Pigeon Summer

by Ann Turnbull

  Speedwell would be flying across southern England now, caught in this storm. There’s going to be a smash, Mary thought. She pictured the pigeons, lost, disorientated, scattered by the weather. She’d lose Speedwell; they’d all lose their birds. The race would be a disaster. And as that thought came to her, the piece of rock she was holding on to came away in her hand.

  Mary fell backwards. She saw the ground only a few feet away, and jumped down, landing off balance on the stony ground. Her right ankle twisted under her and she felt a sharp pain. She dropped the basket and rolled over, clutching her ankle.

  She looked up. The quarry wall towered above her. It was difficult to imagine how she had got down, and impossible to imagine getting up again now.

  High above, the grass at the rim of the quarry glinted as the lightening flashed again, and when the thunder banged, it seemed to shatter the sky and release a torrent of rain.

  Mary looked round for Arnold’s cave. It was nearby – a hollow space under an overhang of rock. She picked up the basket, limped towards it and crawled in.

  The space was just big enough to sit in, and on another day Mary knew she would have enjoyed it: a secret place to sit and watch and think. But now she twisted about, trying to make her injured ankle comfortable. There was nothing to watch but the rain falling, nothing to think about but Speedwell battling home in the storm.

  A summer storm. Unpredictable. Especially from France, nearly three days ago. That was always the risk with the long distance races. They’d have held the birds back, of course, kept them in the baskets, if a storm had been predicted in France on Saturday. But bad weather so near the end of the race… She knew there would be people all over the country now, looking out at the storm, fearing a smash. There had been times when out of a thousand birds caught in a storm, only twenty-odd had come home.

  Mary began to shiver. She crouched back into the hollow and sat with her arms crossed and shoulders hunched. The storm flickered overhead and the rain hissed down, steady, unrelenting. She saw that the sun had set; darkness was gathering in the circle of the quarry. Not just the yellow-purple storm darkness, but the true darkness of night. She was trapped here; she would have to stay here all night.

  Unless they came looking for her. The police, or whoever her mother might have told. But no one knew where she had gone. And, besides, her mother might not have told anyone yet. She’d think Mary had gone to Olive’s or Uncle Charley’s or even to Arnold Revell’s. There was no reason why anyone should be worrying about her. Except Phyl, of course. But Phyl couldn’t do anything.

  I might never get home, Mary thought. I can’t climb out. I’ve got no water and no food. She wondered how long you could live without food. She remembered hearing that you could last a while – but not without water. She imagined the police searching for days, eventually finding her bicycle by the stile, climbing down to discover her corpse and bringing it home to her mother. She saw her mother weeping at the graveside, saying, “Poor Mary – if only I’d been kinder to her.” The picture gave Mary a certain satisfaction. But it didn’t warm her, facing the prospect of a night alone in a quarry without a coat and with a sprained ankle.

  Well, not quite alone. She took the Gaffer out of his basket and held him. She loved his sleek neck and his bright brown eyes and darting glance; his tameness. He pecked at a snagged end of wool on her cardigan and unravelled several stitches.

  I could send you with a message, Mary thought. Not now, but when the storm is over. You’d be home in no time.

  It was a shame to lose the vision of her mother weeping over her coffin, but all the same Mary felt cheered at the thought of rescue. Briefly, she even felt warmer. But it was quite dark now, and the storm was still rumbling. She’d have to wait till morning. She put the Gaffer back in his basket and leaned against the rock wall and tried to sleep.

  The night seemed endless. She got cramp, and woke frequently to shift position. She was cold – miserably cold. Her ankle swelled. She kept feeling it in the darkness, comparing it with the other one. It throbbed with pain.

  The lightning gradually ceased; the thunder rolled away; the rain lessened. But still Mary couldn’t sleep properly.

  And at last the sky grew lighter. She heard birds singing. The rain had stopped.

  She stood up. The throbbing in her injured ankle was worse. She moved slowly, putting her weight on her good leg. Her mouth felt dry. She went out and wet her hands on the dewy grass and sucked them.

