Miss Ranskill Comes Home

by Barbara Euphan Todd

  The Magistrate had been more general.

  ‘This particular sort of case is being repeated day after day all over the country. It is one of the evils of war. These boys are too young to differentiate between crime and what I can only call legalised crime. Don’t mistake me, Miss Ranskill, I am not a pacifist, I can see the difference between the public executioner and the common murderer: the one is the servant of the community, the other is a slave to himself. In these days, most of our young men are public executioners. It is difficult to explain that to children and stimulate their patriotism though. Train-busting would be a crime in peace-time, but in war it is a triumph. These boys read about successful Commando Raids and think it would be thrilling to be a Commando. They can’t go to Germany, but they can break into empty houses and have some of the fun (the imagined fun) of being a Commando.

  ‘Remember another thing, these boys are too young to remember peace conditions properly. Four years, more now, is a long time in a child’s life. The best people in the country, the disciplined younger people are mostly out of the country. All their examples are gone and their fathers are away. Old fogies like myself can’t do a great deal of good though we try our best. Yet these children must be saved or the war will be a mockery and we shall only have bred a race of hooligans who will menace peace as the Germans have menaced it.

  ‘If you make yourself responsible for the boy, you may not have an easy time. Don’t spoil him, don’t sentimentalise over him, but show him the past and let him look at the future.’

  Miss Ranskill remembered all this as she glanced across at the boy. His face was a little more relaxed than it had been when he shuffled beside her out of the Town Hall past the craning onlookers and into the chill of the Market Square.

  The parting with his stepfather had been brief.

  ‘You try and mend your ways, my lad, and be a credit to your Mum and me. She’ll be sending your clothes along for you. Goodbye.’

  The boy had stood looking down at the muddy pavement.

  ‘Saucy, eh? Well, I’ll give you another chance. Goodbye.’

  The boy, prompted by a nudge from Miss Ranskill, had muttered ‘Goodbye’, but he had addressed a leaf in the gutter, and had continued to regard it until his stepfather joined some waiting acquaintances on the opposite pavement. His coarse laughter sounded across the square. He tilted his cap at an angle and remarked in a voice evidently meant to be heard:

  ‘Surly little bastard! I wish the old fool joy of that one.’

  ‘Come along,’ said Miss Ranskill, ‘let’s go to the station. We can get something to eat there.’

  The meal had not been a very great success. The boy drank a great deal, cup after cup of urn-tasting tea, but he only fiddled with the sausage rolls, crumbling the pastry into flakes and kneading the meat between finger and thumb. Miss Ranskill guessed that his hands were hungrier for occupation than was his body for food. Every movement of those hands reminded her of the Carpenter’s, and she wished he would keep them still.

  Conversation was difficult. One could not discuss the events of the afternoon, but she did make a little attempt to explain the future because the boy had followed her hopelessly as a lost dog, trailing a strange pair of heels, without question or interest.

  ‘Colin.’

  He had glanced up at her.

  ‘You do understand, don’t you, that you are coming to stay with me in Hampshire?’

  He nodded.

  ‘The house we’re going to live in isn’t far from the sea. You’ll like that, won’t you?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  She went on to describe the house, and then told him about the little potting-shed that he could use as a workshop in the evenings and on holidays.

  ‘Won’t it be rather nice to have a workshop of your own?’

  He flushed and bent his head still lower over his plate.

  ‘Not if there’s no wood.’

  The flush deepened. Miss Ranskill remembered that one of the charges against him had been one of stealing wood, finely-grained wood for boat-building from the workshop of his father’s successor. He had taken some tools too. He had also stolen a bicycle lamp from another house and a tin of varnish from the local shop. All these things had been found in an old chicken-house at the bottom of his mother’s garden. He had been trying to equip the chicken-house as a workshop. The light shining through the window had given him away to the policeman. The boy had not remembered the need for black-out curtains.

