by Jane Bailey
“What is it? You okay?”
She seems surprised to see me.
“Could you hold the curtains right back?” she asks, a terrible expression of pain and confusion in her face. Then she begins to ease herself on to the window ledge and, huffing and puffing, she manages to get one leg over. “Don’t let me touch the curtains!”
I hold them back as far as I can, and something shiny and heavy slips out on to the carpet from the curtain hem. She is so busy trying to squeeze through the window without touching anything that she doesn’t notice it, and I slip it into my dress pocket.
After launching herself through the window and hurling herself like a paratrooper on to the carpet in front of me, Aunty Joyce completes a small roll and sits up, fists still clenched, relieved. She lets me help her up by the elbow, and when I follow her into the kitchen and she asks me to turn on the tap, I begin to work something out. By now I am fluent in the language of germs, and I see that I’m not the one who’s contaminated. I can’t pick germs up from the dirt around me: it is Aunty Joyce. She is afraid of touching things – not just because they will contaminate her – but because she will contaminate them. Dirt affects her – not other people – and she alone bears the responsibility for keeping it to herself.
Skeletons in the cupboard
In my pocket is a key.
It fits, of course. I prepare myself for a dangling skeleton as I unlock the cupboard, my blood pumping so hard I’m sure my head must be nodding back and forth like one of the hens.
It is difficult to say whether I’m disappointed or relieved. For there, hanging up, is a row of neatly pressed girls’ clothes. A yellow gingham dress, a pink floral one, a blue plaid one and a selection of cardigans. There are pastel summer ones in four-ply and winter ones with collars and pockets in double knit. There is a small pair of corduroy trousers too, and a row of little shoes. I pick one up. It is a red leather strapped shoe, as pretty as can be, but second-hand. I try it on. Although it is slightly too wide, it almost fits in length and is more comfortable than my boots. I try on its partner, and walk up and down the room. Indignation starts to bubble inside me, and I take in deep breaths as I look at this little treasure trove locked away from me for so long. It is quite clear that these were meant for me. Some kind soul like Miss Lavish or Baggie Aggie or Lady Elmsleigh – or maybe even Aunty Joyce herself – got these in preparation for my arrival. But somehow I have not lived up to expectations, and Aunty Joyce has thought the better of it. She was expecting a little girl with glossy ringlets and clean nails, a girl with good manners who never said twat or facky Nell. That I have been a huge disappointment to them is obvious, but I am so hurt I forget that I am precisely what they were expecting: a girl from the East End, warts and all. Or if it does dawn on me for an instant, I shove it aside in the fury of realizing that I am not good enough, not worthy enough in some way for these beautiful clothes. Only one thing is clear: for some reason, she does not like me. I have always suspected it, but now I know.
I plod up the lane to the farm sick with self-pity, aching for someone to talk to, to undo the knot of emotions which is tightening around my throat. But my mum is making weapons and my dad is using them somewhere in Burma. There is a loneliness in being away from those you love, and there is another quite different loneliness, of not fitting in, of standing on the outside of everything around you, with alien smells and alien accents and alien emotions. The smells of muck and dung and sap and silage taunt me as much as the frenzied attack on every wrong word I say. And the sun can shine and the flowers bloom and the birds trill all they like, but the withdrawal of touch is like a prison cell. I am eight years old. To live with a woman who recoils from me is the loneliest thing on earth.
I find Tommy on the way to the fields, and we bunk off together, heading to the woods to the west of Sheepcote. As we enter the woods he takes my hand – just sort of holds it out slightly for me, so that I could miss it almost, if I weren’t so longing to hold on to someone. We walk through a tangle of low vegetation. I still can’t quite believe the way that plants grow. Nothing seems to stop them, and they are everywhere, letting off a stink of juice and sap and pollen. There are tall, indestructible leaves like rubber (he calls these lords-and-ladies) and colonies of leathery leaves, tough as oilskins (he calls these wild garlic); there are stinging nettles with leaves the size of my hand; there are a few ugly spotted orchids that make me catch my breath in horror for fear they might sting (he calls these ‘bee-orchids’), and things that spring out at you from nowhere. There are pretty white star-shaped flowers called wood anemones. Tommy says they’re sometimes called ‘smell fox’.
