School for Skylarks

by Sam Angus

Imelda turned to Lyla. ‘What about you, Lyla – do you want a life like your mother’s?’

  Lyla rolled over on to her side, plucked irritably at the turf and said nothing. She knew Imelda was only jealous that she’d been supplanted in Cat’s affections by Lyla.

  ‘None of us will have lives like our parents,’ Cat interjected breezily. ‘Primrose says it will be a very different world when the war is over . . .’

  The sun had grown hotter. A horsefly settled on Lyla’s leg and, scowling, she flicked it away. After a while, she reached out for her lunch bag, rose and meandered away as if there were nothing wrong and she had simply decided to go in search of blackberries. She lingered a little by a rowan to give Cat the opportunity to join her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Cat.

  ‘Of course I am.’

  Lyla glanced back and saw how Imelda was watching them there together beneath the rowan, and turned a sunny, breezy face to Cat and said, ‘Tawny told me there’s a sheep track through the bracken. It’s near here and it takes you to a place called Shearwater where there’s a deep pool you can swim in and a boathouse. Let’s go there.’

  They splashed in water that held sunlight down to its bottom and then lazed about on the turf, their hair gleaming and twisted, their faces turned to the sun, and they stayed there dozing.

  ‘Robin’s happier, now you know,’ Cat said. ‘Listen, he says –’ she fumbled about in the pocket of the dress strewn on the grass beside her – ‘“I have a really good friend now, called Jack. Jack likes playing Racing Demon too and we are in the same dorm this term, so that’s really good.”’

  Lyla, still jealous of Cat having a brother to write letters to her as well as a mother who wrote every week, remained silent.

  ‘Mother says she might come down one day,’ said Cat, lying back and closing her eyes. ‘She says she’s been saving petrol coupons and the hospital might give her a week off in July. If they do and she comes down, I know she’d love to meet you.’

  ‘Oh, Mop really wants to meet you too,’ said Lyla. She fumbled for the pocket of her dress and pulled out a letter. ‘Mop’s awfully busy too with all the things she does, but she wants to come down and visit too.’

  Cat rolled back on to her side, opened her eyes and looked at Lyla, who began to read.

  ‘My darling Lyla,

  I’m so busy just now with War Work and making jams and parachutes and probably I am going to be a nurse and an ambulance driver. I’m in such a rush just now, due to all the KNITTING I have to do because of the soldiers being cold and needing jerseys and socks.’

  Cat sat up. ‘She’s awfully busy, isn’t she? How will she do jams and parachutes and knitting as well as driving ambulances and nursing soldiers?’

  Lyla turned a little away from her friend, as if the sun was bothering her. Holding the letter a little closer to her chest and shielding it from view with her hands, she read on:

  ‘It is FOREVER since I saw you and I do so want to meet all the friends you are making and hear about all the fun you are having and I don’t mind at all about marks for things like mathematics or grammar.

  I am making lots of plans for all the things we will do and all the lovely islands we can go to when the war is over and we are together again.

  I do miss you and wish you weren’t so far away.

  All my love,

  Mother’

  Cat was silent. She watched Lyla fold the letter and tuck it deeply into the pocket of her dress, and after a while said, gently, ‘They always come on Tuesdays, don’t they, her letters?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ answered Lyla. ‘She writes every week, just like yours does.’

  Cat, still watching Lyla, paused for a while, then said, ‘Come on. It’s getting cold. Let’s go.’

  They dressed in silence, and as they walked back across the park, Cat took Lyla’s hand and held it tightly.

  61

  THE RED CROSS

  In the dark, huddled months, the house filled once more with an arctic chill and everything froze, even, once again, the ink pots. Primrose, most upset, showed Ada a hot-water bottle that had actually frozen solid overnight. The girls slept in all the clothing they could lay their hands on and went about wrapped in blankets and eiderdowns. In the evenings, everyone would gather for warmth, and for light, in the Painted Hall which, having only one window, could actually be blacked out, all the other windows of Great Aunt Ada’s house being too large to be covered effectively.

  One such evening, Great Aunt Ada erupted into the room, waving The Times about.

