It was an awkward climb in or out of the complaining sash window and the floor of the balcony didn’t feel that solid. If I jumped up and down on it I thought it would collapse, but I wasn’t game to try. Roll up! Roll up, birds and squirrels of the woods! Watch Rebecca jump through the floor! Watch her legs dangle through the living room ceiling! None of the other bedrooms had a balcony.
If you carried on past my room you’d find yourself in Emily’s room with its pink candlewick bedspread and posters of David Cassidy and The Partridge Family on the walls. Opposite Emily’s room was my parents’ domain. As far as I could see they had the worst room, overlooking the garage roof and the front entrance to the driveway. If they were lucky, and sometimes they were, a couple of large spiky-headed thistles grew into view.
A tall thin man stood beside those thistles on the vicarage driveway but none of us saw him. Not then, not for a while. I took no notice of his black pointed boots because I did not see them then. His atoms, molecules and cells were dancing through the country air, rearranging themselves in readiness for the cold mist rising from the ground. As we moaned and grumbled our way around the awful newness, he wandered through the house and listened. He was delighted to be back here, of course, he was, despite the circumstances being entirely different. He told me later he sat for hours at the window, waiting for the right moment to introduce himself to me.
I would soon learn that Brightley dwellers, living or dead, had their own way of doing things. Some liked to be found, some didn’t. Signs to the village were easy to miss so you had to be vigilant. They knew the narrow obstructions of village life high in the Chilterns in south-east England. They knew the ways in and they knew the ways out. If you wanted out, which I desperately did, and depending on the speed you drove your car, Brightley was roughly one and a half hours from London. Little Hartley Station was the nearest escape route, three miles down the long winding lane. Fifty-five minutes on the northbound train and you’d be stepping out at Marylebone Station with the London wind blowing in your face.
A Pub and a House and a House and a Pub
The news Maggie had been waiting for arrived on Friday morning. By Saturday we were in the pub. She came down to breakfast at the unrespectable hour of ten o’clock in the morning and found a typed official-looking letter waiting for her on the kitchen table.
Miss Margaret Elizabeth Budde, Brightley Vicarage, Brightley, Buckinghamshire.
‘Well?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Actually, Maggie, while you live under our roof it is very much our business. You know that.’
‘Open it then,’ I hissed at her.
My parents had concerned looks on their faces, their daughter’s future prospects marked out in a few lines in a letter from the Examinations Board.
Maggie sat down, read the letter, and folded it in half. ‘I’ve got three bloody As! I’m in!’ Both parents hugged her and she hugged them and she hugged me. She’d said she didn’t care about results. Maggie said nothing would stop her doing whatever she wanted to do when she wanted to do it. Certainly not exams. What were they, after all, other than words on paper?
Maggie wanted to be a lawyer. Or a politician. Or a fencing instructor. She was never getting married. Unless he was perfect.
‘You’ll have a long wait then,’ said Mum.
Maggie’s ambitions changed on a daily basis, but now she was in. ‘Abes, when I graduate with honours I will be an alumnus like Father. Why don’t you do history and politics? You can do things with them. Get your head out of your silly novels all the time. Look at the world, Abes, there’s a lot going on.’
‘Dad studied theology at King’s College London, not the University of London, there is a difference.’
‘A minor bloody difference, Abraham Know-Everything Budde. Promise you’ll come for a drink tomorrow, Mum? Come on. It’s not every day I get amazing A-level results.’
Not wasting any time, by the second week of September, Margaret Elizabeth Budde had started working the lunchtime shift on Saturdays at the Dog and Bonnet, the only pub in the village. Now she was eighteen she could work from twelve to two and everyone could admire her behind the bar. She had never pulled a pint before in her life. Brian and Amanda Armitage, who owned and ran the pub, were lovely. And it was quite easy once you’d pulled your first pint and got the hang of all the different glasses and when oh when were we coming to meet them?
‘Well tomorrow’s a good a time as any,’ said Mum, who drank a glass or two of sherry at Christmas and maybe champagne in the summer if she was offered any.
