Fireweed

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘It’s too much for me, do you hear? You are too much for me! You argue, and cheek me, and won’t do what you’re told, and eat more than I can buy on your ration book, and I can’t keep track of you at all. You go out, and I never know where you are, and you don’t care at all! What would it be like having you to worry about when the bombing starts? It’s little enough you care about it. You just want to have a good time, as if it was nothing to you, as if there wasn’t a war on! Well, you can just get out of it, and someone else can worry about you. I might be able to keep out of the line of a bomb, if I’ve only myself to take care of!’ By the time she’d finished all this, she was crying, sniffing into her handkerchief.

  I’d never really liked her. Looking back now, I can see that a great growing boy must have been a trial to a spinster with a small house, and not as much money as she had been used to, and getting on now, going grey, getting slower around the house. I didn’t think of that then. I turned on her, furious.

  ‘Before you send me anywhere,’ I said, shouted rather, ‘you ought to write to my father, and ask him!’

  ‘I have written,’ she said. ‘I’ve told him that you’ve gone. Posted it this morning.’

  The ground was slipping from under my feet. ‘You old bitch!’ I yelled at her.

  ‘I was right,’ she said. ‘You are unmanageable. It’s a good thing you’re going. For your own sake. And you are not, ever, to talk to me like that again.’

  ‘If I can’t talk to you how I like, I’m not going to talk to you at all!’ I said.

  ‘Please yourself,’ she snapped.

  So that’s how it was. We spent the next two days in utter silence, not saying anything to each other, even at mealtimes. She never read anything, but she could stare at the salt cellar all through a meal, till it nearly gave her a squint. It was a china salt cellar, with a few mauve flowers painted on it, now half rubbed off with age. I read, or pretended to read, Kidnapped. But though it was open in front of me, beside my plate, I had a head full of rage and scarcely read a word. John and Peter had only just been allowed to come home from their evacuee billets, and now I was being sent off; I’d have no friends left at all.

  I felt angry the whole two days, and it never occurred to me how badly I was hurting myself, quarrelling with her just then. Still, that’s how it was, and in the end I left without making it up with her, although she did give me a cold quick peck on the cheek on the platform at Paddington. And of course she was right that the war didn’t mean anything to me, that I took no notice of it at all. I left her without even asking for my Dad’s address; she didn’t know where I was going, of course, and she left me without any money at all, not even a penny for a stamp to write home with.

  The whole station was crammed with kids. Some were in proper groups with teachers looking after them, some were odd bods like me. We all had little bags with a change of clothes, and luggage labels pinned on our chests, with name and address written on them in capitals. My spare clothes were in a carrier bag, with ‘Harvey’s Drapery’ on it. Some of the kids were very little, and a few of them were howling, enough to make an awful noise, though most of them just looked blank, or frightened. There were a lot of bossy grown-ups thrusting around yelling at people, and a few parents, shut away behind the barriers at the end of the platforms, waving, and jumping up and down trying to see.

  A train came in, and filled up with kids, and pulled slowly away, filling the station with a thin haze of smoke, and looking like some sort of caterpillar, with waving arms for legs. Then another train came in, and took almost everyone, but not me, or a few others who had been hanging back. Then a whole lot of girls trooped onto the platform, all wearing uniforms, and carrying twice as much as the rest of us. They were even humping hockey sticks. Some of them looked very young too. One small dark-haired girl began to grizzle just in front of me, and a great fat woman dressed all in blue hairy tweed, even to her hat, bore down on her, and slapped her back, and said loudly, ‘Chin up, Harriet, mustn’t let the side down!’ Just then the porters started calling to us to board the train, and so I finished up in a carriage full of little girls, with this large tweedy woman facing me in the corner, She took off her coat, and put it on the luggage rack, and sat down and glared at me.

  ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, young man,’ she said. She was wearing one of those nasty brooches made out of a bird’s foot with the claws still on. ‘I think it’s most unsuitable,’ she added.

  ‘Where are we going? Do you know?’ I asked her. She looked as if there wasn’t anything she didn’t know.

