Miss Ranskill Comes Home

by Barbara Euphan Todd

  Miss Ranskill flung up the window and went back to bed.

  She could hear the sea now, shuffling away in the distance. A gentle flapping of the curtains told that the wind was at work too. Sea and wind would be busy with the island too, slurring out footprints – not human ones now though; there would only be the delicate patterning of gulls – coaxing the flesh from bird skeletons and making everything ready for the morning.

  Perhaps this island would be better in the morning too. Always, no matter how wearily a day had ended or how fiercely the night had raged, the silver wash of morning had brought revival. It had been the same in the old life too: memories of disastrous tea-parties, smashed china and turmoil of spring-cleaning had never seemed so bad when remembered over early morning tea.

  Miss Ranskill closed her eyes, content to feel that she need not open them again until the sanity of daylight freshened her mind.

  ‘Put out that light!’ Somebody was shouting in the street below, it was a menacing cry and was repeated by a voice with a snarl in it. ‘Put out that light! Lights! Lights! Lights!’ So might the kin of sailing men have shouted to the wreckers years ago in this very same part of the country.

  ‘Put out that light!’

  Miss Ranskill turned over and, in her half sleep, visualised the bobbing lantern and the ship drawing nearer and nearer to the rocks, while merciful men, savage in their fury against a murderer, scrambled towards him and threatened till their throats ached.

  ‘Put out that light!’

  The handle rattled, the door was burst open and Marjorie pounded into the room.

  Miss Ranskill closed her eyes more firmly, and wished she could close her ears as well. Her gathering dreams would be shredded by any more conversation.

  ‘Are you mad? Are you quite mad?’

  Something clicked, darkness followed, the bed was shaken, and the end of the room near the window became noisy with bumpings and rattling as curtain-rings tinkled and things were knocked over.

  ‘I should have thought … I mean, especially after what’s happened with the police and everything… . This house of all houses… . As ARP warden I’ve always prided myself on having an absolutely watertight black-out.’

  The room was still in darkness except for the faint torchlight that showed Marjorie’s right hand as she stabbed the drawing-pins back into place.

  ‘Do you mean I shouldn’t have drawn the curtains?’

  ‘Of course you shouldn’t!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I only wanted more air. I’ve been so used to sleeping almost in the open.’

  ‘It’s the people who’ve been used to things they won’t do without, who are helping Hitler.’

  Marjorie stabbed a drawing-pin home. ‘I only hope the police won’t hear of this or they’ll think you were signalling to the enemy.’

  ‘I’m very sorry. I didn’t know. How could I know? We hadn’t any curtains on the island.’

  ‘I don’t imagine you had blazing electric light either,’ snapped Marjorie.

  ‘No,’ Miss Ranskill’s voice had a bite in it now. ‘No, we hadn’t, but we had a fire that burned all day and all night.’

  ‘Then I should have thought you’d have rigged up some sort of screen,’ said Marjorie. She came over to the bedside now and switched on the light again. ‘That is, unless you wanted to be neutral?’

  Miss Ranskill sat up in bed and her voice took on a shrill note.

  ‘Can’t you understand,’ she said, ‘can’t you try to understand that I didn’t even know about the war till I left the island? I scarcely know anything now. I can’t learn all the new rules if nobody tells me.’

  ‘Gosh!’ Marjorie’s face looked very young under her tin hat. ‘Gosh! how perfectly awful for you not to know about the war. I’m sorry I snapped, old thing: it’s absolutely my fault for not telling you about the black-out. I say, I mean I just can’t get over thinking of you cooped up on that island with nothing to do all day long. Is there anything else you’d like to know? I could spare five minutes, I think.’

  III

  It was quite quiet now that the windows were shut, and Miss Ranskill, awakened from her second sleep, wondered if it would soon be morning. Her fingers curled round the clasp of the new knife: there was familiarity in its smoothness, surety, and a certain comfort. She had taken it to bed with her just as children, newly returned from a summer holiday, tuck shells and pebbles under their pillows.