‘What’s up with you, Abes? You look like you’ve sucked a slice of lemon. Aren’t you happy for me?’
‘Of course I am.’ I managed a small smile. Everything was changing all at once.
‘I’ll come home at weekends, won’t I? Someone’s got to keep an eye on you.’
‘That’s settled then,’ said my father, rapidly warming up to the idea. ‘We can all go and introduce ourselves.’ Mum stared at her husband, then at me. ‘We’ll eat there and at least lunch will be sorted.’
Pubs. England was full of them. Red and White Lions, Coach and Horses, Dukes, Foxes, Dogs, Pheasants, Standards and Earls, but as everyone liked to tell us, there was only one Dog. The sign swung over the entrance with a painting of a white terrier wearing an Old Mother Hubbard-type hat which looked like a large floppy hanky on its head. The Dog looked both sad and comical, which probably reflected the state of most of the people in there, said my father, once they’d spent an hour or two with their elbows wearing a groove in the bar.
The Dog was built, more or less, at the same time as our house. It stood on one corner of the village green, which had a low white chain around its perimeter held up by knee-high white fence posts that did nothing to keep anything off the grass; decorative was the word my father used. Opposite the pub on the other side of the green stood a large stone cross, the village war memorial. As with so many war memorials up and down the country, to both world wars, there were always too many names.
Two hundred yards around the corner from the pub there was my father’s church, St John’s. A great brick slab of monosyllabic Victorian England. Saint John. St John Rivers—pretty weird name, eh Jane? You remember him? He wanted to marry you! Surely you cannot have forgotten him, Jane? Jane? Jane Eyre wasn’t talking much to me these days. Perhaps she’d tell me Brightley was a good place to find a forgotten life. She’d warn me that only the half-dead lived here and I wasn’t going to be one of them.
Down the lane we trudged and in through the front doors of the Dog, inhaling the yeasty smells of beer, the intoxicating scent of wine and the smoke of a thousand cigarettes. A solid brown-haired woman came out of the door marked Kitchen, a plate in each hand laden with pies and quiches and salad, and headed straight for us.
‘Hello there, so glad you could come—I know how busy you must be. I’ll be with you in a tick.’ She sailed past us, smiling in a busy, happy way.
We sat in the saloon bar. Emily squirmed around and ran her fingers up and down the plush red velvet seats.
‘Can’t you just sit still?’ I said.
‘Can’t you?’ she said.
‘I am sitting still.’
There was a large empty fireplace under a brick chimney in the middle of the room and a smell of ash and burnt wood lingered in the air.
‘It’s nice here, isn’t it? I like it here, Mum. Mum, can I have some cheese and onion crisps, please? And lemonade. Hey, there’s Maggie, Mum—look at that huge glass of beer she’s holding!’
Brian Armitage, publican, was the only man we had met in Brightley so far. He was at least an inch taller than my father and was standing next to Maggie behind the bar, smiling at everyone and serving the locals. Most of the locals were in the public bar, directly opposite us on the other side of the pub. The public bar was stuffed full of men, it was much smaller than the saloon bar, and there was none of the plush velvet. I had never seen such a sm
all room packed with so many men sitting on wooden chairs or stools around small wooden tables.
Brian was going bald but didn’t seem to mind. He had a thick moustache firmly over his upper lip. Maybe that’s where all his hair had migrated to. He wore an open-necked shirt with rolled up sleeves and dark cord trousers with a belt. He looked ready for whatever came his way. Dad and Brian shook hands and Brian arranged the drinks on a tray. Red wine for Mother, a pint for Father. A pint, look, Rebecca, look at what Dad’s drinking. Emily was still wriggling around.
‘Shut up, Squirt, it’s not that funny.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Welcome to Brightley, everyone.’ Amanda Armitage returned and sat for a few minutes chatting with us at the table. She had large brown eyes, the biggest calves I had ever seen and a smart no-nonsense head on a fast, efficient body. She could talk and tidy up the table and direct Brian and employ Maggie for a wedding and ask me if I wanted a job as well all in the first five minutes. She wore a black t-shirt and a flowery skirt and a pair of training shoes that looked as if she played tennis all the time.
