by Betty Burton
‘No, it’s Midsummer holiday, didn’t you know?’
‘No – nor, do I reckon, does the School Board. Everybody else has gone.’
‘That’s because it’s only me that gets today off.’ She winked at Lu.
Joycey wagged her head. ‘Well, have you come to buy something, or are you just visiting?’ As she said later, you really couldn’t help liking Ann Carter’s two eldest; they got the cheek of Old Harry, but they never gave no ofFence, it’s just that they were a law unto themselves, and… they never seemed short of a bob or two.
‘I’ve come for my dress,’ Lu said.
‘Ah yes… your aunty said you’d be in. It’s a present from your mother, she says. Well, Happy Birthday, dear. These ones are your size, your aunty says you are to choose, and she’ll come in and settle.’ One by one, she extracted six from their tissue paper. ‘Shall I leave you to choose?’
‘No, I want this one.’
‘Yellow? I’d have thought you’d go for the green with your colouring.’
Lu fingered the pale lemon cotton printed with darker yellow buttercups. ‘No, this one.’
‘Very well, dear, your aunty said you was to choose. A bit different from Bar here; never wants anything except a length of black since she took to making her own. I never knew a girl choose black before, not many twelve-year-olds got that sort of taste. Mostly it’s widows buy black.’
Bar never responded to the little digs people thought it all right to make at youngsters, especially herself. If Joycey couldn’t see that she looked better in black than anything, then it would be no good trying to explain. Not that Bar had bought more than two or three lengths.
Lu said, ‘I think she looks all right in it. I wouldn’t.’
Joycey gave her a well-you-know-best-dear smile. ‘Do you want to try it on?’
‘I want to wear it.’
‘Out of the shop? You don’t want to show Mrs Wilmott first? Very well, there’s a mirror in the back room.’
‘Do I look all right?’
‘It’s really pretty. You should get some yellow ribbon to go round your hat.’
Peering closely in the mirror, Lu smoothed the thin cotton bodice, and whispered, ‘What about…? It shows them, don’t it?’
‘That’s all right. You can’t hide them, can you?’
‘I didn’t hardly have any after my Dip.’
‘Well, now you’re getting some,’ she grinned, ‘and one day they’ll grow as fat as my ma’s.’
‘Ssh!’
Joycey, having caught whispers and hushes, put her head round the curtain-and-box arrangement. ‘Well, have you decided?’
‘I do want it. And can I have some hat ribbon the same colour?’
Feeling very conspicuous in newness and colour, Lu, carrying her hat, hand in hand with Bar and suddenly feeling quite grown up, went back up the lane to Roman’s Fields where Ted and May were taking a break on cold tea and bread.
‘Well! I must say, you two make a picture. That’s a real pretty dress, colour of sunshine. Ted, go in the house and fetch your camera.’
‘Good idea, go down to the meadow where we’re cutting, that’s the place to take pictures.’
The meadow where Ted and the casuals were cutting hay was full of poppies. There, Ted, who considered himself something of a good amateur with film, took photographs of the two girls standing in tall grasses and massed poppies, then one of May, then each of them separately. May took Ted with the girls, and Ted with Lu. Bar had no doubt how she wanted to appear in her photograph. She let her hair loose and swung it around until static electricity made it stand out like black froth. She got Lu to help her stud it with ox-eye daisies, then, with fists on hips and her legs straddled, she laughed into the camera. Lu reacted quite differently, feeling shy at being the focus of attention.
‘Wait a mo, Lu,’ Bar ordered, ‘and I’ll get you some flowers like a bridesmaid.’ She gathered a bunch of poppies which Lu held shyly, and put others all round the brim of the Panama hat.
These were the first photographs either girl had ever had taken. Later, when they had been processed, Ted had some of the black-and-white prints tinted, pale bluey-green in the background, a lot of summery gold in the dry grasses, Lu’s dress and hat, which contrasted with the brightness of the wild red poppies. May sent one to Vera, gave another to Ann Carter, one each to Lu and Bar to paste into their daybooks, and one for the Roman’s Fields mantelpiece. Ted had the two portraits in a twin frame. A beautiful frame with silver twining lilies and wheat.
