by Sarah Moss
You hear some terrible things about evacuation, it seems especially now we’re all so much older and maybe less busy and you start to remember things you haven’t thought about in years, but for some of us it shaped our lives in the best ways.
And the baby? I re-read. Was the baby implicitly included in the ‘going over’ or does the silence about its death mean it was somehow saved? There would be no need to bury a baby killed by a distraught or suicidal schoolgirl in the back garden. Did she have the mother’s permission, I wondered, to take the baby for a walk? Even in the era of babies left outside shops in prams and parked at the bottom of the garden for four hours to cry, surely people had more common sense than to wave off a baby in the arms of a disturbed child heading towards a cliff. Perhaps the mother came down from putting the laundry away to find the baby gone, or went to investigate after an unusually long nap and found the pram empty. You would search, heart pounding and hands shaking, first the kitchen and then the other rooms. You’d run into the garden and look and look, willing yourself to wake up, and back into the house and look again, and still it would be real. Would it be worse to lose a child through negligence or through bad luck, to know that you betrayed the only thing that really matters or to know that everything that really matters can fall and smash for no reason at all? In neither case could I see any reason to remain alive.
‘How’s it going?’
Would it be more suspicious to minimize the window or to leave it and hope he didn’t come and look? Gentlemen, after all, don’t read their wives’ letters. He came over and began to massage my shoulders. ‘I thought I might go back over to the cottage. I told Jake I’d get the second coat on to the bathroom walls if I had time.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m working anyway.’
The massage stopped. He’d seen the screen.
‘Are you? On World War Two evacuees?’
‘I’ve been thinking about psychoanalytic theory again. Anna Freud did a lot of work with evacuees.’
‘What, on Colsay?’
His hands had left my shoulders.
‘I’ve been working too.’
‘Yeah, right. Jesus, Anna. What are you looking for, someone remembering that once when they were sleepwalking they came across someone burying a baby? Lots of people round here find ancient human remains, you know that. They’re not accusing us of anything, you don’t have to find an alibi.’
I tipped back to look up at him.
‘You want to be careful, using that kind of language round here. Ian MacDonald said.’
‘Said what?’
‘“There are sensitivities to profane language on these islands, Mrs Cassingham.”’
‘Only if you’re the bloody vicar. Come on. Jake swears even more than Connor.’ Connor is one of Raph’s Oxford classmates.
‘Maybe it’s just women who aren’t allowed to swear.’ I swirled the cursor around with the mousepad. ‘Giles, he says there’s ‘local concern’ about the kids’ welfare.’
‘He says what?’
‘You heard. Local concern. Emphasis on “local”.’
‘Are you sure? I mean, you do tend to think people are judging you. I know he’d rather there was a commune of Gaelic-speaking crofters here, but he’s hardly alone there. He’s been perfectly correct with me.’
The screensaver appeared.
‘Oh, he’s always perfectly correct. Nothing I could take down and hold in evidence against him. It’s just – I sometimes wish we hadn’t come here. Or I wish I had your sense of entitlement. Or maybe I just wish there hadn’t been a dead baby in the garden.’
He put his hand back on my shoulder.
‘I know. But you know, I feel entitled because I am. This is my island. And there are lots of burials. You don’t need me to tell you about dead children. Think about your foundlings.’
One of the foundling hospitals in London tried a three-year experiment of ‘hand-rearing’ the babies in the late 1790s, feeding them on mixtures of cow’s milk, sugar and flour instead of getting in wet-nurses. The milk was carried through the streets of London in open pails and the bottles they used for feeding had long leather teats which there was no attempt to wash. The mortality rate varied, year on year, between 97 and 99.5 per cent. Having collected the evidence, the trustees sent the next few years’ worth of abandoned infants out to wet-nurses in the country and compiled statistics noting which women had the lowest death rates, which were around 30 per cent.
‘There are so many of the foundlings I can’t really think of them as individuals. And they’re not in my garden.’
The massaging began again. ‘I know. But get your book finished, OK? I think we’ll all be much happier when it’s gone off to the publisher.’
So I should finish it to make you happy, to get it out of the way so I can get on with Kinder, Küche und Kirche? I didn’t say it. ‘I’m trying, Giles. I get very tired.’
He stroked my hair. ‘I know you do. Look, if we can make the cottage work maybe next year we’ll get an au pair or something, someone to have the children during the day.’
I tipped my chair back again and looked up. He was smiling at my laptop as if Mary Poppins would bound out of it at his command. I was an au pair for a few months when I was eighteen, for a Parisian family who seemed to think the British were still painting themselves with woad and sacrificing people in bogs, but they had a house by the Parc Monceau with a swimming pool, the children were at school all day and it never occurred to them to expect an English girl to produce food.
