The Skylarks' War

by Hilary McKay

  ‘Are we? Are we?’

  ‘I went to the box office and got tickets this morning.’

  ‘But what about Father?’

  ‘Do you think he would like Columbine? Vanessa and Simon are meeting us there. It’s all arranged! Smile! Say, “Rupert, you’re my favourite cousin!”’

  ‘You’re my only cousin.’

  ‘But if you had a hundred?’

  ‘I’ve never been to the theatre! Yes! Even if I had a hundred!’

  Peter said, not unadmiringly, ‘Rupert does as he likes here. Father can only just about bear it.’

  Rupert bought bacon and cooked it for breakfast. He fixed the terrible creak on the landing. When Clarry got drenched feeding carrots to Jester, he hung her rain-soaked coat to dry before the living-room fire. He ran up the stairs two at a time and came down them in jumps. He sang. He vaulted over the banisters, hung by his hands, and dropped into the hall. He fed sugar lumps to horses he met in the street. He said ‘Whoops!’ when he bowled Miss Vane into the coat stand, straightened her up and apologized so seriously that she went straight home and baked him a treacle tart. Vanessa and Simon came over every single day, causing Clarry’s father to remark that the house was becoming worse than Piccadilly Circus.

  ‘Do you like him?’ Clarry asked Vanessa proudly.

  ‘Well,’ said Vanessa. ‘I suppose.’

  On the last day that they were all together, the conversation turned to school. Vanessa described the girls’ grammar school, with its clubs and homework and lists of rules and hats like pale giant mushrooms. Simon made a few bleak remarks about mud, wind, football pitches and frostbite. Peter said it wasn’t much better inside and even the classrooms were so cold you could see your breath like smoke. Rupert said that he’d once tried a cross-country shortcut and got so lost he’d been out till after dark. He told them he’d found his way back by the Northern Lights, so arctic cold was the night. Vanessa described how at her school all the top windows were kept open, even when the inkwells froze. Then it was Clarry’s turn to tell an icy school story.

  ‘Where do you go to school, Clarry?’ asked Vanessa.

  Clarry mumbled that it wasn’t very interesting.

  ‘Clarry goes to the Miss Pinkses’ Academy for Young Ladies,’ said Peter.

  ‘The what?’ demanded Simon.

  ‘It’s two old bats in an attic,’ said Peter. ‘You ought to see it. You can, it’s just round the corner. Come on! I’ll show you!’

  With that, Peter, who usually never showed anyone anything, led the whole group out to see the front view of the Miss Pinkses’ Academy for Young Ladies, which looked like any other house on the street, bare walls, shabby paint and dark windows.

  ‘It’s those three rooms at the top,’ said Clarry’s suddenly ruthless brother, pointing (while Clarry lurked miserably behind). ‘She’s been going there for years, ever since she was six, and she has never learned a single useful thing. Sewing handkerchief cases, that’s all she did last term!’

  ‘We did other things too!’ said Clarry, scarlet-cheeked, but she had to admit that the handkerchief cases had been the main event of the term. They had been embroidered with pink and blue daisies at the two creaky tables where the Miss Pinkses’ young ladies also sat to copy faded maps, to add farthings and pennies and shillings into pounds, to draw shaky sketches of suitable subjects (A Winter Posy, A Quiet View) and to learn psalms from the Bible. The varnish of those tables was always slightly sticky and the air smelt of the paraffin stoves that heated the rooms from September to May.

  There were no open windows or icy breezes in the Miss Pinkses’ establishment. Quite the reverse: by mid-afternoon the combination of boredom, fumes and stuffiness was so overwhelming that it was all the young ladies could do to stay awake. Often Clarry drifted into a headachy sleep on the sticky table.

  Peter was right, it was an awful school.

  ‘Since I went away she’s done absolutely nothing,’ said Peter.

  ‘She sent you all those letters,’ observed Simon, ‘and those two butterflies!’

  ‘I mean nothing intelligent . . .’

