by Jonathan Coe
How many weeks was it, I wonder, before Beatrix and I set up camp there together? Or was it only a matter of days? They say that split seconds and aeons become interchangeable when you experience intense emotion, and after my arrival at Warden Farm I was soon feeling a sense of loneliness and homesickness which I find it impossible to describe. I was beside myself with unhappiness. I would sob quite openly in front of Ivy and Owen – at the supper table, for instance – but never once, to my knowledge, did they think of telephoning my parents to tell them how miserable I was. My distress was simply ignored, by them, by the two boys – by everybody, in short, apart from the cook (who was a kindly soul), and of course by Beatrix. Even she was cruel to me at first. And yet I do think that when she finally took me under her wing, it was because she felt sorry for me, not simply because I was weaker than her, and easy to manipulate. She was lonely, too, remember, and she needed a friend. Beatrix could be a selfish person, at times, there is no doubt about that: I was to see it proved again and again over the following years and decades. But at the same time she was quite capable of love. Rather more than capable of it, I should say: she was vulnerable to it – that would be a better word – deeply, fatally vulnerable. And certainly, I think, during my time at the farm, she came to love me. In her way.
Her way of loving me, in fact, was to try to help me. And her first attempt to help me involved our drawing up a ludicrous plan – a desperate plan – which we resolved to carry out together. We decided that we were going to escape.
During the long afternoons, the lawn stretched out, billiard green, at the front of the house. A narrow, gravelled drive cut through it, but no cars ever used this drive. Almost nobody used the front door at all: only the children – and Beatrix and I especially. It was the back door where the men came to do their business, and so it was the back door that was watched. The cook watched it, from her kitchen, and Ivy watched it, from her bedroom, and Uncle Owen watched it, from his tiny, benighted study. There could be no escape that way. Even at dusk it would be risky – and it was at dusk that we had decided to leave.
That afternoon, sitting alone beneath the low roof, the crazy angles of my bedroom, while Beatrix was downstairs, taking food from the kitchen, waiting until the cook’s back was turned, I thought once more of my own mother and father, at home in Birmingham, going about their ordinary lives. My father riding to work on his bicycle, a gas mask slung over his shoulder. My mother pinning out washing on the line in the back garden, just a few yards from the entrance to the air-raid shelter. These things, I knew, had something to do with danger, with the danger I had been brought here to escape from, the danger that they lived within, now, every minute of every day. And all I could think was that it was not fair. I wanted to share in that danger. It frightened me, yes, but nowhere near as much as this absence, nowhere near as much.
That evening, we waited until the house was quiet, until Ivy and Owen had settled down to a drink after dinner, and the boys had gone upstairs to play, and then we put on our coats and pulled back the heavy latch on the front door and we slipped outside.
She was eleven years old. I was eight. I would have followed her anywhere.
There was a thick dampness in the air, somewhere between mist and rain. The rising moon was three-quarters full, but screened by clouds. There was no birdsong. Even the sheep had fallen silent. We made no noise as we stepped out on to the grass.
Still wearing our school shoes, we scurried over the spongey moistness of the front lawn. We jumped down, over the ha-ha and on to the lower level of the garden, and made for the overgrown gap in the hedge, the opening that led to the secret path; the path that led to the secret place.
She ran ahead; I followed. Her grey school mackintosh, appearing and disappearing between the leaves.
At the end of the path was a clearing, tangled and overgrown with hanging branches and trailing ivy, and within this clearing was the caravan. The cold gripped you the moment you opened the door and stepped inside. The net curtains hung grey and filthy over the windows, ragged with moth holes, blackened with the corpses of flies. There was a small table which folded out from the wall, and two bench seats on either side of it. Nowhere else to sit down. A kettle on the stove, but the gas cylinder was long since empty. From the farmhouse, Beatrix had carried with her a brown bottle, a cork wedged loosely at the top, filled to the brim with cloudy lemonade, and over the last few days, she had been hiding further provisions here. A half-loaf of bread, solid as masonry. A wedge of cheese, Shropshire blue, crusty at the edges. Two apples from the orchard. And three biscuits, shortbread, baked by the cook, and filched from the biscuit tin in the larder at the risk of God knows what dreadful punishment.
