this is, you know. Look at them, scarpering on the buses instead of staying put in their shelters.’
I didn’t point out that not everyone in Southampton had shelters. Deirdre had lost her son at the beginning of the war, in the sea off the coast of Norway; she no longer cared what she said, and nobody took her to task.
‘They’ve got tea, anyway,’ I said.
‘Yes, the stockpile we were saving for the Christmas carols.’ She regarded the child sourly. ‘Your Mr Parr will find that mother of hers. Trained for this, isn’t he. Billeting officer and all.’
‘Yes. I should go in, Deirdre.’
Just then she sighed, and suddenly her eyes filled. ‘Christ, poor bloody Southampton. Fifteen mile away, and such a glow off the clouds last night, it damn near lit me home.’
I made my way into the village hall, carrying the child through the crowd of bedraggled, bewildered, noisy people, edging round overturned chairs, youngsters sliding through puddles of spilt tea. ‘Whose is this little girl?’ I called out. ‘Has anyone seen her mother?’ Nobody replied. I pushed onward past a squirming terrier, a camp of sleeping babies wedged among baskets and coats, a gang of dishevelled old men making free with a hip flask. ‘Is anyone looking for this child?’ I called, louder this time.
‘Where are we, doll?’ said one of the old men.
‘Upton,’ I told him. ‘The village of Upton. Do you know this little girl?’
He shook his head. An odd smell was coming off his coat, a reek of something burnt. I moved away but the smell remained in my nostrils. I glanced up at the high windows of the hall and saw that the light was fading fast. We didn’t have long until blackout.
Halfway down the hall I found Mrs Daventry and Miss Legg. Two pillars of our little community, they were standing by a table and picking hopelessly at the knot on a bale of blankets. I hitched my burden higher with one hand – astonishingly, she had not stirred – and with the other I grasped one loop of the knotted rope and prised it loose.
‘Ellen has such strong fingers,’ Mrs Daventry said to Miss Legg.
‘She’s so practical,’ Miss Legg said to Mrs Daventry.
‘I simply know where to pull,’ I told them.
They looked at me silently.
‘Have you seen a woman—’ I began, but just then the wind rattled the tin roof. A small boy in the corner screamed, cowering like a hen when the hawk goes over. Other children joined him, and then everyone broke out into wordless wails and cries of fright. ‘I must find Mr Parr,’ I told the ladies, and made my way towards the back of the hall. I could hear Selwyn speaking, his true tenor that carried through the hubbub. Such a good singer my husband was, a merry singer. I followed his voice until the crowd parted at last to reveal him bending over a middle-aged couple huddled on their chairs. ‘Are you hurt?’ he was asking them.
‘Selwyn!’ I felt breathless, as if I had run a long way.
‘Ellen, darling.’ He straightened up with a smile. ‘Where are you taking this young person?’
I twisted my neck away from the child’s hot face. ‘She was asleep in the back of the bus, all alone. I can’t find her mother.’
His eyes widened. ‘She was left on the bus?’
‘Yes.’ I stared around the room. ‘Selwyn, what are we going to do with all these people? Another busload and we’ll run out of tea, and then it’ll be pandemonium. And what about the blackout?’
‘It will not be pandemonium.’ He chuckled. ‘The Scouts are coming to put up the blackout curtains. And we’ve got blankets for the men. The women and children we’ll take into the village. Colonel Daventry’s bringing his cart.’ He scratched his head, disordering his fine, sandy hair. ‘They’ll be on the floors, but it’s the best we can do. I can’t find an empty bed in Upton.’
‘I smelt something awful,’ I said. ‘Something charred. I don’t know what it was.’ To my dismay, tears started to sting my eyes.
‘Come now, sweetheart.’ Selwyn squeezed my arm. ‘Chin up. Try that lady over there on the camp bed. She’s completely collapsed.’ He pointed with his pen. ‘I heard her saying, “Daphne, Daphne”.’
I stared up at him.
‘This child may be she.’ His voice was patient. ‘Daphne.’
The woman lay rigid, her eyes flicking like a metronome from side to side. ‘Daphne,’ she declared.
I kneeled down beside her, cradling the child on my lap to let the woman see her face. ‘Madam, is this Daphne? Is this your daughter?’
Her eyes flicked to and fro. They seemed to glance at the girl. ‘Daphne.’
‘That ain’t Daphne,’ said a voice behind me. ‘Daphne’s her Siamese cat. This lady’s Mrs Irene Cartledge and she was right as rain when we got off the bus. We’re waiting for your doctor to come and have a look at her.’
I turned to the speaker. She was sitting on the floor like me, her huge, pallid, bare knees pressed together, one of her eyes half-closed under a swelling purple bruise. ‘I’m Mrs Berrow, Phyl Berrow.’
‘My name’s Ellen Parr. Do you need a compress for that poor eye, Mrs Berrow? I’m sure we can rustle something up.’
‘No, dear. Shock or what, it don’t hurt. Parr,’ she repeated. ‘Your dad’s got a hell of a job to billet us all.’
I managed to smile. ‘Mr Parr’s my husband.’ I thought of my pearl brooch, and felt a little swell of pride. ‘It’s our first wedding anniversary today.’
‘Oh, lor. What a way to spend it.’ She looked me up and down. ‘Ain’t he the lucky one.’
‘Actually, Mrs Berrow, I count myself extremely lucky.’
A friendly glint came to her eye. ‘Right you are, dear.’ She shuffled closer. ‘Let’s have a look at the kiddy.’
Once again I smoothed back the light hair from the child’s face. She was rosy, disdainful in sleep, eyebrows raised and lips turned down. The piped seam of the bus seat had made a darker-pink crease in the pink of her cheek.
‘Wake her up, dear.’
‘She won’t wake. And she went very jerky earlier. I’m frightened she might have damage to her brain.’
‘Bless you.’ Mrs Berrow revealed five sound teeth in a slot of black. ‘They all do that. Sleep through the Second Coming at this age. Give her here.’
She stood the child on her feet, blew into her face, and let go. My own arms leaped out but Mrs Berrow got there first and held her fast, blew again, let go once more. The blowing ruffled the child’s eyelashes and she squeezed her eyelids shut. Then she wobbled, righted herself, and sniffed in a sharp breath.
‘Here, lovey.’ Mrs Berrow grasped the small, chubby arms. ‘Come, open those peepers.’
The little girl did so, suddenly, wide open and startled. Her eyes were clear hazel, almost the same colour as her hair.
‘What’s your name, dear?’
‘Daphne,’ said the woman on the camp bed.
‘Pack it in, Irene.’ Mrs Berrow fixed the child with her one good eye. ‘Let me see. Might you be called Mavis Davis?’
The child gave a slow blink. Still waking.
‘Or Sally O’Malley?’
She shook her head.
‘Or Nancy Fancy? Help me, dearie, I’m running out of names,’ said Mrs Berrow, and the little girl spoke.
‘I’m not Nancy Fancy! I’m Pamela! Where’s Mummy?’
Her voice was clear, piping, like a twig peeled of its bark. She was well-spoken.
‘Pamela.’ Mrs Berrow patted her cheek. ‘Ain’t that a pretty name.’
‘Where’s my mummy?’ Pamela spun around. ‘Mummy? Where’s Mummy?’ Her voice wavered. She pulled away from Mrs Berrow. ‘I can’t see Mummy.’
Ten seconds had passed, a small time but enough for her mouth to quiver and large tears to spill down her cheeks. ‘Pamela.’ I clasped her hand. ‘We think Mummy got off the bus and left you there by mistake, so we need to find her. What does Mummy look like?’
‘Beautiful.’ She scrubbed at her face. ‘But she wasn’t on my bus, she was on the one before.’
‘Her ma got on a different bus?’ Mrs Berrow started to heave herself to her feet. ‘How the hell did she manage that?’
‘The ladies said!’ Pamela stood on tiptoes to peer into the crowd – so futile, in a person barely a yard high. ‘They said I should get on the bus with them and then I’d find her.’
I gasped. ‘What ladies?’
‘The ladies,’ she said impatiently, as if it were obvious. ‘They saw me. The bus came.’ Her face crumpled. ‘They said if I got on, we’d find Mummy.’ Her lungs began to pump out sobs and her arms went up and down, striking her sides. I gathered her to me once again and lifted her up. She wept and thrashed in my arms as I took her over to one side of the hall, set her down on a huge unlit radiator. ‘What’s your other name, Pamela?’
‘Jane,’ she sobbed.
‘No, your family name.’ But she was crying too hard. I stood up straight. ‘Does anyone know this little girl?’ I called out. ‘Her name’s Pamela. Pamela Jane.’ Heads turned and shook, and I saw women gathering their children together, and a bustle in the doorway – people from the village, arriving to take them away. The tide was running out. ‘Pamela Jane! Did anyone travel with this child?’
At last. A woman was emerging from the throng, incongruously elegant in a fur coat and maroon toque, making her way to us. ‘I was with this little one,’ she said when she arrived at my side. ‘I helped her on board the bus.’
‘Didn’t you hear me call earlier?’ I spoke flatly, out of exasperation. If she thought I was rude, she made no sign.
‘I might have been in the lavs, dear.’ She pointed to another, large woman. ‘That lady said the little girl’s mother was on the bus before ours. So we took her on the next one, with us.’ The large woman was already approaching, buttoning her cardigan over her bust. ‘Isn’t that right?’ asked the lady wearing the toque. ‘You saw her ma on the first bus?’
‘That’s what the little one said.’ The second woman’s voice was a creaky whisper. ‘Pardon me. Smoke’s got my throat.’
Pamela gasped. ‘You said Mummy was on the other bus. But she wasn’t!’
‘No, you was saying it, sweetheart,’ the woman croaked, her eyes full of alarm.
‘No!’ Pamela was frantic. ‘I just thought she was!’
‘So I said, we’ll catch up with Mummy, sweetie, and I took her on board.’ The large woman put her hands to her cheeks. ‘Now I think about it, how could any woman get on a blooming bus without her little daughter? But the little one was insistent!’
‘I wasn’t ’sistent!’ Pamela continued her choleric weeping. ‘I saw her head but I didn’t know it was her head! You said!’
The elegant woman put her hand to her toque. ‘And we just got off the bus, leaving her there.’ She turned to me. ‘I’m so sorry. We was bombed, dear. I can’t find any other excuse.’
Now they were both crying. I heard Selwyn calling. ‘Ladies – ladies, please come and join this group.’
‘You both need to leave,’ I said. ‘I’ll find you if I have to.’
Just then Pamela vomited onto the floor. The height of the radiator she was standing on increased the radius greatly, and we sprang back. Pamela clutched at her head. ‘My forehead hurts, I banged it against the bus stop.’ She burst into a wail.
I lifted her down. ‘Where is the doctor?’ I called. ‘Dr Bell? You’re needed here!’ The women, I noticed, were obeying Selwyn and making for the door. Through the ebbing crowd, the doctor hastened towards us. His fur-collared overcoat gave him an oddly cosseted air. Neither Selwyn nor I had taken the time to dress warmly before hurrying out to the village hall.
‘Doctor, please could you look at this little girl? I must get a bucket.’
When I got back from the kitchen Pamela was lying on the floor while the doctor shone a small, narrow light into each of her eyes. ‘A mild concussion,’ he announced, as I started cleaning the mess. ‘There’s a bump under her hairline. She may be very sleepy. But I’m not uneasy.’
I took the bucket outside. Selwyn was seeing off a group bound for the village houses. ‘We’ll be sheltering seven souls,’ he told me. ‘And I’ve washed up the cups.’
I couldn’t help smiling at the expectation of praise latent in this last statement. ‘Well done.’ I emptied the bucket into the drain. ‘But it’s eight, not seven. The little girl. Her mother wasn’t on the bus.’
‘How on earth—?’
‘I’ll tell you later.’
In a knot in the corner, our group waited, set-faced, to be led to our house. With the exception of a couple of tall, tear-stained girls of about seventeen, they were all women on the elderly side. Mrs Berrow, I saw, was among them. Her injured eye looked viciously dark now, and she was hanging her head in fatigue. I lifted Pamela up, and Selwyn took off his jacket and folded it around her.
‘Shall I take her?’ he asked.
‘No. She doesn’t seem so heavy now. I don’t know why.’ I followed Selwyn out of the hall, and behind me our people fell into step. Pamela leaned her head against my shoulder. I could hear the tiny chirp as she sucked her thumb.
Then she took her thumb out. ‘The ladies said they’d find Mummy. They said. So I think they will.’ She put the thumb back in and shut her eyes.
2 (#ulink_5383151c-56c5-57cf-99dc-a3ebc2ecd4de)
I CARRIED PAMELA down the lane. The sun was sinking into the bare hedgerows and the air was sharper. Our people moved as a single clumsy mass behind us.
‘She got on the bus by accident,’ I told Selwyn. ‘Two women took her on board, thinking her mother was on the previous bus. But it now seems the mother wasn’t on any bus at all. She must be still in Southampton. Distraught.’
‘Where were these women?’
‘In the village hall, of course.’
‘No, I mean, where in Southampton?’
‘I didn’t ask.’
He glanced back at our followers. ‘They’re not with us, are they?’
‘No. They left with that last big group.’ I wasn’t even sure of that, now. ‘How silly of me.’
His hand brushed my arm. ‘It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing we can do about it today.’
We heard a soft clopping on the road behind us, a rumble and a rattle. Colonel Daventry was coming up with a cart full of slumped figures: women and some small children. The Colonel walked beside the head of his horse Beeston, a peaceful bay with feathered fetlocks, and the cart was followed by a handful of silent men. ‘Mr and Mrs Parr, we’re on our way to The Place.’ He named his large house in the middle of Upton. ‘We can take a few up to your turning.’
‘Go on, Ellen,’ Selwyn said. I scrambled up and he passed me Pamela. Mrs Berrow and our other ladies climbed aboard. The occupants shuffled to make room for us – all, that is, save one woman who sat motionless, shawled in a length of sacking, her face half-covered in brick dust, while the baby on her lap kicked its bare foot in the frosty air. We were about to move on when an old man standing by the tailgate of the cart took off his tweed cap in preparation, it transpired, to speak.
‘My father worked here, at the big house. Upton Hall. For Sir Michael Brock’s father,’ he told us. ‘Put the locks into the front and back doors, and the coach house and all the outhouses. This was before the Great War.’ His eyes began to spill tears which caught the low sun as they fell, but he spoke on in a steady voice. ‘We made ourselves busy in the stable block, me and some boys from the farm. Filling hay nets. Scampering back and forth.’
Then he put his cap back on, wiped his eyes, and turned to take up his journey again. The Colonel clucked at Beeston who leaned into his harness, and the cart moved off. We swayed in our seats. The woman pied by brick dust clutched her baby’s foot in her filthy hand.
Colonel Daventry let us down at our turning. We began to walk along the embanked track that ran between two low fields to our mill. It was dusk and the people couldn’t see the mill – they hesitated, wondering if they were heading on a long trek out into the countryside. I encouraged them onward, and soon the mill was in sight.
Elizabeth opened the door. ‘Oh, Mrs Parr. What a thing. Oh, look at that little mite.’ She glanced behind me at the crowd with an anxious housekeeper’s eye. ‘I’ve got all the rugs and cushions out. I hope they’ll be all right.’
‘Well done, Elizabeth.’ I stepped inside and set Pamela down on the hall chair. ‘Mr Parr’s following.’ Pamela drooped sideways against the wooden arm, eyes tightly shut. ‘This little one’s mislaid her mother,’ I told Elizabeth in a low voice. ‘We’ll put her upstairs, with us.’
The women filed past us in a draught of icy air with gasps of relief. When they reached the sitting room the pair of girls lay down immediately, straight onto the floor, refusing offers of tea. One slipped off a single shoe, covered her face with her hands, and lay still. Now they were in an enclosed space I could smell the charred stink again, coming off their coats. I still couldn’t identify it. Perhaps it was something that wasn’t usually burned.
Elizabeth and I brought tea, and cut a loaf of bread thickly to make dry toast. Those women still awake devoured it. ‘There’s a bit of dripping, but not enough for all of them,’ Elizabeth whispered.
‘Keep the dripping for the little girl. We’ve got bread, that’s the main thing.’
When they’d finished their tea and toast we helped our guests arrange the sitting room to their liking. The young women drowsily accepted a blanket. Then I went upstairs to see the boys.
We had three evacuees from Southampton: two young brothers and their older cousin. They’d been with us a year and a quarter, since the beginning of the war. Very obedient at first, more unsettled since the September raid which had destroyed the Spitfire factory a few hundred yards away from their homes.
‘It was a big’un last night, wasn’t it, Mrs Parr,’ said Donald, the youngest boy.
They’d all slept through the bombing, but playground gossip had done its work, and his pudgy little face was pale. I wished, for the dozenth time, that his father hadn’t promised to telephone after each raid. I opened my arms and he shuffled over and sat close at my side – too grown-up, at seven, to clamber onto my lap.
‘Yes, Donald.’ I squeezed his shoulders. ‘I’m sure everyone’s quite well, but the telephone lines are down. Daddy might not get through until tomorrow or the next day. Now, tonight’s going to be a bit of an adventure.’ I addressed them all. ‘We’ve got visitors. I’m going to put three of them up here, in your bedroom, and you can make a bivouac on the landing, like Scouts do. How does that sound? And you’ll have to eat your tea very quietly in the kitchen – go in through the hall door. Whatever you do, don’t go into the sitting room.’
‘Why?’ asked Hawley, the cousin. ‘Are they spies?’
‘No.’ I smiled. ‘They just need peace and quiet.’
Under my direction the boys pitched camp, laying out some old bedding rolls and unused velvet curtains.
‘Pooh, this stinks,’ said Donald, and threw the curtain across the floor.
‘It may be a little musty,’ I said. ‘It’s been kept in a chest—’
‘Put it back on the mattress, Donald, you twit,’ said his older brother.
‘Shut your gob, Jack.’
The two boys fell into a frenzy of pulling, kicking and thumping, comical because wordless. Hawley folded his arms. ‘Oi. Lads. Do you want to sleep in the hen house?’
They went still. I looked at Hawley gratefully.
‘They need a tight rein, Mrs Parr,’ he said.
They came down for their supper, stopping short at Pamela who was still enthroned, dozing, on the hall chair. It was an ancient chair, with a low seat and a tall back, designed for kneeling on and praying: Pamela, pale, with her eyes sombrely downcast, could have been a child of the Middle Ages. I put my finger to my lips and the boys passed by silently into the kitchen. I went into the sitting room and invited three ladies upstairs to spend the night on the boys’ beds. ‘Mrs Berrow, I insist you come. I will find you a damp flannel for your eye.’
Obediently Mrs Berrow followed me, along with two others, up to the boys’ bedroom. I brought the flannel, told them where the bathroom was, and left them to sleep. None of them spoke. They were hungry, I knew, but their tiredness was of a kind to conquer hunger. They rolled onto the beds and lay like dead-weights.
I spread a slice of bread with the dripping and brought it to Pamela.
‘Pamela?’
She opened her eyes and regarded me, blinking. She took the slice of bread, dropped it on the floor. I kneeled in front of her and retrieved it and tore off a dusty piece. She chewed without haste, her jaw moving roundly like a small calf. ‘Excuse me,’ she said through her mouthful. ‘Are we in a village?’
