The Moon Field

by Judith Allnatt

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ George asked as they walked out into the balmy air of the warm evening.

  Kitty shrugged. ‘Down to the lake, I suppose. That’s where we always seem to end up.’ They walked across the market place, where cabbage leaves and bits of torn paper were strewn from the Saturday traders’ carts earlier in the day, and then on past the shops. When they came to Abraham’s Photographic Studio, George found himself stopping and peering into the window at the pictures of climbers roped to walls of rock and postcards of lake views, fells and waterfalls. He had seen them all a million times before and yet today his feet had simply refused to pass them. It’s because of Violet, he thought, that’s why, and he pictured her with her camera over her shoulder, setting off on her walk alone, and felt that his heart would break.

  ‘Are you coming?’ Kitty had stopped a few yards further on and was now looking at him impatiently.

  George hurried to catch her up. ‘Are you angry with me too, Kitty?’ he asked. ‘Is it because of the work, as your father said?’

  Kitty made a tutting sound and gave George a look which seemed to say: ‘Don’t you understand anything?’ They turned down Paraffin Alley past the ironmonger’s shop, Kitty striding away from him until they reached Lake Road where she slowed down a little to match her pace to that of the couples and families, tourists and locals strolling down towards the lake and its surrounding circle of quiet hills.

  George held out his arm to her but she didn’t take it. Instead, she said, ‘You didn’t come back for tea. We waited, but you didn’t come. I thought you’d had an accident or something.’

  ‘Oh, is that all!’ George said. ‘I’m sorry, by the time I remembered it was too late to get back, I was in Carlisle you see …’ Too late, he realised that he had meant to keep off that subject.

  ‘What took you to Carlisle, then?’ Kitty said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’d heard about other chaps joining up and I thought I’d just go and see. Just find out.’

  ‘It was a bit sudden, wasn’t it?’ Kitty said, looking at him with that look she had which seemed to go right through you. ‘You never said a word about this before.’

  George, aware that, apart from matters to do with Violet, there had been barely a decision in his life he hadn’t talked over with Kitty first, felt uncomfortable. He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. ‘It was on an impulse,’ he said quickly.

  ‘George,’ she said, ‘that is not like you.’

  They had reached the tearooms, which were still open, making the best of the last of the sunshine that brought folk out to stroll or boat or fish. The sound of muted talk came from the tables on the terraces, as if the stillness of the evening and the calmness of the water demanded that voices should be low and soft.

  ‘Would you like to go in?’ George asked. ‘We could have ices.’ The moment he offered he realised that he had, in fact, no money, and the memory of how he had lost his wages came back sharply, causing his stomach to knot up and his mouth to dry.

  However, Kitty shook her head and they carried on walking until they came to the lake itself and took their usual path alongside the pebbly shore that would bring them to Friar’s Crag. Across the lake, Cat Bells and Maiden Moor were bursting with the green of summer, wide swathes of bracken girdling the fells. They towered above the waters and the reflection of the line of the hills against the sky was beautiful in its unbroken symmetry; the mirror image lent the lake a depth the measure of both earth and heavens. At the landing stages, the last boats of the day were being hired and the splash of oars and the sound of youthful laughter carried over the water in the still evening. George thought of the many times that he and Kitty had taken a boat out to one of the tiny islands that dotted the lake and spent the day building dens, or simply lazing on a rock in the sun and chatting the day away. Now he couldn’t even tell her what had happened, never mind how he was feeling.

  ‘Do you remember when I went swimming and got cramp?’ he asked. ‘You thought I was larking around?’

  She gave him a weak smile. ‘Well, you usually were.’

  ‘You didn’t realise I was really drowning until it was almost too late,’ he said.

  She looked at him as though she was finding it hard to fathom him out.

  They entered the wood of sparse trees: alder and birch. Kitty kept waving away the clouds of midges that hung under the branches and danced around their heads. Usually George would have teased her for her fussiness but he said nothing.

  They reached Friar’s Crag, a rocky point protruding into the lake like the prow of a ship to give a panoramic view of the expanse of water and its thickly wooded islands. Kitty sat down on a tree stump and looked out. George climbed down a little way until he found a flattish rock and sat down with his knees drawn up and his forearms resting on them to relieve the ache in his ribs. The sun laid a glittering path on the water that one could almost imagine walking and George thought, I’ll store this up; I’ll keep this like a picture and remember it precisely as it is. He closed his eyes and opened them again, committing to memory every curve of the hills and every tone of the palette: the worn grey rocks, the shades of green, thick upon the islands, the pink undersides of the clouds and the gold on the water.

  ‘George?’

  He turned his head to find Kitty regarding him seriously.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, fighting. You’re not exactly the fighting sort.’

  George shrugged and turned away again and Kitty fell silent.

  His parents had taught him that the Good Book said you should turn the other cheek and at school he had tried to ignore the teasing and pinching of the nastier set. He had been aware that he was a strong child and that he could beat any lad of his age in a fight but his mother had taught him to be gentle, to try to be fair to his younger brother, and to always keep his fists to himself, even when provoked.

