He put his arm in mine. ‘A bit like the old days, then.’
After he left I remembered what he said, and thought of you. Because you must be thirteen now, and I hope and trust your thoughts do not run as incessantly as mine did at that age on the staples of life. I picture you whirling through the days with your big cousins, the five of you gathering round a table of plenty. Where’s Pamela? Ah, there she is. There she is.
12th May 1951
Dear Pamela,
I’m as indomitable as a spider creeping on a wall. In and out of the crevices of brick. Spinning silently in sunlight. Industry, industry. The mill. Selwyn. The Women’s Institute. The illiterate children I help to read at Upton School, their fingers leaving smears of grime or butter or ink under the difficult words. The mill, the WI, the children, Selwyn: what industrious spinning. My webs hang glittering, drooping under dewdrops.
In the beginning when I looked at those children’s small, soft fingers and saw yours instead, all my weaving was torn away by a dry, heartless, leaf-bowling wind. Nothing to do but start again, and I did start again, and now the children’s fingers remain their own, and I learn their names. Robert and George and Margaret.
If it’s possible to love Selwyn more than I did during the war, I do. I haven’t said anything about how he missed you. We walked a lot that summer, out along the Downs beyond Barrow End. Just the two of us, hand in hand. Almost foolishly bereft. In the evenings we read aloud to each other as we used to before the war. We had begun The Count of Monte Cristo in the summer of 1939 and now we took it up again, and as Selwyn read I felt not the blaze from our log fire but the sunburn on my face from that summer. And if I lay on the sofa, teetering on the edge of a doze, I could almost convince myself the war had not taken place and we, Selwyn and I, had somehow taken a different path through time.
You must be sixteen now. A clever girl, I don’t doubt.
12th February 1959
Dear Pamela,
Lady Brock has sold Upton Hall at last. It will now be Upton Hall School, a boarding school for girls. The new head is one Mrs Margaret Dennis, an army widow who has endeared herself to Upton society by her enthusiasm for drinks parties, bridge, racing, and the odd set of tennis. The ballroom’s a dining room now, the squash court a chapel, the stable block full of pianos. William is now caretaker, a job he’s been performing untitled for years. He can’t count the number of leaks he’s plugged in that infernal old roof, he says: he is so glad there’s money in the place, so he can have done with all this ‘makeshifting and stopgappery’.
And Lady Brock? She hasn’t gone far. Just to the Lodge near the top of the drive. A small square house hidden in laurels – we used to pass it, you and I. Selwyn, William, Lucy, George, John Blunden and I helped Lady Brock move in. We brought the knight in armour, you’ll be glad to hear. He stands guard in her new sitting room, looming beside the window, not entirely steady on his feet. She never tires of telling everyone how blissful it is to be shot of the Hall. ‘I was camping in the sewing room by the end, you know,’ she says, and guffaws.
Now that she has grand-nephews in New Zealand, Lady Brock occasionally regales me with stories of their doings. Recently she told me how after finishing their boiled eggs the boys turned the hollowed shells over in the egg cups to make it look as though the eggs were still untouched, earning a mock rebuke from their mother. But she brought the story to a halt, saying, ‘What silly stuff. Now – about the church flowers …’ Because she saw in my eyes that it was something that you did, my child, when you were here.
11th April 1963
Dear Pamela,
I have walked bareheaded under the Lion Gate at Mycenae, felt the sudden shadow cool on my face. The sky belonged only to Zeus, so blue it was. We’d forgotten our water canteens but we didn’t care. Even our thirst was exciting. Selwyn rubbed a sprig of thyme between his fingers. I was given a great gift, which was to see him again as he must have been in his youth. Because it was a new person I discovered. And I told him so, and he said, ‘It’s you. You’ve made me young again.’
We’ve been to Mycenae, Olympus, Thermopylae. I can’t imagine where you are any more. Still in Ireland? Moved to Dublin? London, perhaps. You might even have been in Greece yourself on one of our trips. Could I have glimpsed you below me on a mountain path, a young woman with a rucksack, exploring?
