by Pip Granger
Finally, we arrived at the sheets of rusty corrugated iron surrounding the site of the dairy that had once stood proudly at the junction of Tennyson Road and Wordsworth Street, known to everyone locally as ‘Poets’ Corner’. We walked round it, looking for a way in, and eventually found a sheet of iron that had been twisted back on itself, allowing us to clamber over broken bricks, tiles and cobblestones into the dairy yard.
We stopped and listened. I thought I heard a faint mewing above the sound of the wind sighing through gaping windows and the shattered roof. There was also the tap, tap, tap of something banging against a pane of glass and the rustle of rodents running through the piles of dead leaves caught in corners. It was eerie standing there in the dark, remembering how the bustling dairy had been before the war, full of the clatter of horses’ hooves and clanking milk churns, and straining to follow that one tiny thread of sound to its source.
We followed it to the edge of the dark, dank hole which opened beneath the pile of rubble that had once been the white-tiled shop and head offices of the Morning Dew Dairy, and shone in a torch. Sure enough, two sets of frightened, golden eyes shone back at us. I heard again the cry from my dreams, but this time Zinnia could hear it, too.
We explored carefully. There was only one obvious way down. The entrance to the cellar steps had been blocked with masonry but the stairs – most of them, anyway – still clung to the wall. The once-sturdy set of wooden steps had been exposed to the weather for years, and rot had made it treacherous.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Zinnia.
‘It looks tricky, hen. I don’t think we can trust those steps without a rope for safety,’ Zinnia replied, between the comforting murmurs and kissy noises she was directing towards her beloved cats, who, sensing relief was in sight, were kicking up a racket.
‘Let’s look and see if there’s anything handy for the job,’ I suggested. It was a good idea in theory, but a disaster in practice, because I dropped my torch, which went out and refused to come on again, and we never did find any rope.
‘I think you’ll have to go and get help, Zin, or at least some rope and a basket or something to carry them home in. You’ll be quicker, seeing you know where you keep it all,’ I told her. ‘I’ll stay put and keep the moggies company.’
‘Don’t you think it’d be better to wait for daylight?’ Zinnia asked.
‘No, I think we’d better hurry. One of the cats is dying. I feel it.’
Zinnia nodded and didn’t even try to argue. ‘I’ll not be long if I can help it. I’ll bring another torch, but I’m sorry, hen, I canna leave you this one, I’ll break my neck. Don’t you move either, in case you break yours.’
Good old Zin! Always level-headed in a crisis. I suppose that’s what made her a suitable Makepeace. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can. And Zelda,’ she paused, ‘thank you for finding my wee cats for me.’ She patted my arm in the dark and was gone. I saw her torch beam weaving about, rising and falling for a long time in the darkness, as she climbed over the piles of rubble to get home.
Once the sound of Zinnia’s scrambling died away, the night was very quiet. Every now and then Hepzibah would mew, Hallelujah would whimper and I’d murmur encouragement to them. ‘It’s all right, pussies, nice pussies, just hang on.’
I remembered coming to the Morning Dew Dairy with my sisters or one of my brothers, to collect milk, butter and, sometimes, a small jug of thick, yellow cream. It was cheaper to collect your own; having the milko deliver it on his horse and cart cost money. The cobbled yard was always busy with horses, carts, milkmen and housewives, and the clang of the metal churns having their lids clamped down on the frothy, white milk ready for delivery on the carts. The shaggy hooves of the horses clattered against the cobbles and their leather harnesses creaked as the shafts of the carts were lowered into place. Milkos in blue-and-white striped coats and long pinnies coaxed the horses to stand patiently while their carts were loaded or unloaded, depending on which end of the day it was.
It was better to buy milk and cream at the tag end, when they were cheaper. The dairy would flog it cheap rather than risk it going off and spoiling. Still, nothing was wasted; pigs didn’t mind a drop of curdled milk and it fattened them up a treat, so it was shipped out to them sharpish if it wasn’t sold by teatime.
