by Jane Bailey
‘Sister?’ I think I looked suitably surprised.
‘Yes, we had a sister once. Beautiful little thing. Died of diphtheria.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Eddie could do wistful as well: ‘Yes … broke my mother’s heart, did our Ivy. She was like a light going out in our family.’
Sidney had leant his head against my sleeve now, and was nuzzling up to me. He must have felt my pulse quicken. My instinct was to run, but Gracie was holding on to me on my right, and Sidney on my left. ‘So there were four children, in fact?’
‘Yes … four.’ I was watching him. He didn’t flinch.
‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do …’ sang Sidney in a faint voice. He, at least, remembered five.
‘Come on, Sid, I think you’re making a bit of a monkey of yourself …’ He looked at me again. ‘I’m sorry – he’s very emotional at the moment. What with Mum dying and everything. And he’s worried he might have to – you know—’ Then he lowered his voice to a whisper and exaggerated his mouth movements, ‘—go in a home.’
I practically yanked Gracie away with me, and Sidney remained clinging to my arm all the way out to the lavender.
‘I’m sorry, Gracie. I’ve got to get away from here. I’m sorry. I’m sorry …’
Gracie said it was all right, and she shouldn’t have made me come. I said, no really, it was my fault, and so on. We were halfway down the road when we realized there was someone behind us. Little grunting noises – like someone trying to speak through closed lips – made us turn. There was Sidney with a bunch of lavender and a penknife. Gracie must have seen that he had clearly used the knife to cut the lavender, but I felt more uneasy. He held the greying lavender out to me, his tiny head on one shoulder: ‘S’for you, that is,’ he said. ‘S’for you, that.’
‘Thank you,’ said Gracie, on my behalf.
‘Thank you,’ I was shamed into saying.
On the bus home, I gazed out of the window as the newly harvested fields drifted by. I thought of the hares and field mice cornered by the stubble and forced to flee. The brambles swept past, covered in blackberries, many already dried into little brown scabs. Luscious clusters of elderberries appeared and dark sloes hung against yellowing blackthorn leaves. Orange woody nightshade made festive chains along the hedgerows, and there was a ripeness to everything.
‘Don’t judge her too harshly, my love. Extreme poverty can make monsters of the best of us.’
I closed my eyes as if it could shut out what Gracie had said. When I opened them I was looking at my own kid-leather gloved hands and my shiny buckled handbag.
‘Well, nothing – nothing – would make me do that to my own children … There’s no excuse for her cruelty. None.’
Although they seemed to have been generated by a warmth for my own children, the moment the words left my mouth they sounded bitterly cold and judgemental, and I felt cheated of my own right to utter them.
I looked down and saw that my hand was on my belly, and Gracie had placed her hand on mine.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘you’ll have plenty of room up at the house.’ I looked at her and smiled, not quite sure what she was saying. ‘I could look after him if you wanted.’
‘I’m not expecting!’ I laughed.
She looked across me out of my window, and then at my face. ‘I don’t mean a child.’
‘Who do you mean, then?’
‘I was just thinking …’
‘Who?’
‘Well, if you wanted him to come with us rather than in some dreadful home, we could take Sidney in … couldn’t we?’
‘Sidney?’ I scowled out of the window. ‘Why on earth would I want to look after Sidney? They’ve never done anything for me, have they? Where were any of that lot when I needed them?’
‘I only thought—’
‘Well, don’t think.’ I could barely believe what Gracie had just suggested. ‘Sidney?’ I drew myself up stiffly on the seat. ‘I’ve got my own family now. I don’t want anything to do with that family.’
Grade examined her gloved hand on the back of the seat in front and said thoughtfully, ‘I wasn’t thinking of them, I was thinking of you.’
I didn’t answer, because I didn’t want to discuss it any further, and she didn’t pursue it. But over the next year I often wondered what she had meant by that: thinking of me.
