by Jane Bailey
“No, it says ‘drowned at sea’.”
“Drowned? How can he be drowned? Mine didn’t say nothing about him being drowned!”
She pulls back from me, and I pull back from her. As we look at each other, and as we hear Aunty Joyce say, “Mrs Green, I think …” we both understand there has been a mistake.
“Oh, my Lord!”
“You don’t mean Tommy, do you?”
Peter and Shirley have toddled off into the garden and are in danger of following Kemble back out of the gate into the road. Aunty Joyce squeezes past my shoulder to go after them, and Lady Elmsleigh arrives.
“I’ve some news,” she says at the gate.
“Lady Elmsleigh – oh, dear. I’m afraid this isn’t a very good time …” Aunty Joyce drops her voice a little, but I can hear it – I can clearly hear it say: “You see, Kitty’s just heard that her father is missing, presumed …” – and this she whispers – “… dead.”
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll call back later. I don’t want to miss her before she goes.”
And that’s how I know. Did they all know? When were they planning to tell me?
It is deemed appropriate to invite my mother and her beau in for an hour or so to break the journey, and this is an hour I can barely recall. There seems no point left to anything at all. I am a dead girl walking. I am food for worms.
I resent it when my mother dips a biscuit in her cup of tea, and when Maurice Trigg smiles at something I loathe him. I don’t want my mother’s erratic sympathy, her sudden smothering hugs. There is nothing nor anyone who can console me, but I find myself going over to where Aunty Joyce is sitting, and silently wrapping my arms around her until it is time to go.
* * *
The door knocker goes a good few times during that hour, and Uncle Jack turns people away. When we come out of the house I see a little group of people waiting to see me off. There is Mrs Marsh with Babs, Mrs Glass, Mrs Chudd, Aggie Tugwell, Tosser, Miss Lavish, Miss Hubble and even Thumper, who is carrying a basket. There isn’t time to speak to them all. I am ushered into the car by my mother, who dumps Shirley in my arms before I can bid anyone a proper farewell. I sit on the springy leather of the back seat and turn to look out of the window. There they all are, the faces that studied me so curiously when I arrived, gazing at me all forlorn.
Everything is happening too quickly. I want some time to say goodbye. It is all wrong, and inside I can’t help blaming my mother with her fancy new man and her blundering bad news and her poor time-keeping and this wretched posh car.
Uncle Jack leans in the front door and hands my mother some tickets.
“First Class!” she squeals. “Ooh! Ooh … you shouldn’t have!”
By way of response, Uncle Jack explains which platform we’ll need to get on. Meanwhile Aunty Joyce leans in the back door and gives me a basket with a lid. “Just a little going-away present from me.” She gives me a quick peck, strokes my hair sadly, and we are off. Out of the back window I see them all waving, and Lady Elmsleigh running up, panting, shouting “Kitty! Kitty!” and then flopping her arms by her side.
I am so bereft, so all at sea, and I thank God for Aunty Joyce’s gift. For the sound of frightened mewing makes me lift the lid to see a black and white kitten – the spitting image of Boomer – just crying out to be cuddled.
Sentimental journey (Late April, 1956)
I don’t know how much of all this I told them, and how much just came drifting back as I was talking: there can only have been time to tell them the bare bones of it all. I’m sure I was careful not to use surnames – they could’ve been those of the little faces peering up at me – and I’d called Jack and Joyce by different names. But when the bell went it was as though I were being lifted out of a trance. And the oddest thing is, I felt physically sick. I looked around and saw that the boys in the back row had already got up to go or were shuffling in their desks. Those were the same ones who had fidgeted for the first half-hour and had swapped things under the desks. I didn’t tell them off then, because I wanted to be liked, and I was afraid they might turn on me and I wouldn’t know what to do. Then they had all gone quiet as mice when I got to the killing of Rosemary by the stream. They all knew that stream, had pirated galleons on it, been shipwrecked on its fallen branches and scored their names into the hawthorn bark with knives. There had been such a hush then, and it had lasted until playtime, when everything fell apart and they were out of the door with a great clatter and thud before I realized what was happening.