  ‘Their diets are deficient, of course; their rooms damp; they’re fed only cabbage and barley . . . We must do something – it is most urgent.’

  The girls turned to her, baffled and amused, for Great Aunt Ada pitched herself with relentless vim and vigour from one mission to the next, and no one had any idea at all who it was that was only eating barley and cabbage.

  ‘The Red Cross must have parcels for our men.’ She glared at the room. ‘Do you know how many of our own soldiers are held captive? Well, do you?’

  Of course no one did, not even the Red Cross, nor of course Great Aunt Ada, though she was above admitting such things. Lyla and Cat glanced at each other, grinning and rolling their eyes.

  ‘Great Aunt Ada Modern Crusader,’ whispered Cat. But Lyla, watching her great aunt, was wondering if there was perhaps some method to her madness, for sometimes she seemed very daft, sometimes very shrewd.

  ‘They need sustenance, yes . . . processed cheese is the thing, herrings, sardines, condensed milk, dried eggs, a meat roll, a tin of creamed rice, perhaps a bar or two of soap. It’s all most imperative.’

  She glared at the room again,

  ‘The Geneva Convention, girls – it’s all in the Geneva Convention, hmm? Our men must have letters, they must have parcels, and they must be sent food and clothing, and so on.’

  British prisoners of war were still much on Ada’s mind that year, and this new craze of hers, which came to be known as ‘Prisoners’, was pressed with the utmost urgency upon both girls and staff.

  So it was that after Wool-gathering came Prisoners, and Tawny was put to heaving crates of bootlaces, tinned puddings and such like into the hall every evening ready for the girls to make up the boxes.

  62

  CHRISTMAS

  That year, the Painted Hall was out of bounds on the day before Christmas Eve, admittance granted only to Solomon and Tawny. There was to be a concert; the villagers were to come. Everyone needed cheering up, their morale boosting and so forth.

  That evening the girls took their places on the staircase, smallest at the bottom, biggest at the top, to stand and gaze at the Painted Hall as it flickered with fire and candlelight, every shield, axe and antler festooned with garlands of ivy and holly.

  Solomon opened the main door and the children from the village poured in to be presented with the spectacle of three hundred Garden Hill girls dressed in cloaks and scarves and mittens, earnestly singing ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’, and they gawped at the splendour and scale of it all.

  There was a sumptuous buffet with rabbit and duck, and even what Cat called the whiskery-bosom-to-belly staff like Threadgold and Trumpet had painted lips and frothy hair, and Prudence ascended from the kitchens in her flowered overall and tin hat, and Solomon allowed himself to relax for a minute or two and smile.

  At the end of the evening, the girls arranged themselves like a ladder up the stairs and sang the school anthem:

  We look to the future, to what lies ahead,

  We look to a life full of work and of cheer,

  To a life free of spite, free of malice and fear.

  We stand all together and we’ll always be true

  To the friendships we make, to the hopes

  That we hope and we ask,

  Am I gentle and brave? Am I bold? Am I strong?

  Do I have courage and kindness and truth

  As I stand hand in hand with the friends of
my youth?

  The Rector Scott Talks Rot said a prayer for all those who were far from home, for those who had brothers or fathers at the Front, and for Cedric Tawny, whose two sons were serving in France. Each child from Ladywood was given a knitted stocking, and they hurried out, shaking their heads in bemusement at the soap and the walnuts that were in it, and at the many oddities of the inside of a large English country house.

  63

  JAMES AND JOHN TAWNY

  The New Year began, and everything was much as before: there was still cauliflower cheese for lunch and Welsh rarebit for dinner; Faye still came top in everything; Elspeth still had chillblains and came bottom in everything; and Lyla still went up and down the stairs with Violet’s various buckets.

  In early February, Aunt Ada stood at the top of the Great Stairs and announced the prayers and, bowing her head deeply, asked the girls to remember James and John Tawny, the sons of Cedric Tawny, both now dead. They were to have farmed this land one day as their father had, and their father’s father had – two brave sons, his only children, lost to Cedric forever.