Regular as clockwork, Arthur Robinson, Percy’s dim older brother, would go round the yard, sweeping up the piles of horse dung and carting it away to a neat heap behind the stables. Then he’d hose down the yard, and the water would run through little channels around the edges. Us kids would squat beside the channels, racing wisps of hay that had drifted from the horses’ feed-bags. That yard was always immaculate. Arthur was dead now, killed somewhere in the North African desert, a long, long way from the Morning Dew Dairy on Poets’ Corner.
I shuddered, brought back to the present by the pitiful mewing coming from the dark hole beside me. ‘There, there, pussy, it won’t be long now,’ I murmured, trying hard not to hear the skitter of many tiny feet on broken white tiles.
At last I saw the beam of a torch wavering in the darkness. Zinnia was back!
‘Sorry to be so long, hen. I tried to find help, but Ronnie wasn’t home and I didn’t like to bother Terry – we don’t want him falling down holes with that heart of his.’ Her voice was loud in the darkness. The cats heard her and stepped up their crying.
‘I don’t want to be falling down holes with this heart of mine, neither, or these kidneys, so I hope you brought a strong rope.’ I was trying to make a joke of it, but I really didn’t fancy the next bit. As the younger of the two of us, I thought I should be the one to go down to fetch the cats.
Zinnia was carrying a wicker basket stuffed with a spare torch, a washing line, a couple of soft towels and a bag containing two boiled fish heads, for use as bribes. Zinnia always had such tasty morsels about, for feeding the many stray cats and dogs that roamed the streets. The poor dears were lost for all sorts of reasons. The bombing sent many animals running in blind panic and some never found their way back home. Others survived a direct hit but their people didn’t, or the people had been bombed out and forced to move and nobody had been able to find their pets before they left.
I tried really hard to forget I was terrified of rats and none too keen on pitch darkness either. And that the combination of the two had me quaking in my slippers. ‘I reckon we should wind the rope round my waist and fix the other end to that beam there,’ I suggested. ‘With all the rubble on the other end of it, nothing’s going to shift it. Certainly not my weight.’ Zinnia nodded in agreement.
Gingerly I put my left foot over the edge. Hanging on to the rope with one hand and a torch with the other, I felt about the yawning gap for the first available step. My toes touched something and I took a deep breath and pushed off with my right foot. The rope stretched and the beam creaked as it shifted slightly – but it held, and the toes of my right foot found the step.
I put my weight on it and it cracked with a sound like a pistol shot. I dropped through the next two rotten steps, barking my shins on their jagged edges. It felt as if my stomach had lurched into my mouth by the time the rope stopped my fall. Warm blood trickled down my leg and into my shoe, and my heart hammered so hard I thought I was going to choke. I waited for it to slow a bit, and realized I was standing on a solid tread.
I took each of the next six steps with great caution. Finally my right foot hit solid ground – and something skittered across it. I screamed, a cat howled and Zinnia shouted, ‘Are you all right, hen?’
‘Yes,’ I quavered, not at all sure that I was. I’d jumped about a foot in the air and tried to levitate, desperate to keep my feet off the ground, but I had to come down eventually, to deal with the cats.
I’d also dropped my torch, and had to will myself to feel about on the filthy floor for it.
I found it by instinct almost. Every nerve and fibre of my body were on full alert. I was drenched in a cold sweat, except for my left leg and foo
t, which were warm and sticky with blood. Weren’t rats attracted by the smell of blood? Or was that crocodiles? Now I knew where the dreams about terror and cold, clammy darkness had come from.
An inner voice told me that it was not the time to dwell on the noshing habits of rats; better to find the cats and get the hell out of there. I tried the torch and, to my huge relief, a beam of light illuminated the scene around me.
One of the cats was lying on its side in a pile of litter, seemingly too weak to move much, and the other was standing protectively nearby.
‘I’ve found them, Zinnia,’ I shouted up to the blur that was her face peering at me from above. ‘I’m going to fix the basket to the rope now. When I’ve done that I’ll get the cats and pop them in. I’ll give you a shout when I want you to pull them up.’
‘Right you are, hen. I’m ready. Put a loop or two round the basket, so they can’t force the lid open and get away,’ Zinnia suggested. ‘They’ll be frightened.’
