Miss Ranskill Comes Home

by Barbara Euphan Todd

  She picked up the cat’s saucer and then rearranged the cups. Whatever the time, one might as well be busy now that sleep had gone. There was no need to be particularly silent either. The other prisoner might just as well be roused.

  Two heads are better than one, Miss Ranskill, even if the second’s an addle-pate.

  III

  ‘Coo!’ The boy sat up and rubbed his eyes with dusty knuckles. ‘Are we going to have cocoa now? What time is it? How did the cat get down ’ere?’

  ‘The cat’s had three kittens,’ Miss Ranskill told him. ‘And we’re going to have cocoa.’

  He scrambled out of bed through a cloud of dust released by the scattered blankets. Except for the dirt that covered his head and pyjamas, he seemed unmarked by the night’s experience. A bomb had mattered a few hours ago: a cat and her kittens mattered now, and there was no more or less excitement over the one than the other.

  When Miss Ranskill had refilled the kettle, and while the boy was still half in and half out of the cupboard, she went once more up the cellar stairs to see if the door were as tightly jammed as she had thought. As she pressed her shoulder against the stubborn wood, the voice of the siren was raised in a long gruesome wail that seemed unending.

  She hurried down the steps, expecting to find the boy in a state of terror, but, though the monotonous wailing continued, he did not withdraw his head from the cupboard. He was lying on the floor, his dusty legs waving in the air, his toes curling happily.

  ‘That’s Jane,’ he remarked as Miss Ranskill stooped over him.

  ‘Is Jane the cat?’ Miss Ranskill tried to sound interested, but her ears were alert for bombs and not for cats’ christenings.

  ‘Coo! You don’t know much, do you?’ The boy wriggled backwards. ‘Jane’s the All Clear.’

  ‘The All Clear?’

  ‘You know, the siren that sounds when the bombing’s over and Jerry’s gone ’ome. We always calls ’er Jane. I’d an aunt just like ’er, always kickin’ up a dust about nothing. Mum ’ates Jane. She can sleep through the Alert, and then Jane goes and wakes ’er after it’s all over. Doctor Mallison says the All Clear’s like the man that shuts the stible door arter the ’orses are gone. What shall we call the kittens?’

  ‘Shall we call one Tibby?’

  The suggestion came from that section of Miss Ranskill’s brain that was not entirely bewildered, but she scorned herself as she spoke.

  ‘I shall call ’em Montgomery an’ Eisenhower and Beveridge.’

  ‘Why?’

  There was contempt in the boy’s eyes as he replied, ‘Most cats and pups that’s not strays gets called Beveridge or Montgomery or Eisenhower, same as most all dogs is called Winston. That kettle’s boiling now.’

  The boy chatted while Miss Ranskill made the cocoa.

  ‘If Mum was at the pictures she’ll be back soon now the All Clear’s gone. Tell you what,’ he edged closer to her, ‘tell you what, let’s bolt the door at the top of the cellar stairs so she can’t come down till we’ve had the cocoa.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she come down?’

  ‘She’d only want me to wash. Let’s bolt the door and keep ’er out.’

  ‘All right then, we’ll keep her out.’

  The boy’s eyes showed amazement at such unexpected agreement.

  ‘We’ll keep her out all right. You stir the cocoa and I’ll go and see to the door.’

  But before Miss Ranskill could hand over the spoon, the boy was scuttering and squealing across the cellar floor: He was up the stairs before she could think of a word that might stop him.

  He would discover the state of the door and be frightened, and the fear would be driven from one to the other and grow quickly and increase in quality. It was better where there were two people that only one should be afraid, else there were no consolation and dominance nor any of the pretence that is the only weapon against terror.

  ‘Cocoa!’ said Miss Ranskill feebly. ‘Come and give the kittens some cocoa.’

  But the boy was pounding on the door already, and she followed up the stairs.

  She heard a new voice from the house side of the door as she reached the top step.

  ‘Is that you, mater? Are you coming up or shall I come down?’

  It was a male voice, quick, and of a light tense quality. Miss Ranskill answered it absurdly.

