September Starlings

by Ruth Hamilton

His cheeks reddened. ‘’Cos I want to come, that’s why. Are you as daft as that mother of yours? “Where do you live, young man, who are your parents?” Anyway, there’s no need to ask me why. I do as I please, always have and always will.’

  There is something completely fascinating about a truly selfish person. I found myself drawn to him as a moth is attracted to a fatal flame, wanted to climb inside his head so that I might truly know him. Tommo loved himself completely, was a clever boy who was not easily satisfied, who did not tolerate fools. So he must have been an interesting person, or he would not have found himself so totally absorbing. While I processed these confused and confusing thoughts, I found my voice again. ‘I meant why do we have to meet in the bushes?’

  ‘Because your mother won’t like us seeing one another. I’ve met her sort before. She thinks she’s the bee’s knees, doesn’t she?’

  I shrugged, didn’t want to speak for or against the motion.

  ‘Well, she’ll only make a fuss. So we’ll meet in the bushes – right?’

  I didn’t know. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  He fixed his gaze on a point somewhere behind my head. ‘You like me, don’t you?’

  ‘Well … yes.’

  ‘So you’ll want to see me.’

  It was nice to have a boy wanting to see me. My world thus far had been populated by females, the biggest of which would now be twitching her curtains in spite of what the neighbours might say. Dad loved me, but he had no time for anyone. It might be fun to have a friend all to myself, someone who wasn’t a girl. ‘Will you bring Ginger?’

  The fire in his eyes roared with life, seeming to send out sparks as he glared at me. ‘Why? Do you want him for your boyfriend?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Well, he won’t be coming with me.’

  I swallowed, began to worry about Mother’s reaction if I didn’t go back soon. ‘What about Art and Enid and Irene?’

  ‘I’ll fetch nobody.’

  ‘Oh.’ My lips were dry, so I ran my tongue over them, but the dryness had gone right through me, into my mouth and right through to my soul. He frightened me, but I liked him. I liked him a lot. ‘Well, they’re all in the gang,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no gang.’ He rattled some things in his pockets, marbles or ballbearings, though Tommo seemed too mature for normal games. ‘If there is to be a gang, it’ll be the two of us. Just you and me, Laura. Just you and me.’

  I felt weak as I stood and watched him walk away. It was as if I had just been bought and paid for, as if the boy had actually begun to own me. Yet the positive side still appealed, the idea that I might be wanted just for myself.

  When my legs found strength, I walked back to the house and peeled the potatoes. Mother continued to rant and rave, carried on fretting about the packing, the cancelling of the milk, the number of people who needed notification of our new address.

  I poked out the eye of a potato and smiled to myself. Tommo loved me. And no-one in the whole wide world knew about it.

  Chapter Nine

  Living in the country was, at first, a bit of a bore. The local children were quieter than my contemporaries in town – even the St Mary’s girls had been rumbustious when compared to the simple souls who inhabited the village of Barr Bridge. At least, that was the impression I got early on in my career as a Barr Bridgeite. But country folk were deep, as my mother found out after a month or so.

  ‘She says these are the only potatoes she has.’ Three sad and greenish tubers lolled in the centre of our kitchen table. ‘We are surrounded by fields and farmers, but that dreadful woman has no decent produce on sale.’

  On later shopping expeditions, Mother was refused candles, semi-sweet biscuits, ready-chopped firewood and Craven A cigarettes. The cigarettes were the last straw. The war was over, the fug of Turkish tobacco had cleared, and my mother wanted her rights. ‘Go to that shop,’ she snapped at me. ‘And get whatever the woman will sell you.’ I managed, after very little effort on my part, to come home with candles, a bundle of firewood, half a pound of Marie biscuits and twenty Craven A.

  This meant war of another kind. Although I was not present during the battle, I understood that my mother had taken the shopkeeper to task. The village was agog with it all. It seemed that Liza McNally had taken no pains to hide the fact that she was too good for country life. She had never before cooked at a range that was both cast iron and geriatric, had never been forced to live with stone floors, had never patronized a shop as filthy and ill-kempt as Mrs Miles’s General Store. Mrs Miles had heard these vicious criticisms as they passed from one customer to another, and she chose to deal with the situation in her own way. So Mother got the treatment she deserved.

