“So?”
“Here, I’ll show you.” Fred scooped the saddle up. He exchanged it for Butter’s, then tossed me into it. My left leg went into the stirrup, snug beneath one of the crooks. My right leg hung down on the stirrup-less side. “Now you swing your right leg over, right here,” he said. He showed me how to tuck my right thigh around the other crook, so that my right leg actually draped over the pony’s left shoulder. “That’s it,” Fred said. “Now shove your right hip back, and get square in the saddle.”
It felt very odd, but also snug and secure. As Butter had become more forward, my bad foot had become more of a problem. That I couldn’t use the right stirrup was no issue, except that it tended to make me lean. But I couldn’t use my right foot properly—I could thump him with it, but I couldn’t keep any sort of proper contact with his side. My ankle, such as it was, didn’t move that way.
“Now,” Fred said, handing me a heavy leather – wrapped stick, “here’s your right leg.”
“My leg?”
“Absolutely. You haven’t got one of your own legs on the right side, see? So you hold one end of that stick and keep the other end on the pony. You’ll signal him with it, just like you would with a regular leg.”
Fred led us out to the field where I usually rode. “Take a bit of time to get used to it, both for him and for you.” He was still grinning ear to ear. “’Ow’s it feel so far?”
“Pretty good,” I said. My seat could still move with Butter’s walk, but my legs felt firm. “I didn’t know they made saddles for cripples.” I wondered where Fred had found it, whose saddle it had been.
“Nah, not for cripples,” Fred said. “This is how all proper ladies used to ride. Back when, straddling a horse wasn’t thought to be ladylike. But after the war, things changed—the gentry women started riding astride, and after that pretty much so did everyone.”
“Which war?” Because the one we were in wasn’t over.
“Last one. Twenty years back.” Fred’s face clouded. “England lost three million men.”
“So they had lots of extra women,” I said. “And lots of men’s saddles for them to use.”
“Suppose so.” He made me go around the field, first at the walk, then at the trot. Trotting was gobs easier in the sidesaddle—I still bounced, but I couldn’t really get shaken loose.
“That’s enough for now,” Fred said. “You can practice runnin’ on your own. No jumping yet.”
Never any jumping yet.
When I’d finished my work I went home by way of the tall hill above the village. Susan had drawn it on my map for me. At the top of the hill I stopped, and watched the ocean for a long time. Some days I saw ships, far off in the distance, and once or twice a fishing boat closer in. Today there was nothing but glimmering sunlight, birds circling, tiny white waves crashing against the shore. Susan said there was sand at the water’s edge, and when there wasn’t a war it was a lovely place to walk and look at the ocean. Just now the beach was fenced with barbed wire, and planted with mines, which were bombs in the ground, in case of invasion. We’d walk on the beach when the war was over, Susan said.
Susan didn’t think I should accept the sidesaddle. She thought it was too valuable of a gift. She marched it and me over to Lady Thorton in the WVS office. “That old thing?” Lady Thorton said. “It must have been my aunt’s. Mother never rode. Of course Ada may have it, or Grimes wouldn’t have given it to her. Margaret doesn’t want it, and neither do I.”
Maggie sent me a letter from her school. Susan laid the envelope on the table one afternoon, and I traced the word I recognized on the front with my finger: Ada. I still had the paper where Susan had written my name, and I’d copied it over and over.
“Shall I read it to you?” Susan asked.
“No,” I said. I opened the letter and stared at the marks on the paper inside. No matter how hard I stared, they didn’t make sense. That night I tried to get Jamie to read it. “Her handwriting’s all curly,” he said. “I can’t read that.”
Still, I didn’t want Susan to help me. In the end I brought it to Fred. He chewed his pipe and said Maggie wanted us to ride together when she came home for Christmas holidays.
“I won’t be here for Christmas,” I said. “The war will be over by then.”
Fred shook his head. “I wouldn’t think so,” he said. “That’s barely a month away. Doesn’t seem to me that the war’s properly started yet.”