  ‘It’s I, and the door’s jammed; we can’t get out.’

  There was a thud on the other side of the wood.

  ‘I think I can do it. You’d better stand clear of the stairs though, in case the door comes down with a wallop.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I

  He was a thin, swiftly-moving young man, with none of the bull-headedness that Miss Ranskill would have expected from Marjorie’s son. His eyes were restless and his hands never quite still. They tensed and flexed in between all the definite movements of stroking the kittens, brought to him one after another by the boy, flicking ash from his cigarette and stirring his cocoa.

  From his jerked replies to the boy’s questionings, Miss Ranskill understood that he had been on night operations for the last three months and that that meant dropping tons of bombs on Germany.

  ‘Bet you killed masses of people.’ The boy’s cocoa-moustached lips grinned admiringly as he spoke, and he crossed his legs swaggeringly.

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘But you said last time –’

  ‘Even a butcher wants a Bank Holiday.’

  ‘But you said –’

  ‘Will you shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I –’ Marjorie’s son turned to Miss Ranskill, ‘I don’t mind anything but the leaves.’ His light voice was raised in fury. ‘It’s the leaves that are so bloody awful – Sorry! It’s all nag and questions and tactfulness, and let’s give him a jolly time. And they make special things for you to eat and watch you eating it with a sort of Last Supper look in their eyes. And, just before you go off again, they pile on the heartiness and talk about all you’ll do on the next leave though they know what you know. If they’d only be ordinary about it: it is quite ordinary, at least it is to us. And then kids like that –!’

  He was interrupted by the shrilling of a female voice.

  ‘Sissle! Sissle! Where are you, Sissle?’

  ‘That’s Mum,’ said the little boy.

  Mum, so Miss Ranskill discovered when she had hurried the little boy up the stone stairs, was half angry and half tearful; and her anger was directed not so much against Hitler and the German bombers as against an unspecified body who had allowed her (Mrs Bostock) to suffer inconvenience. ‘They’ had left a piece of wire-netting lying about at the entrance to the ARP shelter so that her stockings had been laddered in two places – ‘and that’s qpons, mind you!’ ‘They’, being what ‘they’ were, would be most unlikely to refund the shilling she had paid for her seat in the cinema, although the siren had sounded halfway through the ‘Big Picture’, Desert Theme Song. ‘Ever so lovely it was. If we had our rights, they’d let us go back and see it all through tomorrow. Robbery, that’s what it was. And I’ve half a mind to go back now this very instant and give them a piece of my mind.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Miss Ranskill, and was answered by a dark look that made her feel responsible personally for all the happenings of the night.

  ‘We was all singing in the shelter,’ continued Mrs Bostock triumphantly. ‘It was “Roll out the Barrel” at first and then those of us that had been at the picture started up with the song Babe Fenelly sings when she’s sitting all alone in the desert, and she thinks her boy’s been killed, and all the while he’s lying gagged and bound be’ind a palm-tree with a nasty-looking Arab gettin’ ready to knife ’em.’

  Mrs Bostock raised her voice and sang in a piercing tremolo:

  You diddun say ‘Goo’bye,’

  You weren’t that sorta Guy,

  You only whispered ‘Cheerio! So-long!’

  And only you and I

  Beneath the great bl
ue sky

  Knew what you meant the day you said ‘So-long!’

  Tears poured down Mrs Bostock’s face as she continued –

  My dear, I will not cry,

  I’ll look up to the sky

  Where sun and moon and stars shall keep me strong,

  But always, all the while,

  Although my lips may smile

  My heart is echoing ‘So-long, So-long.’

  ‘Ever so pathetic it was, and they kept on showing you close-ups of the young man’s face as he listened from be’ind the palm-tree. She was dressed in white.’ Mrs Bostock paused, and added: ‘Pure white,’ as vehemently as if she feared that some doubting thought of Miss Ranskill’s might sully the film-star’s garments. ‘White, from top to toe. You ought to have heard us singing in the shelter – that ought to show Hitler something if nothing else does. He ought to be a fly on the wall in some of our shelters, that’s what he ought to be.’