  Miss Ranskill waited until the flush had faded from his cheeks. Then she spoke again:

  ‘But there will be wood this time. You can buy some if you work in the garden and earn money.’

  ‘Can I?’

  It was the first responsive thing he had said, and though he ducked his head again immediately, Miss Ranskill was satisfied.

  Later on, she would tell him stories about his father, but not just now while his mind was closed and clutching on misery. One thing must make room for another.

  There’s one thing I reckon you can’t do, Miss Ranskill, you can’t hurry comfort. You can’t give happiness while a misery’s still there. I remember when I was a little lad and my pup had been run over, they wanted to give me a new one straight off. That didn’t do. I’d got to get shut of a part of the misery first.

  No, she must not hurry comfort.

  That was why, so far, she had left him alone with his misery, allowed him to hunch himself up in the far corner of the carriage, to twiddle with the window-strap and swing his legs, now with seeming nonchalance and now listlessly. Even his knobbly and rather grubby knees looked forlorn. His face, travel-stained and white with misery though it was, still carried the likeness of his father’s. His right hand lay relaxed on the seat of the carriage.

  Miss Ranskill was not sure now whether he was asleep or not. His lips had parted a little.

  She took the sea-shell from her pocket and laid it on the seat two inches from his fingers. Then she lifted his hand gently and laid it on the cool curved surface. He shrugged away from her resentfully, nuzzling his head into the corner between the upholstery of the seat and the window-blind with a movement suggesting that of a small wild animal, carried in from darkness to the publicity of a room.

  But she noticed, when she had returned to her own seat, that his fingers were gripping the shell.

  It was time now to close her eyes.

  Presently she became conscious of small scuffling movements in the far corner of the carriage. She did not dare to look yet.

  In her own mind, the island was taking possession of the railway carriage.

  She would wait for two minutes and then she would open her eyes. She began to count sixty twice over and slowly.

  One leg was crossed over the other, his elbow was pressed into his knee, the shell was against his ear and he was listening.

  The water-music was pouring into his mind, sweeping it clear of trouble, lulling the nightmare thoughts and making peace. And, as the magic of the shell did its work, the boy’s face changed. Surliness slipped away, the grey eyes lost their furtiveness and the lips smiled. He was enchanted back into himself again.

  His fingers pressed harder against the shell, and Miss Ranskill, who remembered her own listening, knew that he was hearing a crescendo now – a tumult and surging of many-voiced waters.

  Suddenly he dropped the shell. His face puckered and his right hand groped at emptiness until Miss Ranskill reached him. He was a little boy, haunted by ugliness, bewildered and softened by sudden beauty, crying into her shoulder, ‘I didn’t want to be bad.’

  ‘Yesterday’s over. Listen, Colin, today’s finished too: it’s tomorrow that counts.’

  He began to quieten slowly as he nuzzled into her shoulder and choked, ‘I didn’t have anything – nothing at all.’

  ‘Listen, and I’ll tell you a story.’ His fingers were gripping the lapel of her coat.

  ‘Once upon a time there was a man on an island. He was a carpenter, like
you’re going to be, and he hadn’t anything either except his clothes and a jack-knife. And he wanted to build a boat – a big one. There were trees on the island, but there was no felled timber. It took him more than four years, but he made his boat and he made it seaworthy, so that I could come across the sea to England to look after you because he wasn’t able to come himself.’

  Colin’s head jerked up for a moment.

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Yes, and so did you.’

  ‘Not –’ the boy’s eyes pleaded queerly in the strange light, ‘not – it wasn’t my Dad?’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘But, my Dad’s dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Ranskill, ‘yes, but he made the boat first.’

  The boy’s eyes were hazy with sleep and weeping. His hand groped for the shell. Miss Ranskill gave it to him and settled him into his corner. He gave a little whimpering sound and fell asleep, his fingers twitching on the shell. He handled it as his father would have handled it.

  Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.

