by Jane Bailey
On this particular morning I seem to have woken early, and I am aware of something stirring under the bed. When I find the courage to look, I can see nothing, but I can hear some distinct rustling. There’s a cardboard box shoved right against the wall with old magazines in it. I reach out and tug at an open flap, afraid I’ll be bitten by a rat. Instantly a paw comes out and swipes me on the wrist.
“Kemble!” I croon, a little annoyed at the scratch. “Kemble, come out and let me cuddle you.” I pull harder at the box and get another blow from her paw. But I know she’ll be in for it if she’s found upstairs, so I pull the box right out. The sight of four tiny kittens fills me with such awe that I just sit perfectly still and watch them until I hear Aunty Joyce’s creaking tread on the stairs down to the parlour.
Even Aunty Joyce’s insistence that we cannot keep the kittens does nothing to prevent this new feeling of light-heartedness. I have four kittens and Kemble has chosen my bed to have them under.
“Don’t go getting too attached,” she says. “They’ll have to go.”
“Oh, let her keep them a while,” says Uncle Jack.
“Whatever for?”
“It’s not fair to take them from the mother this early. Let her suckle them at least. Wait till they’re weaned.”
“Have you gone mad? Why?”
“She’ll only pine for them if she loses them this soon. Think of the cat.”
Aunty Joyce slams a loaf of bread on the table, then goes off to the pantry and slams a few tins around on the shelf. Then she comes back and throws a pot of jam on the table.
Uncle Jack looks shifty and says nothing. Aunty Joyce is breathing fire.
“Oh. Think of the cat! Think of the ruddy cat, why don’t you? She’ll lose her blessed kittens! Imagine how she’ll feel! Don’t ever ruddy well think of me!” She kicks the range door shut with her foot. I feel I ought to point out to someone that if twat is a swear word then I’m fairly certain ruddy is too, but she has slammed out into the back garden and Uncle Jack does not look at me. He puts on his boots and goes out of the front door without speaking. Her tantrum is not mentioned again, but I’m pretty sure she never has to wash her mouth out with soap.
Summer arrives in full flood. The road outside the cottage has halved in width as the hedgerows expand fatly along its sides. That summer of 1944, working in the fields and the barns, loitering in the lanes, is the summer I remember most of the whole war. I spend it with the other children earthing up potatoes, picking up stones, cutting thistles and rat-catching, or swapping stories against the knobbly trunk of an old oak tree with Tommy.
In the early mornings we’re sent off to Farmer Hawking’s, up behind the back garden, whose foreman ‘Thumper’ gives us jobs to do. It takes me nearly a week to learn to milk.
“First you wash them,” Thumper says, giving me a wet rag, “then give us a shout an’ I’ll show you how to hold the udders.”
A few minutes later one of the prisoners of war, Franz, starts laughing, and a couple of the land girls join in.Thumper comes back down the line of cows to see how I’m getting on and stands looking at me, his head on one side, smiling.
“What?” I ask.
“Still washing?”
“It takes ages,” I look up at them all, and can feel the red of my cheeks and little drops of sweat around my hairline.
“I’m not surprised! You’re supposed to wash the udders, not the whole bloody cow!”
There are hoots of laughter all round, but the German prisoner on the other side of me leans on his cow’s back and says kindly, “It is a good thing you do. She likes it I sink.” He smiles at me. “She gives you more milk, you will see.”
My whole body aches with milking, and my fingers grow so stiff I can hardly move them. All I manage is a tiny squirt that barely wets the bottom of the pail. As the days pass my squirts become rhythmic and strong, and Heinrich, the kind German, can find less and less in each udder as he finishes the cows off for me.
When milking is over we all gather in the barn and Aunty Joyce brings out a tray of tea with bread and dripping. The prisoners talk to each other in one corner, although I notice Heinrich is often quiet. He seems to look over at me and Aunty Joyce a lot. I look at her as she puts down her tray and blows the air up her face so that the blonde wisps dance aside. She is flushed, and with her sleeves rolled up and her heavily patched wellingtons pulled over her droopy corduroys, she looks radiant. I have been so tied up in trying to understand her that I forgot for a while how beautiful she can be.