  ‘Then we’d swat ’im, wouldn’t we, Mum?’

  A small hand tightened its grip of Miss Ranskill’s and she remembered the child.

  ‘I think perhaps the little boy ought to go to bed now if it’s safe. I heard him crying and took him down to the cellar –’

  But Mrs Bostock continued her story relentlessly.

  ‘These air-raids aren’t run like the Plymouth ones was, and it’s no use saying they are. We’d plenty of canteens there and the tea was ’ot, ’ot and strong. You’d think they put straw in it ’ere. Well, as I was saying, after the All Clear went, and they let us out, you’d think that was enough, but was it? Oh! no. You’d think They thought we ’adn’t ’ad enough, sitting like sardines singing in a damp shelter.’

  What horror was coming next, wondered Miss Ranskill.

  In the flashing light from the torch, waved so erratically by Mrs Bostock, her son’s face looked white and strained.

  ‘Do you think we should put him to bed: he’s not had very much sleep?’

  ‘He’ll not sleep if he goes now neither: too much excitement; he always was highly-strung,’ answered the mother. ‘Well, as I was saying, I’d gone right the length of Maddison Avenue when they turned me back for an unexploded bomb. I’d a gone on, mind you, if they’d not got ropes right across the road and a coupla ARP men guarding it.’

  Even to Miss Ranskill’s unwarlike mind an unexploded bomb sounded dangerous and the attitude of its warders not unreasonable.

  ‘But perhaps –’ she began.

  ‘I’m not saying anything against the unexploded bomb, what I’m getting at is They ought to have put up a notice at the turn into Maddison Avenue, not let us walk all along and then turn us. They don’t think, that’s what’s the matter with them. I told them strite, I said, “You don’t think!” I said, “You can’t never be fathers yourselves. How would you like it,” I says, “if you was a mother and didn’t know if your boy was alive or dead and you was turned back by a notice that ought to have been set up a quarter of a mile back? And like as not,” I said, “thanks to you,” I said, “I’ll be too late to hear the last dying words of my little son.” Come ’ere, Sissle.’

  But by now Cecil too was in tears, and he clung desperately to Miss Ranskill and wailed, ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’

  ‘’Ark at ’im!’ said Mrs Bostock, proudly, but making no attempt to comfort her responsibility. ‘’Ark at ’im, and no wonder! A lot They care! I knew just how he’d be when they turned us back in Maddison Avenue. I said, “he’ll be shouting for his Mum, screaming himself into a fit most likely.” A lot they cared!’

  Encouraged more than ever he had been by the shattering of bombs, Cecil’s voice, raised more and more loudly, seemed to offend his mother’s ears.

  ‘Give over now,’ she threatened. ‘Give over at once or I’ll give you something to cry for as’ll make ’Itler seem soft.’

  Miss Ranskill began to feel more and more a foreigner. Was there any truth in this strange island where laddered stockings, a lack of notice-boards and an illiterate song had more power to rouse emotion than death and destruction and the smashing of bombs! Had it been worth while to take the sea-lane to a wonderland where young men resented their leaves and their mothers kept up the conventions of the fifth form?

  ‘Come on, Sissle, we’d best go and see what the kitchen’s looking like. I come in by the side door, and I’ve not looked round yet. The light’s gone though, so if they think they’ll get ’ot breakfast sharp at eight, they’ll have to think again.’

  Miss Ranskill would have returned to the cellar, but the boy’s fingers were clinging to her own and they tugged urgently as he followed his mother through the green baize door.

  The kitchen, seen by electric torchlight, was fantastic, more like a half-witted property-manager’s idea of what a kitchen might look like after a raid than anything Miss Ranskill could have imagined in sanity.

  The table was laid with a clutter of plaster from the ceiling, but in the middle of it stood a Cona coffee-machine, its frail bubble rising among chunks and chips of ceiling and layers of dust. The black blind was jagged to shreds and arrows of glass were embedded in the white panelling of a cabinet.