  ‘I asked for plums. I could see the plums in a basket by the door. But she would not sell them to me. They were spoken for, she said. John? Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Hmmph,’ grunted Dad from behind the Bolton Evening News. Now that he was ‘a success’, Mother often punctuated her lectures with a request for his opinion, and he was not best pleased by the intrusions.

  ‘So I asked her straight out, demanded to know why she treats me so badly. And the woman had the effrontery to say that she saves the better stuff for her regulars. So I told her that I might well become a regular, and she simply turned away and said something about not wanting regulars like me.’

  Dad had no comment to make, and I dipped a Marie into my tea.

  ‘Laura, don’t do that. Well, I don’t know how I’m going to manage, really. There’s no electricity – when are you bringing it into the house, John?’

  ‘Soon.’ His head was buried in the radio listings. He stood up, switched on the wireless, fiddled with a connection. ‘Didn’t you get the charged one brought back?’ He waved the paper at the battery, a huge square thing that was almost as big as the radio it served, twice as heavy as the dresser. ‘Didn’t the man deliver and collect today?’ Dad loved his radio.

  She threw up her hands in despair. ‘For goodness sake, I’ve had a boy here all afternoon trying to get a goat out of the coal shed. This is no laughing matter, Laura. And those hens from down the lane came strolling up here again, five of them dripping loose feathers all over the kitchen. That goat was black when it finally ran out to the yard. And it wrapped itself up in my sheets, so I had to start again. Have you any idea how long that copper takes to heat enough water for the dolly tub? And when the electricity comes, I’ll have one of those washing machines with automatic wringers. That Victorian thing is ruining my nails.’

  He looked at her, raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ve oiled the wringer,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I know you’ve oiled it, because most of the oil is on my best pillow slips. Laura, stop dipping those biscuits in your tea. I can’t carry on here, I really can’t.’

  He lowered himself into his favourite chair, an old wooden rocker that had been left behind by the previous householder. ‘Well, you can always go back to town, I suppose.’

  She stormed out in a huff. I watched him for a while as he reached across and fiddled with the wireless knobs, listened to his tut-tuts when he failed to get anything except the noise of half-hearted and power-starved static. Then I wandered outside and looked at my new stamping ground.

  The land that used to belong to Ravenscroft Farm had been split up and sold to neighbouring farmers. We still had a large lawn at the front, a piece of rough land at the side, and a vegetable garden at the back of the house. To the right of the house, alongside the patch of weed and thistle, were a few sheds and a greenhouse with broken windows. A path led away from this side piece to the barns where Dad was making his Cooling Tea. Most of the workers came from Bolton, were brought up each morning by coach, then taken back in the evening.

  Mother had made much of the workers’ travelling arrangements. ‘Laura could travel down on the coach in the morning when it goes back empty, then the driver could bring her home each afternoon.’ But Dad refused to allow this, as I would have been
early for school and late home every day. He was beginning to put his foot down, though they seldom argued. There was no fire in the marriage, so quarrelling was not necessary.

  During my first few days at Ravenscroft, I wandered about and studied things, because I’d never seen so much green stuff except in the Bolton parks, and even there the green was contained behind railings and gates. Here, it seemed to go on for ever, dipping and rising eastward into the mists that formed over foothills of the Pennine Chain. ‘That is the backbone of England,’ my father said to me on our first day. ‘In more ways than one, it’s the spine. We’re a fierce lot, Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen, built to last like the mountains that divide us. We fought one another for a long time, you know. There’s a white rose and a red rose, and we are the reds. That war never really ended. Somebody married somebody, then everybody pretended to be satisfied. But never cross a Yorkie and never expect him to pay his way. A Yorkie’s like a Scot with his pockets sewn up.’

  ‘Are they selfish, then, the people from over the mountains?’