‘Yes. A village called Upton.’
‘So is this village bread?’
I smiled. ‘I made it, and I’m a villager. So I suppose it is. It’s a little stale, darling, that’s all. My fresh bread is much softer.’
She continued chewing, eyes steadily on me, not the least reassured. The front door opened and Selwyn came in. He took his coat off, and smiled at me. ‘You look like a supplicant, and she your princess. It’s the high-backed chair, I suppose. What is there to eat?’
‘Bread, and a sausage. About three ounces of tea. Plenty of oats.’
Pamela had been looking from one of us to the other. Now she stopped chewing. ‘Horses eat oats.’
‘Yes, they do.’ Selwyn bent over her. ‘Are you warm enough?’ She nodded. He patted her on the head, absently, as if she were his good dog. ‘Now I think about it, I haven’t got much of an appetite. I’ll sleep on the little bed in the dressing room. You put her with you, in our bed.’
The buttons on the back of Pamela’s dirty little dress were tiny. One of them was broken, a shard which slipped under my nail and stabbed me. I pulled the puffed sleeves down off her shoulders. Her arms were as cold as china.
‘Didn’t Mummy give you a coat, Pamela?’
‘It was so hot in the hotel, she said, “Let’s take our coats and cardigans off.” So we did that.’
‘What hotel?’
She turned her head to look up at me. ‘The hotel that we were inside,’ she said patiently. ‘I want to keep my knickers on.’
She went to the lavatory. I found an old singlet and put it on her. It fell almost to her ankles, the shoulder straps drooping, the low neck leaving her chest bare. I knotted the straps to bring the neckline higher.
‘This is a funny nightie.’
‘Isn’t it.’
Our bolster made her head jut forward, so I fetched a flat cushion from my sewing seat. The bed creaked in the dressing room: Selwyn was retiring. I went in and found him sitting there in his pyjamas. He needed a good diet to keep his weight up, did my husband, and now he was beginning to remind me of my brother Edward. They both went lean in hard times, weathered and springy like the spars of a ship. Selwyn was naturally slighter than Edward, sandier, his blue eyes paler. A cleverer, more far-seeing man.
‘She says that she was in an hotel,’ I told him. ‘She doesn’t know which one.’
He nodded slowly. ‘We’ll think about it in the morning.’ He looked up at me. ‘Where’s your pearl brooch?’
With a jolt I remembered the bus, my first grasp of Pamela’s body. ‘Don’t worry. It’s in my jacket pocket, for safekeeping.’
Selwyn had pinned the brooch on this morning, deftly, and kissed my lips. It seemed like a week ago now. I went and sat on the bed next to him. My eye fell on a small, flat, brown-paper parcel. ‘You haven’t opened your present.’
Exclaiming, he reached for it. ‘Shame on me. My first gift of this kind, too.’ He pulled the knot in the string and removed the paper from a copy of Edward Thomas’s The South Country. ‘Ellen, sweetheart. This is so thoughtful.’
‘I found it in Bradwell’s. Now you really have the complete works.’
He gave a single laugh and put down the book. ‘I promise you one thing, Ellen. Not all our wedding anniversaries will be like this one.’
I put my arm across his back and pressed my face against his shoulder. He embraced me in turn so that we were encircled by each other’s arms. ‘I shall complain next year,’ I said, with my eyes shut, ‘if you don’t supply at least one busload of refugees.’
The brooch was there, in my jacket pocket. I put it into my jewellery box and hung the jacket in the wardrobe. Closing the door, I saw the child’s image flash into the mirror, a pale face with large, grave, light-brown eyes. I undressed and put my nightgown on, all the while feeling those eyes upon me.
She’d moved towards the middle of the bed. When I got in, one small, hard foot scraped against my calf. ‘Shift over, Pamela.’
‘But I was just on the way to my side.’
‘Oh. I didn’t realize you had a side.’
‘This is my side. The other is Mummy’s.’
What about Daddy? I didn’t say that. It was a question for tomorrow.
We arranged ourselves to her liking. She occupied her little space with self-possession, lying neatly on her back with feet together. I remembered sharing the coldest nights in one bed with Mother. Mother, and in the beginning with my brother Edward too. They had both been bigger than me. I’d never lain down beside such a small person.
‘My name’s Ellen.’
‘I know.’ Her head remained still; only her eyes darted towards me. ‘But you haven’t said if I may call you it.’
I smiled. ‘You may.’
How old was she? Her nose was still snubbed, a perfect curve, her cheeks round. I couldn’t ask her about her surname again, not now.
‘Will we find Mummy tomorrow?’
‘I’m sure we will.’
I was woken by a rising siren of wails, as sharp and sudden as if rehearsed. I slid out of bed and went out onto the landing. The boys were asleep – two had rolled off the mattresses and were lying legs tangled in the curtains, leaving the third uncovered. I picked my way among them and went down to the sitting room.
The women had pulled the blackout curtain away from the side of the window. They were all crowded around the slit they had made, crying out and clinging together as if they were in a lifeboat on a high sea. ‘How can they, how can they, the devils.’ ‘Bloody fucking bastards.’ ‘It’s vicious. It ain’t human.’
They’d left the lamp on. The light was shining out through the naked glass.
‘Replace that curtain.’ I spoke in a voice of steel.
One of them sobbed at me, ‘You should see it, dear, before we do.’
Darting to the table, I turned out the lamp. ‘You’ve broken the blackout. And you may also have broken the fastenings.’ I shouldered my way in among them and started lashing the blackout tapes back onto the hooks in the window frame. There it was again, the same rumbling, fleshy stain on the undersides of the clouds, punctuated by white flashes, that I’d seen last night rising over Beacon Hill. I tried to avert my face but with each flash I felt sicker.
‘Those are the flares,’ said one of the girls behind me. ‘They make it like daylight. So you can see the bomb doors, you see, you can see them opening up.’
The other girl burst out into noisy weeping, and several others joined her.
‘Please don’t wake our evacuees.’ My voice and fingers were shaking as I worked. ‘I can’t have them seeing this raid. Their families are in the city.’ The curtain secured, I fumbled for the lamp and lit it again, and saw Mrs Berrow in the doorway.
‘Mrs Parr’s right,’ she said. ‘And that light would have carried twenty mile in the blackout. You want their leftovers dumped on us?’ She folded her strong arms. ‘Now pipe down, and no more of that language, thank you very much.’
Chastened, the women began to settle themselves down, sighing and murmuring. Mrs Berrow and I left the room. Just as we reached the stairs Mrs Berrow spoke again. ‘Any whisper of that little girl’s mam?’
Her face was benign, expectant, in the shaft of dull light from the sitting room.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’
At three o’clock I was startled by a sturdy punch in the back and a long, grinding grizzle.
‘Mummy. Mummeee.’
She sat up, eyes half open, arms outstretched. She wasn’t awake. I pulled her to me and her arms went tight round my neck, her hot cheek pressed against mine. Very small breaths she took, just puffs of air. Then I laid her down onto her small pillow.
*
I rose at six. Selwyn’s bed was empty. He had already gone up to the sluicegate. Our mill workers would be in at seven.
In the hall I met Elizabeth carrying a bucket of water to the lavatory, her face tight. ‘I know they’ve been bombed out, but a cistern still has to fill up before you can flush again, Mrs Parr, no matter who’s pulling the chain.’
The women were stirring in the sitting room. I knocked on the door and when I was admitted found them pulling off blankets, shrugging on cardigans in the lamplight. ‘We’re so grateful, madam,’ somebody said. ‘But we’ll get off home as soon as we can.’
As if they’d been banished by a burst pipe, or an overly bold family of rats. ‘Well, if you’re sure …’
‘Of course we are. You can’t feed us, dear.’
At least they realized.
I brought two full teapots, each with one spoonful of tea in it. They would simply have to make do with that. They took the teacups with both hands and passed them in a ritual silence. I untied the blackout curtains and drew them. One of the young women said, ‘We’re very sorry about last night, Mrs Parr.’ She had fresh lipstick on, defiantly at odds with the graze that slanted across her high, pasty forehead.
‘It’s all right. You were frightened, and with good reason.’
There was a silence, broken eventually by Mrs Berrow. She was sitting in the largest armchair. ‘There wasn’t any thinking,’ she told me. ‘We just covered our heads, and as soon as we could find a bus we cleared off without a backward look. We lost our nerve, dear, is all.’ She gulped the tea. ‘This is pure nectar. Where’s that little girl of yours?’
‘Upstairs … What happened to your friend, the lady who could only say Daphne?’
‘Oh, yes. Somebody did a whopper of a sneeze right by her head and she snapped right out of it. Never saw the like. If you brought the little girl down we could have a chat. Now that we’re in our right minds, or nearly.’
‘I expect she’s still sleeping, Mrs Berrow.’
I hesitated. There were thumps on the stairs.
‘That’ll be your lads.’ Mrs Berrow chuckled. ‘Not very likely, is it?’
They slept through the Second Coming, little children. That was what she’d told me. I almost pointed it out to her.
‘I’ll fetch Pamela.’
‘So we went into the hotel because Mummy said we had to get some candles for my cake. And then we were going to bed there. Gosh, your eye is like a thunderstorm, isn’t it.’
Pamela, in blanket, knickers and knee-length singlet, was standing in front of Mrs Berrow who, seated as she was, had acquired a faintly inquisitorial air.
‘Some candles,’ I repeated. ‘For your cake.’
‘Because I’m going to be six.’ She gave me a passing glance. I was much less important than Mrs Berrow. ‘My cake’s going to be pink.’
‘Could it have been the Crown?’ somebody said. ‘The buses stop right outside.’
‘It was mayhem there.’ Mrs Berrow nodded, remembering. ‘That’s where I live, see, opposite the Crown. So when you and Mummy came out, what happened next?’
A blended howl of outrage and mirth rose from the kitchen next door, along with a crash of cutlery and a thin cry of exasperation from Elizabeth. Pamela peered through the gap in the door. ‘What naughty boys you’ve got,’ she said to me.
Mrs Berrow sighed. ‘So when you and Mummy came out—’
‘Mummy was coming.’ Pamela sat down on the floor. ‘But she was so slow. She was talking to the cake-candle man. So I went out first.’ She crossed her legs and encircled her big toe with thumb and fingers. ‘This is how you comfort your toes, especially when they’re cold. And then I banged my head on the bus-stop pole, and after that I looked for Mummy. But all I could see was the top of her head in a bus window. Then the bald lady asked me if that was my mummy, and I said it was, but that bus was going. Then the other lady, the fat one, came, and they took me on their bus. And the bald lady laid me down under a blanket with a lot of tiny holes in because I was screaming.’
‘The bald lady?’
‘Yes, the one with the special hat. She wouldn’t wear that unless she was bald.’
Her face contorted and she let loose a single, keening, tearless sob. I kneeled down and grasped her. She leaned against my chest and sucked her thumb industriously.
‘There were two women,’ I murmured to Mrs Berrow. ‘Between them they got the idea that Pamela’s mother was already aboard one of the buses. They didn’t stop to wonder how she could have got on without Pamela. They just took Pamela with them on the next bus. I was stupid, I didn’t ask them which hotel they were outside.’
Mrs Berrow patted my hand. ‘Nobody was very clever yesterday, dear.’
Pamela stopped sobbing as suddenly as she’d begun. She broke away from me and clasped her feet again. ‘Your toes you can hold all at once in one hand, look.’ Involuntarily she rolled onto her back, where she rocked like an egg. We all laughed a little.
‘Them knickers need a change.’ Mrs Berrow’s voice was gentle. ‘That much dust and dirt, I’m surprised you remember what colour they are. Come here, lovey.’ Pamela obeyed her instantly and Mrs Berrow pulled down the knickers. She frowned. ‘There’s something crackling in here.’
I put out my hand. ‘I’ll take them to wash.’
‘Wait.’ Her old nails dug along the waistband. ‘Something’s been sewn in the seam, look.’
‘Yes, they are crackly.’ Pamela nodded. ‘Mummy said it’s because they’re new. I can do handstands in them.’
My hand was still reaching out towards Mrs Berrow. ‘I’ll take them upstairs. I’ve got sewing scissors in my bedroom.’
Pa … P … Plymouth.
Small, hasty handwriting, in pencil on a piece of greaseproof paper, mostly smudged away. I folded it in my hand and looked out of the window, at a loss. Downstairs the telephone started ringing. I heard Selwyn answering.
Then I remembered the dress. It was nowhere to be seen. I searched under the bed, then turned down the sheet and blankets and found it, crumpled into a grubby ball. Just under the little collar was a square of fraying cotton tacked roughly onto the yoke. I pulled the tacking out and freed the label. The ink was bleeding into the fabric but the words were legible. Pamela Pickering, 34 Newton Road, Plymouth.
Selwyn had finished his call. He was coming up the stairs. ‘Ellen?’
‘In the bedroom, darling.’
The door opened. ‘That was Colonel Daventry. Another bus has arrived.’ Selwyn went into the dressing room. ‘Where’s my scarf? The fog’s vile out there, raw.’
‘Darling, I found these.’
He reappeared, his scarf in one hand. ‘What?’
I held out my hand. He clasped it so that the pieces of greaseproof and cotton were crushed in my fingers. His hands were thin, cool and dry. Had he been a heavier man, a man whose palms were even just occasionally damp, I could never have married him. He pulled his hand away and I let the labels slip from my grasp.
He uncrumpled them, studied them. ‘Thank goodness. We’ve got something to go on, now.’ He put the scraps down on the bed. ‘Listen, I’m off to the village hall. There’s a chance her mother’s come to Upton. She might have found out that Pamela was taken away on the bus.’ He knotted his scarf with a series of brisk tugs. ‘Imagine it. Dashing out of your hotel, frantically looking for your child, and somebody says, “I saw a little girl, madam. Two women took her away on the bus to Upton.” Good God.’
‘I don’t think we can imagine it.’ I turned to face him. ‘The ladies downstairs think she might have left from the bus stops outside the Crown Hotel.’
‘You need to find those two women who put her on the bus. Why don’t you go up to see Lady Brock? She took a great crowd. Didn’t you say they were in the last group? I’m almost sure they’re at Upton Hall, with Lady Brock.’ He spoke hurriedly, crossing the landing ahead of me. ‘We’ll try to ring the police. Though the Colonel tells me you can’t get through to Southampton for love nor money.’
‘We could ring Waltham.’ Our nearest country town, it had a big telephone exchange. ‘I’ll take Pamela with me to Lady Brock. Elizabeth’s got far too much to do.’
‘If you want.’ He gave me a careful, wide smile. ‘Clever of you to find those little clues,’ he said, and led the way downstairs.
Pamela was sitting on the lavatory with Elizabeth in attendance. ‘And after church they gave us a biscuit,’ she was saying, ‘with icing on it, and I bit mine so I could see the biscuit and then the icing on top like a layer of snow. Snow,’ she repeated, rounding her eyes.
Elizabeth turned to me. ‘They’re saying they’re off home.’ She jerked her head towards the sitting room. ‘And there’s not even any water in the taps.’
‘But we only got one biscuit,’ Pamela went on. ‘I kept a piece in my pocket for a long time but then it crumbled up. Can you wipe my bottom? My arms are still too short, Mummy says.’
A slap resounded behind the sitting-room door, followed by a girlish cry of pain and fury. ‘That’s for ladderin my stockings, you little cow,’ said an older, husky voice. ‘I should put you over my knee, never mind how big you are.’
‘The poor devils.’ Elizabeth sighed. ‘But I shan’t mind if they clear off.’
‘Ellen, can you wipe my bottom?’
‘You see the ladies out, Mrs Parr.’ Elizabeth was firm. ‘I’m used to bottoms, with my nieces.’
I stood aside as the file of women came out of the sitting room, the older ladies scrupulously combed and buttoned, the young women’s hair slicked penitently against their scalps. As they passed they thanked me one by one. Phyllis Berrow was the last to leave. She peered over my shoulder at Pamela, who was coming out of the lavatory. ‘Any the wiser, dear?’
‘You were right. There was a piece of greaseproof. I couldn’t read it, but the label in the collar of her dress says Pickering. Of Newton Road, Plymouth.’
She mused. ‘Plymouth, indeed. Plymouth.’ She scrutinized me. ‘Lucky about that other label.’
I nodded. ‘Mrs Pickering was taking no chances.’
‘Would you, with a little sugar plum like that?’
‘I wouldn’t have let go of her hand.’
She smiled. ‘Sometimes you has to. Even if just for a minute. And you shouldn’t be punished for it. Take care, dear.’
‘Good luck, Mrs Berrow. Please come again.’ Which was absurd, as if she was an afternoon-tea visitor.
‘Yes,’ said Pamela. ‘Please come again.’
3 (#ulink_fc08f002-f680-511b-abe9-8cbf15b37dfb)
OUR BOYS TOOK a good look at Pamela, who held my hand tightly under their scrutiny. The two brothers, Jack and Donald, gave her an especially thorough once-over from beneath their fringes. Hawley, being older, was more discreet.
‘Why’s she still here?’ Donald asked me.
‘I’m waiting for Mummy,’ Pamela told him.
Hawley, sharp as a tack, held my gaze.
‘Take your cousins to school, Hawley, please.’
I washed Pamela’s knickers and dress and hung them over the range. She watched me while I rummaged in the chest in the attic. I pulled out a smock my old friend Lucy Horne had given me when I was waiting for the evacuees, before I knew they were all to be boys. The smock was beautifully made by old Mrs Horne, Lucy’s grandmother: I could easily picture Lucy in it, a small, pale, dark-eyed child. I would have liked to take Pamela to the Hornes’ cottage, show them the beneficiary of the smock, but this was unlikely to happen. For reasons I had yet to discover, Lucy hadn’t spoken to me for almost a year.
I sighed. There was nothing I could do about Lucy, especially today. I started to pull the smock over Pamela’s head.
‘This is brushed cotton, Pamela. It’ll keep the warmth next to your body.’
Pamela shut her eyes, and when she opened them again she was a small shepherdess, robed to the ankles. I gave her long socks and my smallest pair of drawers.
‘These are giant’s knickers!’
I pulled the elastic through a gap in the waistband and knotted it at her waist, or rather, the completely circular middle of her little body. ‘They’re like breeches for you.’
She beamed. ‘Mummy will laugh.’
‘Yes, she will. But we might not see her today. Mr Parr’s going to find out where she is. But we might have to wait another day or so.’
The smile vanished. ‘That’s not what the bus ladies said.’ Her eyes glistened. ‘I don’t know why she doesn’t come.’
I kneeled down and took her hands in mine.
‘Those ladies,’ I said, ‘are good ladies. They thought it would be an excellent idea for you to get on the bus, because it’s safe here for children. Very safe. Mummy’s safe too.’ My eyelids fluttered, I couldn’t help it.
She gave a small cry and stepped from foot to foot but she didn’t pull away from me. I let my thumbs stroke the soft backs of her hands. Her knuckles were dimples. ‘They were naughty.’ She sniffed. ‘They shouldn’t have said “We’ll find Mummy”, because they haven’t. Mummy was shouting at the candle man all night, you know.’
