Song of the Skylark

by Erica James

  Walter was an easy child to love and his vulnerability pulled on Clarissa’s heartstrings. He was small for his age, anxious and liable to start at sudden noises. His hair was as dark as his brother’s, but his blue eyes were paler and often resembled pools of sadness. At bedtime when she tucked him in – he was now sleeping in his own bed – he would kiss her cheek and hug her close. Of the two boys, he was the one who craved physical affection and Clarissa willingly gave it to him. Her experience of young children was practically nil, and it surprised her just how comfortable she was with these two young boys.

  Just as they were learning to adapt to their new life, she was doing the same and knew not to overwhelm Thomas with her desire to make him happy. It could not be forced. She could tell that he was naturally a quiet and reserved boy, and courteous to a fault. Clarissa was no expert, but she wondered if he believed that any display of emotion from him towards Clarissa or Lavinia would seem like an act of disloyalty to his mother. Polly had explained to her that this was frequently the case. Polly had also supplied some limited background information about the family, that they weren’t practising Jews so there was no need to worry about that side of things. ‘Like so many,’ Polly had explained, ‘the parents see themselves first and foremost as German; religion doesn’t come into it.’ To Clarissa, this made their plight seem altogether worse.

  Despite Thomas and Walter writing to their parents every other day, there had been only the one letter to arrive from Germany for them. Judging by the postmark on the envelope, it must have been mailed almost immediately after Thomas and Walter had boarded the train from Berlin. Clarissa didn’t know its contents but it seemed both to cheer and sadden the two boys.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  August 1939, Shillingbury Grange, Suffolk

  The days and weeks passed and before Clarissa knew it, it was August and she’d been at Shillingbury Grange for three months. Somehow they had all adapted in their different ways to the changes thrust upon them. Some days were easier than others, and it felt as though the household had never known any other routine.

  The days Clarissa found difficult were those when tempers and frustrations flared. Like the day when Thomas had come home from school and angrily shut himself away in his room and refused to come out. With gentle encouragement, from both Clarissa and Walter, he had eventually opened the door and, with eyes brimming with tears, he had told her in faltering English of the taunts he’d received at school that day. Clarissa dealt with it swiftly the next morning by speaking to Mrs Russell. The thought that Thomas had escaped persecution in Germany only to be treated badly here in England incensed Clarissa. She had known from reading the newspapers that there were plenty in England who were pro-Fascism and anti-Semitic, just as there were people in America who were equally blinkered, but she’d be damned if she would stand back and do nothing about it. To her credit, Mrs Russell dealt with the matter firmly and threatened dire punishment to anybody who indulged in name-calling, whatever the reason. It transpired that the taunts had been as a result of Thomas coming top for the third time running in an arithmetic test. He was obviously a bright child of above average intelligence and that, of course, made any child a target, irrespective of culture or nationality.

  But today, as the hot summer continued and with the school holidays still stretching languidly ahead of them, there were no angry tears of frustration to deal with. Today the garden echoed to the sound of what any observer might think was an ordinary family having fun. At lunch Charles had deemed it essential that Thomas and Walter should be taught to play the game of cricket, and now, while Clarissa and Lavinia watched from the terrace where they were shelling peas they had picked from the vegetable garden, she listened attentively to the instructions being given. She was as much in the dark as the children when it came to the rules, and knew that to compare the game to baseball would infuriate her grandfather. She had fond memories of her parents each extolling the merits of the game with which they had grown up.

  ‘This is what will make you truly English,’ Charles told them sternly as he handed Walter a bat and Thomas a ball. ‘Master this and you’ll have no trouble living in this country.’

  Clarissa could see that teaching the boys to play, and all from his wheelchair, brought out a new side to Charles; it was one of those rare moments when she saw him truly involved in something and enjoying himself.

  ‘He always hoped he’d have a son to play cricket with,’ Lavinia said quietly to Clarissa as they watched Thomas swinging his arm ready to throw the ball at his brother.

