by Katie Munnik
Dear Baby, My lucky love. I want you to know that you are wanted. That is the place to begin. Everything else will grow from there. If you ask, I will be honest. You surprised me. I had my eyes on other things when you crept up on me.
Will I, really? Be honest like that? I’d like to. And over time, I will. I am sure of that. Because I think you should hear your story. I will shelter Stanley. I won’t tell the world that it was really him, but I must tell you. How else will you be able to make decisions? Our decisions shaped you. You will need to know.
But not yet. Not when you’re little. And soft. For now, I will simply tell you that you are born of love and longing. And I want you.
You are a half-made thing, but so am I. Half said, half thought, half aware, I’m sure, of all that’s going on around us both. And maybe just as hidden as you. Hidden and conspicuous. And so is your father. He’s hidden, too, hidden from me. But I trust that we’ll emerge. We’ll all emerge from this darkness, this mad noise and fear and be able to see each other. To look each other in the face and tell the truth, if only through silence.
10
THE KITCHEN IS DARK. I PUSH THE BLACKOUT CURTAIN aside to let moonlight into the kitchen and a shadow walks up the garden path, hops onto the wall, pauses and licks paws before easing through Miss Baxter’s open window. I turn to the table and slice a thick wodge of dense brown bread, then a precious onion, too. There are still drippings in the pan from yesterday, so I scrape them out with the knife and slather them on the bread like glue for the onions. My stomach makes appalling noises. No end of indignities when blessed with child. But the sandwich tastes good and I eat it slowly, the onion sharp, sweet and crisp. We used to eat onion sandwiches with cheese, me and Stanley together out in the dunes before the war. We even believed the water was warm in those days, took off shoes and socks and waded up to our knees in the blue, blue water. Now the sea looks different with winter. A November sea is corpse-cold, hungry and grey as old pans.
There are never enough eggs in November. Not enough light so the chickens give up, and that means no cake. When my mother came to visit last week, she seemed surprised by this.
‘But you’ve all the farms out here,’ she said. ‘And all the garden space, too. Surely there must be many families in the village with a decent supply of eggs. Haven’t you been making friends?’
She wants me to come home and go back to being happy. I am not sure what she means. I told her about Muriel and her mother, about Rosie and the scraps and the sausages that followed, then about Connie and the minister.
‘Well, I am glad,’ she said. ‘It is good to have friends on hand. You’ll be needing them soon, won’t you? Are you getting your energy back, my dear?’
‘I’m managing.’
She smiled, because she understood. There were enough of us at home.
‘Of course. You’ll manage just fine. It does take time to learn, but I know that you will manage beautifully.’
Beautifully is hardly the word but she’s right. I am trying. Halfway through already and trying. And hungry. I can’t stop myself thinking about food. So much of my brain is occupied with food chatter. Egg and cake and onions. Mum brought me a gift from home: my granny’s cookbook – Everybody’s Pudding Book, by Mrs Georgiana Hill. The recipes are arranged seasonally, starting with January. Another eggless month.
‘The shelves of all good housekeepers should still be stored with a fair share of preserves of different descriptions, which, with the numerous farinaceous substances such as sago, tapioca, rice and others that are always readily obtained, our resources of festivity will be found to be most ample.’
Ha. To give her credit, she does note that it is also not the best time of year for milk, cream, or butter and, with that in mind, she gives the recipe for simple currant fritters without eggs. Half a pint of mild Scotch ale, flour, and currants, fried in a pan of boiling lard, then sugared and served with lemon juice. A thoughtful touch.
But not on the ration. Today, I resorted to the newspaper’s recipe suggestions which feature an ‘elegant eggless ginger cake’ recipe. I thought it would look nice on the blue cake-stand. Cheerful. But it was false and boring, even with the suggested mock cream on top, gritty goop that it was. Bland, false and boring and sweetened with flavoured gelatine. I wished Rosie was still in the land of the living because then I could donate the failed cake to her and that would mean more sausages for me.
I’ve been spending time copying out recipes onto careful cards, looking forward to the impossible tomorrow when they will mean something again.