  A posy of pale grey flowers in a pale grey bowl on the dresser astonished Miss Ranskill. They looked exactly like Dresden china; and not till she had touched one, releasing a shower of fine dust from the petals, did she realise that they were marigolds. The wall by the fireplace was bulging, a cupboard door hung squalidly from one hinge and a plate on the mantel-shelf lay in two half-circles.

  ‘Well!’ said Mrs Bostock.

  Then, clear and cool, crowding a woodland into a mad kitchen, sounded the voice of the cuckoo. For an instant Miss Ranskill felt moss at her feet and the stirring of wet leaves against her cheek. This was one of the things she had travelled to hear: the kitchen was gone and May was alive in England.

  ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’

  ‘They’ll not get their ’ot breakfast. They can’t expect it!’ declared Mrs Bostock. Her torch swung round again and shone momentarily on her red face and tawdry hat.

  ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’

  Parody skeltered through Miss Ranskill’s mind.

  ‘A slattern and a cuckoo’s song will never come together again.’

  ‘They’ll have to get help to clear up this mess.’ Light from the torch glinted on the jagged daggers of glass low down in the woodwork and the tiny body of a mouse scurried across a lit circle of floor.

  ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’

  Miss Ranskill fancied she smelled hawthorn blossom, but the scent of singeing candle-wick took its place as Mrs Bostock flung down a match. Was it possible that the woman didn’t hear?

  ‘Cuckoo!’

  A tiny wooden door clicked above the face of the clock that hung on the wall behind Miss Ranskill.

  ‘Wrong as usual: it’s nearer two,’ said Mrs Bostock, and added aggrievedly: ‘You’d have thought They might have stopped the clock while They was about it, wouldn’t you?’

  II

  Miss Ranskill was back again in the cellar and once more she was in the company of a sleeper. Marjorie’s boy was lying in a deck-chair. His cigarette had fallen to the floor and the fingers of his right hand seemed to be fumbling for it.

  The voice of the wooden cuckoo had exhilarated her, but now she felt tired, helpless and impatient. She was lonely too, and in need of speech.

  We’ll have plenty to tell each other, won’t we, Miss Ranskill, after we’ve both got back to our homes. I’ll write to you and you’ll write to me. We won’t have to think what to say. I’ll not have to chew up my pencil then, same as I used to, thinking what to say.

  Yes, she must write to the Carpenter and tell him about coupons and bombs, a cuckoo and a cat, cellars, laddered stockings and the blackness of a house by night. News thrust itself into her mind before she could remember that he was dead. Then she tried to imagine him living and alone on the island and receiving, perhaps by carrier pigeon, the letter she would write fro
m the world – a world that now seemed more fantastic to her than ever the island had been. Her thoughts were harking back now instead of forward. She felt like a country child who, in the middle of a whirling day in London, was thinking, not of the treats and new excitements to come, but of the little village station whence the start had been made, of the station-master’s wallflowers and the safe familiar seat by the luggage trolley.

  ‘Flowers in their wounds,’ muttered the airman, ‘that’s what she couldn’t get over, flowers in their wounds, flowers.’

  It was a strange remark, strange enough to send a whole series of pictures flashing through Miss Ranskill’s mind. There was a wayside Calvary she had once seen in France. It had been newly painted, and with such realism that the tall foxglove growing beside it had seemed a spear, piercing the Wounded Side with brutal tenderness. There was a poster done by a young artist during the last war, a poster showing a wounded man lying among the Flanders poppies. There was a dying harvest rabbit whose blood had stained a patch of vetch and stubble by the side of a field. There was a blind man smelling a bunch of carnations held by his wife – ‘Are they red or white ones, darling? No, don’t tell me, I must follow my nose now.’

  A ballad jigged into her brain –

  ‘And out of Lord Lovel

  There grew a red rose

  And out of his lady, a briar.’

  She hummed it, as she began to wipe the dust from the table. Marjorie might return at any time now, she supposed, and though seven maids with seven mops might not clean the house in half a night, the cellar might be made habitable. While she was sweeping the dust into a saucer, the airman gave a sudden shout and opened his eyes.

  ‘Gosh! I woke myself up. Have I been asleep long?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Miss Ranskill.

  ‘I say, will you tell me something, please?’