by Dirk Bogarde
I really did want to give her a bonk on the nose, but Lally gave me one of her looks, and I just shrugged, and Lally said the mice were miles away in the lean-to, on a high shelf, and that Minnehaha was too old to ‘caper about mousing’. It was kind of her, but I wasn’t altogether certain. I didn’t like the flat ears bit. But, of course, he could just have been listening for strange sounds after our house in Hampstead. His tail was twitching slowly, and I felt a bit worried. But I did want to bonk Flora for putting the idea into his head.
The lean-to was a bit cold. It had a tin roof and wooden walls, and no curtains or anything at the windows to keep out the draughts. But the Weekend seemed all right up on its shelf, and I’d given them a good chunk of fresh apple, some corn and a big fistful of hay for their bedding. There was a good smell everywhere of not only onions and paraffin, but creosote and turpentine. There were sacks of potatoes, a big row of marrows, jars of gooseberries and greengages, rows of our father’s painting things and canvases stacked in a corner, and a line of stone jars full of ginger beer and parsnip wine which our mother ‘put up’ at the end of every summer. I liked the lean-to very much. It was sort of outside the house but inside the house at the same time, because if you opened one door you were in the garden, and the other one opened right into the kitchen with the glowing range and the copper and all the dishes and pots and pans. It was really very decent.
We didn’t have Christmas stockings now that we were more grown up. So even though I woke up early, even before Lally, because you could see there was no light round her door, there wasn’t much point in being awake because of no Christmas stocking, which was a bit sad. I remembered feeling it in the dark, the nuts in the toe, the tangerine a bit squashy if you weren’t careful, the interesting rustling of paper and the liquorice-strap (that was easy to tell by being flat and round), and the cracker wagging about at the top. It was pretty exciting, but now there was no stocking and no tree. I just hoped there were presents of some sort. I had asked for a theatre from Mr Pollock’s shop in Hoxton, but I didn’t suppose our father had had the time to go there, not if he forgot the tree.
So I went to sleep again, and only woke up when Lally gave me a push and said, ‘Happy Christmas, and you, Miss Fernackerpan! Wake up! It’s Christmas morning and your parents’ tea to get. Bonnie Caledonia! Wake up! Happy Christmas!’ And carrying her candlestick and her indoor shoes, she went off down the stairs. She was so bossy and busy that you just had to get up, and this morning there was no wooding to do, so we had to wash our faces and hands first off. We each had a bowl and a jug of freezing water, and a big slop pail, and shared the soap. So it was all a bit of a muddle, except the girls got dressed while I washed, and then I gave Flora the Lifebuoy, and then my sister took it. We poured the bowls into the slop bucket and I had to carry it down and empty it in the drain outside the lean-to.
In the kitchen, kettles were boiling, the goose was on the table looking very white and dead beside a carrier bag from MacFisheries. Lally said, don’t touch, because it was full of innards and she needed them and we’d have to manage best we could about breakfast and clear ourselves places because she was up to her eyes. Anyway, we had boiled eggs, no porridge today, and toast and rhubarb and ginger jam.
Then we all had to go down to the Court to get the milk and some cream. Our mother came down to see how we all were, and get another cup of tea and make the stuffing for the MacFisheries goose. She looked pretty in her kimono with a huge gold dragon on the back, and when I asked where our father was she just shook her head and said she really didn’t know. I was pretty sure she really did but wasn’t saying. So we went down to the Court, not down Great Meadow, because it was all muddy and boggy and my sister said there were some cows down in the corner and Flora said she was scared witless of cows. But I didn’t take much notice of that because she was witless anyway, so how could she be scared out of something she hadn’t got? We walked, sploshed really, down the lane, and the chalky water was gurgling and spilling down the ruts because of the thaw, and there was no sound except for our sloshing and the water burbling.
‘You’d think the world had stopped just because it’s Christmas Day. It feels so funny,’ said Flora, who was pretty funny herself.