‘You must be hungry after all that. Come on, I made a special treat, seeing how you aren’t twelve every day.’ The treat was a deep open tart filled with strawberries set in red jelly, which May, Ted and the girls sat at the edge of the field and consumed to the last crumb. Lu had seen such treats in the window of the Swiss patisserie and tearooms in Southsea. The taste was as luxurious as the look.
‘What’s the programme for this afternoon?’ May asked.
‘We’re going up to show Bar’s ma my dress, then I expect we’ll go back over the woods.’
‘I should be careful of it then; that yellow won’t be much good for climbing around over there.’
‘Oh, we shan’t go climbing, Mis Wilmott. I expect we’re going to get flowers to press for Lu to take back home.’
‘Off you go then,’ May said, ‘enjoy the day. I’ll go back and put something out for your tea and Father’s, but I shan’t be in that early: with this heat and sun, the fruit’s ripening as you watch it. You be all right?’
‘Yes, Aunty, it’s the best day in my whole life.’ She began to follow Bar, but then turned back to May and struggled out with, ‘All the time here is the best day in my life… thank you for letting me stop with you,’ and rushed away, covered in the confusion of her attempt at expressing what was not really expressible.
Slowly, slowly the sun went down into the afternoon. Lu showed off shyly to Bar’s ma, who said she looked a treat and the bloom on her cheeks was all credit to May. ‘I know what day it is, because she hasn’t talked about hardly anything else lately. I don’t know what she gets up to half the time. Anyway, I got a keepsake for you.’ She drew from her shirt pocket a small lozenge of smooth wood with a small hole bored in it through which a leather lace was threaded.
It appeared to Lu that it was made to be worn around the neck, so she pulled it over her head.
‘You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want. It’s called a pocket-piece. It’s ash, which was known in old times as “sympathetic ash” for its virtues. I once did a trade for a whole box of them, and, as it was told to me, they came direct from a man who cut thousands and went about giving them to anybody he could. This was more than two hundred years back, so that’s a good old piece.’
Lu listened; no one could help but listen when Ann Carter leaned enthusiastically into her subject.
‘The thing is, this man knew what he was doing, because ashwood is at its most potent at Midsummer, so if it is cut then, the piece is partic’larly special. You mustn’t ever sell ash for cures, it has to be give away, so when I heard you was a Midsummer child, I thought you should have one.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Barney. Is it an amulet? There was a hero in one of the stories had an amulet.’
‘I suppose you could say it is, except that amulets was often worn against witches, which was wrong, for there was never a witch born that would do harm to any creature that come to live on this earth.’
‘I never knew that. I thought they were bad.’
‘Ach! That’s men saying lies. You want to remember that: witches were the wise ones and the birthers till men couldn’t stand playing second fiddle, so they started this tale about magic and spells… Well, if you think about it, bringing a baby or curing a sickness is a kind of magic, but it was never anything but good magic. When you hear any bad thing being said about any creature female, you just ask yourself if there’s any truth in it, and who says there is. Anybody ever calls you a �
��bitch” you say thank you, for bitches are gentle and caring, ’tis dogs that goes after each other’s throats.’
‘Oh come on, Ma, don’t keep on all day, we want to go back down to The Swallitt Pool.’
‘All right, you go on and sport yourselves about a bit. You going to swim?’
‘We did already.’
‘It’s the best sort of weather for it. A pity more don’t want to go to the old Swallitt.’
‘No! We don’t want nobody else, do we, Lu? It would just be spoilt.’
The woods are still and the warmth in them seems to have quietened birds, small animals and rustling leaves alike. As they make their way back towards their earlier spot by The Swallitt Pool, the fresh smell of new-grown moss, dog mercury, violets and other floor-covering plants kicks up as they walk. Lu’s towel and their bottles of water are still where they left them by the pan with the cairn.
