Miss Ranskill Comes Home

by Barbara Euphan Todd

  ‘So you had to bury the Carpenter?’ he soothed. ‘Yes, of course.’

  Miss Ranskill closed her eyes and then snuggled her head into the pillow like a tired dog.

  The Surgeon-Lieutenant waited for a minute or two, and then, baulked by her closed eyelids from any more questioning of the interesting case or even more interesting spy, returned to the Wardroom to report that though Barnacle Belle might have delayed concussion or bats or both, in his opinion she was overdoing it.

  ‘Overdoing it, my foot!’ said the First Lieutenant. ‘It’s perfectly sane to bury a dead carpenter.’

  ‘All right, but when she first came to she tried to kid me that she’d kidded herself that the barrage balloons were flying whales.’

  ‘Keep it clean.’ The First Lieutenant, who had given the unwelcoming hospitality of his cabin to Miss Ranskill, yawned and stretched himself. ‘Don’t let’s have obstetrics even if you did get a first in midwifery.’

  The Surgeon-Lieutenant grinned sulkily and went along to give a more modified report in the Captain’s cabin.

  III

  Commander Wrekin was used, after long years of service, to ministering to the needs of many people, from Mastersat-Arms suffering hurt dignity to ships’ boys whose swelled-headedness must be balanced against homesickness. Nor was woman business kept apart from his jurisdiction even at sea, or likely to be kept apart so long as AB’s continued their requests to ‘see privately on family matters’. The family matters, slowly divulged, usually meant that ‘the wife had been carrying on with a friend’, and that another friend had thought it ‘his duty’ to acquaint Able-Seaman So-and-So of the facts and always when the ship was away from home waters. The usual result was that the harassed AB, after nights of brooding in his hammock, fell foul of some Petty Officer and ‘didn’t seem to have heart for anything somehow, sir.’

  Yes, the destroyer’s commander had had to deal with ‘woman business’ often enough, but he found Miss Ranskill baffling.

  She received the news that she was the only woman aboard the convoy with little surprise and less embarrassment, remarking:

  ‘It will be odd to see a woman: for years there was nobody but the Carpenter.’

  Little by little, as the days went by and her strength increased, so that their conversations could be longer and more frequent, he was able to piece her story together into a more or less consecutive whole.

  She had been on a world pleasure cruise.

  ‘It was just after the Munich scare and we thought it would be safe. Things were beginning to look very bad though, a few days before my accident.’

  That was as much as he heard the first day, because that seemed the moment for him to tell of the outbreak of a war that had made convoys and balloon barrages necessary.

  ‘I hope the Maginot Line is being a success,’ said Miss Ranskill.

  The story of the fall of France and the great evacuation of Dunkirk was as much as she could bear to hear that day.

  ‘And we had four years of peace,’ she commented. ‘Stolen sort of peace. I’m glad the Carpenter didn’t know. He was at sea in the last war. It doesn’t seem fair for us to have had that separate peace. If I’d only believed war was coming I wouldn’t have bothered about my hat.’

  ‘No,’ he said, and not interrogatively because her eyes were closing. ‘No, I’m sure you wouldn’t. Well, I mustn’t stay chatting any longer now.’

  But before he left the cabin, Miss Ranskill raised her head from the pillow.

  ‘Wasn’t there a War of Jenkins’s Ear?’ she asked.

  ‘The Peace of Ranskill’s Hat,’ she muttered, and the sense of irony that had lain so many years dormant roused itself for a moment before she went to sleep.

  The next morning she explained herself.

  ‘It was only a silly little pull-on felt. I didn’t even like it particularly except that it generally stayed on better than the others. It was getting dusk and I was standing alone by the rails on one side of the ship when it blew off. It didn’t go right overboard, I mean, not right down because it caught on a hook or something. I can’t be technical, and, anyway, you don’t count P and O’s as ships, do you?’

  ‘Well, never mind that though, go on.’