After playtime Miss Pegler still hadn’t returned and I was terrified as they began to thunder back in. I gave them all some paper to draw their ideal picture of the new school at Heaven House, and while they were drawing they started asking questions, wanted more of the story. I told them about going back to London, and how when we got back to Maurice’s mother’s house – where we were going to be living with him and his daughter when they joined us later – it too had been hit and was like an open doll’s house, but with everything looted and crumbling. But I didn’t mention that when I opened my suitcase I saw that Aunty Joyce had mounted Tommy’s sketch of me in a frame I recognized as belonging once to Jesus of Nazareth, and she had packed all the things that remotely fitted me from Rosemary’s wardrobe.
I did write to them once, but then I forgot to put my address on the letter – partly because we didn’t have one for a while, and partly because you forget these things when you’re nine.
“Miss, you ’aven’t done the register, miss. You ’aven’t.” A girl with a chest smaller than her tummy looked earnestly up at me from the front row.
“Right … I’ll um … stay where you are! I’ll just …” I found it on Miss Pegler’s neat desk, clearly labelled with a hurriedly written note: ‘Essential: take register’. Even at speed her writing was classically neat. “I’ll be quick – surnames only … Ardlan … Bunting … Capper … Chudd … Fletcher … Glass … Hubble-Schmidt …” I looked up and murmured the name again, searching to see who said yes. “Could you put your hands up as well as saying yes, please?”
“Yes.”
I gazed at the beautiful brown face of a boy who probably didn’t know he once played Jesus, and couldn’t help a little smile of triumph. They were all there, the same twisted noses and heavy brows and pointed chins, the same big ears and buck teeth and blocked sinuses, passed on from generation to generation. Nothing had changed dramatically, but everything had changed a little. A slight shift in the combination of genes, and there was a whole new set of possibilities. “… Rutter … Shepherd …” I looked up like a startled fox. She was a little version of Joyce, with Jack’s dark curls.
“Miss, yes, miss,” she said tentatively for the second time, because I failed to continue.
“… Tugwell … White.”
Miss Pegler came in as I was finishing off, and made them all stand in silence before letting them go home for dinner, row by row.
She was full of apologies. The architect hadn’t been on the first train so she’d felt obliged to wait for the second, but he’d not been on that one either, and so on. She invited me home for some dinner, but I made my excuses: I wanted to stretch my legs and explore a bit. Before I closed the register I glanced at it again to check the Shepherd girl’s name. It was Kitty.
Long ago and far away
Off I went into Sheepcote with my briefcase and my new red-print dirndl skirt, not sure if I was a grown-up transformed into an eight-year-old, or an eight-year-old pretending to be a grown-up.
And this time I felt like a giant. There were familiar hedges and fences which used to block out the world, but which I could now see over; five bar gates I could lean on if I wanted, without having to climb up them; and drystone walls no higher than my waist.
I hadn’t smelt hedgerows like these for eleven years. They were doing that great unfurling thing that used to send me … I was still feeling nauseous, all choked up somehow. I had thought I knew the story of my evacuatio
n, thought I’d packed it away carefully in a sealed container to be brought out exactly as I’d left it whenever I chose. But I hadn’t bargained on being older. It didn’t occur to me how much more of it there would be than when I left it, and how it would shed new light on itself, just in the telling of it.
I went to Tugwell’s – the only shop left in the village, apart from the post office – and the door pinged as I opened it. I had completely forgotten how it did that. Mr Tugwell was not behind the counter, and I was glad. I felt awkward – like an impostor, almost – as I bought a banana from a sullen-faced girl at the till. I didn’t want to reveal myself just yet. Even buying a banana from the store that never once saw a banana when I was there, seemed a treacherous thing to do. I felt I ought to be sharing it out amongst the inhabitants: cutting it up into a thousand slices.
