A Bit of Earth

by Rebecca Smith

  Then he thought of Felix in his stripy T-shirts and legionnaire’s hat with Tintin on the back and thought, no, let it all melt away slowly.

  The bamboo maze was one of their favourite bits. Making one would be quite simple really. But much easier to start from scratch and do it with neat planting, rather than attempt to hack into an established bamboo thicket like those that were growing up on some of the slopes in the garden. Guy considered that he would need a serious machete for that. He didn’t have one good enough in the tool shed. Perhaps the grounds staff would have one, but they probably wouldn’t let him borrow it.

  The floor of the French bamboo maze had been soft. Yes, it had almost certainly been planned, and done by clever planting. Perhaps one day they might …

  A place where Felix often sat and waited was the huge tree stump that they called the Badger House. The tree had fallen during the 1987 hurricane, and been dragged away by a hired tractor, but the badger’s sett beneath it had survived. In fact it had been there for many hundreds of years. Felix had never seen the badgers, but Guy had promised that one day they would come by night and watch. For now Felix left tiny offerings at their portals: half-eaten apples, minute pictures he had drawn on Post-it notes (he weighed these down with the smoothest pebbles he could find), a piece of chalk or string, a sweet if he had been given any at school. Some of the other children brought them in to share on their birthdays, and Felix, unaccustomed as he was to sweets, could take them or leave them for the badgers. He had seen badgers eating peanuts on wildlife shows, so Smarties were probably OK for them, and so were Magic Stars. Anyway they disappeared. He hadn’t considered the possibility of pigeons or rats, or that sweets might be bad for badgers.

  Felix loved the way the wind moved in the trees. It started as a whisper, was it even a sound? It became a growing swish. Then the whole gust would come as if by magic, as if from nowhere, becoming visible as it moved through the treetops. He loved it when the branches moved. He loved the Beaufort wind scale. He had copied it out from his encyclopaedia and put it up on the wall by his bed.

  He often hoped for a ‘scale four’ when (if only he were at sea) there would be ‘fairly frequent horses’, or a ‘six’ which would see ‘large branches in motion’ and mean that umbrellas would be used with difficulty. He sometimes longed for a ‘twelve’. The countryside would be devastated.

  The wind seemed to move all around him, and then it would be gone. He would wait for the next gust. He would imagine himself sat on his globe, the wind circling him. He thought of the maps in his atlas.

  This gust in the trees right now, where had it come from? It must have come from all the way round the world. From the South Atlantic up to the Gulf of Mexico, across the sea and land to him and then away again. Did winds get worn out, he wondered, or did the same gusts keep circling the planet? He was glad he didn’t live on Jupiter where the storm of the Big Red Spot would suck him in and destroy him.

  When a gust reached him he would sometimes whistle with it, or put out his arms to greet it and call out ‘Hellooo!’ and ‘Goodbye!’ Would his words go right round the world with the wind and then come back to him?

  His globe was on the little table beside his bed. Once Esther at school had told him that if a butterfly flapped its wings in South America, there would be a hurricane in Europe. He kept on wondering about this. Surely there were millions of butterflies constantly flapping their wings in South America, and these would include giant blue Amazonian ones with wings the size of school dinner plates. Maybe only certain butterflies could cause hurricanes.

  If he jumped up and down, would a volcano erupt in Iceland? Or a geyser suddenly spurt upwards in Yellowstone Park?

  Perhaps some of his mum’s words were in the wind. Perhaps when they’d walked to nursery and laughed in the garden the sounds had been taken away and gone around the world. Perhaps if he opened his mouth the words and laughter would go back in.

  Sometimes Erica would come and talk to him or show him things; often he would have noticed the things himself, unusual fungi, when the frogs spawned, or the first buds on something … He liked to see what Erica was doing in her greenhouses, and often she gave him sandwiches or apples. She liked the same sorts of things that he did, things that were very plain, cheese on big hunks of brown bread with bits in, hard-boiled eggs out of a paper bag (she told him that her family had twenty-four hens), apricots, cream crackers with butter and Marmite on (Snowy would lick Marmite off his fingers). Sometimes Erica brought him things that were just for him. Often it was a gingerbread man from the baker’s, or a carton of Ribena, or, if it was a Monday and Erica’s mum, who made cakes, had been to visit, there might be home-made things like chocolate brownies. He was pleased when those Mondays happened. Food at home was unswervingly the same.

