The Golden Lion

by Pamela Haines

  Helen asked her one day, ‘How’s Bambi? Why don’t you fetch him to school?’ But Ermintrude just stared hard at Helen and said, ‘Mind your own business, you horrid little girl.’

  School would have been all right if it hadn’t been for the crowding, all the desks pushed much too close together, and the difficulties between the vackies and the village children. Helen didn’t really know any of them and would like to have belonged to the village group.

  As well as all the food, there were the sweets. Auntie Hilda and Uncle Jack both said, ‘Help yourselves, love.’ Helen had to keep a rein on Billy who didn’t know when to stop. To begin with, Helen ate and ate. She seemed to have endless space to fill. Whenever the pain began about wanting Mam, she would cram her mouth full of nut toffees and chew and chew it all away.

  Uncle Jack encouraged her. ‘Puppies need to be nice and podgy. Eat up.’ But she never got any fatter. The village boys, in and out of school, called her ‘Skinny-stick’. ‘Skinny-stick, skinnystick!’ they would shout during sliding games, sliding into her deliberately when she stood with a group of the other girls.

  Auntie Hilda said how they’d always wanted children but God hadn’t sent any. She cuddled Billy a lot and called him ‘lollipop’, and ‘peppermint candy’, so that he became quite cocky sometimes. Like Helen, he was allowed as many sweets as he wanted. But it was her task to clean him up, both ends – Auntie Hilda made that clear the first days. ‘If you did it at home, love, you can do it here. We don’t want any mess, do we?’ There was a young girl called Doreen who came in to do the washing: she had to see to the sheets each day.

  Billy was filling out. Auntie Hilda complimented him on being ‘a bonny boy – if only he didn’t wet…’ But after tea and before bed he’d drink cup after cup of Eiffel Tower lemonade, stirring it as he drank, the bright yellow grains still undissolved. Helen felt saturated in shame for him. She never thought if she loved him. He was just Billy. She looked after him, but it was for Mam she did it.

  She tried not to worry about Mam but it was difficult. No news could mean anything, but oh, how she wanted to know if Mam was stronger, and what the hospital had said. Above all, she wanted to see Mam.

  On Saturdays now she sometimes helped Uncle Jack in the shop while Auntie Hilda went to have her hair done, in tight corkscrew curls. Then they’d have a fish tea and she and Billy would go up to bed while Uncle and Auntie listened downstairs to the wireless.

  Nothing much seemed to be happening with the war. No bombs falling on big cities. Every night she prayed, Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be. She’d have liked her First Communion rosary she’d left behind, but didn’t want to ask Mam for it. She knelt beside her bed in the warm room above the shop. ‘Dear Our Lady, make me a good lass and Billy dry and make Mam well again and send me a Bambi like Ermintrude’s.’

  She half woke. Saturday night. She felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Auntie Hilda in her blue dressing-gown, her hair net on, holding a torch. Helen blinked.

  ‘Up with you. Get up and come along. Father wants to speak to you.’

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked sleepily.

  ‘I told him – how naughty you’ve been.’

  ‘But I haven’t, I never did,’ she said, sitting up now.

  ‘That’s as may be. Quick now. He’s something to say to you.’

  ‘I want to go to sleep. It’s bedtime.’

  ‘And after all we’ve done for you … Come along. Up with you.’

  She followed Auntie Hilda. In the bedroom, the lights were on over both their beds. Uncle was sitting up in striped green pyjamas. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Come over here, lass.’

  ‘What have I done?’ she asked. ‘You’ll not say what I’ve done.’

  ‘It’s not what folk do,’ Auntie said, ‘it’s what they are. You’re a naughty girl, Father says.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Uncle said. ‘Naughty. And what happens to naughty girls, eh?’ He smiled at her. She didn’t answer. Auntie said, ‘They get smacked, don’t they?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Uncle said. ‘Lie down like a good lass. Lie on Mother’s bed, there.’

  She climbed up fearfully. Puzzled. Afraid. Perhaps it was a dream. I’m in the middle of a bad dream.

  ‘No, on your tummy, love. It’s your bum gets smacked. Where’s the hairbrush, Mother?’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said into the pillow. ‘I didn’t – I never did –’

  ‘Hush, will you,’ Auntie said sharply. ‘You do what you’re told.’

