Ballad of Favour

by Monica Dickens

  ‘No trouble from you tonight.’ Gwen chuckled and went down to create the small explosion that lit the gas burner under the big fryer, which was always full of oil and used over and over again.

  She took one of the packets of frozen chips out of the refrigerator – there was not much else in there – and put it by the stove until the oil was hot enough. Meanwhile, with a shuddering crash, the opening music for the next programme started. Red Hot Pepper! Gwen’s favourite programme. She hurried into the front room, to see the Red Hot singers and dancers hurling themselves about the screen in a frenzy of sound and whirling arms and legs and dazzling coloured lights.

  ‘Red … Hot … Pepper! Ai-ai-ai! Gwen put her arms in the air and threw her fat body about

  Get back to the kitchen! Rose was in agony. The oil, for God’s sake. The gas flame’s up high and the oil will burn.

  Gwen was obsessed by the music. The oil! The kitchen – fire! There must be something Rose could do to make her remember. But Gwendolyn’s mind didn’t work as fast as that. The music and movement absorbed her, and as she turned, Rose was spun out of the scene with the music in her head and another, terrifying sound – the hiss and sizzle of burning oil.

  * * *

  She woke lying heavily on the moor, her limbs aching, as if she had been flung there. She lay stunned for a moment, too shocked to get up. She had left the scene too soon. The house was going to catch fire. It was too late to help.

  She got up wearily and went over to Crackers, who was calmly choosing and chewing sapling leaves, since Rose had been gone for no time at all, as far as he was concerned.

  She hooked the reins over her arm and started to lead him back to the hotel. She had no energy to mount and ride him back. Sadness fell over her like a grey cloak. Too late. She had failed. As she plodded on, with Crackers nudging her pockets and bumping her with his head, she looked at her watch. Five o’clock. Red … Hot … Pepper, said the dejected tread of her feet.

  Red Hot Pepper! Of course. Sundays. But it didn’t start until seven o’clock. She must have been seeing two hours into the future when she was Gwen. The programme had not even begun. Gwen hadn’t lit the gas under the fryer. Nothing had happened yet.

  Should she call the Fire Brigade from home? But the fire wouldn’t have started by now. If she waited till seven, they might get there too late. How could they get there anyway when she didn’t even know the name of the street?

  Two hours. How could she get there in time? Favour – help me. Rose turned back, tugging Crackers, who wanted to go home. She tied him again and crashed through the undergrowth.

  ‘Favour!’ But there was no valley there. No mist. Only the lake, lapping gently at the gravelly shore, its surface ruffled by the evening wind.

  ‘Favour!’ she called the horse, but only the lake birds answered her, sadly, and the wind in the thicket of trees.

  Chapter Fourteen

  She must go by herself. With the challenge, her energy returned. She struggled on to Crackers, hopping on one foot while he whirled in circles, and rode him fast for home.

  Ordinarily, she kept him cautiously to a trot and a slow canter, but in this emergency she was able to let him stride out, covering the ups and downs of the moor, plunging into the hollows and charging up the hills. Because Rose did not really care now who was in charge, she was relaxed enough to be able to remain in charge of the pony. Because she was thinking only that Davey was in danger, there was no room for being afraid. Was this how a good rider felt all the time?

  She steered Crackers carefully down the last bushy slope, trotted him briskly through the wood and turned him out in his little paddock to roll off the sweat.

  Joyce would have a fit, but Rose had always felt that rolling was better than brushing, and the idea of Joyce and her rules seemed as far away as if they were on Mars.

  Old Paint was leaning against the crab apple tree. ‘Don’t choose today to die.’ She wheeled him across the lawn to the drive and was just going to mount, when her father came out of the hotel.

  ‘Rose – I need you.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad. I’m in a dreadful hurry.’

  ‘Just for a moment. I need you to nip up to the store room and find a box of old papers for me.’

  ‘Can’t you find it yourself? I –’

  ‘I’m too tall to clamber about among all that junk. Where are you going in such a hurry?’

  ‘To Newcome.’

  ‘Why?’

  Rose was too distraught to invent a reason. ‘Oh, I can’t tell you. Dad – it’s a secret, sort of, but it’s important.’

  ‘More important than me?’ He sometimes said things like this, which made you cringe.

  ‘No, of course not, but look – oh well.’ She took her foot off the bicycle pedal. ‘I’ll do it.’

  She hared up all the flights of stairs and up the last narrow stair to the attic, where she hunted frantically for the right box among dozens of boxes and bits of furniture and pictures and piles of old curtains. She was just going to hare back down again to say she couldn’t find it, when she saw the right label. She dragged the heavy box over to the stair and backed down, letting it thump from step to step.

  Her father was on the landing, asking her to do something else, but she pretended not to hear, and flew on downstairs.

  She rode like a demon, with her head down and her legs driven by urgency. Newcome had never been so far away. Although she was riding as fast as Old Paint could travel, it seemed to take forever. Her legs were exhausted. The bike rattled and jounced her aching body. The back tyre was getting flatter. She stopped twice to pump it up, and the last time, she abandoned the bicycle on a patch of waste land and took off over a fence, across a yard and down an alley, taking short cuts wherever she could towards the brick wall of the railway embankment.