Lu, who has grown confident that The Swallitt Pool is secluded and unused by anyone else, is becoming quite accustomed to taking off her clothes and walking into the pool, which no longer feels cold, but fresh and clean. As she paddles on the margins of the water, she likes the feel of the meadow-sweet and purslane upon her bare skin; then, as she goes a bit deeper, quillworts and frogbit brush her legs beneath the waterline. With her yellow dress, ash amulet and hat safely hanging from a branch, she wades in and swims with her head held above the water and gathering armfuls of water to her as Bar had shown her. She looks across to see if Bar is watching, but Bar, still dressed, is seated on the bent willow, leaning forward and looking down at the place where they jumped in and became bound everlasting.
At the far side, she turns on to her back. From 21 June, the days grow shorter; in a few weeks she will have to go back to school. She would like to stay floating in this magical world in The Country, the place that had a few weeks ago been empty and frightening but has turned out to be amazing. She sometimes misses home, but if she’s honest, only when she wants to tell Ray something she has discovered. She has forgotten how Ken sounded. It seems awful not to be able to remember something like that.
How badly she is going to miss Bar. She thinks again of those few seconds when they stood on the bent willow, clinging to one another, just before they dropped into the centre of the rings. The experience of closeness to a girl of her age is totally new. Her best schoolfriend is Kate Roles; they had started school together and stayed friends, yet she would never have been able to wrap together naked as she and Bar had done. Kate would have giggled or tickled and said they were being rude. With Bar it had been serious and really lovely, and except for their heads and their eyes looking at each other, it had been almost as though she couldn’t tell which was Bar and which was Lu.
Bar’s voice breaks in, ‘D’you want to try the dervishing?’ They sit, Lu in front as Bar winds Lu’s hair into six or eight long, thin plaits.
Lu’s first attempts make her giddy and she topples around.
‘It’s because you’re not thinking inside yourself. Be as if you’re a conker on a string, only be a seed of thistledown spinning on a spider’s thread, round and round.’
It takes a good many attempts, but at last, with her arms stretched, Lu is able to keep her feet on one spot as she pirouettes, east to west, sunwise. Slowly at first, but then faster. She closes her eyes and gets the rotating rhythm. The sounds of the woods and the water fade until they have become small disturbances within her ear. Faster, until she feels that she has started to whirl east to west, with the earth, with the sun and the heavens, with her plaited hair. Whether her movements are graceful and flowing she can’t tell, only that she hears Bar say, ‘You got it… that’s it, that’s lovely.’
There is no slowing down, but suddenly she feels that she is in a brilliant light and the spinning has stopped, yet when she slits open her eyelids, she sees the trees, the pool and Bar whirling around her. Then it does slow down; she opens her eyes wide and finds that she is standing still, as steady and as rooted to the spot as the birches around her. Her arms are stretched above her head as, hands laced, her two forefingers steeple skywards. Waiting for a conclusion. Bar, standing only inches away ready to catch Lu if she topples, says, ‘Now you know.’
Lu, surprising herself, puts her arms around Bar’s neck and gives her a hard kiss on the mouth. The elation from her experiences with Bar today, together with the daily joy and pleasure of this summer, is summed up in that warm kiss.
Suddenly, there is a yell and a loud splash and they jump apart. Lu crouches down behind the sedges on the margin of the pool, hiding her breasts with her arms. Not so Bar: she has picked up stones and is hurling them out into the pool where strong arms are pulling a swimmer along in the direction of the bent willow. Once there, Duke hauls himself out and stands dripping on the branch, his long black hair plastered to his head and shoulders. ‘Don’t take no notice,’ Bar said, ‘it’s only because he thinks we’re watching him. He just likes showing off. Nobody’s interested in him.’
But Lu is interested. Duke’s face and arms are so brown and his feet always so dirty that the whiteness of the skin ordinarily covered by the dungarees is astonishing. He looks lovely and smooth, like a statue.
‘I can’t come out, he’ll see me. Give me my towel.’
Bar raised her voice. ‘Have you been watching us, Duke Barney? You clear off. We was here first.’
‘No! You don’t own it!’
Lu, immersed in intimate silence as she waits for Bar to throw her the towel, is intent on Duke Barney standing on the willow, the first mature testicles, the first black body-hair, the first partly turgid penis, the first completely naked man she has seen.