  One day he said, ‘Dad, do you think we could sometimes have something that isn’t actually breakfast, or to do with breakfast?’

  Guy looked at him blankly.

  ‘Er, not to do with breakfast?’ What did he mean? They had lunches and dinners whenever necessary, didn’t they? True, the menus didn’t change. Cereal, toast, eggs, beans, bagels, potato cakes, Scotch pancakes, cereal for pudding, Ready Brek for dinner. What else was there to eat really? With the amount of cereal they got through, Felix should have been rich in cereal packet toys, but Guy tended to buy only dull ones like cornflakes and Weetabix that usually came without them.

  ‘We have fruit,’ said Guy, ‘and bagels are an any-meal food.’ It was true, most of their meals were kind of toast-based: grilled tomatoes and mushrooms on toast, cheese on toast (well, that was definitely tea-time fare), vegetarian sausages on toast. But really, what else was there to eat?

  ‘I know, Felix, let’s have tea in the staff club café. We can have something different for a change.’

  When they got there most of the tables were empty. Felix chose one by a window that looked out onto a very small and neglected quad. Guy had never seen anyone go into it although there was a bench there, and a pond with koi carp. Too much blue-green algae was thickening the water. A lack of shelter and water snails, Guy surmised. Perhaps he could get one of those bundles of barley straw and lob it in.

  The café closed in half an hour. Pizza was all gone. Likewise the cassoulet, all jackets, mushroom stroganov and a spinach risotto that they probably wouldn’t have liked much anyway. But they could have an All-Day Breakfast.

  ‘Make that two,’ said Guy. ‘And a hot chocolate. And a jasmine tea.’ He didn’t notice the café lady’s lip curl slightly when he asked for his wussy drink.

  ‘I’ll bring it over,’ she told him. Honestly, she thought, these professors. He didn’t look capable of managing the tray all by himself; he’d probably trip over his own feet.

  ‘Is that your little boy?’ she asked, noticing Felix, and softening.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mum’s day off, is it?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  They exchanged smiles. As he sat down, Guy realised that it wasn’t jasmine tea he wanted, but a beer. He looked out at the dark green water and the empty bench. For a moment he wished that he smoked.

  Then he saw Erica coming towards them, swinging her arms. Could there really be room here for limbs that long?

  ‘Hey Guy, Felix,’ she said. ‘Waiting for your tea?’

  Felix said, ‘You can sit with us if you like.’

  Other people might have noticed that there was a perfection in the way that Erica moved and in the way that she was proportioned. Her skin was tanned to the colour of well-oiled pine. All those years of working outdoors in the sun or in sweaters that other people might have found too itchy had given her the smooth, brown, hairless arms and legs of an artist’s manikin. Her face was oval. She consisted of a set of symmetrical planes. Her shoulder-length dark brown hair was kept back in a single stubby bunch, as thick and straight as a child’s paintbrush. Her clothes were completely predictable: jeans or cut-off jeans and a man’s green or brown Shetland car
digan or jumper, worn with a plain T-shirt or a very soft shirt. She was without logos. She wore hiking-type boots or espadrilles, depending on the season. There was nothing unnecessary or extra about her, apart perhaps from the length of those limbs.

  Chapter 8

  Guy hadn’t often been ill, or at least off school as a child. His mother’s rule had been that if you could walk, you went to school. Nowadays he would have been the winner of many Headteacher’s Certificates for Perfect Attendance. An exception in his record of unbroken terms was when Jennifer and he had caught chickenpox and then, just weeks later, measles. How the days had dragged! Even the Misselthwaites couldn’t be sent to school if they were covered in spots.