  The sun rose above the lip of the quarry and shone on the opposite wall. Mary picked up the Gaffer’s basket and limped across to find a patch of gold.

  The feel of the sunlight was like a shawl around her shoulders.

  The Gaffer was restless. Mary picked chickweed with dew on it for him to eat.

  “You can fly home now,” she said. “You can take a message for me.”

  And it was only then, as she said it, that she realized she had no pencil, no paper, nothing to write a message with.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  She could write on her hanky, she thought. But what with? She found a piece of chalky stone and wrote “Mary” on a rock; but the stone wouldn’t write on cloth. There was nothing here that would do. She couldn’t write, she decided; she’d have to send something – something that would tell whoever found it where she was. Something light and small. A plant? Suddenly she remembered finding the speedwell in the meadow at the top – a speedwell she’d told Arnold was different from the one in her garden. If she could send some speedwell, and if Mum or Lennie found it, and if they thought of asking Arnold what it might mean, Arnold might remember… There were so many “ifs”, but it seemed her only chance.

  She had to search a while before she found what she was looking for: a nondescript plant with tiny mauve flowers. She unravelled a bit more of the wool that the Gaffer had pulled from her cardigan, and broke it off. Then she took the Gaffer out of his basket and used it to tie a flowering stem of speedwell to his leg, tucking the end securely under his ring. She held him, reluctant, now, to let him go.

  “You’re the only company I’ve got,” she said.

  The Gaffer cooed. He darted his head forward and tweaked at her cardigan again.

  Mary laughed. “You’re making a hole. Silly old thing. I’ll have to let you go. You’ll fly fast, won’t you? Bring me help soon?”

  She put him down beside the basket, and was almost relieved when he didn’t fly off. Then she began to worry. The Gaffer was an old bird; usually he never did much more than circle the loft. Perhaps he wouldn’t go home.

  But at last he took off. Mary squinted, watching him fly up into the brightness. For a moment he circled around, a dark shape in the saucer of light. Then he was away, over the lip of the quarry and out of sight. He’d be home in no time.

  Now all she could do was wait. She limped about, drinking dew and finding a few clover flowers to munch. Her ankle felt big and painful. Soon she was forced to sit down. She chose a sun-warmed rock, and felt the sunshine steaming the damp out of her clothes and separating and warming the strands of her hair. But she was hungry. And lonely. She missed the Gaffer. She wished he was still there to talk to and hold.

  Slowly the sun left her rock and moved to another. By the time it was overhead, filling all the quarry with its warmth, she knew it must be midday. Surely they’d found the Gaffer by now? But perhaps not. If they were looking for her, they might not even think about the birds; they might not have been to the loft…

  No one came. The sun moved across the sky, towards the further rim of the quarry. The place where she had sat in the morning lay in shadow. Mary was hungry. Her ankle hurt.

  And no one came.

  The shadows lengthened. In her morning sitting-place, the daisies were closing, revealing their pink undersides. Suddenly, in panic, Mary decided that she must get out, on her own if she had to.

  She returned to the cliff. She must reach the top before night came again. She tucked up her dress, braced herself
for the pain, and began to climb, trying not to put weight on her bad leg.

  She got a few yards up the steep rock wall and then stopped, gasping, unable to move. She needed to push up with her right leg, and couldn’t. She tried to cross over and use the left, but it was no use; the rock was so steep, the footholds so precarious, she couldn’t possibly do it with only one good leg.

  And now she couldn’t get down. To get down would mean jumping the last few yards – unbearable to think of – or risking a slithering fall. The pain in her swollen ankle stopped her from doing either. She leaned against the rock wall, tufts of grass clutched in her hands, all her weight on her left leg, too scared to go up or down.

  “Mum!” she shouted, through choking tears. “Mum! I’m down here! Help me! Someone help me!”

  No answer. The wind rustled in the grass on the edge. Far, far up, skylarks called.

  Mary thought again of dying. Only this time it seemed real, and the satisfaction had gone out of it.

  “Help!” she shouted. “Help! I can’t get out!”

  And then: an answer!