‘They’re not pretty, are they? But they’re the best things when you’re on your feet all day.’
Mum agreed and they started talking about work and comfortable shoes and Dad drifted off to chat to Brian and his short quick-handed bartender, Ted, who nodded and smiled and was showing Maggie the ropes behind the bar. He was soon joined by a group of well-wishers, mostly the men from the public bar who had drifted around to the other side of the pub to say hello, hands in their pockets, and drink beer with the new vicar.
Emily burped loudly and blushed.
‘Say excuse me, Emily, please.’ Mum was already red in the face. ‘Wine is a vasodilator,’ she whispered in my ear.
Dad had bought me half a pint of shandy, which was probably illegal but no one cared. ‘Cheers!’ he said. ‘To Brightley!’
Drinks kept appearing on our table until there wasn’t room for any more glasses. I watched my bright clever sister behind the bar, finding her way among the bottles and glasses. What was I going to do without Maggie to tell it to me straight and stop me from dreaming?
Emily danced around us on the way home, singing, ‘Everyone’s bright in Brightley.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her to shut up again.
I accepted red formica kitchen benches, bullocks in the back garden, chrysanthemums, clumps of earth on the bottom of my shoes, early-morning fog and condensation on my bedroom window. I rejected Brightley, my father’s church, winding roads, dogs, ditches and impenetrable darkness. Of course it grew dark in Wye, but there were streetlights at regular intervals down the street. There was traffic on the roads at all hours. We had next-door neighbours two feet away from us. There were lights and telephones and televisions and well-lit homes with people in them. Brightley had no streetlights. Roll up! Roll up! See Nothing! Go Nowhere!
Here the darkness rose from the ground and swallowed you by teatime. There was an extra layer of darkness pulled down over the sky just for Brightley. There. Not quite dark enough for you? Have this. A piece of blackout material left over from the Second World War? Will that do for you? Yes, thank you. Hold on to it at the corner here before Hartley and there, right at the crossroads leaving Brightley, pull it right down, good. Now that’s what a proper night in the country looks like. Pitch-flaming-black.
I took to waking in the middle of the night, my heart pounding with fright from a dream. It was always the same dream. Someone was kneeling at the side of my bed close to my face, watching me. That was when I woke up. I could almost see a face but not quite. They were there and they were not there.
‘Rebecca, you’re reacting to being somewhere new. We all are, in our different ways. They’ll go in a while, you’ll see,’ said Mum.
Who are you? What are you trying to tell me?
That night there was a tap-tap-tapping on my bedroom window. Half asleep I headed into my dream. It was Dave. Dave! He was carrying me in his lanky arms back to Wye. Past Sue, waving to me with her tennis racquet. We were running and running back down the road to Wye, past the church and past my grandmother standing on the corner, her arms full of rose petals which she threw over us like confetti.
Litter Rat Ture
Mr Jeremy Treadwell sat opposite me behind his paper-strewn desk in his Head of Department office at Hartley College of Further Education. Smooth dark hair slicked back over his head, kind eyes stuck behind a pair of large tortoiseshell glasses, white shirt, swirly-patterned tie which he kept fiddling with as he spoke.
‘Anything else you would like to ask, Rebecca?’ Mr Treadwell was trying to regain my attention. I was finding the carpet quite interesting.
‘So I definitely can’t do Latin here?’
‘’Fraid not. It’s a dead language, that’s not what we offer. If you want a career in the civil service or academia, well, okay, maybe, but seeing as you’re here, it’s either sociology or history with English for both years. And from what Mrs Chevalier has said about you . . .’
I was looking forward to your progress next year, Rebecca. Your end-of-year results are outstanding, apart from maths. It’s a shame we’re losing you.
He waved a letter about so I could see he had something tangible from my old life. ‘You’d be a very welcome addition to the litter rat ture class.’ He spread out the syllables each time he said the word ‘literature’. Perhaps he was trying to make the whole thing more interesting for me?
