Miss Purdy's Class

by Annie Murray

  Gwen gave a watery smile, trying to swallow down the lump in her throat. ‘I’d love to spend the day with you both.’

  By the time Daniel and his uncle came back that afternoon there was only just time to make it to the valley train. Gwen said fond goodbyes to Shân and Billy, with renewed promises to write to Billy. But as she and Daniel set off she felt tense inside with pent-up hurt and anger.

  ‘Plans are coming on,’ he said, full of excitement, as they walked down the hill. The day was dull, cooled by the previous night’s rain. ‘They’re thinking about making it October. Nothing’s getting any better here, whatever the out-of-work figures say!’

  Gwen nodded, silent.

  Daniel continued talking animatedly. His complete obliviousness to her misery made her feel even worse, and once more she found herself on the verge of tears, but she forced them away. How could she ask Daniel anything about what she had heard last night when she wasn’t supposed to have been there to hear it? But how could Daniel just go off for the day like that without her, and not think now to apologize or ask her anything about her day?

  Daniel was still distant, but full of talk. And I’m just a willing audience for it all, she thought bitterly. By the time they changed trains, she was so tense with hurt she was ready to explode.

  They settled into a carriage in which there was only one other person: an old man, asleep by the window. As the train moved off, Daniel turned to her and went to put his arm round her.

  ‘Don’t!’ she said, affronted. How could he start that, acting as if they were close when it felt as if he had never been further from her?

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ The conversation was conducted in a venomous hiss so as not to rouse the old man. ‘What d’you mean what’s the matter? You’re so caught up in yourself and so oblivious to anything else going on around you, you can’t even see, can you?’

  Gwen got to her feet. This time she couldn’t push the hurt away, pretend she didn’t mind.

  ‘What . . .?’ Daniel began.

  ‘Oh, don’t ask me “what” again! I just can’t stand it. And I can’t stand sitting with you for the rest of this journey, either.’

  ‘Gwen – for heaven’s sake!’ He got up to stop her, but she pushed him forcibly aside and went to the compartment door.

  ‘Just leave me alone!’

  She found another compartment, empty except for a man reading a newspaper. She sat by the window and silently let the tears roll down her cheeks.

  Forty

  There was a playful breeze tickling his right cheek, and a sudden press of sun rays against his eyelids. He opened his eyes, rolled onto his back on the prickly straw bed and looked up into the high barn. He could hear the dogs, and a moment later a wet nose edged with black and white hair nudged at his face, the tongue licking him.

  ‘Molly! Ugh – gerroff!’

  He sat up, clinging to her. The dog’s eyes seemed to smile into his. She was a shaggy, rumbustious, farm dog and, of all the good things here on Elm Tree Farm, to Joey she was the best.

  ‘Time to get up, you lot!’ Mr Belcher had swung open the barn door and dusty rays streamed in. Joey could see the man’s round face beneath the brim of his hat, pink in the warmth. ‘Come on – shake a leg!’ They had been on the farm for a week and so far he had said that every morning, nothing more, nothing less.

  Joey was stroking Molly, her hot, panting breath on his face, as the men woke around him. He kept touching the soft bit of black fur between her ears. Stroking that velvety spot made him feel nice. Next to him John sat up blearily, straw caught in his beard. Frank always woke very fast, was on his feet and moving within a couple of seconds, body a lean silhouette in the doorway as he went out to relieve himself. Steven lay curled up, as if he hadn’t heard anything. He’d shouted out in his sleep again in the night.

  Mr Belcher disappeared and a moment later they heard him whistle Molly, who obeyed instantly, pulling away from Joey.

  ‘Molly . . .’ he whispered after her hurrying form. He wrapped his arms round his knees.

  All that week they had been picking potatoes, gathering them in sacks in the long, sloping field beyond the farmhouse, hands burrowing in the dry soil to uncover the dusty potatoes, the smaller ones pale, like buried eggs. They worked on their knees, sacks under them, to save their backs. Once they’d worked for an hour and a half or so, they gathered with the other farm workers in the yard – only in the house if it was wet – and Mrs Belcher handed out plates of food. The first time Joey saw what they were to have for breakfast, the other men laughed at him.