  She lay there shaking in her thin nightgown, though the room with its electric bar fire was quite warm. Auntie held the brush. It came down, bristles up, on to her flesh. She heard Uncle say twice, ‘That’s right, aye, well done.’

  And then it was over. She felt Auntie’s hand then on the back of her head. ‘Lie still. No moving now, lass.’

  She pressed her head into the pillow, biting her cheek by mistake. She spoke up:

  ‘Can I have my bum covered, then?’

  ‘Hush,’ Auntie said irritably.

  ‘I weren’t naughty. I cleaned Billy up. And I never cheeked.’

  ‘Don’t back answer, you’ll put Father off –’

  Uncle was still in bed. She thought she heard Auntie climbing in too. They were making a great noise. She wondered if Uncle was going to have a coughing attack. All that groaning and Auntie saying, ‘Quick now, while it’s up.’ She remembered about coughs and mucky stuff. Mucky stuff – you had to get mucky stuff up. But then the groaning and grunting was more like someone in pain. She supposed Auntie was looking after him –but if they’d to send for the doctor and she was found in here with her bum uncovered? Saliva filled her mouth. I don’t want to be sick. Please Our Lady Jesus Mary Joseph. There’d be dribble stains on the pink pillow as it was.

  Auntie’s hand on her head again. ‘Back to bed with you, lass.’ She heard the bedside light go off. The room was almost dark, just the light of Auntie’s torch. ‘You were a good lass, taking your punishment like that.’

  Her legs were all shaky. ‘But what did I do, I never –’

  ‘And what’s more,’ Auntie was saying, ‘we’ve never to speak of this, eh? To any folk. You got that? You know about secrets. It’s best a secret …’

  Our Lady, Jesus, oh Mam, as if I’d tell … I’d be ashamed, she thought. And anyway, hadn’t Father Casey told them they were going to new Mams and Dads that Almighty God had chosen for them? You had to do what they said.

  But as she crept back into bed, she shivered uncontrollably. After a few moments she began to cry. Oh Mam, Mam. Mam who was ill and might need Helen. But not now, tonight, as much as Helen needed her.

  Sunday morning. And there was Miss Dennison in the car with her evacuee Rosie, waiting to take her and Billy over to Egton to church. Auntie her usual bustling self, making a fuss about Helen fasting (‘It’s not right, going out on an empty stomach’), slipping a Milky Way into her pocket to eat on the way back. Last night might never have happened. Except it did.

  The brown church. Candles burning. She had money to light one for Mam. The priest, and words she couldn’t understand. Introibo ad altarem Dei. Going up to the Communion rail with Miss Dennison, sticking her tongue out, hoping there’d be no dribble. Remembering her face pressed into the pillow, her mouth filling and oozing, bitter, frightened.

  As she watched Miss Dennison, with her pale kind face, she wanted to tell her – but how could she with Rosie there? And anyway mightn’t Miss Dennison think she’d made it up? Worst of all, she might tell Auntie Hilda and give away that Helen had talked. And then, what then?

  Auntie Hilda took her into Whitby and bought her a kilt, red and green tartan, hanging from a white bodice. Like one that Ermintrude wore. ‘That’s for being a good girl,’ she said.

  The weather had changed. The ice-cold school milk, sucked through a straw from the bottle, sent shafts of pain through the roof of her mouth. Cold raw mornings, going out full of porridge and bacon and fried bread but still
cold inside, wondering if this Saturday if would happen again. Coming out of school, she would meet often a misty damp in the darkening sky. Beneath lowering clouds, the moors looked strange and frightening.

  At school Billy clung to her. She didn’t seem able to move without him at her elbow. It was difficult to tell if he was unhappy – he never talked of Mam, or of home at all. She wanted to be angry but couldn’t because of Mam and her promise. Auntie Hilda and Uncle Jack didn’t even like her telling him off for drinking at night or for eating too many sweets. ‘You’re too hard on the little lad… And the other thing – he can’t help it, can he?’

  Auntie told him to fill his pockets with sweeties before school. ‘There’s no sense in going hungry …’ But he kept them all to himself. You could see his pockets bulging with wrapped toffees and shiny glacier mints. The older boys would rob him of them, holding him down, and dipping their hands in, pulling out the lining to his pockets. Then she’d hear him cry, ‘Our Helen, they’ve took my goodies –’ A thin screech, ‘Our Helen!’ Tears running down his sticky face. And there’d be nothing to do but to rush in, all flying fists. Defending Billy. Sometimes there’d be such a fight that it took Miss Garner, the teacher, to come in and stop it. Because she didn’t know who’d started it, Helen would get punished along with the others.

