by Jane Bailey
Aunty Joyce sighs. “You’re a funny old thing.”
I smell it again, pushing my nose into the paper and inhaling deeply. “It’s just I never had a parcel before …”
Uncle Jack raises an eyebrow thoughtfully at Aunty Joyce. “Well, whoever sent it wanted you to open it, I’m sure of that.”
I take a deep breath and start to unknot the string. Then I unravel it and lay its yard length on the table, and Uncle Jack winds it up neatly and puts it in the pocket of his jacket which is hanging on the chair. Inside the brown paper is a box. More suspense. And inside the box is tissue paper, and under each piece of tissue paper is a red shoe. Two new red shoes with a bar and a buckle!
There are gasps and hoots all round as I try them on. I waltz up and down the room and feel like a film star. Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce think I must be the luckiest girl alive, and I do too, although there is a little something niggling me.
At teatime there is a jam sponge cake with my name on and a candle, and Aunty Joyce and Uncle Jack sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me and I feel like a queen.
But at the end of the day, after I’ve vainly worn my shoes in the lanes and spattered them with mud and risked scuffing them on stones, all for the joy of wearing them to the grocer’s and the post office and round to Babs’ house, I sit down on my bed and take them off and I know what the trouble is. At first there was just a hint of it, and I ignored it because I wanted to. But all through the day it has been getting worse, and now there is no escaping it: they are too small.
Aunty Joyce says I’m silly for wearing them out – we could easily have sent them back and my mum would’ve changed them. When I look wretched she apologizes because she thinks she has said the wrong thing. But that’s not what I’m thinking at all. “See how fast you’re growing!” she says, in an attempt to comfort me, but this is exactly what is tearing me apart. It seems that with every inch taller I grow, and every shoe size, I grow that much further away from my mother. My toes have been stinging all day and now they are red and raw and screaming out to me that I am growing so fast that by the time this war is over I shall have grown out of my childhood and out of my mother’s arms and I will never fit back there again.
* * *
When we return to school towards the end of August I get caught up in the excitement of a new term. I will be in Standard Four now, but still taught, along with Standard Three, by Miss Hubble. Let them try keeping me away from her now! Ha!
But we’re in for a surprise. It is not Miss Hubble’s rosy face that greets us as we troop in, nor are there any jars of lavender and marigolds on the desk. It is a new teacher, Miss Priddle, who takes the register and appoints the ink and coke bucket monitors. She is pleasant enough in her pale rayon dress, and shows us how to defy Hitler by making nutritious meals from the school garden vegetables, but she is not Miss Hubble, and there are no clues as to why our smiley young teacher has left without at least a goodbye.
I have to wait till break time, when Betty Chudd tells Babs Sedgemoor who tells me: Miss Hubble ‘got into trouble’ and can’t come back. Babs and I both imagine she’s been arrested and spend the next few days plotting to rescue her from behind iron bars.
It’s the knitting group which eventually disabuses me.
“Whatever she gonna do with a baby round ’ere?”
“Tiz such a shame to see our girls lettin’ theirsels go so easy.”
“Tiz awful.”
“In my day we waited till we wuz married …”
“That’s not what I ’erd …”
“Oooh! You devil you!”
“Tiz possible someone ’ad their wicked way against ’er wishes.”
“There’s no one’ll ’ave ’er now, poor soul.”
Then Lady Elmsleigh announces that she’s staying with her for the time being. She has plenty of room up at the house. And everyone shuts up.
I have all the information I need, and I tell Babs. The prison rescue is hastily replaced by a plan to knit baby clothes in secret, but I can’t help wondering how poor Miss Hubble can have allowed herself to be treated like that rabbit in the cage, and the image haunts me for the rest of the term.
No sooner has school started again than we’re allowed time off for the harvest. This is a strange new experience for me, and like having a holiday all over again.
The fields around Sheepcote are difficult, sloping fields to harvest, and most of them were pasture before the war. Whole families I have never seen before seem to appear in the fields all of a sudden, along with soldiers and airmen off duty, land girls, prisoners of war, refugee Norwegian whalers and any of us children tall enough to stack a bale of corn.