‘Giles, if you seriously think any teenage girl with whom we would contemplate leaving the children is going to spurn the metropolises of Europe to live with a family of mad academics on an island with no shop, no television and no way out, where it rains about three hundred and sixty-two days a year, you need – you need a weekend in Paris to remind yourself what life is really like.’
He lifted my hair off my neck and ran his fingers lightly around my nape.
‘Let’s do it. We’ll park the kids with my mother.’
I tipped the chair forward again and maximized the window with chapter four in it. ‘What, and leave the Fairchilds to their fate? Anyway, I’d as soon leave the children in the monkey enclosure at the zoo as with your mother. Animal instinct is probably a better bet than class war for childcare.’
‘It takes two sides for a war, you know. She means well.’
‘I dare say George Bush meant well. Go on, do your painting. Paris can wait.’
He left. I woke up the computer and he came back.
‘Anna?’
‘What?’
‘What’s in this bag?’
‘Which bag?’
‘Oh fuck, Anna!’
I sighed and went not particularly fast to investigate. He had tried to pick up the bag of bureaucracy and it had burst. Brown envelopes and bills which Giles opens but puts back in their envelopes slid across the floor, followed by nearly empty jars and the mug, to which mould still adhered although most of the ex-tea had been absorbed by the smug lifestyle magazines.
‘What were you doing?’ he demanded, in tones more appropriate to fish under the pillow or toothbrushes down the toilet than recycling in a bag labelled recycling.
‘Tidying,’ I said. ‘I’m going to bed.’
As I climbed the stairs, Moth began to cry. Behind me I could hear the rustle of plastic and paper as Giles resurrected the heaps.
Night Waking: 01:42
It would be much easier just to sleep in here, to lie on the floor and put my hand through the bars. If Moth would let me lie down. Instead, I pick him up and we set off to the window and back, up Walton Street, glimpsing the green and pleasant land of Worcester’s gardens behind the tangle of bicycles. Past the end of Little Clarendon Street where, giggling to the point of incontinence late one night, my nineteen-year-old self stood on the periphery of a group rearranging some roadworks for reasons which have long eluded me. Past the cocktail bar that provided a series of unsu
itable young men the year I was twenty-three, two of whom subsequently got together and seemed to be in every café and library I entered for the next two years. Moth droops on my shoulder and we near the cot.
‘Mummy sing a Gruffalo.’
‘A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood …’
My eyes are closing. We set off again, not to fall asleep and fall down. If I had known then what I know now, would I have had children? I think about childless, child-free, friends, who not only go to see plays in New York and attend weddings in Singapore and must not be phoned until eleven o’clock at weekends and are always out, that mysterious ‘out’ of childless people who can afford to live in Zone Two, when the children are in bed and I could phone them to hear about plays and galleries and new restaurants, who read the weekend papers at the weekend and cook using both hands. They keep up with their publishing schedules and get the jobs we all apply for. Would I do it again, understanding as I do now and didn’t then, that failure at motherhood is for life and beyond, that everything that happens to my children and my children’s children is my fault? That my meanness and bad temper are going to trickle into the future like nuclear waste into the Irish Sea? No. Not because I don’t love my children – everyone loves their children, child abusers love their children – but because I don’t like motherhood and you don’t find that out until it’s too late. Love is not enough, when it comes to children. Bad luck.
Colsay House
14th Nov.
Dearest Allie,
Thank you for your letter! It made me feel very far away, somehow, to understand that you and Mama had been in London and I still fancying you at home. You might go, of course, to Paris or Rome or back to Lausanne and be home before I knew of the journey. It seems, though, that you did not receive my last? I must ask Mrs Barwick again about the postal arrangements, but you know there is no road closer than Inversaigh (for all the islanders pay the road tax! I sometimes begin to doubt Lord Hugo’s philanthropy, and no school either), and so everything must be carried on someone’s back, as if the poor people were just beasts of burden. It is no uncommon sight to see the women especially doing the work of animals here; apparently in the Spring they harness themselves like oxen and drag the plough and harrow themselves. I do not look forward to seeing this. Aubrey and Papa would say it is no different from factory work, but it is – to drag a plough requires not even the manual dexterity of the boys at the looms and somehow it troubles me particularly to see the women reduced to mere brutes. They are not fair ladies, to be sure, though one or two are comely enough on Sundays when they remove their weekday headdresses and take clean aprons, but I think even Mama would agree that it is a painful thing to see a woman’s body strain under a weight a man could lift. Although one of the things that has been upsetting me rather is the way they do treat their animals – all the dogs (and there are many) spend their days hobbling around with one paw tied up to their necks so they can’t run away or trouble children or sheep and of course sometimes the bindings get caught and the dog strangles. And sheep going to market are marked by the simple expedient of cutting a piece off the ear with a knife. The worst, somehow, is what Mrs Barwick told me when she saw my distress at the method used to dispose of a litter of unwanted puppies, which I will not harrow my soul by committing to paper nor yours by communicating, but suffice it to say that nothing in man’s inhumanity to man should surprise us when we think what children are sometimes allowed to do to animals. She told me also that when the lambs are born, it is the custom to force a stick or stone too large to be swallowed into the lamb’s mouth in the evening and tie its jaw hard, so that in the morning the ewe’s milk can be taken for the children before the lamb is able to suckle again. Is this not horrible?