54
It was a miracle to be a parent, and I was constantly taking my bearings. It was only then, as I watched my son turn four, that I could see the true horror of what my mother had done. Of course I had felt it – all my life I had felt it. But even when I made the decision not to acknowledge her – even at her funeral – a small part of me had been willing to accept that there may have been circumstances I hadn’t understood. I had even felt guilty for my part in our estrangement. But now …
There was nothing, not poverty, not illness, not criticism, not wars or deluges, nothing could make me give up a child of four years old; and to condemn him to an institution, a madhouse … Everything was different now that I had children of my own: now I knew the full extent of her crime.
Despite its grandeur, Buckleigh House was a cold and draughty place outside the radar of the kitchen. I warmed the pyjamas by the range and wrapped the children in my arms under the stone-cold sheets of the beds. On winter nights I would join Jill in my double bed, enveloping her warm little figure. She was wrapped up to the neck in soft flannelette and as oblivious to the cold as a hibernating animal. At my back the freezing air would melt away, and I would wake cocooned in a warmth so perfect it seemed impossibly adjusted by some angelic thermostat. Then the noise which had woken me would fling itself into the room and into the bed beside me. I would snuggle down, a child in each arm, like a great lucky sheep who’d been allowed to keep her lambs way past June. Then we would tell dozy stories to each other under the covers until we heard Mrs Bubb’s alarm clock upstairs. Moments of joy woven into the long hard winters of the war.
It isn’t true that absence makes the heart grow fonder. That was not my experience, at any rate. Absence just seemed to make the heart forget. As the months rolled on into years, James became a series of postcards, a focus for romantic thoughts, a bright but blurred vision of the future. He became so remote that I had to look at his photograph to find him again, and even then I didn’t always succeed. Sometimes it was hard to remember if I’d ever really known him at all. Half-forgotten nights under the stars, a few passionate kisses in the woods and at The Mill: did this constitute knowing a man? At times like this I felt fragile and guilty. It wasn’t that I didn’t long for James. I did. I just wasn’t certain any more if he was real.
I tried to explain everything that had happened in my letters to James. I told him how I had met my own mother face to face. I explained how I didn’t know what truth to tell, or what to hold back. I didn’t know how much others would get hurt, how much I would hurt. We wrote to each other two or three times a week. It had become almost like writing a diary. For sometimes a week would pass before I received a letter from him, and at other times three would arrive together. And when we read each other’s letters, they were in response to some letter written long before.
Nonetheless I looked forward to the letters, and came in from the animals each morning in the hope of finding one waiting on the door mat, or in the toast rack where Mrs Bubb put them if she came across them first.
One wet morning in September there was one for me in a different hand. I eyed it for several minutes before I found the courage to open it. I waited until I was alone, and went into the living room.
Dear Joy (Daisy!)
I hope you don’t mind me writing. Naturally, I have been thinking of you a lot while I’m here. Not much goes on, and yet my world has turned upside down of late. I’m talking about discovering you again, of course. But I’m afraid there is more news, and not so good since then. Eddie died in Italy last week. I only just heard and thought you ought to know.
&nb
sp; I wonder could you do me a great favour? Sidney has had to go into a home for the time being since Mum died, and I know he’s very lonely. The nurses tell me he’s also getting quite ill with the upset of it all. Do you think you could visit him? Eddie said he took quite a shine to you at the funeral. It would mean so much to me. You wouldn’t have to tell him who you were or anything. Our neighbour, Mrs Farrell, has all the details. I know it’s a lot to ask, but just in case you have time.
I want you to know that I love you – very much. There’s not been a day gone by I haven’t wondered about you. I hope you can find the happiness you deserve with Buckleigh. I’m sure you will.
Your very loving brother,
Philip
I dropped it into the fire and watched the flames curl round it, watched the paper take up the swiftly spreading scorch mark like blotting paper. And I did feel, as the little explosion of heat from it burned my cheeks, that I had blotted something out for good.