I distracted the guard cat with a fish head and gently wrapped the other cat in a towel, cooing reassurance all the time. ‘There, there pussy, gooood pussy, there, there.’ I stroked a set of claggy ears and placed the bundle in the basket.
I turned and found the other one ignoring its fish head and watching me and what I was doing to its mate very carefully. I made kissy noises and called encouragingly, ‘Here, Hepzibah, come over here. There’s a lovely girl, what a pretty puss, come on now.’ She sidled towards me: instinct told her that I was the way out, but natural caution made her hesitate and weave and wave her tail about.
At last she came within reach and deigned to let me pick her up. I wrapped her in the other towel, cooing all the time and tickling her chin with a spare finger. I popped her in the basket next to her much quieter companion and closed the lid, which was secured by a bar running through wicker loops. I wound the rope around the basket several times to make sure the lid stayed closed.
‘Haul away, Zinnia,’ I shouted. ‘And be quick about it. I want to get out of here.’
‘Right you are, Zelda,’ she called back and began to heave. Once the basket was safely beside her, she sent the rope down for me. I got up those steps a bloody sight faster than I got down; I fair flew up them, and have rarely been so relieved to be out in the air in my entire life. I hadn’t dared look to the left or right while I was in that cellar, in case there were lots of little eyes looking back at me.
My lungs heaved on the dawn air. The sky was just beginning to lighten in the east and the birds were waking each other up.
The walk back to Zinnia’s was far easier now that we could make out the narrow tracks made by children and animals between the piles of rubble and the puddles. At the end of it, we had two filthy, frightened tabbies nestled on hot water bottles in front of the range in Zinnia’s kitchen, so I suppose it was worth it. Well, I know it was, by the look of relief and tenderness on Zinnia’s normally somewhat stern face when she unpacked her cats.
She turned to me, eyes filled with tears. ‘Thank you, Zelda, for everything you have done for me lately.’ I opened my mouth to interrupt, but she held up a large hand and I shut it again. ‘Thank you especially for restoring my moggies to me. I shan’t forget it, hen, any of it.’ And to my utter astonishment she gave me a swift cuddle before briskly getting on with the business of caring for her cats.
Hallelujah was in a bad way. His fur was matted with dried blood and he was very weak. Hepzibah was in much better condition. There had been no shortage of rats, mice and water to keep her going. ‘I’ve a mind that she kept him in rodents too,’ said Zinnia. ‘After all, when they’re home, they bring me my share because I’m too slow and stupid to catch my own.’ Her fingers probed gently at Hallelujah’s bloody flank. ‘Ah! I see.’ She stopped prodding and stroked his head instead. He tried a feeble purr, but soon gave it up.
‘What do you see?’ I asked once I could stop my teeth from chattering. I hadn’t got over that cellar yet.
‘He has an infected wound and there’s something lodged in it. I’ll have to get it out and clean things up a wee bit if he’s to come around.’
She drugged him with a drop of whisky in warm milk, adding the tiniest dose of something from her shelves to help him relax. While she was at it, she gave a drop or two to Hepzibah, who could finally stand down from her long watch, and a rather larger splash for me. She cleaned and dressed my scrape and then started work on Hallelujah.
Half an hour later Zinnia and I were staring at a small pellet glinting in the first rays of the morning sun that was rising fierily over the railway tracks. Some bastard had shot Zinnia’s cat with an airgun. How the cats came to be in the cellar was a mystery. It was possible that the same bastard had put them there, but we couldn’t know for sure. Zinnia swabbed the wound with antiseptic, wrapped Hallelujah tenderly in a clean, white towel, then popped him in the smallest oven of her range.
‘Zin!’ I cried, appalled.
‘Don’t worry, hen. I’m not cooking the puir wee scrap. When I was a lassie we put our premature or orphaned lambs in the wee oven of the range. It keeps them warm and secure, because they can’t move about much. He’ll come to no harm in there. It may well be the saving of him.’
We sat quietly in front of the range for a while, sipping cups of Ovaltine and talking quietly about the events of the last few weeks. I felt we’d grown closer, somehow. I’d always felt like a child around Zinnia, the way I did with Mum and Dad, but now, in a funny sort of way, I felt I was coming of age and that Zinnia recognized the fact and treated me accordingly.