  She couldn’t tell on them, though. Just as she couldn’t tell on Auntie and Uncle. Oh, how she wanted to tell someone. She had come to dread Saturdays so, especially as she never knew before she went to bed if it was going to happen. Once there were three Saturdays in a row without it. She thought perhaps it was all over. Only it wasn’t. The next time it was worse. Auntie hit harder. She said Uncle had told her to. ‘He needs it,’ she explained, ‘he says I’ve to give you a real clout, so as he can hear – don’t you, Father?’

  Only three weeks to Christmas now. Some of the children had been visited by their families several times already. Helen hadn’t expected that. Mam couldn’t travel. Now a lot of them simply stopped being vackies and went home. Ermintrude had already left. Instead the Vicar had two little girls who’d been unhappy at their first billet. Helen wished he’d offered to take her and Billy – but a Vicar couldn’t take RC children.

  The war was still quite quiet. Miss Dennison called it the Bore War, and Auntie Hilda the Phoney War. Helen wrote home and asked if she could come for Christmas, or best of all, could she come home for good? Auntie Winnie wrote back saying Mam wasn’t well enough to write anything, even printing, and as for her and Uncle Arnold, they’d Alan and Leslie and Valerie to visit, and couldn’t hardly be in two places at once. ‘So no more talking about coming back, Mr Hitler has plenty up his sleeve, your best where you are …’

  She tried to be brave. Two weeks before Christmas she was told to write to Santa Claus, telling him what she wanted. She wrote: ‘A Bambi to cuddle. A party frock.’ She felt wicked. Who had money for that sort of thing and what ever would Mam say? Auntie Hilda read the letter before it was sealed up. ‘Well, there’s no harm in asking,’ she said.

  Miss Dennison’s adopted son, Guy, went in the car with them to church on Christmas morning. It was the first time she’d met him and she was shy and tongue-tied. He admired her kilt and asked her if she liked living in a sweet shop. ‘When I was your age – it’d have been absolute heaven.’ She muttered something. She felt sick and dumb. He was very kind and wore a warm brown coat and soft leather gloves with cuffs. For a prayer book he had a missal like Miss Dennison’s.

  Miss Dennison gave her a rosary for Christmas. Pink beads which felt lovely as they ran through her fingers. ‘It’s been blessed by the Pope, dear. So you must take great care of it.’

  Auntie Hilda and Uncle Jack did their best and she knew she ought to be grateful. Billy cried a lot. ‘Can’t we go back to Mam, our Helen, why can’t we?’ He cheered up on Christmas Day itself. Under the tree for him there was a real Hornby engine with two carriages, a tunnel and set of rails.

  Bambi was there, underneath several thicknesses of brown paper. She wanted to cry when she saw him. She could not stop stroking the velvet coat with its lovely dusty spots. The sweet expression in his eyes. Uncle Jack said wasn’t she going to look at her big present? It was a dress of pink organdie, with silver thread on the bodice and a petticoat to go with it.

  She wore it for a Christmas party at Miss Dennison’s. Billy had a stomach upset and couldn’t go. All the vackies left in Thackton were there. The house was very warm and welcoming and there was a large tea with buns and animal biscuits and red jelly and farm cream whipped. But because the next day was Saturday, she felt all the time a little sick. Party games. Oranges and lemons … and here comes the chopper to chop off your head. She got the shakes, she couldn’t help it, she knew the chopper would come down on her.

  Perhaps she really could tell Miss Dennison this time? She thought: I’ve just to tell her it’s bad, that it’s something bad. She even had a chance, and didn’t take it. It was when she went upstairs to the lavatory after tea. As she came out, there was Miss Dennison in the doorway of a room.

  ‘Helen dear – what a lovely dress! Are you enjoying yourself?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Miss Dennison.’ She hesitated. But it was too difficult. She said, ‘Is that room where you sleep, Miss?’