  ‘His eyes’re going to pop out of his head!’ one of them teased. ‘You never seen food before, then?’

  ‘Don’t look like he has to me – ’e’s thin as a stick . . .’

  Joey was too busy tucking into the porridge to respond. It was thick and creamy and topped with a spoonful of treacle and he felt it sliding down into his stomach, warm and utterly comforting. He licked every last bit off the big spoon and stared at his face in it, stretched into a funny shape. As if the porridge wasn’t momentous enough, the next thing to appear was a great platter of curling bacon rashers, which they ate on hunks of bread, and white, thick-rimmed cups of tea into which he could put as much sugar as he liked. Joey ate until he thought he would burst. Later his stomach went crampy and he had to go and be sick at the edge of the field. After a couple more hours’ work, one of the men brought round a basket of bread and cheese and more tea, then later every day there was dinner and tea, pies or roast meats with lashings of gravy and mashed potato and vegetables and big, filling puddings with jam or raisins or treacle and custard. Joey had never known there was this much food in the world, that it could taste like this! He was getting used to eating better food and at every meal he bolted down as much as he could possibly manage.

  Mrs Belcher was a blunt, comforting person, with muddy-coloured plaits coiled round her head. Joey never saw her without a huge apron on, either white or made out of colourful flowery cotton.

  ‘Why’s this little ’un on the road with you, then?’ she asked John on the first day. Joey and John had limped along the rutted track to the farmhouse and asked for food and water. She looked doubtfully at John with his filthy black clothes and wild beard, but then her gaze fastened on him. Joey saw a horrified expression in her eyes.

  ‘He’s with me,’ was all John would say in his wooden way.

  ‘Is he your boy then?’

  ‘He comes with me.’

  ‘Dear God – he’s all skin and bone.’ Joey saw her make a face when she came closer to John, though Joey could see she didn’t mean to. Joey was used to John’s stink. ‘Are you hungry, boy?’

  Slowly, Joey nodded. When was he ever not hungry?

  ‘You’d better come on with me then.’

  She had sat them down at a long wooden table in the kitchen, where there was a large range and lots of huge pots and a kettle bigger than Joey had ever seen. She fed them tea and bread and butter. On the table in front of them was a dish of brown eggs. She didn’t ask any more questions. They needed help bringing the potatoes in, she said. And there was haymaking to do. They could sleep in the barn with the other men who were helping out.

  ‘Wait there, before you go out.’ She disappeared upstairs and appeared with clothes for Joey.

  ‘These were my son’s – don’t fit him no more. They’ll be too big on you, but you can’t go round dressed like that! Give me them rags of yours and we’ll put ’em on the fire. Here – you’ll need a bit of twine to keep them trousers up.’

  In the barn, Joey changed into the trousers. They were made of brown corduroy, well worn so that they were almost bald from thigh to knee, and were capaciously too large. Even tying them round the waist was not adequate – two or three Joeys could have fitted into them. John managed to rig them up by using the thick twine crossed over Joey’s shoulders so that the trousers reached halfway up his chest, and turning t
he bottoms up. There was a blue-and-white checked shirt that reached below his knees and he rolled the sleeves up almost to the shoulder. The clothes felt heavy and awkward after the threadbare remnants he had been wearing and when he started work in the trousers he kept having to adjust the string on his shoulders. The farm workers started to call him Coco the Clown.

  Later that day they’d met the two other migrant workers who had been taken on for the time being. Frank was a tall, lean, ginger-headed man who, Joey noticed, talked like Christie and had two fingers missing from his left hand, the little finger and the one next to it. All that remained were stumps with no nail and the flesh was stretched and shiny. Joey kept looking at them when they all sat at table together. When Frank used the rest of the fingers on that hand they looked like hooks. He had a scar on the side of his face next to his left eye. He joked with Joey, called him the ‘little fella’ like Christie had done. Sometimes he picked Joey up and spun him in the air. He was stringy thin, had prominent cheekbones and vivid blue eyes and Joey didn’t feel safe with him. His eyes were hard, whereas Christie’s had been soft and kind.