  Once the first horrible phases were over, the days had seemed endless. Daddy was always at work. Mummy was not a natural nurse, and had been irritated by their presence. Even though they were still covered in spots, she treated them as though they were malingering. She bought them Ladybird workbooks, full of sums which were really too easy, join-the-dots, and exercises in producing line after line of cursive ‘C’s and ‘S’s and ‘O’s. Guy and Jenny’s elbows were sore from propping themselves up and reading. Guy thought that he’d read every book in the house. He was weary of the Land of Counterpane.

  One morning, in soft brushed-cotton pyjamas that really could have done with a wash, he slowly got out of bed. His legs were skinny and pale and wobbly. He made it to the downstairs bookcase and sat down too quickly, feeling as though he had fallen. The bottom shelf was all atlases and reference books that were so heavy they made his wrists ache when he only looked at them. Not quite so heavy and in a faded cover the colour of the school hamster, and bound with cloth that was even softer than his pyjamas, was Ons Suid-Afrikaanse Plantegroei. It was a while before his tired eyes saw that it had an English title too, Our South African Flora.

  ‘Guy! What are you doing out of bed?’

  ‘Just looking for something to read.’ He had the feeling that his mother only wanted him in bed so that she could keep him contained and away upstairs. ‘Please, please, can I read this? On the sofa?’

  ‘Well, all right, but I suppose Jennifer will want to come down too.’

  ‘I think she’s asleep,’ Guy lied. Jenny was doing French knitting. Just looking at it made his arms hurt. She had a tail coming out of the Knitting Nancy that was yards and yards long. She was going to break the school record. There was so much of it that it filled a Spar carrier bag. How he hated that knitting! Sometimes he thought of snipping it into pieces in the night. He would do it with the pinking shears. What on earth could she make with it? Enough little mats to cover all the kidney-shaped dressing tables in the world, to stock all the school bazaar craft tables until the end of time. And Daddy made such a fuss of it. Called her his Spinning Jenny. All Guy wanted Daddy to do was help him with an Airfix model or something. But it was always ‘Not tonight’.

  ‘Please let me read this. I’m so bored.’ He blinked and blinked, and fumbled in vain for his hanky. It wasn’t that he was crying, it was just that water kept coming out of his eyes.

  ‘Come on then. That was made by your great-great-grandmother and some of her friends. They were missionaries. Be careful. It’s really fragile.’

  He sat on the sofa with a blanket, a horrid, itchy, brown tartan one that he loved. You could plait the tassels.

  ‘Is it nearly lunchtime?’ There were another two hours to go. ‘Why do we have to have lunch at one o’clock?’

  In the end he had some Lucozade. His mum disappeared again behind the frosted glass door of the kitchen.

  When the Welsh rarebit arrived at one o’clock he let it get cold. This was one of the most beautiful books he had ever seen. And very old. His mother’s name (before she had married Daddy) was written in the front in writing that was worse than his. He bet she would have been in trouble for that.

  ‘This album,’ he read, ‘when completed, contains 100 cards issued by arrangement with the United Tobacco Cos. (South) Ltd., Westminster Tobacco Co. (C.T. & L.) Ltd., Policansky Brothers Limited, for the benefit of smokers of their products.’

  The missionaries must have been dedicated smokers, or at least friends of dedicated smokers, for the album was complete.

  The inside front and back covers were landscapes in sepia tones of what the South African veldt of the imagination looked like. Some gentle-looking deer, or maybe antelope or possibly gazelle, were grazing beside extravagant flowers with a backdrop of mountains. His fingers itched for his coloured pencils, but Mum would definitely be cross. He read:

  FOREWORD

  The flora of South Africa is celebrated for its great size as reckoned in number of species; for its endless botanical interest; and also for its richness in plants of beauty and distinction.