On the way to the fields from the cow barn is the short lane leading back to Weaver’s Terrace, and the trees bordering it are in full bloom, forming an arched tunnel of green. On our first day of fieldwork Tommy flies on ahead of me with the other children, calling to me to hurry up. But I stand in the middle of the lane, feet planted firmly on the yellow track, and stare upwards. I am so awed at the plumpness of a full-blown summer, the rampant sticky stems and the sweet woody smell of the air, that I forget to move. My insides pummel at me like a rabbit in a sack, and I don’t know if it is homesickness or the overwhelming shock of tender green that makes my face wet with tears.
At dinner time, in these first few weeks, I find an excuse to slip home so that I can check up on my kittens. Aunty Joyce moved them out of the house straight away and stuck them in a tool shed near the lav. I cuddle each one in turn and they let me, until they spill out of my grasp, light as air, and on to the grass. Some days, if Aunty Joyce is not there, I take them into the house. There is a little black and white I call Boomer who always runs up and down on the piano in the front room. Since I’ve never been invited into this room, I guess it is somewhere I shouldn’t go, a bit like Aunty Vi’s front room, reserved for visitors only. When Boomer runs up and down the piano it’s a devil of a job to get him back out because the door doesn’t shut properly. He knocks over the wedding photograph or leaps into the knitting basket and plays with the wool. I can see he’s going to be a handful when he’s older, but he’s definitely my favourite.
Sometimes Heinrich comes with me to see the kittens. He leans over the back wall from the field and looks wistful.
“Ket!” he says sometimes.
“And kittens,” I say.
“Is like you. Kitty! You are a kitty, I sink.”
I laugh. It is always the same joke, but it is his attempt to make contact. And when I give him a kitten to stroke, he caresses it so hungrily I can feel the great hollow he is desperate to fill, and it is just like mine. We kiss and cuddle the kittens, snuggling their soft fur to our cheeks and necks with matching greed.
Germ warfare
Since Uncle Jack’s shifts keep changing, our routine in the Shepherd household revolves around the Railway. When he does an early turn a boy comes knocking at the door in the small hours and shouts, “Jack! Jack! You up?” like he’s barking mad or something. And since Uncle Jack is never late for anything, he shouts, “Keep your hair on, you noisy blighter!” and stomps grumpily out of the hallway with his boots already laced up.
I don’t always wake up with the call-boy, but on the few occasions his knocking has pulled me out of sleep I have had that sense again that my mum has been with me, holding me in her arms. I can almost feel her warmth taken suddenly away from me, and then I become so chilly I can’t get back to sleep.
When Uncle Jack comes home after an early turn, Aunty Joyce always complains about the night’s banging, and he curiously changes allegiance, explaining that if he had overslept he wouldn’t have been able to get the engine up to steam on time, and the whole system would be running late. The call-boy, he maintains, is an essential part of the well-oiled machine that is the very Great Western Railway. Other times Aunty Joyce complains that his eight-hour shift has lasted nine hours, and he places his black oilskin driver’s cap upon the table, tilts his head back importantly, and explains. “What you’ve got to understand,” he says, “is there is no such thing as an eight-hour shift with the Great Western.You
can’t relieve a train halfway between Stroud and Gloucester, or between Cheltenham and Swindon. The driver stays with his train until the journey is complete. Then – and only then – can he finish his shift.” He sits back and taps the flat of his hand on the table. “How would it be if I took a running jump halfway between Stonehouse and Stroud? Hmm?”
Aunty Joyce looks sometimes as though she thinks this might be a very good idea. And although her main irritation is that she can never get dinner on the table at the same time for him, I wonder if she’s a little fed up with his evangelical devotion to the Railway and to God, and maybe wishes he would be a little more devoted to her.