Extraordinary to think that you’re now older than I was when I first met you. Older than I was when I let you go.
10th January 1971
Dear Pamela,
Selwyn has gone. Mister Parr has gone.
Pneumonia took him. A cough turned to bronchitis; he recovered. Then he got worse again. One cold afternoon he became very agitated, wouldn’t stay in bed, paced around the bedroom, saying, ‘I can’t see them, they’re calling but I can’t find them.’ I suspected that in his delirium he was back at Messines. Looking for the wounded men in the mud.
William came. He was magnificent. He said, ‘Lieutenant Parr, return to your bunk.’
He drove me to the hospital in my Land Rover. We let the ambulance speed ahead of us into the rain.
It isn’t called the Borough Hospital any more, thank God. That name went after the war. It’s Southampton General instead, a competent modern name. Though the injections and modern doctors did not make a difference, in the end.
Selwyn died before the winter dawn. I was almost asleep but felt him leave me. I pressed the bell and a nurse removed the oxygen mask. He had an expression I hadn’t seen before, that of a traveller gladly alighting with no thought for the companions he was leaving behind. That expression didn’t belong this side on earth but should only have been seen in the afterlife.
By now my friends were sleeping in the waiting room, propped upright on benches. Lady Brock was there – she had been reading to him in his last hours. She had long training in this task. Articles from the Hampshire Chronicle, the prices of grain and feed.
The moment I came in they awoke and rose to their feet as one.
William took us all home and I sat in the back with Lucy. Selwyn’s watch and his toothbrush and copy of Edward Thomas’s The South Country were in a plastic bag on my lap. I took the watch out, felt it smooth in my hand, the rubbed pale-gold back and rim, the soft brown leather strap, the biddable buckle. I slipped it on and the narrowest hole in the strap fitted.
I put it to my ear and heard him still, in the ticking of the watch.
23rd October 1971
Dear Pamela,
There are so many things gone, I clutch at what’s left. Often I still touch the things he touched – the paperweight in the study, the clock key – because it’s comforting to know his hand rested where mine is. I wear his watch, of course, the heavy golden penny of it snug beneath the cuff of my blouse.
I’ve been building my own waymarkers now for a long time, building them just as carefully as cairns on moorland. A scone and butter, a nap, three clues of the crossword, to help me beat a path through the day however low the fog rolls. They punctuated mourning in the beginning; now they punctuate work. I run the mill with Suky Fitch now, and pay her accordingly. But when she retires, which is soon, I’ll lease the mill. I couldn’t do it with both Selwyn and Suky gone.
When you left it was different. I didn’t want your things around. After the first agony I buried your small blue dress deep in the layers of a linen chest and extirpated everything else that I could because it hurt too much to see them. It was wartime, you never had a wardrobe full of clothes or a box full of toys, but you had left your mark everywhere. You took the Peg family but all the other clothes-pegs had to go too, because over the years you had put eyes and mouths on all of them. You had a child-sized fork and spoon, your own, and you had bent the tines of the fork trying to pull a nail out of one of the runners of your sledge. I had to put those in the attic. In the bathroom you had drawn a fox in the steam on the mirror, a fox that reappeared with every bath I took for days and which had to be scrubbed away.
I still find things. A pencil stub at the back of a desk drawer, the end chewed by milk teeth.
8th February 1973
Dear Pamela,
I remember you teasing Mr Parr as he read the newspaper. He had the paper spread out in his usual way, as wide as a windbreak, and he was hunched in the chair behind it, eyes narrowed behind spectacles, wanting nothing more than a few moments’ peaceful wandering among the newsprint columns. And you could not give him that, you terrible, gorgeous girl, and you kept tapping and poking at the outer pages until he brought the paper down with a great flap and a howl of only-just-pretend annoyance that made you shriek in delight.
You had a great deal of mischief in you, Pamela. I hope that mischief hasn’t gone.