This image of youth, male beauty and virility standing unashamed of its potent state, was surely bound to be a standard by which a mature Lu must measure all men who would come later.
* * *
With the regularly renewed approval of Vera, relayed by Hector Wilmott, Lu stayed on at Roman’s Fields until the end of August, when it could no longer be said that she was still recuperating from diphtheria. If she didn’t appear on the register for the new term, the School Board would be after her mother.
Upon the morning of her departure, she teemed with so many mixed emotions that at times she felt her heart would jump out of her chest and that she would burst into tears.
It was hard having to part with Bar, and the relations at Roman’s Fields. And with her bedroom, its peachy walls, daisy toilet set, and view over to the strawberry fields. She went into the village wearing her new dress and said goodbye to the shopkeepers, and then to Ann Carter, who held her hand and kissed her on the cheek. Ted gave her The Children’s Golden Treasure Book and said he was sorry there had been so many stories in which the boys were the heroes, but before she came next time, he would search for something where girls had the adventures. ‘But then, you’re reading so well now you’re ready for some of the classics: now they’re an education in themselves.’
Mr Strawbridge gave her the leather bag he had taken on his journey to South Africa in which to put the many possessions she had acquired since her arrival, and asked her to try to keep up her daybook, on the first page of which he had written ‘Question, question, question and, when there is an answer, ask, Why? Why? Why?’
‘Will you write us a line, Lu?’ Uncle Ted said. ‘Let us know how your mum is going on. And listen, if you ever need anybody… you know… if there’s a time when you’d like me or Aunty May to do anything, you know you’ve only got to ask.’
Lu noted the serious tone of his offer and thanked him solemnly.
Aunty May shed a few fat tears, and said the door of Roman’s Fields was always open and her room would be always ready. ‘Next time you’ll be a head taller.’
Uncle Ted said, ‘Next time she’ll know her way around.’ Lu said, ‘And I shan’t be worried, now I’ve seen both sides of the hill.’
Charlie Barrit handed back his tea-mug and Uncle Hec came back from the outhouse. ‘Ups you get t
hen, Lu my lovely.’
As the lorry drew out of the gate, Lu felt suddenly a moment of apprehension at going back to the city, almost equal to that of the outward journey.
Although Uncle Hec had made his delivery at The Bells on his way in, he said he had promised Peg they would stop a minute on their way back, about when afternoon ‘Time’ had been called, just so she could say hello. Lu, wearing her sandals and yellow dress, was unhesitating in jumping down from the lorry when it stopped. She had tied up her hair and put the diamond shooting star on top.
Peggy, wearing an off-the-shoulder ‘gypsy’ top and full skirt, came out, followed by a man wearing an open-neck shirt and tennis shorts. He was a happy-looking man, as big as Uncle Hec, with black hair and a bunch of dark hair showing where his shirt buttons were open. Peggy waved as though Lu was an old friend. ‘Well, will you just look at that! Your Uncle Hec said that you were better, but I never expected such a young woman. That frock! You look a real treat… lovely. Didn’t I tell you Louise was a star, Dick?’ Dick Briardale, landlord of The Bells, stood back, nodding and smiling affably, drawing on a cigar, whilst Peggy patted Lu and clasped her hands. ‘Your holiday’s done you a lot of good, I can see that. Did you enjoy it?’
‘It was lovely… there was so much happened. I got a new friend – Barbara. We’re going to write to each other, and I’ve got loads of things to take home.’ She patted her diamond star. ‘I decided to keep this for special days. I’m wearing it today because I’m going to see Mum.’
‘Well now, just you promise to come in next time you’re passing. We’ll be wanting to see, won’t we, Dick?’ Dick Briardale felt in his shorts pockets. ‘Here, Peg, give the girl a “stiver” to spend when she gets home.’
The stiver turned out not to be a sixpenny piece, but a florin, which Lu later slipped into the pocket of Mr Strawbridge’s bag in which were her accumulated earnings from strawberry picking, her bag of gifts, slippers and new clothes.