The Skylarks' War

by Hilary McKay

  ‘Don’t know. If you like.’

  ‘Wednesday, then, at seven o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Violet, and she didn’t say another word all the way back to the shop, where, just before she opened the door, she hugged Clarry hard and said, ‘Sorry!’

  So Clarry went home with a new friend, as well as a new dress, and the following week she wore the dress and the pink beret and the successfully washed lace stockings to Peter’s speech day. There she watched as her brother limped on to the stage eight times to deafening applause, and collected prizes that included the gilt cup for Best Science Essay, the debating society’s Voice of the Year award, an enormous dictionary in two volumes (which was the traditional gift to the editor of the school magazine) and an Oxford scholarship.

  ‘I tried to make Father come,’ whispered Clarry, when she had a moment with Peter.

  ‘Never mind him,’ said Peter, not whispering at all. ‘I knew he wouldn’t from the start.’

  ‘He . . .’

  ‘Just for once, Clarry, could you not make any excuses for him? I like your hat!’

  Clarry, who had been so anxious to get everything right that she had brought his postcard with her for reference, sighed with relief. ‘And my dress?’ she asked. ‘It’s new as well.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. I didn’t notice it. Yes. Good dress.’

  ‘Vanessa liked it too,’ said Clarry happily. ‘Did you hear her whistle through her fingers when you went up onstage?’

  ‘Was that Vanessa?’ Peter grinned.

  ‘Yes, she’s over there with Simon. Come and say hello.’

  Vanessa flung her arms around Peter the moment she caught sight of him. ‘You and Simon!’ she cried. ‘What a pair! Let’s take Clarry round the school now you’ve finished. She’s never been here before. Where shall we show her first?’

  ‘The chimney we cleared with her rocket,’ said Simon. He had collected nothing onstage but the leaver’s certificate that everyone had been given.

  ‘Is he all right?’ Clarry asked Peter privately.

  ‘Of course,’ Peter replied, knowing that Rupert’s spare key to the cricket pavilion hung round his bony friend’s neck.

  Then, while other guests were in the library drinking sherry with the headmaster, Peter, Simon and Vanessa raced Clarry around the common room, the quad, the stage on which the Three Little Maids had sung together, and the chapel, inside and out, so she could marvel at the height of the pinnacled roof where Rupert had long ago stood in triumph, supported by nothing but sunlight and cheek.

  ‘I wish he was here now,’ said Clarry, and found she was clutching Simon’s hand.

  ‘So do I,’ he said.

  THIRTY

  Simon Enlists

  Simon Bonnington, Bonners, the Bony One, the one who hated outdoors, found football painful, detested mud, had secret bedsocks all through boarding school, who once wrote a letter to the Old Fish, the headmaster, about the lack of soap in the school toilets, who could have had almost another year brushing down Lucy, writing bad poetry, staring into the mirror, tidying his bedroom and annoying his relations . . . went ahead and enlisted in the army instead of doing any of those things.

  When they asked him his age, after weighing him (132 pounds), measuring him (6' 3") and doing various other checks to see if he was real, he said, ‘Nineteen.’

  The doctor peered up at Simon’s great height and stubbled chin (he had shaved twice a day since he was fourteen but it was still never enough), and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘All right, twenty-one,’ said Simon, grinning.

  ‘What have you been up to, then?’

  ‘I don’t know, really,’ said Simon, truthfully enough. He had considered this question beforehand. Did Lucy count as farmwork? Did ‘Three Little Maids’ count as stage?

  ‘I live with my mum,’ he said, and then, having nothing to lose, ‘And my great-aunt! And my sister.’

  Simon the Bony One sensed amusement in his audience, which he never could resist. Also, nervousness made him reckless. What else could he offer?

  ‘I can sing,’ he suggested. ‘I’m a . . . a . . . a . . . bloody good singer! Don’t you want me?’

  But it was all right; they did.

  Start to finish, the whole thing, including medical and a short (but much applauded) rendering of ‘On a Tree by a River’ (‘I sing it with my mum’), took eight minutes.