  ‘I thought I could reach it, so I climbed over the rails and hung on with one hand. Then my foot skidded on some iron or something and I suppose the jerk made me let go.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Oh! all darkness and choking and then when I came up I think I lost my head and just swam desperately. I’m not awfully good, and clothes make a difference. When I did see the ship she seemed quite a long way away, and I couldn’t make my voice carry. It seemed to scream back into my own face till my throat was sore. Nobody heard… . I tried to follow the white line – the wake, you know, and it seemed to keep stretching out like elastic, getting longer and longer as the ship went further away… . It was dark by then, and I don’t suppose anyone could have seen me even if they’d been looking… . It was awfully lonely swimming in the dark… . I gave up trying to swim fast… . I don’t know how long it lasted… . I got tired… . I suppose I went down because I remember choking and fighting, and then –’

  Miss Ranskill’s eyes were wide with horror and Lieutenant-Commander Wrekin laid a hand on the scarred fingers that were doubling up a fold of sheet.

  ‘Go on,’ he ordered, knowing that she must finish now if she were to have the peace of a mind unburdened.

  ‘I don’t remember any more. I suppose I was pretty well drowned. When I came to I was lying by a big bonfire and being sick and someone was working my arms about – a man with a beard… . It was the Carpenter.’

  Suddenly Miss Ranskill gave a little choking sob. Before she needed it, her listener pulled a white handkerchief from the pocket of his monkey-jacket.

  ‘Quite clean,’ he said, ‘and don’t mind me. Here, let’s get your pillows better.’

  Then as he stooped over her, Miss Ranskill’s hands clutched his coat-lapels, her head butted the hollow of his shoulder, while his arms, practised in such holding of his two small daughters and not so very much bigger wife, went round her quivering body.

  Presently she gave him a little push and lay back on the pillows.

  ‘It was awful of me –’ she said. ‘But –’

  ‘It wasn’t awful at all. Any woman would want to cry after an experience like that.’

  ‘It wasn’t that, it was talking about the Carpenter. I never cried on his shoulder… . I never wanted to – till he was dead. It’s awful when a man’s dead and he was the only person who could have comforted you.’

  Miss Ranskill stretched out her hand for the handkerchief, but he took it, and dabbed professionally at the last of her tears.

  ‘Do you good to cry a bit.’

  ‘It doesn’t really, at least, it won’t any more.’ She took the handkerchief and gave a final dab to her nose. ‘Think if that young doctor had come in!’

  It was not a thought that the senior officer cared to brood over, but he replied, ‘Done him a lot of good if he had.’

  Miss Ranskill grinned.

  ‘It would have been rather funny. He hasn’t much sense of humour.’

  ‘No, he’d probably prescribe soup for you. As a matter of fact that’s what I’m going to order now – a cup of good strong soup.’

  And at once the word soup became a rescuer, relieving them both from embarrassment, changing the subject and making the relationship easy again.

  ‘Soup,’ said Miss Ranskill. ‘Yes, I should like some soup. After that I’ll have a sleep.’

  Most of her days as well as nights were spent in sleeping: there was so much to be made up. In the intervals between sleeping and dozing she ate and asked occasional questions whose answers she digested slowly. There was a good deal of digesting to be done. Geography and history were so curiously changed and muddled. Germany had removed its neighbours’ landmarks and turned the whole of Europe into No-man’s land. Friendly Italy
had become foe; Russia, so often cartooned, was the saviour of civilisation, and France was divided against herself.

  The wireless made her head ache, besides, she could not follow the news, and remarked, after her first attempt, that she felt like a kindergarten child who had been jumped into the sixth form of a high school.

  She did not ask many questions about England. It would, she decided, as there had been no invasion, be very much as it had been in the last war, anxious and busy. But her sister, a permanency if ever there was one, would still be doing the church flowers and having servant difficulties. Miss Moxon and Miss Grant (two other permanancies) would still be quarrelling under the roof they had shared for twenty-five, no, for twenty-eight years now. The village children would have grown, the tiny ones plumping up and the taller ones pulling out.

  She never thought of considering whether there would be any change in herself: there is not much difference in age between thirty-nine and forty-three. No, everything would be pretty much the same in the village when she, Nona Ranskill, came back, with a story to tell that would make tea-party gossip for week after week.