  He smiled at me and placed a hand on my head. It always felt good, having his hand on my head, as if things were safer and surer while he touched me. ‘It’s a myth. Some Yorkshiremen are tight with their money and some aren’t. But the fact remains that we’re made of good stuff up here, so never regret your roots. There’s money down south, money and not much more. The Government keeps the south safe and out of trouble, because trouble down there would be trouble in Parliament’s back yard. So all the fretting and fuming goes on up here. We don’t know the difference between a depression and a boom, because ordinary folk here are usually poor no matter what the state of the country. But it’ll not last for ever. One day, the southerners will need us and we’ll be too busy feeding ourselves to worry over them and their fancy houses.’

  I felt so grown-up when he talked to me like this, when he told me about politics and money and people. ‘You don’t like them from London, then?’

  He chuckled. ‘I use them, Laurie. I use their money and their big ideas, pay them back a bit for their trouble. But on the whole, they’re nowt a pound.’

  This was really funny, because Dad hadn’t much of an accent and wasn’t given to the use of colloquial speech. I thought it was a shame that he had no respect for the people from the cities – the funeral men, as I called them. Like many from the north, he was proud and angry, had clear memories of poverty, filth, dying children and men who marched on the capital with empty bellies and no boots on their feet. Although I was sad about his anger, it was good to know that he felt strongly about something.

  He wasn’t around very often, so I explored the countryside with Anne. There were all kinds of creatures, slugs and frogs and creepy-crawlies, rabbits, hares, farm animals, dogs and cats. Solomon was still living with Anne, though she always called him ‘Laura’s cat’, so I still had no real pet of my own. Instead, I adopted everything I met, had a special affection for Monty, a billy goat from up the road. He used to live on our farm in one of the sheds, and he returned to base with a frequency that was monotonous and infuriating for my mother. She hated and feared him, but I fed him on vegetables from our garden and steered clear of his horns.

  Our house was wonderful. There was a huge kitchen with flag floors and a black-leaded range. This room stretched all the way across the back of the house, and we lived in it for much of the time. Mother made a few quips about our rustic existence, but she set about the business of cleaning up, scrubbed out an aged dresser, balanced some plates on a rack above the fire, scraped the dirt off a massive table with bulbous legs and drawers at each side for cutlery.

  When the kitchen was clean enough for her, she tackled the two front rooms, made one into a parlour and the other into a kind of study. Sometimes, Dad worked at a desk in the study, and Mother used the same room for her sewing, though never when Dad was working on account books. The sewing was not sensible stuff, as Mother’s seams were about as straight as a dog’s back leg, but she amused herself for a while with tapestry work, cross-stitched pictures of flowers and country cottages. I watched and waited, knew that the novelty would wear off eventually, wondered where she would go for some adventure.

  The upstairs of our house was in the roof, which made the bedrooms odd and exciting. There were two staircases, both of them narrow and tortuous. One led to my bedroom, and the other went up to a pair of interconnecting bedrooms where my parents slept. They no longer pretended to have a marriage, so Dad slept at the back of the house while Mother used the front room.

  I loved my bedroom. It had lots of odd little corners, big beams, a shiny wooden floor and two windows, one at the front and the other at the back of the farmhouse. I used to stand in the dormer and stare at the mountains, spent hours wondering about fierce Yorkshire folk with sewn-up pockets and white roses in their buttonholes.

  The bathroom was a nightmare. It housed a terrible bath with brown stains all over it and a single cold tap suspended from a bent lead pipe under the window. Above the bath sat a gas heater with a bad temper and an explosive cough. The farmer had been very proud of this acquisition, had demonstrated it to my father some months earlier while the sale was being negotiated. ‘He lit it,’ Dad said, ‘and it sent forth a long blue flame and a shower of sparks. The farmer’s face was black and his eyes looked terrified. I couldn’t remember whether he’d started out with eyebrows, but he had none after his adventure with the dragon. I think we’d better use a tin bath for now.’

