by Jane Bailey
The day of the Sunday school picnic starts off well enough, with salmon sandwiches and a tomato for everyone up at Lady Elmsleigh’s big house. There is tug-of-war and pass-the-ball-under-your-chin, and what’s left of the Sheepcote Brass Band with four old men, three cornets and a bugle. There’s even a boogie band laid on by members of the American air base a few miles down the road, but that is for later in the afternoon.
First it’s time for the Sunday school to do their bit. We give a small play in which Joe Bunting stars as Jesus and in which I mercifully do not perform, and the whole joyous sun-baked event is rounded off by some hymn singing and the fateful ‘Jelly Ghost’.
We sit cross-legged on the grass, and the Reverend Mr Harrison leads the singing in a dapper linen suit and straw boater. Because I am looking at him, I don’t notice Miss Didbury’s face change from blissful content into rage, and I’m surprised when she rises from her canvas seat to interrupt the vicar.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!”
We all fall silent and crane our necks this way and that to see what’s happening.
“I’m sorry, vicar.” Miss Didbury has gone mauve. “Who was that?”
Everyone looks at each other dumbly.
“Who is singing … who is singing … ‘jelly ghost’?”
Some children titter. What a daft question. We all are, aren’t we?
“You!” cries Miss Didbury, panting at me. “You are making fun of the Lord’s anthem! Stand up!”
I scramble to my feet, heart pounding and knees like the jelly ghost.
“What are you singing?”
I begin to tremble. “Jelly ghost, miss.”
Everyone laughs treacherously.
“Be quiet! Repeat after me, young lady: ‘Praise from the great angelic host.’”
Every girl wants to be a young lady, but somehow when you’re called it by a grown-up it sounds really quite nasty. I swallow. “Praise from the great and jelly ghost.”
More titters are silenced by Miss Didbury’s blood-filled face.
“HOW DARE YOU!” Then in words clipped as sharp as blades, “Repeat … after … me … ‘angelic host’.”
I haven’t a clue why I have to keep repeating it. I listen intently.
“Repeat it! Angelic host!”
Maybe ‘ghost’ is wrong. I take a deep breath and try to steady my voice: “And jelly coast.”
More pitiless laughs. Miss Didbury calls me out to the front of the seated multitude, pushes up my cardigan sleeve (there is a lot of pushing to do) and slaps me over and over again with her Sunny Songs for Sunday School. Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! I feel my lips trembling, but not because of the pain, nor even because of the humiliation of being punished in front of the whole of Sheepcote. I am devastated by the clenched teeth and pursed lips of this woman who seems, for no reason I can fathom, to hate me with all the spite in the world.
The vicar hangs his head awkwardly, shuffles from one foot to the other, and scratches his nose. Then he rubs his hands together and says with a little too much joviality, “How about some campfire songs? ‘If you’re happy and you know it …’ Ready, everyone? One, two, three …”
I go back to my place and clap my hands and stamp my feet with happiness along with everyone else, then as soon as the songs are over I slip off to find Tommy before Aunty Joyce or Uncle Jack get their hands on me. The brass band starts up and I scamper past the food tables where the poorer children are stuffing paste sandwiches down their shirts and jumpers, and weave my way through the boogie orchestra which is just setting up. I see Miss Hubble arriving on the back of a motorbike with a black American airman. She waves vigorously at me, totally unaware of what I have been through. They both look so glamorous, and I am pleased for her being with him, and pleased that she wasn’t there earlier, because if she had been I would have wondered why she let it happen and did nothing.
Tommy reaches out an arm from behind the summer house and pulls me in towards him. He stands facing me sadly, and rubs my arm. I look back at him frowning, and can think of nothing to say.
Every time I open my mouth, it seems, I may well make someone angry. I’m determined to get to the bottom of it, and there’s only one person I can ask.
“What’s facky Nell?” I ask Tommy as we escape down the lane.
He gives a little laugh, and looks at me to check I’m being serious. “It’s like swearing.”
“Why?”