Shouting at the candle man.
‘Did you stay in the hotel just one night, darling?’
‘That’s what you do in hotels.’ She explained it to me. ‘You stay all night. They give you soft pillows. We took the pillows to the cellar when the raid started. I was comfy in the cellar but Mummy wasn’t.’
Her voice was so clear.
‘You don’t know what the hotel was called?’
‘No. But Mummy can tell you when she comes.’
I leaned back on my heels. ‘I thought we’d go and visit those bus ladies. They’re staying in an interesting house called Upton Hall. They have an enormous vegetable plot.’
Pamela looked unconvinced.
‘And a suit of armour. Like knights wear.’
That was more like it.
She had no coat, so I got a clean flour sack and pulled holes in the seams for head and arms. It did very well. I lifted her onto the bicycle rack and she clung to the saddle, face set.
‘Is it all right, Pamela?’
‘The bicycle is digging my bottom.’
I lifted her down again, glancing somewhat shamefully at the rack. No one could sit on those black bars. I went and got my old sheepskin from where it lay, somewhat yellowed, on the bedroom floor by my dressing table. Rolled up and tied tightly, it was perfect padding. Pamela screamed with delight as I pushed down hard on the pedal and we sailed off.
‘Ow, ow! You’re sitting on my fingers!’
‘Hold my waist, like I said. Arms round my middle.’
Selwyn’s fog had cleared and the sky was a pale, uncertain blue marked across with high, motionless bars of pearl-grey cloud. I heard a tinny rattle. ‘Take your feet away from the wheels, Pamela Pickering.’
‘How did you know my name?’
‘Mummy wrote it in your clothes.’
‘Well I never.’ She gave a breathless, adult little laugh.
We crossed the main road. The lane wound on, ruttier now. She was lighter than a quarter of grain, if more mobile. The hedges grew higher: nobody had cut them, and soon they’d be as tall as they had been when I was a child, and walked these lanes alone with one wet foot, my left foot. ‘I had a hole in my shoe when I was young, you know.’
‘Didn’t your mummy mend it?’
‘She didn’t know how.’
We came to the Absaloms. A row of cottages sunk into the damp of the lane. Mother and I had lived at Number One. It was derelict now, and should have no power to hurt me, but I never came by here if I could help it. Only today, with the child, because it was the quickest route to the Hall. ‘See those walls? They’re called the Absaloms. They were cottages once. I used to live in the end one.’
‘It’s got no roof!’
‘It did have. The others didn’t. They were already ruins.’
‘Can we play in those ruins?’ Pamela said.
‘Not today.’
I dismounted at the beginning of the drive to the Hall. The potholes were now deadly. It was hard skirting them with Pamela on the back of the bicycle. I whistled under the trees to keep our spirits up, and eventually we reached the old dairy which was alive with the chip of metal on stone.
‘Hello, young’un,’ said a familiar sunburnt face of forty or thereabouts, quizzing us through a rough new gap in the bricks. It was William Kennet, who gardened for Lady Brock. When he wasn’t turning over the grounds to food crops he was busy with Home Guard duties – in this case, fitting the old dairy out with gunsights. So many things, these days, had to be seen to be believed.
‘Morning, Ellen,’ he said. ‘Who’ve you got there?’
‘Morning, Mr Kennet. Sergeant Kennet, I beg your pardon. This is a little girl from Southampton.’ I spoke meaningfully, and he gave a slow nod. ‘Say hello, Pamela!’ I used my brightest tone.
Pamela waved from her perch but said nothing. Her face was pinched. I was hungry, so I knew she must be too.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked William.
‘Giving this old wall a few holes,’ he told her. ‘To make a nice breeze in the dairy.’
‘It must be awfully difficult with that bad hand.’
‘Oh Pamela, that’s not polite.’
William smiled, held out the hand to her. ‘Look, it holds a chisel right well. So I can hammer away with my hammer.’ He made a claw, to show her. His thumb and finger were huge beside hers, calloused and bent from overuse. Behind the finger was a single nub of a third finger, and then nothing. What remained of the palm and back of the hand was bound by scar tissue, now silvered and braided. It was a creation of a shell, during the Great War, at the Battle of Messines. He was a copper-beater before that shell screeched over, a high craftsman, but I never knew him as such. To me he was a gardener, with a potting shed that was a refuge throughout my later childhood, a charcoal stove that was the only warm thing in my life.
Pamela, awed, was mimicking him, trying to make her own claw, her small perfect little forefinger sliding off the soft top of her thumb. ‘Mummy’s still in Southampton,’ she confided to him. ‘But she’s coming to fetch me this afternoon. Do you know, we saw a house with no roof!’
‘Did you now?’ He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘That’s not a lot of use, is it? A house with no roof. Now, Upton Hall certainly has a roof, and a tower too. Wait till you see it.’ He glanced at the bicycle. ‘I’m glad you found a use for that old sheepskin.’
‘It’s not old. It’s lovely. I used to sleep on it when I was tiny.’
‘I know.’ He gave me his square grin. ‘It was me that gave it you, when you were newborn.’
‘Oh, William, how very kind!’ I was astonished. ‘I never knew! I would have thanked you for it long since!’
He shrugged, still smiling. ‘It was a cold winter, and I had it to spare. And your ma and pa thanked me on your behalf, very civilly.’
‘I keep forgetting that you worked for my father.’
‘You were too young to remember. And I wouldn’t call it work. More like a day here and there.’ Mr Kennet tipped his hat with the remains of his right hand. ‘Now, I can’t linger, my dear. Come and have a cuppa when you get time.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said, wondering when I would ever get time.
Lady Brock opened her front door, boots spattered and mackintosh hemmed with mud.
‘Good morning, Ellen. How do you like our defences? Have a care, William Kennet will soon be asking you for the password of the day.’ She came down the steps. ‘I saw you, skirting the quagmires. Sometimes I’m glad Michael’s no longer with us, you know. He wouldn’t have minded the ploughing –’ she indicated, with a wide sweep of her arm, the great pathwayed allotment of ragged, nutritious brassicas and rich, black potato furrows which had replaced her lawns and rose garden ‘– but he’d have loathed the drive. We only needed a few ruts for him to say it looked like bloody St Eloi.’ She turned to Pamela. ‘I do beg your pardon, dear, for my foul language.’
After the Great War Lady Brock’s husband, Sir Michael, had been an ambulant if rather wheezy hero; over the next twenty years the gas had reduced him by increments to a gurgling wraith in a bath chair before killing him in September 1939, ten days into the present war. Lady Brock as usual had a gorgeous rich red on her wide, rather fish-like mouth. The lipstick, plus a feathered hat and a shy, rarely seen beast of a fur coat, constituted all she had of glamour. On the day of Sir Michael’s death, which had been by internal drowning, she had donned them all, to serve as her breastplate, sword and buckler.
Pamela gave her a guarded look. Lady Brock laughed.
‘We’ve come to speak to two of the women who were on the bus,’ I said.
‘Ah. I know the ones you mean. I’m afraid they’ve all gone. They departed en masse at first light, desperate to get home. Like a shoal of salmon. There was nothing I could do to stop them.’ She saw my shoulders sag. ‘Buck up, dear. All is not lost.’ She crouched down in front of Pamela. ‘So you came by bicycle!’
Pamela nodded.
‘Was it your first time?’
Pamela nodded again.
‘That deserves an egg, at the very least,’ said Lady Brock, ‘if not some mashed potato.’
She cooked without removing her mackintosh, flinging cold mashed potato into the sputtering frying pan along with the egg, stabbing unhandily at the mixture with the tip of a long iron spoon. ‘I shan’t disturb Mrs Hicks. She went to see her sister in Cosham and got stuck on a train all night. Caught her absolute death.’ When Pamela was served she picked up a pan containing the remains of a burnt breakfast of porridge. ‘The girls scorched this specially. Come with me, Ellen, while I feed Nipper.’
We stepped outside into the flagstoned yard. Lady Brock scraped the porridge pan into a tin bowl and the dog, a rangy collie with one blue eye, loped out from the empty stables. Upton Hall currently housed Nipper, Mrs Hicks, William Kennet, six land girls and Lady Brock herself. The herds were dispatched, the fields turned to wheat and turnips. ‘I had two hunters in those stables, and now that dog’s the only resident,’ she remarked now, quite cheerfully. ‘I don’t know. What a bloody comedown.’
She knew what had happened to Pamela. The two women on the bus had told her.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Anyway, Pamela doesn’t know which hotel it was. My guests thought it might have been the Crown. The family’s from Plymouth, so they’d have stayed in an hotel.’
Lady Brock banged the spoon in the pan to release the last scraps of porridge and the dog snapped at them as they fell. ‘It was the Crown Hotel. The ladies told me.’
‘Ah. Well.’ I ran my toe along the gap between two flagstones. There was something comforting about the worn edges. ‘I’ll telephone the Crown, then, and the police if need be. And Mrs Pickering, who couldn’t be bothered to mind her own child, will come with tears of joy to us.’
Lady Brock surveyed me, a gentle pike.
‘That was uncharitable of me.’ I felt the blush heat my cheeks. ‘My people were noisy last night.’
‘I didn’t hear mine. I put them in the drawing room and took a spoon of Michael’s mixture.’ Lady Brock’s eyes glinted. ‘Don’t breathe a word to Dr Bell but I’ve got some left over. It’s absolutely topping. One doesn’t move a muscle all night. Now, let’s go. Pamela’s scraping the pattern off that plate.’
Pamela and I followed Lady Brock past the ballroom. The chandeliers hung sheeted in canvas from the dim ceiling; the alabaster lions were corralled in some hidden basement, the carpets rolled up and gone. Instead there were a half-dozen rows of trestles bearing camouflage netting for the anti-aircraft batteries. Many of us in Upton came here to weave strips of drab fabric in and out through the mesh of tarred ropes. Our first efforts were returned as ‘insufficiently garnished’ or, as William put it when he saw them, ‘like a pack of dogs with mange. Jerry will see right through ’em and let fly.’ So now we worked until the sides of our hands were rough and sore. Today the room was empty, the half-finished nets hanging forlorn.
‘Aren’t those holey tents,’ Pamela said.
‘Yes. They need mending.’
We mounted the stairs. The suit of armour glimmered in the darkness of the upper corridor next to the door of Sir Michael Brock’s bedroom, the gloom now permanent with the blackout. In former days it stood in the hall, lit around with candles so that its reflection hung, an inverted ghost in the depths of the polished oak floorboards. Candles but no candle man, no candle men here. Lady Brock had been faithful. What kind of a woman comported herself in that way, shouting at a man all night with her child in the room? Too busy to notice when her curious little girl crept off outside? The floorboards were dried out and dusty now, the armour tarnished. ‘Mrs Hicks wants to get up here and apply elbow grease,’ said Lady Brock. ‘But I’m not having it. We both need to conserve our strength. Who knows how long this is going to last?’
I helped Pamela onto a stool. She lifted the visor and replaced it, transfixed by the grille, the blackness behind, the small creak as it settled into position. ‘Peep-bo,’ she said softly. ‘Peep-bo.’
‘I’ve always felt guilty about you, Ellen.’ Lady Brock’s voice, unused to speaking low, was husky. ‘I felt we didn’t do enough.’
Creak. Peep-bo. I remembered the grate at the Absaloms, black with past coal but no coal in it to burn, the cold looming from the walls.
‘It was very difficult to do anything for my mother,’ I managed to say at last. ‘She wouldn’t be helped.’
We left Lady Brock at her front door and went down the steps. ‘Perhaps my boys could buff up these floorboards for you,’ I said, as I helped Pamela onto the bicycle. ‘They’re always on the lookout for a job.’ I was exaggerating the case somewhat, but they were helpful boys on the whole, not overly given to skulking.
She stared out over my head, at the turned earth of the potato beds and the mud of her drive. ‘I’ll be down there with William, you know,’ she said. ‘In the old dairy. With my rabbit gun.’
‘And I hope that William would send you straight back again, Lady Brock. We need you.’
‘Not before I pot one for Michael.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘I promised him, you see.’
We went home, pushing the bicycle through the kitchen garden and out through the back gate. The sky was the same light blue. I let Pamela chatter on, about the bicycle spokes, the brick wall, the crows in their high nests.
Selwyn opened the front door as we came up the path. ‘Give Pamela to Elizabeth,’ he murmured. ‘Let her go in.’
‘What news? Selwyn? Have you found Mrs Pickering?’
Pamela slipped past him into the house. Perhaps Mrs Pickering had come to the village hall. Perhaps she was even now indoors. Yes. Selwyn had let her in for Pamela to find, as a surprise. My heart battered my chest.
‘In a manner of speaking.’ He ran his hand over his eyes. ‘The Crown was bombed last night.’
4 (#ulink_c18e6213-7b27-521c-b9bf-235a919293dd)
‘WE CAN’T BE EXPECTED to behave as if we’re made of Derbyshire peakstone.’ Selwyn wielded his handkerchief. ‘That poor little child.’
The woman’s face was untouched, he told me. Her ration book was in her handbag, in the name of one Amelia Pickering, residing at the same Plymouth address she had sewn into her child’s clothes. ‘I called Waltham police station after you left,’ he went on. ‘Sit down, darling.’
I did so, and so did he. We faced each other in our sitting room’s comfortable armchairs. The lower part of my face, my cheeks, felt strange; the skin numb, tingling.
‘They managed to get through to Southampton. Then Southampton called them back about an hour ago.’ He blew his nose. ‘Mrs Pickering contacted them when Pamela disappeared, but they couldn’t get to the hotel until this morning. By which time it had been hit.’ A hollow, wooden rumble came from the kitchen, followed by a scream of pleasure. ‘What on earth is that?’
I cocked my head. ‘I think it’s Lord Plumer.’
Lord Plumer was an ancient croquet ball, legendarily unbeatable, named by Selwyn’s uncle after the general who, in turning the course of the Battle of Messines, had, in his estimation, spared the life of his nephew. Old Mr Parr, bereaved of both his sons at the Somme, had been grateful for small mercies. When he gave up croquet he had planed a flat underside onto Lord Plumer, fastened a lead plate thereto, and used it as a doorstop for the pantry. No one else was allowed to win a game with Lord Plumer.
The rumble returned. ‘That’s the way!’ we heard Elizabeth say, in a high, breaking voice. ‘Off it goes.’
‘You’ve told Elizabeth, then.’
‘Yes. She’s taking it badly.’ He spread his hands, clasped them as if washing. ‘Apparently Mrs Pickering called the police and then ran out to look for Pamela, only coming back at nightfall. And then, along with a dozen other unfortunates, she placed too much faith in the cellar. The ceiling came down on them all.’
I pictured her returning tear-stained in the evening to her certain death. For even while she was running in the streets, shrieking Pamela, Pamela, the bomb for the Crown was being loaded into its bay.
‘God damn them.’ I swallowed the stone in my throat. ‘I wish them eternal perdition.’
Selwyn breathed in. ‘That attitude helps no one, darling.’
‘It helps me.’ I swallowed again. ‘The police will come now, won’t they? And take her away?’
‘They will. Eventually.’ He took out his spectacles and started cleaning them. He was going to read the Bible: he always gave the lenses fastidious attention before doing so. ‘They’re looking for her father, obviously, and other relatives. They’ll be in touch soon.’
I pushed away a lock of hair. The bicycle ride had made it messy. ‘You could try the Book of Job,’ I told Selwyn. ‘We need his God now. One who can shut the sea with doors. Unload granaries of hail.’
Pamela was sitting on the kitchen floor, wrapping the croquet ball in a tea towel. Elizabeth was putting onions in a baking dish.
‘Baked onions,’ I said. ‘They take me back. Do you know how lucky we are, to have got all that precious onion seed from Upton Hall? Most people’s mouths are watering for onions. They haven’t seen one in months and months.’ I babbled on, in the same bright tone. ‘Months and months.’ Elizabeth’s eyes were brimming. I made to embrace her, my hands on her shoulders, but she shrugged me away.
‘No, Mrs Parr,’ she murmured. ‘It’ll only start me again.’
‘Dolly needs a headscarf.’ Pamela held up her swaddled ball. ‘Otherwise she might get earache in the wind. Do you know what happens then? Somebody irons your ear.’
‘No!’ I feigned amazement while Elizabeth dashed her tears away. ‘With a hot iron?’
Pamela sucked her teeth. ‘They put a towel over your ear first. And then they put the iron on the towel, and it’s so lovely and warm. Mummy’s being very slow.’
‘Yes, Pamela. She must be very busy.’
Elizabeth put the dish in the oven. ‘Perhaps she’s gone to see your auntie. Have you got any aunties?’
Pamela’s face puckered. ‘Why would she go and see Aunt Margie without me?’
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Of course she wouldn’t do that.’
‘Aunt Margie’s a long way away. She’s in Cape Town. They have grapes there and lots of flowers. I haven’t been there but Mummy went before I was born. She says it’s wizard. She wouldn’t go and visit Aunt Margie without me.’ She hummed a little and unwrapped the ball to fold the tea towel into an uneven triangle. ‘Bad headscarf.’
‘Let me.’ I took the tea towel and made a neater job of it, and knotted it as best I could under Lord Plumer’s flat chin.
Pamela cradled the ball experimentally, in each elbow, and then set it on the floor to take bobbing steps. ‘Pamela, we’re going shopping. Oh, do come on, darling. Do hurry up. Honestly, it’s like wading through treacle.’
I set three places at the kitchen table. Selwyn didn’t have lunch. Elizabeth started the last loaf, cutting it fine. We listened to the voice of a dead woman piped through Pamela’s mouth, Mrs Pickering exhorting her small child, and prepared the meal.
In the afternoon I found an old bed-jacket that my mother used to wear when she sat up against the pillows to drink her tea. It was a flouncy woollen affair with a flapping collar and silky straps, and it hung down almost to Pamela’s knees. When I drew it off her shoulders she clutched at the swathes of wool. ‘No. No, it’s too cosy. Let me keep it.’
‘You shall have it back when I’ve taken off these silly straps. We need buttons, nice big ones …’
I had no buttons large enough. After a long search we found, in a wooden box in the dressing room, the toggles from an old duffel coat belonging to my brother Edward. That coat had been so torn and stained that Mother and I had cut it into strips and burned it on the fire. I refused to worry about Edward because he’d told me, the day he left to go to sea, that I should never worry, that worry brought bad luck and he would always need luck. He’d been fourteen, I eleven, and since then we had spent a total of nineteen precious days together. His last letter, dated a month ago and headed Singapore, said I’ll take my chances here, drst Ell. The company is doing terrifically, what with soldiery everywhere. I’ve been in a few jams before now and know my way around. Place like a fortress – indeed, it is a fortress and always has been. I’ve been contemplating calling myself Senhor de Souza and speaking entirely in pidgin. But like as not will end up doing my bit.
At least doing his bit wouldn’t put his life in danger, not in Singapore. I was glad he was far away from all this.