  A clock in the distance struck midnight.

  ‘It’s morning at last,’ thought Miss Ranskill. ‘It’s tomorrow.’

  But now she was not longing for the day any more. Here in the darkness she was comfortable and secure. The hours of sleep had rested her, but she was not quite alive yet for her thoughts tagged about in a random way and she had no check on them. Nor had she any responsibilities or any hopes or fears.

  ‘I’m a sort of ghost,’ she thought, ‘I haven’t any identity and I’m supposed to be dead. But the Carpenter is really dead… . The island is still there… . Everything on it is the same as it was before we arrived except for the shelters. This morning the same big gull will light on the round rock by the stream and the others will follow.’

  Let’s go to the pictures again tonight, Miss Ranskill, shall we? It’s my turn for the plush seat. What are you going to show me this time?

  So Miss Ranskill, secure between sheets, played the island game of going to the pictures. And this time she went alone and back to the island to sit by the light of the fire, one cheek glowing from flame and the other icy cold where the wind caught it.

  Something was shrieking in the darkness. It was too loud and too despairing for a gull’s cry: no bird could have produced that insistent wavering whine. There was something despairing and demented about it. Miss Ranskill, struggling with sleep, imagined some half-human monster rising from the sea. Scylla or Charybdis might have moaned like that. The wailing sounded more loudly, menacing the island, and she began to fight the sheets whose smoothness affronted skin, now accustomed to the gritting of the sand. She tried to escape from their folds, fighting desperately. Was the monster itself enveloping her? Then, jerking herself from the nightmare to wakefulness, she remembered where she was. It was perfectly quiet: she had only been dreaming.

  But it was quiet for no more than a moment. The banshee, or whatever it was, had followed her out of the dream. Once more it raised its unspeakable voice and threatened peace. When its moaning had ended, it was succeeded by a little echo of its own despair.

  A child was crying somewhere in the house.

  Miss Ranskill stumbled out of bed and into the darkness. She could not find the switch, but at last her fingers met the door-handle and she blundered out into the passage.

  Something dreadful had happened. The torment of the siren (unrecognised, of course, and all the more dreadful because of that) still sounded in her mind and the child’s voice was raised to a crescendo.

  ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’

  Half-way along the passage she groped against another door and pounded against it.

  ‘Doctor Mallison! Doctor Mallison! Wake up.’

  There was no reply, and the child’s voice was raised more insistently every moment. At last she found a switch. Then a strange blue light showed that she was standing at the head of the staircase.

  ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’

  Her hand was blue on the banister and her bare feet were blue too.

  ‘It’s a dream,’ Miss Ranskill told herself. ‘I shall wake up in a minute. It can’t be true: nobody has blue lights. Nothing in England makes a noise like that.’

  Then, from farther away this time, another voice raised its shuddering cry.

  The turn of the stairs screened all but a reluctant gleam from the blue light, but it was enough to show her a small huddle crouching on the lowest stair. It seemed to be shapeless at first, but then a head was raised.

  ‘Mum! Mum!’ said the little boy.

  In another moment her hand was being clutched by a v
ery small one, whose owner said, ‘’Urry, can’t you?’ and tugged hard.

  He had a little torch in his hand and its faint gleam showed a green baize door.

  ‘We’d better look sharp,’ said the small boy, and Miss Ranskill, her hand still held in his insistent clutch, followed as he bumped against it with his shoulder. She dreaded what she might see the other side – murder, perhaps, or torture; but there was only an empty stone-flagged passage with another door at the end.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked, but the only answer was – ‘Come on.’

  Then the child opened the other door, switched on a light, and began to plop bare-foot down a flight of stone stairs.

  Miss Ranskill closed the door behind her and followed him.

  A square case, dangling from a strap, was slung over his shoulders. He was wearing blue-and-white striped pyjamas and his gold-streaked hair was ruffled at the back of his head.