  ‘Don’t ask questions!’ she snapped. ‘Don’t you know there might be a Jerry listening, anywhere?’

  ‘Well there isn’t one here, unless it’s you,’ I thought, and sat and hated her while the train jerked its way out of the station.

  We were in that train the whole day. She never said a kind word to any of her kids, but she certainly knew how to look after them. Her enormous bag had books in it, and spare handkerchiefs, and a bag of barley-sugar, and round about lunchtime she went up the corridor, and came back with piles of cheese sandwiches. When they had all finished eating in front of me, with me looking out of the window swallowing, trying not to look as hungry as I felt, she suddenly said, ‘Have you anything to eat, young man?’

  ‘No, Ma’am,’ I said.

  ‘Well, as good luck would have it,’ she said, ‘I have miscounted, and I find we have more sandwiches than we require. Here they are. You may have them.’

  ‘Thanks, I mean thank you,’ I said. She handed them over, unsmiling.

  We passed station after station, but we didn’t know where we were going because all the names were blacked out. At last we got somewhere, and people got out, and stood about on the platform. All the uniformed girls and their teachers collected together, and got shepherded out, and then they didn’t know what to do with the rest of us. They uncoupled one carriage, and ordered us back onto that, and shunted it off into a siding. We waited half an hour, and then another train came in, with children’s staring faces at all the windows, and they put our carriage onto the back of that train, and on we went. By now it was getting dark. It was pitch dark when we finally arrived.

  Wartime dark was quite fearful, because of blackout regulations. They would have extinguished moon and stars, and set wardens over them if they could have. All lesser lights were put out. We all scrambled out of the carriages onto a strange platform, without even a torch to go by. I could hear adult voices somewhere up the platform, though I couldn’t understand them. We stumbled against one another, groping in the thick night. Then the station master came up with a lantern, heavily hooded, and walked up and down.

  ‘How many are there, then?’ called someone.

  ‘Over a hundred, easy,’ he answered. They had warm, sing-song voices. We were in Wales.

  ‘Bring them through here,’ the voice called. ‘Let us count them over.’

  Counted, we filed out of the station. It was not quite so dark under the open sky. There were people standing there, who seemed to have come to meet us. A man with a handful of papers in his hand was talking.

  ‘More of them, see. I have got names of all those who offered to take them, and there are not enough places, not nearly. And late it is, already. Now everyone take some children, and go and find them billets. Not all the same way. We shall have to knock on all the doors till we find billets for all of them …’

  There were a few minutes of great confusion, and then we were trudging uphill, stumbling, two by two, hand in hand. My hand was clutched by a tiny clammy paw belonging to a small boy, or perhaps a small girl, I couldn’t see in the dark. Whoever it was was tired, pulled at me, hanging back, and whimpered a bit when it stumbled.

  Every few steps we stopped, and the man with us knocked on a door. He spoke in Welsh, urgently. They looked out at us, peering into the darkness from their doorways, looking us over. We couldn’t understand a word, yet it was easy to tell whether
they were saying yes or no. Several times the man pushed me forwards, and the woman shook her head, and said something, and took a small child, much younger. I was nearly full grown by then, head and shoulders taller than the others in the group. At last I was the only one left, and he scratched his head a bit, and then took me up a rough track, still uphill, on and on, and then when I thought I couldn’t walk a step further, he brought me through a yard of some kind, and knocked on a door. The woman who came said no, like all the others when she saw me, but he talked and talked, and then a man came to the door too, and joined in. Then suddenly the man who had brought me from the station left, and trudged away down the hillside, and they let me in through their door.

  It was a big farm kitchen I walked into. A great log fire was burning in the chimney corner, and there was bread and cheese, and a cold roast chicken on the table. I was so hungry the sight of food made me feel tight in the stomach. They looked at me, and the man said something in Welsh.

  ‘How old is it you are?’ she asked me, in English.

  ‘Fifteen,’ I said.

