The Girl Now Leaving

by The Girl Now Leaving (retail) (epub)

  Uncle Hec takes messages back and forth between Lampeter Street and Roman’s Fields, a cheery report on Vera’s health for Lu, and a more realistic one for May. ‘I don’t like to say this, but like my Else says, she’s seen other women go the same way. She can’t see Vere making old bones. They let her go home, but she’s not the same woman… but there, Vere hasn’t been the same woman for years, humped up in that chair trying to get her dozens done for the factory. Outwork like that’s the ruin of many a woman, but there, what can they do if they’m married to a man like our Arthur? I know he’s my brother and your Ted’s, but, speak as you find, he never had no responsibility to his family. He shouldn’t never a got married, we’ve said that many a time, he never had to marry her, it was as though he couldn’t a-bear leaving her for some other chap to have. And of course, you know Arthur, he always was a ladies’ man… oh yes, I’ll say. But Vere Presley was a cut above the rest. The Presleys was quite a posh family compared to ours – a course they’re all gone now. Like I said to Else, if our Arthur’s a rotten husband when he’s at sea, he don’t improve ashore.’

  May frets about what Lu will find when she goes home. The best that she can do for Lu is to continue making her as healthy and resilient as is in her power to do. She also determines to give her a small amount of savings in the Post Office for when she returns. She says that Lu must be paid something for working out in the fields, to keep for when she goes home.

  * * *

  Midsummer Day, the day of Lu’s birthday. Some of her experiences of this day would be trapped in her memory like flies in amber.

  Bar was no longer needed to see that Lu made a good breakfast, and since Lu’s recovery was complete, she continued to come in before leaving for school and the two girls would sit and eat together. Although when she came today it was still very early, the kitchen at Roman’s Fields was busy with preparations before starting another day of strawberry picking, Ted pulling on his field boots, Gabriel Strawbridge eating a dish of porridge, May, packing a rush bag with cheese and chunks of bread said, ‘Morning, Bar, you’re early. You look nice… been making up remnants again?’ Bar wore a black sleeveless dress with a gathered skirt, much like the one she had worn for the fair, except that it had rows of brown ricrac sewn around the hem.

  ‘Good Midsummer, Mis Wilmott.’

  ‘Oh… I’d forgot… Good Midsummer to you too, Bar.’

  ‘It’s your birthday, in’t it, Lu? I got you these.’ The sheaf of flower spikes in a jar of water gave off a fragrance that filled the kitchen.

  Ted said, ‘Wild orchids, that’s nice, you must have gone a long way off to find the “butterflies”. I haven’t seen one of that kind around here in years.’

  Lu, having often listened to Bar on the subject of wildflowers, guessed that these were special. ‘Thanks, they’ve got a lovely smell.’

  ‘It’s not the “butterflies” that have the smell, it’s these ones with the little flowers. Their proper name’s “spirantes” but I think “summer tresses” is the best.’

  Ted ruffled Bar’s hair. ‘Proper mine of information, an’t you, Bar?’

  ‘Teacher don’t think so, she says I’ve got a rag-bag of worthless information, and I’d do better to learn to take dictation without so many spelling mistakes.’

  Gabriel Strawbridge said, ‘No information is ever worthless. But you’d do well to learn to spell… last thing I heard, you were going to start writing everything you know about nature, so that when you’re grown up you can write a book. You’d need to be able to spell to do that.’

  ‘I should come and ask you, Mr Gabr’l. I had to go out to Wamford for them, but I lent Pixie.’

  Lu, knowing how possessive Duke was of the little mare now that he owned her, said, ‘Duke let you borrow her?’

  Bar flashed a grin. ‘Yes… he borrowed her to me all evening. He didn’t know though, not till he caught me bringing her in over the field way. Anyway, when I told him I had to go to Warnford to look for “butterflies”, he never said anything, only next time I should ask first. You see, I said he liked you.’

  Lu blushed, not really wanting May and Ted to know about that.