  ‘Keep your head down, dicky bird,’ they advised him as he left.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Peter’s Plans and Clarry’s Dreams

  Peter’s father said, ‘A doctor! A medic! A medical degree! Where on earth do you get your ideas from?’

  Peter thought of his mother, whom no one had been able to help, of the soldiers returning with injuries that would be with them for life, of his own badly set leg. However, he had lived too long with his father’s complete lack of interest to try to explain these things.

  ‘Just thought I might,’ he said, and shrugged.

  ‘And how do you propose to manage? You won’t be earning for years!’

  Peter said quite the opposite. He’d a job for the summer already: porter at the local military hospital, with a letter of introduction from Oxford asking if he could spend his free time observing on the wards.

  ‘Well, it seems that I have no say in the matter,’ said his father peevishly. ‘I did hope you’d find something meaningful to do. We could have found a place for you in the office, in time. I hope it’s not just another of your fads!’

  Their conversations always seemed to end with one or the other of them slamming out of the room. This time it was Peter, who stomped upstairs and related the conversation to Clarry.

  ‘I used to think you’d work in a museum,’ said Clarry. ‘Researching, and writing books. Perhaps Father did too.’

  ‘He didn’t. He thought I’d work in his beastly office.’

  ‘Oh, well, he can’t make you,’ said Clarry. ‘I expect you’ll be a good doctor. I’m so glad you’ll be here this summer. I’m glad you’re here now! Miss Vane brought us a great bag of watercress this morning, and a poor little duck!’

  ‘A poor little what?’

  ‘Duck. A duck to cook. To celebrate you doing so well. It’s still got all its feathers and beak and feet and everything. It still is a duck. Will you come and help me?’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Stand guard while I bury it in the churchyard.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Peter.

  The summer passed in dust, thunderstorms, food queues, short tempers, work and trying not to think. Fear lurked in the undergrowth of the days, waiting for the moments when the noise of everyday living died down. Then – while Peter kept watch in the night-time corridors, or Vanessa paused between dances to ease her aching feet, or Clarry hung, pen poised over a blank sheet of letter paper – then the fear would come. Where was Rupert? Clarry wished she had someone to talk to about him. Peter was no good; it only stirred up the old guilt that Rupert was enduring a life he had escaped. Vanessa was elusive whenever his name was mentioned.

  Violet was the best. Violet asked, ‘Did he like the ink?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘Have you got a picture of him?’

  ‘Yes.’ Clarry reached automatically into her bag for the one she carried everywhere, cut small enough to fit into a little card frame.

  ‘Coo, lovely,’ said Violet. ‘Why’s he not in uniform?’

  ‘It was before. In Cornwall.’

  ‘Was it cloudy in Cornwall?’

  ‘No, it’s steam from a train.’

  ‘Who’s he looking at?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Well!’ said Violet. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t write him . . . Oh, never mind! I liked that Red Cross thing you took me to. I’ve done two pairs of socks already and stuffed them full of messages! And I heard there’s girls needed on the trams and I’ve applied. I know I shouldn’t say it, but I quite like this war. Th
ere’s more to do. Do you think it’s really so bad over there, as some people say?’

  ‘Yes, I think it probably is,’ said Clarry. She had found the newspapers in the library now, and had no illusions left.

  ‘Still, you have to carry on,’ said Violet cheerfully.

  It was true. They kept on doing ordinary things. They coped with the endless shortages in the shops, treasure-hunting in the backs of cupboards for things they had never known mattered before, like a forgotten packet of tea, or sugar or rice. A triumphant box of lavender soap showed up just in time for Miss Vane’s birthday.

  ‘I hope she didn’t give it to us,’ said Peter.

  ‘She’ll be glad to get it back if she did,’ said Clarry practically.

  They were both busy that summer. The Grace children no longer needed extra coaching, but their mother had asked Clarry to stay on for the school holidays. Peter was at the hospital day and night, hobbling down the corridors pushing trolleys and wheelchairs, or shadowing the doctors and nurses. Sometimes, scrubbed up, he hovered at the back of an operating room. In between shifts he found a quiet corner and made his way through as much as he could of the reading list sent out from Oxford. He often woke with a jump over a pile of notes, or a textbook.