  Miss Dennison smiled. ‘Do you care for paintings? Come in and see, if you’d like –’

  The room was very simple with a plain dark bedcover and a bedside table with books on it and her slippers lying neatly side by side underneath. You could hardly see the walls for pictures. She’d like to have stayed a long time looking at them. ‘There’s Our Lady!’ she exclaimed. ‘That one there – it’s Her with the Angel, we had that one at St Aidan’s … I think Our Lady’s the most beautiful person in the world after Mam.’

  ‘How is your mother?’ Miss Dennison asked. ‘I always remember her in my prayers, Helen.’ They walked down the stairs together. Helen thought: I’ll tell her now. But how to say it? The seconds passed and she hadn’t.

  They were back in the big downstairs room, for Hunt the Thimble. She knew now she never would.

  Saturday night. And there was Auntie Hilda waking her.

  ‘You’re to come to Father.’

  When she followed the torch sleepily, the bedside light was on as usual and there was Uncle Jack sitting up in his pyjamas. Auntie Hilda whispered, ‘Did you wash last night? All over?’ Helen tried to remember, fighting off the dizzy sleepiness. Auntie persisted, ‘All over, you washed all over? Properly?’ Helen nodded her head.

  She thought at first she wasn’t going to be smacked because instead of telling her to lie down, Auntie said, ‘Come over to Father. He wants to see –’ She gave Helen a little push. ‘Show Father you’ve washed down below. He wants to see if you’re, you know – clean.’

  ‘No,’ Helen said, ‘I can’t – I mean, I’ve not to show people. Mam said. It’s not nice, is it?’ She began to cry.

  Auntie smacked the side of her head. ‘That’s the only language you understand, you and your dirty little brother. Nice, don’t talk nice to us. Do you think the mess he makes is nice, eh? Is it then?’

  Helen was choked with tears, ‘Well, I won’t -1 can’t –’ Auntie hit her again.

  Uncle Jack spoke then. His voice was kind. ‘Come on, little lass. Up with your nightie.’

  She didn’t struggle when Auntie lifted it for her – but she thought she would die of shame. She shut her eyes as Auntie parted the lips down below. She felt the shivers coming on. ‘Still, now …’

  ‘Lie down, there’s a good lass.’ She didn’t open her eyes as she was pushed over to the bed. Her nightdress was still ruckled up. She didn’t dare to pull it down, waiting as she was for the smacking. But tonight it didn’t happen. Instead the creaking and the groaning and grunting began at once. ‘Get it over with,’ she heard Auntie say, ‘come on now, get it over with.’ A little while later and she was shivering her way back to bed.

  Next morning she fel
t so dreadful she was scarcely able to answer Miss Dennison’s questions on the way to Mass. In the afternoon, up in her room, she wrote a letter. She didn’t want it to go to Mam in case it upset her, so she addressed it to Auntie Winnie. It felt like crying inside, when she wrote the words down:

  ‘They make me do things I don’t like, bad things, so let me come back please Antie Winnie, I cant stay hear …’

  She stole an envelope and stamp from Auntie Hilda’s desk and posted it on the way to school on Monday.

  She waited anxiously for an answer. Perhaps they’d say yes? Perhaps they’d even come and fetch her home. Then suddenly she’d be sick with worry because they mightn’t understand or believe, and if they wrote to Auntie Hilda …

  The answer came after two and a half weeks.

  ‘If its work they want from you I dont blame them, billet money there paid, its not much, we have to pay now, just having one of your moods, all your other letters was cheery wasn’t they – maybe theres too many sweets for your good, we dont want your mam worried so be a good girl and dont you write again till you can write cheery – Valeries not any trouble …’ When she’d read it, Helen tore it into little bits and stuffed it in a sweetie bag. She felt as if a door had slammed somewhere. Tight shut.

  The weather stayed cold. At school they sat in a circle round the stove to get what warmth they could. The cobwebs on the ceiling fluttered in the heat from the stove. The lights had to be on all day. She thought she might always be cold, always miserable.

  There were a few nice times, like when Miss Foster came to give the singing lesson. After they’d practised The Ash Grove and The British Grenadiers, she would suggest a sing-song. She could play any tune by ear. They sang Roll out the Barrel and Little Sir Echo and Wish Me Luck. Helen sang loudly, standing as near the piano as she could get. Miss Foster told her: ‘You’ve got a good sense of rhythm.’ Suddenly Helen would feel sad, remembering how she’d used to sing for Mam.