  Voices, people coming. A man’s voice shouting. “Mary? Is that you?”

  And the next moment a figure appeared at the top of the quarry: Sid Revell. Glancing back over his shoulder, he shouted, “It’s all right, missis! She’s down here. Stuck.”

  Mary sat in her father’s chair by the kitchen fire. She was wearing a clean dress, her hair was combed smooth, and her right leg, propped up on a stool, had been expertly if too-tightly bandaged by Aunty Elsie, working with angry hands.

  Mary’s mother’s hands had been angry, too. On her cheek Mary still felt the slap her mother had given her as Sid Revell hoisted her out of the quarry and on to firm ground. And then, before the shock of the slap had died away, her mother had hugged her hard enough to crack her ribs.

  Everyone had been angry with her: her mother, Olive’s mother, Mrs Lloyd next door, Uncle Charley, Aunty Elsie. Especially Aunty Elsie. Uncle Charley had seen the Gaffer come home and found the sprig of speedwell on his leg, but nobody had known what it meant. Mum had put off going to the Revells. She had been to Elsie’s, Charley’s, Olive Jennings’, even Doris Brown’s. She’d had a feeling that Mary might be at Arnold’s, and in the end she had confessed this suspicion to a surprised Mr Jennings, who had gone to the smallholding – “Poking around like he thought we’d murdered you,” Arnold told Mary.

  Arnold had gone back with Mr Jennings to the Dyers’, just as nosy Mrs Mullen arrived to say that she had seen Mary yesterday afternoon cycling off in the direction of Wendon.

  “Phyl!” Mum exclaimed. “I should have guessed.”

  Then Uncle Charley had shown Arnold the speedwell, and Arnold had said, “I think I know where she is.”

  “When we saw your bike by the stile I knew I was right,” he told Mary proudly.

  He wasn’t angry, of course, and neither was his father. But all the other grown-ups felt it was their duty to lecture Mary on how thoughtless, wicked and inconsiderate she had been. The house seemed to be full of them, scolding and nagging.

  “And all you could say, instead of ‘sorry’, was ‘Where’s Speedwell? Has she come home?’” protested her mother, when they had all gone away.

  “Well, I wanted to know. And Aunty Elsie wouldn’t let me go and look. She said I had to put my leg up. Mum, this bandage is too tight.”

  Her mother knelt to adjust it. She sighed. “Uncle Charley says not to give up. He says there’s only one come home so far out of the whole lot from Culverton. But they’ll come back slowly, over the days and weeks, he says.”

  Mary knew that was partly true. Some would come home. But not all. In a storm like that, most of them would be lost, beaten down, driven into power cables, wings broken – or just fall, exhausted, to die.

  She sniffed back tears. “You really love them, don’t you?” said her mother.

  Mary nodded. “I want some of my own – when I’m grown up. I want my own loft.”

  “It’s a man’s hobby, that.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Things will get in the way,” said her mother. “Marriage, babies… Do you know, when I was young, I wanted to go on the stage, to be a singer. I was good, too. Always in the plays at school and chapel. I used to imagine my name up in lights in the West End: Miss Adeline Hill…”

  “Why didn’t you do it? You can sing. You sing lovely.”

  “I didn’t know how to go about it.”

  “You could have found out.”

  “Yes, I could have. But somehow … well, the family wouldn’t have approved – I knew that. And I went to work in the paper shop, and then I met your dad…”

  “You should have done it – gone on the stage.”

  “Then I might not have had you.”

  That was a strange thought: not being.

  Her mother said, “I’m sorry I killed your pigeons, Mary. I should have asked.”

  “I’m sorry I ran away.”

  “Scared the life out of me, you did. What would I have done if we hadn’t found you?” She smiled. “You drive me up the wall sometimes. But I reckon we’ll rub along together a bit better now than we used to.”

  They heard footsteps in the passage. Mum pulled a face. “If that’s Elsie again –” and then she stopped, and listened. She darted to the door.

  Mary, too, recognized the footsteps. She was struggling to her feet when the door opened and her father walked in.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Don’t ever marry a miner, Mary,” her father said.

