‘I won’t spoil it by telling you what it is, but I thought you should have something of your father’s to remember him by. Something . . . practical. Now then, would you throw another log on the fire? This chill has crept into my bones.’
I’d done so, and after a chat about what I had been up to since she’d been away – which was nothing much, although I could have told her that Daisy had been entertaining Bill in the kitchen more often than I thought was necessary – Granny had said she was exhausted and needed to go up for a rest.
‘Come here and give your Granny a hug first.’
And I had, and even though she looked so frail, her arms had gripped me tightly, as if she would never let me go.
‘Well now,’ she’d said as she stood up. ‘Onwards and upwards, Posy. That’s the way forward.’
Three days later, a small van had arrived outside the front door. I’d wandered into the hall and seen a brawny man heaving big boxes into the study. Granny had appeared beside me as I looked up at her askance. She’d laid a hand on my shoulder.
‘They’re all for you, darling girl. Go and see, and then you can arrange them to your liking on the bookshelves. I’ve cleared enough space to make room for them.’
I went into the study and tore the thick tape off the top of one of the boxes. And there inside, covered in their familiar soft brown leather, were my beloved Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
‘They will keep you occupied on a dark Cornish night,’ Granny had said as I’d lifted one out and placed it on my knee. ‘I bought them all for your father, every Christmas and birthday. I know he would want you to have them.’
‘Thank you, Granny, thank you so much,’ I’d said, as my hands caressed the leather and my eyes glittered with tears. ‘It’s the best thing I could possibly have to remember him by.’
Over the next year, I’d watched Granny slowly begin to revert to how she used to be. Even though I often saw sadness in her eyes, I was glad that she was returning to herself, as she bustled about the house and, as winter subsided, applied her energy to the large expanse of garden behind the house, which was fast awakening from its months of hibernation. When I wasn’t at school or up on the Moor with my friends, I’d taken to helping her. As we worked, she taught me about the various species we were planting or tending. In the old lichen-covered greenhouse, she showed me how to germinate and nurture seeds. She’d even presented me with my very own set of gardening tools, contained in a sturdy willow trug.
‘Whenever I feel sad,’ she’d told me as she’d handed them over, ‘I dig into the rich earth and think of the miracles it produces. It never fails to lift my spirits. I hope that you too may feel the same.’
And to my surprise I had, and I’d found myself spending more and more of my spare time either getting my hands dirty or poring over Granny’s gardening books and magazines. Daisy took me under her wing in the kitchen and I spent many happy hours baking and rolling pastry. I had also continued with my botanical drawings, as Daddy had asked me to.
One afternoon at the end of March, Granny had invited the vicar to tea to organise the annual Easter egg hunt (which was always held in our garden, because it was the largest in the village). I couldn’t help feeling a surge of pride as the day of the egg hunt dawned and all those who took part commented on how well cared for and pretty the garden looked.
It was around about that time that I’d started getting postcards from Maman in Paris. Apparently, she was singing again. There wasn’t a lot of room to say much more on a postcard, but she’d sounded happy. Which I’d tried to be glad about, but given the inner Posy was as hollow as an empty coconut shell (despite the outer Posy pretending she was just the same as she always had been), I’d found it almost impossible. Granny was always talking about ‘generosity of spirit’, and as my own couldn’t be generous to my own mother, I’d decided I must be a very horrible person. The truth was, I wanted her to be as miserable as I was. To find it impossible to be ‘happy’, when the person we had both loved most in the world had gone forever.
In the end, I’d confided my feelings to Katie, who, despite never having ventured further than Bodmin (and that was only once, to a great-aunt’s funeral) and being completely clueless during lessons, possessed a great deal of common sense.
‘Aye, well, maybe your Ma is pretendin’ to be happy just like you are, Posy. You thought of that?’ she’d asked me.
