The Skylarks' War

by Hilary McKay

  Very stupid indeed, thought Rupert, furious with himself. Not that it wasn’t true. The horses were looked after, as far as anyone could – rubbed down, watered, fed (although food was always short and sawdust was mixed in with their rations to make them go a bit further). He’d seen people hug them often. He hugged them himself, breathing in the comforting smell of horse. There were hundreds of them working out here. They dragged supplies, camp equipment, heavy guns, sandbags, ambulances and each other’s dead bodies. There were corpses of horses rotting in spinneys, in ditches and among the churned-up remains of cabbage fields. If you got close enough, you could see the pale bone round their eye sockets and along the length of their forelegs. Their teeth were always bared, as if their last thought had been to lunge in futile fury. Their barrel bodies were full of rats. Rupert, who had not prayed with any conviction since he was seven, now prayed, ‘Oh, God, not Lucy.’

  His grandfather had changed his mind completely about war.

  He was no longer furious, he was proud, glad that Rupert was not skulking in Oxford, hiding behind books. He wrote that the patriotism of the young men of today was the finest thing he had witnessed in his entire lifetime. He wrote that if he could he would be there too, but since he couldn’t, well, perhaps Rupert could look out for a familiar bright brown pony coming up the lines! Of course, at fourteen hands, Lucy was a bit under what the army wanted, but she was a good sturdy pony and if she could not pull a gun, she could rattle along a canteen or a field ambulance, doing her bit. He was going to offer her anyway.

  Your grandmother is not so keen, he had written. She says at Lucy’s age she is much too old, but I dare say Lucy and I will talk her round!

  Fool! thought Rupert viciously, but he did not mean his grandfather.

  The horses, as well as being always hungry, were perpetually uneasy. After all, they had been rushed to this miserable new existence as fast as the men, and without a word of explanation. It was best not to catch the look in their eyes. It was best not to think about them with any emotion at all, if possible. Rupert wished he had not asked the reason for the evening firing from the gunners. Ammunition was so short they could fire for only a few minutes a day. So they waited until just before nightfall, in order to target the German horse transport . . .

  Rupert was thankful Clarry didn’t know about that.

  It was late spring now, nearly summer. The flies were dreadful. Along the front line the trenches were being reinforced with barbed wire and sandbag parapets, propped up with timber. The duckboards that made tracks were being repaired or replaced. Two hundred yards away, across the ruined landscape of no-man’s-land, the Germans were doing the same. Something big was going to happen very soon, everyone knew, and everyone wondered where they would be when it began. Nobody stayed in the front-line trenches for long. The pattern varied, but at present it seemed to be a week at the front, and then a few days back in camp, where they cleaned kit and drilled and caught up on sleep. There wasn’t much sleep at the front, even though there were bunkers now and then, dug into the sides of trenches. These were lantern-lit, earth-smelling caves, blue with the cigarette smoke that hung in the air. Everyone smoked. It was comforting and it covered a multitude of smells. There were unburied bodies in no-man’s-land, too far out to collect, and too long dead. They were slowly sinking into the earth, and they had been there so long that they were no longer shocking.

  This time last year, thought Rupert, I was still at school, and now I don’t find unburied corpses shocking. I use them as landmarks.

  He was still writing his letters home, with less and less to say.

  He wrote to the thin girl (her name was Elizabeth):

  I think of you every time someone’s hat blows off and goes rolling away, and whenever I hear an out-of-tune piano, and whenever we have lemon-curd tarts for tea. You will be pleased to hear that in the whole time that I have been here I have never seen a single spider, and so of course I am quite safe . . .

  Elizabeth thought, He must be tired; he’s gabbling. And, what’s more, he’s mixing me up with someone else. I’ve never minded spiders. I wonder how many girls he writes to. Not that it matters. She wrote back, with great compassion, Stay safe, Rupert, and sent him peppermints and chocolate.

  Rupert wrote to Vanessa:

  I meant to tell you about a place in a village we came through. We sold them tinned beef and tobacco and knobbly socks and they sold us red wine and very good sausages. ‘What’s in the sausages?’ I asked, and the woman said, ‘Garlic, rosemary, sage and pepper, and vilains garçons allemands. Naughty German boys!’