  ‘Those butterflies were really clever,’ said Simon, warming up his defence when he saw Rupert’s approving grin. ‘I couldn’t have made them in a million years. And you liked them! You kept getting them out and looking at them!’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ said Peter impatiently. ‘But I meant she hasn’t learned anything. Before I went away, I used to teach her—’

  ‘You didn’t!’ interrupted Clarry indignantly. ‘I helped you! I helped you with your homework! Stop grinning like that! Vanessa, Simon, stop it! I did help him! And I didn’t choose to go to the Miss Pinkses! You needn’t think I like it, because I don’t.’

  ‘Then why do you go?’ asked Vanessa.

  ‘Because she’s too lazy to make Father send her somewhere better!’ answered Peter.

  ‘I am not!’ stormed Clarry. ‘And how could I, anyway? How can I make Father do anything?’

  ‘Of course you can’t,’ said Rupert, putting an arm round her. ‘Shut up, all of you! Leave her alone! Clarry can do as she likes. Not everyone wants to go prancing off to Paris. Or boil their brains at university. I wish they’d let me into the Miss Pinkses’! They’d never get me out!’

  Vanessa and her brother laughed and Peter snorted in disgust, but Rupert took no notice and led Clarry away.

  ‘I’ve got to go back to Cornwall tomorrow,’ he said, still with his arm round her. ‘Want to come with me?’

  ‘Father would never let me,’ said Clarry.

  ‘Run away, then! Back to the ancestral home in the west! I’ve got money for train tickets.’

  ‘Just me?’

  ‘Just you.’

  ‘What about Peter?’

  ‘What about blooming Peter? Come on, Clarry! You’ve never seen Cornwall in winter. Come and surprise the grandparents! You could stay till it was time to go back to your lovely Miss Pinkses.’

  ‘I really couldn’t.’

  ‘You really could!’

  ‘Rupert?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I don’t want to go back to the Miss Pinkses.’

  ‘Just because Peter teased you? Course you do! Where else would you go?’

  ‘Vanessa’s school.’

  ‘It’s all rules and frozen inkwells, according to Vanessa. Anyway, I can’t see you becoming a grammar school girl, stomping around in a mushroom hat.’

  ‘I wish you could,’ said Clarry.

  January 1914

  TEN

  Girls Can Do Anything

  Rupert had gone. Christmas was suddenly over. All the brightness was being washed away by torrents of grey rain. Peter was exiled in his room with a sudden and ferocious cold. A new term with the Miss Pinkses was about to begin.

  Clarry brushed her hair very carefully, put on her most tidy dress, sewed up a hole in the knee of a stocking and went down to tackle her father.

  ‘Oh, really, what now?’ he demanded as soon as she pushed open the door and stopped hopping about from one leg to the other. ‘I am a busy man, you know, Clarry!’

  ‘I know,’ agreed Clarry. ‘But I need to ask you something very important. About schools.’

  ‘Has Peter put you up to this?’ demanded her father explosively. ‘In any case, the answer is no! The subject is not up for discussion. Peter is staying where he is!’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Clarry, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Not Peter’s school. Mine.’

  ‘Yours?’ he repeated, sounding completely surprised.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clarry, and then as best as she could she explained about the handkerchief cases and ancient maps, the headachy oil stoves and the psalms, and Vanessa’s school, across the other side of town, where there were science labs and open windows and—

  ‘I didn’t particularly care for that girl Vanessa,’ interrupted Clarry’s father. ‘And why on earth would you want that sort of education, anyway?’

  ‘To learn th
ings!’ explained Clarry.

  ‘But what would be the point?’ asked her truly baffled father.

  ‘You don’t mind Peter learning things.’

  ‘Peter is a boy.’

  ‘Girls can learn things too!’ cried Clarry. ‘I used to learn a lot when Peter let me help him with his homework. In Cornwall I learned to swim. Why is it different for Peter?’

  ‘Peter,’ said her father, ‘will one day have to earn his own living.’

  ‘Well, so will I!’

  ‘Clarry, that’s enough,’ said her father, getting up from his chair and beginning to fold his newspaper very carefully. ‘This conversation is quite unnecessary. Even if you do not marry, there will never be a need for you to live independently.’

  Clarry opened her mouth to protest, but her father was faster.