“What d’you mean, ‘Why?’ It just is.”
“What’s it mean?”
He looks a little coy. “It’s like shaggin’.”
“Ah …”
“You know shaggin’ ’don’t you?”
“Yes.” I do know shagging. As a word. I haven’t a clue what it’s about.
“So … what’s it mean?”
“Shaggin’? You don’t know what it means?”
I shake my head. We walk on in silence. Then Tommy stops and looks at me.
“Come on!” he says, taking me by the hand. “I’ll show you.”
He helps me over a gate and leads me through some knee-high barley. I am full of anticipation, part excitement because this is an adventure – and part fear, because I have been warned about Tommy, and maybe I am about to discover why.
When we reach the other side of the field he helps me over another gate and on to a path which runs between some old corrugated iron huts and chicken coops. There is an old, disused caravan on the left-hand side, with bits of old upholstery hanging out of it.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“The Lovatts.”
He grips my hand tighter and I feel a little thrill shoot up my arm.
“What’s the Lovatts?”
“Just a smallholding. Used to be a big farm, now it’s just bits and pieces.”
He leads me into some bushes at the side, and I see there is another small path. I follow him, still holding his hand, until we stop in front of some wooden boxes. He opens a clasp on one and I can hear scuffling. I see now it is a hutch, and he’s holding a large brown rabbit.
“Hold this,” he says, and the rabbit scrambles furiously up on to my shoulder. I frantically try to pull it back, feeling its claws in my neck. But Tommy takes it back from me and places it in another hutch he has just opened.
“There,” he says. “Watch.”
We watch together, as two rabbits twitch their noses up and down at us, then at each other. Soon the one rabbit has shuffled over to the other rabbit from behind, and seems to be nudging it. I look at Tommy curiously.
“What are we looking at this for?”
“That’s shaggin’,” says Tommy.
“What? That?”
“Yes. That’s how they make babies. That’s how babies are made. The male shags the female.”
I stare at the cage in disbelief. He unfastens the cage door again, takes out the reluctant male by the ears and replaces him in his own cage.
We saunter back along the paths.
“Well, I won’t say facky Nell again if it’s swearing. But frankly, I can’t see what all the fuss is about.”
Tommy laughs.
“So is jelly ghost shaggin’ as well?” I ask.
He laughs again.
“There’s nothing wrong with your jelly ghost. You can say it as often as you like. It’s just that they wanted you to sing ‘angelic host’,” he pronounces it in a very posh accent, “and they thought you were making fun of them.”
We weave our way back through the barley.
“What’s the angelic host?”
“A bunch of angels.”
We reach the gate.
“Do you believe in angels?”
“No … do you?”
We lean on the gate together, looking out across the green and golden valley.
“Nah.”
They are not angry with me when I get home late. In fact, Uncle Jack’s face is a picture of sympathy and concern.
“That Miss Didbury needs taking down a peg or two,” h
e confides.
“Jumped-up old hag,” adds Aunty Joyce, handing me a cup of Ovaltine.
Although it soon becomes clear that it is not concern for me but venom for Miss Didbury that drives their unusual sympathy, I lap it up with a mixture of joy and relief.
“I’ve told Leslie time and time again she’s not the woman for the job. And Mr Fairly agrees with me. But does he listen?”
Aunty Joyce shakes her head. “She doesn’t have a clue how to deal with children.”
“Not a clue.”
“Daft bat.”
“So full of her own importance!”
Maybe it is the Ovaltine, maybe it is the glow of the fire in the range, I don’t know, but I feel so reassured that I take a notion to join in.
“Po-faced old twat!” I suggest.
They both stare at me in that same blank-but-indignant way sheep stare at you when you go in their field. Then they start to look not unlike Miss Didbury.
Uncle Jack makes me wash my mouth out with soap. It stings a lot. I start to cry and Aunty Joyce says I’m a very rude girl and makes me wash my hands three times.
