Miss Ranskill Comes Home

by Barbara Euphan Todd

  ‘We’ll have to eat the cheese ourselves, I suppose, as our ration. You’ll just take the rolls then?’

  ‘Could I,’ said Miss Ranskill, very humbly and nervously, ‘could I buy something to put on them instead of cheese?’

  ‘Fish paste?’

  ‘No,’ Miss Ranskill checked a shudder. ‘Not fish. Marmalade or jam would do.’

  ‘That’s points again.’

  ‘Points! Jam.’

  ‘Jam’s on points.’

  ‘Oh!’ Miss Ranskill changed a conversation that was, to her anyway, becoming absolutely idiotic. ‘Never mind, I’ll have them as they are.’

  ‘You could have turkey-and-tongue paste if you like.’

  So, with the rolls in one pocket and a small pot of turkey-and-tongue paste in the other, Miss Ranskill went down to the beach. There with her back against a boat, and her toes scuffling sand again, she felt more at home than she had done for weeks, even though the barricading of barbed wire behind her annoyed her by its ugliness.

  There was the sea that she had alternately loved and hated. There were the waves, up to their old tricks again, frittering themselves against the rocks, teasing the seaweed, rolling and shuffling the pebbles to a shushing rhythm. There were the gulls mewing, mocking, and crying their plaints.

  ‘It will take a lot of getting used to,’ thought Miss Ranskill, referring to the new world.

  She choked down the dry roll and the paste she had spread using a piece of cuttle-fish, then closed her eyes against the sun’s brightness, and dozed for a little.

  Presently she awoke with a jerk, startled from a dream of the island by a sound only half familiar – the sound of crying. But it was not the crying of a gull. Sunshine dazzled her eyes so that at first she saw only a dizziness of gold shot with blue and a small figure standing near her.

  A child on the island – a small living jetsam?

  She was on her feet before she remembered, but memory did not check her feet. Here, at last, in her unwelcoming country, was something in distress – something that needed her.

  The little boy was sandy and shabby – almost as shabby as she was. There was too big a gap between his shorts and his scarred knobbly knees. His jersey was hunched up pathetically under one ear. Tears poured down his face and he was licking them up as fast as they ran.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Miss Ranskill. ‘Oh! what is it?’

  ‘I’ve lost my knife, my new knife and it matters.’

  ‘Of course it matters.’ Didn’t she know how much it mattered? Didn’t she know what the loss of a knife might mean?

  She was on her knees by now and the conviction in her voice sent his head bumping into her shoulder. One cold sea-wet hand found her own, the other one wriggled up between his face and her shoulder-hollow to knuckle the tears away.

  ‘How many blades?’ she whispered.

  ‘Two and only one broke’; his voice was still choking. ‘It was give me by a carpenter.’

  ‘I shared a knife with a carpenter once, and then he – he went away and I lost my knife too.’

  The head came up now, and only the rubbed lashes and a streak on each cheek showed where the tears had been.

  ‘Did you find it?’ asked the boy.

  Miss Ranskill shook her head. It was queer that she could speak of the Carpenter to this rumple-headed brat.

  ‘You can’t by the sea.’

  He scuffled a bare foot in the sand, took a few steps and looked about vaguely.

  ‘’Tisn’t here,’ he said. ‘Did you lose yours here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How many blades had it?’

  ‘Only one.’

  ‘Mine was better.’ The little-boy swagger was returning. ‘Mine had two and only the little ’un broke.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Miss Ranskill, and the thought raised her voice to excitement and tossed her head for her. ‘Tell you what –’ But another thought checked her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me something.’

  The boy hunched up his shoulders, doubled his fists and pushed them into the pockets of his shorts.

  The attitude suggested he had been had that way before and preferred to keep himself to himself.

  ‘Dunno,’ he muttered.

  ‘Try then. Can you buy knives without ration books or anything?’

  Suspicion lightened and interest increased.

  ‘’Course you can. Anyone knows that!’

  ‘You’re sure? Tell me what does need ration books?’

  ‘Cheese, butter, sweets, bacon, soap –’

  The boy’s hands were out of his pockets and he was checking off the items on his fingers.