  Now they were in the cellar, but it was not at all an ordinary sort of cellar. There was a strip of carpet on the floor. Three camp-beds, each with a bundle of rugs, were stretched along the length of one wall. There was a paraffin stove and a little oil-cooker and a couple of deck-chairs, in one of which was a rather grubby Teddy Bear.

  A set of shelves by another wall held a row of books, a row of tins and a white-painted box with a red cross on it. Another shelf made a home for saucepans, a frying-pan, a kettle, crockery and a teapot.

  There were candles and a box of matches on a table.

  The little boy curled himself into one of the deck-chairs, nuzzled his face against the Teddy Bear and remarked:

  ‘We’re in time tonight. Mum’ll go to the pictures once too often.’

  There were traces of tears on his face, his eyes were shining and a tiny pulse beat under the blue veining of his temple. But now that his crying was over, he was perfectly assured and at home. If he had rubbed his torch and summoned a wailing banshee to appear in a blaze of blue light, Miss Ranskill would not have been more amazed, for, to her, this cellar was an Aladdin’s Cave of delight. If it could have been moved to the island, she and the Carpenter would have had all they could possibly have needed. Here was simplicity and everything that was necessary – all the furnishing in perfection for a desert island.

  ‘Better light the stove, ’adn’t you, and a candle case the lights go?’

  The striking of a match and the shielding of its wavering flame was better to Miss Ranskill than all the electric light switches in the world. She felt a sense of ritual as she lit the stove. Now she was compensating herself for all the fire-lighting struggles on the island. She set match to candle, too, before asking, ‘Why should the lights go out?’

  ‘Power Station might cop it,’ answered the boy. Then he added conversationally, ‘We brought down two Fokker-wolfs Thursday – that was the night our own flak killed Mr Coppinger.’

  ‘Oh!’ Once again Miss Ranskill was made aware of the new English language. She asked another question.

  ‘What was the noise – that awful whining noise before we came down here?’

  The boy fidgeted and rubbed his chin against the Teddy Bear’s head. His face flushed as he answered, ‘I’ve not created for a long time now, but I’d bin dreaming.’

  ‘Created?’ repeated Miss Ranskill. Was the boy a ventriloquist? No, it was impossible that that eerie outpouring of misery could have proceeded from his small throat.

  ‘Kick up a row,’ he explained. ‘But ’Arold woke me up and I’d bin dreaming, and I didn’t know if Mum was in. I knew the doctor ’ad a went out some time since. I’d heard the night-bell.’

  ‘Who’s Harold?’ asked Miss Ranskill.

  ‘’Arold’s our siren – the one that sounded first. The second one we ’eard was Minnie from Larkford.’

  ‘Sirens?’ Miss Ranskill’s mind was snatching at a story – the story of a cruel-faced beauty luring sailors to the rocks. So might a siren have wailed across the water enticing the brave to the sound of distress.

  ‘Air-raid warnin’s – you know.’

  ‘Do you often have them here?’ She emphasised the last word as disguise for her ignorance.

  ‘Not so much as we did, but they mean something now. Early on when we did ’ear the siren we didn’t get bombs. When we did get bombs we didn’t get the siren.’

  He was about eight or nine years old, Miss Ranskill decided, terribly wise in his pathetic generation. His face was grey with sleeplessness, and his hair clung limply to his forehead. He shivered a little, and she changed the subject.

  ‘What have you got in that box round your neck?’

  ‘Go on! You know!’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Go on with you!’

  ‘Show me then?’

  Grubby fingers groped at a fastening and dragged out something with rubber straps. Then with a duck of the head and a jerk of the fingers the little boy was transformed into a pig-faced monster, a sort of synthetic goblin. His voice sounded muffled as he spoke.

  ‘Mrs Mallison always makes me bring it down in case of leaks from the gas. She don’t think ’Itler’ll use gas ’cept in the big towns. They mike us tike ’em to school though, just in case.’