“Mam’ll send for us,” I said. “All the other evacuees are leaving.”
Fred scratched behind his ear. “Well, we’ll hope not, won’t we? Don’t know what I’d do without you, I don’t.” He grinned at me, and to my surprise I grinned in return.
I knew I couldn’t really stay. The good things here—not being shut up in the one room, for starters, and then Butter, and my crutches, and being warm even when it was cold outside. Clean clothes. Nightly baths. Three meals a day. That cup of Bovril before bedtime. The ocean seen from the top of the hill—all of these things, they were just temporary. Just until Mam came for us. I didn’t dare get too used to them.
I tried to think of good things about home. I remembered Mam bringing home fish-’n’-chips on Friday nights, crisp and hot and wrapped in newspaper. I remembered that sometimes Mam sang, and laughed, and once even danced Jamie around the table. I remembered how when Jamie was little he spent his days inside with me. I remembered the crack on the ceiling that looked like a man in a pointed hat.
And even if it felt like Mam hated me, she had to love me, didn’t she? She had to love me, because she was my mam, and Susan was just somebody who got stuck taking care of Jamie and me because of the war. She still said so sometimes. “I didn’t ask for evacuees,” she said, when Bovril puked mouse guts on the living room rug. “I don’t need this,” she said, shaking her head, when Jamie came home with his sweater ripped, smeared in dirt from head to toe. “I never wanted children,” she said, when Butter shied at a pheasant and dumped me in the road, and ran home with my crutches tied to the saddle. Susan came out to find me, muttering, crutches in hand, and when she saw me she scowled and said it was a mercy I wasn’t killed. “I never wanted children.”
“I never wanted you,” I said.
“I can’t imagine why not,” she said, snorting. “I’m so loving and kind.” The wind had come up sharp and it was nearly full dark. I was shivering. When we got home Susan draped a blanket around my shoulders. “Make us some tea,” she said. “I’ll put up the wretched pony.” She squared her shoulders and stalked into the night, and I watched her go, and wanted Mam.
I wanted Mam to be like Susan.
I didn’t really trust Susan not to be like Mam.
Susan took us back to see Dr. Graham. “I can’t believe it’s the same children,” he said. Jamie was two inches taller, and I was three. We were heavier too, and I’d grown strong from riding and helping Fred. With my crutches I could walk for ages without getting tired. We didn’t have impetigo, or lice, or scabs on our legs, or anything. We were the picture of health, he said. Then he took my bad foot and wriggled it. “Still nothing?” he asked Susan.
She shook her head. “I’ve invited her to visit for Christmas,” she said. “If she comes, I hope to convince her.”
“Who?” asked Jamie.
“Never you mind,” Susan replied.
I was hardly paying attention. My mind always wandered into its own corner when strangers touched me. Susan tapped my shoulder. “Does this hurt?” she asked.
I shook my head. My foot hurt, it always did, but Dr. Graham wiggling it didn’t make it hurt worse. I just didn’t like it.
“If perhaps you could do this, every day,” he said, twisting my foot as though unwringing a cloth, as though he could make it look more normal, “if she could gain some flexibility, that would only be a help for later on.”
“Special shoes,” I sai
d, my mind coming back to me. “Fred said clubfoot horses had special shoes.”
Dr. Graham let go of my foot. “That won’t be enough at this stage,” he said. “I’m convinced you’ll require surgical intervention.”
“Oh,” I said, not having any idea what he meant.
“Still,” he said, “massage might help, and certainly can do no harm.”
It turned out he meant Miss Smith was going to rub and tug at my foot every night. We’d already switched to reading Swiss Family Robinson in the blacked-out living room after dinner, snug by the coal fire that didn’t quite heat our bedrooms upstairs. Now Susan sat on one edge of the sofa, nearest the lamp, while I sat on the other and stretched my feet onto her lap. Jamie and his cat lay by the fire on the rug.