Tonight, tea was only tea, but at least I slept afterwards.
I suppose that is one good thing about living alone. Stanley would be horrified to see what I’m eating. As would my mother, I was jolly well sure, if she looked past my brave face and tea-party sandwiches. But hell’s bells, if I am to stiff it out here alone in the wind, I might as well eat what I like, that’s for damned certain.
I need to sleep better. The aeroplanes are loud at night and it’s making me rather Anglo-Saxon, I’m afraid. My language is usually cleaner than this. I wonder if the baby knows. Can she hear me? I mean, all the unspoken bits. Thought vibrations, maybe? The energy of vulgarity passing through the womb walls?
Yesterday, she moved. So early and I thought I must be imagining it. How can she be big enough yet to feel? I’m too skinny, that’s what it is. Not enough meat on these wartime bones to give a bairn a cushion. But it was wonderful. Just a little flutter somewhere behind my navel. I was sitting by the window, trying to get into a rhythm with my knitting. I can manage, but the stitches all need to be so deliberate. I’ve none of Connie’s momentum, her clickity-clackity stitch-after-stitch-after-stitch. I need to think it through. So I sat there thinking, working the grey wool in my fingers, not too loosely, not too tight, wondering if Stanley was warm enough at night in the cottage. What a mothering thought, that, and then there they were. Bubbles in a glass of champagne.
When the war is over and Stanley is safely home to stay, we’ll drink champagne. Nothing but, and bucketfuls. It feels close to the end now, but the end of my tether or the end of the world, I can’t know. When the world does end, I want to be out in the dunes. Drinking champagne, yes, and with Stanley, of course. I want those ugly concrete blocks all swept away, the wind empty and strong around us, and the grasses to grow wild again. We’ll spread out a blanket on the sandy ground and there will be larks and rabbits and geese, too, out on the sandbar or flying over the waves in their family skeins and because it’s the end, there will be no more shadows, no planes overhead, no warships on the Forth. All that will be swept away and we’ll have time to be together just as we are, unafraid after all and love and love and love until the day is over. That’s how the end will be.
I’m not sure the minister or Connie would approve. These aren’t quite godly thoughts. I’m finding church hard now. The pews are uncomfortable and so is the lack of men. Old men come, but there are far too many women and and they stare at me. I’m sure they do. It’s far too early for them to tell, but I feel their eyes anyway. They know. Maybe they can see it in the way I walk or in how tired I know I look. Or if they don’t and I’m making it up, they’ll figure it out soon enough, anyway. A baby bump out of season. What will they be imagining? How on earth can I keep Stanley safe? Only one way, really, and though hard, it’s sure to work because Stanley grew up here and he’s their golden boy. And me? The suspect floozy. I won’t mind. I’ll carry that. And everything else I must keep hidden.
Miss Baxter is awake through the wall. I heard her close her window after the cat, and then the springs on her chair eased down again. I still haven’t gone round to see her, not properly. Only spoken with her during the raids, and when we’ve come up from the shops at the same time. She must be my mother’s age, but thinner. I’ll go round in the morning. I wonder if she’d like the eggless cake.
* * *
There was a suggestion in the newspaper about adding a grated c
arrot to a cake for moistness, and it’s not a bad idea, really. I think I’ll add it to the Christmas cake I’ve promised the Grants. I’ve been setting aside sugar for weeks now and Muriel says she will contribute an egg to the cause. She pops in to see me, gangly, awkward with her hair cropped shorter and uneven. She looks unhappy. She tells me her mother is planning a rabbit with bacon for Christmas Day.
‘Your pig is keeping us all fed these days,’ I say. ‘Makes the best dripping I’ve ever had.’
‘The butcher thought she was a bit too fat. He said we should have had her earlier. Mum said we’re all needing all the fat we can get these days.’
‘Me too,’ I say, but she doesn’t laugh. She fumbles a question about when Stanley’s coming home on leave. I tell her I don’t know. We find other things to talk about.