The road through Sheepcote was tarmacked now and, although still quiet, it took me by surprise, with cars hurtling round the bends every now and then. I found the five bar gate I was looking for and climbed it. I made my way through the familiar field paths, choked by the beauty of the cowslip field, the fragrant yellow clusters nodding in the breeze and yellowing the whole pasture land. I climbed through sheep fields and across stiles until I could see it up ahead. The stile on the horizon beyond which lay our spot: the buttercup field, the oak tree and our valley.
I began to grow fearful, as I approached, that it would all be changed. I was panting with the climb, but unsure if it was fear or exhaustion or excitement that made my pulse race as I swung my leg over the last boundary.
A fresh flood of smells swept over me as a breeze hit me full in the face, and there it all was: the oak tree and the woods behind, littered with wood anemones – the sneaky smell fox – and wood sorrel. And over the ridge of the path was the valley, the lush, vast, rambling valley of my memories: leafy, green, unfurled to spring, waiting indifferently for me to feast my eyes upon it, as if not a second had passed since the last time I pounded its grass with my fists.
I must’ve stopped breathing, because the next thing I was gasping, and I had the galloping feeling I’d had as a child when I first saw this place, and I could see myself twirling and running, feel the cardboard racing over the grass. I remembered the studied gaze while being sketched, the plans that were made here, the dreams that were hatched, the promises …
A little lap of wind seemed to curl about my neck briefly, and I could feel his hand on my shoulder. I turned my head and I could see him, towering above me, eyes fixed on the horizon and his future projects, a furrow of determination between his brows. This very smell of warm metallic earth after rain hurtled through me as if it belonged to him. I could see his hair flopping about in the breeze and his stubby pencil tucked behind his ear. And I would’ve put my arm around his waist, and leant my head into him, had I not made him vanish eleven years before by opening my mouth at the wrong time.
He had told me a secret, and I had betrayed him. If only I had kept my mouth shut, he would’ve had no need to run from Fairly, and he might’ve been here now, on this beloved stretch of land, living peacefully and tending his sheep.
I had lived with these thoughts for years, but they had become such familiar companions that the sheer force of them in this place took me by surprise. I was punch drunk on guilt, gasping for air again.
I lay down on the grass and tried to breathe, and let the warm spring-excited earth nurse me back to a sort of calm.
As I climbed the lane to Weaver’s Cottage I reached the exact spot where we had met Miss Lavish, and I remembered how Aunty Joyce had flipped over the label on my coat to read my name – and then only because someone else wanted to know it. I was all but shaking at the memory of that heartless welcome, as if the very ground under my feet was feeding it all back to me. But when I stepped out of the spot I saw her only as a happy woman, transformed by guilt and grief, and I continued up the lane.
A familiar figure came cycling towards me downhill. After she’d passed me, I turned, and she too had turned, propping her bike up with one foot on the road. She was greying but very sprightly, and with lively wise eyes I recognized straight away.
“Miss Lavish!”
I ran back towards her and she looked at me smiling. A few seconds passed.
“It’s not Kitty, is it?”
“Yes! Don’t tell me – I haven’t changed a bit?”
“Kitty! Kitty!” She held out a hand whilst keeping the other on the bicycle, and clung on to my arm. “Yes, of course you’ve changed. My, you’re a real lady! No, I only guessed because Miss Pegler said the new student teacher had been here as an evacuee, and that narrowed it down to a few dozen! Oh, Kitty! You’ve no idea how wonderful it is to see you!”
I seemed to have broken the ice, and I felt less nervous standing on Sheepcote soil than I thought I would.
“Miss Lavish! It’s so good to –”
“I’m not Miss Lavish any more, actually,” she giggled girlishly. “I’m Mrs Edwards!”
“Mrs …?”
“I married Harry … the headmaster?”
“Boss Harry! You married Boss Harry! Miss Lavish! You dark horse!” We giggled a bit more, and I realized how pleased I was that she had found a companion. “I’m so happy for you.”