  George thought about Charlie Spragg and Silas Norris, the worst boys at school, and about how he and Kitty had come to be friends: the fat girl and the dopey boy teaming up to find safety in numbers and sticking together because no one else wanted them.

  Kitty was quicker-witted than he was. She had always had a sharp tongue and could give short shrift when someone shoved her or called her ‘lardy’. She saw off her enemies but her tartness and prickly demeanour made others wary of her and left her with no friends. This had made no difference to George. He took everyone as he found them, so when he found himself seated next to the chubby girl with a suspicious expression he simply looked out of the window as usual and waited for her to speak to him. It had taken two whole days but eventually, seeing that Mr Bevinson was making his way round the class to check their sums, she had whispered, ‘Look out!’ George had only done the first two sums before embarking on a drawing of a galleon in full sail; she had turned his page over and pushed her book towards him so that he could quickly copy her figures down. After that, she started to talk to him, and George didn’t mind if she was sharp or impatient when he was slow. At some level, he recognised that their minds just worked in different ways and to different rhythms, that was all.

  At the end of that week, Spragg had put dog dirt in George’s desk and then waited, sniggering, for Mr Bevinson to discover where the smell was coming from. Mr Bevinson had sworn under his breath and been about to haul George out to the front to give him the stick when Kitty stood up, all red in the face beneath her freckles, and said she’d seen what had happened.

  George had been able to put up with a lot after that: the name-calling, Spragg setting him up to take the fall for writing an obscenity on the privy door, even the feet stuck out to trip him in games. He had been able to put up with it all as long as he had Kitty to sit next to in class and to walk home with at the end of the day.

  For Kitty, even when she had lost her puppy fat and become merely curvaceous, the taunting continued, simply shifting its focus,
picking instead on the fact that, as the postmaster’s daughter, she was well turned out and knew some long words. Suddenly she was ‘snooty’ and ‘born with a silver spoon in her gob’.

  There had only been one time when George had actually snapped and that had been over Kitty. He’d been thinking about a plan he had for a painting of the Lodore Falls and how the tumbling water looked like ropes and wondering how you could do that in paint and yet still keep the lightness and the shine of water: he had been kept behind for not paying attention in class. By the time he got out, Kitty had had to go on ahead.

  He found her sitting on a boulder down by the river. It was the only time he’d ever seen her cry. Spragg had taken her beloved piano music and trodden it into a puddle. When she’d tried to get it back, shouting at them that she needed it and that she didn’t have it by heart yet, they had pushed her over and when she stood back up and shouted at them they had thrown stones and Spragg’s had cut her lip. George had taken her home and then, filled with a cold white rage that blanked out all rational thought, he had run to the park where he knew the boys hung around after school and waited behind the toilets until Spragg came to take a piss. Then they had fought and something had come over George that he didn’t like and that he didn’t ever want to happen again. After George laid into him, Spragg stopped trying to hit him and put his forearms up in front of him, which anyone knew meant he was done, but George hadn’t been able to stop. He kept pummelling Spragg until his nose bled and he was in a ball on the ground shouting, ‘Stop it! Stop, you mad bastard!’ George stood over him, panting and trembling. Then he walked away and left him there with his face smeared with blood and snot. Spragg had been away from school for days. Kitty knew nothing about any of it.

  He heard Kitty get up and scramble down the rocks. She sat down nearer to him.

  ‘No, really, have you thought about what it’ll be like? Arthur says they have to do bayonet practice and stick the thing into sandbags as if it was a person’s stomach.’ She pulled a face. ‘It’s so you can do it when it’s real. I mean, how will you manage?’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ George said, though the thought made him feel sick. He felt stung that she thought him a coward.

  Kitty said nothing more.

  The noise of the pleasure boat setting off to bring the guests back from the town to the Lodore Hotel carried across the lake and soon it came into view, ploughing a frothing wake through the darkening water, bedecked with spots of yellow light from oil lamps that swung and bobbed with the motion of the boat.

  Kitty began picking out the small pebbles strewn between the cracks in the rocks and throwing them into the water. ‘It’s going to be horrible without you,’ she said quietly, almost too quietly for him to hear. ‘Just me and Mother and Father and no Arthur. I shan’t have anyone to talk to.’

  He knew that she meant him to confide in her, to share their feelings as they had always done, but what could he do? He couldn’t tell her the sorry tale of what had really happened and he couldn’t – wouldn’t – lie. Not to Kitty.

  It was growing colder; Kitty held her elbows and then rubbed at her arms. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me, George,’ she said. ‘And I wish you would.’

  George, panicking at her persistence, said, ‘It’s really none of your business,’ and immediately wished he had bitten his tongue.

  He saw Kitty’s shoulders stiffen and she raised her chin as she always did when someone hurt her. He braced himself for her sharp riposte but none came. He was left at a loss.

  ‘Come on, you’re cold. We’d better be getting back,’ he said, trying to soften the harshness of his last words. He stood up slowly and climbed past her back to the path.

  She sat on until she had thrown the last of the pebbles and then followed him. As they passed back under the trees, it was difficult to see her face. She made no further attempt at conversation and they walked silently together, the only noise the slap, slap, slap of the water lapping against the pebbles of the shore, the distant result of the steamer’s wake.