  The snowdrops came once more, but it had been a bleak start to a year that grew bleaker.

  Aunt Ada was very distracted throughout January and February. She was devoted to the wireless news bulletins and what was happening in Africa, and she kept mislaying Little Gibson’s cuttlebone, which upset the canary a great deal.

  Lyla worried about Ada, who’d grown increasingly jumpy and preoccupied for no reason that Lyla could understand. She’d lost interest in her Pink Dandelions, there being no longer any imminent threat from Germans in the Bristol Channel. It was only ‘Prisoners’ that appeared to still be a matter of urgency.

  ‘Come on, Lyla,’ Cat would say of an evening. ‘Prisoners.’

  Lyla would drag her heels a little, bored as she was with packing boxes of bootlaces and tinned Ambrosia for the soldiers that might be in foreign jails.

  ‘No, Lyla, it’s important,’ Cat would say, gazing at her friend.

  And so Lyla would spend evening after evening sealing and addressing boxes, because Cat thought that, you never knew, they might just be desperately needed by someone somewhere.

  After the snowdrops, and entirely in accordance with Ada’s pattern, came the bluebells and the primroses.

  Lyla walked with Cat one afternoon through the Orangery to go and fetch boots and coats. Cat pointed. Someone, perhaps one of the more daring sixth-formers, had placed her bra on the upper part of Hermes, but neither Cat nor Lyla giggled, for the year so far had a gloom that couldn’t be shifted.

  Wrapping their coats tightly about themselves, they went out into the old knot garden. The roses had long been uprooted and replaced with vegetables. Cat paused, looked up and – as if it had only just occurred to her because of the tree being right there – said, ‘It’s a long time since you gave me a letter from your father.’

  Lyla never thought about her father’s letters at all. She would simply hand them to Cat without a second thought, and Cat would give them to Solomon.

  Cat waited under the tree and Lyla called back to her, ‘Come on, it’s cold.’

  In the potting shed, as they collected a sack of what Mr Tawny called ‘earlies’, which were actually just a kind of potato that grew earlier than the other ones, Cat asked, ‘Don’t you ever think about him?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Lyla, though she knew exactly who Cat meant and, in truth, the deaths of Brenda’s father and of Cedric’s sons had combined to inch the undercurrent of her thoughts in Father’s direction. ‘Never,’ she said.

  Cat’s forehead creased a little as she looked at Lyla. They were silent for a long while, bending side by side, dropping the earlies into a furrow. As they washed their hands under the icy tap beside the potting shed, Cat asked, ‘You know, you might be able to visit your mother one day – Primrose lets girls do that sometimes, if, say, your second cousin or someone like that has something happen to him. I am sure Primrose would let you if you asked her.’

  ‘I might . . .’ answered Lyla, instantly dismissing the idea, for she knew, deep down, she’d never go to London.

  Lyla could no longer think about Mop with any clarity, nor even for any great length of time, for if she did she would grow uneasy. A dim awareness that there were things she did not wish to acknowledge stopped her from looking further or deeper. There were things half known, things half remembered, half seen, that had, perhaps because of the deaths of Cedric’s sons, begun to waken, to stir and scuffle in her mind like jackdaws in a chimney. Lyla, who felt as fragile as a porcelain thing that might crack and shatter under the faintest of pressure, knew also that these were things she mustn’t allow into the light, things she must keep down like rats in a cellar.

  She glanced at Cat and frowned, wondering why her friend was suggesting she visit Mop now when she’d never suggested it before, then took a deep breath and said brightly, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m going to read you my letter from Mop this evening. It came today because her letters don’t always come on Tuesdays any more.’

  Cat smiled gently. ‘You’re so similar, you and your mother,’ she began carefully. ‘Sometimes it’s like hearing you talk when you read her letters.’

  64

  THE GENEVA CONVENTION

  A new sign had suddenly appeared on the door to the Billiard Room.

  TOP SECRET

  NO ENTRY TO PREFECTS

  PETTY OFFICIALS OF ANY STRIPE

  NOR TO ANYONE WITHOUT PERMISSION

  That night at Prisoners, Ada declared with her customary vigour that British prisoners of war were not so much hungry as bored. Their spirits must be kept up. They must have board games. Board games were the thing for raising morale, whiling away the hours, encouraging them, and so on.