  Her hands and knees were bruised and grazed. Her breathing was harsh and rough, as if her throat was closing. She stumbled once and fell. Tears came, and her crying was the sound of the child crying.

  ‘I can’t get there. I’ll die in the attempt.’

  She got up, and changed that to, ‘If I die in the attempt, I’ll get there,’ and somehow she could run on. She did not know what she was going to find. She did not know if she was too late. She had broken her watch climbing over the fence, and it seemed like much more than two hours since she had last looked at it on the moor.

  Too late … too late … Her heart pounded. Her breath rasped in her throat like the smoke from the fires of the terrible savage soldiers who were somehow mixed up with their wicked Lord in this race against time, this desperate contest between hope and disaster. She passed the grocer’s shop. Through a window in the next house, her attention was caught by a blaze of light from a television set, and the crash of music and drums and howl of voices that was the programme that had sent Gwendolyn from the kitchen to dance along with Red Hot Pepper.

  Now! It was now! Gwen had lit the gas, and the oil was burning now! The smoke in Rose’s throat could really be smoke. The crying of the child that tormented her imagination was the real sound of Davey crying. As she turned the corner and ran down the Morgans’ derelict street, she heard the child wailing and choking.

  ‘Mumma!’ Davey cried, and choked on a sob. ‘Mumma!’

  ‘I’m coming!’ Rose croaked with the last of her breath.

  The back door of the house crashed open, and a wild-eyed, wild-haired figure, totally hysterical, ran out yelling, ‘Fire!’, stumbled round the house and ran past Rose, blindly screaming.

  Then Rose was through the gateless gateway, past Carol’s bicycle and fighting her way into the kitchen, which was full of smoke. Flames blazed in the frying pan and the curtains were on fire.

  Upstairs, Davey was cowering in the bed, sobbing and choking and staring in terror at the smoke seeping up through the loose floorboards.

  Rose grabbed him and went to the door. She looked back at the smoke and thought of Carol, and had to go back and bend down, still holding Dave
y, to lift the floorboard and rescue the poems. Smoke poured up into her face and a small tongue of flame licked along a beam and leaped for her as she grabbed the papers blindly, choking, thrust them in her pocket and struggled to her feet with Davey.

  The child clung to her, coughing, choking her still more with his clutch round her neck as they went down the stairs where the smoke was beginning to climb. Rose knew the front door would not open. It had to be the kitchen. The flames had already spread. At the doorway, she was knocked back by the acrid smoke. She turned her head towards the hall, took a deep gulp of air and charged through the dense smoke and the heat of the fire with her eyes shut, and somehow down the back steps to the yard and out into the street.

  A woman was running across the road from the opposite house, and people were coming down the street. Rose thrust Davey at the astonished woman, and ran through the railway arch.

  On the other side, she lay for a while exhausted on some dirty grass, coughing and retching, trying to recover her breath and her senses. As in a far-off dream, she heard the fire engines, faint, then growing louder. It was not until she was on her way back to find her bicycle, climbing over the railway line beyond the viaduct where it was on level ground, that she felt the pain in her hand and saw that she had burned it, rescuing the poems.

  The bicycle was in the bushes where she had left it. Over by the railway embankment, the sky was full of smoke. She pumped up the bicycle, and headed for home in the gathering dusk. She was totally exhausted, but totally at peace.

  She had to stop three times to pump up Old Paint, which was difficult with a burned hand. She headed straight for her room when she got home at last.

  She was lying on top of the bed, asleep in her clothes, when her mother came up.

  Mollie never said things like, ‘Where on earth have you been?’ She said now, ‘Oh, Rose, your poor face is filthy, and your shirt’s torn. Did you fall off the bike?’

  Rose nodded. Too much sympathy, and she might cry. Gently, Mollie unwrapped the towel Rose had wound round her hand, and drew in her breath.

  ‘I burned it in the kitchen,’ Rose said huskily, and started to cough. Her throat was still very sore.

  ‘And caught a cold, going off on your bike so late without a sweater.’ Mollie sat down on the bed and stroked her hair. ‘Your hair is filthy too. I’ll wash it for you later on, if you can stay awake.’

  Rose was already asleep again when her mother came back with ointment and bandages, and a glass of milk and honey and a huge piece of Sunday cake, which she baked every week, and was her best. Rose opened her eyes and saw on the tray the little blue and grey Hoopla horse with the red saddle and bridle.

  ‘Ben won that at the fun fair. He left it for you, and said he’d see you at half term.’

  ‘Oh good.’ Rose winced as Mollie turned her hand over.

  ‘How did you burn it?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Hot saucepan handle. I’m so clumsy.’

  ‘Hilda didn’t tell me.’

  ‘She wasn’t there.’

  ‘Poor Rose, you do sound hoarse.’ As she bandaged the hand, Mollie said without looking at her, ‘I know it’s a secret time, the age you are now. It was for me. If you can’t tell me things, that’s all right. Just don’t ever stop being my friend.’

