An Episode of Sparrows

by Rumer Godden

  The garden was not ready, she had no pots, and she had to plant the seedlings out in tins, a golden syrup tin, two cocoa tins, and a child’s old seaside pail she found in a dustbin. “Just for now,” said Lovejoy. “Till we’re ready.” She looked at the long roots of the snapdragon. “When we put them in the beds, we’ll have to plant them deep,” she said. She brooded over them, and went to tell Mr. Isbister.

  “Must take care of them,” said Mr. Isbister. “Young plants are the same—as babies; that’s why they call—a seedling bed—a nursery. They need—food and—warmth and quiet and—loving,” brought out Mr. Isbister.

  “Loving?” asked Lovejoy, astounded. She had never thought of plants as being loved, but, “Yes,” said Mr. Isbister curtly.

  He was giving a coat of green paint to an empty half-barrel in his barrel garden.

  “Why is it empty?” asked Tip, looking at the way the other barrels were crowded. Nowadays Tip sometimes came with Lovejoy to see Mr. Isbister. “Why is that one empty?”

  “That’s my summer holiday,” said Mr. Isbister. Tip and Lovejoy looked so blankly at the half-barrel that he chuckled. Lovejoy had never heard him do that before; it sounded as if he were excited. Then he straightened his back and told them. Every July since they were married—“Fifty-three years now,” said Mr. Isbister—he and Mrs. Isbister had gone on an excursion to the sea, but this year Mrs. Isbister was going alone.

  “Why is she?” asked Lovejoy dutifully as he paused dramatically.

  That was the right question.

  “Because I need m’ticket money,” said Mr. Isbister in glee, “t’buy something special.” He was going to the Chelsea Flower Show, he told them—“Well, every year I go,” he said, “but I’ve never ordered anything. The prices is wicked, but this year, for once, just for once before I’m too old, I’m going to buy, up to twenty-nine-and-six, that’s the price of the ticket and what we’d spend. You don’t buy straight off, mind. You order. I’ll order from one of those big slap-up nurseries,” boasted Mr. Isbister.

  “What will you order?” asked Lovejoy.

  Mr. Isbister did not answer at once; then, “Might be a fuchsia,” he said, “and a new chrysanth—but I’d have to wait till the autumn shows for that—or it might be a rose.” When he said “rose” his voice took on a deeper, more respectful note. “Last year there was a new little rose, a polyanth,” said Mr. Isbister; he was looking up at them through the railings but now his eyes looked over their heads. “’Twasn’t even on order then, but it will be now; I saw it in the catalogue, pink-orange, coppery, it was; they called it flame. Costs a guinea,” said Mr. Isbister.

  A guinea to Lovejoy was rich and exclusive; the things in the shops she looked into with Vincent, if they were marked at all, were marked in guineas. She had assessed Liz’s suit in guineas. “Guineas used to be gold,” Vincent had told her and she saw them as rare little round gold moons. “Can a plant cost a guinea?” she asked.

  “It can,” said Mr. Isbister proudly. “Look,” and he searched among the catalogues he kept in a pile, took out a new-looking one, wet his thumb, and turned over the pages and then held one up for her to see; it was a coloured photograph of a copper-pink rose.

  “I don’t think it says ‘rose,’” said Lovejoy, peering down as she tried with her usual difficulty to spell out what it did say. “Jim—Jim.”

  “Jiminy Cricket,” said Tip, looking over her shoulder.

  “That’s its name,” said Mr. Isbister complacently.

  “Do roses have names?” To Lovejoy it made them come almost into the category of people.

  “All special flowers have names,” said Mr. Isbister. Not people, Somebodies, thought Lovejoy.

  “Jiminy Cricket.” She tried it over on her tongue. “Jiminy Cricket.” For a moment she too was dazzled, then she sighed and came back to her own garden. It had too many problems to let her have guinea-visions just now.

  The eight little plants looked naked and solitary against the pair of long stone-edged beds, each six feet long and nine inches wide. “I had dozens of cornflowers, but how can we buy dozens? How can we get them?” asked Lovejoy. “They’re four shillings a box, that’s twopence each, and the pansies are fivepence.”