  Steven was older, balding, with large, deep brown eyes. Frank called him ‘the toff’ as he had a soft, well-spoken voice. He was gentle and nervous and had bad dreams, crying out, screaming in the night. The first time it happened, a high, unearthly shriek out of the pitch black, it woke Joey and left him trembling with fear. Then Frank’s voice came, blearily, ‘Give it a rest now, Steven. It’s all right, pal.’

  Other things shrieked at night: owls, and rats which pattered and rustled through the straw. Joey lay on the soft stalky bed, stomach distended with Mrs Belcher’s food, his back aching, limbs twitching with exhaustion after a day of hard work and sunshine. His face and arms, at first a raw pink, were turning brown. Occasionally at night the men walked three miles to the nearest pub, but usually they were too tired and sat outside the barn smoking. Joey would hear the rise and fall of their voices. Sometimes he heard them talking about life on the road, comparing spikes – the dirt-cheap doss houses – and characters they’d run into. John barely said anything and was always the first to come in. Joey knew, though nothing was said, that he didn’t like Frank. He called him, ‘that Frank’. Frank was always talking about Ireland and about guns and fighting, and he had a short temper which could whip out in a flash. Sometimes, as he drifted into sleep, Frank’s voice would get muddled in his head with Christie’s and Joey would have an ache in him to know why Christie had left them and where he had gone, and Siobhan too. And then he wouldn’t think about it any more. Nor about his mother, nor Miss Purdy. He tried not to see their faces. In the daytime he didn’t think about them.

  He and John had left a few days after Christie failed to come back.

  ‘I’m not staying here no more,’ John said. ‘We’re going to get out on the road when I find some boots.’ The next day he bought some in a pawn shop, and a hairy brown wool coat for Joey, which was too big and hung round his shins. They bundled a few things into the old red curtain: the pan, knife and spoon, the remaining candle stubs, matches and what little they had in terms of food and clothing. John carried the curtain over one shoulder, the contents clanking as he went along. Joey slung the coat round his neck, hanging forward over his shoulders.

  They walked out of Birmingham along the Warwick Road.

  That first day was very hot. They passed through Greet and Acock’s Green, the glare of the sun in their eyes. The soles of Joey’s feet began to burn on the hot road and each step hurt. The coat felt like a great weight and made his neck hot and prickly. In Acock’s Green they stopped at a vicarage and asked for water. The woman gave it to them in jam jars and made meat-paste sandwiches. She told them to sit in the shade of the church. With the sandwiches were two pieces of fruit cake, and they ate them and lay dozing in the heat until a man came past and yelled at them to clear off. Later they got down onto the towpath along the cut, watching the boats go up and down, and moving out of the way of horses. It felt cooler there by the water. They sat for a while by a bridge and Joey took his boots off and dangled his feet in the filthy water. John didn’t take his boots off. Joey wondered why not. He had never once seen John change his clothes. He barely ever even took his hat off. His beard was so tangled it looked as if it had melted into one big mass. They never said much to each other, just plodded on all day, Joey following behind John’s black-clad figure. That night they slept in a park, the next tucked under a hedge in a field. It rained on the second night and the drops gradually trickled through the canopy of leaves, though the curtain and the coat, which Joey wrapped round him, helped keep some of it off. They woke the next morning and rolled out from under the hedge, looking out across a pasture of thistles and dock leaves dotted with black and white cows, all shrouded in a fine mist, which burned off as the day grew hotter. There were brambles woven into the hedge, but the fruits were still green and hard. Joey tugged one off its shoot. It was tough and gritty, and made his face twist at the bitterness, so he spat it out. The grass smelt so nice when you lay close to it that he tried eating that, nibbling at the young, green shoots.

  ‘That ent no good,’ John remarked. ‘Only animals can eat that. You’ll make yourself bad.’

  After a lot of effort John lit a fire at the edge of the field and eventually they had a pan of black tea. They had spent almost a week on the road, wandering, begging from village rectories and farmhouses, sleeping in barns and hedgerows, when they walked up the track to Elm Tree Farm.