  ‘I’m sure there will always be a home for you within the family. If not here, perhaps with your grandparents, or even with Peter. Some way or other you will be provided for! Now, off you go!’

  He rolled his newspaper, patted her on the head with it in dismissal, twice, bump, bump, and was gone from the room before she could say another word.

  Until then, Clarry had not thought much about the future. Year after year, she had lived in the storybook world of childhood, the glowing adventures of summer in Cornwall, the long, dull chapters of life in between, bookmarked in the middle by Christmas. The illustrations for the stories had changed, it was true. Rupert grew taller, sometimes he even stepped out of the book completely. Peter went to boarding school, and when he came back he glanced around the old familiar pages of home as if they held new words. But all through the book Clarry hardly changed at all, and it never occurred to her to wonder, What will happen in the end?

  Until her father’s ‘Clarry, that’s enough’.

  And there she was! Pages of story turned over in wodges. Whole chapters skipped. Grown-up, and nothing before her but other people’s homes.

  Clarry did not spend much time staring at this bleak last page. She rushed up the two flights of stairs to Peter’s room and clattered in without knocking.

  ‘God,’ said Peter unwelcomingly, rolling away in bed.

  ‘How can I get away from the Miss Pinkses if Father won’t help me?’ demanded Clarry, shaking his back.

  Peter groaned and hunched under the covers.

  ‘You know what will happen to me if I don’t,’ said Clarry.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Yes, nothing. Forever and ever and ever. Like Miss Vane.’

  Peter shrugged.

  Clarry pulled away his pillow and his eiderdown and heaved at the thin mattress until it slid to the floor with Peter still on it. He seemed to be laughing, or shaking at least.

  ‘It’s not funny!’

  ‘There’ll be an exam,’ said Peter.

  ‘What?’

  ‘For that school Vanessa goes to.’

  ‘An exam?’

  ‘It’s miles away. Right across town, near their house. How would you even get there?’

  ‘Perhaps there are buses,’ suggested Clarry. ‘Anyway, I could walk. Do you really think there’s an exam?’

  ‘I’m cold. I feel awful. Help me up.’

  Clarry helped him lift his mattress back, shook up his pillows, smoothed his eiderdown, fetched the blankets from her own bed and piled them on top.

  ‘Wait,’ she told him, and went down to the kitchen, boiled a kettle and made tea. She stirred honey into it, wished for a lemon, and found one among the Christmas oranges. Mrs Morgan was there doing vigorous things with a pile of onions and a very large knife.

  She asked, ‘What’s to do?’

  ‘Peter’s got an awful cold. All shivery.’

  ‘Hot-water bottle,’ said Mrs Morgan, groping in the dresser cupboard to find one.

  ‘He hates them.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Sweat it out. There you are. That’ll warm him! Check the stopper and wrap it up in something soft. Father gone out?’

  ‘I think he might have. He was a bit cross not long ago. What are you cooking, Mrs Morgan?’

  ‘Onion broth, with barley to soften it. There’s a pair of chops for your father after, and you and His Majesty who doesn’t like hot-water bottles can have eggs whenever.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Clarry gratefully. Mrs Morgan’s cooking was unspectacular and only fairly reliable, but it had kept them alive for a long time now. ‘Soup will be just right for Peter. I liked cooking that chicken at Christmas. I should learn to cook properly.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ asked Mrs Morgan.

  ‘Then you needn’t always do it all by yourself. And we could make exciting things, like at Grandmother’s house in Cornwall. Saffron buns and apple dumplings and—’

  ‘I often make you a cake!’ interrupted Mrs Morgan, ponderously indignant.

  ‘Rough Cake’ Mrs Morgan called it. ‘I’ll make you a Rough Cake,’ she would say, and later it would appear, currants and raisins in a heavy fragrant slab with brown sugar sprinkled on top. Very sustaining. Delicious on hungry days.

  ‘I love your cake, Mrs Morgan,’ said Clarry. ‘It’s just the sort of thing I wish I could cook.’

  ‘I’ll show you, one of these days,’ said Mrs Morgan. ‘Get off up to your brother now, before we have pneumonia on our hands.’

  Clarry collected her things and went, though not fast enough for Peter, who complained, ‘You’ve been forever,’ as soon as she opened the door.