Some two weeks later another letter arrived in the same hand. I put it into the fire without opening it.
Eight, maybe nine days later, something odd happened.
It was mid-October, and the evacuees were practising for a harvest concert or play. We were all in the living room watching them when the telephone rang. Howard got up to answer it and the children plodded their way through ‘We plough the fields and scatter’ which, lovely though it was, seemed to go on for ever in their hands. They decided to use the tall velvet curtains as stage curtains – regardless of the few inches of stage it allowed them – and before long they were improvising an early nativity which went on so long it involved Jesus celebrating his first birthday and sheep singing ‘The Farmer’s in his Den’.
Howard had been gone some time, so I went to see if all was well. Closing the living-room door quietly behind me I heard him speaking with his back to me. Usually, Howard considered his own voice needed to travel the distance covered by the telephone line and barked insanely into the receiver, but even he had lowered his voice now: ‘Just don’t tell Joy. Whatever you do, don’t tell her. She mustn’t know. You must absolutely promise me.’
I froze for a moment behind one of the giant potted plants, but the conversation seemed to pass on to other things. I closed the door again behind me, more loudly, and made my way to the kitchen, smiling at him as I passed.
Not long after Apple Day I heard that Philip had been killed in a direct attack on his site office. My brother died, that’s what I should say. All I could think was that it wasn’t James. I was very sorry, of course, but there were people dying all around and there wasn’t time to be ground down by it all. Nonetheless I was shocked at my lack of grief. I even affected dark looks in front of Gracie and Howard but I felt a fraud. If I’m honest the greatest grief I felt was that with him died a lot of unanswered questions. There. My selfish homage to my own brother. What sort of person had I become?
55
The following morning the evacuees came running into the kitchen shouting.
‘There’s someone in the orchard nicking apples! We seen him!’ panted Donald. ‘I shouted at him and told him to dear off!’
‘No you didn’t!’ said his sister, looking at him incredulously. ‘You ran away.’
‘Well … I sort of …’
I was already heading for the orchard, running as fast as I could, potato peeler still in hand. The orchard was still swollen with leaves, every stubby tree puffed out in green and heavy with fruit. It made visibility difficult, but as I dodged between the low branches I heard a rustling up ahead at the far end near the fence.
‘Wait!’ I shouted. Tripping and skidding on windfalls, I soon spotted a small boy scrambling to his feet. ‘Wait a moment! Please!’
He turned tail and belted off towards the gate, and I made ground as he stumbled over it. I could almost have reached out my arm and touched him as I said, ‘Take whatever you need! It’s all right.’
At this the boy stopped and turned for a moment. His pullover was comically bulging in all directions with a dozen or so apples and he held it in at the waist with both hands. His hair was scruffy, his knees grubby and scabbed, and his face no better, but for the briefest of moments his eyes looked so directly into mine that I froze like a hare. What did he see? He seemed to be assessing me, a mixture of wariness, curiosity and control. They were Nipper’s eyes. It was difficult to know which one of us was the more astonished.
‘Okay?’ I said, when I got my breath back. ‘Whatever you need.’
It was the briefest of nods, and he was off, tearing over the field like a deer – like his father before him. I watched him, but couldn’t see where he disappeared. They were back then, the gypsies, and still going strong. I allowed myself the faintest smile as I retraced my steps, but then had to deal with Mr Rollins and the children approaching with rakes and pitchforks.
Unaware of the weight of my own sense of guilt, I threw myself into the war effort and the household with even more gusto than before. That autumn I collected sackfuls of rose hips with the children (the Ministry of Health were offering two shillings for every fourteen pounds), stinging nettles and comfrey leaves.
Despite the damp and the cold and the dreariness, I used to love the surprises in my pockets. A bright red leaf maybe (placed there with the unreasonable expectation that it would remain flat), stones chosen for their smoothness or colour or some other special quality known only to my children, old conkers, teasels, whole dandelion heads, twigs in shapes which – for a few brief seconds – had seemed exceptional, all these spoils I would turn out at the end of the day. And although they were limp or torn or crushed or dried up and entirely forgotten by their hitherto earnest collectors, something of the first childish pleasure on finding them remained in them, and I held them in my palms like tangible moments of joy.