  “I’ll get you some,” said Tip.

  “It took ages to get the candle money.” Lovejoy did not mean to be ungrateful but she was beginning to know how quick was time, how inexorable; even her stiff little neck had to bow to that. The earth in the beds was not even dug, she saw the whole garden doomed, and her voice was sharp as she said, “And all that time you only got sixpence!”

  Tip did not answer. Soon the silence seemed so long that Lovejoy looked up. He was sitting on his usual bit of stone but he was not whittling anything with his old knife, not knocking anything with his shoe or a bit of stone; he was quite still; his head was bent and he was looking at a piece of skin on his fingers. “What’s the matter?” said Lovejoy.

  “Nothin’,” said Tip. That was true; there was nothing the matter with his finger; it was Tip himself who was hurt.

  A new feeling began to be in Lovejoy; it was the first time she had ever hurt anyone and minded. The unkind words seemed to go on and on in the air. Lovejoy suddenly found she could not bear Tip’s stillness, his bent head and hidden face. She could not take the words back—words never will come back—and she looked round for something she could do. With the fork she began to dig up the earth in the beds; she was not really thinking of what she was doing but of Tip; she put in the fork, and there was a small hard sound as if it had hit something; she brought the fork up, put it in, and the sound came again. She looked down the hole she had dug, remembered the length of the snapdragon roots, and looked up with a horrified face. “Tip! Tip!” she cried.

  No answer. Tip looked at his fingers.

  “Tip.”

  The unhappiness in her voice reached him. “What?” said Tip unwillingly.

  And Lovejoy answered, as if the end of the world had come, “Tip, there isn’t enough earth in these beds.”

  •

  The little garden was laid out, enclosed in its stone; round the space that was to be the lawn they had made a path with the old grave’s marble chippings; the broken pillar rose gracefully with its ivy trail at one end; the beds were outlined; at the entrance were two corner stones embossed with lions. The lions had wings, they were supernatural lions; Tip had found them on a shattered monument, and Lovejoy had identified them. There never would have been such a garden, but it seemed almost treacherous now. “We could have found a way to get the seedlings.” Lovejoy lifted a stricken face. “We could have tried to sow the grass but we can’t do anything, anything at all, without earth.”

  “Let me see,” said Tip, but it was true; there was a depth of perhaps four inches of soil before the fork struck stone. Lovejoy threw the fork down in despair, but, “There’s more earth underneath,” said Tip.

  “We can’t get through to it.”

  “No,” said Tip. He knelt, tapping the fork, which he had picked up. “Don’t do that,” said Lovejoy irritably.

  “I’m thinkin’,” said Tip with dignity. At last he said, “Flowers grow in window boxes and boxes have hard bottoms and are not very deep.”

  “Deeper’n that,” said Lovejoy.

  “We must build the beds up with earth,” said Tip.

  There was plenty of earth, of course, under the rubble, but there was no hope of moving the heavy pieces of stone; it had been as much as their hands could do to bring the bits they had used. Earth was there, as it was under everything, under the church, under the houses and the Street, the whole of London. “Why, the world’s made of earth,” said Tip.

  “And we can’t get through to it,” said Lovejoy. She sat down on her chosen stone by the garden and began to cry.

  It was a strange thing that Lovejoy, who before had scarcely ever cried, and certainly would have let no one see her, cried continually with Tip; as on the first day, he seemed to encourage her
to cry and, when she did it, an equally strange thing happened to Tip; he became both weak and strong. The weakness seemed to come from somewhere above his stomach, where his counterpart, Adam, had lost a rib, perhaps, and it was sweet and powerful, a tug, as if the rib were attached and pulling; it made him do—“Anything,” said Tip helplessly. Wrong things, silly things. Well, a man can’t go against his own rib, he might have said. Tip—and probably Adam—had judgments of their own, good judgments, and knew they were running into trouble, but Eve, Lovejoy, made them feel strong, big and invulnerable, sometimes stronger than they could conveniently be, and now, “Stop crying,” said Tip. “I’ll get you some earth.”