  Is that funny? wondered Vanessa. I suppose it is; I’m just in a mood. I think he’s forgotten I’m working in a hospital full of men back from the front. I’ll remind him.

  Drlng Rp, today 32 bedpans sluiced and scrubbed, 12 Mackintosh sheets as above, 3 stockings left unladdered (all different shades of black unluckily), 2 slices of Victoria sponge – jam very thin and no cream at all, 1 fall on B.T.M. – slipped on wet floor in sluice room, 26 dressings changed, 3 marriage proposals, 4 hours’ sleep last night, 0 mention of spiders in your latest, thank gdness for that, hd begun to dread opening. Simon and Clarry are up to something wicked. Gd nght, swt drms, may flghts of angls etc. VnSa xx

  Last of all, Rupert wrote:

  Wonderful Clarry, the rain here is wetter than English rain. I am getting severely trickled on. You might send me a small handkerchief for dabbing the drips from my neck. The other thing I would like, if you have a moment, is a magic carpet. Remember how you made one in Cornwall with the old landing rug, by stuffing the lining with feathers and flowers and setting fire to the corners? Baffling that it wouldn’t fly but probably for the best since you constructed it on a cliff top. I realize now that if you had sprinkled it with eau de cologne and a very small amount of gunpowder you would have had better luck. I would try to make one here, but unluckily no access to either eau de cologne or the right kind of feathers. Don’t let them send Lucy here, just don’t. Love to everyone, Rupert.

  Summer 1915

  NINETEEN

  Lucy

  The second letter arrived on Saturday morning. Two letters about Lucy in two days. Clarry became very still as she read.

  Simon, who had taken upon himself the Saturday morning task of cleaning the fireplaces, saw something was wrong and asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s from Rupert,’ said Clarry, and her father overhead and asked, ‘Rupert? Quite the family hero, I gather, these days. Is he well?’

  ‘I think so. He says it’s raining. He mostly writes jokes.’

  ‘Ah,’ said her father, and hurried away, as if fearing he might have to listen to them.

  ‘He’s written about Lucy again,’ said Clarry, holding out her letter to Simon. ‘Look!’

  ‘I’ve been doing the grates,’ he said, rubbing ashy smudges on to his trousers.

  ‘Never mind that. Just read it!’ Clarry pushed Rupert’s letter into his red bony hands and noticed that they were suddenly trembling.

  ‘He’s not telling you a lot of things,’ said Simon, after a moment.

  ‘I know. I know it’s not as nice as he pretends.’

  ‘Nice,’ repeated Simon, shaking his head solemnly. ‘No.’

  ‘I think I’d better write back straight away and say not to worry about Lucy. That would help.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I’ve got a sort of friend who knows about horses. At least, he must, because he’s got a horse. Jester. I often see him about the streets. Mr King, he drives a rag-and-bone cart.’

  ‘The one who told you how to clean a chimney!’ said Simon suddenly. ‘I remember!’

  ‘Yes, him. Perhaps he would help. Perhaps there would be room in Jester’s stable for Lucy too. Then Jester could have some days off pulling. He’s very old.’

  ‘But how would you get Lucy here?’

  ‘Jester came across Devon in a horsebox on a train.’

  ‘You’d have to steal he
r first!’

  ‘Not steal! Never mind that just now. The first thing is to write to Rupert. Wait!’

  Clarry found a pen and writing paper and began.

  Dear Rupert, don’t worry any more about Lucy . . .

  Clarry paused and looked up at Simon. ‘Are you helping?’

  ‘Of course. Anything.’

  Simon and I are going to Cornwall today. By the time you get this Lucy will be safe somewhere else. I will send you the handkerchief for the rain trickles next time I write to you . . .

  She looked up into Simon’s dark eyes. ‘That’s just a jokey bit so he knows we can manage,’ she explained.

  He nodded, understanding.

  Simon sends his love . . .

  ‘You do, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  And so do I,

  Clarry

  ‘Can I write my own name?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Simon C. Bonnington, wrote Simon the Bony One carefully, and added Bonners in brackets.