Up in the field behind the house one of the land girls drives the tractor back and forth, put-putting loudly past our ears, then purring off into the distance. Thumper works the binder, and we crowd round it, heaving the sheaves to form stooks.
We work in pairs or threes, under a relentless sun, our legs streaked with stubble scratches and itching from head to toe with harvest bugs. There is something noble about our joint venture, something moving about the way the land girls sweat and toil and swig cider in exactly the same way as the prisoners and the soldiers and the refugees and the farmer and the gypsy children and the Heaven House boys and us evacuees.
I stack sheaves with a toothless old farm worker and a pretty land girl called Nancy. When we finish our stook, old Gum-face starts up another and Nancy and I bring the sheaves over from the binder, our fingers and palms burning from the binding twine, and resisting a desire to scratch every nook and cranny of our skin.
I catch sight of Tommy and he comes over to me. No one is here who will care, no one will tell on us.
“Meet us after?” he says.
“Okay then.” But he is not looking at me all the time. He keeps stealing quick glances at Nancy, whose bra straps can be seen through her open blouse, whose milky cleavage is turning rapidly pink in the sun, whose breasts are speckled in tiny droplets of sweat. Nancy wipes her arm across her wet brow and seems unaware, but I know she knows, like all the land girls, just how explosive are their open-necked shirts and their bare bruised knees amidst the men and the stacking corn on hot, never-ending days like these. I long to be Nancy, and am angry with Tommy that I’m not.
“I’ll see ya then,” I say decisively.
“Yeah.” He looks at me and Nancy. “One of the men in our lot’s got some cider, look. Come over next break.”
Nancy smiles. I put a sheath down in front of me and try hard not to pout. “Maybe.”
When there’s a break everyone slumps down in the shade of a corn stook or over by the oak tree. There are sandwiches and cider and extra rations distributed for the harvest. These don’t amount to much, but make us feel important. Then there is a long soft lull of birdsong, voices that melt into silence, a quiet that is all the more intense after the noise of the binder and the tractor, a hush of bodies outstretched in the heat, all itching for one reason or another.
The harvest goes on for ever, days of gold and warmth and musty sweet smells that will always conjure up that summer in 1944 when I first began to learn the many secrets and surprises of creation and procreation. It was a time both enlightening and full of light: the yellow corn, the deep ochre of the stones scattered in the soil, the sky as blue and tranquil as a picture book and, apart from the occasional miaow of one plane chasing another, barely a hint of a war.
A man and his dream
When harvest is over, the world begins to change, and I see Sheepcote as I haven’t seen it before. First come the blackberries, a luscious surprise among brambles I have only seen as scratchy weeds until now. Then powdery black sloes appear in the yellowing blackthorn, shiny elderberries hang in upside-down bouquets and clusters of bright orange rowanberries appear from nowhere. The hedgerows are full of fruit and colour, and the apples are swelling on the branches, ready for plucking.
Harvest Festival was just a phrase I heard before, somewhere in the
autumn. Now that I have taken part in a harvest I feel utterly overwhelmed by the service in church. Standing between Aunty Joyce and Uncle Jack in pews packed with children and villagers and land girls and refugees, I sing more passionately than ever before:
“We plough the fields and scatter
The good seed on the land,
But it is fed and watered
By God’s almighty hand;
He sends the snow in winter,
The warmth to swell the grain,
The breezes and the sunshine,
And soft refreshing rain.
All good gifts …”
By the chorus I realize my eyes are filling with tears, but thankfully no one notices.
“He only is the Maker
Of all things near and far,
He paints the wayside flower,
He lights the evening star …”
I can’t imagine what has come over me, but I think that it is around about now, in this little packed church with the ancient thanks for the harvest ringing all around me, that I feel I belong here. I am part of the scenery, along with the sleepy cows and the stacks of corn, the frosty five bar gates, lichen-covered stone and fruiting hedgerows; along with the whispers of lovers in the barn and in the woods, the secret sorrows of happy people, the longings and the joys of prisoners and evacuees and refugees, orphans and gypsies and waiting mothers, the inflated importance of the Home Guard and Mr Fairly and Uncle Jack, the gossip and giggles of the knitting group; I, Kitty Green, am part of all this.