“Smell fox?”
“Yep. Know why?”
“Foxes like ’em?”
“No. ’Cos they’ve got poison in their stems. Can give you blisters. Sly like foxes, see.”
Tommy reckons that plants were here millions of years before man and will be here millions of years after we’re gone.
“They’re the most powerful living things on the planet,” he says, and I believe him. “Hold the answer to all illness, they do.”
He stops now and then to show me a butterfly, and sketches them quickly in his notebook, which he carries in his pocket. When he’s finished he tucks the short pencil behind his ear like the grocer or the bread deliveryman. Today there is a tortoiseshell, a wall brown, a meadow brown and a large skipper. There are moths too, wings folded horizontally on the tree bark. I treasure their names like jewels: pale tussock, burnished brass, rosy rustic. There is a buff-topped one that looks like a stick and he makes me hold one, so that I won’t be afraid any more at night.
Out of the woods, it is the unbroken horizons that impress me most. There are no jagged edges like in cities, since the villages are nestled into the slopes, and their ageing stone merges so well into the landscape that a thin mist can hide them altogether. Some mornings a whole hill can disappear under the mists.
Even with the arrival of jeeps and combine harvesters, chewing gum and jitterbugging, this little pocket of Gloucestershire seems secluded in spirit. Tommy says the hills were nothing but sheepwalks once, and the land nothing more than herbs and wild grasses to feed the famous – the glorious – Cotswold sheep. Now the drystone walls remain, but the fields are being stuffed with wheat and barley, potatoes and mangolds, and every bit of fallow pasture is ploughed up for the war effort. It’s all wrong, according to Tommy. He says we’ll never get the fallow land back, and it’s storing up problems for the future. The land needs to breathe, to rest, to renew itself. He shakes his head. He’s afraid his good earth is ruined for ever.
When the church bell strikes ten o’clock and I’m certain Aunty Joyce will be out, I take Tommy down to the back field behind our house to play with the kittens.
Kemble is lying slumped in a patch of sunlight behind the shed, and two of her kittens are suckling. The other two are bouncing and leaping around the garden, falling over each other and attacking imaginary foes.
Tommy’s face lights up. He can’t stop smiling.
“Look at that one – he’s bonkers!”
The black kitten is doing a somersault over a leaf he has found, then pushing the leaf with his paw so that it moves and he can attack it all over again.
I laugh too. “He can be yours, if you like.”
Tommy looks at me, open-mouthed. “You’re allowed to keep ’em?”
“We’re keeping them till they’re weaned. Uncle Jack says so. You can have Bonkers and I’ll have Boomer and Heinrich is mad about the little tortoiseshell. He calls her Kitty!”
I pick up Bonkers and give him to Tommy to hold, then hold Boomer up and smile into his dear kitten face. I try to detect a smile on Boomer’s face, but he looks off into the middle distance and wriggles free.
“Best not get too attached,” says Tommy. “They won’t let you keep him.”
I consider this for a moment. Whatever happens I will continue to see Boomer. I’ll visit whoever owns hi
m every day, or else I’ll hide him.
“It’s Aunty Joyce,” I say, biting my lip. “She doesn’t like me.”
“What makes you say that?”
I pick at a few tufts of grass and hold them up to the kittens. “She doesn’t like you and she doesn’t like me. I know she doesn’t like me. She had a whole load of girls’ clothes hidden away – nice stuff – and she makes me wear this, and I know what’s going on because it’s all the right size, and the reason she hasn’t even let me try it on is obvious!”
“What?” He looks strangely worried. Almost panic-stricken.
“There’s just something about me she can’t like, no matter how hard she tries. What is it, Tommy? What’s wrong with me?”
He breathes out a long sigh and smiles. “It’s not you.” He shuffles up closer to me by the wall and puts his arm around me. “These clothes weren’t meant for you, look. She collects things.”
“No she doesn’t.”