And with that one sentence, everything had become a little easier. Maman and I were both playing a game of ‘pretend’; Maman was throwing herself into her singing just as I was throwing myself into my lessons and my very own patch of garden, which Granny had recently given me to nurture and plant whatever I wished. We were both doing our best to forget while we still so painfully remembered. I also thought of Granny, and how she was striving to get back to normal. I only knew she was still hurting about Daddy’s death because of the sadness I saw sometimes in her eyes. I couldn’t see Maman’s eyes, and after all, if Granny had written me a postcard from a foreign country, I’m sure she would have written something jolly too.
The postcards had become more infrequent in the last two years, and then, a year ago, I’d had one from Rome with a picture of the Coliseum on the front of it, telling me she was taking a ‘petite vacance’.
‘More like a grande vacance,’ I complained again to my reflection in the mirror as I twisted my impossibly unruly hair into a plait. I’d tried not to mind that she hadn’t visited me once since she’d left just after the news of Daddy’s death, but I couldn’t help minding sometimes. She was my mother, after all, and it had been five long years.
‘At least you have Granny,’ I added to my reflection. ‘She is your mother now.’
And as I went downstairs to join her for supper and talk about this boarding school she’d mentioned, I realised it was true.
‘Right, that’s everything,’ Daisy declared as she closed the lid to the shiny leather trunk Granny had had sent from London, along with the bottle-green school uniform, which I personally thought was hideous. But then I supposed it was probably meant to be hideous. It also didn’t help that it had been ordered without me trying it on, so every item drowned me.
‘Room for growth, Posy,’ Granny had said as I’d stood in front of the mirror in a blazer whose arms covered my fingertips and had enough room across the shoulders for Katie to climb in with me too. ‘Both your mother and father were tall, and doubtless you will shoot up like a young sapling in the next few months. In the meantime, Daisy will tack the sleeves and the skirt, so you can let them down easily when you need to.’
Daisy bustled around me, pinning the blazer sleeves and the hem of the kilt, which currently brushed the top of the black leather lace-up brogues, which felt – and looked – like I was wearing boats on my feet. It was quite hard for her to ‘bustle’ actually, as she had an enormous bump in her stomach and was due to give birth any day. I was desperate to see the baby before I left for school, but it became more unlikely as each day passed.
Out of the three of us, Daisy was the one who had found true contentment on the Cornish moors. She and Bill – Granny’s odd-job man – had married two years ago and the entire village had attended the wedding, as they did for any celebration, or, for that matter, wake. Daisy now lived with Bill in the cosy gardener’s cottage which stood in the grounds of the main house. The pale, whey-faced girl I’d known at Admiral House had blossomed into a pretty young woman. It was obviously true love that made one beautiful, I thought, and as I looked at myself decked out in bottle-green in the mirror, I wished I would find some myself.
Over our last supper together later that day, eaten outside in the balmy late August evening, I asked Granny if she was going to be all right on her own.
‘I mean, with Daisy about to have her baby, and me gone, how will you manage?’
‘Goodness, Posy, please don’t write me off just yet. I’m only in my fifties, you know. And I will still have Bill and Daisy – having a baby does not mea
n that one becomes incapacitated. Besides, it will be wonderful to have a little one about the place. New life always lightens the spirits.’
As long as that baby doesn’t replace me in your affections, I thought, but didn’t say.
The next morning, as I climbed into the ancient Ford motor car for Bill to drive me to Plymouth station, I had to hold back my tears as I kissed Granny goodbye. At least she didn’t sob all over me as Daisy had done, although her eyes certainly looked brighter than usual.
‘Take care of yourself, darling girl. Write to me regularly and let me know what you’ve been up to.’
‘I will.’
‘Work hard, and do your father – and me – proud.’
‘I promise I’ll do my best, Granny. Goodbye.’
As Bill drove me along the drive, I looked behind me. And knew that, whatever the pain I had suffered since arriving here five years ago, the small community I’d lived in had protected me. And I would miss it dreadfully.