‘Let’s eat some of this now,’ she said; and we set to it, quietly and with great deliberation. I had not been able to eat much dinner and was hungry now even though my stomach was so tightened with fearful anticipation that I could barely force the food down.
There were a few items of cutlery still in one of the drawers, and Beatrix used a fruit knife to cut the bread and the cheese. When we had finished eating, without saying another word, she took my hand, turned it palm upward, and drew the blade of the knife along my tiny forefinger. I cried out, and hot salt tears sprang up in my eyes. But she took no notice. Calmly, she did the same to herself and then pressed her finger against mine, so that the two pools of blood mingled and coalesced.
‘There,’ she said. ‘We’re sisters now. Together. Whatever happens. Agreed?’
I nodded, still without saying a word. What I felt – the thing that robbed me of my voice – was either terror, or love. Or both. Probably both, I think.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a long way to go tonight.’
We had already packed our clothes and brought them to the caravan the day before. Mine were squashed tightly into the small dun-coloured suitcase my mother herself had first packed a few weeks ago. It was not a practical arrangement, for an escape across countryside. My little knitted woollen toy, a black dog called Shadow, would not fit into the case. I was going to have to carry him. When I picked him up he gazed at me inscrutably, without expression. He was the thing I loved fourth best in the whole world, after my mother, and my father, and now Beatrix.
The light died quickly that night. When we left the caravan and closed the door behind us, the darkness was already absolute. We turned our faces away from the farmhouse and set off into the woods, leaving it behind for ever. Beatrix held my hand. The only sounds were the sounds of our footsteps, the clumsy snapping of twigs.
I know now – at least I think I know, insofar as one can ever know these things – that it was never her intention to take me home. She was old enough to know that two little girls could never walk all the way to my parents’ house. But I did not know that, and I trusted her. And besides, we were blood-sisters now.
We came out of the woods and crossed the last of Uncle Owen’s fields. After that we walked for perhaps no more than an hour, but to me it seemed a hundred lifetimes. Beatrix knew that country well and she chose her route with cunning, describing an almost perfect circle. When we reached the glade where I begged her to rest, we must have been almost back at the farmhouse, but for all I knew, we could have been anywhere.
We lay down, and I clutched Shadow to my chest. The clouds had parted and the moon bathed everything in a quicksilver light. I could not stop shivering. Now I was more tired than scared, and gripped with a clinging despair, but still, there was a kind of beauty all around us. I was aware of that, even then. Beatrix put her arm behind my neck, and I pressed myself tightly against her, and we lay like that, on our backs, staring up at the stars.
‘Do you think we’ll get there?’ I asked. ‘Do you think we’ll get there tonight?’ And when she didn’t answer, I framed another question, the one that had been puzzling me the most: ‘Why do you want to come? Why do you want to leave home?’
‘I don’t like my mother and father,’ she answered, after a
long time. ‘I don’t think they love me.’
‘Are they cruel to you?’ I asked.
Again, she didn’t answer.
In spite of myself, I began to grow sleepy. A barn owl was hooting, crying out in the night, very close to us. The trees rustled, the undergrowth was restless with hints of subtle, mysterious life. I could feel the warmth of Beatrix’s body, the pulsing of blood through the arm at the back of my head. Her sensations became mine. The moon continued to rise, and with a flurry the owl launched into sudden flight, skimming away beneath the branches of the trees. The dampness had left the air. The goal I had fixed upon – reaching the city, knocking on the door of my astonished parents’ house – receded and vanished. Despite the cold, I was happy here.
When I awoke, Beatrix was no longer with me. I sat up and looked around me, my heart pounding.
I could see her standing at the edge of the glade, looking out over the moonlit field. Her fragile silhouette. And I could hear voices. Human voices, although they sounded as desolate and unearthly as the low wail of the barn owl. Human voices, calling our names: her name, and mine.