  ‘Give me the pen and I’ll do the envelope. I’ve done it so often I know it by heart. Wait!’ She put kisses at the end of her message. ‘I always do,’ she told Simon, offering him the pen.

  ‘I’d better not,’ he said, smiling a little. ‘Now, listen. You post that, and then go and look for your friend with the horse. I’ll go to the station and find out about tickets. Meet me back here as soon as you can.’

  ‘Rupert sent some money. I don’t know if it will be enough.’

  ‘I’ve got some too, and just in case I’ll . . . I’ll pawn Dad’s watch!’ said Simon, and waited for Clarry to protest at such recklessness, but instead she said, ‘Oh, what a good idea! And I’ve got one too we could use.’

  ‘Not like this one,’ Simon said, fumbling in his pocket. He held it out to show her, and Clarry saw that it was heavy and gold, a fat, gold pocket watch on a brown plaited lace. ‘He gave it me to look after just before he went away.’

  ‘Would he mind?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind if I were him. I’ll do it on the way to the station. Bring yours, though! We’ll need it for the train times.’

  Clarry nodded, picked up her precious silver watch and hurried after him out of the front door.

  ‘Good luck!’ she called as he set off for the station, and she wasted a moment to watch him hurry away; in great lanky, clumsy strides, as if he wore badly fitting seven-league boots.

  ‘Good luck,’ he called back, half turning, before walking into a lamp post, staggering a little, and then vanishing round the corner.

  Clarry didn’t have good luck. It was easy enough to find Mr King, but persuading him to look after Lucy turned out to be impossible.

  ‘No, no, no!’ he said, walking backwards with his hands in the air. ‘Not ever! Not on your life! Them Sunday School prizes is one thing! The books had your name in, I could see they were yours. But nothing else! Not after the piano and the brass table! How’d I be sure the horse wasn’t stolen?’

  ‘She would just be borrowed,’ pleaded Clarry.

  ‘Borrowed, my hind foot!’ said Mr King rudely.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to have another horse to help Jester?’

  ‘And have him standing idle with his hocks all swelled from nothing to do? Jester earns his keep on the streets, same as me, and that’s that, so good day to you, missy, and mind you keep honest!’

  ‘He was no help at all,’ Clarry told Simon, half angry, half tearful, when he arrived back at the house.

  ‘Would a field do?’ asked Simon. ‘I should have thought of it before but I was in such a hurry to get to the station. It’s just a field, no stable or anything, but it’s out at my great-aunt’s, where my mum’s staying. It belongs to the cottage.’

  ‘A field for Lucy? It would be perfect!’

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Simon. ‘Shove some things in a bag and we’ll get the tickets. I pawned Dad’s watch, got another two pounds. The Cornwall train’s in half an hour and the first one back with a horsebox is Monday.’

  Nothing would have worked without Simon, Clarry wrote to Rupert two days later. He thought of the field and when we got Lucy back here he unloaded her at the station and walked her all the way. It was nine miles. We stayed in Cornwall on Saturday and Sunday night and we pretended to Grandfather that Simon had just come with me to visit. But Grandmother knew the truth, and she was so pleased. She helped us get Lucy to the station early on Monday morning, and she said she would manage Grandfather.

  ‘Now perhaps I will be able to sleep at night,’ she said.

  Before I left, she did something she never had before – she kissed me and she said, ‘Dear Clarry.’ And she said that Simon was a wonderful friend, and he is. Will you write to Simon, please, Rupert? He pawned his father’s watch so we had enough money, and I could see he was worrying about what his great-aunt would say. Vanessa told me that once his great-aunt said he was soft because he cried when his father went away.

  Clarry had almost cried herself when the train left the little Cornish station, so early in the morning. She waved and waved to her grandmother, and Grandmother waved back, alone on the platform with the empty pony trap behind her, and if Clarry could have done one thing then, it would have been to stop the train and leap out and rush back into her arms.

  ‘I liked it there,’ Simon said, when she finally retreated from the window and went to sit beside him. ‘That house and the moor and the sea.’ He had spent the weekend being as invisible as possible, but Grandmother had given him Rupert’s room, and Clarry had taken him round the old treasured landmarks: the sunny hollow where Rupert had once found a baby adder, picked it up and been promptly bitten.