  The engine took up the refrain Into something rich and strange, rich and strange, rich and strange. Yesterday’s over, yesterday’s over, yesterday’s over. A re-eed shaken with the wind, a re-eed shaken with the wind.

  Yesterday was over for Miss Ranskill too.

  The island was still there, but she did not need it any longer. This other island needed her more. There was so much to be done, so much to be restored to compensate for what had been destroyed.

  The Carpenter was not really dead: he was alive in his boy and she could share in that immortality.

  Her mind was harking forward, away from the island and into a garden, forward to a spring morning, to a thrush whistling on a walnut tree and a boy whistling in a woodshed, to a liver-and-white spaniel, very fat and very kind, waddling beside a perambulator, to Lucy’s voice repeating, ‘What’s the use of killing if you aren’t giving anything back?’

  The engine was hurrying now and Miss Ranskill’s thoughts speeded with it.

  The train stopped with a jerk, and Colin opened his eyes.

  Then the carriage door was opened and a porter bawled ‘Lynchurch! Lynchurch!’

  ‘We’re home now, Colin.’

  He blinked sleepily and smiled at her as he tucked the sea-shell into his pocket.

  Miss Ranskill had come to the end of her journey.

  AFTERWORD

  In the autumn of 1946, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, then at the peak of her literary career, was commissioned to write fiction reviews for The Listener. Her judgments were perceptive: she gave high praise, for instance, to Albert Camus’s The Outsider, which was not then recognised by other critics as the modern classic it has become. I came across these reviews while researching for my forthcoming book on Lehmann’s own literary reception, and was intrigued by her warm commendation of a novel which I discovered to have been long out of print, and whose author, named as Barbara Bower, was unknown to me. Miss Ranskill Comes Home, Lehmann said, ‘is a work of great originality, and delightfully readable, a blend of fantasy, satire and romantic comedy’. I was able to find a copy in the British Library, and having read and enjoyed it, I contacted Persephone, and this republication is the result.

  Rosamond Lehmann was not alone in her appreciation of the novel, as I was to find out. J D Beresford, in the Manchester Guardian, congratulated Miss Bower on ‘a witty first novel which besides being continuously entertaining displays a fine appreciation of life’s values’. The book also received an enthusiastic reception in America, despite transatlantic readers’ lack of experience of the wartime shortages, black-out and other restrictions, which are an integral feature of the plot. Sara Henderson Hay in the Saturday Review of Literature said that the novel was ‘somber, satiric, often bitter, a mixture of realism and romanticism’, and that it ‘approaches a modern morality play; it is an idea, an allegory in a way in which fantasy is blended with fact for the purpose of the whole’. Anne Richards in the New York Times also praised the blend of ‘reality and fantasy, irony and pity’.

  The novel received an unprecedented accolade from one of America’s most influential popular journals, the Saturday Evening Post. At that time that magazine’s fiction section consisted of short stories, serialised (and almost always abridged) novels, and condensed novels, contained within one issue, and labelled ‘Novelettes’ but evidently not with any pejorative meaning. For instance, one such novelette was H E Bates’s acclaimed The Cruise of the Breadwinner, rightly described by the Post as ‘a distinguished war story’. In the case of Miss Ranskill Comes Home, however, they announced that, since they felt it to be ‘one of the finest stories we have read in a long time’, they would publish it neither in instalments nor as a Novelette, but in full ‘in three long parts, each about three times the length of a typical Post serial installment’.

  So who, I wondered, was Barbara Bower, and why, despite her book having been so well received, did she only seem to have written one novel? The answer partly lay in the fact that Bower was the author’s married surname; her full maiden name was Barbara Euphan Todd, the name under which for some twenty years previously she had enjoyed considerable success as a children’s writer, most famously as the creator of the talking scarecrow of Scatterbrook Farm, Worzel Gummidge, and his friends.