  He meant, bring it from the old garden. After all, it’s my bomb-ruin, he thought. I kin bring it when the boys won’t be there; but Lovejoy’s eyes, though they were still wet, were looking a long, long way beyond Tip. “Good garden earth?” asked Lovejoy tremulously.

  That was something new to Tip. All dirt’s the same, he would have said. “Wasn’t your old garden good garden earth?” he asked.

  “No,” said Lovejoy firmly.

  “What is good garden earth?”

  “The—the Square.”

  Tip took a deep breath. “Oh well,” he said magnificently, “I’ll get it from the Square.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  “ISN’T it stealing?” Lovejoy asked when the plan was made. She asked because Tip was peculiar about stealing. “Love-joy!” he would say sharply when she as much as edged towards a box of seedlings.

  “They won’t miss one,” she would say defiantly.

  “Love-JOY!”

  “Of course it’s not stealing,” said Tip now about the earth. “It’s only dirt. If we took flowers, or broke off branches, it would be stealing, but dirt’s dirt,” said Tip reasonably.

  “If it’s not stealing why do we have to come at night?”

  “Because we have to get over the railings,” said Tip. “They wouldn’t let us do that. They don’t trust us,” he said with animosity.

  But that had its compensations; never, not even in the faraway days with Maxey, had he made such a perfect plot. Had he made it or had Lovejoy? He decided not to go into that, but he was beginning to feel that it was the time he spent away from her that was wasted. He did not, of course, let her know this. “You can’t come tomorrow?” she would say as if the sky had fallen, and Tip would growl, “Can’t I have one day off?”

  It was not an easy plot; as Olivia was to say, they should have had a medal for persistence, “And full marks for carrying it all out,” she said.

  “Marks for stealing?” asked Angela coldly.

  “They are not big children,” said Olivia, “and to wake in the middle of the night, night after night, well, three nights running, shows—enterprise and daring,” said Olivia. “I should have been frightened, at that age, to go out at night into the streets. Then think of the work, those heavy loads; two of them have small arms and legs. And look how beautifully they did up the buckets.”

  The buckets were deadened by being wrapped with two thicknesses of sack; the handles were wound round and round with rag. “They’ll make first-rate thieves, no doubt of that,” said Lucas.

  The buckets had to be done up each night, undone again in the morning, because one was Vincent’s and one the Malones’; the shovel and sacks were Tip’s, and the rope with which the buckets were let down from the church steps into the garden was, in the daytime, Mrs. Combie’s washing line. “Our line’s too long,” said Tip. “It’s for eleven people’s washing.”

  The most difficult part was the waking. Lovejoy had Mrs. Combie’s alarm clock; she fetched it from the kitchen when Mrs. Combie had gone to bed and put it back as she crept out in the morning—“Only it isn’t morning, it’s still night,” she said—but an alarm clock was no good to Tip; he slept on through it even if it were put close to his ear. For two nights Lovejoy waited and he did not come. “It’s no good,” he said. “I’ll have to get Sparkey.”

  “Sparkey?” said Lovejoy with distaste.

  “Yes. He’ll stay awake if I tell him,” said Tip. “He’ll do anything for me.”

  “But—can he?” asked Lovejoy.

  “He doesn’t sleep very well, he’s so delicate, you see; if there’s a mouse he wakes up, and he’d be thrilled,” said Tip.

  “But would his mother let him?”

  “She lets him go with me,” said Tip easily. “She knows that I’ll look after him. I will, you know. We’ll make him put his gumboots on and a thick coat. It’s only three nights,” said Tip. “We ought to be able to take four loads a night.”

  “But he won’t have to come,” said Lovejoy. “You can leave him in bed.”

  “That wouldn’t be fair,” said Tip sternly.

  Tip was woken by the dutiful Sparkey—“I thought you was dead,” Sparkey said to Tip the second morning—but he had to dress Sparkey and then lift him out of the window—they slept in the basement flat—and grope up the area steps to the railings and the pavement. “’F you hear a policeman or anyone, get into a porch and duck down,” ordered Tip. It was light in the Street but a queer colourless light that made them feel as if they were not real; it was queerly cold, and their stomachs were empty, which made them feel more queer; after the first night Lovejoy brought some bread, but what they needed was something hot and their stomachs rumbled loudly. “What’s the use of us being quiet?” said Tip.