  She was in the state known to all of us in some degree when the train has steamed out of the station – not quite here and yet not there either, with all the pictures of the destination as bright in the mind as coloured postcards.

  Yet, some urgency of mind told her that though her own particular pictures might keep their brightness for a week or so after her arrival, they would soon fade or be superimposed upon.

  ‘But just for a little,’ drowsed Miss Ranskill, ‘just for a little, early morning tea and hot baths and electric light switches and armchairs and roses. All so easy, getting into a train and going where you want to, and listening to the wind blowing outside and the rain on the window-panes, and seeing the lights blazing from the windows when you come home from a walk.’

  One morning she remarked, ‘It’s very queer to be so safe.’

  ‘A convoy,’ replied Commander Wrekin. ‘A convoy isn’t everybody’s idea of safety, you know. I’d meant to have a chat about that, but I didn’t want to worry you after the shaking-up you’ve had.’

  ‘Oh! submarines!’ said Miss Ranskill, in a voice that might have dismissed a mouse. ‘I don’t mind them. It was being alone on an empty sea that I minded. One can get used to most things, but not to that.’

  She was gradually getting used to the idea of freedom and plenty again, and, as mind and body were fed, desire grew. She longed not for one knife but for twenty, for dozens of silk stockings and abundance of clothes. She would have four years’ income to spend.

  It was not until they were two days offshore that she heard their destination was Hartmouth. Hartmouth? What did she know about Hartmouth? She shook her memory and saw a sheet of blue notepaper with a stamped address – Hillrise, Newton Road, Hartmouth. Tel. Hartmouth 258, looked again at the tight precise little handwriting on envelopes that reached her three or four times a year. The letters they carried brought news of the tea-parties, ‘marvellous bargains’ and ‘wonderful’ holidays of ‘yours ever, Marjorie Mallison (Mottram).’

  Yes, Marjorie, whose india-rubber she had shared, whose pencils she had chewed, lived at Hartmouth and was married to a doctor. Stodgy-legged, smooth-haired, rabbit-mouthed Marjorie would be glad to see her, would put her up until she could buy a trunk and a suitcase and fill them both. She would put up Edith too, if her sister came to welcome her.

  She would telephone to Marjorie as soon as she was ashore and then she would take a taxi to Newton Road.

  Marjorie, who had won the ‘Special Prize’ for ‘being the most helpful alike to staff and pupils’, whose reports, lacking the venom that had brightened Nona Ranskill’s, were tributes to sterling and stodgy character – very good, tries hard, good careful work, an excellent term and (eulogy from the Head Mistress) Marjorie sets the tone of the school and is a first-class influence – would be the very person to help.

  That was all settled then. Miss Ranskill packed up her mind for the night, pulled down the sleeves of the First Lieutenant’s pyjamas, knocked her head against the edge of his bunk and turned over to sleep.

  Visions of Marjorie kept interrupting, echoes of Marjorie’s voice jogged her to wakefulness. It had been rather a throaty voice.

  ‘I say,’ (this on the occasion of her first Head Girl speech to the sixth form) ‘I say, this isn’t going to be a pie-jaw or anything, but I do sort of feel it’s up to all of us to make this a frightfully specially good term because of that new school that’s come to the Towers. I mean, we mustn’t go ragging about in crocodile or anything. Personally, I think it would be a frightfully good idea if we were to march in step for the first half mile, or anyway till we’re through the village. I know it’ll be a bit of a fag but I do think it’s up to us to show this ghastly new school that St Catherine’s is the school. We’ll have to challenge their eleven next week and fix up a match, and we simply must win it. But anyway, I do think it would be a jolly good idea if we were to begin by marching in croc.: Hands up everyone who agrees… . Wake up, Nona… . Nona, everyone else has put their hands up. Aren’t you going to vote?’

  And back through the years, surviving the death and burial of the Carpenter and threat of starvation at sea, Nona Ranskill’s answer came echoing back to her:

  ‘Well, I don’t see why we should suddenly start marching about just to show off to a new school.’