Pamela was delighted with the toggles. They were of such smooth, dark-polished wood. I took her to the mill where she sat on the office floor while I tidied my desk. My eyes lit upon an advisory leaflet on the turnip gall weevil which for some reason had come my way, and which I was going to pass to Lady Brock, with her great root crop. It seemed now that this message, arriving as it did before the bombing, belonged to another world. Pamela sat leaning against the wall, sucking her thumb, putting two fingers over her eyelids to pin them closed. That seemed to comfort her, as did the battering of my typewriter keys when I began my letters. ‘Do more,’ she said, whenever I paused. ‘Keep going bangbang.’ It was a noisy behemoth of a machine. We went back to the house an hour before dusk and saw a policeman ahead of us, wheeling his bicycle up the path.
He turned to face us. The strap of his helmet ran beneath a chin now blue with the bristle that accumulated by the evening.
‘Mrs Parr,’ he said, by way of greeting. ‘I’m Constable Flack. Suky Fitch’s brother.’
‘Suky’s brother!’ Astonishing, how such a bulky individual could spring from the same stock as our diminutive mill forewoman.
The constable’s flinty, fifty-year-old eyes warmed. ‘We had different mams.’
He removed his helmet. For a sickening moment I thought he was about to announce Mrs Pickering’s death. But instead he said gravely to Pamela, ‘Would you be so kind, miss, and take this hat for me? I’ve got a great bag of papers to carry.’
He and Pamela went into the sitting room. Elizabeth was shutting up the hens, so I made tea the colour of washing water and took it through. ‘That’s my number,’ he was saying to Pamela. ‘And that there, GR, what do you think that means?’
‘It means you’re fierce. Grrr. So have you been to see Mummy?’
He lifted his bewildered face to me. I heard Elizabeth open the back door. ‘Pamela, I need to speak to the constable. Elizabeth’s got some milk for you.’
She burst out with a loud bellow. ‘Why won’t anyone bring me my mummy!’ I embraced her but she growled and with surprising strength pushed me away. ‘Don’t keep hugging me! You’re not my mummy!’ She stamped her foot. ‘Where’s my mummy!’ Her face crimson, she threw herself on the floor, roaring, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Oh, my mummy!’
Elizabeth came in. We gave each other blank, drained stares. The constable shifted in his chair. ‘I’ve got to get back before dark,’ he said through the din.
‘Come into the kitchen, Constable.’
We left Elizabeth kneeling beside the screaming child. As the door closed I saw her place the flat of one gentle hand on Pamela’s stomach. Her face, Elizabeth’s face, was a mask of sorrow.
In the kitchen Constable Flack handed me a child’s ration book. ‘This was found in her mother’s handbag,’ he told me. ‘You must make sure it goes with her.’
I gasped. ‘When will she leave?’
‘Sit down, Mrs Parr.’
I did so. We listened to the screams in the sitting room. If she didn’t stop, I’d have to go back in there. But just then Pamela gave a choking sigh, and Elizabeth’s voice came to us, muffled. ‘There, there,’ she was saying. ‘There, there.’
Constable Flack cleared his throat. ‘We don’t know what’s become of Mr Pickering. He scarpered long before the war, it seems. Nobody in Plymouth has ever seen hide or hair of hubby.’
‘Pamela hasn’t mentioned him …’ My breath fluttered out through my nostrils. ‘What were they doing in Southampton?’
He shrugged. ‘We’ve got no way of knowing. She said nothing to the hotel staff.’
I picked up the ration book, stared at it in a sort of stupor.
‘You’ll get a pint of milk for the little one. And please obtain a child’s respirator. Hers couldn’t be found. Register her at your shops here in Upton. However short her stay.’
A pint of milk for Pamela. ‘She mentioned an aunt in South Africa.’
‘Oh, yes.’ The constable nodded. ‘A Mrs Marjorie Lord of Cape Town. The Plymouth officers found some letters, none more recent than ten year ago. Seems the sisters weren’t corresponding at the time of Mrs Pickering’s death.’
‘She certainly talked about her sister to Pamela.’
The constable rubbed his chin. ‘The Plymouth boys have it in hand, but it’ll be a good while before we hear from Mrs Lord. Any rate, you’re stuck with the little girl until Southampton sorts itself out. Telegraph, electricity, telephones, all properly snarled up. Plus there’s the stragglers from the raid. One lot were out in a field, in a storm drain. A storm drain.’ He stood up. ‘Don’t worry unduly, Mrs Parr. We’ll find her somewhere suitable. A nice family who’d take her on. Pack her in like another little sardine.’
‘We’ll have to tell her soon. It’s worse not to.’
‘I expect so.’
I stared up at him, and then rose to my feet.
‘Constable Flack, we’re not unsuitable ourselves, you know. We’ve got three boys from Southampton already. We’d be happy to pack her in, as you say.’
In the silence which followed I heard the front door open, and then Selwyn’s light voice. ‘Hello?’ I could tell from his expectant tone that he’d seen the constable’s bicycle.
I raised my voice. ‘We’re in the kitchen.’
‘Ah.’ Selwyn came in. ‘Good afternoon, Constable. Have you unearthed any family?’
‘This is Constable Flack, darling. Suky’s half-brother.’ I gripped the back of the chair. ‘I was just telling him we’re perfectly prepared to take Pamela under our wing for a while.’
‘Just until we manage to place her, sir.’ Constable Flack fitted his helmet onto his head.
‘She’s got an aunt in South Africa,’ I told Selwyn. ‘Her father’s long gone. There’s no one else.’
‘I was informing Mrs Parr that we’ll do our best to find her a berth –’ Constable Flack delved in his tunic pocket and produced bicycle clips ‘– while we try to get a hold of the aunt. Or, if we’re lucky, this darned elusive Mr Pickering.’
‘Pickering. Pimpernel. Very good.’ Selwyn grinned, twitching the buttons out of the buttonholes of his coat with a brisk thumb and forefinger. Most people used both hands to unbutton their coats, but he didn’t.
‘Quite a job it’ll be, with half the men overseas.’ Constable Flack was sombre. ‘And these blokes who scarper, they’re generally a bad lot. No responsibility or fatherly feeling.’ He dwelled for a second or two on these feckless men. ‘If they had an ounce of decency,’ he concluded, ‘they wouldn’t have gone in the first place.’
‘Some sort of fostering arrangement, then. That would be a capital solution.’ Selwyn sighed. ‘Poor little mite.’ He and the constable left the room, and I heard the front door open once more. Selwyn murmured something, and there was a scrape of boots on the path. Then a loud ticking as Constable Flack freewheeled down to the gate. Only then did I make for the door. I brushed past Selwyn in the hall.
‘What the dickens—’
‘Just something about the ration book,’ I stammered. ‘I forgot to ask him.’
I dashed down the path to see the constable’s bicycle gathering speed. ‘Constable.’ I started running. ‘Constable Flack!’ He slowed, and I caught up with him.
‘Everything all right, Mrs Parr?’
‘Do remember that we could have Pamela. That’s what I was saying. We’re suitable.’
‘It’s not for me to decide. Mr Parr seemed very agreeable to the idea of a family taking her.’ He squinted at me. I was standing against the declining sun.
‘Mr Parr hasn’t had two seconds to consider the matter.’
The constable gave a couple of slow nods. ‘Telephone Waltham police in the morning. Ask for Sergeant Moore. He deals with these matters.’ He ran his finger under his chinstrap. ‘I must get on.’
‘Thank you, Constable.’
‘Sergeant Moore,’ he repeated, and pedalled away down the lane.
The boys came home late. They’d been playing football on the green. I told them that soon I would take them to Upton Hall, and if they gave the oaken floorboards the most brilliant shine, they would then be allowed to polish the suit of armour. They nodded solemnly, awed not by the task but by the sight of Pamela. ‘She’s still here, then.’ Donald folded his arms against the newcomer.
Jack smirked. ‘Her clothes are funny.’
‘Never mind them,’ Hawley told her. ‘Do you like rissoles? They’re fried-up veg rolls with gravy.’
Pamela shook her head, her chin trembling.
I took her hand. ‘Boys, why don’t you play cards in your bedroom? In a little while you can help Elizabeth with the vegetables.’ The two younger ones tramped up the stairs, Hawley lagging on the bottom step.
‘Hawley, try not to worry—’ I began, because I knew that no one had telephoned from Southampton.
‘Mr Parr told us the lines are still down.’ He smiled at me. ‘It’s all right.’ He turned to climb the stairs.
I gave Pamela some bread and milk. She ate slowly, pausing to say, ‘I like this food,’ and then, ‘But I don’t like you.’
‘I’m not surprised. It must seem strange being in our house. I must seem strange.’
‘No.’ Her eyes glowed with anger. ‘You seem nasty. Why are you making me a coat? I’ve got one already. It’s in the hotel.’ Then the anguish rose again, too large for her body, needing to be expelled in gusts of crying. ‘I don’t think Mummy’s coming. I think she won’t ever come to get me.’
No, she won’t. Pamela darling, you must be very brave. I was about to say those words because this seemed the greater cruelty, to let so small a child venture unaccompanied into the truth. But then Pamela spoke. ‘She said she’d do it. “One more naughty thing, Pamela, and I’ll go off with the candle man.” And now she has.’ She began to growl with grief. ‘Horrid Mummee.’
I embraced her. This time she allowed it, her arms hanging by her sides.
I heated two pans of water and poured them into a tin tub in the kitchen to spare her the glacial bathroom upstairs. I kneeled down and unlaced her shoes. Looking up, I found her face in front of mine, watchful, dreaming. A world in those large, light-brown eyes, clear as a peat brook, flecked with the same dark grey as pebbles in a stream. She lifted her arms for me to pull her top clothes off, obediently stepped from foot to foot so I could remove the knickers and long socks. Everything I did must remind her of her mother, and yet she said nothing. She was so small.
She sat gingerly down in the water. ‘Is it too hot?’ I asked, anxious. She shook her head. I should wash her hair, probably. But not tonight. Instead I washed her grubby hands, her grubby knees and neck with my own bath soap, and scooped water over her shoulders and back. Her skin was uniformly pale, dense, creamy. Perhaps I was wrong, and this bathtime was so new and peculiar that nothing about it recalled her mother.
She knew about the candle man long before she’d seen him. She used to hear him come whistling up the path, just after she’d been put to bed with her library books. He had a whistle like a blackbird. He always came on library day. Then one night she went downstairs for a drink of water. And her mother had said: This is Eric. He’s going to get some candles for your cake. ‘And he did this with his eye at me.’ Pamela gurned, trying and failing to close one eye without the other following suit. ‘And the next day we all went to Southampton. We put everything into a special kind of suitcase called a vast suitcase,’ she said. ‘When you go away for a long time, that’s what you need. A vast one.’
‘Vast means extremely big, Pamela.’
The bathwater lapped around her knees. She floated the face flannel on the water’s surface, poking it with a finger until it sank down. She wasn’t a fat child but she still had her baby’s chubbiness around the wrists. ‘Vast,’ she said again.
She didn’t know why they had to go to Southampton, why Eric couldn’t bring the candles to their house. But Mummy said they needed an adventure. They took a train, then a bus. Then they walked. Mummy was frightened of bombs, but the candle man said the bombers had already got everything they wanted from Southampton. ‘So we went to the hotel and took off our coats and cardigans. Mummy put me on a chair outside our room while she shouted at the candle man inside. We all went to bed in the cellar. And then in the morning I had to sit on the chair again. That’s why I went outside to watch the people rushing around. I was bored.’
I dipped my hand in the warm water and scooped it over her pale, round shoulders. ‘Promise me that if you’re bored here, you will stay where you’re put. Pamela …’ I tried to sound careless, conversational. ‘This candle man. Eric. I suppose he wasn’t a bit like your daddy, was he?’
She gave me a blank gaze. ‘Oh, I don’t have a daddy.’
‘Really? I thought everyone did …’
‘No. You can be excused from it, you know. Mummy told me. He decided not to be a daddy, and so he isn’t. He went off just after I came out. Do you know that babies come out of people, out of a wincy little hole that stretches?’
‘Goodness, Pamela!’ I had a sudden sharp image of a woman perched at a dressing table, throwing out the facts of life to her little child while lipsticking her mouth. ‘Yes, I do know that.’
‘Are you having a baby, Ellen?’
I gave a wavering laugh as the heat flooded my face. ‘I certainly am not. And it’s not a question you ask grown-ups, dear.’
‘You might be.’ She was unabashed, round-eyed. ‘They’re teeny when they start growing, like a little nut. So you could have one inside you and not know about it till you start being sick as a dog.’
‘That’s not a nice expression.’ I smoothed my hands over the pinafore I’d put on to bathe her. ‘I haven’t got time for babies, Pamela. Not with all you children to look after. Now let’s forget about all this silliness.’
I ran through phrases in my mind. Pamela, darling, your mother … Mummy … Pamela, sweetheart … I couldn’t get any further. It would have to be done tomorrow. Tomorrow or the next day.
Quite suddenly she started to grizzle, baring small, square milk teeth. Her tears fell into the cooling bath. Elizabeth came in with the vegetables for supper, filled the sink with cold water, cast a sombre eye on Pamela, and left the room again, saying, ‘Hens.’
I told Pamela she’d see the hens tomorrow, that she could feed them with Elizabeth if she wanted, but she shook her head, because hens were no good to her. I dried her and took her upstairs to dress, and met Hawley coming down to peel parsnips. The others were too darn comfortable to move, he said. ‘They’re the lazy branch of the family. No, truly they are. My dad says so.’
After supper I put Pamela back in my bed and told her a tale about a swan, one who kept her babies in the soft, white feathers on her back between her wings as she glided along a shining, dark-green summer river. They went for long, long adventures until Pamela grew drowsy.
5 (#ulink_31c5f5f1-1f16-57c2-83ed-ba5375cc13b1)
PAMELA KEPT ME AWAKE for a large part of the night, a sleeper in almost perpetual motion. At six o’clock I was in the kitchen starting some bread when the telephone rang in the hall, the bell immediately drowned by thundering feet on the landing and Elizabeth’s hopeless cry, ‘Donald, you’re a plain old-fashioned disgrace!’ I heard Selwyn say, ‘Children, stop this bawling,’ but they took no notice and crowded noisily into the kitchen, Elizabeth following.
‘Donald refuses to have his hair cut,’ she announced.
I was pouring warm water into my flour. I looked up to see the older two were freshly shorn, the black-haired Hawley monk-like under his pudding-basin crop. For the first time I noticed the faintest dark down on his upper lip. ‘Hawley, you look very dapper,’ I said. ‘Donald, don’t you want to be as smart as your cousin?’
Jack, the elder of the two brothers and a russet boy, spoke for Donald. ‘He says we look like girls.’
Donald scuffed his feet by the range, his fringe in his eyes. Shorter, stockier and redder than Jack, he was a wayward Highland calf.
‘Really, Donald, dear. What sort of girl would have such a plain style?’
‘Mrs Parr, save your strength.’ Elizabeth scooped oats into a pan, her face creased with exasperation. ‘Donald won’t be told.’
The older boys sat down, their necks wet, the snipped hems of their hair still bearing the furrows of the comb. When I was fourteen, Elizabeth had cut my hair. She’d worked for Mr and Miss Dawes then, who looked after the children of the parish poor. I was older than these boys but I was nonetheless a parish child. So Elizabeth had clipped me and deloused me with gentle kindness.
I looked up, met her eyes.
‘I’ve never told Mr Parr, you know,’ I said quietly. ‘About my short crop.’
‘Of course not.’ She began to smile. ‘He doesn’t have to know everything.’
My corn goddess, Selwyn had said, when he unpinned my hair for the first time. So easy to worship you. He knew that Mother and I had fetched up in the Absaloms, but I had painted this era in broad brushstrokes, very broad strokes indeed. What corn goddess in her right mind would regale a suitor with stories of long-ago lice?
Just then Selwyn came into the kitchen. ‘Good morning, boys. I’ve been speaking to Cousin Hawley’s father. They’re all fit and well, although there’s no water and an awful lot of smoke.’
They were too proud to shed tears of relief but Hawley’s shoulders settled and Jack blinked rapidly. Donald gave a series of blowing breaths, a small bullock on a misty morning.
‘Donald won’t have his hair cut,’ I told Selwyn.
‘I know. The fearful row you made quite impinged on my telephone conversation. Donald,’ Selwyn commanded, ‘submit to a trim this evening and at Christmas I’ll take all you boys to Suggs’s in Waltham for a proper chap’s back-and-sides.’ He wagged a finger. ‘This is a gentleman’s offer, conditional upon meticulous obedience to Elizabeth. Is that understood?’
If the vocabulary was a little high, the gist was clear. ‘Yes, Mr Parr,’ Donald said, and the boys seated themselves with an awful scraping of wooden chair-legs on earthenware tiles and Selwyn sat down too. Elizabeth served the porridge while I kneaded my dough, rolling it and slapping it on the board. ‘My spoon’s jumping up and down on the table,’ said Jack. ‘Look. Bang the dough again, Mrs Parr. There!’
‘Pick your spoon up and start eating,’ Elizabeth directed him through set teeth.
The telephone rang again. Selwyn said, ‘Damn,’ and left the room.
‘Hawley’s only eight years younger than you, Mrs Parr.’ Jack started to inhale his porridge, speaking between and during mouthfuls. ‘Don’t you find that strordinary? That he’s already thirteen and you’re only twenty-one, but you’re completely grown up?’
‘She isn’t. She scrapes her porridge bowl like we do. Mr Parr, now he’s properly grown up. He’s forty.’
‘Donald, I shall tell Mr Parr how rude you’ve been about Mrs Parr.’
‘Really, Elizabeth.’ I rolled up my dough and put it back in the bowl. ‘It’s no more than the truth. I’m always starving. And Mr Parr is forty-one, to be exact.’
‘Yes, Mrs Parr. But Donald’s manner.’
Selwyn returned, unsmiling. The boys, seeing it, were quiet.
‘Who rang, dear?’
‘Sharp’s.’ He sat down again at the table. ‘The fire hoses did for the grain, nearly all of it, but there’s some dry wheat left. They’re sending for people to fetch it away and grind it.’
‘Oh lord,’ said Elizabeth. ‘They got Sharp’s.’
I rubbed dough from my fingers, awed at the knowledge that, in hitting the Southampton docks, the bombers had laid waste to the largest flour mill in the South.
I followed Selwyn out to the yard where the lorry was garaged. I tried to match my stride to his; we were both tall, but he was eager to be on his way. ‘Darling, when I dashed after the constable yesterday, I did mention that we’d be happy to hang on to Pamela for a while.’
‘We haven’t got much choice, have we, in the short term.’ He spoke absently, fumbling for his keys. We were approaching the garage.
‘What I mean is, she wouldn’t necessarily have to be with a family. People are so hard-pressed now. She might do better with us and the boys …’
Selwyn unlocked the door and snapped the padlock shut. ‘Sweetheart, these past few days we’ve all been through a great deal. You’ve been absolutely marvellous—’
‘I really haven’t. I simply did what had to be done—’
‘—but I think the experience has left us, perhaps, not quite in our right minds.’
The doors gave a rusty scream as Selwyn pulled them open. I followed him into the garage. ‘What do you mean, in our right minds? Selwyn?’
‘Darling, can we talk about this later?’ He was opening the cab door, swinging himself up into the driving seat. ‘It’s hardly the most apposite moment.’