I will not pretend, to you, that all is well here (though please keep this letter quite to yourself, I would not have it known even in the family that I may be betraying Aubrey’s faith in me). I have made some progress with Mrs Grice, who expects her child in the next month, but I am far from confident that she will allow my presence at the delivery, much less that she will dispense with the services of the ‘knee-woman’ in my favour, so that the most I might hope is to witness the child contract the poison. I hear that the wood for its coffin is already set to steam, coffins being now the sole item in the layette here. Truly, there are no baby clothes on this island. In late years, when a child is born they wrap it in rags and wait to see if it will live before going to the bother of sewing, and of course in all cases but one this economy has been quite justified by events. I watch Mrs Grice. Her cheeks are hollow now, as the unborn babe takes more of her overtasked strength. Sometimes you can see the child’s limbs pushing under her gown (for I do not think women here are burdened with the manufacture and maintenance of many petticoats) and she knows and they all know that before Christmas it will be cold in the ground. There is nothing I can do.
I tried, last week, to start a small school for the children, thinking that at least I might teach them the alphabet and perhaps some rudiments of English. I knew, of course, that without Gaelic myself I had no right to expect much progress, but someone must do something or they will grow up with no hope beyond the filth and hardship of what they already know. Education or emigration seem the only possibilities for improvement, although the people themselves, so far as I can see, express no dissatisfaction with their lot beyond the universal belief that rents and other expenses are too high in relation to income (on which topic, if you were able somehow to send me six pairs of new stockings, whatever you have been reading this Autumn and please, dearest Allie, another fruit cake and perhaps one of those boxes from Kendal Milne?). I asked Mrs Barwick to tell all the parents, and I made up an alphabet myself, trying to find objects that would be familiar to the children in place of the apples, balls, elephants etc. (cats, dogs and fish are familiar – in the case of the two former, too familiar for my liking!). Lacking slates, I prepared to sacrifice some of this paper and my own supplies of ink, planning to ask the boys to make pens from the feathers which are after all available in unlimited number in every household. Nobody came.
Mrs Barwick has been teaching me to knit. Often, after serving my supper (only don’t imagine soup, or Welsh rarebit, or omelette – dried fish and gruel, or, very occasionally, a barley bannock with the suspicion of butter on it), she goes off to the villagers, but of late, with the weather so bad and food, I fear, becoming scant, I believe most of them are retiring very early and I found that she sits at the kitchen range with her needles going faster than the clock ticks. The women knit not to clothe their families, who are mostly wrapped in a kind of rough tweed that would bring you out in hives, but because the shawls and jerseys can be taken off to Inversaigh, where someone calls once or twice a year to take them ‘away’. The payment for this labour is made not to the women but to the shop in Colla, minus the expenses of transport, where it reduces the debt run up by each household against their supply of meal and tea. The mystery to me is why Mrs Barwick, who has after all worked in Edinburgh and travelled even to London with Miss Emily in the days of her youth, should choose to remain here, but I suppose she is well housed and clothed and her own knitting is certainly not to pay off debts for oatmeal. I am making a sort of blanket or shawl, which has the advantage of being straight and not rendered structurally unsound by the odd dropped stitch!
I am also hoping that these evenings around the fire will give me a chance to find out more about the islanders and what can be done to help them, although so far Mrs Barwick prefers to tell old tales of supernatural happenings that make it difficult for even such a hardened rationalist as myself to go calmly up the dark stairs and to bed by candlelight afterwards! I wish the Grey People were less in the habit of jumping out from cupboards and chests with their menaces and unreasonable demands!
Anyway, my fire is dying and I must go to bed before I lose its little glow. Already the shadows seem to crowd close around my chair.
Fondest love as alway
s,
May
THE CAPACITY OF AN ADULT
The difficulty in using reality as a criterion lies, not in there being no reality, but in our imperfect capacity to comprehend it. That a child has an imperfect capacity to comprehend what is or may be truly dangerous is usually taken for granted. That the capacity of an adult is greater often by only a small margin tends to be forgotten.
– John Bowlby, Separation, p. 186
Two days later, we all went over to the cottage. There was sun bright on our faces and when Moth rolled on the turf he found it was warm, so we all sat there for a while, watching a trawler pull across the sea, black against the sparkling water. I looked back at Colsay House; on the bluest summer day with the air smelling of honey from the sun-baked grass, it still looked as if it had been built by Calvin to remind sinners of the tomb. Moth was eating grass. A raven flew gleaming overhead and landed on the roof.