  The only child of a country parson, Barbara Euphan Todd was educated, as she later put it, ‘very slightly’ by daily governesses until she was sent to boarding school at the age of 14. She appears to have been somewhat coy about her date of birth; reference books cite the year as being ‘1890 (?)’. During the First World War, she worked on the land, and as a VAD nurse. After the war, she returned to her parents’ home, and began to write, first collaborating with various others on collections of fairy stories, and then writing her own realist adventure novels appealing to slightly older children. Her first attempt to combine the worlds of fantasy and real life adventure in the shape of Worzel Gummidge was however rejected by several publishers, and the manuscript was put away in a drawer for a number of years.

  Later Barbara had poems and short fiction for adults published in Cornhill Magazine, and regularly reviewed books for Punch, which, even at the modest rate of £2. 12s. 6d. per contribution, provided a steady income. By strange coincidence, in 1936, she was among the critics who disliked Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets. The heroine, Olivia, irritated her, and so, she continued, ‘does her creator, who seems to show an almost old-fashioned determination to shock’. While admitting that the book was clever and interesting, she nonetheless wished that Lehmann, ‘who can write so beautifully about beautiful things, would not bother to write so badly about ugly ones’. It should not be thought, however, that in praising Miss Ranskill, Lehmann was being remarkably forgiving ten years later: she was unlikely to have known the name of the reviewer, Punch reviews then being unsigned.

  It is tempting to identify the Barbara Euphan Todd of the years before her somewhat late marriage with the middle-aged heroine of her first story published in Cornhill. Miss Blessop has unexpectedly inherited a large fortune, and sets out to relive her childhood as it might have been, had it not been blighted by the severe, unloving aunt, who had brought her up. Despite an empathy with childish desires, the narrator tells us, Miss Blessop ‘was not a sentimentalist’:

  She had no desire for little fingers to clutch at her heart-strings, for the sound of little feet to patter up and down her new corridors in Kensington. Never once since the days of her anæmic girlhood had she sighed for a family fireside and the love of a good man – the former would worry, and the latter embarrass her.

  But at the age of 42 Barbara Euphan Todd did find a man to marry, who was unlikely to have embarrassed her. John Graham Bower was a family friend, formerly married, with two young children, a retired naval commander awarded the DSO in the First World War, who listed his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘shooting, hunt
ing, and boxing’. A devout Christian all her life, it might have seemed uncharacteristic that Barbara should marry a divorcé, but throughout her writing there is an unconventional streak, and a dislike of authoritarianism in any form. This attitude is made clear in ‘Sign-posts’, the poem signed B E T, which is the foreword to The Very Good Walkers (1925), her first published novel for children, written in collaboration with Marjory Royce. The sign-posts ‘along the hot and dusty roads where grown-up people go’ are ‘policemen tall and straight’, declaring: ‘„There really isn’t time to play.“’ But children and other free spirits, the poem continues, should follow the swallows who ‘flash and flicker past’:

  They point the way to Over There

  To Far Away and Anywhere,

  ‘Beyond’, they say, ‘the hills are blue,

  Beyond, Beyond, the roads are few,

  We are the finger-posts for you!’

  John Bower, the younger son of a baronet, had himself published adventure and travel books for adults, using the pseudonym, ‘Klaxon’. His novel Heather Mixture (1922) seems to have autobiographical elements, his hero being a much-decorated Lieutenant-Commander, ‘Dicky to intimates, Fawcett to others, and Lofty to the Lower Deck’, who finds in 1918, in common with many of his fellow-officers, that the welcome home offered by the Admiralty amounts to relegation to six months’ unemployed pay. Bower nevertheless stayed in the Royal Navy until the year before his marriage to Barbara. The couple pooled their interests, and collaborated, as ‘Euphan’ and ‘Klaxon’, on several educational but entertaining children’s books. They lived in Blewbury, a picturesque village in Oxfordshire, inhabited by a number of writers and artists, with whom they became friends, including the painter William Nicholson and the novelist Marguerite Steen to whom Barbara later dedicated Miss Ranskill Comes Home.