  The potato crop was picked and they were put to haymaking. To save the horses from the hottest time of day, Mr Belcher began mowing soon after four in the morning. The others went out with him, still heavy with sleep, into the grey, uncertain light and the smell of night and dewy grass. A shred of moon still glowed in the sky. Joey was given a rake to gather in the long, damp grass, which dried in piles as the sun rose and the heat grew. The air was moist from the dew, then warm as a steam bath. In that early part of the day they worked in silence. All the men were quiet except Frank, who after breakfast would often whistle or hum lively, jigging tunes to himself. Joey liked the songs, his mind followed the thread of them, but for some reason they seemed to enrage John, who Joey sometimes heard mumbling that Frank should ‘fuckin’ shut up’ or ‘shut his cake hole . . . bloody Irish carry on . . .’ Joey didn’t understand what made John like this about Frank. You never knew with John. He had liked Christie.

  The sun beat down on them as the days grew hotter. Mr Belcher stood the horse and cart in the shade of the one tree in the field for as long as possible. Frank and Steven flung forkfuls of hay up onto the cart and the mound grew higher and higher.

  ‘You can get up there now.’ Mr Belcher picked Joey up and almost threw him onto the pile, passing him a pitchfork. ‘Get it spread out. We’ve a lot more to get on there yet.’

  Joey stood, legs splayed, on the top of the cart. Molly was allowed to lie panting in the shade underneath. Part of the time Joey was busy with his fork while the others pitched up bundles of hay. As they went off to get more, he had time to stand and look around from the whispering green shade of the tree. The next field was full of waving heads of oats, which Mr Belcher said would be the next job. Beyond it, way down at the bottom edge of the farm, was the railway and every so often they heard the LMS trains chugging in the distance, puffing out clouds of steam to the blue sky, the sound building, then receding. Every time a train came by, Joey felt a thrilling sensation. He stood wanting to wave and shout. There were moments when everything seemed right, a perfection in the puffing of the train, the warm ease of his body fed with the morning bread and cheese, the smells of cut grass and horse, the animal nibbling at the grass and giving out loud breaths away to his left. There was Molly with her lovely soft head lying near him, only leaving the shade of the tree when she spotted a rabbit across the field and tore off after it. It was too quick for her and she returned with her tongue lolling to one side. He thought nothing could be better, ever.


  There came a couple of days of rain, so heavy that they had to wait before anything else could be harvested and the Belchers found them odd jobs to do round the farm. Joey was put to cleaning the stiff, filthy harnesses in the barn. Afterwards it grew very hot again. They had a day’s haymaking left. But the day was interrupted.

  The heat built up. Even though they were gathering hay right from the top end of the field, Mr Belcher wouldn’t move the horse. Frank cursed about this.

  ‘The animals get treated better than us here . . . Treats her like a queen and us like scum . . .’

  ‘No, he doesn’t – you know he doesn’t.’ Steven reasoned with him. ‘He’s a very fair employer, Frank – you know he is.’

  Joey liked Steven. He was gentle and kind. Steven had once worked in a bank. Joey didn’t know why he was on the road now. He wondered if he ever screamed and shook when he was in the bank.

  After a dinner of bread and meat pies, they rested for a while in the shade. Soon after they had picked up their rakes and pitchforks again, they heard a train coming up from the south. Joey watched it from the top of the cart. There was a heat haze across the pale oatfield and the train, dark and metallic, seemed the one thing with any definition in the landscape. Its steam was a cloud of white and the sound began to decrease. Then Joey saw something. Something which shouldn’t have been there: flecks of coloured light. He narrowed his eyes. The light was leaping up, orange, dangerous.

  ‘Fire! Down the oatfield. Get down there!’

  At Mr Belcher’s cry, everyone was running. Joey slid down from the stack, not knowing what to do but run. It seemed such a long way across the field. He was with Frank, John and Steven and Molly came with them too, her tail a flag amid the oat stems. Mr Belcher had disappeared, shouting that he was going to get some sacks. The four of them saw the fire take hold of a seam of the crop, licking hungrily at it.

  ‘Thank heavens there’s no wind,’ Steven panted. ‘Must have caught from a spark from the train.’