‘Well, I’m taking her to Barker’s in Waltham this morning. For clothes. So I won’t get to the office till after lunch.’ My voice was rising. ‘But she needs some things. I can get her things, can’t I? While she’s here?’
‘Of course you can. Ellen, what’s the matter?’ He leaned down towards me.
‘Nothing. I’m perfectly all right.’ I shut my eyes. ‘And I’m certainly in my right mind.’
‘I do beg your pardon. That was a stupid thing to say.’ He smiled deliberately down into my hot eyes. ‘Take Pamela shopping and don’t worry about the office. Suky and I can dash off a couple of bills between us. I must go.’
‘Of course you must.’
He drove off, to Southampton, and Sharp’s, and the undamaged grain.
I went back inside. Stared at the slowly rising bread dough. Ate my helping of porridge, half-cold, from the pan. Then I went out to the hall and lifted the telephone receiver.
‘Waltham police station, please,’ I told the operator.
Pamela appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Miss Ell, Missis Ell!’
‘Quiet, sweetheart. I’m telephoning.’
She thumped her way down, hopping from stair to stair. Six steps from the bottom her foot slipped. ‘Pamela!’ She pitched forward and so did I, catching her as she fell against my chest and knocked me to my knees. Behind me the telephone receiver cracked against the wall.
‘Be careful!’ I yelped the words as pain shot through my knee. Pamela, unhurt, threw herself on the floor and began to wail.
‘Good grief, Mrs Parr!’ Elizabeth was standing in the doorway.
‘We’re all right.’ I levered myself upright. ‘My dear, take her into the kitchen. I must telephone.’
Sergeant Moore excused himself for eating his breakfast. His thin voice worked its way through crumbs. ‘I daresay you’d be unopposed in this scheme, madam.’
‘I’d hardly call it a scheme. Just a wish. Of course I have thought it over. Let’s say, a carefully considered wish …’
Loud screams issued from the kitchen. ‘No! No! Not porridge!’
‘Do you have other children, Mrs Parr?’
‘None of my own, but we’ve got three evacuees.’ I pressed the receiver against my ear. ‘We’re used to looking after young children. We could be—’
The kitchen door opened. ‘I! Am! Not! Eating! Nasty! Porridge!’ Pamela screamed, and thundered up the stairs.
‘– like a family to her!’ I shouted.
‘Just so,’ said the thin voice, with a little clearing of the throat, as Pamela thundered down again, giving a long, roaring bellow, as far as I could see for the simple pleasure of doing so.
When I went into the kitchen she was sitting on a chair with her knees up and the singlet pulled over them. Elizabeth was stirring a pan on the range. ‘I’m just making some more porridge, Mrs Parr.’
‘I gathered.’ We both smiled. ‘I’m taking Pamela with me to Waltham to get some clothes.’
‘Look, I’m in a bag. I’m a bag girl.’
‘Yes, Pamela. Elizabeth dear, can you knock back the bread dough later?’
Elizabeth nodded. ‘I can. But you’ll have to hurry if you’re to get the bus.’
‘Let’s go upstairs, Pamela, and get dressed.’ I made my way to the door but she remained on the chair, pulling the singlet over her toes. ‘You’re stretching the fabric now. Get up.’
‘Bag girl, bag girl. I want porridge.’
‘Oh. Now you want porridge. Well, you will have porridge, but you need to get dressed first.’
‘No, porridge now.’
‘It’s not ready. You must dress while it’s cooking. Do you want to go shopping?’
‘Yes, but after porridge.’
Elizabeth was laughing. She lifted the pan from the heat. ‘You do what Mrs Parr tells you, young lady, or I’ll feed this to the hens.’
Pamela got off the chair.
Upstairs she raced into the dressing room and out again, squeezed herself under our bed. Her laugh was rattling, hysterical. I persuaded her out after three minutes or so. I brushed her hair and she seized the brush from me, tried to brush the back of her hair with the back of the brush, refused to surrender it. I pulled her nightwear off her and she lay on the floor bicycling her legs until I caught one hard little foot and then the other and forced them into the leg-holes of her clean, dry knickers.
Now we had a bare ten minutes to get to the bus. And now she didn’t want to go shopping. I sat her on a kitchen stool; she jumped down. I pulled her back up onto the stool with my hands under her armpits and she went slack, as if boneless, flopping sideways.
‘Pamela, we’ll miss the bus!’
A spoon of porridge went in, and then I pulled the flour-sack tabard over her head. ‘I don’t want to go shopping,’ she growled, her face pasty with anger.
‘I will carry you if I have to,’ I vowed.
I did have to carry her. She dragged her feet, stumbled to her knees, squatted down, all the while yanking at my hand, until I was forced to hoist her into my arms. Just as I broke into a clumsy trot, my shopping basket bouncing against my hip, the bus to Waltham passed by the end of the lane on its way to the stop. I called out, ‘Wait! Wait!’ without the remotest chance of being heard. Perhaps a passenger was alighting: we might still make it. But the bus roared on, flashing through the gaps in the hedge, and I hurried the last few paces to the junction only to see it vanishing heedless into the dip at the bend of the road. I set Pamela on the ground, absolutely winded.
‘There,’ I said. ‘Look what you’ve done. We’ve missed the bus.’
‘I know.’ Her eyes were dancing and a delicious bloom had spread over her face.
My own eyes stung with frustrated tears. I watched the bus emerge from the dip and rush on up the hill, through the bare trees and away to Waltham.
‘I was going to get you warm clothes and new knickers, Pamela, but I can’t now. You’ll just have to sit naked while I wash your old ones. Uncomfortable, and cold.’
In response she started her nasty, rattling giggle.
‘Stop it!’ I shouted, but the giggling sharpened, accompanied now by a knowing leer.
I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and breathed right to the bottom of my lungs. ‘Pamela. Please.’
Her face crumpled and she started crying, high and strident as a lamb. I crouched down and put my arms around her.
‘Mummy’s not coming. Mummy’s not ever coming again.’
‘No. Darling, Mummy won’t come back.’
‘Never come back.’
‘No.’
‘Mummy’s gone.’
‘Yes.’
She pulled away from me, her wet eyes clear hazel, almost round.
‘She didn’t go with the candle man, did she. And she didn’t go to Aunt Margie where the grapes are either. Those are just tellings.’
‘That’s right, sweetheart.’
She leaned back into me, her breath whiffling through her nose. Then she spoke again, her lips moving against my neck. ‘I bet you’re going to say she’s gone to Heaven.’
I held her tight but without clinging. More to stop her falling. ‘Yes, Pamela, I am going to say that. Mummy’s gone to Heaven.’
Smack – her small palm hit me squarely on the cheek. She sprang backwards out of my arms. ‘Nasty lady!’ she cried, and ran off down the road towards the blind bend. There was something coming the other way. The thunder of a big engine, filling the air.
‘Pamela!’ I dashed after her. ‘Pamela!’ I shouted again, as a tractor rounded the corner, pulling a huge, spined harrow that seemed to fill the road. I ran harder, flung my arm out and grasped hold of the flour sack, tugging her onto the verge at the very instant the tractor roared past us, the harrow bouncing after it, missing us by a foot. Pamela and I both fell down, she under me, screaming like a child in a collapsing building. She flailed at me but I grabbed her hands. She screamed higher: her palms were grazed.
I heard a shout, turned my head. The tractor had slowed down and was pulling into the wide field gateway opposite the bus stop. Then the driver jumped down and ran back towards us. A small woman galumphing in wellingtons. As diminutive, sallow-faced, black-eyed as ever, and the black eyes just now furious.
‘Ellen Parr, what the bloody hell are you up to?’ bellowed Lucy Horne. ‘I nearly crushed that child!’
6 (#ulink_ff648cda-ae93-5a3f-9c51-e268dbe7655f)
‘WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?’ I clung hard to Pamela, who was thrashing like a landed fish. ‘I’m trying to take care of her!’
‘You’re makin a bloody awful job of it!’
‘I’m aware of that!’ I cried.
She glared back, panting, her almost permanent wheeze audible after the mad dash and the telling-off. Then I let go of Pamela and put my face in my hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘We missed the bus.’
My cares came mounting one upon the other. It was the bus, and Pamela’s naughtiness, and her dead mother. It was the white flares over Southampton, and the smell of bombing in the people’s coats. And it was Lucy herself. I had no idea of the reason for her muteness, her ostentatiously blank stares, her turning of the shoulder at church or in the village hall. She’d been my bridesmaid, for goodness’ sake.
Well, she was certainly speaking to me now.
I took my hands away from my face. She was holding a dumbstruck Pamela by one hand, alternately frowning at me and squinting up the road towards the tractor. Then she gave an explosive sigh. ‘Bloody hell, Ellen.’
‘Yes.’ I got slowly to my feet and took Pamela’s other hand. The child, ash-pale, allowed it. ‘I won’t keep you, Lucy,’ I said. ‘I need to take Pamela home and get her warm.’
Lucy gave a short chuckle. ‘Darned if that’s not my old smock, under that flour sack.’
‘Yes.’
‘Glad it came in handy.’
Another pause, which Lucy filled with a long, ruminative sniff. Then she released Pamela. ‘I’ll just run that harrow into the field. I’m going home for my dinner anyway, so you might as well have a warm-up at my house. Harry Parker won’t know if I take a couple on the back.’ She gave me a dark glance. ‘If you was inclined to come, of course.’
We rumbled into the village, perched on the back of the tractor seat. Pamela gazed dully at the receding road. I pointed out the milk churns on the high stand at the end of the main street, and she blinked slowly in response but didn’t turn her head to look. What did she care for churns, motherless as she was.
Motherless, and in the charge, furthermore, of an incompetent, childless woman. Who would give a child to me? Perhaps she should go to a family after all. At least that way she wouldn’t end up under the wheels of a tractor. I twisted round in my seat, saw Lucy’s shoulders, hunched high and stiff. She’d been on the tractor six months now, and her dainty little hands were skilful on the wheel. She’d been a kennelmaid before the war, and I knew she missed the hounds now that the hunt was closed. She would be a kennelmaid again, she hoped, when the world dropped back in kilter. I knew about these feelings and hopes of hers because George Horne, her father, had told Selwyn of them, in the course of general conversation, and Selwyn had told me. That was how I learned Lucy’s news, these days. I wondered, now that the ice had been broken in such a spectacular fashion, what this invitation would lead to.
She parked neatly on the triangle of grass at the end of the street. I clambered off the machine and jumped Pamela down. She stumbled against me as she landed. We walked the hundred yards up to the Hornes’ cottage.
‘We took three of ’em,’ Lucy said, as we went up the street, and I knew she meant refugees from Southampton.
‘Wherever did you put them?’
‘On the parlour floor.’ In the old days she’d have said, Yes, Ellen, ain’t it amazing. Being that our house is no more than a bloomin hovel. But I felt more sharply rebuked by this measured, adult response.
Pamela tugged at my hand. ‘I want to do a wee-wee.’ We hurried the last few yards. Lucy’s cottage was set high above the road, up a flight of steps, and the privy was at the end of the garden.
‘Why do we have to go in this box?’
Lucy suddenly smiled. ‘It’s the lav, dear.’
‘Look, it’s got a heart in the door.’ It did, a heart-shaped hole cut out of two planks. They had cut half a heart out of each plank and then matched them. I’d known this privy for ten years and never noticed before how exactly the two halves fitted. Lucy went indoors and I led Pamela into the lavatory.
‘Do I just wee-wee into the hole?’
I found myself laughing. ‘Yes.’
Her face darkened. ‘Mummy hasn’t gone to Heaven anyway. She said, “Pamela, I’ll always tell you where I’m going.” And she didn’t say anything about that.’ Her eyes wandered upward, caught in the shaft of light from the cut-out heart, looking for a solution. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘even if she has gone to Heaven, she won’t be long. That’s the other thing she always says. “Won’t be long, Pammie.”’
She shut her eyes and pressed her lips together.
I washed my hands and Pamela’s at the kitchen sink. Lucy handed Pamela a slice of bread and butter. The food stemmed her tears but they began to flow again the moment she swallowed the last bite. Soundless this time. ‘Come, Pamela.’ I opened my arms. ‘Sit on my lap.’
But she didn’t move. Instead she addressed Lucy, jerking her head at me. ‘She’s a horrible lady.’
‘We won’t mind her,’ Lucy said steadily, looking all the while at Pamela. ‘Now, do you know what a tortoise is?’ Pamela nodded, tears dripping from her chin. ‘There’s one in the shed. He’s in a hay box. We can go and take a peek if you like, but we can’t disturb him. It’s not a normal sleep, you see.’
They went out into the garden. I remained sitting, suddenly too tired to move. Lucy came back in. ‘She’s havin a bit of a scramble on the apple tree. Not a tear. They turn on and off like a tap, that age.’
How did people know these things?
‘How come you’ve still got her?’ Lucy went on. ‘Where’s her mam?’
‘Dead.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Dead in the Crown Hotel.’ I told Lucy about the stampede for escape, the well-meaning women. ‘Her mother never made it to Upton. I’ve only just told her.’
Lucy whistled. ‘Blimey.’ She went again to the back door, and I stirred myself and followed her. We both peered out at Pamela. She was jumping, quite unperturbed, onto and off the apple tree’s ancient trunk which bowed like a camel almost to the ground.
‘I don’t think she believes it yet,’ I said.
‘Oh, the poor mite. Oh, lord.’ Lucy gave a sad little chuckle. ‘Explains why she don’t like you. I didn’t much take to the woman who told me my ma was dead. Old boiler of a night nurse.’ She pursed her lips into an O. ‘“I have some very grave noos for yoo, Miss Horne.”’
The hooting tone made me laugh in spite of myself. ‘She didn’t talk like that!’
‘She did.’
We went back to the kitchen and Lucy cut us some bread. She laid the slices on a familiar plate, the edge decorated with pansies which years of scrubbing had worn half away to leave the odd, faded, windblown petal and glint of gilt on the stems. Years ago I had eaten a pie off that plate, and even now it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.
We ate now, Lucy breathing noisily, her eyes fixed on the table. No remark, no smile came my way. Finally I took my courage in my hands.
‘What’s wrong, Lucy? What have I done? Please tell me.’
Outside in the garden Pamela chirped like a blackbird in spring. A child used to her own company.
‘You’ve been forgetful,’ she said at last. ‘Forgetful of your friends.’
My mouth fell open. ‘When did I forget you? You were my bridesmaid!’
‘Yep, and you dropped me straight afterwards. Didn’t call by, didn’t chat. Months and months. So I assumed –’ she leaned on the word, using my voice to do so ‘– I assumed that it was my pay-off, the bridesmaid job, and Mrs Parr didn’t want anything more to do with poor little Miss Horne and her chest –’ she coughed theatrically ‘– and her teeth and all.’
Lucy was missing six teeth, many at the front. The teeth were long gone and her gaps were familiar to her friends but all the same she pulled her top lip down to smile, to speak to strangers. And she had coughed every day of her life.
‘I invited you to our garden party. You didn’t reply.’
‘Oh, yes. Your garden party.’
She spoke softly, as if to a silly child. I studied my clasped hands in sadness and shame. The invitation had been written on a card: Mr and Mrs Selwyn Parr, At Home. I hadn’t even popped my head round her door to ask her in person. Merely summoned her to mill about on my lawn with tea and cake, as if she were any one of my acquaintances instead of my oldest friend.
‘Mrs Parr was happy,’ I said after a while. ‘She wasn’t used to that. It made her clumsy.’ I looked up at her. ‘Lucy, please come and see us. We can bake you a potato, and you can share our parsnip stew. It won’t be as nice as yours, because I can’t cook like your nan. But we’ll spare no effort.’
She licked her finger and dabbed at the crumbs on the plate, gathering them up. I did the same thing at home after the children had finished. When she spoke her voice was gruff.
‘They do say you must forgive newly-weds. Their minds run on one thing. Though in your case it was Greek poems, like as not.’
‘Yes, it was. The Iliad. He was teaching me Greek.’
She burst into a cackle. ‘You pair!’
I laughed too. ‘It was fun. We’ve got no time for lessons now, of course.’
‘How’s it been, Ellen? What you expected?’
A mariage blanc, Lady Brock had said. Have you heard the expression, my dear?
The sheets of our marriage bed unfurled, heavy white linen. Is it the French for white wedding, Lady Brock?
No, my dear, it is not.
Lucy was gazing at me. How dark her eyes were. In the gloom of the kitchen I could hardly distinguish iris from pupil.
‘It’s been exactly as I expected,’ I said after a moment. ‘And I’ve honestly never been more content, Lucy.’
Pamela was still on the apple tree. The bark was fissured and slippery with moss but she was sure-footed, turning on her toe at the end of each pass. As she walked she raised a scolding finger. ‘No, no, you’re naughty donkeys.’ Her voice carried in the still air. So clear. She would sing well. Selwyn could teach her. She saw me and jumped down immediately, ran to me with her arms open, collided with my midriff. I clung to her and she to me, her arms bound around my waist, her head pillowed on my belly, all her animosity gone. The door creaked and Lucy appeared on the step, her face sallow in the low light. Pamela continued to cling. ‘Ellen,’ she said. ‘Ell.’
‘Did the tortoise wake up?’ Lucy called. Pamela buried her face in my skirt.
‘Pamela, answer Lucy.’
Pamela turned her head. ‘No, he didn’t, Lucy-Lou.’ She broke away from me and took Lucy’s hand. ‘Come on, Lou and Ell. Come and see my donkeys. They’re all tied up by the tree trunk.’ Together we went to the apple tree, Lucy and I, with Pamela between us. We pretended to admire the donkeys. There were a great many of them, all with complicated, mutable names. Pamela became lost, happily, in her naming.
‘Here’s some news,’ Lucy said. ‘Dan’s home for Christmas.’
‘Oh, how splendid!’
Daniel Corey was a friend from our childhood at Upton School. We hadn’t seen him since the summer when he came home on leave after Dunkirk. Then he was sent away into the east of England, there to transform the flat shoreline into a bulwark against enemy landings. ‘Think of all those concrete blocks,’ I said now. ‘Like giant sugar lumps, all along the beaches. They’ll stop a tank dead.’
‘That’s what Dan says.’
‘It’s true. Anyway, the Germans can’t bring an army across. Colonel Daventry says they haven’t got the boats.’
‘Let’s hope he’s right.’ Lucy stared for a moment into the middle distance. Then she sniffed. ‘Tell you one thing. If those buggers come up the high street, there’ll be trouble if they shoot me dead. I’m the only one who can start that bloomin tractor.’
I couldn’t help smiling. ‘How is it on the farm?’
‘Cold. The dogs, they worked up a good fug.’
The first proper grin of the old days.
‘I was thinking of that pie earlier,’ I found myself saying. ‘The first one I had from your nan. I’ve never forgotten it.’
‘Oh, yes. Nan’s flaky pastry.’ Her face softened. ‘You was so perishing hungry.’ She released Pamela’s hand, patting the back of it. ‘I’ve got to get back to that harrow. Stay and play with those donkeys a while, unless you want a lift back to the turning?’
‘No, we’ll walk.’
‘I’ll say ta-ta, then, Pamela.’ She went off towards the steps. ‘Shut the gate,’ she called back, ‘or Mary Wiley’s dog’ll come and have a go at Maurice.’