  Miss Ranskill listened and tried to memorise the list. He seemed to her to be a very well-informed small boy indeed, a most superior war-child.

  ‘Sugar, corn-flakes and marge. Oh! and oranges and meat and tinned stuff and jam. Not knives.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I go shoppin’ for Mum. What do you want to know for?’

  ‘Because if you’d like to, and if you know a shop, we could go and buy new knives now – one for me and one for you.’

  ‘Coo!’

  He knew a shop, of course. ‘Mr Jackson’s just round the corner past the quay.’

  Miss Ranskill followed him. She was bare-footed and bareheaded because she had taken off the woollen stockings, the scarf-turban and the suspenders, but quite unselfconscious. Beside the Naval officer and beside the girl with the ring she had looked a figure of fun. Now, hurrying after a bare-foot boy through the poorer quarters of the town she was only a shabby woman with rather peculiar hair.

  ‘Come on,’ begged the boy as he scuttled round a corner. ‘Here’s Mr Jackson’s.’

  The little shop smelled of tar and rope, oil and new leather.

  The sight of a single-bladed knife with a horn handle stabbed at Miss Ranskill’s memory and her fingers curved their longing to hold it.

  ‘Coo!’ said the little boy. ‘Look at that one there.’

  The dream of every little boy lay there shining before his eyes – a many-bladed knife with a corkscrew, a thing for making holes in leather, and –

  ‘A thing for taking stones out of horses’ hooves!’ he chanted. ‘That’s what that’s for. That’s what I want.’

  ‘Do you meet many horses with stones in their hooves?’

  ‘You might.’

  ‘This is cheaper,’ said Mr Jackson, who had noted Miss Ranskill’s clothes. ‘Quite good enough for a boy to lose.’

  He fingered a two-bladed knife. The boy glanced at it for a moment. He was hunched up again now, shifting from foot to restless foot, waiting, hoping, terrified.

  ‘You will?’ said Mr Jackson, and he snapped the elastic that held the grander knife to its sheet.

  Miss Ranskill paid and waited till her change was counted out before she put the knife into the boy’s trembling hand.

  ‘There you are,’ she said, ‘and there’s half a crown to buy sugar for the horse when you’ve taken the stone out of his hoof.’

  ‘Coo!’

  ‘You’ll have Lord Woolton after you,’ warned Mr Jackson, ‘talking like that.’

  There was a scutter of bare feet on the floor and the boy was away.

  Miss Ranskill went to the door and watched him running, knock-kneed, down the street. His heels flew out almost at right-angles. He jumped into a puddle and was splashed with a rainbow of spray.

  ‘Well, I never!’ said Mr Jackson as she turned into the shop again.

  ‘No manners these days, have they? Not so much as a thank-you.’

  ‘Knives are too important for thank-yous. Now I want one for myself, a horn-handled jack-knife, like the one there, only bigger.’

  Miss Ranskill pointed to the knife she had first noticed.

  ‘I think I’ve got one downstairs. I’ll see, if you don’t mind waiting. Beats me the manners of children nowadays, and the boy will have los
t his knife tomorrow as like as not.’

  ‘I hope not. Oh! I do hope not.’

  Miss Ranskill answered as the man clattered his way down some stairs.

  For to her the gift of the knife had been a symbol. She had thought of it as a talisman with power to save the boy from what she herself had suffered through the loss of a knife. She remembered the Carpenter’s singing of the Lyke Wake Dirge –

  This Aye neet, this aye neet,

  Ivery neet an’ all,

  Fire and sleet and candle-leet

  And Christ receive thy saul.

  His whittling had kept tune.

  If ever thou gavest hosen or shoon,

  Ivery neet an’ all

  Sit thee down and put them on

  And Christ take up thy saul.

  We couldn’t do much in the hosen or shoon line if a tramp was to come along now, could we, Miss Ranskill. I wouldn’t want to do more than give him a lend of the knife neither. By gum! though, when I get home I’ll give a knife or two to some lads and learn ’em to use ’em. Where’d we be now if I’d not learned, eh, Miss Ranskill? Suppose I were a clerk?

  So it was really the Carpenter’s present that was jolting along in the little boy’s pocket, and Miss Ranskill had begun to pay back part of her debt.