  He was sitting in his usual chair, sipping tea, while Mary’s mother sliced bread and fried up an end of bacon.

  “I won’t,” said Mary. “I might marry a poacher – they’re never out of work.”

  Dad laughed, the laugh turning to a cough. He had lost weight, and his face was greyish.

  “I’ll send to Elsie for some of her cough mix,” said Mum. “Mary, can you manage to get upstairs and fetch Doreen? I can hear her fretting.”

  Mary climbed awkwardly up the stairs, enjoying her injury in spite of its inconvenience. Doreen was red-faced and grizzly. Mary picked her up. At once she stopped crying. She put a pink fist to her mouth and made sucking noises.

  Mary guessed her mother wanted to tell Dad about the pigeons and how Mary had come by her sprained ankle; she took Doreen to the window and pointed out trees, birds, a cat balancing along the fence, nappies flapping on the line. Doreen chuckled.

  When Mary came back into the kitchen with Doreen in her arms, her father was talking about how he had fallen ill and lost his job. He’d found another labouring job, struggled with it, still poorly, for a week, then collected his wages and headed for home.

  “I’d had about enough of being away,” he said. “I met Bob Lloyd in town on the way back. He reckons they’re taking on more men over at Staveley Pit. I’ll try there.”

  “Not till you’re properly well, you won’t,” said Mum.

  “And what’ll we live on, girl?”

  “You’ve brought a week’s wages, haven’t you? And when that runs out –” she winked at Mary – “I’ll sing in the streets. Put my Sunday hat down for pennies.”

  “Seriously, though,” said Mary, “it’s my birthday Sunday after next, and I’ve got a job starting the day after at Greenings.”

  “And Phyl’s home that Sunday,” said Mum. “She’ll bring her wages.”

  “Everyone safe home,” said Dad.

  “Everyone except Speedwell,” said Mary.

  Everywhere there was talk about pigeons lost in the smash: talk in the shops, in school, in the pigeon club. Birds came home in dribs and drabs, some so badly injured that they would never fly again, some so exhausted they died. But Speedwell didn’t come home.

  Every day Mary scanned the sky; every day her father let the birds out for exercise, and looked, when they came in, for an extra bird. But Speedwell didn’t come.

  “We’ve lost her,” he said. �
��Don’t fret, Mary. It’s not your fault. You’ve got to risk them to have a chance of winning.”

  But Mary was not comforted. She thought of Speedwell, beating across the Channel, every instinct driving her on, all her heart and spirit bent on surviving, on reaching her home, her loft, her mate. Mary couldn’t bear to think that somewhere on that journey Speedwell had given up, fallen or been driven down.

  Arnold’s pigeons didn’t take her mind off it, but they gave her and Dad something else to do. Mary had told her father about Arnold wanting a pair of birds. Dad went round to the smallholding with Mary and helped Arnold with ideas for building his own loft and promised him the pigeons when it was done. Arnold was soon happily at work.

  “He’s quick, that lad,” Dad said. “Soon learn the tricks of the trade, he will.”

  “Miss Lidiard thinks he’s stupid.”

  “There’s different kinds of cleverness,” said Dad.

  Word soon got around at school that Mary was friendly with Arnold Revell. She became aware of whispers and glances.

  On the Thursday before the end of term she was in the school yard, sucking a mint humbug and gossiping with Olive, Edna and Doris. Arnold passed by, heading for the boys’ end of the yard. Mary made a decision.

  “Arnold,” she said.

  He stopped, a bit reluctant, eyeing the other girls suspiciously.

  “Dad’s chosen you two young birds. They should be good ones, he says. One of Bevin and Ruby’s, and one of Trotsky and Speedwell’s.”

  Arnold smiled. “I’ve about finished that loft. Want to see it?”

  “Yes. I’ll come on Saturday, shall I? With Dad. We’ll bring the birds.”

  Edna said loudly, “There’s a pong round here. You coming, Doris? Olive?”

  Doris screwed up her face. She went with Edna. Mary saw Olive hesitate, and stay.