  ‘And perhaps then a grandson?’ replied Clarissa with an enquiring look. ‘If I had been a boy maybe that would have brought about a reconciliation sooner for him.’

  ‘He’s had a lot of disappointment in his life,’ Lavinia murmured in a faraway voice, without answering Clarissa’s question. ‘We both have. A lot of which we’ve brought on ourselves, I can see that. I don’t think the regret of what we did will ever leave me.’

  Clarissa laid a cautious hand on her grandmother’s arm. ‘It’s not too late to enjoy life now, you know. Or to accept forgiveness.’

  ‘Do you really forgive us?’ Lavinia asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

  Clarissa nodded. ‘It’s obvious that you’ve suffered enough; it would be needlessly cruel of me not to forgive you.’

  ‘It’s more than we deserve,’ Lavinia said, now staring at her husband leaning out of his wheelchair to show Walter the correct way to hold the cricket bat. ‘I don’t say this lightly,’ she went on, ‘but one way or another you’ve brought us back to life. Your mother would have been proud of you.’

  ‘And she would have been proud of you, giving three strangers a home.’

  Lavinia twisted her head round to look at her, her brow creased. ‘You’re not a stranger.’

  ‘I was when I first showed up here. I could have been anyone. But you made me feel welcome despite all that had gone before. That couldn’t have been easy for you, I do understand.’

  ‘For one so young, you have a wise head on those shoulders of yours, and a compassionate heart. It’s a rare combination.’ She went back to shelling peas, but then, at the sight of Charles beckoning to Clarissa, she said, ‘I see that it’s now your turn to be instructed on the finer points of cricket.’

  ‘I’ll play if you do,’ said Clarissa boldly.

  ‘Me?’ The expression on her grandmother’s face – the face of a woman of unimpeachable respectability and of an age when wielding a cricket bat was as likely as growing wings and taking to the skies – was one of startled horror.

  Clarissa rose to her feet. ‘Why not?’

  ‘But I’m … I’ve never … I mean I couldn’t possibly—’

  ‘Even more reason to try now.’ And taking her grandmother’s hand, they crossed the lawn together. It was then that Clarissa had the idea to enlist the help of Jimmy and Lily. ‘From what I can see, the more players we have, the better,’ she said when she put forward the suggestion.

  Charles smiled. ‘Capital idea! It’ll be just like in the old days when I was a boy and my father used to round up the servants to join in.’

  Lily and Jimmy could not have looked more shocked, but once they’d recovered themselves, Charles divided everyone into two small teams – Thomas was captain of his team, which was made up of Clarissa and Lily, and Walter captain of Lavinia and Jimmy. It soon became apparent that Lily was a demon bowler, having grown up playing the game on the village green with her brothers. In his element, Charles delighted in shouting out the scores and what they were doing wrong. But the high point came when Lavinia took a wild swing with the bat and struck the ball with such force, she sent it flying over the beech hedge and straight through the roof of the glasshouse.

  Charles roared with laughter and applauded her. ‘You couldn’t have done that if you’d tried!’

  When she was finally bowled
out by Lily, and Charles declared Thomas’s team the victors, Lavinia went over to her husband. With her cheeks glowing and her grey hair, always so sharply pulled back, tumbling loosely around her face, the hairpins she used to hold it securely in place lost on the lawn somewhere, she knelt on the grass in front of him. The look that passed between them was so tender and intimate that a lump formed in Clarissa’s throat and she had to look away.

  With Jimmy now gathering up the stumps and cricket bat and ball, Clarissa asked the boys to come inside with her and Lily to help bring out the tea things. At the mention of food, their faces lit up and they raced ahead, Walter’s shorter legs struggling to keep pace with his brother’s longer strides.