  ‘What about this one?’ Mr Jackson reappeared. ‘Old stock that one is, you won’t find steel like it today.’

  Miss Ranskill bought it – a young knife, stiff in the hasp and shiny in the blade. It had no stories to tell, no nick to show where its life had nearly ended and no rust-bite on its nameplate. All the same it felt comforting to her hand, and she was satisfied, for this after all was what she had meant to buy first.

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Mr Jackson.

  ‘Nails,’ answered Miss Ranskill recklessly, ‘three-inch and two-inch mostly and a hammer and a pair of pliers, a chisel, a spirit-level and a plane and an axe… .’

  Here in this shop, at any rate, there seemed a chance of buying some possessions. She had not been allowed to buy what she wanted in other shops, but there would be a certain solace in owning some of the things that had been so needed by her and the Carpenter. She could not have explained, even to herself, how she could provide for the past by laying in stores for the present, but the idea persisted in her mind.

  A check came again, this time from the lips of Mr Jackson. It seemed that before buying certain tools he must be certain she was engaged on necessary work. There was danger, he explained, that private customers might buy tools for frivolous purposes.

  ‘A plane for smoothing one’s cheeks, I suppose,’ murmured Miss Ranskill, ‘or an axe for chopping embroidery cotton! Is boat-building frivolous work?’

  ‘Oh! if you’re engaged on boat-building –’

  ‘I’ve finished my boat, but I might want to make something else,’ said Miss Ranskill, in an attempt to be honest, though the hammer, the chisel, the plane, the spirit-level and the axe were more desired by her than dulcimer, harp, sackbut, psaltery or any lovelier-sounding implement.

  ‘Well, if you women aren’t wonderful!’ said Mr Jackson admiringly, as he began to collect the tools.

  Presently she slipped the knife into her pocket, then collected her armful of ringing steel and polished wood and walked out into the street.

  A clock told her it was quarter-past four and a crawling taxi reminded her that the new luggage was heavy.

  ‘Hillrise, Newton Road, please,’ said Miss Ranskill.

  She felt, as she settled herself in the corner and laid the axe across her knees, that everything was going to be perfectly all right now. Her bare toes twitched against steel and the new knife satisfied her hand.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I

  And now Miss Ranskill stood outside a prim house. Facing her was a most respectable-looking door and to her right was a trim patch of garden, so precise and squared, edged and tidied that she was astonished to see a row of lettuces in the narrow border beneath the window, where she was quite certain there should be lobelias. In front of the lettuces was a fringe of parsley. Then came a gravel path and another parsley-edged bed full of rows of neatly earthed-up potatoes.

  ‘Most odd,’ thought Miss Ranskill, who knew that Marjorie’s idea of a garden must surely be beds as precise as a page out of Euclid, set in smooth grass.

  The door was opened by a bouncing slattern, who glanced at the visitor, bounced back, shouted, ‘We don’t want anythink todiy,’ and, with a slam that left the knocker bumping, left Miss Ranskill alone to stare at green paint.

  The slattern seemed as remote from Marjorie as from the ordered garden, and, just for a moment, Miss Ranskill wondered if she had come to the wrong house. Memory of a brass plate on the gate told her she had not. She set hand to the bell again, but before she could pull it the door opened and three people came out.

  Two of them carried buckets of water and the third (could she be Marjorie?) an implement that reminded Miss Ranskill of a garden hose and a motor pump.

  ‘Now remember,’ she was saying. (Yes, it was Marjorie: there was no mistaking the conscientious prefectorial face under the tin helmet.) ‘Now remember the bomb’s fallen right through the greenhouse roof. Take your stations, everyone.’

  ‘Marjorie!’ exclaimed Miss Ranskill, but the sound of her voice was overpowered by the clatter of bucket-handles.

  ‘Don’t pump till I say,’ commanded Marjorie. ‘It’s an incendiary bomb – delayed action. I’m Number One. You’re Two, Miss Sprink, and Miss Jebb’s Three.’