I say my prayers trembling by the bedside, and round them off with: “I’m sorry God about the rude words but I don’t know what’s swearing and what’s not and nobody will tell me, anyway, I don’t see why Aunty Joyce and Uncle Jack are so horrible to me and why they are so horrible to Tommy. Please let me understand why they don’t like a poor orphan boy. Otherwise, to be honest, I just don’t think I can believe in you any more –”
“Shut up! Get into bed!”
I scramble into bed, and she approaches me with a candle.
“What’s all this nonsense about Tommy?”
I have hidden my face under the covers.
“Kitty? What’s he been telling you?”
I peep just above the covers. “Nothing. Just you don’t like him.”
“That wicked boy! What a …!”
There is a sharp intake of breath, “Now you listen to me,
Kitty. Tommy Glover is a bad sort. A bad bad boy. You are not to go near him again, do you understand?”
She blows the candle out before I can answer, and I am left in the dark once more.
Command rescue
Even through the summer holidays, Sunday remains a busy day for me. Church is still followed after dinner by Sunday school, which is followed by a unique Sheepcote club called the ‘Sheepcote Commando Cadets’, an inspired creation by Mr Fairly from the boys’ home to help with the war effort. I am now a fully fledged member of the SCC, which is really just an offshoot of the Sunday school and consists of the same children donning their commando gear immediately after prayers. The uniform, devised by the vicar and Miss Didbury, is a black beret and khaki jacket with black trousers for boys, black skirt for girls. Because only one boy has a black beret, most of the Sheepcote Commando Cadets wear red, blue, green or brown berets, or else woollen bonnets or balaclavas in a selection of interesting colours and patterns.
For most children, this is the highlight of their week. Our activities include map reading, tracking, signalling and first aid. We do collection rounds with an old pull-cart. We leave empty sacks outside people’s houses and call back later to pick them up, full of paper, magazines for the air forces, or sometimes scrap metal for munitions and planes. But most interesting of all are the Civil Defence exercises. These are performed in conjunction with the APP and the Home Guard, and usually consist of a mock-up air raid in which numerous German V1 bombs take a notion to give Sheepcote a direct hit. Sheepcote Commando Cadets are needed to play the wounded, and some thirty-odd children are happily dispatched to the four corners of the village and surrounding fields with labels on their coats, and told to wait to be rescued.
My first time I’m sent to lie outside the post office with a ‘badly mutilated torso – severe bleeding’ and Tommy has to slump by the baker’s with mustard gas poisoning. Miss Didbury has ‘severe burns’ and has to be lowered from Mr Tugwell’s ‘blazing’ upstairs window, which involved Mr Tugwell (the grocer) and Mr Marsh (the milkman) tying her up zealously with ropes. Baggie Aggie Tugwell (who only has ‘mild concussion’) looks on enviously. The vicar, who has ‘lacerated legs – delirious’, plays his part so well that the Home Guard think he has completely lost it. Miss Didbury is black and blue all over and vows she will never take part in another exercise. The vicar finds screaming at members of his congregation a tremendous release, and looks forward to the next operation. I don’t know what a torso is so I hold my leg and roll around on the pavement for a long time, moaning in agony, until Mrs Chudd from the post office tells me she can’t hear the telephone, and I’m carried off on a stretcher to the village hall. Poor Tommy comes off the worst. Since the treatment for mustard gas poisoning is to wash the skin, the APP set up screens around the baker’s, strip him naked and give him the coldest shower you can imagine. He reckons mustard gas isn’t a threat any more and this is just plain barbarism.
On another occasion he is sent to the field next to Lady Elmsleigh’s with ‘head injury and severed leg’, where he lies for three hours waiting for rescue. Then it begins to get dark, and Lady Elmsleigh spots him and invites him in out of the cold. She gives him tea and drives him back to Heaven House, tartly reassuring Mr Fairly that he would have bled to death by now anyway.
Uncle Jack is dogged by the same fantasy as every man in Sheepcote, and there is something about the long stretch of the war that sharpens its allure. It is, quite simply, to be a hero.