‘Who’s Maurice?’
‘The tortoise,’ Pamela said. ‘Ta-ta, Lou.’
Pamela and I made our way home, unprovisioned. We’d all have an early tea of potato pie if there was some lard. I hoped there was some lard. Beacon Hill was caught in pale sunlight. I wanted to take Pamela there and lie on the top as I had with my brother Edward when we were young. She hung on my hand, whining, dragging her feet. ‘That bread didn’t touch the sides, did it?’
‘Touch the sides of what?’
‘The sides of your tummy.’ But she didn’t really understand. I drew her onward down the winter lane to home, and found four loaves on a rack on the kitchen table. Quickly I put them away before she caught sight of them. Then I took her upstairs to get warm under the bedcovers. She stared at me as I moved around the room, so small and huddled in the bed. I was already cold and the sight of her, snug against the pillows, made me feel even colder.
‘I’ll get in with you, Pamela. Five minutes can’t hurt.’
She rolled away from me and started to breathe hard, in and out. I wondered for a moment if she was starting to sob, but I soon realized she was simply puffing and blowing for the enjoyment of it, like a small engine at rest. The rhythm soothed me, and I fell headlong into a deep sleep.
The slam of the front door woke me. The last boy into the house walloped it shut. Pamela was now crying quietly.
She elbowed me away. ‘No. I want to be on my own.’
I made some pastry while the boys, subdued and orderly, peeled the potatoes. ‘Pamela’s lost her mother,’ I told them. ‘She died in the bombing.’ I hated saying this, but they had to know. ‘Only speak about this if she does. Be as kind as you possibly can.’
Pamela came downstairs, and the boys fell into a deathly, unnatural quiet until Hawley lifted her onto a kitchen stool and gave her a slice of carrot. She ate it, and started to groan with hunger. I didn’t offer her any bread because it would immediately mean four slices off the first loaf, since the boys wouldn’t stand for being left out. When suppertime came she beat the boys to an empty plate, and Donald, used to being the youngest and hungriest, was aggrieved. ‘She’s as greedy as a dog, Mrs Parr!’
‘Donald, that is not kind. Pamela’s hungry.’
‘She’s going to eat all our food. Munch and gobble up the meat and everything nice.’
‘She’s got her own coupons. For that teasing, Donald, you stack the dishes. Hawley, please take them to the sink so Jack can start the washing-up. Pamela, darling, please don’t cry. There, there, darling. Oh, Donald, don’t start too, for heaven’s sake.’ The uproar drew Elizabeth from the vegetable garden. She clasped Pamela to her, and stood viewing me in the midst of my domestic straits. No help, no calming shushes came my way. Instead, unaccountably, in the face of the sobbing of the two younger children, the clattering of plates, the strewing of scraps of potato peel on the floor, the bullock-like jostling of the two older boys at the sink – in the face of this, Elizabeth succumbed to helpless laughter.
The boys took Pamela upstairs for a game of snap. Elizabeth, Selwyn and I tackled the remains of the potato pie. The dish was wholesome, with a dried sprig of mint snipped small and mixed with the potatoes. Elizabeth and I ate with relish but Selwyn left a slab of pastry on his plate.
‘I’m sorry we missed the bus, darling. I’d have made a better job of supper, if we’d been shopping.’
‘I wasn’t blaming you.’ He pushed away the pastry with his fork, politely, to show he had finished. ‘You were saddled with Pamela. By the way – was she playing with the telephone today?’
‘The telephone?’
‘There’s a crack in the receiver.’
I remembered the bang it had made as it hit the wall. I hadn’t noticed any damage when I’d made my own telephone call. But then I’d been so flustered.
‘She shouldn’t, you know. It’s not a toy.’
‘I realize that. No, it wasn’t Pamela.’
‘Did you dash it to the ground in rage?’ He gave me a tired smile. ‘I wouldn’t blame you, if you were speaking to the Ministry. We’ll have to do another letter. It’s getting ridiculous.’
The Ministry. Of course. We needed to replace the metal screen which stopped the flotsam of the channel from getting into the mill turbine. The screen was rusting, much patched with wire. The next split would be irreparable. But we couldn’t obtain a new screen without an order from the Ministry.
‘I haven’t yet. I’m so sorry.’ I picked up my plate and clinked the cutlery onto it. ‘I must have replaced the receiver clumsily.’ I stood up and took his plate. ‘I wasn’t saddled with Pamela, actually. We just set out too late. It won’t happen again.’
Elizabeth and I carried the plates to the kitchen. When I returned alone he was sitting with his head in one hand. I sat down beside him without speaking. After a moment he lifted his head and stared at the curtained window.
‘I passed a house today,’ he said. ‘With its face torn away, only the gable remaining.’ His eyes wandered towards mine. ‘It reminded me of someone I met in the hospital gardens. Nothing left below the browline, yet somehow the man was alive. Bandaged, of course. With a tube for breathing.’
Where had Selwyn been treated after the Great War? Somewhere in the North, I thought, a stately house of grey stone, viridian lawns, a cedar casting black shadow. He’d told me about it when we met, but the details had since escaped me. We were in peacetime back then. Why should I remember?
‘I didn’t realize there were any … I thought your hospital was only for nerve patients.’
‘It was.’
The horror reigned inside me for a long moment. Then I opened my palm and put my hand over his and formed my lips for speaking. ‘Next time,’ I said, ‘I will go to Southampton. You know how much I like driving the lorry.’
His own lips moved. ‘It’s no picnic. Slag heaps of rubble. And smoke.’
‘You’d better give me some tips, then.’
‘Practical girl.’
Elizabeth came in from the kitchen bearing toast cut into fingers and sprinkled with a few grains of sugar. ‘Pudding,’ she announced.
I put Pamela to bed without opposition. I said that it was her turn to tell me a story, and so she did, one about her imaginary donkeys.
‘Did you know, Mummy was killed in the bombs?’ she suddenly said, on the edge of sleep. ‘That’s what Donald said when we were doing snap with the cards.’
I sat back down on the bed and clasped her shoulders. ‘I was going to tell you, darling, but I thought I would wait until you asked. You must forgive Donald. He doesn’t think before he speaks—’
‘All the boys said it.’ Her eyes were limpid, tearless. ‘They also said you can’t come back from Heaven. You can look down, though. Hawley’s grandpa’s looking down, he says. He went up there from drinking drinks, though, not from the bombs.’ She rolled away and put her thumb in her mouth.
7 (#ulink_c70562df-3aa9-5504-a526-11b32f686b04)
PAMELA DIDN’T BREAK my night this time. And when I woke early she was still asleep, motionless on her stomach, issuing soft snores, her arm flung over a pillow. I’d do better today. Get her some proper warm clothes – a coat, a nightdress, stockings. We’d have plenty of time if I went to the office early. Got the most important letters done before breakfast.
As I watched she rolled without waking onto her side and drew up her knees, giving the pillow a hearty kick.
‘Silly nonsense,’ she declared, and I almost laughed. Somewhere in her sleeping mind she’d found a place without grief and knowledge, huddled into it like a mouse into the bole of a tree. I encircled her with my arms for five minutes or so, and she smelled of warm, dry, brushed cotton, and something else, that somewhat salty aroma of newly baked bread I had noticed when I lifted her off the seat of the bus. What was it? Her heated skin, her hair at the nape of her neck? I didn’t know.
Stealthily I got up and dressed, and went to the mill before dawn broke. I climbed the stairs to the office, my feet finding their way in the gloom. The stairs were wooden, with two worn dips in each tread. We were to install a fine iron stair, fit for a century to come, but the war began and there was no metal for such vanities.
I lit the gas lamp and typed in my coat. I no longer had my book from the loft at the Absaloms, coated with dust and mildew and the frass of woodworm. Typewriting: A Practical Manual Based Upon the Principles of Rhythm and Touch. By W. R. Sedley. The back had been eaten half off but there had been a keyboard, a cardboard keyboard which folded out, and I used to batter this keyboard with my fingers according to the principles of rhythm and touch. I had no idea, half the time, whether I was right or wrong.
‘Darling, what are you doooing?’ came the worn cooing from the bedroom, and I would reply, ‘Homework, Mother. Just thinking out my arithmetic.’
I found my shorthand pad and wrote now to the Ministry, Selwyn’s voice in my ears and in the rhythms of my fingers. If the screen is regularly put out of action our stoppages will mount until we are unable to fulfil our orders. There is a certain truth, Mr Gresham, in the saying ‘spoiling the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar’. I considered this saying, and substituted another, more apt in my opinion. For want of a nail the shoe was lost. And I added: I am sure, sir, you are familiar with the final lines of this rhyme. Perhaps this was going too far. But the prevarications of Mr Gresham were wasting our paper, ink, typewriter ribbon, postage, not to mention the time and attention of our women. Perhaps I should add something about morale. Our own manager, a capable woman, reports that the constant repairs to broken machinery sap her morale—
As if by telepathy, Suky Fitch stuck her head around the door. ‘I’m closing the sluicegate, Mrs Parr.’
‘Suky. How do you feel, when the screen needs mending?’
She stared.
‘I’m writing to the Ministry. Would you say it sapped your morale?’
‘Oh. Yes.’ She grinned. The most unsappable woman one could hope to meet. ‘And that of my workforce.’
… and that of her workforce. ‘Thanks. Why isn’t Mr Parr doing the sluice?’
Suky raised her shoulders. In someone less delicate it would be a shrug. ‘I don’t know. He asked me. Oh – I saw you with the little girl. Yesterday on my day off. You were running for the bus. I was on it, but I couldn’t make that old sourpuss of a driver stop. Oh, I felt for you.’ She was smiling down at me, warmth in her bright blue eyes.
‘Oh, yes. We missed it by a mile. Children.’ I shook my head as if knowingly. Where was Selwyn?
‘I expect you’ll be glad to get her settled,’ Suky said. ‘The Henstrows are respectable people, very clean. Mrs Henstrow I’ve always found very … practical.’
I let my fingers drop onto the keyboard. A handful of keys rose into the air, the limbs of a struggling metal insect.
‘The Henstrows?’
‘That farm up at Speeds Hill, yes. You sound like you’re getting a throat, Mrs Parr. Be sure and tie your scarf high. Peter told me last night. Peter Flack, Constable Flack, you know he’s my half-brother. Oh, Mrs Parr, are you off, then?’
I fled out, coat unbuttoned. The cold air in my throat like pewter. I reached the house, skating on the damp flagstones of the path. I went into the hall. ‘Selwyn!’
His voice came, muffled, from our bedroom. I ran upstairs.
He was sitting on the floor with Pamela. Between them was a wavering rank of toy soldiers and a cushion.
‘The Henstrows,’ I said. ‘Suky told me.’
‘Yes.’ He levered himself to his feet, tugging the bags out of the knees of his trousers. ‘I arranged it yesterday. We got them in the nick of time. They were about to take a boy from Portsmouth. I’ve just been explaining it all to Pamela. I thought it was important that we had a proper talk about it as soon as she woke up.’
Pamela toured a toy soldier over the plumped cushion. ‘I’m going to be with a family, you know, Ellen.’ She spoke without turning her head, her face a small, pale, full moon in the wardrobe mirror.
‘You telephoned.’ I looked at Selwyn. ‘Yesterday afternoon, while we were out.’
I sank down onto the bed. He came to sit beside me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. His wrists were thin, the veins stark, his cuffs frayed. His large, spare hands were beautiful. ‘Darling—’
‘Why didn’t you tell me yesterday?’
‘I should have. I know.’
In the mirror I saw Pamela’s face close. It was almost nothing, a barely perceptible tightening of the corners of her mouth. Many people wouldn’t have noticed, but I knew her face already.
Selwyn spoke. ‘We were thinking about packing, Pamela and I.’
I got up and left the room. On the landing I paused. In front of me was a picture, a Victorian oil of a family of bucolics disporting themselves in a tree-shrouded lane entirely free of mud and animal dung. Young and old alike were rosy-cheeked, clad in clean, white smocks. I felt a blunt stab of pain, as if from a bone needle.
Selwyn followed me out, laid a hand on my shoulder, withdrew it again when I didn’t turn round. ‘Selwyn, did you know I hate this picture beyond measure?’
He gave a small puff of soundless laughter, agonized. ‘I love you so much.’
‘What?’ The word broke out of me in a stunned gasp. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
Pamela opened the door. ‘Why are you whooshing?’ she asked.
‘Pamela,’ I said, ‘why don’t you make a battlefield? You can show the boys when you’ve finished.’
We went downstairs. The boys were chattering in the kitchen, and Elizabeth was hanging the children’s smalls on a clothes-horse in front of the sitting-room fire. We slipped outside and sat on a bench in the garden. For a minute, sitting straight-backed in the sharp frost and the low morning sun, I felt that we were both young, with everything before us. A great shiver convulsed me.
He began speaking immediately. ‘I can’t have a child in this house. It’s too dangerous.’
I gaped. ‘What are you talking about? The house is full of children. They’re here because it’s safe.’
‘It won’t be, in an invasion.’
‘My God.’ The nerves leaped in my belly. ‘Have you heard something? Has there been a warning?’ I clutched his arm. ‘Selwyn—’
‘No. Nothing like that. I’m simply looking to the future. If they invade, the children will all have to be moved.’ He squinted up at the mill. ‘You know our building’s strategic. I told you, Ellen. William Kennet and his party will be up there tomorrow with their chisels.’
‘He didn’t say anything about that when I saw him.’
‘Discretion is the watchword. He probably didn’t know then.’
Above me the mill rose quiet in the sunlight. Such a fine place it was, well-founded and built for peace, the only damage two centuries of weathering by frost and sun. I could not picture it pierced by gunsights, even less wreathed in smoke. The idea was sickening. I wrapped my arms around my body. If no one would comfort me, I would do it myself. ‘Why just Pamela?’ I spoke mutinously. ‘Why aren’t the boys going?’
‘Their families will take them when the moment comes.’
‘If it comes.’
‘If it comes. But with Pamela it’s different. Her life’s been shattered. We can’t risk her taking root here, and then having to be moved again. It wouldn’t be fair. Constable Flack suggested we find her a family, and that’s what I’ve done. On a farm, far from the roads, as safe as can be, for the duration of the war. That’s no more than our duty, in my view.’
The sun was lifting into the bare branches of the rowan tree. There was a rowan outside my house at the Absaloms, and an owl that used to perch in it. The tree and the sun were tainted now with a dreadful bitterness. If only Selwyn hadn’t driven down to fetch the grain. If only he hadn’t seen the city after the air raid.
‘I should have gone to Southampton,’ I said.
He laughed; it was an unpleasant sound. ‘Yes, you should,’ he said. ‘You’d have seen the children then, with tears running through the soot on their cheeks. It’ll be worse, of course, after the actual invasion.’ He turned to look at me. ‘You really should have seen France in the last war, Ellen. Children standing alone in shelled houses, too stunned to cry, surrounded by the bodies of their families.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, France. You’d know, then, what could happen to Pamela.’
A long moment passed. Selwyn’s eyes were slitted against the early-morning light, his face worn, crumpled.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said in the end. ‘I thought you agreed with Colonel Daventry. He doesn’t think it’s remotely—’
‘Daventry’s making petrol bombs.’
The sun was rising higher into the tree. A branch had split it across.
‘People make a better job of things,’ I heard Selwyn say, ‘if they’re not utterly terrified. That’s what we find. So we encourage a certain superstition, in the Home Guard. That the more thorough our preparations, the less likely it is that they will be needed.’ He stood up slowly, pushing his hands against his knees. ‘Now. Pamela needs to get ready.’
She raised her arms obediently as I pulled the singlet over her head. I could believe that children were born out of the buds of giant flowers, little gods and goddesses, so perfect was her body. Those extraordinary, clear, peat-brook eyes, wide-set in a round face. This hair the colour of the darkest honey. Those neat, plump little toes. I wondered if Mrs Henstrow would look on her and marvel.
‘Can I come and take you for walks?’ The tears bathed my eyes.
Her eyebrows kinked. ‘Just me, will you take? Or all the Henstrows? There’s five, Mr Parr said so. A boy and a boy and a boy and a girl and a girl, and that last girl is ten. The boy at the top is a farmer, he’s so big. So he would be too busy to come, I expect.’
I buttoned her dress. Reached the broken top button. ‘Let me snip off this button and sew on a new one. Hold still.’ I opened my sewing drawer. My scissors lay beside Mrs Pickering’s slips of greaseproof paper and cotton.
‘I might stay with the Henstrows for ever, or Aunt Margie might come and get me after the end of the war. But we don’t know when that’ll be. Why are you sniffling? Do my button.’
If she was in South Africa I’d find her. I would find her on all points of the earth. ‘Say please.’
‘Do my button please. Please may you do my button.’
‘We don’t say please may you.’ I cut the button fragment off and tore out the broken threads.
‘Yes, we do. It’s polite.’
‘No, we only say, please may I.’ I licked the end of the thread and inserted it into the needle, holding my eyes wide so that the tiny, shining, oval hole should not blur. ‘We say please can you, or could you. Put your head forward.’
She bent her neck. I pushed her hair aside. Her nape was covered in fine, golden down. How could anyone refuse this glory? I kneeled behind her and put the needle’s point through the loop of a small pearl button.
As Pamela ate her porridge I took hold of her free hand and rubbed my thumb across her dimples of knuckles. The hand small enough still for the fingers to radiate, like a starfish. A crease at her wrist, the babyish plumpness. Her whole forearm I could take in my spread hand.
‘If Mummy comes here, will you tell her I’m at the Henstrows’ house?’ she said suddenly. ‘I do know she’s gone. But just in case.’
Blessed art thou.
‘Yes. Of course I will. Would you like some more?’
‘Is there any sugar?’
‘No.’
‘Then no more.’
Selwyn stood in the doorway in his hat and coat, his thin jaw cuddled by his scarf. ‘Hurry, Pamela, or the kitchen pig will come and snuffle you away.’
‘What kitchen pig?’
‘This one.’ He made an absurd snort, and she giggled like bubbles coming up through a stream, and for that astonishing glimpse of fatherliness, now that it was too late, I wanted to strike him.
The motor car coughed and struggled into life. ‘How much fuel have we got?’ I asked Selwyn.
‘About a teacupful.’
There would be no more until after Christmas. We ought to walk, but she was so small and it was cold. And this way it was over quicker. Pamela got in with a practised air, her face set. She was carrying a bag holding the smock and singlet and the bed-jacket I had given her to wear. ‘When I was small I did ballet.’ She peered out of the car at me, as if it was of great moment, and I had to be told this instant. ‘We used to go together. Mummy and me and Mr Dexter. It was Mr Dexter’s Humber car. Or it might have been Mr Watts’. I can’t remember. This isn’t a Humber car, though, is it?’
I didn’t know what to do. Whether to sit by Selwyn, and try to persuade him against giving her away, or beside Pamela, to drink in the last drops of her. Selwyn opened the passenger door for me, and paused. ‘Darling, would you prefer to stay here? It might be easier.’
‘I’ll come.’ I got into the back beside Pamela, and held her close to me.
She struggled out of my grasp. ‘That’s not comfy.’