‘Do you know, hen,’ Zinnia confided in me, ‘all this business with the furniture, the tool shed fire and now my dear cats makes me feel as if there’s something really malevolent taking an interest in me, and I don’t mind admitting that I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all. It’s making me more nervous than Hitler ever did. I wonder why that is?’
I thought about it as I sipped my drink. ‘Because this time it’s personal?’ I suggested.
Zinnia sighed deeply. ‘Aye, that’ll be it, hen, that’ll be it. You’re a good person, Zelda, and I am glad you’re on my side.’
I’d never heard Zinnia talk that way before and I don’t know whether it was because it moved me, or simply because I was exhausted, but for a minute there, I thought I was going to burst into tears.
25
So much for a peaceful night at Zinnia’s. The bags under my eyes were almost down to my knees, so I was in the wrong frame of mind for what faced me at work that Thursday morning. Mrs Dunmore was a human tornado, whizzing around the place wiping her bony digit along this surface and that, finding fault wherever she turned. ‘Just because the men eat like pigs at the trough, that’s no reason to feed them in a sty. Get cracking with a scrubbing brush and plenty of soda,’ she ordered. ‘I want this dining hall spick and span by the time I return.’
‘Get her!’ Beryl mouthed behind Mrs Dunmore’s back. ‘Dining hall? It’s a bleeding canteen.’
Cook and Beryl were mystified. ‘She arrived with a wasp up her jacksie,’ Cook told me. ‘It was nothing we done.’ We agreed it was time to raid Mrs D.’s secret hoard of Rich Tea biscuits and have a quiet cup of tea to soothe our jangled nerves. Mrs Dunmore had a way of sharing her feelings with you, so you ended up wound tight, like a wet rag.
‘It’s gotta be her love life, now she’s got one,’ Beryl told us confidently. ‘I mean, first it was because she was a frustrated, dried-up old bat, but now she isn’t, Percy’s got to be giving her trouble. Stands to reason.’
‘Maybe she’s found out about Mrs Robinson,’ I suggested: it was only a matter of time before some kind soul told her, after all. News, especially bad news, got around. It was a miracle that she had been in the dark for so long.
‘I did hear that Mrs Robinson was back from her sister’s. P’raps that’s it,’ suggested Cook. ‘Percy’s having to stay closer to home.’
We agreed. It was probably that.
Whate
ver it was, it didn’t improve as the day wore on, and I was virtually on my knees by the time I got home that evening. Dilly arrived with Terry just after I’d got in from work. I’d only had time to make a cup of tea and sit down by the window with my poor throbbing dogs resting on a pouffe – made, the man said, from camel hide. It was a shabby object in a deep, dark red with gold patterns dodging and weaving all over it. I’d bought it from a bloke in the market when I’d first married Charlie and it was still the only item of furniture I actually owned. The rest came with the flat, but of course I’d re-covered the chairs and painted the rest. There wasn’t a lot.
Our landlord was not a generous man, whoever he was. I left the rent money at the greengrocer’s downstairs on a Friday morning and the landlord’s agent collected it, signed my rent book and buggered off. I’d only ever seen the agent once, when Charlie and me took the flat, and I hadn’t been impressed then. As I remember, he was sweaty and had dandruff.
Dilly was in a bit of a state and Terry looked mournful.
‘How’s life treating you?’ I asked, about as brightly as a Toc H lamp.
‘Seldom,’ said Terry as he marched in and nicked my comfy seat.
‘Same here,’ said Dilly, nicking the other one.
‘Sit down, do,’ I said, bitterly. ‘I’ll jump around making you two lazy swine some tea, shall I?’ I already knew the answer. I whacked the kettle under the tap with undue force. Time I reread How to Entertain Gracefully by Lady Emmeline Snot.
‘Sorry, Zelda, have I taken your pew?’ asked Terry, eyeing my tea cooling beside him but not shifting his bum at all.
‘Don’t mind me,’ I grumbled. ‘I only live ’ere. So to what do I owe the pleasure of seeing your dolly old eeks, may I ask?’