“Your foot is so cold,” Susan said, the first evening. “Doesn’t it feel cold?”
I nodded. We were still keeping it bandaged, but the bandage tended to get damp and my foot was nearly always freezing. “I don’t mind,” I said. “When it gets numb I can’t feel it.”
Susan looked at me, puzzled.
I said, “When it gets numb it doesn’t hurt.”
She winced. “You could get frostbite,” she said. “That wouldn’t be good for you. We need a better plan.” In typical Susan fashion she set about making one. First she took one of her own thick wool stockings, which were bigger than mine and easier to slide over my inflexible ankle. Then she messed around with an old pair of slippers and a needle and thread, and pretty soon I had a sort of house shoe, with a leather bottom and knit top. It didn’t keep my foot completely dry, but it helped a lot. “Hmmm,” Susan said, studying the shoe. “We’ll keep working.”
She had her sewing machine going all the time now, three or four hours a day. She made bed jackets for soldiers from cloth the WVS gave her. She made a coat for Jamie out of an old woolen coat she said had been Becky’s. She went through a pile of old clothes and ripped them apart at the seams, then washed and pressed the cloth pieces and cut and sewed them into different things entirely. “The government calls it Make Do and Mend,” Susan said. “I call it how I was raised. My mother was an excellent manager.”
“Does your mother hate you?” I asked.
Her face clouded. “No. She’s dead, remember?”
“Did she hate you when she was alive?”
“I hope not,” Susan said.
“But you said your father doesn’t like you.”
“No. He thinks my going to university was a bad idea.”
“Did your mother think that?”
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “She always did whatever my father wanted.” She stopped pinning pieces of cloth together. “It wasn’t a good thing,” she said. “It made her unhappy, but she did it anyway.”
“But you didn’t do what your father wanted,” I said.
“It’s complicated,” Susan said. “At first he was pleased when I won a place at Oxford. Only later he said he didn’t like the way it changed me. He thought all women should get married and I didn’t do that, and—it’s complicated. Only I’m not sorry I made the choices I did. If I had it to do over I’d make them again.”
Susan made Jamie a pair of nice shorts to wear to church out of an old tweed skirt that had once been Becky’s. She recut the jacket that had gone with the skirt and turned it into a short heavy coat I could wear when I was riding.
Since the day I broke Susan’s sewing machine I’d refused to touch it, but Susan started to teach me how to sew by hand. She said it was better to learn that way first anyhow. She showed me how to sew on buttons, and I sewed the buttons onto all the bed jackets she made, and my jacket, and the flap on Jamie’s shorts.
At the WVS meeting, she told the other women that I had helped her. She said so, when she came home.
One day she rummaged around in her bedroom and came out with an armful of wool yarn. She got out wooden sticks. She looped the yarn around the sticks and pretty soon had made warm hats for Jamie and me, and mufflers, and mittens to keep our hands warm.
My mittens looked like they had two thumbs apiece. Susan showed me how one thumb-part went over my thumb, and the other went over my littlest finger. She had taken very thin scraps of leather and sewed them across the palms. “They’re riding mittens,” she said, watching my face. “See?”
I saw. When I’d first started riding Butter I’d held the reins in my fists, but Fred insisted I do it the proper way, threading them through my third and fourth fingers and out over my thumb. In these mittens I could hold the reins right, and the leather strips would keep the yarn from wearing away.
“I made them up,” Susan said. “They were all my own idea. Do you like them?”
It was one of those times when I knew the answer she wanted from me, but didn’t want to give it. “They’re okay,” I said, and then, relenting a little, “Thank you.”
“Sourpuss,” she said, laughing. “Would it kill you to be grateful?”
Maybe. Who knew?
The vicar came over on a Saturday with a gang of boys and built an Anderson shelter in the back garden for us. Anderson shelters were little tin huts that were supposed to be safe from bombs. Ours didn’t look safe. It looked small, and dark, and flimsy. The bottom half of it was buried in the ground, and you had to go down three steps to open the little door. Inside, there was just room for two long benches, facing each other.