  Clarry was thinking of Oxford too. She arranged a day off with Mrs Grace, put on her grey-striped dress and her raspberry beret, and travelled there with Miss Fairfax.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Clarry Visits Oxford

  ‘Nothing is the same,’ Miss Fairfax warned Clarry. ‘There are soldiers billeted everywhere. My college is a hospital – I can’t take you in. They put us up in a little corner of one of the men’s places. I’m going to show you as much as I can, and introduce you to a great friend.’

  And so she did, introducing Clarry to the Principal of the College, saying, ‘Miss Penrose, meet Miss Penrose!’

  The Miss Penroses looked at each other and laughed in surprise at their shared surname, and then Clarry was rushed around libraries and common rooms, in and out of a punt, and back to college for tea with students who had stayed behind to work through the summer. Nobody there thought it was odd to like Latin, her raspberry-pink beret was much admired and there was a lot of hopeful talk about after the war. Clarry noticed how, unlike at home, they talked about it as if it really would end, had to end, could do nothing else but end.

  Then colleges would fill up again, and there would be good academic work to be done, by women as well as men. Especially by women, now it had been seen what they could do. Everyone spoke as if Clarry would quite naturally be coming to join them.

  ‘Bring your bike!’ they advised. ‘And your lovely pink hat!’

  ‘So,’ said Miss Fairfax on the train home. ‘Two years, Clarry, and then it could be your turn. You’d better get down to some real work now! Can that brother of yours start you on Greek, or had it better be me?’

  ‘Greek?’

  ‘Oh, yes! They’ll examine you in Greek and Latin and maths the moment you set a nose through the door! Always supposing you’re invited to that door in the first place! Still, we’ve made a start. Everything your brother did easily through school, you will have to do the difficult way. Which will toughen you up wonderfully, so let us not lament. No more Grace children next term, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Mrs Grace doesn’t need me anyway,’ said Clarry, a little ruefully. ‘The twins are all caught up with work, and they can take care of Robbie after school too, I expect.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Miss Fairfax. ‘Then you’d better make that dress last and hang on to your hat! Now then, Greek: recite after me: alpha, beta, gamma, delta . . .’

  For a little while they had both of them forgotten about the war.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Clarry’s Butterflies

  However, the war was still there; the Western Front still stretched its monstrous smile across the battered lands. Rupert, back in Flanders, had a fleeting few minutes of awful, clear-eyed sanity, during which he wrote a letter to Clarry, the first one for months.

  Were they real, those summers? There used to be skylarks. There used to be green waves. There used to be buns with raspberry jam. There used to be grass and quietness. Is anything left how it was before? So many things are gone. Are you still the Clarry who sent butterflies? Or have you vanished too?

  Rupert knew now that he should have taken more notice of the grass and quietness. Thick, wild grass, springy with life. The clean smell of it. And the quietness. So quiet that you could hear a wasp shredding wood for its paper nest, so quiet that birdsong could wake you from a dream, that a pony’s hooves sounded loud and a steam train pulling into a sunlit station was a glorious clattering, hissing roar.

  ‘Clarry,’ he said out loud, and for one moment the grass felt close enough to touch.

  Peter was at home when Rupert’s message arrived, which was a miracle, because he was usually in Oxford. He saw Clarry’s face light up at the sight of Rupert’s handwriting, and then he saw the lightness fade, as she read.

  ‘I’ve always written to him every week,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if he gets my letters, though. He doesn’t write like he did. He hasn’t replied for ages. I thought he’d forgotten us.’

  ‘Not forgotten,’ said Peter, his mind going back to his early weeks at boarding school when it had seemed to him that the only way of surviving was to numb the memory of any other life. ‘He perhaps just didn’t let himself remember.’

  ‘He sounds so far away.’

  Peter hugged her, less awkwardly than in the past. ‘He’s still alive, anyway,’ he said, and did not add, as he once would have done, ‘or was.’

  ‘What shall I say? Help me, Peter.’