I turned my attention from the carpet to the window. I was sitting in a stuffy modern room, overlooking more buildings. Jane, where are you? But Jane was running through the mist.
‘Sociology?’
‘I’ll give you the short version. Society. Are we in or are we out? Do we belong? Or do we live in splendid isolation? If I may borrow that phrase. Are we held by the chains of conformity or are we biding our time waiting for an outbreak of individuality?’
‘But aren’t we all individuals? I mean, who tells us how to behave?’
‘Exactly! A born sociologist! The question we are asking is what makes us do the things we do?’ He raised his eyebrows at me.
‘You mean whether you like David Bowie or Led Zeppelin? Whether you vote for Labour or the Conservatives?’
‘Yes, sort of, but how do we get there? How do we make these choices? Have they already been made for us in some way?’
‘Well, isn’t that what literature’s for?’
‘Yes, but what kind of litter rat ture are you talking about now, Rebecca? Poetry? Novels? Plays? Why do we read what we read? Who reads what? And litter rat ture is also fun, for entertainment, don’t you think?’
I nodded. I wasn’t sure what to think.
He continued, ‘Sociology is a social science, not an exact art, so the content can seem a little general. You might look at, for example, how the place you live in affects you.’
‘Isolation and misery, that kind of thing?’
‘Yes, and then there’s social class—how do we fit in to all of that?’
‘Snobs and toffs and all the rest of us?’
‘Yes—how does class affect the individual caught in those slippery coils? Interested? You only need take one unit for this year. It’s not a hard course. Lots of students enjoy it.’
At my old school we’d studied French and Latin, biology, chemistry, maths and English language and English literature. Nothing vague or general you could study every time you walked down the street.
‘Sociology it is then, Rebecca. See you next week.’ Mr Treadwell was shaking hands with me and saying goodbye, nice to meet you.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. I had no intention of coming to Hartley College. I nodded and smiled politely and listened to the murmur of my parents as we drove back to Brightley.
I hatched my plan in the twenty-five minutes it took us to travel from some kind of civilisation back to nothing. My plan was exceedingly simple. Dave. Dave. Dave. He would save me.
The September
Rescue Plan
A beautiful white line of early-morning mist floated around the perimeter of our garden. It was like a thought from a dream stretching out into the world. There was such a still beauty to the day. It was early and everyone else was still asleep. I crept quietly from the house. A huge cobweb glistened on the woodshed door. In my heart I should have been leaving the house to begin the journey to school, bicycle tyres pumped, satchel strapped on the rack, but I was not there. My new life in the lower sixth was not beginning.
All I could hear was the crunch of my boots over the gravel driveway. Today was the Rescue Plan, the Dave Scenario. My plan involved a journey to Wye, knocking on the door of 23 Milton Close and the opening of that door by Dave. As far as plans go, I thought it was pretty good.
Nutrition: A Marmite sandwich, packet of plain crisps, one apple.
Transport: Bus, train, legs.
Drink: From the Lake of Welcome I would receive at Wye.
Departure time: 7.27 am, Brightley Vicarage verge.
As usual I was early because I could not miss this bus. I pulled up my collar and shivered a bit in the mist, which seemed to be following me out of the gate. Instead of leaving with the day the mist was rising. I was on the grass verge, waiting for the bus, looking around and listening to my own breathing, when I thought I saw a long thin hand appear through the mist. I rubbed my sleepy eyes. Was that a voice calling me? Miss Budde! Miss Budde! Was that voice also saying, Please do not be afraid, I will not harm you?
Do murderers say that sort of thing? Perhaps Flora Shillingham was stumbling through the mist and any minute now she’d present me with a basket of flowers.
Please, Miss Budde. Hello.
I stifled the urge to scream.
Go back inside the house, Budde, go now.
I wasn’t going to miss the bus, was I? I stayed exactly where I was, didn’t move an inch, and turned to face the voice speaking through the mist.
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