  ‘You look more. I thought you were a grown man when you stood out in the dark there,’ she said. ‘Will you want your bed right away?’

  ‘Can I have something to eat first?’ I asked.

  ‘Right away, boy. Sit down then,’ she said. She put food in front of me, four sorts of bread, and great hunks of cheese, and butter with beads of saltwater shining in it, and the rest of the chicken. She sat down by the hearth, and folded her hands in her lap, and the two of them talked together in Welsh. I listened to all that musical mumbo-jumbo and ate and ate, and as soon as I stopped feeling hungry my head drooped forwards onto my hands, and I fell asleep at the table where I sat.

  2

  I suppose I stuck it there for about five weeks. They weren’t unkind; but Mr Williams, the farmer, spoke no English, only Welsh, and his two shepherds, David and Evans, were the same, save for a word or two. Mrs Williams, and their son, Hugh, could speak some English, enough to tell me simple things, like where to put my clothes to dry when I came in soaking, and when to come to table, and not to go by myself on the mountain; now and then they even talked to each other in a funny sort of English, just to help me not to feel left out of it. It didn’t make me feel that! Anyway they couldn’t manage it for long.

  The farm was a mile above the village, on a narrow track all its own. The village wasn’t like an English village at all; it had no church, but two chapels, one made of red brick, the other of green-painted corrugated iron, a bit rusty at the corners. There weren’t any cottages, only rows of terraced houses like bits of a town thrown down in the valley, and ugly bits of a town at that: grey, and vicious red brick under slate tiles that seemed shiny with rain all the time. A railway ran up to the head of the valley, but it only served the slate quarry, where everyone worked who didn’t work on a farm. For the rest there was mountain, great humps of bare green; smeared with blotches of purple where heather grew, blotting out the sides of the sky in every direction. And the colours and shapes of the land were always blurry, washed out by a haze of incessant fine rain. I suppose it can’t have rained without stopping for five weeks, but that’s how I remember it. I spent a lot of time lying on my bed, reading the only thing I could find – old Woman’s Weeklies, with sloppy stories in them, which Mrs Williams kept stacked up under the stairs. They didn’t seem to take a newspaper, and if they talked about the war, well, of course, I couldn’t understand what they said.

  Once the billeting officer came to see if I was giving any trouble, and they said no, thank you, they could manage me nicely. I plucked up courage to ask him if there was a school I could go to.

  ‘There is the school in the village, boy,’ he said. ‘But nobody still at it, the age you are.’

  ‘I was at a Grammar school,’ I said. ‘I should be at a Grammar school.’

  ‘There is a Grammar school over the mountain, in Bala,’ said Mrs Williams.

  ‘He would have to go on the bus every morning, and come back at night,’ said the billeting officer.

  ‘Who would be paying for that, now?’ asked Mrs Williams, ‘And with books, and uniform too.’

  He lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. ‘How about his family, do you think?’

  ‘It is not like Mrs Jones’s boy, who gets pocket money from home every week, as I hear. There has not been twopence for him yet. And he has no good boots, and no thick socks with him either, and his things only in a paper bag, too. I don’t think it likely.’

  And there they let it rest.

  I swallowed my pride, and wrote a letter to my aunt. I told her about the school over the mountain, and asked her to tell my father. I asked her to let me have my father’s address, and some money for stamps. Mrs Williams said I must wait till market day for a penny-halfpenny from her to post this letter; most days of the week she had no money with her. I daresay that was true, though at the time I thought she was being purposely cruel. Evan took pity on me, and gave it to me out of a box he kept on the chimneypiece, but he made me earn it by sweeping out the yard, and carrying wattle for a sheep-pen up to him on the hillside.

  I took my letter down to the post office at the back of the village shop, and waited for an answer. And none came. Day after day went by, and no letter. I didn’t even see the postman. In the valley bottom, along by the stream, the trees turned pale gold, and thinned so that chinks of sky showed through their branches. Evan and David and Hugh went up on the mountain every day, with the dogs, and brought down the sheep, and put them in the fields below the farm, where they bleated all day. I liked watching the dogs working, running round the sheep. But every day was spoiled at the start on which no letter came. I thought my aunt was still keeping up that silly quarrel we had had, and punishing me for calling her names. I hated her bitterly, worse every day.