  Peter looked down at the letter again. ‘Tell him that those summers were real,’ he said at last. ‘Tell him how we think of him every day. Tell him you haven’t vanished. Make him believe it. He wants to believe it.’

  Peter paused, and looked at Clarry’s anxious face. She wrote every week, she had told him, but perhaps words were not enough. A photograph? he wondered. Would she look the same Clarry in a photograph?

  ‘Send him a butterfly,’ he said.

  ‘A butterfly? To France? A butterfly when things are so terrible?’

  ‘You never sent a swallowtail.’

  ‘I was saving it for in case.’

  ‘Now is in case,’ said Peter.

  The butterflies that Clarry had once sent to Peter at school were three-dimensional models, as close as she had been able to come to a real butterfly. Their bodies were made of carved matchsticks wound round with embroidery silk, their antennae and legs were varnished black cotton, their painted wings were coloured on top and beneath. They had never been quick to make, even when Clarry had had all the materials to hand and plenty of time to do it. Peter was back at Oxford before she reached the painting-of-the-wings stage on Rupert’s swallowtail.

  ‘Doll’s-house games,’ said her father, disgusted at this apparent return to childhood, but for once Clarry did not try to explain.

  Autumn 1917

  THIRTY-FOUR

  A Dog Called Rupert

  Simon the Bony One reached France by way of a ship from Southampton in the autumn of 1917.

  I’m here, he wrote to Rupert the day he arrived, crouched on a crate of tinned beef that looked like it had been abandoned by the roadside for years. I can see now why no one says much about it at home. I keep thinking I see you. It would be nice to bump into you soon.

  Had he said too much? Nothing was private in the army except the space inside your head. If you died, they got your letters out of your pockets and read them. And these last few days he’d started talking in his sleep again, it seemed. ‘Who’s Rupert?’ they’d asked, but he got out of that, quick as a flash. ‘My dog,’ he’d replied. ‘Golden Lab.’ He’d turned the talk to dogs very successfully. Dog stories had come pouring out from a dozen listeners. You were allowed to love your dog.

  ‘You were shouting for your dog again
last night,’ his neighbour remarked a few days later.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, completely casual. ‘I dream about him a lot. I dream he’s lost.’

  ‘I dream I’m lost,’ said his neighbour, and Simon nodded and said, ‘Yes, I do that too.’

  Back to the letter. How not to sound desperate.

  France seems a bit busy, he wrote.

  It was a bit busy. Miles back from the lines, the ground throbbed with the pounding of the guns at the front. It was terrible seeing the horses, knee-deep, toiling, their carts slipping sideways. They were moving back the wounded as fast as they could.

  Never for one moment did Simon wonder why he’d come. Nor was it worse than he’d thought it would be. He’d guessed it would be very nearly unendurable, and it very nearly was. His feet were agony. They didn’t seem to make boots his size. Already he’d seen things that he knew he’d never ever tell. A cartload of dead men. Loose-limbed, turned blackish. He hadn’t known that happened.

  ‘They’re all Australian,’ someone said, as if that explained anything.

  He’d never thought of grave-digging, but then he’d never thought of rum. It was very helpful stuff, he decided. He was nearer to Rupert than he’d been for years.

  It rained and rained.

  Three days after landing they sent him to the front. He had a pack weighing nearly sixty pounds on his back, and a rifle that he’d fired only half a dozen times. Round his neck was Rupert’s spare key to the cricket pavilion, along with his dog tags, so they’d know who he was when he died. The dog tags were made of asbestos, so they wouldn’t burn if he burned. There was a red one to be taken off his body and a green one to be left on. Whenever he reached the point when he believed he could not stand the misery for a single hour longer, he thought of Rupert, who had stuck it out for more than two years.

  Peter was now at Oxford studying biomedical sciences, the consequence of jumping off a moving train, an adaptable brain and accidentally running into the Regius professor of medicine while getting a photograph copied. He was so busy he hardly had time to look up from his work, but when the news came that Simon was going to France he spared a moment to drop his head on his arms and remember his friend. A long letter came from Clarry; he could picture her writing it, in her room at the top of the cold, narrow house.