Figures – a whole row of tiny black figures – appeared in the distance, coming towards us across the field. In defiance of the blackout, some of them were carrying torches, and these needles of bobbing light danced like sad fireflies as they made their inevitable progress towards Beatrix, who stood and watched, impassive, trembling slightly, but only with the cold, never thinking to turn and run, as I wanted to. And why should she? She had provoked this moment. She had intended it.
They were coming to find us.
Picture number four: Warden Farm itself.
I am guessing – from the colours, and the quality of the image – that this photograph was taken some time in the 1950s, more than a decade after the events I’m talking about. But the house did not change, in the intervening years.
It’s a good picture, one which captures the house just as I remember it: handsome, solid, impressive. There are three storeys, in red brick, although most of the brickwork, on the first two storeys, can barely be glimpsed beneath the thick tendrils of ivy coiled and tangled around the sash windows. The house was built in the 1830s, and in style, as this picture shows, it was symmetrical and rather plain. On the ground floor you have a mock-Grecian portico flanked by two arched windows of the same height; above that, on the first floor, are three rectangular sash windows, and above them, on the second floor, three smaller, square windows. That’s the main body of the building. Then, on either side, continuing the symmetry, two further rooms were added at ground-floor level, some time later. Both, again, have large arched and latticed windows, surrounded by dense, dark green ivy. This green is slightly darker than the green of the lawn, but not as dark as the shadows cast upon the lawn by the ancient and massive oak tree which grew at the front of the house. The branches of this tree overhang the front of the picture – the photographer must have been standing underneath the tree itself – and obscure the windows on the top floor of the house.
Two of these top-floor windows belonged to the playroom. It was a wide, low-ceilinged attic room, equipped with dolls and tin soldiers and board games which even then were in a state of some decrepitude. There was a ping-pong table, too, and an elaborate train set, laid out on a table top amidst a papier mâché landscape upon which someone, at some time, must have lavished a fair amount of energy. All of these things held a certain fascination. But no attempt had ever been made to make the room welcoming. There were no bookshelves, and the wallpaper was faded and peeling, and no fire ever seemed to be burning in the grate. For this reason, it was rarely visited. The boys never came up here, and Beatrix and I only seldom. Our domain was next door, in the crooked, oddly shaped bedroom, tucked among the eaves. Aunt Ivy and Uncle Owen slept on the first floor: so did their two sons. Their rooms were airy, regular, full of a sense of space. Ours was gloomy and enigmatic. The roof sloped at wild, erratic angles and my own bed was wedged into a tiny alcove that made it invisible from most parts of the room. I was completely screened off from the window, from the warmth of the morning sun and, at night, from the moonlight in which Beatrix would bathe as she drifted in and out of sleep. Mine was a realm of ever deeper and darker shadows.
You would think that I would have a clear recollection of what happened in the wake of our escape attempt, but I don’t. It is my suspicion, now, that Ivy and Owen did not even tell my parents about it. Certainly, many years later, when I mentioned to my mother the night that Beatrix and I had attempted to run away from Warden Farm and walk all the way to Birmingham, she said it was the first she had heard of it. Were we even punished, in any way? I stayed at the farmhouse for another six months, at least, and in that time I don’t remember any of the repercussions one might have expected: no being locked in our bedroom, or having to live on bread and dripping for a week; nothing worse, in fact, than a mild dressing-down from Aunt Ivy the next morning, couched not so much in terms of reproof as tremulous concern for our own safety and happiness.
And yet she did not forget the incident, or indeed forgive it. Of course, the whole village must have talked about it, for some time afterwards, and that must have embarrassed her. But I think that Ivy and Owen were enraged, more than that, by the sheer inconvenience to which we had put them that night. Beatrix’s duty, you see, was to remain invisible, as was mine, for that matter, once I had arrived at the house. Ivy’s world revolved around herself, around her position in the village, around her social life, her bridge and tennis, and also, more than any of these, around her beloved sons and dogs. Beatrix did not show up on her radar. That is what Beatrix must have meant, I think, when she told me that her mother was ‘cruel to her’. Ivy’s was the cruelty of indifference.