Gracie had already found a new lease of life bottling fruit and making jam. She had become so keen in the WVS that she could now turn out perfect pies for England. Between us, we made every kind of jam and chutney possible with English fruits, and we held enormous jam-making sessions at the house with over twenty women sitting around the great kitchen table.
Howard had never seen anything like it. He was astonished and delighted at the new uses his home was being put to, and at the unexpected visitors that appeared busily working around every corner. But although necessity changed all our habits, he was bewildered, as the weather turned bitterly cold, when I took all the children out collecting cowpats for fuel.
I had grown very fond of Howard but, to be honest, every time I saw him I had to fight off a little frustration. I couldn’t understand why, after such a mutual explosion of attraction between himself and Gracie, he had managed to stay so aloof for so long. Although she never showed it, I knew it must hurt her deeply. I remembered the way she had patted her hair in front of the mirror that day we first came up to Buckleigh House together. What was he playing at? Was he so attached to tradition that he couldn’t divorce his loathsome wife and marry Gracie? Could he not allow himself a little flirtation? A kiss? A wink? He was civil enough to her; they were relaxed in each other’s company and smiled a lot. But I wondered how she could bear it.
That winter we had very little coal, and on Gracie’s suggestion I went down to her old house with the boys, Johnny and Donald, armed with a sack. There was only an inch or two of coal left in the coal-shed. It looked more but I saw that the few coals had been propped up by something else, making it look deeper than it was. After a bit of scrabbling around Johnny fished out a filthy bag and opened it. ‘Phwoar – some smelly old rags.’ And I saw once again the cream silk dress and the green velvet one, along with the two others Celia had added.
They were mildewed of course. Gracie laughed when I told her the story behind them, but insisted we should wash them. I wanted to throw them out, to get rid of all traces of Celia, and a time when I had betrayed my friends. They were all beyond repair, but the silk one had a few patches of good material in it which I offere
d to Gracie for her embroidery. I think Gracie could see how much poison I saw in those dresses with their grey rashes of mildew. She knew instinctively how to stop them hurting me.
‘You should make something out of it,’ she said.
So I did. I made a pair of silk cami-knickers for Mo and sent them to her billet. Gracie always had good ideas.
But that wasn’t the end of it. She unpicked a thread of gold – one I hadn’t seen – running through the mildewed border of a dress, and she embroidered a cushion with it. The cushion was stuffed with the shredded silk and embellished with rosebuds: the emerald buttons salvaged from the velvet dress. Then she had found a fine thread of crimson from the tartan pattern of another mouldy dress and used it to embroider the tips of emerging rose petals.
‘You have to look carefully for the good bits,’ she said. Anyone else would have thrown them all away.
As the evenings grew lighter, there was talk everywhere of the war ending soon. On clear nights I took Andrew and Jill with me to the paddock and lay with them snuggled together under blankets. The stars were never out, and we would find pictures in clouds: ducks, sheep, Mr Rollins, dragons, swans, a sad lady, an eagle, a big boot. Once Andrew saw a woman holding a child’s hand. It took a while for me to see it too, but it was observant of him, and I was proud. Then we watched as the breeze made the child’s arm longer and longer, and Andrew chuckled until they both melted into other shapes, and the impossibly long arm disintegrated at last into thin air.
Mrs Bubb and Gracie said they would catch a death of cold, but I wanted my children to know the earth I knew, and I wanted them with me. I wanted them with me until the blackbird sang his last fluted note and we were enveloped in the loamy smell of dew.
56
In the following spring, the May of 1945, most people were preoccupied with the end of the war. But our household had a different drama to deal with, one which would make me reassess everything we’d been fighting for.