The dairy at the Court was very interesting because it was half underground and half not, so that it would never get warm even in the very hottest summer. And it never did. There were little ferns growing along under the big slate shelves where the bowls of buttermilk and whey, skimmed, and ‘Today’s’ and ‘Yesterday’s’ stood. Everything was usually covered in muslin because of the flies from the yard, only, not today, because it was so cold even the ferns had gone all limp. But Miss Barbara Aleford was fussing about the very moment we pushed open the door. Inside it smelled lovely and damp, earthy and then sweet from the milk, and she was pouring a big crock of new milk into the bowls with ‘Today’s’ on them.
‘Heigh ho! Heigh ho!’ she cried loudly and set the big crock down with a crack on the slate shelf. ‘Happy Christmas! Wonderful day! See you’ve got your cans with you and that doesn’t leave me to guess you need some delicious new milk from my animals. Got it right?’
I said that was right and gave her the cans.
‘Today’s or Yesterday’s? All the same to me. In this cold Yesterday’s will do you just as well and you can come down tomorrow and get some Today’s. Capital!’
She was quite tall, with earphone things curled round the side of her head, and men’s corduroy breeches and canvas gaiters, and Lally once said that she was a poor soul who was grieving for her fiancé who had gone missing in the war. But she was still waiting for him because, at any old time, she told Lally, he’d just turn up. He knew the way like the back of his hand, and his pipe and baccy pouch were still in the front parlour where he’d left them.
It was a bit difficult to think of Miss Barbara with a fiancé, and waiting so long in those awful breeches, and her big red hands and earphones and all, when perhaps the fiancé had just gone away somewhere. Like our grandfather who, our mother said, suddenly hop-skipped it off to South America without so much as a by-your-leave or even a kiss to his wife, and just never came back. Wrote some letters but never came back. Just went off. Perhaps our grandmother had got into a bit of a huff. People did do that and it could make you very disagreeable. My sister did it sometimes, and sometimes Lally.
Miss Barbara was ladling the Yesterday’s into the milk cans and humming under her breath. ‘Bring your white mice again? Remember last summer and the harvest mice? Terrible that was! You got so upset . . .’
I remembered the harvest mice all right. I’d brought them back to the farm from the gleaning and they’d jumped out of my pocket and Miss Barbara had trodden on one in her huge old boots and killed it dead. So of course, I got upset, anyone would. Silly woman. So that’s why I bought Sat and Sun in a pet shop in Lewes, to make up for it. Being dead, I mean. I said yes, they were in the lean-to and very well, thank you, and she ladled the milk and said that Mrs Daukes, up the top, had told her that my mother was not so well, on account of she had a nasty fall down the stairs not long ago . . . and how sorry she was if she’d lost it . . . and then she went quite red in the face and told me not to mind. Which I didn’t. Grown-ups are very peculiar sometimes. Really . . .
When we put the lids on the milk cans and thanked her, she wrote down what we owed on a slate on the wall and said, ‘Take your mama some nice brown eggs, a present from me, help to build her up.’ As if she was a castle or something. Still, it was very kind, and she put them in a brown paper bag with Eat more fruit on it, and gave it to Flora to carry, on account of we had the cans. Then we all called, ‘Happy Christmas’, and shuffled about on the wet stone floor and went out into the slushy yard. All the way to the lane we could hear her singing – well, that’s what she would have called it – ‘If I Had a Talking Picture of Youhoooo’. She was really a bit batty.
Our father was in the lean-to when we got back. He was looking very
nice, wearing his painting smock which Mr Dick, the shepherd, had given him, and he smelled of turpentine. He had a saw in one hand and a clump of mistletoe which he’d cut from the old apple tree in the orchard. He held it over Flora’s head and said we had to have a bit of mistletoe in the house so that he could kiss all the girls, and Flora made a soppy face and gave him the eggs instead.