  ‘He said it hardly hurt at all, and walked all the way home,’ Clarry told Simon. ‘But by the time he got back we had to cut his sleeve off his jacket to get his arm out and it was swollen for a week.’

  She showed him too where the swallows always nested, the spot where Peter had jumped from the train, the bathing place by the cliff path and the shop where they bought ice creams.

  ‘One day we should come back,’ said Simon, and Clarry said, ‘Yes, you and Vanessa, and Peter and me, and Rupert. All of us.’

  ‘And Lucy,’ said Simon. ‘Did Rupert love Lucy a lot?’

  Clarry nodded, suddenly unable to speak. Simon sat twisting the empty watch lace in his big bony hands. His long giraffe face was patchy with shadows, and presently he closed his eyes.

  TWENTY

  Sausage Rolls

  Thanks, I knew I could ask you. R.

  That was all Clarry heard from Rupert, scrawled on a postcard. Peter told her that Simon the Bony One had a postcard too. It had arrived at school, said Peter, and Simon had not shown it to anyone, just tucked it in his pocket and walked away.

  For a long time after that no one heard anything from Rupert. Clarry’s birthday passed with, for the first time ever, no acknowledgement from Rupert at all.

  ‘Don’t be angry with him,’ said Peter unexpectedly.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Clarry. She wrote to Rupert every week, with news of Lucy, gleaned second-hand from Vanessa or Simon, and of the grandparents in Cornwall, who, her grandmother reported, were ‘managing very well with an elderly grey donkey’. Without these things Clarry would have been stuck for much cheerfulness to put into her letters. There was no Cornish holiday that year, and it was a relief to Clarry when the new school term began in September. The war news was dark and there seemed nothing they could do to help. Miss Vane knitted feverishly, and when she wasn’t knitting she was busy at a Red Cross centre, packing parcels to go abroad. Mrs Morgan found a job in a munitions factory, cooking in the canteen. She still appeared occasionally, however: she turned up one afternoon when Vanessa happened to be visiting.

  ‘Oh, what bliss to see you!’ exclaimed Vanessa, hugging Mrs Morgan, who always filled her with a hilarious sort of joy. ‘How are you, Mrs M? Are you very busy?’

  ‘I’
ll give you “Mrs M”, my fine lady!’ said Mrs Morgan. ‘And yes, I’m busy, but in the wrong place. I’m not suited at all in that canteen. I’d rather be filling shells.’

  ‘Perhaps you soon will be,’ said Clarry comfortingly.

  ‘I’d better be,’ said Mrs Morgan. ‘And if it’s not soon it will be never at all. If you ask me it’s only a matter of weeks before the whole place goes bang!’

  ‘Then you should stay safe where you are!’ said Vanessa.

  ‘If it goes, it goes,’ said Mrs Morgan philosophically. ‘Canteen’s attached, so it would make no difference. Mr Morgan’s in the thick of it, stacking and crating.’

  ‘Poor Mr Morgan!’

  ‘He’s having a high old time,’ said Mrs Morgan, sniffing. ‘All those young women that’s there, it’s one long party for him! And how’s your blessed father, Clarry? Still full of the joys of spring?’

  ‘He’s very well, thank you,’ said Clarry cautiously. ‘I don’t see him often. There’s an old-fashioned restaurant near his office where he mostly goes out for supper. I can’t seem to cook the sort of food that he likes.’

  ‘None of us can cook the sort of food that we like these days,’ observed Mrs Morgan severely. ‘And what about your own meals?’

  ‘We have hot dinners at school,’ said Clarry, ‘so it doesn’t matter so much about me.’

  ‘Rubbish and nonsense! Doesn’t matter, my hind foot!’ exclaimed Mrs Morgan, and dived into her shopping bag. ‘Sausage rolls!’ she said triumphantly, producing a paper-wrapped bundle. ‘They was left over at the canteen, being a bit darker than people like. Now don’t go wasting them! I dare say your friend gets fed at her hospital . . .’