Susan said we wouldn’t have been able to dig the hole ourselves, not if we worked all week on it. She took drinks out to the vicar, and said so. The vicar, sweating in his shirt sleeves, said it was his pleasure. They’d been putting up Anderson shelters all over the village. It was good work for the boys.
Some of the boys were evacuees and some weren’t. One was Stephen White.
He grinned and rested his shovel when I went over to him. “So you’re not busy every day?” he asked.
“I am busy,” I said. “I ride. I help Fred Grimes. I do things.”
“I just meant, you said you were too busy to come to tea.”
He used a dirty hand to push his hair away from his face, and it left a smear of mud on his cheek. Still, like me, he looked better than he had in London. His clothes were neat and clean, and he was taller.
Something about his grin made me feel I could trust him. “I wouldn’t know what to do at tea,” I said.
He shrugged. “Sure you do. Bet you have tea every night.”
“But that colonel—”
“He’s an old ducks, he is. You’d like him once you got to know him.”
“How come you didn’t go home with the rest of your family?” I’d been wanting to ask for ages.
Stephen looked uncomfortable. “The colonel’s mostly blind,” he said. “You’ve seen him. And he’s got no family, and when I first got here he was really feeble. A bunch of the food he’d been eating had gone bad, only he’s lost his sense of taste too, so he couldn’t tell, and so it made him sick, and his house was just awful. Bugs everywhere, and rats, and he couldn’t fix any of it.
“I cleaned the place up. The vicar’s wife taught me to cook, just easy things, and she brings us food sometimes too. She’s nice. And I read to the colonel, and he likes that. He’s got piles of books.” Stephen picked his shovel back up and started heaving dirt onto the top of the shelter. “Mum’s after me to come home. I’d like to go. I miss home, I do, but if I leave, the colonel’ll die. He really will. He’s got no one.”
Stephen looked around the muddy garden, at the house and stable and Butter’s field. “Pretty nice place here.”
“Yes.”
“Your mam ain’t come for you?”
“No. She doesn’t want us.”
He nodded. “Just as well. She shouldn’t’ve shut you up like she did.”
I shivered as the wind whipped higher. “It was because of my foot.”
S
tephen shook his head. “Foot’s the same, isn’t it?” he said. “And you’re not shut up now. Come to tea sometime. The colonel likes having visitors.”
When everyone had gone I stood just outside the door of the shelter. I didn’t like it. It was dark and damp and cold; it smelled like Mam’s cupboard beneath the sink. Goose bumps rose on my arms, and my stomach churned. I didn’t go inside.
Susan stocked the shelter with blankets, bottles of water, candles, and matches. She said air raid sirens would go off if enemy planes were coming to bomb us. We would hear the sirens and run into the shelter, and be safe.
“What about Bovril?” Jamie asked anxiously.
Bovril could come into the shelter. Susan found an old basket with a lid on it, and put it into the shelter. If Bovril was scared, Jamie could shut him in the basket.
“He won’t be scared,” Jamie said. “He’s never scared.”
Butter wouldn’t fit in the shelter.
It was cold now and dark came early. The color had leached out of the grass in Butter’s field, and he’d started to grow thin. When I showed this to Susan, she sighed. “It’s all the exercise you’re giving him,” she said. “He used to be fat enough he could winter over on grass.” She bought hay and we stacked it in one of the empty stalls. She bought a bag of oats too. Every day I took Butter three or four flakes of hay and a bucket of grain. He still lived outside. Fred said it was healthier for him, as well as being less work for us.
Back when the leaves had first started changing color on the trees, I’d been alarmed. Susan promised that it happened every year. The leaves changed color and fell off, and the trees would look dead all winter, but they wouldn’t actually be dead. In spring they’d grow new green leaves again.
The War That Saved My Life Page 12