Uncle Jack’s shifts mean that some weeks Aunty Joyce needs me in the mornings, and sometimes in the afternoons or evenings, so my farm help is never too regular. There are no annual summer holidays for the teachers, and if children can’t be at home or in the fields then they’re found chores to do at school. Of course, the Heaven House boys flock to the fields, and only the very small ones have to help at school. And since I know I’ll end up there too if I can’t be of enough use to Aunty Joyce or the farm, I am eager to get some sort of routine going.
When milking is over, Tommy and the others go off to the fields, and I sometimes go with them. But if Aunty Joyce needs me for chores, I stay while the prisoners muck out the sheds and load the heavy churns on to the waiting milk cart, and until Aunty Joyce has finished collecting all the empties on her tray.
After breakfast I sweep the kitchen floor, feed the chickens and pick vegetables from the garden, while Aunty Joyce sits at the kitchen table to consult her second bible, Gleanings from Gloucestershire Housewives, before pronouncing on the intended dinner.
The grocer is Mr Tugwell, Baggie Aggie’s husband, and he always gives me a wink. Aunty Joyce buys a tin of Spam, some flour and butter or a portion of cheese. She doesn’t buy powdered eggs because we have our own, but she never fails to remark on the poor souls in cities who have to rely on the stuff.
“This poor girl never had a fresh egg in her life till she came to us,” she says with a self-congratulatory shake of the head. I soon realize how important it is for the world to see what a fine job she is doing with one of the nation’s unfortunate paupers. Sometimes, if there’s a crowd, I join in: “I thought cows grew on trees till I came here,” or “At last I’m free of nits,” or, better still, taking off my bonnet and giving my head a good shake, “Look! The nits have almost gone!”
Aunty Joyce usually pats me on the head and smiles at the other shoppers.
She does find it hard to smile, I think. With her curly blonde pageboy hair, her generous lips and wistful blue eyes, there is more than a passing resemblance to Ingrid Bergman. And the butcher, Mr Glass (of wife with very fat arse), often gives her his wrapped pink flesh with a wink and tells her that for a moment he thought he was in Hollywood, even though we are standing ankle deep in sawdust and surrounded by smiling china pigs wearing aprons. She never gives anything more than a wooden smile, but he keeps on trying.
Of course it is hard to imagine why anyone would want to flirt with a man who sports a meat cleaver and wears blood. He often puts his raw bloodied knuckles into my cheek and says, “Hello, my darlin’,” and I want to duck. But still, I wish she would loosen up a bit.
I think hard about ways to make her laugh, and start to tell jokes in the shop queues.
“What am I saying, then? Look!” I touch my ear, my eyes and my nose. “What is it then, eh?”
But Aunty Joyce just looks uncomfortable.
“Ear eye nose you!” I blurt out, grinning hopefully. “Get it? Ear, eye nose you! Get it? D’you get it?”
She tells me not to be rude.
“No. See, it’s not rude, it’s –”
“You’re making too much noise!”
“All right,” I whisper, “how about this one? One bloke goes to another bloke, ‘My wife’s on ’oliday,’ and the other bloke goes, ‘Jamaica?’ and he goes, ‘No, she went of her own accord!’”
She frowns sternly. My voice has risen steadily and I find I’m belting it out.
“D’you get it?”
Maybe she would tell me off good and proper if she didn’t notice the other women in the shop tittering.
“My, she’s a card, en’ she?”
“You got a right cracker there, Joyce,” “Lovely to hear them happy, ennit?” and, from Miss Lavish, “How are your knickers, Kitty?”
“I got plenty more of them up my sleeve,” I say, basking in the attention. “Not knickers – jokes!” Everyone laughs. I am a success. “D’ya hear the one about the bear with piles …?”
The shop is in uproar. I am as high as a kite, and Aunty Joyce, praised for her highly entertaining protégée, still only manages to roll her eyes at their mirth.