  Rows of pig-faced goblins paraded before Miss Ranskill’s mind’s eye – a ballet of child-goblins dancing to the tune that Hitler played and capering to the death-call of Harold and Minnie, the sirens. So this was England now, and she had looked forward to picking primroses.

  The child pulled off the pig-face and began to stuff it into the cardboard container.

  ‘I’ve a tin ’at too,’ he told her. ‘Bought it at Woolworth’s last Christmas.’

  ‘Do you take that to school too?’

  ‘No, that’s only a bit of fun. It might keep a bit of shrapnel off of my ’ead though. D’you think there’ll be bombs tonight?’

  His eyes darkened slightly.

  ‘I –’ said Miss Ranskill, helpless against the look that awarded her a false omnipotence. ‘I – surely not tonight.’ There was pleading in her voice too.

  ‘I don’t mind all that much. After there’s been bombs, Mrs Mallison gives us cups o’ cocoa and biscuits.’ He glanced at the row of tins on the shelf, and went on reminiscently.

  ‘Arter we was bombed out in Plymouth that time, they give us bully beef and cocoa made with Nestlé’s. You don’t get that now – not unless you’ve been bombed out.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  Miss Ranskill was remembering the iron tonics of her childhood and the rewarding chocolate ‘to take the taste away’. Was bully beef just compensation for the iron tonic of the bombs?

  ‘I liked Plymouth better’n this. When the blitzing started we used to go and sleep out in the fields all night, and walk back in the mornin’.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Most of us along our street. I used to get a ride on top of a pram sometimes. It was all right in the summer. Then our street got an ’it. Our kitten and me Aunty got killed and Mum said she ’adn’t the ’eart to get any more furniture together, so we come ’ere. I missed the kitten.’

  Having given his wordless picture of ‘Aunty’, the boy continued:

  ‘Worst time was when they got the school. We was all right though, me and about fifteen more, but some in my standard was killed.’

  He broke off and his knuckles whitened as he clutched the Teddy Bear.

  ‘D’you think there’ll be bombs tonight?’

  Miss Ranskill looked at the ceiling for answer, but found none there and none in her mind either. She asked another question.

  ‘Did you always live in Plymouth?’

  ‘We was in London till the war.’

  ‘And was that lovely?’

  She longed to turn his mind to something childlike, to the Lord Mayor’s Show or a school-treat in Epping Forest or a glance at the Crystal Palace from the top of a bus.

  The boy scowled at the question.

  ‘Dad was out of work.’ There was a little pause, and he add
ed, ‘Dad was killed at Dunkirk.’

  He twiddled the Teddy Bear’s ears while Miss Ranskill considered these two chapters of a life-history. The phrases united into a poor little poem –

  Dad was out of work;

  Dad was killed at Dunkirk.

  No, it was a rich poem and a great one, worthy of a place in any sequel to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

  She knew about Dunkirk because Commander Wrekin had instructed her in that most miraculous chapter in any history of war. Listening to him she had thought of two other sea occasions and the phrases that governed them – one: ‘He blew with His winds and they were scattered’; the other – ‘Peace, be still.’ She knew how the waters had been lulled in the Channel, so that small craft, hurrying from England, had run a silk-smooth course to the beaches where the men were crowded more thickly than any August mob in peace-time. In twenty-four hours the word ‘beach’ had changed in value: and lost its power to call up a holiday. The men who had come from that place would never be quite the same again.

  ‘Dad was killed at Dunkirk.’ He had died, presumably, that his son might inherit the land. The child, so far, had inherited Plymouth air-raids and his enemies had stolen his birthright of fearlessness. Miss Ranskill felt furious that anything so small could be counted as enemy.

  The boy’s knuckles were rubbing his eyes now and he yawned.

  ‘Where were you before you come ’ere?’

  ‘I was on an island.’

  ‘Sheppey?’

  His head was nodding before she could answer, his chin prodded the Teddy Bear’s head and the lids closed over eyes that had seen more than any child should have imagined and would, for always, be liable to darken because of the bad news-reel stored in his mind’s cinema.