  ‘Never.’

  Rose would have given anything to be able to tell her what she had done. No, not quite anything. Not the risk of losing the horse and her job as a messenger because she had betrayed the secret.

  Next morning, Rose’s throat was still sore, and she had to miss school. Her father had a day off, so she had lunch with him in their apartment upstairs, watching the local news on television.

  ‘In Newcome yesterday evening, a serious fire partly destroyed a house in the North End, already marked for demolition.’

  And there were the Morgans in the street with the wreck of the house behind them, one half of it a blackened ruin.

  ‘I understand the baby was saved by a heroic rescuer.’ The television news man thrust the microphone in front of Mrs Morgan, wearing her tent and holding Davey with a blanket wrapped round him.

  ‘That’s right.’ Mrs Morgan looked stunned. The whole family looked as if they had been hit by a tornado. Carol appeared to have been crying. ‘We was at the fun fair, see, and the police come to us,’ her mother went on. ‘I said, “Davey!” and wanted to faint away, but he said at once the child was rescued.’

  ‘By the baby sitter?’

  ‘Must have been, but Gwen’s not been able to talk since, her gran says. The shock of it, see?’

  ‘Well, thank God for a heroine,’ the television man said heartily. ‘But you’ve lost almost everything. How does that feel?’ He held the microphone out to Carol, who looked as if she were going to cry again and said, ‘I lost my bike.’

  ‘And your home too, I’m afraid.’

  Mr Morgan, his thin hair on end, his green jacket buttoned up wrong, pushed his face towards the microphone and grinned. ‘Blessing in disguise,’ he said. ‘Now the Council will have to find us decent housing.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Philip Wood said, as the picture changed, ‘he probably put a match to the house himself.’

  Rose did not argue the point. Behind the Morgans, in the smoke still rising from the house, his mane and tail part of the smoke, she had seen a vision of the Great Grey Horse. He looked at Rose. No one else would ever know that she was the heroine, but in his full grey eye she saw his pride in her.

  And Mr Vingo knew. When Rose went downstairs later, he said to her, ‘I saw it on the telly. I knew that it was you.’ He picked up her burned hand carefully and planted a ceremonial kiss on the bandage. ‘Well done, O Rose of all Roses. Were you afraid?’

  She nodded. She had lost her voice.

  ‘Rose of all the world.’

  When her mother gave her the money for working at the wedding, although she had not really earned it because she had been a bridesmaid part of the time, and not even there part of the time, Rose bought her new bicycle. She did not feel sorry for Old Paint any more, because she knew what she was going to do with him.

  She was uneasy about telephoning strangers, especially official ones, but she nerved herself to ring the Housing Department and ask them about the Morgans.

  ‘I’d like to help them,’ she explained. ‘I heard that girl say she had lost her bike in the fire, and I have an old one – well, it works all right, and I’d like to give it to her.’

  ‘How nice of you.’

  ‘But I don’t know where she is.’

  ‘I believe they’re in temporary housing. Why don’t you bring the bicycle here, and the social worker will see that she gets it.’

  So Rose got Jim Fisher to mend the slow puncture, and to take her and the bicycle in the van to the Housing Office. When they got there, she was scared to go in and have to explain to a receptionist, so Jim said he would do it.

  As he picked up Old Paint to carry him up the steps of the office building, Rose hopped out of the van and ran to the pillar box and posted the envelope with the poems to Carol Morgan, at the address of the Housing Office.

  Carol would never understand who could have rescued her treasured poems from the fire. But she could look on it as a miracle, if she liked.

  A Note on the Author

  Great granddaughter to Charles Dickens, Monica (1915–1992) was born into an upper middle class family. Disillusioned with the world in which she was brought up, she acted out – she was expelled from St Paul’s Girls’ School in London for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge. Dickens then decided to go into service, despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair Of Hands, published in 1939.

  Dickens married an American Navy officer, Roy O. Stratton, and spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts and Washington D.C., but she continued to set the majority of her writing in Britain. No More Meadows, which she p
ublished in 1953, reflected her work with the NSPCC – she later helped to found the American Samaritans in Massachusetts. Between 1970 and 1971 she wrote a series of children’s books known as The Worlds End Series which dealt with rescuing animals and, to some extent, children. After the death of her husband in 1985, Dickens returned to England where she continued to write until her death aged 77.

  Discover books by Monica Dickens published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/MonicaDickens

  Closed at Dusk

  Dear Doctor Lily

  Enchantment

  Flowers on the Grass

  Joy and Josephine

  Kate and Emma

  Man Overboard

  No More Meadows

  One of the Family

  Room Upstairs

  The Angel in the Corner

  The Fancy

  The Happy Prisoner

  The Listeners

  Children’s Books

  The House at World’s End

  Summer at World’s End

  World’s End in Winter

  Spring Comes to World’s End

  The Messenger

  Ballad of Favour

  Cry of a Seagull

  The Haunting of Bellamy 4

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book.

  The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

  This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,

  London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain 1985 by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd

  Copyright © 1985 Monica Dickens

  All rights reserved

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