“Old family stuff, she does. And look, I can promise you, you’re very lovable, you are.” He gives my shoulder a squeeze, and I flop into it, taking grateful wafts of his woollen sheep-smelling jacket.
When it is teatime I have an idea. I go upstairs and take out the little key from my curtain hem, where I’ve hidden it. I open the door and select the yellow gingham dress and try it on with the pair of red shoes and a lemon-coloured cardigan. I creep into their bedroom and look at myself in the dressing-table mirror, turning this way and that and smiling at my reflection. It is dinner at teatime today, and I can’t wait to see the surprise on Uncle Jack’s face when he sees how smart I can look. And Aunty Joyce will wish she’d thought of lending them to me sooner.
It seems foolish now, I know, but that little eight-year-old simply doesn’t guess. I blunder in there in the full party frock of their dead daughter and wonder why Aunty Joyce drops the runner beans all over the floor and opens her mouth in slow motion and narrows her eyes and lets out the most terrifying howl anyone has ever aimed at me before or since. I wonder why she leaps on me like a mad woman, tears off the cardigan and orders me to “Get it off! Get it off. You wicked girl!” I wonder why she screams, “How dare you?” so many times, and why Uncle Jack just keeps repeating, “Joyce! Joyce! Joyce!”
Counting ourselves lucky
There are many stealthy sorrows in Sheepcote. There are those you just chance upon, like George, who drives an imaginary Spitfire down the road and makes the sound of an engine. He is a six-footer with the build of a warrior, but his little head hangs apologetically from his monstrous shoulders, and when the village girls tease him – “D’you wanna go out with us then, George?” – his eyes light up and he nods so credulously it would break your heart.
Then there are those you’d never guess at, hidden behind the little lace curtains and the stoic Sheepcote faces, sorrows and secrets that only an invisible person at the knitting group can uncover.
There is Mrs Marsh with the small moustache, whose husband delivers the milk and who’s taken in the evacuee, Babs Sedgemoor. She’s lost two of her three sons in the war, one by a U-boat and one shot down over France, and she’s had no bodies to bury. Her gloves and mittens are perfect, with not a stitch out of place, not a fault in the neat four-ply. Then there’s Mrs Glass with the very fat arse, the butcher’s wife. She can hardly look Mrs Marsh in the eye with two strapping lads, still too young to join up, and lucky as Larry to be safe on Gloucestershire soil and not lifeless on some strange field far from the smell of home. She is so guilty for it you wouldn’t know she forgot to put cold water in the tub some years back and immersed her first-born in a bath of freshly boiled water. The fatal baptism killed her only daughter, and left a furrow on her brow which everyone understands and no one speaks of, at least not while she’s there. “I’m a lucky woman,” she says eagerly, and with a note of apology for her two healthy boys, safer than they should be in the midst of war; but no one really knows what ‘lucky’ is any more.
But what of Aunty Joyce? I listen eagerly for snippets about her. Often, on a Thursday, she’ll pack me off to the village hall and stay in with Uncle Jack if his shift means he’s home. At least, that’s what she tells Aggie and the others, but I can’t see them having much fun together.
These are good times for me though, because I’ve learnt that whenever someone is absent, they become the unofficial topic of conversation.
“See our Joyce is busy again,” starts Mrs Chudd. “Got work up at the farm, ’ave she?”
“Just spending some time with Uncle Jack, I think.”
“Oooh?” A mewling of surprise from Mrs Chudd.
A moment of silence, but Mrs Chudd will not let this one go. “She’s such a pretty thing. I wonder she doesn’t wear make-up any more. Have you noticed? She could look like a film star with a bit of rouge.”
“It’s Jack as stops her,” says Aggie Tugwell.
“No!”
“He does. I heard that ever since … you know … he won’t let her touch the stuff.”
“Get away!”
“Tiz true.”
“Well, that don’t make no sense, do it? Tiz like he’s punishing her.”
“Twuz hardly her fault.”
“Makes no sense at all.”
Clicking of needles. Things are hotting up. I put my nose down and knit furiously.
“These things make people behave in strange ways,” says Miss Lavish, generously. “I should think it can tear a couple apart.”