  By the time they’d reached the town and walked back through the darkening streets to the market place, Kitty still hadn’t spoken. George began to feel that he had managed very badly and that he was actually very miserable. He tried to put himself in Kitty’s place: it would be hard for her, caught in the middle of the stresses and strains between her parents, and lonely with only the younger post boys for company, who were surely a trial to endure, with their cheek and their practical jokes. Now she would have him to worry about as well as Arthur …

  As they came level with the last street lamp before the post office, he touched her arm and bent round to try to look at her face. ‘I’m sorry I’m going away and that you’ll be lonely …’ he started but tailed off when he saw her expression.

  Kitty moved her arm away. ‘Oh, you have a high opinion of yourself, George Farrell, if you think I’ll miss you that much.’

  ‘But you said you would be lonely!’ George said. ‘You said, just now, on the rocks!’

  Kitty took a long quivering breath. ‘I shan’t be on my own; I have a follower,’ she said and began to walk quickly towards home.

  George caught her up and stood in front of her, saying, ‘Who? Who are you seeing?’

  ‘It isn’t anyone you know,’ she said shortly. ‘In fact – it’s really none of your business.’

  The words hung between them like a thread stretched too thin.

  George swallowed hard. ‘Well, shall I write?’ he managed to say.

  ‘I expect you’ll suit yourself,’ Kitty said; then, without even shaking his hand, she walked past him and went inside.

  When George got home, everyone had gone to bed. He could hear the murmur of his parents’ voices from upstairs. They were talking quietly so that they wouldn’t wake Lillie, who slept in a cot at the foot of their bed. When he locked the front door and pulled the bolt across the voices stopped so George deduced that he was the subject of the discussion. He climbed the stairs slowly so that he wouldn’t make another sound and give his mother a reason to call out to him or come to say goodnight. He paused at the top of the stairs and overheard his mother tell his father that when he had come home that afternoon she had smelt drink on him. He crept past the door hoping that he could postpone conversation with his father until the morning. He was still feeling jangled and shaken up by the strange exchange with Kitty and unready for a discussion with his father. He slipped into his room and undressed in the faint light that came from the rectangle of the window. His mother had taken the uniform away, he noticed, and he hoped that she would mend it and return it to the post office for him. Ted stirred as George pushed his shoes under the bed where he wouldn’t trip over them but then turned away towards the wall and subsided again into sleep. George got into bed and lay still, trying to calm his thoughts. The last he heard was the continuous murmur of his parents’ voices as though bees were in the wall behind his head.

  6

  FEATHERS ON THE STREAM

  George’s father, Frederick Farrell, was a conscientious man. He worked hard all week at Force Crag, mining ore for the zinc, and he worked hard in his spare time to support his wife, Maggie, in the raising of their family and in the service of God. The work at the mine was dirty and dangerous: the ore lay in veins that were almost vertical within the side of the hill and were worked by a series of cramped tunnels driven straight into the fell side, which were linked inside by shafts and ladderways. The ore had to be dislodged with explosives in such a way that the veins were cut away in steps, leaving huge blocks of mineral in place to act as supporting pillars. Frederick, having been a miner all his working life, knew the fragility of human flesh in the face of roof falls, moving hoppers or the jaw crusher: a piece of mill machinery that began the process of breaking down the ore. His belief was that life was difficult enough with all the illness and injury that comes uninvited, without men taking up arms against each other.

  Frederick had stayed awake u
ntil the small hours thinking about his eldest boy and how best to approach the matter of his desire to go soldiering. George was a man now and could be stubborn in his views. Frederick had prayed a little and had eventually gone downstairs, lit the gas in the parlour and spread his books on the table, turning to the words of the Church for understanding and guidance. He skimmed through an index, found the page and ran his finger beneath the tiny print:

  The United Methodist Church supports and extends its ministry to those persons who conscientiously oppose war and who therefore refuse to serve in the armed forces. However, the Church also supports and extends its ministry to those persons who conscientiously choose to serve in the armed forces or to accept alternative service. The Church also states that ‘as Christians they are aware that neither the way of military action, nor the way of inaction is always righteous before God’.

  He sat back, frowning at the passage, which clearly presented the decision as a matter for individual conscience. Surely, he thought, the Bible was adamant on this; what could be clearer than ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Although, on the other hand, it was true that there were battles in the Old Testament ‘by the word of the Lord’.

  He read on, studying one book after another until he had exhausted both himself and the subject, and then returned to bed with cold feet, feeling that, in all conscience, he could not forbid George to join the army but that he would do his utmost to dissuade him.

  He slept fitfully until dawn and was glad when the light began to creep through the gap in the curtains. He dressed by the dim light without waking Maggie and Lillie and went quietly to the boys’ room. George was sleeping on his side, and Frederick noticed that he had one hand under his cheek, just as he used to sleep as a child. Look at the length of him! He never ceased to be amazed at the fact that George was a head above him. Maggie put it down to the off-cuts they’d had for free from her father’s butcher’s shop. Well, it was probably true. There had been little enough meat to be had in his family, to be sure. He touched George on the shoulder and waited for him to wake.