Inside, the kitchen smelled of roasting goose and gravy, and the range was red hot and the copper boiling with steam tumbling about, and our mother, in a cotton frock, was getting the chestnuts ready for the sprouts. Everyone was very happy, busy and cheerful. You’d never know we had forgotten the tree. Our father hung the mistletoe in the door between the kitchen and the hallway and Lally said it would be a terrible nuisance there and couldn’t we have it in the dining-room, over the table, and he said well, how could he kiss them all if it was over the table unless they all got on it? Anyway, Lally won, as usual. So he nailed it to a big beam above the table in the Big Dining-Room, which we never really used except for parties or Christmas. The door to their sitting-room was shut, and locked, and we had to go and take off our Wellingtons and coats and things and then he called to our mother, ‘Margaret! I think it’s high time for the presents, don’t you?’ and Lally and our mother came into the hall, and our father took off his smock and opened the sitting-room door.
And there it was.
The most beautiful tree you’ve ever seen. All gold and silver. Shining in the firelight. And we all cried out in surprise, and our father said the only thing was not to touch it really, because it was all made of holly branches and he’d had to paint all the leaves gold and silver by hand and it had taken him half the night. Our mother said that was his punishment for forgetting the tree in the first place, and Lally said it was a good thing she wasn’t about to do any washing because her clothes’ prop was now covered in holly and thick as a hedgehog with nails, and our father said there was quite a gap in the fence down at the Daukeses’ cottage. Then they had sherry. Even Lally had a sip, but not too much on account of she’d be tipsy taking the goose out of the oven. All round the gold and silver tree were the presents, including Flora’s haggis – you could tell them easily because they were round and wrapped in tartan paper, and there was a huge box for me and I knew what it was by shaking it. It was the Pollock’s Theatre. So they hadn’t forgotten after all. And they had made the tree.
After we’d opened all the presents our parents went down to the village to telephone The Times. You always had to telephone The Times to check that everything was all right and that nothing terrible had happened in some place like the Sahara or Berlin. You never could be certain, our father said, that some ‘idiot’ hadn’t got himself assassinated or pushed off a cliff, and that really meant just ‘killed’ in simple English. But he had to ‘check in’. So they did, on Christmas morning even, from the Star at the Market Cross because it had a telephone. Lally said nothing stopped for The Times, it was all go.
I hoped, with my fingers crossed, that nothing awful had happened when they telephoned, because if it had, that meant our father would rush back to London no matter what. So no Christmas dinner. I just prayed there wouldn’t be another airship crash, like the R.ioi, or another Emperor crowned in Abyssinia. Things like that got in the way. But it was all right, and they came back safe and sound. When I asked them, my mother laughed, looking so pretty with sparky eyes and said no, nothing to make our father go to The Times, just a bit of trouble in the Punjab but then there always was, so we’d have a decent time and dinner was at three o’clock on the dot.
It was terrifically busy at Euston Station: everyone in the world seemed to be going to Scotland. All you could see was hundreds of people, and all you could hear was clangs and rattles and doors slamming and steam hissing and the scuff-skoff and clickety-clack of feet on the platform. Everyone was in a terrible hurry. Except us, because Lally said you always had to allow time for journeys and those sorts of things.
Flora was rather pale and didn’t say much, and even at the bookstall, which was pretty exciting, she only nodded when she was asked if she’d like this or that for the journey. So she ended up with a copy of Everybody’s and Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. And, just as Lally was putting her change away in her purse, there was our mother, and her best friend, Aunt Freda (who wasn’t kith or kin but almost), who had a pointy nose, lots of rings, and came from Ireland. She also gave you jolly decent presents at Christmas and birthdays – like money.
‘Found you at last!’ said my mother. ‘What a crowd, and you are fearfully early. But perhaps that’s just as well.’ And then she told Flora a lot of things about love to people, and to write a card when she was safely back, and hoped she’d had a lovely time with us and that we had been kind to her. And everyone agreed. I mean, standing among all those people by the bookstall, what could you do?
Lally adjusted her hat, put her bag under her arm, and I picked up Flora’s suitcase, which wasn’t very heavy really, in spite of all the presents we’d given her. Our mother said that she and Aunt Freda were off to Gunter’s for coffee, because they hated goodbyes, and then they’d go off to the Caledonian Market, which was their favourite thing to do, and which they did once a month. With a lot of kisses and hugs and rearranging of veils and fur collars they went away, waving like anything, until we couldn’t see them. All that was left was a smell of scent and face-powder, and that didn’t last long.