  Then one afternoon Mrs Williams hung up her apron behind the kitchen door, and put on a black hat, and a black coat with a fur collar, and went down to the village for a meeting, something to do with the chapel. She was gone all afternoon. I thought she looked at me a bit oddly when she came back. After supper she got a bowl of hot water, and a bar of black soap, and a funny fine comb, and set them one end of the kitchen table. I thought she was going to wash the dog. I took no notice.

  ‘Come here, boy,’ she said to me.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said, looking with suspicion at her broad aproned chest, and rolled-up sleeves.

  ‘Come here, boy. I am just going to look at your head.’

  ‘Look at my head? What the hell do you mean!’

  ‘No need to fly off at me. Mrs Jones, and Mrs Evans both say their evacuees had lice. Now I am just going to clean you up, see?’

  I backed away from her. ‘You’re not going to touch me!’ I said.

  ‘I will not have lice in my house,’ she declared, ‘no matter who it is they are on.’

  ‘There aren’t any lice in your house!’ I said, swaying between outrage and laughter. Watching us from his rocking chair by the fire, Mr Williams grinned broadly. I collected myself, and said in a normal tone, ‘There are no lice in my hair, Mrs Williams, I have never had lice.’

  ‘You just come here, boy, and let me see,’ she said, marching towards me, comb in one hand, soap in the other. I tipped up a chair in front of her, and backed out through the door to the yard.

  Evan and David were out there, with a lantern in the dusk, rolling a three-gallon drum back to the shed. She came to the door, and called out to them to stop me, or I suppose that’s what she was calling, for they ran after me. I jumped over the wall into the field, and ran across the grass. Sheep lumbered away from me, bleating, as I went. Shouting gibberish at me the two shepherds came down the slope behind me.

  At the bottom of the field there was a dip – a sort of narrow concrete pool, with a little stream running alongside it. Last time I had seen it the dip had been empty and dry. When I felt the hard concrete under my feet, I jumped, expecting to land on
the bank of the stream, and be over that too in another stride. But the concrete was wet; I slipped, fell, and plunged into five feet of stinking water. The stink was heavy disinfectant. It reeked. It burnt my nose and mouth. I coughed, sank again, and took another mouthful. There was no grip on the sides of the pool, and the top edge was too high for me to reach. I floundered. Coming up with the lantern David and Evan stood high above my head on dry land, and laughed like maniacs, hanging on to each other for support, and howling with laughter. Somehow I struggled to the end of the pool, and scrambled out.

  I was so angry I thought I was going to murder them. I caught myself looking round for a stone, and feeling the blow in my mind’s eye. When I took a grip on myself I began to shake all over.

  They were very concerned. They hurried me up to the farm house, and stood me beside the fire, while they peeled off my sodden clothes. I was still possessed by fury.

  ‘What in hell was that there for?’ I asked through my teeth.

  ‘It’s for delousing sheep, see,’ said Hugh, roaring with laughter again. But I didn’t think it was funny.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said, clutching the towel I was wrapped in.

  ‘Mrs Jones told me there is a letter for you at the Post Office, and you have not been asking for it,’ said Mrs Williams. I stopped on the bottom step.

  ‘You mean, someone has been keeping my letters?’ I demanded.

  ‘Keeping them back? You are not in London now, boy. The postman cannot come round the whole mountain, just for one or two letters for the farms. Our letters stay at the Post Office till we fetch them.’

  Well, how could I have known that?

  First thing next morning, I was down there, asking for it. Mrs Jones gave me two letters, out of a cubby hole behind the counter. I felt self-conscious, standing there, for I was sure I still smelt like a sheep, though I had stood in the yard for ten minutes pumping cold water over myself, and scrubbing down my flinching and tingling skin. I went out and sat on the stile opposite to read them.