  May said, ‘I’m off out to see to Cowslip. You two help yourselves to what you want. You coming down to the fields later on, Lu? And don’t forget we’ve got to go down to Joycey’s and get that frock your mum said you were to have.’

  ‘Could me and Bar go on our own?’

  May considered. ‘I don’t see why not. After all, you’re the one has to wear it, and we all have to learn at some time to make our own decisions. All right. Why not go down there first thing, then there’s time to take it back today if you change your mind.’

  ‘We was thinking of going over the woods first. Can I take a towel?’

  ‘You best not go in till the sun’s well up, that Swallitt can strike cold. And take your hat.’ May had great faith that Lu’s good hand-me-down Panama hat would prevent any chance of renewed fever by protecting the top of her head from strong sunshine.

  Lu made no promises, but nodded.

  ‘No school then, Bar?’ Gabriel Strawbridge asked.

  ‘I never goes to school on Midsummer.’

  May smiled. As Duke had made his own rules about what was and what was not worth wasting time on in classrooms, so Bar too was getting through her school years, treading the path between rules that applied to village children but did not apply to Romanies. It was not often that the School Board wasted its time trying to make gypsy people abide by the rules laid down for children who were settled and conventional.

  Bar’s shaking of the head about getting something to eat was imperceptible except to Lu, who already knew that they were not to eat yet, or in Bar’s own way with a secret language which Lu loved to hear, ‘No morsel shall touch our lips till the Sunwising be done.’

  How Bar came to be aware of those things she knew but which were not taught in school was a mystery. Perhaps as much a mystery to Bar as to anyone else. At best she might have explained, ‘Things just come by me.’ One might say that rituals, and the ecstatic spinning, were of her own invention, except that she did appear to have some sense that what she did was nothing out of the ordinary, and that there were other people who wouldn’t think her queer for what she did and what she knew. Certainly in the village school there was never a mention of anything spiritual, except what was orthodox Church of England teaching in a C of E school, and anyone knowing the circumstances in which the Barney family lived, would find it hard to believe that this mystic side to her nature had come from anywhere except from the air around her. But then, how had Ann Carter come to read cups and palms? Certainly not from Eli who, as a male gypsy, would not have been taught the art, and she had most certainly not learned it from her own respectable family, who would have no truck with any of it.

  The prospect of Sunwising and learning to dervish both excited and alarmed Lu, much as sitting in church and watching teachers take Holy Communion did. On those occasions she had always been thrilled to watch the way the teachers, kneeling at the altar rail, were transformed. From the back of the big church, where schoolchildren were consigned, she saw them transformed into biblical characters, kneeling before somebody more powerful than themselves, the only time they ever appeared to be humble. The robes and precious objects, the solemn tolling of the bell. Then the language of mystery which could send more than a mere frisson of alarm running from the pit of her stomach to a place between her legs. ‘Take, eat, this is my body.’ Did the bread really become meat? Did the jug of wine contain blood?

  However, the alarm was only in small proportion; it added importance to the occasion. Perhaps there was danger in gaining access to mysteries, but it would be worth it.

  ‘First thing we have to Sunwise the house, which is walk round it east to west.’ This accomplished, they Sunwised a yew tree, and the bee skeps, then set out for the woodlands, at the centre of which was The Swallitt, the site of Bar’s Midsummer observances. ‘We
can’t cut across the fields, because we have to follow the pathway of the sun.’ So they set off along the tarmac road and then made their clockwise approach into the birch woodlands and then on to The Swallitt. By the time they reached the wide pool of clear water, the sun was penetrating the quivering leaves of the birches. ‘Say this: We make a vow to come by the well, and tour all about it thrice times… Now take a mouth of water from the bottle and hold it till you have done your tour all about, then you open your mouth and let your water out into the well.’

  ‘The Swallitt’s not a well.’

  ‘It don’t matter. We can’t do it round the well, Pa forbid me after last year. Don’t swallow the water, give it back to the mother.’

