The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  With the scrap of my sister’s wallpaper in hand, I took in the view of the Plain from her window – another thing that I couldn’t take with me. The grass looked bleak at this time of year, stretching its rags over the chalk. It used to pain me so much to see it like this that I would pull out Father’s botany pocket book and reel off the names of the flowers that sprouted there in the summer, as if the colour in their syllables could stir up some magic in the bones of the hill and beckon in spring. I would miss the shiver of ash trees that flanked the right side of the garden. The fullness of their branches in the summer almost masked the Plain from us entirely.

  Having taken up his post during the summer of 1931, my father could not understand the need for the trees; he loved the view of the plain as much as I did and was in half a mind to take an axe to them. But the other villagers were quick to warn us against it and, come winter, we were glad of their advice. The winds rattled the house to its core throughout February and we became used to these small fracas, putting up shutters and sometimes even taking refuge in the cellar. Later, when the bombs fell in Wilton, I thought of Imber’s winds and how we rode them out underneath the house with nothing but a candle and a song from Freda.

  At the window that day, I tried to convince myself that I’d soon come home to see the ash trees clothed again, drinking in all of August’s light; I would come back for my father’s sake. But the gap in the line of ashes – where we had felled his tree – told me otherwise. Like the shadow of a sinking Zeppelin, the war had started its descent. Only Martha Nash was resolute in her insistence that we would return within two years. She had to be, I guess, for Albie’s sake.

  After I had finished packing I left the parsonage in search of my mother who, I knew, would be in the church. I found her in the tower, staring up at the bells.

  ‘They will look after it, won’t they?’ she asked after a while, running her eyes down a bell rope to meet mine at the base of the tower. Her birth, her marriage and the beginning of each week had been marked under the peal of these five instruments. ‘No one ever wishes for death, Vi-vi,’ she told me, ‘but there was always comfort in knowing you would bring me here when it did come.’ I didn’t like to hear her talk as if we weren’t coming back. She wasn’t old. She had no reason to think she would not return in her lifetime. Not like Albie. But ever since the accident she had handled her days so carefully, aware that they could evaporate at any minute.

  ‘Will they let you bury me here?’ she asked me. She had always been like that, posing questions that were beyond my reach, as if she were the child and I were the mother. I would scramble in vain for an answer and always came up short.

  The Major’s wife appeared at the door. ‘Are you the last?’ Her voice skimmed across the nave.

  ‘We’re just waiting for the ATS girls to come back from Langton,’ my mother replied, standing up.

  ‘Where are they housing you?’ she enquired.

  ‘We don’t know. Somewhere in Warminster, I expect. Perhaps Wilton.’

  ‘Oh, Warminster … I see.’ She picked at the doorframe as she spoke. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Only I thought you might like to leave a note. I have paper.’

  ‘A note?’ I queried, my mother squeezing my hand as a way of telling me not to pry.

  ‘Yes. I thought he would want –’

  My mother stared at the slip of paper that was held out to her. ‘But … what would he have me say?’ she asked, her question floundering in echoes around the four walls of the tower.

  The years have yellowed the note, curling it up at the edges as if to check what is underneath. I push the church door open, the last word, ‘kindly’, on repeat in my ears. The hinges turn in their sleep and I stand in the base of the tower – this time without my mother. The air next to me where she would have stood is as cold as a tomb. There are four bells missing from the cages above; only one remains. The wind’s chorale enters the tower from the Barrow. It disturbs the ghost of each bell and carries their peal in silence across the Plain.

  CHAPTER 2

  We kept them away for so long. There was no reason – other than a war – for us to let them in.

  Mama said that, even if there had been no evacuation, there would have been other wars, other threats that would have overtaken us. But in my mind we had a course mapped out, which, once lost, could not be caught again – only ghosted. The men and women we would have married, the children they would have given us: everything remains locked in some parallel womb of impossibility.

  If it hadn’t have been for the war, we would still be hidden in the Downs with Father, coaxing our living out of the land. Each meal – dark with the earth from which it had been drawn – would have been as hard-earned as before. And the water would have tasted all the richer for having half a mile’s walk sweated into it.

  The army could not comprehend why we wanted to stay. Winter floods and withering summers plagued the valley floor; Imber’s water arrived in abundance or not at all. It was not uncommon for the Dock that ran through the village to dry up completely in the summer. Then, come wintertime, we would watch it bleed and swell into the floors and furnishings of the cottages bordering the stream. The land was of little use for anything other than sheep farming, a hard vocation at the best of times. The military watched the fluctuations in the weather; they saw how little the seasons yielded us; they watched from all four sides of Salisbury Plain. Then they crept in on us, preying on the precariousness of our harvests and buying up our farmers’ land, piece by piece, plot by plot.