  Miss Ranskill wondered if she ought to do anything, and if so, what, but before she could open her mouth again, Marjorie pushed past her and sprinted, with much flapping of blue trousers, down the path between the parsley and potatoes. Then she dropped to her knees and began to crawl on all fours towards a greenhouse by the far hedge. A trail of narrow grey piping followed her. Miss Sprink or Miss Jebb plonked the pump into one bucket. Miss Jebb or Miss Sprink, in the attitude but not the garments of a Hebe, stood beside her with the other bucket poised.

  If there were a bomb, it must be a very well-behaved one, decided Miss Ranskill. Then, remembering Marjorie’s remark about delayed action, she set down her armful of tools and put her fingers in her ears. It was an ignominious gesture, but what could she do?

  Had she really come home to watch, like a fiddling Nero, while her old friend crawled serenely to death, was she witnessing some charade or had she gone mad?

  Marjorie butted the greenhouse door with her head, Miss Sprink or Miss Jebb pumped furiously and Miss Jebb or Miss Sprink shifted the spare bucket from one hand to another. Both of them had set, stern faces.

  Miss Ranskill’s mind slid back to a day years ago when she, motoring from Dorset, had seen the car in front of her slew across the road, climb a steep bank, overturn and poise quiveringly, while a whole family tumbled down into the road. The accident had not seemed real at the time: it had been only a series of pictures seen at a cinema. She had watched with more interest than horror. So she watched now. But then her hands and feet had responded automatically as she had pulled up her own car.

  She removed her fingers from her ears and took a few uncertain steps towards the women by the buckets.

  So might a young recruit feel, staring assishly at the hand-grenade dropped by the instructor, wondering if it was a dud or not – if he’d only make a fool of himself by chucking it out of the trench – or not. The soldier would soon know… .

  Miss Ranskill, also worried by a trial in etiquette, was to know quite soon.

  Only Marjorie’s heels were visible. The pump squeaked, the bucket jangled. Were the almost domestic sounds of this strange new England to be overmastered by a crashing explosion? Was Marjorie –?

  ‘There was a head laying by the pavement – clean cut off by the flying glass!’

  Where had she heard that? Today, of course, since she came home. And she, instead of Marjorie who had a husband and two children, should be facing death.


  The slam of a gate made her jump. A woman with a baby in her arms was walking up the garden path – a fresh-faced rather pretty young woman, unaware of danger. Here was Miss Ranskill’s job. She ran down the path.

  ‘You’d better go back!’ she gasped. ‘There’s a bomb in the greenhouse.’

  ‘Bother!’ said the stranger, stooping down to pick up a woollen bootee. The ejaculation might have referred to the bomb or the bootee. ‘I forgot they generally have one of these incendiary bomb things on Thursdays. I’ll wait till it’s over.’

  She plumped herself down under the hedge that divided the garden from its neighbour and began to wriggle the baby’s foot into her bootee.

  The bland face of the infant urged Miss Ranskill to protest.

  ‘Is it safe to sit there?’

  ‘I always do.’ The young woman patted the grass bank and then looked at her palm. ‘It’s not so damp as all that!’

  As well interrupt a coronation to ask if the King’s crown were real, as question this young woman about the liveliness of bombs.

  ‘If that’s how they all behave, it’s how I’ll have to behave,’ thought Miss Ranskill, trying to affect nonchalance, as she strolled towards the porch where her tools lay scattered.

  Now Marjorie, erect once more, rather flushed and with a red mark under her chin where the strap of the helmet had bitten in, was shouting at the bucket-party.

  ‘I said last time not to stop pumping till I said. If it had been a real bomb we’d have been sunk. Jebb, your tunic isn’t buttoned properly. Sprink, your shoe-lace is untied. You might have tripped and upset the bucket: then where’d we have been if it had been a real bomb?’

  No, there was no mistaking Marjorie, the prefect, and Miss Ranskill was thankful she had made no display of her bewilderment.

  Miss Jebb jerked a violent salute, and must have hurt her knuckles on the edge of her helmet. Miss Sprink’s salute was elegant and nonchalant. Marjorie’s hand went up smartly and descended without hindrance.

  ‘Dismiss!’ she shouted, so fiercely that Miss Ranskill dropped the spirit-level.

  Marjorie came striding down the path and then paused to dust the gravel from her knees.