The early autumn is a time of plenty. We have stewed apple every evening and often with cream. We start to eat the fruit that was bottled in the late summer: damson, greengage, strawberry, and we forget the hardships for a while.
The leaves turn bright orange and yellow and the copper beeches turn dark pink. But the first heavy frost is followed by gusty winds, which bring them swirling down into the lanes, beautiful crimson carpets on which we walk regally to school. The linesman has his work cut out now. He sweeps the leaves all day long into great ginger heaps by the side of the road, which we selfishly stamp our way through, sending them back in all directions.
Then the heavy rains start, and turn them all to mulch, and soon the lanes and roads and woodland paths are nothing but brown mashed potato, greasy leaves and thick mud sticking to every shoe and boot and making walking a heavy business.
By October Aunty Joyce is stuffing newspaper around the cracks in the windows and putting sacking across closed doors to keep out the cold winds. We keep our coats on in school and the coke is always running out. Sometimes we keep our coats on at home too, and everyone, young and old, has several layers of knitted garments, which stay on all day and often all night.
One November morning Tommy is overjoyed. Boss Harry announces the visit of an old boy, Jonathan Crocker. He reminds the school – although Tommy needs no reminding – that Jonny has been serving in the RAF, and they must all treat him with the utmost courtesy. If we are lucky, he might speak to Standards Four to Seven about his exploits over Germany. The wooden partition between the three classrooms is folded back for morning prayers, and I can see Tommy clearly from where I’m sitting. He can hardly contain himself, although perhaps irritated that he did not have more time to prepare for this bombshell. For Jonny Crocker has not forewarned the headmaster of his arrival, having decided to come on a whim during some unexpected leave.
He comes after prayers, and I begin to panic. This is the man who will find a ‘way in’ for Tommy, which means a way out of Sheepcote. I am certain that by this evening, Tommy will be gone.
Everyone stands up when the RAF pilot enters. Boss Harry is wearing his academic gown, which he reserves for parents’ day, and some of the girls snigger.
I can see Tommy trying to catch Jonny Crocker’s eye as he talks about aircraft designs, RAF training, and the advantages of youngsters joining the Air Training Corps. Then the chil-dren’s hands shoot up with questions, and he gives impassive replies about missions over France escorting bombers, locating plots and chasing ME 110s, dodging anti-aircraft fire, flying blind at night and the differences between Spits and Hurris. I can see Tommy’s hand is bolt upright, his face rigid and pink with desire to be chosen. I can tell his head is scrambled with questions, see the urgency in his eyes as Boss Harry slips his fingers into his waistcoat, removes his watch and looks at it. Tommy panics.
“Please, Mr Jonathan Crocker, sir,” he blurts out, “how many Germans have you killed?”
There is a general murmur of excitement from the boys – who are clearly keen to get down to fundamentals – and a hiss of disapproval from Boss Harry, who scowls at Tommy and says, “Who asked you to ask a question? Were you asked?” Then he turns to the pilot and apologizes for the rudeness. But Jonny Crocker clears his throat and asks who asked the question.
When Tommy sees the pilot’s eyes on him at last, he looks as though he’s going to faint. All the blood goes from his face, and I wait for the moment when he will either pass out or Jonny Crocker will give him an expansive smile of recognition. But Jonny Crocker merely nods in his direction and speaks very soberly to the whole class.
“How many Germans have I killed?” He sighs, his face seems to cloud over and he looks suddenly not like a fighter pilot at all, but like a fourteen-year-old boy. “I don’t know how many.” He scratches his brow, and takes a deep breath, and starts again with a shaky voice.