  But even if the crops had died out or the water had dried up, we would have survived on other things: long draughts of air sprinting across the Plain; the sunlight snagging itself on each chalk milestone; the spasm of a newborn lamb in our hands. I think of this impossible valley so often that the light there has yellowed; the trees have grown fuller and the flowers have turned to glass. The more I paint it in my mind, the stiller everything becomes. But we were not so hidden, not so set apart, as to be forgotten by the war.

  Aside from fetching gas for our lamps, we had very little cause to travel to town before war broke out. Seven miles from the next village, we were not in anybody’s way; and Imber had preferred to be left to its own devices. It was a meek existence and one that we did not complain about. Even our parsonage, a sprawling yawn of a house that rivalled Imber Court for size, did not have its own water or electricity.

  My father preferred it that way; he hated how the grandness of the house set us apart from our neighbours and caused them to treat our family with a deference that we neither deserved nor desired. When Imber Court offered him the use of their outside tap, he continued to send Freda and me to fetch water from the well so that we would not be seen to be distancing ourselves from the rest of the parish.

  Mama stopped short of putting her head in her hands when on one occasion, while dining at Imber Court, he took issue with Major Whistler’s complaint about the chalky taste in his tap water. Father was at pains to remind him that the rest of the village had to walk half a mile to quench their thirst. Mama laughed away his affront as best she could. Yet behind closed doors my father knew his place. He instructed us on a regular basis never to go and play in the grounds of the Court unless invited by the Major. My mother would add, with a wry smile in his direction, that if we were fortunate enough to receive an invitation, it would be thoroughly improper to mention their tap.

  My sister loved nothing more than to go and play in Imber Court. She thought the Whistlers a rather superior breed, which she should emulate wherever possible. She mimicked their mannerisms and their tone of voice and even purchased a pair of clip-on earrings that she thought resembled Mrs
Whistler’s. When the other girls called her a copycat, she bought a different pair to distinguish herself – as if they wouldn’t guess and smile archly behind her back. She hated having to go to school with the rest of us and begged Father for a governess, like Mrs Whistler had had when she was younger. She needn’t have bothered asking: Freda would not have been given her way even if we had possessed the savings for such a thing. My father wanted us elbow to elbow in the local school with the rest of the village, where we belonged. It was hard on Freda – at fourteen, she had been the eldest of Imber’s schoolchildren and the brightest, and Mrs Williams, the mistress, had quickly run out of ways to keep her occupied. She had treated her more like an assistant than a pupil. It had angered me to watch my sister turn from her own books to help the labourers’ children with their writing. The little ones loved her for it but I saw only her pride at having been singled out. She used to tick them off terribly for not paying attention. It was no wonder their heads lolled with sleep in class when they had been up before the sun, tending sheep on the Downs. Freda thought all farmers lacked wit and sharpness and was not afraid to say so. She had not seen, as I had, the maturity with which an Imber boy could whistle orders to his dog and keep an entire flock in check. She was too busy copying Mrs Whistler’s jewels.

  I resented having to scrub my hands and face after school and put on my best dress to go to Imber Court, particularly when they asked us to play tennis. Mrs Whistler loved to see the old court being used by the children but I was bewildered as to why anyone would want to fill an entire afternoon by hitting a ball back and forth over a net. She seemed to have forgotten that, in the rest of the village, there were harvesting and rabbiting and shearing to be done. I sat at the side of the court for most of the matches and let Freda play with the Dean children from Seagram’s Farm. She used to dance through her games, stretching out her long limbs and nursing the ball neatly over to the opposite side of the court; I was convinced Harry Dean let her win only because she was pretty. It became a ritual of mine to ignore the pop, pop of the ball on the grass and pick out underneath it the slow grind of a tractor somewhere on the Downs. The farm workers told me that tennis was an idle sport for people who had nothing better to do. I wanted to be out in the fields with them, in the midst of the seasons, ushering livestock through winter and spring and reaping the rewards of summer. I wanted to be with Father, not playing silly games with the Deans. He would be the first to roll up his shirtsleeves and lend his help in the lambing season to any farmer in need of it. I would beg to go with him in the hope of trying my hand at birthing lambs and loading the mangers in the barns with hay. Provided I wasn’t engaged for an afternoon at the Court, he would always give in, despite protests from Mama. We would push a bottle of hot tea into one of Father’s woollen socks and pass it around the labourers when we found them on the Downs.

  He didn’t treat me like a normal little girl. He knew I was different from Freda. When the military widened the road through the village and channelled the Imber Dock through stern, concrete pipes, Freda caught me red-handed, up to my knees in mud, trying to crawl from one end of a pipe to the other. I tried to explain that the schoolmistress’s son had dared me to do it but Mama was furious when she found out. She said I had disgraced myself in front of the entire village. Father, however, ran a hand through my muddied hair and told me not to get caught next time.