Boarding school was . . . fine. I mean, if one ignored the frosts that formed on the inside of the dormitory windows as winter drew in, the utterly inedible food and the ‘PE’ that they made us take in the gym three times a week. ‘Perfectly Execrable’, I called it, because it was. A lot of gawky teenage girls trying to hop over a pommel horse had to be one of the most inelegant sights possible. On the other hand, I took to hockey – which I had never played before, much to the horror of Miss Chuter, the burly games mistress – like the proverbial duck to water. I had a ‘low centre of gravity’, apparently, which I felt was just a euphemism for having two feet planted firmly on the ground, but it suited the game and I soon became our team’s top scorer. I also excelled at the cross-country runs, having spent most of the past five years outdoors on the Cornish moors.
This propensity for games at least helped the fact that the other girls thought me far too keen on lessons – which I was – and nicknamed me ‘Swotty’. Just as they didn’t understand my enthusiasm for academia, I couldn’t see why they weren’t lapping up the knowledge that was freely offered every day. After years of learning most of what I knew from the hallowed pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Granny had of course been right about Miss Brennan struggling to keep up with me), to have a living, breathing human being bringing subjects to life was simply wonderful. Used as I was to being an only child, and the odd one out, even when I’d been ‘in’ a group with Katie and my other Cornish friends, the fact that the girls at my new school mostly viewed me with suspicion did not hurt me the way it might have done. It helped that there was another girl in my year who was also thought of as strange, due to her passion for ballet dancing. And that created a bond between us.
Like was said to be drawn to like, yet, beyond our supposed mutual strangeness, Estelle Symons could not have been less akin to me if she tried. Where I was already tall compared to my classmates, solidly built and, as I saw it, rather plain, Estelle had a tiny, delicate frame, and even when she walked, she reminded me of a wisp of gossamer floating on a breeze. To add to that, she had a thick mane of shiny blonde hair and big, china-blue eyes. Whilst I spent any free time I had in the library, Estelle was in the gymnasium, practising her leg-lifts and twirling in front of the mirror. She told me she came from a ‘bohemian’ family; her mother was an actress, her father a well-known novelist.
‘They’ve sent me here because my mother is always travelling to some theatre or other, and Pups – my father – always has his nose in a manuscript, so I was in the way,’ Estelle had shrugged pragmatically.
She had also confided in me that one day, she would become a famous ballerina like Margot Fonteyn, who I had never heard of, but of whom Estelle spoke in hushed tones. Due to her obsession with dancing, Estelle had little time for her schoolwork, so I did my best to finish her prep for her, making sure I added spelling and grammar mistakes so it looked like her own work. Alongside her ethereal physicality, Estelle had a dreamy, ‘otherworld’ personality to match it. I sometimes thought that if they ever made a ballet about a beautiful, blonde-haired fairy, they would choose Estelle to dance her.
‘You are so clever, Posy,’ she said with a sigh, as I handed her back her mathematics workbook. ‘I wish I had brains like you.’
‘Personally, I think it must take a lot of brains to remember all those dancing steps and which way to move your arms.’
‘Oh, that’s easy; my body just knows what to do, a bit like your brain knowing the answer to an equation. Every human has their own unique talent, you know. We are all blessed.’
The more I got to know Estelle, I realised that her being a dunce at lessons was simply because she wasn’t interested in them, since she was actually very bright when it came to the world – and far more philosophical than I was. To me, a spade really was a spade, whereas, to Estelle, it could be something far more imaginative. She made me think back to the days when Daddy would call me ‘Princess of the Fairies’, with him as King, and I realised that I had lost that magic somewhere along the way.
As autumn and winter passed and we all returned for the summer term, the two of us would lie in a shady spot under an oak tree and share confidences.
‘Do you think much about boys?’ Estelle asked me one sunny June afternoon.
‘No,’ I answered honestly.
‘Surely you want to get married one day?’