‘Sit on my lap, then.’
‘No.’ She composed herself, and looked out of the window intently, as if at an unfolding panorama instead of the dank stretch of winter hedgerow.
I raised my voice so Selwyn could hear me. ‘Nobody has asked her what she wants.’
‘What?’ He didn’t turn his head. His hat brim bent the tops of his ears down. I leaned forward.
‘We haven’t asked her where she wants to be. Who she wants to stay with.’
‘I did, actually.’ He threw the words over his shoulder. ‘She says she wants to be with the children. The children and the pigs, she said.’
‘And the donkeys,’ said Pamela.
‘But you’ve got donkeys, remember?’ I scratched in my mind for their names. ‘Floriday, and the others?’
She was contemptuous. ‘They’re not real.’
We drove out of the village and up the lane shrouded in bare trees. The line of the hill travelled upwards along with us. I knew Speeds Farm of old, when I walked up there and Mr Speed drove the sheep down. After he died his daughter took the farm, and then she married a Henstrow. She had five children and now, with Pamela, she was to have another. To those that have, it shall be given. There were tussocks all the way up to the brow of the hill above Speeds Farm, where they’d chopped the trees down and left the stumps and the turf had grown over. When my mother and father were alive Edward and I used to take bread-and-butter picnics up there, and we’d sit down on the tussocks and look over at Beacon Hill across the valley. But that was long ago, ten years after the Great War, when nobody believed there could be another.
When the gate was in sight Selwyn drew the car to a halt. ‘Here we are.’
‘Why don’t you go on up into the yard?’
‘I don’t like the look of those ruts.’
Pamela and I got out of the car. Selwyn’s face was hollowed, slightly shiny behind the windscreen.
Pamela and I walked the remaining distance to the frosty, deserted yard. A collie loped towards us. Pamela put out her hand. ‘Good dog, good dog.’ The dog gave a long, ripping growl and she snatched her hand back again.
‘Not all dogs are good, Pamela.’
Mrs Henstrow appeared at the door. Her red hair was scraped into a round bun on the top of her head and her legs were bandaged, the crossovers running as neat as ears of wheat up the fronts of her calves. ‘My veins.’ She pointed at the bandages. ‘This is the best thing for them. My niece does it for me, she’s on her nurse training. Oh my lord, what a little one. I thought she’d be eight or nine. Let’s hope she’s not a gusher. I can’t abide a gusher. Keep clear of Tig, dear, he’ll give you a nasty nip. He don’t mean nothing by it, it’s his job.’
Pamela wound her hands into the front of her skirt, her face pale, round, uncertain.
‘Mrs Henstrow.’ I spoke in as low and as steady a voice as I could muster. ‘Have you been told what happened to Pamela?’
‘Oh yes.’ Mrs Henstrow rolled her eyes. ‘Her ma copped it in Southampton, down in the cellar of the Crown. That’s it, dearie, in you go. There were a fancy man, weren’t there. Oh, I’ve got my spies. Just because I spend all my days up here turning the collars on shirts and feeding stock don’t mean I’m ignorant. He copped it too, the fancy man, didn’t he, so there is some justice. Have you got the coupons, dear?’
Her kitchen was dark, clean, and full of male people. They all rose to their feet with many scrapes of boots as Mrs Henstrow said, ‘There’s John, Archie and Newton, they’re my three boys, and them two old lads are the Lusty brothers, the farriers. They don’t talk much. Come up for the shires today. The girls are out in the hayloft doing lord knows what. Gossiping, I expect. I must say, I thought she’d be nine or ten.’
The young boys were different shades of their mother’s rusty red. Two elderly men, both with mouths that pushed forward and turned down like coal scuttles, nodded. Pamela squeezed my fingers.
‘The coupons,’ repeated Mrs Henstrow, with extra clarity, as if English were not my mother tongue.
The kettle began to whistle. ‘I need to speak to my husband,’ I said above the thin wail. ‘He’s parked down in the lane.’
‘Didn’t fancy it, did he?’ Mrs Henstrow said, spooning tea into a pot. ‘Little ones can bawl so, can’t they, when things don’t go their way.’
‘Please, no tea—’
‘Don’t worry, madam, it’s not for you. I was going to get out some rosehip syrup, dear,’ she said to Pamela, who was standing dumb beside me and didn’t so much as nod. ‘Hmm. Another one with no manners. No syrup for those with no manners. Oh, no. We’ll have to do something about that.’
I took Pamela by the hand and we left Mrs Henstrow considering what precisely she would do about Pamela’s manners. We made our way across the yard. She called after us, ‘You can leave her here, my dear, while you fetch her things,’ but I didn’t turn my head. Pamela skidded on an icy puddle and I tugged her upright before she fell, my legs shaking so much that I too almost lost my footing.
Selwyn was waiting, huddled deep into his scarf with his hat tipped forward.
‘I’m not leaving her there, Selwyn.’
He sat up, peered out at Pamela.
‘I don’t like that dog. But I like dogs. But that one is a dog, and I don’t like him. Even so, I do like dogs.’ She stood, trying to reconcile it, run through by deep shivers.
Selwyn looked from Pamela to me. Then he got out of the car. ‘Get in and keep warm,’ he said.
We waited four or five minutes. I showed Pamela the game with the folded fingers. ‘Here’s the church and here’s the steeple. Open the doors and here’s the people.’ She laced her soft little fingers at the knuckles and turned her joined hands over, and laughed to see a wiggling row of pink fingertips. Here were the people, praying on their knees. Here were the church bells, tolling for the invasion. They’d been silent since the beginning of the war, but when the time came they’d ring out over our streets and fields. At first we’d simply not believe it, and then we’d begin to believe it, and we’d start running, and shouting. We’d hold out our hands to each other, and start to speak urgently about the children. I fastened my arms around this child, though it squashed her a little, and then I too laced my fingers together to keep her in my embrace.
Selwyn was making his way back to us. He got into the car without speaking and started the engine. As we jolted down the track he made a sort of flapping gesture to me with one hand. I interpreted it as best I could.
‘Pamela, you won’t be staying there. The dog was too nasty.’
After a few minutes we ran out of fuel. The engine died and we coasted the rest of the way down the hill. The tyres tore quietly over the tarmac. At the bottom Selwyn stopped the car and went to fetch the boys from the house. Pamela began to cry. ‘Will I go somewhere else now, or can I go to bed?’
‘Sweetheart, you won’t go anywhere before morning.’
Selwyn returned with Hawley and Jack. They pushed the car while Pamela and I steered. She sat on my lap holding the wheel, turning it and straightening it again with me until the car was back at the mill and safely inside the garage. For five or ten minutes we were absorbed in this task like a happy family. Elizabeth appeared and silently put out her hand to Pamela. The boys swarmed past her into the house. Soon Selwyn and I were alone in the hall.
‘Just because I couldn’t leave her with that vile woman—’
‘Doesn’t mean you won’t find someone else,’ I said. ‘A more kindly farmer’s wife. I know. You’ve already made yourself clear.’
He shook his head. We stood in the dim light of the hall. He touched my face with his fingertips. Something I usually adored, but today my skin felt numb. I had to find something of him, grab some scrap of the man I loved, out of this wasteland.
‘Please play the piano, Selwyn.’
‘I haven’t the heart.’
‘For Pamela, then, if not for me. Please.’
Pamela wanted ‘Jingle Bells’. It was only a few days to Christmas. Selwyn played it for her roughly three dozen times. It was getting dark, but not yet time for supper. Pamela and I cut out some newspaper dolls, some with skirts, some with trousers, and the boys joined us to sit cross-legged and snipping, and Pamela spread them out on the floor.
Elizabeth came in and sat on the arm of the sofa. Selwyn asked her what song she would like to hear.
‘I’ve always been fond of “Sally Gardens”. I’m making a macaroni cheese.’ She and I sang together and Pamela dragged the lopsided dolls across the carpet. Selwyn’s fingers pranced over the keys, his eyes hidden behind his glasses. Pamela went into the kitchen and Elizabeth followed her. His fingers stilled immediately.
We ate the macaroni cheese. It was delicious: all that baked hot milk and flour and those shavings of cheese. I had taught Elizabeth to make the body of the dish with milk only, and as much salt as was tasty, and to reserve the cheese slivers for the top. Selwyn quarantined the mixture in his mouth before manfully swallowing but the rest of us ate it up with gusto. We put the house in order, and went to bed, all of us, at eight o’clock in the evening.
I put Pamela on the small bed in the dressing room and admitted Selwyn back into our double. Selwyn lay on his back, hair tufted against the pillow. Our first night together we’d read poetry, Edward Thomas, lounging on the pillows. We still did this from time to time but I sensed it wouldn’t happen again for a long while. So little time it took, for a small girl to bring me to this. The least likely thing to happen, as astonishing as an imago in a chrysalis. I let my gaze become absorbed into the gloom of the curtains, their heavy, somewhat threadbare blue velvet a powdery grey in the lamplight.
‘You would never have let her stay,’ I said. ‘Even if there had been no war.’
‘If there had been no war, she would never have been here.’
That was unanswerable.
‘Somebody will come for her, Ellen.’
‘No. She’s got no one. Her aunt hasn’t been in touch for ten years. Her father’s probably forgotten she existed.’
He made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan. ‘If this child is taken away from you, and you suffer, I don’t know how I’ll forgive myself. You say you don’t want children, but—’
‘I don’t want children.’
‘You want Pamela.’
I stroked my hand over the linen sheet. The sheets didn’t smell of lavender now, since Elizabeth and I hadn’t found the time or the spirit, last summer, to make up new lavender bags. I was eighteen the first time I saw this bed. It was so beautiful. The headboard of polished wood the colour of toffee, and the sheets heavy, crisp and scented. They had reminded me of my earliest childhood, before our ruin. I pulled myself away from his reaching arms and got off the bed. I started tearing my clothes off, tossing my woollens onto the floor, stripping my legs of their stockings. I trampled my way out of my skirt and stood barefoot in my slip, tugging pins out of my hair.
‘Darling, do put on your dressing gown. You’ll catch cold.’
‘You think this room is chilly?’ I laughed without pleasure. ‘When I was a girl I woke with frost on the carpet. The carpet that we put on our bed, Mother and I. It stank of mice, even in the frost, but we couldn’t get to sleep without it.’
He got out of bed and came to me. His pyjama-clad body was warm against mine and this time I let him put his arms around me. ‘I’d be the last person to make light of your hard years.’ He pressed his cheek against the top of my head. ‘But – forgive me, I can’t see what bearing they have.’
I released myself from his embrace, stood so that he could see my face. ‘What bearing?’ I shook my head in wonderment. ‘Seriously, you can’t see it?’
He gave me a baffled, unhappy stare. ‘You told me how you and your mother suffered. How you had to scrimp and save—’
‘Scrimp and save.’ I laughed again. ‘Do you know why I’m not frightened of the cold? Because I know about it. How you can let it sink right into your bones, and it won’t damage you at all. I know how to suck on a pebble to keep hunger pangs away. You have to do that, you know, if you’ve just given a child your own food. The pain’s excruciating otherwise. And I can carry her, further than anyone. I can walk twenty miles with nothing inside me but the skin of a baked potato. You say I’ve got no idea about war, and shelling. Well, you’ve got no idea what I can endure for her sake.’
He stood in front of me, a mild man, a clever man. Pyjama’d, bespectacled. So beloved. Pushed beyond his bounds. He’d tried to push me, too. But he’d simply forced me down onto my bedrock.
‘I don’t care what happens after the war,’ I told him. ‘That’s not the point. You can put her where you want, but I’ll go with her. She needs me now. Me. Do you see? We’re the same, Pamela and I. I was a child like her. A child who lost everything in the world.’
Ellen (#ulink_1bfd5e01-ec59-5b85-b1fc-053a897eb93e)
8 (#ulink_3f587c34-b35d-526c-b7a0-57f638c8568f)
I WAS ELEVEN when things started disappearing.
First it was my rocking horse, a beautiful thing with a blood-red bridle of suede. I was really too big for her now but all the same I loved her. When I asked Connie and Miss Fane, and they both said, ‘She’s gone to be repaired,’ using those exact words, I knew they’d been taught a lie. Three weeks later I saw Miss Fane in the hall, planting her foot on the lid of her trunk and bending to tug the strap tight. Then she too was gone.
I ran outside, found my brother Edward in the orchard, swinging a stick. The orchard was the jewel of our house, which was known as the Stour House after Godfrey Stour who had sold it to my father, and the generations of Stours before him who had planted and grafted and filled the apple press with cider jars. Edward looked up as I came running, crying. He put his arms around me and chose words a little too young for me, perhaps to soften the blow or perhaps just because he too, at fourteen, was confounded.
‘Daddy’s made a mistake with the money.’
My mother and father didn’t shout: instead they went to the study and spoke in a level tone, each word separate as if etched into the air.
‘It’s simply gossip, Susan.’
‘People are gossiping because they haven’t been paid. And they haven’t been paid because you’ve ruined us.’
‘I’m an investor. There are always ups and downs—’
‘You’re a gambler.’
On the word gambler my mother’s voice tightened to a whisper and the acid bit deep.
On the following morning Daddy came to my bedroom resplendent in waistcoat and watch chain, his moustaches groomed, his round blue eyes full of glory. He kissed me on the side of the head roughly, said, ‘Kitten,’ and went downstairs. I heard the front door slam, his footsteps on the gravel, the gorgeous cough and chug of the engine of his car. He changed gear once, twice, as he tore away down the drive. He was awfully skilful at driving.
In the hall I found his goggles, gloves and driving coat, slung across the hall table.
I asked Edward if he shouldn’t be back at school, and he gave a bark of a laugh. ‘What do you think has happened to our father, Ellen?’
We were loitering on the stairs where Mother couldn’t hear us. On a post at the top of the banister sat a small, wide-eyed, oaken owl looking at us, his feathers in neat carved rows.
‘We don’t know exactly,’ I said patiently. ‘Mother said he’s away, trying to salvage what he can.’ The word ‘salvage’ made me form a picture of Daddy, a great figure in oilskins, seawater sluicing off his sou’wester, pulling treasure from a wreck in the pounding surf.
‘He won’t be coming back. He’s absconded. Do you know what that means?’
‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘And it’s utter nonsense. He’s on his own, he hasn’t absconded anyone.’
Edward let loose a groan of fury. ‘That’s abduct, Ellen!’ He clattered away down the stairs. ‘To abscond is to escape on pain of arrest!’ And he left the house, slamming the front door after him.
I started to brush the dust from between the owl’s ranks of feathers.
Connie, our maid, stayed for a while longer, and then I did Mother’s hair on my own, and it was just me, Edward, Cook and Jennie, to look after everything. Edward made the fires and I folded the sheets with Jennie. She wouldn’t look at me as she took the sheet from my fingers, nipping the edges together neatly; she turned her head away. She’d been eating onions, she said, she didn’t trust her breath.
Mother couldn’t stay downstairs for long. ‘I’m finding our circumstances extremely trying,’ she would say. ‘I need my rest.’
She couldn’t salvage her friends. Lady Brock was far too busy with the shoot, Mrs Daventry preparing to travel to India. ‘You have no idea what has to be done, children, when one shuts up a house like The Place,’ Mother told us, glassy-eyed. ‘It was silly of me to expect her to linger chatting in the street.’
My friends, too, were beyond rescue. I no longer went to dance Scottish reels with Esme and Lucinda Drake in their drawing room with its delightful carpet the colour and texture of moss. I didn’t sit cross-legged any more in Clara Mayhew’s bedroom where Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur were kept in cupboards of black oak. Anyway, how would I get to their houses? The car, with its leather seats redolent of luxury and nausea as he swung me around the lanes, was gone, of course, along with Daddy.
Edward sold the pig. Cook’s brother took it away to be butchered and came back with a warm newspaper parcel. ‘You give that to Irene, my love, it’s some nice hocks and trotters.’ That was how I learned Cook’s Christian name. But soon afterwards Cook and Jennie went, and we were alone. And then Mr Dawes from the parish was at the gate, grimacing under his moustaches, because what expression is suitable when you’re turning the Captain’s family out of their home; and there was a cart outside, and I wore my plaid coat and carried a small case containing my first workbook; Daddy’s hand had cupped mine as I wrote Ellen Beatrice Calvert on the first page. That great thumb I remembered, and the ring with the claws holding a garnet. It was astounding how quickly we’d fallen. The apple trees had been in blossom when my rocking horse disappeared, and now the early desserts were cropping in the orchard. The time of the rocking horse and Miss Fane seemed like the dimmest age of the ancients.
I remembered, as the dirt came, how white everything had been at the Stour House. A tongue of milk spooling into a jug, and the jug itself, white china with a white beaded cloth on top against the flies. And the apple blossom, of course, and my petticoats and drawers, and the tablecloths that Mother embroidered out on the porch in full sun, white silk thread on white linen, and why are we doing this? I would ask.
And Mother’s secret smile. ‘It’s a present for you.’
‘But I don’t want a tablecloth.’
Smiling more secretly. ‘You will.’
I kept my plainest drawers and the cotton underskirts. Miss Dawes, the sister of the parish man, sold the embroidered linens discreetly for us. They fetched a good price. We put our furniture – two beds, an armchair, two chests, three kitchen chairs and a table – on the cart. A firescreen decorated with Arcadian scenes, a fluting shepherd and a lolling goatherd, so that Mother could sit facing the fire and forget that the house was gone: the dining room, the sun room, the sleepy sunlit bedrooms with their wrinkled quilts of eider down. Mr Dawes and Mr Blunden, who mowed the graveyard, lashed everything together with stiff ropes. ‘Heave ho,’ said Mr Blunden, bearing down on the rope and guffawing as if our belongings were a pile of bric-a-brac for the Whitsun Fair.
We left the Stour House, which stood out on its own beyond Beacon Hill, aloof from the hamlet of Barrow End and the village of Upton. We left owing money in Barrow End, Upton and Waltham, and no doubt in Southampton and London too. And if anyone were to come and dun us, whether it be for the price of a buttonhook or a hundred railway shares, we had nothing to give them but the charity shown us by the parish, and if they took that they might as well take our bones for bone meal too, because we’d surely die.
The cottage was on the edge of Upton, the first of five dwellings clustered at the top of a dead-end lane that petered into a wasteland of ruined shacks, nettles and broken fencing. The other cottages were empty, too dilapidated to live in. Mary Absalom, who had given them over to the parish, had been dead a hundred years but people still called the place after her, a fact I learned on my first day at Upton School when a sallow-faced girl said, ‘You’re the one that’s come to the Absaloms, then.’
From this girl I also learned that the last occupant of our house had been one Vic Small who, when drunk, fired a crossbow into the front door, which accounted for the splits.
‘I prefer not to know about Mr Small,’ I told this girl, whose name was Lucy and who cackled, ‘Only being friendly, dear.’
Edward couldn’t come to this school because the pupils left at fourteen. I refused at first to go without him, but it was cold in the cottage and Mother said that I’d be warm there. ‘You don’t have to speak to anyone, darling. I’m sure Miss Yarnold will be kind.’ Her voice wavered: she was sure of no such thing. ‘And don’t bend your head too close to another child’s. Something may leap from their hair.’