  The illustrations in this book have been made from a few of the vast number of subjects which the South African flora presents. They depict plants from various parts of the Union, though the Cape Province with its outstanding floral wealth …

  The words blurred in front of his tired eyes. Nobody yet knew that Guy needed glasses. And Guy, fortunately for a small boy, knew nothing of what was currently happening in the land whose plants were about to enchant him, or that ‘Kafir’ was now a term of abuse. He looked at the Afrikaans pages. Maybe he could teach himself this language by switching backwards and forwards between the two texts. Or maybe not. The pictures were the thing. He was simultaneously bewitched and soothed by the vivid colours and the exotic names. He had hardly seen any of these plants before. The gardens of England had yet to be overrun by Osteospermum. Here was Erica foliacea, and many other members of that family. He read that the flowers of Erica ‘though relatively small, are produced in great numbers and are remarkable for their beauty of detailed form and colour’.

  It was the start of a long love affair. He gazed and gazed, and tried to decide which one he liked best. Was it the peacock flower, or the wild pomegranate, or perhaps the Kafir honeysuckle or Port St John’s creeper? Which one was the most amazing? Was it the stone flower (how he longed for one) or the carrion flower (he couldn’t decide if he wanted one of those) or the Big Wooly Protea? Could you eat the cones of the Kafir bread tree?

  He kept the book hidden from Jenny. After ten days he was better and ready to go back to school, and he had the whole of Ons Suid-Afrikaanse Plantegroei off by heart. There was only a week until the Easter holidays, and they were all going to stay with Granny and Grandpa Misselthwaite in Yorkshire. Guy was taking the book to show them. He had it safely wrapped (and still hidden from Jenny) in a pillowcase in his bag.

  Guy often had daydreams about being left behind in Yorkshire, where time and outdoors seemed to go on forever. Grandpa had been one of the gardeners at the ‘big house’. He had retired just before it was sold. He said that his own garden was nothing much, but Guy loved it. Granny knew just as much as Grandpa. Behind her bit of the garden (which was where the flowers were) was a little shrubbery where you could hide, and then the vegetables. Guy liked helping with all of it. Jenny didn’t help much at all. Unless the job was picking things, she just sat around and watched. Guy knew that she was secretly frightened of worms.

  The only rule Grandpa had was ‘Be careful in the shrubbery’. When they were little they’d thought that there might be monsters or bad men in there. Now they knew that it was because of Grandpa’s camellia. It was called Camellia japonica ‘Eleanor Clark’. The family at the big house had given it to Grandpa when he retired, along with a watch, but that wasn’t quite so treasured. Grandpa said that it was the only camellia with a little natural blue in the white, and that it was very rare. He said that when he and Granny died, they must make sure that it was looked after. Guy had nodded and promised. When Grandpa offered him a just-snapped broad bean the pact was sealed.

  Chapter 9

  Miss Block’s class were going on a trip. Even Guy couldn’t fail to be unimpressed. It was a geography field trip to the local shops. They had worksheets to com
plete and boxes to tick. They would draw maps of it all when they returned. Felix, as usual partnerless, was with Miss Block.

  ‘Block,’ said all the parents. ‘What an ideal name for a primary school teacher!’

  Miss Block had once been engaged. There had been a chance of her exchanging Block for Benning. But she had broken the engagement off when her intended had laughed at the sketches she had made at her weekly life-drawing class. Miss Block had really wanted to go to art school, but somehow she had done a B.Ed. instead. She thought of herself as a cautionarytale. This was her first proper position, it was only a maternity cover job, but who knew … it was a nice school. Perhaps they would ask her to stay. She was desperately hoping that Mrs Partridge would find herself unable to return after the baby was born.

  Felix and Miss Block were bringing up the rear. There would have been little chance of Felix running off, Miss Block speculated, she hardly needed to keep an eye on him. He was plodding along like a little old man; perhaps his shoes were uncomfortable. She looked down at them. They looked like the most sensible shoes in the class. Perhaps he was just bored.

  ‘Do you come to these shops all the time with your mum?’ she asked him.

  ‘My dad and I don’t go shopping to these shops. My mum’s dead.’

  ‘Oh Felix, I’m so sorry!’ Why on earth hadn’t they told her?

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, plodding on.

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘When I was little.’

  Miss Block thought that he was still very little. Only seven.

  ‘It must be very hard for you and your dad.’

  ‘We’re all right.’

  Perhaps he didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘Miss Block?’ Her spirits soared. He did want to talk about it!