  Bar’s rituals were entrancing, truly so, because as the morning progressed, Lu did become overpowered with delight as she was carried ever further into the world Bar had created, or had somehow discovered. Their first search was for empty snail-shells, which seemed a hopeless task, until Bar showed her how to use her eyes.

  In a clearing on the bank of The Swallitt where the water was shallow, there was a pan of gravel just above the waterline where Bar made Lu lay out the snail-shells in a spiral. ‘Go them sunwise, like the shells theirselves go.’ On the snail-shell base, Bar then built up a small pyramidal cairn of stones.

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘It’s Soil’s clock.’

  Lu didn’t question what Bar meant, or how Bar knew; she accepted that it was so. Much of the time Bar seemed preoccupied, her eyes searching, seeming constantly on the alert. From time to time she counted silently on her fingers as though ticking off from a list of items to remember. Lu squatted and watched. When the cairn was finished, Bar sat back with her arms about her drawn-up knees. ‘That’s the best one I ever made. Did you ever know in Portsm’th that you was a Midsummer child?’

  ‘I never even knew about a Midsummer anything.’

  ‘It’s one of the most important days in the year. I wished I knew what time of day you was born.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of how important it is. If you was born Midsummer Day, then it makes you partic’lar special to it, and I’d like to know where in the sky Soil was when you came out of your mother. Days of the week is named after old spirits and Sunday is named after Soil. I do wish I could find out what time of day you was born.’

  ‘I can easy tell you that. It was when the fact’ry dinner whistles went, my mum said it was like they gave me a twenty-one-gun salute.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s when a ship goes by and somebody important’s aboard. They fire off some guns down the dock, and it’s according to how important they are how many they booms off. Seven’s lowest, and top of all is twenty-one guns. You have to be the king or admiral or somebody to get that.’

  ‘Then what time of day is it when the dinner whistles go?’

  ‘Same time they always do, twelve o’clock for dinner-time and half-past for going back. Does it mean something to be twelve o’clock?’

  Bar smiled. ‘I’ll tell you when we’ve got it all ready.’ The morning grew warmer and the sun more sharply piercing through the birches; their earlier business slowed until they eventually sat beside one another looking into the pool. ‘Are you still scared to jump off the bent willow?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll bet you wouldn’t be if you did it. You can swim all right now, and there’s nothing you can hurt yourself on. Just hold your breath.’

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘You keep on asking is everything important.’

  ‘Well, is it?’

  ‘Of course. Everything today is important. We have to get bound together everlasting.’

  Although Bar had talked about it, Lu was still unsure of what ‘bound together everlasting’ was meant to be. Bar said it was a kind of marrying, only it was better than that because a man and woman being wed, or coupled like her ma and pa, meant that you couldn’t have anyone else, but the sort of binding they would do was that you were true to each other for ever until you died, but you could be true to other people as well, except that the first person you were bound to was more important than the rest.

  Lu said, ‘There was this film at the Tu’penny Rush, and a young cowboy boy and a young Red Indian boy both cut their left thumbs and pressed them together so that their blood mingled and they were brothers.’

  Bar drew her brows. ‘Boys always have to do things like that, showing off… Anyway, they should a cut their wrists. Shall I tell you now why it’s important, and why you got to try to jump in off the bent willow? You know what I said about today being one of the most important days…? Well, the other one is Midwinter Day. D’you know Midwinter?’

  ‘Only the carol.’

  ‘When did I tell you is my birthday?’

  ‘Twenty-first December.’

  ‘Well…?’

  ‘Is that it? A course, it’s exactly six months from today, so it must be Midwinter.’

  ‘Before you came, I asked your aunty when your birthday was, and I knew it was an omen. Then, when I saw you, it was that exciting I near told you right out.’

  ‘You just stared and said you thought I was asleep.’