  ‘But it isn’t showing off. I mean, they must jolly well know that St Cat’s is the best school. It’s only just keeping up our prestige sort of. I mean, I don’t want to pie-jaw, but there are some things one just can’t explain. I do think that marching would sort of show. Hands up again everybody… . Nona!’

  ‘But I don’t see why their school shouldn’t be the best to them. P’raps they’ll march too: then we’ll want a band. Besides, I don’t see why we should call St Catherine’s the best school just because we were sent to it.’

  ‘Nona!’

  ‘Well, I don’t. It’s silly!’

  Thereafter, Marjorie, perched on the edge of the row of wash-basins in the sixth form cloakroom, had pleaded confusedly to Nona to ‘back up St Cat’s’, had mingled the death of Nelson with dinner-jackets on shikari, linked the school song, ‘Forty Years On’ (taken with no sense of humour from Harrow) with ‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’, and waved (metaphorically) a new National Flag composed partly of the Union Jack and, more largely, of the school badge on whose shield-shaped background a Catherine Wheel, a portcullis and the legend Honour before Honours were embroidered, until Nona, more embarrassed than convinced, muttered that she wouldn’t mind marching so much if she didn’t always start off with the wrong foot.

  Marjorie’s triumphant ‘I knew you’d come round. I knew you were only ragging, you chump,’ ended the conversation.

  There followed visions of Marjorie reporting herself (with a heroism that reeked of smugness to the lawless) for absolutely necessary speech in the dormitory. ‘Still a rule’s a rule, and I did break it and it would have been rotten not to report myself, even though I had to tell that new girl where the bathroom was, because she said she was going to be sick.’ Visions arose of Marjorie’s return, absolved from shame, though the owner of a conduct mark she had insisted on receiving from the Head Mistress – ‘She was jolly decent. I’m most awfully glad I reported myself. Do you know, she actually said… . No, I can’t tell you… . All right, then, I will… . She said it was … well, I mean she said I could consider it more of a decoration than a conduct mark!’

  Still Marjorie, who had always had stores of pencils and india-rubber and blotting-paper, who could read a time-table as well as a genealogical one, whose suspenders never broke and whose folded clothes were as trim as piles of sandwiches, would be the very person to advise a returned desert-islander.

  IV

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Commander Wrekin, ‘tomorrow, with any luck, you’ll see land.’

  At last he had a
nswered the question she had not dared to ask: the slow days aboard had taught her that queries were not encouraged.

  She did not answer, for his words had given her a picture of the Needles, as she had seen them just after dawn one June morning. She remembered their mistiness and the shimmer of New Forest trees edging Southampton Water and the traffic of the wide sea-lane and how the magic of return had clutched at her though she was only coming back then from a holiday in the Channel Islands.

  ‘Yes, tomorrow you’ll see land again.’

  An icy quiver ran down her spine, so, just like that she had thrilled to rare and occasional music, to the ice-clear voice of a chorister singing a carol in King’s College Chapel, to a Highlander piping up Regent Street, to Reveille after the fraught silence that follows the Last Post, to a thrush in November, to the new bleating of a lamb in spring and to the sound of bells across water.

  ‘Queer,’ said Miss Ranskill, ‘what a good word nostalgia is. It sounds like smells, I mean, one thinks of a nose at once, and it is by smells one remembers things best.’

  ‘It means “return pain’, roughly translated, and, God, how that hurts – the return, I mean, even more than the thinking about it. Don’t know why, but it does. England hits me again every time I come back.’

  ‘Pierces, I think,’ said Miss Ranskill, ‘if we’re being particular about words.’ She added, ‘I shall buy a dictionary first of all. No, a knife first, then a dictionary. It’s funny, I always used to read the lists of books that people made out for imaginary desert islands, but nobody ever put down a dictionary.’

  ‘Sir!’ the First Lieutenant interrupted, and after that Miss Ranskill, who was on deck for the second time only since her rescue, was left alone to plan her return to the land.

  It was a blue-and-silver morning, and even the battleship-grey of the long line of ships had taken on a hinting of azure. The sun silvered the bellies of the barrage balloons and caught the wings of an aeroplane that zoomed above.