Muriel says that she’s candied some rosehips and offers some for the Christmas cake. I tell her I’ve dried some apples by the fire and have some sultanas saved, so that should do for dried fruit. I draw the line at turnip. I’m no good at this wartime housewife game.
Muriel refills our teacups and the second cup is stronger. The kitchen feels warm with two of us sitting there. I push up my sleeves and ask about her garden, her parents and then, after a while, I ask about Izaak. She fixes her gaze on the stained doily. When she does speak, it is slowly.
‘Well, I wouldn’t know how he’s doing, would I?’ The spaces between the words are precise and sharp. ‘Isn’t it you who keeps track of Izaak these days? You have some nerve sitting there, asking after him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘As if … as if you really believed I didn’t know about the notes you two sent back and forth. As if I didn’t suspect you’d been meeting. You could have told me. Should have.’ Muriel’s face is flushed and unhappy and I can’t help but straighten in my chair, though she isn’t being fair and she’s raising her voice now. ‘You’re married! You have some nerve.’
‘Muriel.’
‘No. Don’t. Please. I don’t want to hear anything else. It’s not worth fighting about.’
She doesn’t stay. At the door, I try to hug her but she is nothing but shoulders and elbows and my breasts feel sore when I try to reach around her. She shrugs me off and pulls her collar up against the rain. On the walk outside, she pauses for a moment and looks at me with a crumpled, angry face and it looks like she’s going to say something else, only she just jams her hat on over her ears and scuttles away down the deaf and empty street.
This won’t get any easier when my bump starts to show.
Half an hour passes and I hear the door again. I want to ignore it, but can’t. I’ll need to tell her something. Maybe everything. Can’t, I think. Can’t, can’t, can’t as I walk down the hallway, then the key turns slowly in my hand, the rain on the street, the sound of a cat.
‘Miss Baxter,’ I say. ‘Come in, please, come in.’
She stands on the threshold, her head tilted, her face soft. The cat in her arms dark, sleek and patient and the sleeves of her jumper catch the raindrops. ‘I wondered if you might need company on such a wet day.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That would be lovely. I have been meaning to knock on your door. I just …’
‘Well, now there is no need. Here I am.’ She wipes her feet on the mat and follows me through to the kitchen. I test the kettle to see if it needs more water, but she stops me. ‘No need for that, either,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you used plenty of tea when your friend was here.’ She sits down in the seat where I had been sitting, sighing a little as she eases herself into the chair. Her hair twists into coils over her ears, the moisture creating a soft halo around her small head.
‘Is it all right if I let Basil down? He likes to explore new places, but he won’t cause mischief. He’s very good.’
‘Of course. Make yourself at home,’ I say.
‘I call him Basil, you see, because when he was small he liked to sleep in a plant pot, so the name suited. Silly really, but there you are. He’s my company.’
I watch the cat walk the perimeter of the room on careful feet as if the tiles are untrustworthy, though I imagine it’s just the same tiles on the other side of the wall. He sniffs the small mat by the back door, the bristles of the broom propped up in the corner.
‘My sister thinks I’m daft to keep him. Recommends giving him sleep instead. Isn’t that a grisly way to put it? Sleep. But so many have done precisely that. My sister read about it in the London paper, and told me it would be a kindness. I could never. It’s not right. Not out here in the country. He’d never go hungry here, which is what they fear in the cities, I suppose. You can’t get rations for pets. Here, there’s no need and he copes fine with whatever mice and birds he finds.’
The cat weaves himself around me, the soft pressure of touch on my legs and I have to turn away, blinking. Miss Baxter reaches out and lays a gentle hand on mine. ‘There now, my dear. There now.’ Her voice is so gentle.
It doesn’t matter, does it? That I am not alone, that Muriel isn’t fair, doesn’t understand. It doesn’t matter that Stanley is gone and I can’t I can’t I can’t talk about it or tell anyone or he won’t be safe and I don’t know if he is safe at all these days or if I will ever find him again or
‘There now. You make as much noise as you need to. What a lonely stretch of coast out here. We must all be mad to live like this.’