  ‘Ten minutes. Less. I made you tea with lemon and honey and you’re to put this under the blankets. You’ve got to sweat it out, Mrs Morgan said.’

  ‘What does she know?’

  ‘Lots of things we don’t. Peter, what about Vanessa’s school? Do you think I could really go there?’

  ‘You could if I helped you.’

  ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘Yes. Leave me alone a bit to think.’

  Clarry went back to the kitchen and made a cake with Mrs Morgan. They mixed it in the enamel basin usually used for washing dishes.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Clarry, who had not expected that.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Morgan, ‘it’s only a Rough Cake.’

  The Rough Cake was a success and neither smelt nor tasted of washing-up. Clarry and Mrs Morgan gazed at it with pride.

  ‘What else can I learn?’ asked Clarry.

  Mrs Morgan sighed and gave her a look. ‘I dare say Mr Morgan would show you a bit on his guitar,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Clarry. ‘Yes. One day that would be nice.’

  ‘For, you see,’ went on Mrs Morgan, ‘if I was to learn you like the things you was saying, fancy work, saffron buns and dumplings and the like, then what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll tell you, my girl! You’d be down here making them! You get too clever in this kitchen and you’ll be landed with it!’

  ‘Mrs Morgan?’

  ‘Yes, my dear?’

  ‘It’s not just cooking I want to learn.’

  ‘Course it isn’t. Nor was it with me.’

  ‘What did you want?’

  ‘Blacksmithing!’

  ‘BLACKSMITHING?’

  ‘Time was, Clarry, I could have taught you to shoe a horse! My father had a forge, and there was just me and my brother, and he was much younger. And nothing did he care about it. I started off holding the horses’ heads, and then I was on the bellows, and before I finished I could shoe a horse and what do you think of that?’

  ‘I never knew girls could!’ said Clarry, hugely impressed.

  ‘Girls can do anything, but they’re hardly ever let.’

  ‘Why did you stop shoeing horses? Because you married Mr Morgan?’

  ‘Because my brother got interested in the forge.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And when my father died it went to him: the forge and the cottage with the garden and the two pigs out the back and the old horse and the cart.’

  ‘How unfair!’

  ‘And my b
rother drank it all away and I went scrubbing and charring! But I’ve still a store of horseshoes, put away for special. Made them all myself.’

  Clarry flung herself into Mrs Morgan’s enormous arms and hugged her.

  ‘Us girls must stick together,’ said Mrs Morgan, hugging her back.

  Peter’s cold made his eyes and nose run, his head ache, his chest wheeze and his temper frightful. Clarry dosed him with lemon and honey, Vanessa sent butterscotch for his sore throat, the Bony One appeared one afternoon and visited the kitchen to boil up hot black liquorice water and Mrs Morgan cooked up vats of mutton soup, beef broth, stewed chicken, and gruel. Despite all this, he was still coughing when his new school term began.

  ‘I’ll tell Rupert how you are when I get back, shall I?’ asked the Bony One, when it became clear that he would have to leave without Peter.

  ‘Don’t bother, he won’t care,’ said Peter, and then, in a moment of humanity, seeing his friend’s disappointed face, ‘Yes, all right, if you like,’ and started coughing again.

  ‘Poor old Peter,’ said Clarry.

  ‘You should be pleased I can’t go,’ said Peter.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That exam.’

  Clarry had asked Vanessa, and found that Peter had guessed right. There was an exam. Vanessa had said, ‘Oh, that exam! But you could do it, Clarry. History questions. Maths. Some Shakespeare, Twelfth Night. It’s always Twelfth Night, everyone says. Scripture. I think that was all. And there will be the forms to sign, of course.’

  ‘What sort of forms?’

  ‘Entrance forms. For parents. I’ll go to the office and get them for you, if you like.’

  Vanessa had done this the next day and made the trip across town to deliver them. Now Peter demanded to read them.

  ‘I was going to show you when you were better,’ said Clarry.

  ‘I’ll have to go back to school when I’m better. Show me now.’

  ‘Father will have to sign them before I even begin.’

  ‘He never will. Give them to me!’