  ‘I stared because of your colour, your hair. I couldn’t believe it, you was Midsummer and the colour of summer… see? I’m black, the colour of winter. We was both born at a solstice… oh, never mind what it is now… but see? the two of us together makes a whole one, it must have been foretold that we should meet, so I’ve been working out everything for today.’ She threw a stone far out into the pool; it plopped and the rings began to spread out. ‘See the middle of the rings where the stone went in: we have to jump in dead centre. We have to keep facing each other, and hold on to one another so we don’t get parted, and so we go deep enough for our whole selves to be right under the water. That means we shall have to jump off sideways and keep holding on till we have come up again. Then we are bound, winter and summer together.’

  Now that she knew how the ritual was to be done, and the meaning of it, Lu found the whole idea of having their own ceremony so thrilling that her heart seemed to be beating very fast. She imagined the stone making an opening for them to enter the pool, she visualized the frogs and fish and the dabchicks bouncing about as the rings reached their floating nests. Lu, for all that she had been schooled in Old Testament burning bushes and pillars of salt, plus New Testament resurrection and the feeding of the five thousand from one lunch-basket, had never seen much relevance to life in Lampeter Street, nor had she known any kind of spiritual experience. But this was real, it signified something she could understand. ‘It’s wonderful! How did you think it? I shan’t be afraid to jump… I want to. When can we do it?’

  ‘When Soil is overhead.’

  Shielding her eyes, Lu looked up. ‘It is now.’

  ‘Not quite. See? We can’t go until there’s no shadow from the stick on the cairn.’ The tall flower-stalk that topped the cairn of stones by the water’s edge was now very short. ‘We have to let our hair loose and take off our clothes.’ They stood together hunched, their fingers knotted nervously, pale- and dark-skinned, golden- and black-haired; delicate, vulnerable, unformed, embryonic women, shivering a little in the air at the water’s edge, and watching the shrinking of the last inch of the shadow of the stalk. Bar looked up, squinting her eyes. ‘Soil’s looking full down on us. It’s even better now we know this is your true birthing minute.’ She picked the topmost stone from the cairn and took a step out on to the bent willow. ‘Come on then. When we get to the diving part of the branch, face together and catch a hold round each other’s waists and when I say jump, don’t let go of me, don’t close your eyes.’ They stood for a second, then Bar let the stone plop into the water just below the branch; the circles on the surface of the pool began to form around the turbulence. Lu felt Bar’s hard fingers grasp her tightly by the waist so that their chests and bellies touched. She gave Lu a broad smil
e and whispered, ‘Now!’

  Lu didn’t close her eyes, even so she could see nothing but disturbed water as they went in, and then nothing except their own hair swirling around them as they touched bottom and were pulled round by their own impetus. For a second, as her toes clutched at the silt, she saw Bar’s still-smiling face close to her own. Then Bar, clasping her tightly, pushed off from the sludge and gravel. They soared upwards. When they broke surface, Lu drew in a gasp of air. Bar, paddling with one arm, made them twirl, then they released one another and Lu turned and floated on her back. The water was fresh but not cold. Lu looked up at the sky and thought it had never looked as blue as this before, nor the trees as green, nor the air as clear, nor anything as anything as it had been before. Bar, her hair like a crepe cloak, paddled water. They looked at one another and giggled. Bar said, ‘It was good, wasn’t it?’

  Lu grinned. ‘Really good. Did we go down in the right place?’

  ‘Yes. I think I felt my stone, I’ll see if I can find it.’ She flipped over, her bottom, legs and feet broke the surface of the water and disappeared as she dived down, then in seconds reappeared holding the round stone which she lay between her breasts as she sculled gracefully along on her back, her hair now streaming like a silk scarf in a wind, her body scarcely making a ripple.

  Arms stretched wide, Lu lay still, feeling the small movement of the wash made by Bar lapping her body. A few weeks ago she would never have believed it possible that she could ever feel so safe in water; it was as though she had always known how to swim, as she had always known how to walk and run.

  They rubbed down with Lu’s towel and sat in the warm sun drying their hair. ‘I’m getting hungry,’ Bar said, ‘let’s leave the dervishing till another day; then we can get a bite to eat and then go down to Joycey’s and get your new dress.’