I’m sure it won’t be for long, she said. Something will come up.
We stood by our desks and recited the Lord’s Prayer. We would do it every morning thereafter, so that, for me, the words remained saturated with the body odour of those children. Amen, we said, and stank, because when I got home I did too, and we didn’t know it but soon I would on my own account, and our smell was unnoticeable save to people who washed.
Miss Yarnold took the register. My mother had always greeted her when we met in the haberdasher’s in Waltham. ‘How nice you look, Miss Yarnold, so fresh,’ my mother usually said, or something like it, and I’d nod and smile as well, tilting my head the way my mother did. Now I felt the heat envelop me as she reached my name: ‘Ellen Calvert,’ she called, and my ‘Present’ came out as a choking cry that made one boy crow like a cock in imitation. I looked her straight in the eye then, because she’d said my name a shade too loud and sharp, almost trippingly.
‘Daniel Corey,’ she said next, with a guileless gaze and a tweak of a smile.
On that first day she announced the national competition. Each of us was to write two essays, one about a bird, the other about a tree. We would observe our birds and trees over the course of the autumn.
We set to work. I sat at a double desk with the girl Lucy. I chose the waxwing and the rowan, being that there was a rowan tree outside our house at the Absaloms. I hoped to save myself labour since the waxwing was a migrant and fed off the rowan. I might whip it all into one text and have done, since surely by winter I wouldn’t be in this school. Daddy would have come back and rescued us by then. He’d come bounding into the schoolroom, tall and moustached, and gather me out of my seat. Come, my kitten, not a minute more. My fingers squeezed my pen.
‘I’m so sorry, Ellen.’ Miss Yarnold smiled over our desk. ‘But the rules are specific. It must be a native bird. And do choose an unrelated tree, since otherwise there would be too much repetition. And now, Lucy. There’s nothing on your page. What is it to be?’
‘The linnet, Miss.’
‘And why?’
Lucy shrugged.
‘And your tree?’
Another shrug.
Miss Yarnold smiled more brightly. ‘Dear Lucy. Always so slow.’
By mid-morning Lucy had written ‘linnet’, which I had spelled for her, and ‘prity’, which I hadn’t. There followed a break during which I stood at the edge of the yard and watched the boy Daniel Corey, whose name came after mine in the register, try and fail to push another boy over a log. This second, stronger boy was called John Blunden. It was his father who had helped us lash down our cart of shame. As they broke from their wrestling John stepped back and glanced at me, and frowned a hot, embarrassed frown.
At midday the classroom emptied at the first strike of Miss Yarnold’s little handbell – emptied, that is, apart from me and two small twin girls. ‘We stop at school,’ one said, and the other added, ‘Our dinner-time’s not till night. Is your dinner at night too?’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence. They were pale and long-haired, the hair dark and lankly curling.
‘What are your names?’
‘I’m Amy and she’s Airey.’
‘I’m Airey and she’s Amy.’
They’d spoken in unison. I smiled and pointed at the left-hand twin. ‘Amy?’ When she smiled back I saw the distinguishing mark, the tiniest chip on her front tooth. Then they placed their folded hands on their desks and laid their heads down. I sat still as their breathing fell into a single rhythm.
‘I must say, Ellen, you’re bearing up awfully well.’
A month of this life had passed. Edward and I were returning to the cottage from the copse on the other side of the lane, pulling behind us a bundle of dry dead branches lashed together with Edward’s belt.
‘It’s not so bad.’ I copied his tone: stout, cheerful and schoolboyish. I knew it was worse for him. He’d been to petition Mr Dawes over and over again for work – anything, clearing field drains, beating for the shoot. But all jobs were taken, it seemed.
‘We shall keep warm, I’m sure,’ I went on, ‘if we throw ourselves into our tasks.’
We stacked the branches and set to cleaning the windows. There was vinegar in the cupboard, and newspaper in the kitchen drawers, left, we assumed, by Vic Small. The windows were so crusted that we used all the newspaper on four panes, creating four clear, bright holes ringed by a fuzz of grime. Edward went inside and I tried scrubbing with a hard brush, but it had been left outside in the weather and only made the glass dirtier.
‘More paper, look.’ Edward reappeared with a bold, red-lipped smile and handed me a sheaf of illustrated pages. I glimpsed a corseted female torso, a suspendered leg cocked upon a stool, and dropped the pages in the mud. Edward broke into a baying laugh. ‘You can’t afford to be so nice. Not any more!’
I heard tapping and looked up to see Mother’s fingers against the glass. ‘She wants tea.’ My eyes were stinging. ‘I’ll go.’
The police came one afternoon late in October, all the way from Southampton in a black car whose headlights illuminated billowing tents of rain as it drew up outside the cottage. The car disgorged two men, a constable in a cape with skirts shining in the wet, and a detective sergeant doffing a trilby whose brim shed a short stream of water onto the floor. And then Miss Dawes, a surprising, straggling third.
The detective introduced himself and his junior. ‘I’m here to inform you, Mrs Calvert,’ he continued, ‘that we’ve found your husband.’
‘What do you mean, you’ve found him?’ Mother stared. ‘He’s not lost. He’s simply absent for the moment, retrieving our finances. He’s a capable, resourceful man. A very good provider.’ She waved an airy hand. ‘I expect he was fairly cross when you found him. Busy as he must be. He does get so involved in his enterprises.’
For a moment nobody moved or spoke. Then Miss Dawes turned to me and Edward. ‘Let us put the kettle on.’
‘We’ve got no fuel in the range,’ I told her. The wood we did have was wet, and I wasn’t burning our coal for Miss Dawes.
‘We’ll pop into the kitchen, dears, all the same.’
Edward folded his arms. ‘I’m staying with Mother.’
I stood with Miss Dawes in the yellow shaft thrown from the open kitchen door into the dim room. The detective began to speak but his words were soon drowned.
Edward went with the policemen to identify Daddy. It was a formality. A formality, I learned, was a senseless cruelty whose sole purpose was to inflict a lasting wound on a boy most innocent and undeserving. I would have gone too, but Miss Dawes told me to stay with Mother.
I learned the truth the following day, in the course of a halting catechism given by Mr Dawes. Daddy had died by his own hand, three days previous, in Southampton. Daddy had felt terrible shame at ruining us. Although he’d made a dreadful blunder in suicide Daddy couldn’t be blamed because the balance of his mind was disturbed. Daddy was now at peace, we should know; he loved us, and we should remember that his heart was in the right place.
Edward told me later that Daddy had put a gun to his own chest. His blue eyes looked black as he spoke. ‘Ha. Ha. Daddy’s heart certainly isn’t in the right place now.’
I screamed in his arms as he begged forgiveness for saying such a thing.
In school Miss Yarnold sat me nearest the fire with Amy and Airey for company. It transpired that they had also lost their father. ‘Dad fell from a roof and broke up his leg,’ Amy said.
‘His leg and his back,’ added Airey.
‘And they wouldn’t mend so he expired,’ said Amy. ‘We do pity you, Ellen dear, but you’ll get over it. We got over it, didn’t we, Airs?’
As if the loss were a high fence on a bleak upland field.
No one else spoke to me – no one, that is, except the girl Lucy, who instructed me to accept her condolences and take them to my mother and brother. ‘On my behalf and on behalf of my dad and nan. That’s Lucy Horne, George Horne and old Mrs Horne. There ain’t no young Mrs Horne because my ma passed on.’
I cast around for words, and then put out my hand. ‘I’m very sorry to hear it, Lucy.’
We shook hands. Her palm was warm and the hand itself small and dainty. She said, ‘Long time ago now.’
Mother developed a routine. She would rise early and light a small fire and get herself ready for the day. She toasted bread for us, and made tea. She didn’t eat until evening, apart from the crusts of our toast, and then, when she saw that we wanted the crusts, she left them on our plates. ‘Much too chewy for me, my dears.’ She washed our plates and cups and walked once around the garden. Then she took up her seat by the fire, with the screen shielding her gaze from the room. After the fire went out she stared at the ashes in the grate. At dusk, when no one could see her, she walked a while in the lane, and then she’d come in and light a second fire. We sat round it eating our supper, which became earlier as we grew hungrier with the increasing cold. Edward would stare at the flames like Mother and gently chew his knuckles. When the second fire went out we went to bed.
‘Edward?’
‘Hm?’ He was rolled in a coat on the far side of our bed, dozing. Lit by a bright half-moon in the window.
‘Do you think it was raining when Daddy died?’
He turned his head. Such a handsome boy he was. I was proud of him. He and I had blue eyes like Daddy but he had Daddy’s chestnut-brown hair. Mine was blonde as a stook of corn and much the same in behaviour, bunching and sticking out however tightly I plaited it.
‘Why do you ask?’ He had a new, distant way of talking, now that his voice was breaking. I didn’t mind. If anything it made him more admirable and manly.
‘I’m just trying to imagine it.’
The rain, and then a bang, and then more rain.
‘The balance of his mind was disturbed,’ Edward said at last. ‘It overwhelmed him, alone as he was. The shame and dread.’
‘Is that the same as being mad?’
‘Temporarily. Temporarily mad.’
He started to sob without weeping tears, and even that was manly, in his new breaking voice. I sat up and put my hand on his crisp hair. In the morning he and I found an old potato bed and two rows of turnips among the weeds.
The tenth of December, and my twelfth birthday came. Mother gave me a book which she’d secreted among her things. For the first time since our fall her cheeks and eyes glowed with pleasure. ‘This belonged to my mother, and now you shall have it.’ The book was leather-bound, old and very battered, entitled Downland Flora. All the plants of the chalk downs were in there, the colour plates shielded by paper so translucent that the images beneath were visible as if through soft rain.
Mr Dawes called on us. He carried a box containing a pudding and three Christmas crackers. ‘My sister will come on Christmas Eve with a duck, Mrs Calvert. A few vegetables and you’ll do handsomely.’ Miss Dawes duly came and we gave her fulsome salivating thanks. Later that same evening, there was a knock at the door. I opened it but there was only darkness outside. Then I saw a paper bag, and in it a bottle of beer. As I picked up the bag the gate clicked, and I looked up to see Lucy Horne vanish behind the hedge.
That first Christmas Day we polished our shoes, brushed our coats and went to church. We weren’t going to sit in our hole like mice. We slid to the end of one of the back pews and stared straight ahead. Behind me Daddy’s strong voice rang out in the bass variation to ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. O come, Daddy, O come. Edward sang the hymn loudly in Latin as he’d been taught at school. Adeste fideles, laete triumphantes. We left the church without looking back or stopping, even though Miss Dawes blurted, ‘Mrs Calvert, Merry—’ as we passed. We walked on down the lane, and when it came to the turn for the Absaloms we halted, all three of us. At the Stour House there’d have been dinner waiting for us, guests gathering in the hall. Cries of delight at our tree with its glass balls as big as a man’s hand and red as a man’s blood, its tiny brass bells, its lights glimmering through angel hair like stars through cirrus cloud.
Mother clasped her hands together. ‘I can’t go back to the cottage yet. Not today.’
‘No. A Christmas walk is in order.’ Edward was using his stout voice. ‘We can always have dinner later.’ And we strode on as if we were normal people, not creatures so clemmed that our stomachs were wringing inside us.
We went all the way out of the village to where the land spread out and up towards Beacon Hill. It was dry underfoot and Edward and I ran to and fro along the track, again and again, for the pleasure of being in the open, of being back on the hillside we’d known since we were able to walk. Edward inhaled lungfuls of downland air. ‘I don’t know why we didn’t come out here before, instead of staying cooped up in the cottage!’ But I knew. It was because so much had become forbidden to us. Even as we ran and panted and laughed, there was a sense of truancy.
We helped Mother over the stile. Her legs had got so thin that her stockings were wrinkled at the ankles. We held her hands and pulled her to the top. Edward sang, ‘Fal-de-ree, fal-de-ra, my knapsack on my back.’
At the top it was silent. We sat on a hillock that Edward said was made in the Iron Age. Then one by one we lay down on the soft springy turf among the dry rabbit droppings. We were warm from the climb, and the weather was mild. I tried to identify some of the downland flora but only managed buck’s-horn plantain, a humble rosette of pointed leaves. It was edible, according to my new book, so Edward and I nibbled like rabbits. Like bitter parsley, we decided. Then I rolled onto my back and stared up at the bands of still winter cloud that blurred into the blue. A long time of peace elapsed.
Edward touched my cheek. ‘Ellen. You were nearly asleep.’
In January I grew out of my boots. Edward put newspaper in his so that I could wear them to school. He found a pair of wooden clogs in the outhouse. When I came home we changed shoes. But soon it became clear from Edward’s pigeon-toed walk that his feet had grown too. He went to look in the cash box under Mother’s bed.
I went out into the garden. My feet slid over the ruts at the edge of the vegetable bed. I stamped and blew out a plume of white breath like a fire-eater. I tried to sing, but it turned into a sob. Edward came outside again. ‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘Oh, Edward.’ I knew something was going to happen.
‘There’s not enough, Ell, not for three of us to go on like this—’
‘Don’t leave us. We’ll die without you—’
‘Nonsense. You’ll do very well on the parish money, and then—’
‘Where will you go?’ I was crying.
‘Southampton.’
‘Oh, God—’
‘There’s a fortune to be made on the steamers, everyone knows that. And adventure. Who knows what I’ll send back? Come on, Ellen. You’ll live like kings.’
‘Edward. Oh, Edward.’
He turned away. ‘I must tell Mother.’
I wiped my face on my sleeve. My cheeks and eyes felt raw. I heard Mother give a broken sort of moan, a sound like a roosting hen.
In the morning I felt the first stubble on his chin graze my temple, his bony jaw and ear as he bent lower to whisper, ‘Keep Mother safe and study hard.’
‘Good luck, Edward. Don’t forget us.’
‘It’s for you I’m going, my dearest Ellen. So that’s hardly likely.’
He set off in his clogs down the lane. I watched him until he turned the corner. It was agony, but I had to, in case he looked back. He didn’t look back.
Three weeks later came a letter. With a stamp like a tiny stained-glass window, there were so many colours in it. Dear Ellen, it read, they used to call this land Darien. We have all been sick from the Atlantic swell. We are bound for Puntarenas and thence to San Francisco and then my hopes are for the Far East though it will lie in a westerly direction for me.
Mother seized the envelope, raked the inside with her forefinger. ‘How could he send no money?’
I handed her the banknote, five American dollars, which had been enclosed in the fold of the letter. ‘In future we can get it from the company. That’s what he says.’
9 (#ulink_4c5d5bb2-c037-5ef7-9645-f542bb570d7f)
SPRING CAME, hot and late, and then a cloudless summer. Mother and I walked to Waltham and took the bus to Southampton, and made our way, at two in the afternoon, to the shipping office of Raymond & Rose, where we sat on hard chairs in the blessed cool and dimness of the wood-panelled room.
‘So.’ The man behind the desk turned the pages of a ledger. ‘Edward Calthrop.’
‘Calvert.’ My mother spoke sharply. ‘He said his hopes were for the Far East.’
But I didn’t even know if that was true. I could imagine him in front of the mirror, thrusting out one leg, shading his eyes from an imaginary tropical sun, and saying, ‘Edward Calvert, who took ship for the Far East.’
‘Calvert, Calvert.’ The man turned another page. ‘Ah. Here he is. Siam, ladies. Bangkok, Swatow, Hong Kong. Rice out, general cargo on return. On our Queen of the Straits.’
My mother folded her hands together so that they could each comfort the other. She seemed unable to speak so I did it for her.
‘It’s simply that we haven’t heard from him for so long.’
The man nodded. He knew what it meant, for a seaman’s family, to hear from him. ‘I’m sorry. He gave us no authority to stop back a portion of his wage.’ He dipped his nib in the well, pecked at the page. ‘There,’ he said, with satisfaction. This had been an easy task. ‘A note. Family enquired. It’s all I can do.’
I inked the holes in my stockings but when I sat down at my desk the holes slid to reveal crescents of white skin. Like the clock face which showed the lunar phases; Daddy sliding the brass lever to make the moon wax and wane, wax and wane. Temporarily, perhaps just for ten seconds, my father had lost his wits. Shot himself in the heart and got out of everything. No more pain and certainly no hunger.
‘You’ve got half-moons peeping out on your legs,’ said Lucy.
‘I know.’
‘You want to do them patches bigger. Or get yourself some darning wool like everyone else.’
If 2a equals 10 what is a? Clearly a is for asinine, Miss Yarnold. Can there be a person alive who cannot see that a is 5? But yes, there are such persons – John Blunden and Daniel Corey for two, and Lucy for a third, and others, who all cry in protest, ‘But, Miss. We’ve gone an’ learnt two fives was ten. And now you says it’s two a’s that make ten!’
I met Miss Yarnold’s eyes and saw a glint of tears.
Lucy nudged me. ‘Or you could try soot. It spreads better.’
One Sunday in autumn I left the house, leaving Mother unfolding three yards of calico on the kitchen table. There’d been a discount on five yards but we couldn’t run to five. Nonetheless she’d galvanized herself, taken herself to the haberdasher’s in Waltham, and she was going to make drawers for us: ‘The light’s good, darling,’ she’d pleaded, but I was too hungry to sit sewing. ‘I’m so slim now,’ she was saying gaily as I swung the door closed, ‘I can squeeze an extra pair in, I’m sure.’
That gay tone I hated even more than the pleading.
I went by the back lanes even though they were wet and my left shoe leaked. The clouds broke late in the afternoon and I stopped by a field in the low sunlight and leaned on the gate, the field a wet, vivid green, and a large, pale cow rocking her head by the fence halfway down the hill. Lucy Horne was in the next field, leaning on the fence watching the cow. Beside her was a boy with a shock of walnut hair. When he sprang up onto the fence I recognized him as Daniel Corey. Before I could move they saw me.
‘Ellen,’ Lucy called, ‘come here.’
I could have darted on down the lane, pretended I hadn’t heard. I would have been hidden by the hedge in a second. But I was lonely.
Daniel was at the top of the fence when I reached them. He was wearing an enormous pair of breeches, so long that the knee cuffs came almost to his ankles. He didn’t turn his head or say hello, just swung each leg over and sat on the top rail. ‘Dorc,’ he was saying. ‘Ready, Dorc.’
‘He’s going to get up on Dorcas, if she’ll let him.’ Lucy grinned at me. It was a sight. She had so many top teeth missing.
The cow stood, still rocking her head although there weren’t any flies. Daniel perched his feet on the rail below the top, leaped up into the air, where he seemed to hover for a moment before falling deftly with his knees each side of the withers of the cow, who did not move. Lucy squeaked. ‘Good Dorc,’ Daniel breathed.
Dorcas had deep folds on her pale neck. Her muzzle was the colour of the lining in my mother’s kid gloves.
‘She’s beautiful, int she,’ said Lucy.
‘What would the farmer say?’ I whispered. I didn’t want to startle Dorcas.
‘She’s Daniel’s. Well, his dad’s. Do you fancy coming to ours for tea, Ellen?’
Lucy lived at the far end of the village street, on top of a high bank. I had always known there were cottages up there, but had never mounted the brick steps that led to them. Now I followed Lucy and Daniel up, placing my feet carefully, for the light was going.
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