  The girls would fill the boxes for prisoners with processed cheese, tinned puddings and so forth in the Painted Hall as usual, but before they were sealed, they were to be wheeled in a wicker log basket to the door of the Billiard Room to have the board game added by Ada herself, and in this Ada must be helped by Lyla Spence.

  ‘Why do I have to do it?’ Lyla complained to Cat later.

  ‘Of course you do. I would if I were you,’ answered Cat quietly.

  ‘Well, you’re not,’ said Lyla.

  ‘If I help you will you do it?’ asked Cat.

  And so it was that both Lyla and Cat presented themselves in the Billiard Room, and when Solomon with his customary flourish and sense of occasion opened the door to them, Lyla saw that it was much changed, for the gelignite, blasting powder, ammonite and all the other ingredients that went into Pink Dandelions had been swept aside into a far corner, and stacked around the edges of the room were now piles and piles of wooden boxes with the word ‘MONOPOLY’ running across the side in black. At the far end of the room there was a separate table on which were lined up lots of lines of silver top hats, several piles of small folded papers and a screwdriver.

  ‘Yes, yes, Monopoly! A game manufactured by Waddingtons, who have kindly donated some to our own prisoners of war. It is a most amusing game, great fun and just the thing for when you’re bored and locked in a jail and far from home. Now, d’you see, you are to take a Monopoly set, like so, and pass it to me –’ she gestured to the table with the screwdriver – ‘and I will . . . well, I will check it is complete, mend anything broken and so on, and then I will pass it back to you, like pass the parcel, d’you see? And you will then add it to a box, then seal the box and address it to the International Red Cross Committee in Geneva.’

  ‘We could give them some other games too,’ suggested Lyla. ‘I think Conflict is quite a good game—’

  Great Aunt Ada looked astonished at such a notion. ‘No no, the kind of game that English men like to play when in prison, the only game worth its salt, d’you know, is Monopoly.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cat agreed. ‘They want to play Monopoly, Lyla.’

  Those evenings in the Billiard Room were wonderful. There, with the large fire bu
rning and in the company of those who loved her, Lyla felt safe and happy and didn’t really mind at all about only being able to put Monopoly in the boxes rather than any other game.

  Ada would work away most intently and Lyla would wink at Cat and roll her eyes, for Aunt Ada appeared so very earnest about the game, checking and double-checking all the various pieces of each set – the little metal hats and dice and so on – until finally she would replace the lid and pass it over to the billiard table and urge them to hurry their sealing and labelling, and again Lyla would smile and roll her eyes, most amused by Ada’s peculiar view on what was required by an Englishman in captivity.

  ‘Not to worry, not to worry,’ Ada would say, a little impatiently, as Lyla double-checked the list of contents. ‘Don’t you see, it’s the game that will keep them going, not the cheese and so on.’

  ‘Don’t you see, she is dotty. I said she was, and she is,’ whispered Lyla. ‘I’ve never heard of anyone sending Monopoly to prisoners. I mean, it’s just a game. It’s not as though it could feed you or keep you warm. Anyway, there might be other games they prefer.’

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t be doing it for no reason at all,’ answered Cat quietly.

  65

  A SHORT-WAVE S 88/5 ABWEHR TRANSMITTER

  Rather abruptly in April that year, Great Aunt Ada banished The Times from Furlongs. The Wireless was coming in very handy indeed: it carried no nonsense or tittle-tattle, nor news that wasn’t news. So, from now on, no printed press was to cross the threshold of her house. As in all things, Great Aunt Ada was thorough about the whole business.

  At the end of that term Primrose announced that both the Art Cup and the Art Scholarship this year would go to Lyla Spence. Lyla, who’d never in all her life won an award, went to the top of the Great Stairs and took the cup. She heard the applause and her eyes filled with tears for the longing that she had to tell her mother that she, Lyla, her mother’s daughter, had won a scholarship for art.