Back home the day’s spoils are lined up on the kitchen table and put into the larder. Now we prepare the vegetables. I am not allowed to do any chopping, but I scrape the carrots and new potatoes and wash the cabbage or lettuce in the sink in ice-cold water.
Before she lets me do anything Aunty Joyce makes sure my hands are clean. She ties back my hair with a fat kirby grip and sets to work scrubbing my nails for me. Then, to my bewilderment, she washes the tap. In these days of shortages, of thin slivers of soap to serve whole families, Aunty Joyce washes the tap. She does this “to stop the germs”. I have it in my head that germs are something to do with Germans, so I’m happy to enter into the spirit of things, at first.
“It’s no good cleaning your hands if you then go and turn off the tap which you turned on with dirty hands.” She looks at me with wide eyes: “Recontamination, Kitty!”
After the cleaning rituals she takes down her book from its shelf and reads aloud the recipe for the day’s dinner. I always feel important when she reads out to me, and sometimes she even asks me for advice.
“Small tin of corned beef – have we got that, Kitty? Two or three onions?”
I nod gravely.
“A small quantity of lard?”
“It will have to be small,” I say.
“Okay. Cut beef into slices and place in bottom of dish …”
After reading, she announces one day that Mr South has killed a pig and promised her the head. She starts flicking pages.
“Brawn … mmm … I fancy a bit of brawn. Half a pig’s head that has been salted or pickled … one or more pig’s tongues … clean out the eye part. Put the head and tongues into a saucepan, cover with water, and bring slowly to the boil.”
Facky Nell!
I take some newspaper from the shopping basket, sit at the table and begin cutting it into squares.
“What are you doing?”
“Cutting it for the lav.”
“We don’t use paper that’s been used, Kitty. We use clean newspaper, that’s been read.”
I stop cutting and look up. “It’s all going on your bum, isn’t it?”
“Don’t be disgusting!” She looks at me with utter repugnance. “Ah! Here we are: Headcheese: the pig’s head is singed, then soaked in salt water for twenty-four hours. It is then taken out, scrubbed and cleaned. A red-hot poker is thrust into its ears and nostrils … blah … blah …”
I put my hand to my mouth and close my eyes tightly. Aunty Joyce goes on for some time about simmering and liquid. “… take note that the eyes which in boiling will be removed from their sockets are taken out and thrown to the hens.The ears are chopped with the other meat.”
“I ain’t feeding no eyeballs to hens. I ain’t eating no chopped-up ears!” I run to the sink and retch.
She looks faint. “Lord above! Now I’ll have to disinfect the sink!”
“Please, I wasn’t actually sick. You needn’t worry!”
“There was a dribble! I saw it! As if I haven’t enough to do without all these extra germs!”
She looks so wretched that I begin to feel sorry for her, as well as feeling deeply guilty for having brought so many extra germs into the house.
As the weeks pass, however, I do wonder if Aunty Joyce isn’t perhaps a bit barking mad. This household germ invasion seems to keep her more occupied than the German one which is bothering everyone else.
It’s one particular event which first arouses my suspicions. I’ve been up in the fields earthing potatoes and return home to find the house empty. I’m aware of making great clods of earth on the front path, so I leave my shoes outside the front door. There may even be some cow dung on them, for I’ve been in the cowshed earlier with Tommy. At any rate, I stand by the range in my stocking feet and wonder what I should do. The parlour is spotless, so there’s no point in tidying. I go into the front room and open the window to see if Aunty Joyce is coming. There’s no sign of her, so I take a newspaper, place it on the front room sofa, and sit down on it tentatively so as not to leave a trace of dirt. I pick up a magazine from the rack on the floor. Mrs Sew-and-Sew is looking smug next to some refooted stockings, and so is a boy whose mother has cut off his overcoat to make him a hideous jacket. I wouldn’t be so chuffed if I were him. I’m having real trouble with some of the words, when there is a grunt from the window. I look up and see Aunty Joyce trying to open the window wider with her elbows, her fists clenched tight in front of her. I rush over to help her.