  As of last week, after Mrs Kent gave notice to leave Shillingbury and go and live on the Norfolk coast, they now had a new cook. Amusingly, her name was Mrs Cook and she was Lily’s aunt on her mother’s side of the family. She had recently moved back to the village following the death of her husband – the threat of war also a deciding factor in her moving out of London. A jolly woman with a rotund shape that put Clarissa in mind of a barrel balanced on a pair of stout legs, she was a breath of fresh air and took to the household with enthusiasm, lavishing delicious, well-cooked food on them, especially Thomas and Walter, who she adored on sight. Charles would occasionally mutter about the extravagant cost of the meals now being served, but Lavinia hushed his grumbles and told him not to be such a misery.

  The truth was, and Lavinia didn’t want Charles to know this, but Clarissa was paying Mrs Cook’s wages. As she had planned, Clarissa was helping with the household finances. Lavinia had been against the plan, but she was no match for Clarissa’s determination that since she had talked her grandparents into taking in Thomas and Walter, contributing financially was the very least she could do.

  There were other changes she had gradually made to the running of the household, such as organising the cleaning of all the curtains. Then, while they were down, with Lily’s help she had washed away years of sad neglect from the windows and polished the glass until it gleamed.

  From the garden, and from the areas that Jimmy had managed to keep under his control, Clarissa picked roses and sweet peas and placed them strategically in vases to scent the house. She filled decorative bowls with rose petals and lavender picked from the straggly border beneath the dining room window and placed them where anyone passing by would smell the summery fragrance. On walks across the meadows with Thomas and Walter she would return with bunches of wild flowers to put in pretty china jugs. Sometimes Jimmy would accompany them, and in his gruff, and at times incomprehensible, East Anglian dialect, he would teach them the names of the wild flowers and insects they came across.

  Clarissa was sure on one outing that he was pulling their legs when he pointed to a ladybird and called it a bishy-barnibee. His heavily lined face darkened with a fearsome scowl when she asked him if he was joking. Without answering her, he’d gone on ahead, muttering and shaking his head. From that day on she didn’t doubt another word or explanation from him, and did her best to absorb as much of his knowledge as she could. She learnt that a crow was a dunbilly, a hedge sparrow was a hedge-Betty, a nightingale a barley bird, an owl a jilly-hooter, a robin a ruddock and a skylark was a lavrock. The skylark had become Clarissa’s favourite bird; she loved to hear it sing, there was something so wonderfully joyful about its song.

  Under her guidance, the house was slowly regaining some of its shine. Or a shine that Clarissa imagined the house had once had in the days when its occupants had been happy. Some nights she would go to bed and wonder at the turn her life had taken. Grandma Ethel was still demanding she return home, but Boston no longer felt like home; Shillingbury did. Maybe it wouldn’t always be home, but for now it was. She was needed here. Whatever lay ahead for her, this was where she was meant to be right now. In her long and frequent letters to Grandma Ethel, she tried to explain that for the first time in her life she believed she was doing something useful.

  In the kitchen, Mrs Cook had everything for tea waiting for them. ‘And don’t even think about pinching one of those jam tarts or gingerbread men,’ she warned the boys as she filled the teapot with water from the kettle – or the betsy, as she called it – ‘you know I have eyes in the back of my head. Now wash your hands and be quick about it!’

  Her sternness never caused Thomas and Walter to feel anxious; they had quickly learned that her bark was worse than her bite and that she didn’t have a mean bone in her body, for frequently, after any warning or scolding given, she would chuck them under the chin and shoo them off with a beaming smile and usually a boiled sweet, from a jar which she kept on the shelf of the dresser. The kitchen was almost unrecognisable under her command; she kept it as neat as a shiny new pin and liked nothing better than to have an audience while she cooked. Thomas and Walter could often be found there, either watching her making something, or helping.

  Mrs Cook had confided in Clarissa that with all the talk of war she deemed it prudent to start getting in an extra stock of what she called ‘essentials’ to store in the larder. ‘I remember the First World War and all the shortages,’ she told Clarissa, ‘so with your permission, miss, I’ll ask the grocer for a few extras, you know, tins of corned beef, salmon, peaches, powdered milk, cocoa, tea and sugar. I’ll show you all the receipts and that way you’ll know what’s what.’