At the compartment door Flora said she’d take her case, but I got in and put it on the rack. There was a quite nice lady on one side and a fat man with a pipe who looked over his glasses and rustled his paper on the other. But they looked kind. Flora had tears running down her face. I mean she wasn’t crying, not making any sound, and her face not screwing up or anything, just the tears down her cheeks. Lally got out her handkerchief but Flora shook her head and wiped her face with her gloved hands.
‘Don’t cry, Flora dear. All good things have to come to an end, you know? And you’ll soon be back. In the summer perhaps . . . ’
And Flora just said, in a sort of choky voice, ‘I haven’t got one, you see?’
‘Haven’t got what?’ said Lally, looking worried in case she’d lost her ticket. But it wasn’t that, and she said after a big sniff, and another wipe, that she hadn’t got a mother. That made us feel rather awful, but Lally said well, you have got brother Alec and your father and she was sure they would be simply longing to see her again, and they’d be at Central Station, Glasgow, to meet her.
But Flora just shook her head miserably. ‘You are lucky. You are so lucky, you two. You have one of each and I’ve only got the one and he’s always away fishing or sailing or shooting or something.’
No one knew what to say, but thank goodness there was a sudden moving about and doors started slamming, and a guard came hurrying along calling out and looking at his pocket watch like the White Rabbit. Lally said it was time to get on the train, and we all did a bit of kissing, only Flora’s face was still wet and a bit sticky, and she was holding Everybody’s and the Annual. The Guard slammed the door, and took his flag in his other hand, still looking at his watch, and Flora called down and said she was sorry, that she’d had a great time, that she’d never forget us all, or the cottage and her ‘wee’ room, and that we were very, very lucky.
As the train started to move slowly away, she waved and waved and it got faster and faster, and then she’d gone to Scotland, and we walked slowly through the people, and there was one woman crying, and a porter pushing a trolley and Lally said we had to mark her words.
‘You’re both very lucky children. Both very lucky indeed.’
That’s what she said. So.
Part Two
Chapter 6
If I turned my head to the left everything was pretty blurry, on account of all the grasses, very close to my face. And then, a bit further on, it all got speckled with blue, that was the scabious, then strips of red, and that was sorrel, and there was a quite big ant waggling up, his fe
elers waving about. If I turned my head and looked straight upwards it was all blue. Huge blue nothing. Not even a cloud . . . it just seemed to sparkle if you stared at it long enough. Our father said that was infinity. It’s jolly far.
Then if I looked to my right, I saw my sister’s head, and she was lying on her front, her fringe falling over her face so that all I could really see of her was her poky nose. But I knew she was fiddling at something, because her hair was swinging about and now and again (and this bit almost made me laugh out loud), you could see her pointy tongue flicking out. So there was her nose, her hair falling about, and her tongue flicking in and out like a grass snake. Only I didn’t say so because she’s petrified of snakes and when we come up here to the top of Windover she stamps through the grass because she says the vibrations will frighten away anything vile. She means snakes of course. Adders and so on. Even nice old slow-worms.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m saving its life.’
‘What’s life?’ So I rolled over on my front because it was quite interesting to know what she was saving. Couldn’t be a snake and it couldn’t be a beetle: she’s not very fond of beetles either. I don’t know, sometimes, why she doesn’t live in Hampstead all her life. It was a pretty fiddly job, whatever it was she was doing, I could tell. And very slow and careful. Like peeling off a transfer.
‘It’s a poor little moth-thing. All wrapped up in a spider-web, and I’m going to save its life.’
‘If it’s all wrapped in cobweb it’ll be too late. It’ll be dead anyway.’
‘No. Oh no. Sometimes the spider just wraps things up, like parcels, and keeps them in its web for later. Spider’s larder. Only this poor thing isn’t going to be eaten.’ She cupped a sort of mummy-looking thing in her hand. It was all grey with web, but here and there you could see a bit of black and a little piece of red, so it had been a burnet moth or something. I mean ‘had been’ because it was as dead as anything. You could see that easily. Only she couldn’t.