Perhaps that makes what your grandmother went through as a child seem rather trivial. Certainly there are children, all over the world, who experience much, much worse things at the hands of their parents: naturally, I am aware of that. Even so, it seems to me important – crucially important – that one should never underestimate what it must feel like to know that you are not wanted by your mother. By your mother, of all people – the very person who brought you into existence! Such knowledge eats away at your sense of self-worth, and destroys the very foundations of your being. It is very hard to be a whole person, after that.
Only occasionally did it appear to me that Ivy was not just indifferent towards Beatrix but actually hated her. There is one incident, in particular, that stays in my mind. It was only a small thing, but it has stayed with me, over the years. It concerned a dog called Bonaparte. The family had many dogs, as I have said. There were three full-grown ones while I was there, three over-affectionate Springer spaniels. I soon came to love them, especially a Welsh Springer called Ambrose, who was also Beatrix’s favourite. He had great intelligence, and great loyalty – you can’t ask for much more than that, in an animal or even a human being. But Ivy for some reason was far more interested in Bonaparte. He was a black, wire-haired toy poodle, one of the most unattractive breeds. He was very stupid, and unreliable, but full of energy – I suppose that could be said of him at least. If Ivy herself was not present, he could be guaranteed to scamper around in a kind of directionless frenzy, always chasing imaginary objects, in a perpetual state of neurotic excitement. It was exhausting trying to keep him on a lead. But indoors, with Ivy for company, he only ever wanted to sit at her feet or, preferably, on her lap. He would lie there for hours, staring up at her with the glaze of unconditional love in his little round eyes. Ivy would stroke his hair and feed him little favours from her box of Cadbury’s chocolates (of which she seemed to have an inexhaustible supply, even during wartime).
Now Beatrix, by and large, kept well away from this animal. It was not that she wanted nothing to do with him, but that he wanted nothing to do with her. She would have liked nothing more than to pet him, I imagine, if only because it would have made her feel closer to her mother and might have won her approval. But Bon
aparte, perhaps in imitation of his beloved mistress, treated Beatrix with utter disdain. The only exceptions to this rule were at meal times, when he would occasionally deign to interest himself in some little titbit that she might offer him from her plate. The incident that I am thinking of took place, I believe, in the spring of 1942, towards the end of my stay at Warden Farm. The whole family was having dinner in the kitchen. The cook had roasted two large chickens, and Beatrix broke off a piece of one wing and tossed it to Bonaparte, who as usual was crouched beneath the table, his tongue hanging out greedily. Well, after chewing on the wing for a few seconds, he began to make the most horrific noises: a kind of anguished cough, from somewhere deep in his body, accompanied at the same time by a fearsome whine. It was obvious that a small bone had become lodged in his throat and he was choking. For a few seconds everyone just stared at him in horror. Then Aunt Ivy began to wail, her voice rising to a scream, to a pitch I had never heard before and would never have believed her capable of; no words were emerging and she was not doing anything as practical as asking someone to intervene, but all the same, Beatrix leaped forward, threw herself at Bonaparte, who was squatting in the middle of the room by now, and seized him by the jaw, attempting to force his mouth open. This didn’t seem to do any good at all. In fact, Bonaparte’s coughing and whining became even more distressed, until Ivy recovered her power of speech and screeched at her daughter something that sounded like, ‘Stop that, you fool! You’re strangling him, you’re strangling him!’, at which point Raymond (inevitably) leaped to his feet, grabbed the wretched creature from Beatrix’s arms, and did… something, I don’t know exactly what – something that involved an almighty slap on the back – the canine equivalent of the Heimlich manoeuvre, I suppose – so that the little bone shot out of the dog’s mouth and landed on the other side of the kitchen floor.