  “It was on the morning of May twenty-sixth,” Father Lambert was to say when, later, he made his statement to Inspector Russell at the police station. “Priest’s House,” he explained, “adjoins the church steps, and I sleep in a room at the back, overlooking what was the old churchyard. It was a sliding sound, followed by a slithering.”

  “Is there a difference between sliding and slithering?” asked Inspector Russell.

  “The one,” said Father Lambert, “is an even sound, as of a rope being let down—which is what it was; the other is uneven, like legs.”

  “Was it legs?” asked the inspector.

  “It was,” said Father Lambert.

  It was Tip who let the rope down with the buckets, one at a time; the legs were Lovejoy’s, coming over the wall, groping their way down. She untied each bucket, staggered with it to the garden, emptied it on the beds, took it back, and tied it to the rope again, and Tip drew it up.

  “Did you hear anything else?” asked Inspector Russell.

  “Not a chink,” said Father Lambert. He also admired the buckets. “They were cleverly muffled,” he said.

  He had heard the beginning of a lament from Sparkey, who wanted to see the garden, but that was instantly smothered.

  “Did you recognize the children?” asked Inspector Russell.

  “I knew Tip Malone, of course, and I recognized the little girl but I didn’t know her name.”

  “Did you hear them again?”

  “I didn’t listen. I went back to bed.”

  “Didn’t you know what they were doing?”

  “Not exactly,” said Father Lambert. “What I did know”—and he said this later to Angela—“is that children have to play.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  TO LOVEJOY it was very far from play. When the last bucket was tipped out and she saw the two flowerbeds filled with fine black earth, good garden earth, she had a feeling of such triumph and satisfaction as she had never known. “Who plants a garden plants happiness,” says the Chinese proverb. In that moment Lovejoy was absolutely happy.

  To Tip it was not play either. He had thought that, having got the dirt, he would be allowed to rest on his laurels, or at least to go back to the gang, but there was a story Olivia could have told him, a story she and Angela used to ask for when they were little girls, “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle.”

  The old woman who lived in a vinegar bottle found sixpence one day when she was sweeping; she took it to the river shore to buy a fish for dinner, but the fish was so small that she had pity on it and put it ba
ck in the water. “Bubble, bubble, bubble,” went the water, and there was the little fish. “Call me, and whatever you ask I shall give you,” it said. The old woman said there was nothing she wanted, but no sooner had she gone back to the vinegar bottle than she remembered the dinner she should have had; she went back to the river and called the little fish. The hot dinner was provided and then she thought she would change the inconvenient vinegar bottle for a house; but her furniture would not go with the new house and she asked for new furniture; her clothes looked shabby with the new furniture and she asked for new clothes; she could not do housework in her new clothes and she asked for a little maid; the maid sent her to the shops to buy chops for dinner and she asked for a pony-carriage. “Bubble, bubble, bubble,” went the water all day long. If Tip—or Mrs. Combie—had heard that story they would have known just how tired the little fish became.

  “Wanting is the beginning of getting.” Vincent said that often.

  “Then why don’t people get things?” asked Lovejoy.

  “Because they don’t want hard enough.” Certainly no one could have accused Vincent or Lovejoy of that.

  “We can’t put these poor little things in this beautiful earth,” said Lovejoy, looking with disfavour at the snapdragon, the daisy, and the marigolds and alyssums. “We must have something special.”

  “What sort of special?” asked Tip warily. It was a word he was beginning to dread. Tip’s face was beginning to look as no Malone face had ever looked before, careworn.

  “Mum,” said Tip, coming to sit on a box by his mother when she was washing up at the sink, “Mum, I do wish I had some money.”

  “How much money?” asked Mrs. Malone cautiously.

  “I don’t know,” burst out Tip. “That’s it. I don’t know. I don’t know where I am. There’s never any end to it,” said Tip and kicked the box.

  Mrs. Malone looked at her son in astonishment. That was how Mr. Malone talked on a Friday night.

  To give Lovejoy her due, some of her wants she achieved for herself; for instance, the lawn.