  The tin bath was where Mother drew the line. Once a week, she travelled on a rickety bus to Bolton and went to the slipper baths. I am sure that she must have gone to the public bath house in disguise, probably with a scarf on her head and dark glasses covering her eyes. When she returned, she was happier for a while, could even be heard humming under her breath. There was no doubt in my mind that Mother had found some entertainment in town, though her temper was always back to normal within twenty-four hours. ‘Laura, get some coal for this fire. Laura, go to that awful shop for your father’s Bolton Evening News, and don’t dawdle on the way. Laura, lay the table, sweep the floor, peel these carrots, find me a tablet for this dreadful headache.’ She clouted me a few times, but the blows were almost half-hearted. I no longer crouched and cowered, refused to hide in the house when the marks of her blows shone bright on my face. As her power diminished, I relaxed, enjoyed my freedom.

  Every weekend, I waited at the bridge, looked for Tommo, felt disappointment when he didn’t arrive. Anne came with me, wondered why I lingered for so long in the same spot. I distracted her, played games, fell into the water, cut my head and got stitched up by the local doctor. And he still didn’t come.

  There seemed to be no poverty in the country. Everyone was robust and rosy-cheeked, no-one wore nit-caps, no-one sported heavy clogs with irons on the soles. There was no knock-a-door-and-run, no swinging from lamp posts, no fun. When I thought about it, there’d been no fun of that sort since I’d left the gang. And even snerchy Norma began to look vaguely interesting when viewed retrospectively. But gradually I grew used to the pace, slowed myself down, looked around until I found something to attract my butterfly attention. And I had Anne. Anne was the balm for any wounds I might have sustained during the lifting of roots. There were other compensations too, like a sky that was prettier, cleaner and bluer away from all the dust and smoke of a cotton town.

  We had no proper pavements near the farm, just muddy dirt tracks and clinkered lanes that seemed to wander in circles that had lost any sense of direction they might once have had. The village street was cobbled, while the narrow pavements consisted of very uneven flags with steps here and there when the single thoroughfare dipped too deeply for paving stones.

  There was just one shop, the place where Mother was not welcome, and it seemed to sell everything from postage stamps to lamp oil. The keeper, Mrs Miles, wore fingerless gloves all the year round and sported a long black skirt that swept the floor as she walked. The shop was so dirty th
at Anne and I decided that Mrs Miles’s skirt served two purposes – one to cover her thin, bent frame, the other to gather the worst of the mess from her filthy floors.

  This remarkable lady was a relic from bygone days, the sort of figure that was usually seen only in books about the Victorian era. Her hair was scraped back so tightly that it stretched the skin of her forehead, made it almost smooth, though the flattened wrinkles still showed and looked as if they had been drawn with a greyish pencil. She would have been tall except for the stoop, and the rounded shoulders were always covered by a fringed shawl that dangled in butter, sugar and any other commodity that required weighing and bagging. Anne and I liked her because she was weird – her individuality appealed to our romantic souls.

  After a very short time, Mother refused outright to be insulted by the keeper of the village store, so she travelled to Bolton more frequently. The Bolton coach ran twice a week on market days, and my mother sat in its ramshackle front seat as it bounced to and from the metropolis on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

  Auntie Maisie, a gregarious soul, was quite content to do her buying in Barr Bridge. The village took to her, and she was quickly on nodding terms with most of the inhabitants, on cup-of-sugar terms with her immediate neighbours in the row of cottages that climbed up the hill towards our house. As Auntie Maisie’s cottage was fastened to Mrs Miles’s shop, she never wanted for anything, even when the store was closed. So sunny was my aunt’s nature, that she soon melted old Ma Miles’s frost, became the aged crone’s nearest and dearest within a fortnight. ‘She’s mortallious troubled with her back, poor soul,’ said Auntie Maisie a few days after our arrival in the district. ‘So I’ve got her some of John’s liniment.’ Auntie Maisie would have fitted in anywhere with the possible exception of hell, as she was a good Christian woman.

  Of course, we had to go to school. Until now, education had been one of the elements in the tragedy we called life, a necessary poison that could not have been sweetened with a thousand sugar canes. I’d made friends among the holy women at St Mary’s, but the endless lists of places and battles and French verbs had been too much for a mind already saturated by images found in Heidi and Little Women. Because of my grounding in a ‘crammer’ school, the Barr Bridge centre of education made easy going for me. I became lazy and complacent, concentrated on the social aspect of school, learned little or nothing in my short time at St Mark’s.