THREE
Ellen
1974
22
I PLACED MY FEET solidly on the branch, held tight with one hand, and with the other reached for an apple. They were beautiful this year, large enough to fill my palm and spread fingers, excellent for peeling. The warm, rustling breeze swayed me gently to and fro. A mile away, the church tower peeped above the wall and beyond, under strong sunshine, lay the recumbent flank of Beacon Hill. To be aloft in an apple tree, on a hot afternoon in late September: surely this was an instance of heaven on earth.
Lucy was below, filling the barrow with windfalls. From my position I could see the inch of grey at her parting.
‘I wish you’d come up, Lucy. It’s simply glorious.’
‘My climbin days are done,’ she replied equably. ‘As you well know.’ She placed a palm over the top of her head. ‘I can feel you lookin at my roots, Ell.’
I giggled, and picked another beauty. ‘I suppose I could always send the basket down with my eyes shut. If you don’t mind it landing on your head.’
She squinted up at me. ‘Have you thought about hair dye, dear? You don’t want to end up like Miss Peacock. Remember her?’
Xanthe Peacock, who had been born in 1879 and who used to live by the ford before the war. A goat-keeper and cheesemaker, she had been famous for her long, looping, iron-grey locks.
‘My hair is nothing like hers.’ I unwound the rope attached to the basket handle and began to pay it out. ‘It’s simply a rather light blonde after the summer. Particularly at the temples.’
The basket began its dallying descent. I heard Lucy stifle a snort.
We took the kitchen chairs outside to do our peeling. Deckchairs were more comfortable but all you could do in a deckchair was loll. And lolling was a temptation, beneath this deep-blue sky as hot as a brick-kiln.
Lucy heaved a sigh of happiness. ‘We’re owed this.’
She was right: a rainy August had kept us damp and discontented. ‘Didn’t the blackberries recover well, though? Jet black. Prodigious.’
Lucy laughed. ‘Your Selwyn was the blackberryer. I remember him gathering at that big hedgerow behind Beacon Hill. Hooking them down with his stick.’
Selwyn used to wear an old mackintosh which he spread against the brambles so he could lean in and reach the high treasures. Tall and spare, his soft trilby on the ground next to an enamel bowl. I’d be homeward-bound, calling him in a low sun, but on he’d go, returning at dusk with his quarry. It was three years since he’d died – three times I’d entered into the dark tunnel of January and come out the other side, and each time the light came a little sooner, and now I could talk like this about him, smiling.
‘Selwyn was no gatherer of blackberries,’ I told Lucy. ‘He was a hunter.’
We worked on, throwing the apple parings into a bucket placed between us. The quartered apples, sliced of their cores, swirled in a plastic tub of water. A platoon of ants was trying to bear away a scrap of peel the shape of a tiny shield; they circled, unable to find direction.
Lucy grunted. ‘Them ants need a general.’
I picked up another apple, smooth and slightly greasy in my hand. I should start peeling, but instead I closed my eyes in the sunshine.
‘Do you know young Colin Bowyer, Lucy?’
Colin was the son of Barney Bowyer, an affable red-haired chap who had taken over the lease of the mill when Suky retired.
‘Him that charges around in bell-bottom trousers? Strange flappin articles. Not a hornpipe dancer, is he?’
I had never heard Lucy describe a man born after 1945 with anything but censoriousness and denigration.
‘I expect many people admire those trousers. And he charges around because he’s busy and hard-working. Anyway, Colin told me his father Barney is nephew to old Evie Norris who taught me typing, about a century ago.’
The sunshine was warm and rosy on my eyelids.
‘Norris, now,’ Lucy said. ‘Norris. Oh, yes. Her with the warts on her fingers. From the estate office at Barrow End. And it was all down to Bill Kennet.’
I smiled, and opened my eyes to the blue. ‘She was a terrific horticulturalist, it turned out.’
‘Lucky for you she was, Ellen. My word, what a piece of good fortune you had there. A husband. A house. Clean sheets and a roaring fire. All on account of Bill and his rare cuttins, and Evie Norris.’