“One thing I do know: they haven’t just been men in uniforms with swastikas. I’ve escorted bombers that have killed women and children – children like you – and babies in their cradles and old people with walking sticks and people in hospital too ill to run for shelter. And I’ve killed German pilots too, blasted them to bits, young pilots with mothers at home like me. And I’m not proud of it, and I hate doing it, and every time we scramble my legs turn to jelly, and every time we come back I count the friends I’ve lost.”
There is a silence. Only the squeak of a shoe. Boss Harry looks uncomfortable. We wonder if the pilot is going to cry, or is already crying, and we look down at our inkwells.
“So,” continues the pilot, in possession of himself again, “don’t be too keen to join up. Of course we have to do our bit for King and Country, and it is the right thing to do … I suppose. But there’s no glamour in it – don’t go away with that idea – there’s no glamour in it at all,” I catch Tommy’s face, and it has collapsed, “only misery.”
Boss Harry looks even more uncomfortable. We imagine he is unhappy about his pupils being given unpatriotic messages, and don’t realize that he has squashed his mouth up, not in disapproval, but to choke a sob, and hung his head, not in shame, but to conceal his grief.
The silence is broken by a big forward girl in the front, none other than Mrs Chudd’s daughter, Betty, who looks eighteen although she’s only thirteen. “Please, sir, could I have your autograph?” She thrusts her exercise book under his nose and looks at him adoringly. The pilot smiles and sighs, and is then swamped with requests as children wave bits of paper at him while others rummage in their desks to find things for him to write on.
Tommy waits his turn. Maybe he has given up the cherished hope of a personal chat, but there is still time for confirmation of their agreement, a secret sign as he writes his name on the small cut-off exercise book.
To our surprise, Boss Harry allows the noise and moves to look out of the window, where he stands for some time with his back to the scramble.
At last there are only a couple of remaining books to sign, and Tommy wades in right at the very end. I am picking at my cardigan, rubbing little pieces of wool furiously into tiny balls between my fingertips, and dropping them on the floor. Tommy beams as he hands over his open book, and Jonny Crocker smiles wearily back. Tommy waits for him to write, but he continues to look at Tommy with a question in his face.
“Who shall I put?” he asks at last.
Tommy swallows. I stop picking at my cardigan.
“Tommy,�
� he says lamely, and may have been about to add, “You remember me!” but the pilot is already head down over his pen. When he has finished scribbling he hands it back to Tommy without even looking at him, and looks instead at the clock on the back of the classroom wall.
The other children are admiring their autographs, momentarily losing interest in the visitor, and the headmaster is still staring at clouds, and Jonny Crocker is there, for a moment, unhindered.
He begins to rise from the front desk he was perched upon, and I can see Tommy is sick with disappointment. Jonny Crocker is just a film star to the others, a celebrity who can provide them with booty to show off at home. He is no more than a good film at the pictures – a weepie, perhaps. Maybe some of the girls will cry when they get home, and most of the boys will remember his words. But to Tommy he is something else. He is an escape route. And I see his dear face watching all hope being extinguished like a series of lights going out one by one, and he stands by, letting it happen, sunk like an ocean liner.
“Please!” he says suddenly, clutching the pilot’s sleeve in despair. “Don’t you remember me?”
The young man looks round at him, startled but curious. “Do I know you?”
By this time several of Tommy’s classmates have noticed him and are watching, like me, in disbelief.
“I’m Tommy – Tommy Glover. You came last year – you remember? And you told me you’d get me in somehow. You said you’d make sure I got in when I left school.”
The pilot looks blank.
“You did!” says Tommy desperately. “You … you –”
Billy Piggot, a tall boy whose pullover is too short by half, is laughing. Another boy joins in with a sneer: “Give it a rest, Tommy.You’re living in cloud-cuckoo-land, you are! He don’t know you from Adam, look!”
Perhaps moved by this sniggering, the pilot halts his move towards the door and turns right round to look at Tommy.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I said some cocky things when I’d just got my wings. I was probably showing off. I’m sorry.” And he is joined by Boss Harry who, smiling apologetically at Tommy, ushers his visitor away.