  He might not have cared about having his own well, but he was not averse to craving some of the superfluities that life in Imber did not afford: he longed for a telephone line. The dark arcs dissecting the skies of Salisbury and Warminster fascinated him; I often caught him running his eyes along them on our journeys into town, as if he were trying to listen in on the conversations sealed inside the wires.

  Not even Imber Court had use of a telephone. When a line finally arrived, it was installed with Mrs Carter in the post office. It was to be a public telephone, which, much to my father’s glee, we were all at liberty to use.

  On its first day of operation, the queue for the telephone stretched all the way down the road to the smithy. My school friends Pete and Annie were sent across to Chitterne to receive calls from those of us who could not think of anyone beyond Imber to telephone. I remember nervously slotting in the pennies, waiting for the voice of the operator and pressing button A with a giggle, just as Mrs Carter had instructed me to do, as soon as I heard Pete’s voice all small and compressed and ticklish in my ear. But when I think back to those first words whistling through the wires to places beyond the Plain, I can’t help but feel that we entered into an irrevocable bargain: wired for ever to the outside world, we could never again know what it was to be fully alone.

  I have begun to trace the roots of the evacuation back to that sprawl of unsightly wires. What if we had stayed separate? Kept ourselves to ourselves. Maybe then they would have left us alone, firing shells from one side of the valley to the other without even knowing we were there.

  It would be different if Annie and Pete were around: they would anchor me, stop me keeping everything behind glass, in a snow globe, as if it can never be retrieved. But they’re not here. Annie married a northerner, and Pete – it’s enough to say he’s gone too. They did not suffer the trouble that I had in moving away. I can still imagine their faces pressed into the black lacquer of the telephone receiver, Pete holding the earpiece, Annie trying to grab it from him, as they made their first call.

  Annie, a small, pale sprig of a girl, was scared stiff of my sister. She was in awe of the dresses that she wore at weekends and would do anything she could to avoid being frowned upon by her at school. She found it difficult to keep up with the others; I would watch helplessly as Mrs Williams called her to the front of the class to solve sums and conjugate verbs: she would always flounder over the answers and I wished Mrs Williams would stop asking her in front of everyone. I’d try to mouth the answers to her. But Freda always caught her squinting in my direction, which only made it worse for Annie. She feared Freda’s scorn more than she did the schoolmistress. Annie didn’t have any sisters of her own; if she had, she would have realized that, by choosing to become my friend, she was placing herself directly in Freda’s line of fire.

  Nevertheless, we became inseparable. Everybody else thought her a foolish, bashful girl but I saw her spirit. Annie had a good heart and that, to me, was more important than arithmetic, spelling or a well-trimmed dress. With Annie by my side, I felt as if I could do anything. Imber gave us the confidence that we might have lacked in larger, grander climes. Only in Imber could a parson’s daughter roll up her skirt and dig a hole, take a pair of shears to a sheep or play cricket. I hear stories, now, of girls who wept at the end of the war; they said the fighting bought them their freedom. But I was already free. I didn’t need their explosions, their calculated invasions, the gradual erosion of what I had known.

  Pete understood why I needed Imber. He knew I depended on it in a way that he never had to. I’d catch him looking at me knowingly when I tried to help with the thatching or stone walling. In any other place, I would have been made to stay inside, like a proper parson’s daughter. It unsettled me – the way he seemed to want to try to work me out with his eyes. But he was too quick-witted to be made an enemy so I swallowed my inhibitions and made sure he was my friend.

  Out of all the boys in Imber, Pete was the most practical – he fitted into other people’s families like a key cut for a door; it didn’t matter if it was lambing or ploughing or firing a gun, he picked it up quickly and became the best there was at it. It was the same with places: I took a long time to settle into Wilton after we left Imber but it was only a week before everyone knew Pete. He possessed an ease with the outdoors that showed
itself in his shoulders and limbs, a strength that everybody knew he would carry with him into adulthood. I tried to ignore his good looks by joining in with the jobs he performed around the village, casting myself as an ally rather than standing back and asking to be admired, like the other girls. Annie was the worst: she played with her hair and pretended not to hear his questions, just so he would ask them again. He was not the kind of boy with whom I wanted to fall in love; every girl in the village had her eye on him – I hardly needed to add my admiration. But I couldn’t help myself. I knew I saw something in him that the others failed to see: the way he raised his eyebrows in a questioning fashion every time somebody spoke to him. Or the manner in which he stood listening with one foot always slightly ahead of the other, as if he were about to bolt at any minute. He was always poised, never settled. He worked the land with vigour, as if striving for something.

  I was never presumptuous about his opinion of me. Even when I happened to meet his eye, I was quick to stifle the thought that he had looked at me first. It was fanciful. I was making it up.