‘I’ve never thought about it, probably because I can’t imagine any boy wanting me. I’m not beautiful and feminine like you, Estelle.’ I looked down at my pale freckly legs, stretched out in front of me, thinking they were both reminiscent of the tree trunk I was leaning against, and then at Estelle’s perfect ones, tapering down to a pair of elegant thin ankles, that Maman had always said were a thing that men loved. (She had them, of course, unlike her daughter.)
‘Oh Posy, why do you say such things about yourself?! You have a fit, athletic body that doesn’t have an ounce of fat on it, gorgeous hair the colour of autumn leaves and a lovely pair of big, brown eyes,’ Estelle chided me. ‘And that’s apart from that brain of yours of course, which is a match for any man’s.’
‘Maybe they won’t like that either,’ I sighed. ‘It seems to me that men want women to have their babies and make their homes comfortable, but never express an opinion on anything much at all. I think I would make a very bad wife, because I would have to correct my husband if he was wrong. Besides,’ I confessed, ‘I want a career.’
‘So do I, darling Posy, but I can’t see how that means I wouldn’t be able to have a husband too.’
‘Well, I can’t think of one woman I know who is married and has a job of her own. Even my own mother gave up singing when she married my father. And look at the schoolmistresses here: all single, the lot of them.’
‘Perhaps they bat for the other side,’ Estelle giggled.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No, so stop talking in riddles.’
‘It means that perhaps they like each other.’
‘What?! A girl likes a girl?’ I said, astounded at such a concept.
‘Oh Posy, you might be clever but you can be so naive. You must have noticed how Miss Chuter moons around over Miss Williams.’
‘No,’ I replied abruptly. ‘I don’t believe that can be true. It’s . . . well, it’s simply against the laws of nature.’
‘Don’t get botany mixed up with human nature. And just because the subject isn’t in one of your fat encyclopaedias, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It does,’ Estelle said resolutely. ‘And men liking men too. Even you must have heard about Oscar Wilde, put in prison for his relationship with a man.’
‘You see? It’s illegal, because it isn’t natural.’
‘Oh Posy, don’t be such a square! In the theatrical world, such things are standard. And besides, surely it’s not their fault? People should be allowed to be who they are, whatever society’s rules, don’t you think?’
And, thanks to Estelle, I did begin to
think. Not just about photosynthesis and chemical compounds as I had done up to now, but about the way that the world had laid down rules of what it believed was acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. And I began to question it.
I was growing up.
November 1954
‘So, Posy, we need to discuss your future plans.’
Miss Sumpter, the headmistress, gave me a smile from the other side of her desk. However, I only saw it out of the corner of my eye, as every time I’d looked at her over the past five years, my eyes were immediately drawn to the wart that sat to the left of her chin, and the long grey hairs that sprouted from it. For the umpteenth time, I wondered why she didn’t use a pair of scissors to cut them off, because the rest of her face was actually quite pleasant to look at.
‘Yes, Miss Sumpter,’ I replied automatically.
‘You leave us next summer, and now is the time that you must start thinking of applying to university. I am presuming that this is what you want?’
‘I . . . well, yes. Where would you advise?’
‘Given your academic prowess, I feel you should aim for the top and give Cambridge a shot.’
‘Golly,’ I said, feeling a sudden lump come to my throat. ‘My father went there. Do you really think I’d have a chance? I understand the competition for places – especially for women – is intense.’
‘It is indeed, but you are an outstanding student. And we must add that your father attended to your letter of application. The old school tie never does any harm,’ she smiled.
‘Even if it is to be worn by a woman?’ I said wryly.
‘Quite. As I am sure you already know, Girton and Newnham are the two established female colleges, but I wonder if you have heard about New Hall? It opened this September with only sixteen students, and the tutor of the college, Miss Rosemary Murray, is an old friend of mine. It would mean I could put in a good word, although your admission would solely depend on passing the three-hour written exam. Last year, four hundred young women applied for just sixteen places. Competition is stiff, Posy, but I honestly believe you stand a very good chance of gaining entry. I’m presuming you would wish to study a science?’
The Butterfly Room Page 14