‘I … I’m sorry. I shouldn’t …’
‘Shouldn’t say shouldn’t. Tears come. Let them.’
So I do. I let the room fill with tears, the table a raft that rises as a black line of weather covers half the sky and horror hovers like barrage balloons. Miss Baxter is a quiet hill and anchors the room as I rage.
‘And I’ve … I’ve … promised to spend Christmas with them. I can’t. I just can’t. Not knowing what she thinks.’
‘No? Mistakes shouldn’t matter so much. Maybe I should come along, too. Do you think you might ask Muriel’s mother if there would be room at the table for another poor lonely woman who can’t travel this terrible Christmas? If you would like the company.’
‘Would you? You’d come with me?’
‘Of course. Would it help if I mentioned that your husband had been home? What was it, four months ago that he helped me with my blackout curtains? Five? Such a nice young man. Handsome, too. Shame it was such a quick visit before he was reposted. Is that the word? I could tell all sorts of people about that. Or would that be the wrong information to spread? Which might smooth the way for you, my dear? You think about it.’ She sets a cup of water in front of me and I find I am thirsty.
‘You are so kind.’
‘It will be all right,’ she says. ‘Things settle. In a small place, they get stirred up easily enough, especially in difficult days. But they will settle. By the time your bonny baby is here, you’ll have dozens of offers of kindness again. I am sure of it. But then you might choose to move, too. A change might be good for you. And the baby.’
‘You mean somewhere away from the talk.’
‘Perhaps. It might be good to have some space around you. That would be nice. Oh, God bless you, child. You will find it, if that’s what you want. Or it will find you. Things turn up.’
‘And Muriel?’
‘She won’t ossify. There is too much life in her for that. She’ll soften again, I’m sure. You won’t lose her.’
A few days later, the wind is high and Miss Baxter knocks on my door again, asking for help with a rattling window pane.
‘It keeps me awake in the night and I worry it bothers the cat, too. Just a little noise most nights, but on days like this, it can be loud. A silly thing to bother you about with all the other noises in the night, but I thought perhaps you might have an answer?’
I find a scrap of cotton and tear off a small piece. Outside, the trees beside the kirkyard point their fingers to a pale sky, storm-broken and grey, and I think of Tennyson’s yew, which changest not in any gale – that was it, wasn’t i
t? And something about yews smoking with pollen when touched by wind. These rags of poems are the words in my head as I work the cloth between the frame and the glass with a blade and Miss Baxter sits on the edge of the bed, her cat curled beside her.
‘My mother once told me that men like the wind,’ she says. ‘Men like the wind, but women don’t. Do you think she’s right? I love the wind myself.’
‘Me too.’
‘It’s lively and so … so moving. It makes the world a lovely thing to watch.’
The snow comes in December. In the middle of the month, someone puts a shortened Christmas tree in the Anderson shelter and wreathes it with paper streamers. The week before Christmas, the tea and sugar ration is increased and I think about going home to Edinburgh after all, but there is a notice in the paper about a travel advisory – fuel conservation for the war effort. Well, Mum will understand that one, at least.
I am hungrier now, even with my maternity rations. I drink water to keep full and promise myself to forage the hedgerows come summer for more provisions. That and plant more onions, if I can find the sets.
There are no church bells this Christmas. Not here in East Lothian nor in Edinburgh, nor any city up and down the country. Since the summer, a ban has been instituted so that the bells might be reserved to signal a German invasion. And so it stands, even at Christmas. The silent bells hold both fear and joy, and I wonder how we’ll hear them when they do ring out again.
Mr Grant comes home from London with plans to stay for the rest of the winter. Mrs Grant slipped on the ice and has done something nasty to her back, so he’s concerned. I hear this from Miss Baxter who heard it at the kirk.
On Christmas Day, we go together to the Grants, Miss Baxter and I. The morning has been crackling cold and frost has iced every blade of grass, every yew needle and the stones of the kirk tower, too. Now the wind has sharpened and the walk to the house is cold. Beyond the trees, we hear the wild geese in farmed fields, gabbling among the precious winter wheat.