  ‘Please do as you think best,’ Clarissa had replied, ‘but perhaps keep this between us for now; I don’t want my grandparents alarmed in any way. I’ll settle the grocer’s bill as usual.’

  The teapot filled and hands washed and dried, with Lily setting the table for her and Mrs Cook to sit down with a cup of tea together, Clarissa gave Thomas a plate of sardine paste sandwiches to carry out to the garden and Walter a basket of freshly baked scones, their fruity fragrance filling the warm kitchen.

  The atmosphere in the house had changed considerably since the departure of Mrs Kent and Mrs Cook’s arrival. A well-fed person was a happy person, was the latter’s motto, and as Clarissa carefully carried the heavily laden tea tray out to the garden, it seemed the gem of a woman was on a mission to prove that sentiment true.

  The next morning the sun shone down from a cloudless sky and once breakfast had been eaten and the boys had tidied their room, Clarissa took them for a walk across the meadows. With Thomas and Walter scampering on ahead – Walter’s cries for his brother to slow down for him going unheeded – Clarissa wandered behind at a more leisurely pace, enjoying the beauty of the landscape. A skylark flew overhead, its cheerful call blending harmoniously with the dazzling beauty of the day. Life could not be any better than this, she thought.

  And yet, if the newspaper reports were true, and what was being said on the wireless by the BBC Home Service, precious days like this were numbered; it was only a matter of time before the skies would be filled with airplanes and bombs and not birds. Two of Lily’s brothers had recently enlisted, as had several of their friends from the village. Change was on its way.

  Polly had written from London to say that some people just wanted war to be announced, that the knowing would be more bearable than the not knowing. Polly’s letter had also contained the advice that if Clarissa wanted to return to America, she should do so now before it became too risky to cross the Atlantic. But Clarissa had no intention of leaving England, or Shillingbury. How could she? How could she leave her grandparents and Thomas and Walter? They were, to all intents and purposes, her new family.

  Later that day, as though to underscore this realisation, the boy from the post office arrived on his bicycle with a telegram for Clarissa.

  It was from the lawyers in Boston: Grandma Ethel had suffered a heart attack and wasn’t expected to live much longer.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  September 1939, Shillingbury Grange, Suffolk

  Clarissa had decided to return to America right away when she heard about her grandmother
but she was strongly advised by the lawyers in Boston that, with the threat of war imminent, it would be extremely unwise to cross the Atlantic now.

  Then on the 3rd of September, as the long, hot summer showed no sign of ending, the news that everybody had been waiting for finally came: Britain was at war with Germany. The announcement on the wireless came as no surprise, but nonetheless it had the instant effect of casting a sombre atmosphere over the house.

  ‘I knew all along this would be where we’d end up,’ Charles kept muttering to no one in particular that evening, and rarely strayed from the wireless in case he missed some fresh piece of news.

  The following day there were news reports that a passenger liner, the SS Athenia, bound for Halifax in Canada, had been torpedoed. As they took in the horror of the attack, Lavinia and Charles both urged Clarissa to heed the advice she had been sent from Boston, that she should stay in England. Two weeks later, on the 17th September, the day the HMS Courageous was sunk in the Atlantic, Grandma Ethel died.

  Shocked at how upset she was over her grandmother’s death, Clarissa threw herself into keeping busy, applying blackout fabric to all the windows of the house with Lavinia’s help, and learning from Mrs Cook to bottle produce from the orchard and vegetable garden as well as how to knit socks for the troops. It was better to be busy than dwell on her grandmother’s death and the fear of what the reality of going to war really meant.

  Down in the village there was a false sense of jollity. It seemed to Clarissa that whenever she went to the shops people were arming themselves with a veneer of British Bulldog spirit, of laughing in the face of adversity. Many claimed the war would be over practically before it had started.