She dismounted her bicycle in a decisive sort of way and started to walk it uphill alongside me. I pictured her taking some items from her front basket and asking jauntily, “Can I say ‘knickers’ to you?” But it slipped away. She genuinely wanted to talk to me, and I noticed that she was quite a few inches shorter than me too. It felt so odd being a grown-up here.
“Two wheels, I notice.”
“Yes, the old tricycle fell apart! Now, what about you? We’ve all been wondering what happened to you.”
“Really? I wasn’t sure whether Aunty Joyce and Uncle Jack would be pleased to see me or not …”
“Heavens! Thrilled, I should think! You’ve no idea how hard they’ve tried to find you over the years.”
“Over the years?”
“Yes. They tried writing to the address your mother gave them, but the letters were returned. They went up to London and hunted every Green in the telephone directory.”
“Oh – well, if we had a phone, it would be under Trigg.”
She came to an abrupt standstill, as if in shock. “You got married?”
“No – my mum remarried – that man, remember?”
“Oh!” It was a sigh of relief. “Well, that explains a lot. Lord, they were up in London knocking on doors – several trips they made, over a number of years.”
“Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce?”
We were outside Weaver’s Terrace.
She looked startled. “Oh Lord! You haven’t spoken to them yet, have you? You don’t know!”
“What? What don’t I know? Are they still …? Have they had more children?”
“Oh yes, yes, they have. Three – Kitty, Tom and Patricia.” She continued to look shaken. “You’d better come inside.”
It was smaller than I remembered it, but the smell of piano and old books came hurtling through my memories as I sat in her front room sipping tea.
“What happened to that Mr Fairly?”
“You’ll remember Lady Elmsleigh …”
“Yes, of course.”
“She tried very hard to get Fairly convicted, but nothing came of it. None of the boys would say anything to the police. In the end his wife left him – and his housekeeper – and he just went away, scot-free. Lord only knows where he is now, or what he’s up to.”
“That must’ve been hard for Aunty Joyce and Uncle Jack. I remember, Tommy wouldn’t even say anything about Rosemary.”
“No, that’s right.”
She put down her cup of tea and looked directly at me. “You’ll hear this anyway, now you’re around, so it might as well be me who tells you. I just hope it doesn’t upset you too much.” There was a fearful, apologetic look, and one I recognized: the harbinger of bad news. I felt a
rush of panic, but it was too late to stop her.
“Tommy did something much worse. Something I think you never knew about …”
“You know the school bell’s ringing, do you?” said Boss Harry, coming in from the garden and smiling fresh air around the room. He held out a round warm hand to shake, and I wondered if he knew who I was. “Go on, Kitty Green. You don’t want to be late on your first day!”
Wild garlic
The sickly hollow feeling of my afternoon was made worse only by the kindly attention of Miss Pegler, whose inclusive questions (“Don’t you think so, Miss Green?” “Ask Miss Green – she knows more about that than I do.” “Miss Green, have you anything to add?”) simply drew everyone’s attention to the fact that I had turned into a peaky-looking deaf mute.
Since I had further to travel than the other student teachers, it had been agreed with my college that Miss Pegler would provide me with tea for the first week of term, so that I could catch a later bus back to Cheltenham without missing a meal. This would enable her to give me essential ‘debriefing’ at the end of each day, and discuss lesson plans with me. Miss Pegler’s aim was to debrief as briefly as possible the very moment the bell rang for home time, thus freeing her later to prepare tea and relax.
All I wanted to do was escape for a quiet walk, so I was grateful to Miss Pegler for her efficiency. Her assessment of my performance today was ‘excellent’, after waxing lyrical about my voice projection, my presence and my ability to hold the attention of a completely unknown group of children this morning. Not surprisingly her tip for happy teaching was “praise, praise and more praise”. She snapped a completely unnecessary book shut on her lap and replaced the lid on her unused pen.