“It takes its toll for certain,” says Aggie.
“It do that,” says Mrs Marsh, her moustache unmoved.
“But tiz no one’s fault …”
“Well …”
“They do say that lad Tommy –”
“No!”
“Well, there was something fishy going on,” says Mrs Chudd, pulling decisively at her ball of wool to unravel another yard.
“Tommy would never do a thing like that. I’m sure of it,” says Miss Lavish.
“Well … that’s not how she sees it. I don’t know how she puts up with it. Seeing him around.”
“She’s a saint is Joyce.”
“She is that.”
Then all faces suddenly freeze as Aunty Joyce turns up with my cardigan and decides to stay till the end. We talk about Gregory Peck and Betty Chudd’s amazing arithmetic, and I am left yet again with this notion that Tommy has done something too dreadful to speak of, and also with the more curious notion that Aunty Joyce is, of all things, a ‘saint’.
When we get back it’s still light, but time for my bed. I go out the back to the lav, and try hard not to think of the many-legged creatures scuttling around the wooden seat and in the murky corners. After I’ve flushed I go round the back of the shed to the kittens, but they’re not in the box. I look under the wooden crates and in the bushes and over the wall. At last I see Kemble and she comes to rub up against my legs.
“Where are those naughty kittens?” She continues to rub up against me, but makes strange mewling noises. “Have you lost them? Let’s help you find them.”
I search behind the hen coop, in the cinder pile and between the rows of beans. Then I lift the lid of a pail, which is sitting by the shed, and see a pile of wet fur with pink flesh visible underneath.
I drop the lid and it clatters off down between the runner beans. Kemble comes up and sniffs the pail, miaowing pathetically. I take them out one by one and lay them on the grass, but Boomer I pick up in my arms. I hold his little soggy body close to mine. His head rolls right back and I support it in my hand, catching my breath as giant angry sobs build up like a tidal wave.
“NO!” I scream. “No! No! No!” I run indoors, Boomer’s little head flopping backwards as I trundle into the parlour.
Uncle Jack covers his face with his hand, but not in shock, more as though he saw it coming. I plant myself in front of Aunty Joyce, face burning with tears and nose running over my lips, ready to rebuff all her excuses.
She looks at me unmoved. It is
not the look of a saint.
Sketching heaven
Once again the solace of touch is taken away as I awake. There was a human warmth surrounding me and now it has gone with the sunlight on the curtains.
Yesterday’s horror steals over me. I remember my wakefulness for hours and lean out of bed to reach for the bundle I have left hidden beneath it. I unwrap Boomer from my cardigan and stroke his dried fur gently.
I am a bag of nerves and sorrow and anger. I will run away. I will kill myself. I will kill Aunty Joyce, smash this house to pieces, scream in church, stab Miss Didbury, swear in Sunday school, facky, facky, facky Nell! And facky Jesus and facky jelly ghost!
Instead I pound the eiderdown with my fists, grit my teeth, and go straight out of the house without any breakfast, leaving Aunty Joyce standing by the range with a pot full of porridge.
I go to the only grown-up I can think of who might understand my grief. He is still busy milking, but he stops when he sees me with my bundle and my rumpled face. “Look, Heinrich! Look what she’s done!”
He stands up, and then immediately crouches down to comfort me.
“He is dead?” He takes Boomer and strokes him affectionately. “And the others also?”
I nod, blotchy-faced, folding my lips as tightly shut as I can, but then erupt into ferocious sobs: “She did it! Aunty Joyce! She drowned them all in a bucket! She’s a cruel witch! She’s a witch!”
Heinrich puts his arm around me and pulls me in close. I can smell the reassuring cow odours of his jacket and the musty woody smell of his neck and hair, and suddenly everything feels a little bit all right. This is the consolation I need, the rescuing warmth of an embrace, the fragrant comfort of human skin.
“Don’t cry, Liebling. Don’t cry.”
I gulp in the balsamic wafts from his closeness, unwilling to let go. He strokes my hair. “I sink Joyce she is a gentle woman. I sink she will not hurt any creature without a good reason.”