It is all very well for the men in the armed forces. They just have to be absent from daily life to become heroes. For all anyone knows they may be sharpening pencils in some hidden barracks, but they wear a uniform, and that entitles them to the same awe as those who regularly blast Germans to bits and lose body parts. But, for those doing Essential Work, like Uncle Jack on his railway, it’s not so easy.
You can see he wants so much to make a difference. He longs for people to look at him the same way they look at the young servicemen who walk indifferently into shops but have women almost genuflecting in respect, awe and lust. If he were to share his thoughts with any number of Sheepcote men he would find he’s not alone in his fantasy heroics, for they too probably rescue maidens from pillaging Germans and heave friends from the flames of battle on a daily basis.
The trouble is, Uncle Jack has spent his life preaching against vanity, even though his ambitions to stand at the golden eagle in front of a packed church are fuelled by the very same thirst for glory. Even with his manly composure and the attention of a full nave, he cannot command the same mystique as the American soldiers with their wretched chewing gum. And despite years of striving, it seems he cannot even challenge the indifference of his wife, let alone the utter unamazement of an entire congregation.
Then one day he sees his opportunity, and decides to grab it. It is on one of these very training days, in fact, where men, women and children are proving their potential heroism to a considerable audience.
Things are coming to a ragged sort of end, and people are tidying up, when there is a shriek from the upstairs window of one of the council houses. Looking up, Uncle Jack sees his chance. Young Mrs Nicholas is shouting for help, although the day’s exercise is definitely over.
Quick as a flash he grabs the ladder that is being loaded on to the back of the APP van and runs to the small front garden. Up he climbs, fearless as a young officer, turning round briefly to check his audience.
“Watch carefully and observe!” he commands Mr Tugwell, Mr Chudd, the vicar and an assortment of astonished onlookers.
The ladder is a little short, and he is still a few feet lower than the victim when he reaches the top. He approaches the window and grabs the young woman brusquely under the arms.
“It’s okay. I’ve got you!”
Young Mrs Nicholas shrieks again.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got you. You’re safe now. Just hold on tight!” and he begins to yank her forward.
Uncle Jack looks up to see what he hadn’t noticed before: a man in a state of complete undress standing behind her. Mr Nicholas is home on leave and, seeing his wife leaning out and dusting the windows, has had the sudden notion to disrupt her daily routine. It is while Uncle Jack is trying to absorb this shocking animal fact that he loses his balance on the ladder which, amply helped by the thumps of Mrs Nicholas, moves like the hand of a clock turning a quarter past.
Women run from all over to crowd around the injured hero, lying in some redcurrant bushes with badly bruised hip and pride. One of the girls from my Sunday school group, Babs Sedgemoor, whispers in my ear, “She was getting it from behind.” I nod sagely, and remember the bunnies.
Miss Lavish stops her tricycle in front of me in a panic. “Whatever’s happened?”
“Uncle Jack tried to rescue her,” I explain. “But she was just having a shag.”
A little on the lonely side
In the night I dream I’m being held in my mother’s arms. It’s so real I can feel my bottom pressed into her warm lap and my cheek resting against the soft inside of her arm. I swear I actually wake up in the dark and know she’s there. But when the morning light wakes me through the curtains, she is gone.
There is no sound from downstairs yet, and I lie for a while listening to the birds and the distant bleating of a sheep. The walls of my room are white with leaves of duck-egg blue winding up to the ceiling in stripes on the wallpaper. The curtains are cream with ladies on horseback riding across the folds. They have red jackets and black hats and smile as they race off to the kill with their little patchy dogs. The room is empty apart from the bed, a chest of drawers and a picture of Jesus, which hangs above my pillow. And then there is the door, that other door covered in so many layers of cream paint the panel ridges are just faint hollows. It is the cupboard I cannot open, but by now I am sure it holds some important clue to Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce. I am certain that if I can just find the key to it, all will be revealed. I imagine opening it and finding a body or something. I sort of want to open it, and I sort of don’t.