‘Give me some credit.’ I laughed. ‘I worked jolly hard. Anyway I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. I met Selwyn by chance, after all. We bumped into each other in Waltham Square. I was looking at a seagull flying down Castle Road.’ The gull making its way down the street below the tops of the buildings, white wings flashing in and out of sun and shadow. Catapulting me into the arms of a tall man whose skull banged against mine as we kneeled to retrieve my library books. And we had spoken of Neanderthals. Brow ridges. Brain size.
Lucy tossed neat chunks of apple into the tub. ‘Just think. You might be there now, if it weren’t for that gull. Typin away at the town hall.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded. I was extremely happy, with my warm room and my independence.’
‘Or you might have married that boy who was sweet on you. Tom Coward—’
‘Bob Coward.’
‘— Bob Coward, and got the full bowl.’
‘Bob Coward? Not in a thousand years.’ I wiped my hand on my apron. ‘I saw him at Waltham Show last year, strolling with his lady wife. A beer-belly leading the way, and not a hair on his head. What do you mean, anyway, getting the full bowl?’
‘The full bowl of cherries. You know, what life is meant to be.’
‘Actually the saying is, life is not a bowl of cherries. Or even a bowl of apples—’
A familiar engine roared at the top of the lane. It was my Land Rover. Lucy jumped to her feet. ‘Bill’s back!’ She rushed away, knife in hand, and disappeared round the back of the house to the mill yard.
I sat looking at the cut apples swirling in the glinting water. I wanted to follow Lucy but I couldn’t. Something was stopping me from gathering myself together. I gazed up at the unending sky, blue vault opening upward into blue vault. My heart gave a series of strong thumps, as if demanding to be let out.
After a moment, I levered myself to my feet.
William was drawing into the yard, his tyres dusty.
He hopped down in a semi-crouch and unbent cautiously. ‘That journey was too long for my old back.’ But he was smiling. He was wearing sunglasses, which gave him a rakish look. Now there was someone who’d never gone grey. He’d simply bleached, from wheat to white.
‘Oh, Bill.’ Lucy, for the first and probably the last time, hugged him.
He patted her small narrow shoulder with his good hand. ‘Steady on.’ He put out his other hand to me and I clasped it. It had been a great trip, arduous and long-planned, to the cemeteries and battlefields of Belgium and France.
‘Welcome back, William.’
Lucy released him. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
We followed her into my house where he sat down at the kitchen table, took off his sunglasses, nodded towards the open back door. ‘You girls have been at your apples, I see.’
I brought in the plastic tub and drained it.
‘It’s a bumper crop.’ I put a jam pan on the stove and tipped the apples into it.
Lucy set the kettle on the other hotplate. ‘So what about those graveyards, then, Bill?’
‘I visited all the Upton lads, then the rest of my old pals. Then I scarpered.’ William rubbed his fingers, easing each knuckle in turn. ‘I couldn’t abide the numbers.’
There were seven men from our parish who had fallen in the Great War. Frederick Broad; Ralph Corey, brother to Dan’s father Harvey; Ernest Horne, brother to George; William Rail; Henry and Victor Parr, cousins to Selwyn, offspring of old Mr Parr; and George Yarnold. All of them absent and grievously incorrect on the memorial for Upton and Barrow End. From time to time I wondered about those boys: who would have stayed on the farms, who would have made money in town. Who would have stolen a pig and run away. And their children and grandchildren, who could not be imagined.
‘I’m glad you didn’t linger.’ Lucy shook her head. ‘I didn’t want you traipsing for hours around all those headstones, not on your own.’
‘No. If I’d felt like viewing all the cemeteries, Lucy, I’d have gone with a pack of old codgers on a bus tour. But with Ellen’s vehicle I was my own master. I went back to Plugstreet Wood, found some bunkers in the young trees. Looked at the mine craters at St Eloi and round about Messines. Sat in a field a while, near Dammstrasse.’
I tried to imagine him there, chewing a grass blade, remembering the squall of shells. Was it in that field that he had wounded his hand? He was as quiet as if he’d just recounted a fishing trip. I stirred the apples and then sat down at the table, wishing I had one ounce of his boundless calm.
We Must Be Brave Page 28