The Skylarks' War

by Hilary McKay

  Rupert, on a hot summer’s day, would leave his grandparents’ house to run across field and moor, racing along narrow fox tracks between bramble and gorse, and galloping through quaggy stretches of bog. Not pausing for thorns, nor the fiery patches his sand shoes rubbed on his heels, shoving aside fat sheep, arrowing his way to where the cliff dipped down to the sea. At this point, whether at high tide or low, there was always deep water. In the last few yards of his race, Rupert shed shirt and shoes, and when he reached the edge of the land he leaped without pausing. Each time it was the best moment of his life. One element to another. One world to another. Escape.

  It was not the same for Peter. Even before he broke his leg, he wasn’t much of a runner. The first time he saw Rupert leap from the cliff he assumed his cousin would drown. He hurried to the edge and peered over. There was Rupert, not far below him, laughing and blowing like a human porpoise in the glinting blue water.

  ‘Come on in!’ called Rupert.

  Every now and then Peter was struck by a mood of reckless madness. It hit him then. So he dragged off his clothes and, in a skinny tangle of shoulders and shin-bones, he hit the rocking sea. Peter could swim too; twice a week in summer term the boys from his day school were marched down to the town pool. In water Peter was as agile as Rupert. He could dive, as well. He had been the first to take off from the cliff in a swooping header. But it was Rupert who had said, the year before, ‘We should bring Clarry.’

  ‘She can’t swim,’ said Peter.

  ‘She’d soon learn, like we did.’

  Clarry, when asked, said, ‘Yes! Yes, please! But how could I? What would I wear?’

  They looked blank.

  ‘What do you wear?’

  ‘Bathing suits or we don’t bother.’

  ‘I can’t not bother and I haven’t got a bathing suit,’ said Clarry.

  ‘Ask Grandmother,’ suggested Rupert, but that was no use. Clarry’s grandmother said that little girls paddled. They paddled in their summer dresses carefully at the water’s edge, having left their shoes and stockings neatly on a rock. This behaviour entirely prevented any risk of drowning, said Clarry’s grandmother, and closed the sitting-room door.

  Clarry (in private) contemplated her reflection in her knickers and her liberty bodice. It was awful. She tried on Peter’s old bathing suit and it hung in great black loops from her shoulders to her knees. And so she gave up hope of swimming with the boys that year, although she often sat on the cliff above, watching as they dived and porpoised through the blue-and-green water.

  And then the next summer, there was the sovereign!

  It was agony to part with it, but she did, and for ten shillings bought a girl’s black bathing suit from a dismal little shop near the marketplace. It was made of wool, rather rubbed up because it was not new, baggy around her knees, and gathered with large, bright blue bows at the shoulders. Clarry didn’t like the bows, but the bathing suit was the lightest thing she had ever worn. She put it on and pranced into Peter’s room, saying, ‘Look! Look! Look!’

  Peter was lying on his bed, reading and resting his aching leg. He put down his book and peered at her. He said, ‘It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen you wearing.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Clarry. ‘It can’t be!’

  ‘It is. Can you get that blue-ribbon muck off?’

  ‘The bows? They’re what hold it on.’

  ‘Well, it’s awful,’ said Peter, picking up his book again. ‘Wait till Rupe sees it. He’ll tell you.’

  ‘What’ll I tell her?’ asked Rupert, coming in just then. ‘Oh . . . CRIKEY, Clarry!’

  ‘What?’ demanded Clarry.

  ‘Did you make it yourself?’

  ‘I bought it,’ said Clarry. ‘With my own money. Some of my birthday sovereign.’

  ‘From a shop?’ asked Rupert incredulously, and then, seeing Clarry’s face and remembering his manners, added, ‘Well done! Good for you! Superb!’

  ‘Are you mad?’ asked Peter. ‘Look at her!’

  ‘I only wanted to learn to swim,’ said Clarry, sighing. ‘I’m tired of just paddling. I know it’s not a very nice swimming suit.’

  ‘It’s just right,’ said Rupert. ‘Come on, then! Put something on top and we’ll try it out. We’ll run across the moor.’

  Clarry cheered up tremendously, pulled a dress on top of the bathing suit, hugged Peter goodbye and scampered after Rupert so quickly that in less than twenty minutes they were at the cliff edge, looking down.

  ‘Now what?’ asked Clarry.

  ‘Jump!’

  ‘Straight in, not round by the rocks?’

  ‘No, no, of course not! You said you were tired of paddling!’

  ‘Is that what you did the first time you went swimming? Jumped straight in?’

  ‘Yes. Straight in, and no screaming at the cold or else detention in the gym!’

  ‘And then you just started swimming, as easily as that?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rupert, and he honestly believed it was true.

  ‘It’s not far down, is it?’

  ‘Hardly a step,’ said Rupert. ‘In you go, and you’ll come up swimming like a duckling. Even Pete did. I’ll count you in, shall I?’

  Clarry wavered on the brink, nearly overbalancing.

  ‘Three . . . two . . . Don’t try diving. Diving needs practice. Do it the safe way, feet first, just to start with. Now then: one!’

  The safe way, Rupert had said, and Clarry shut her eyes, stepped into nothingness, flailed in sudden panic, and then found herself plunging down, and down, below the slapping green waves, into such coldness that she gasped in great panicky gulps, not of air, but of salt water.

  Everything ended then, the whole warm lovely world gone in a moment. There was no direction to reach for, and no air to breathe.

  There was an icy grip, disbelief and then blackness.

  Up above, Rupert, smiling, waited for her to bob up.

  This did not happen. Nothing happened. The green glass sea swung and rippled, quite undisturbed. Rupert shaded his eyes and craned sideways to see if Clarry was climbing up by the rocks and, as he did so, he caught sight of a small black shadow rocking in the depths.

  Sheet-lightning fear flashed from the water, blinding Rupert as he dived. Even so, he found her, weightless as a shadow, dragged her to the surface, towed her to the rocks, rolled her over and hit her sharply between her shoulders.

  Water poured from Clarry in streams and rivers and fountains. She was fish cold and grey-granite pale.

  ‘Clarry!’ bellowed Rupert, and turned her upside down and shook her. She retched and came alive, but her eyes didn’t open.

  Rupert picked her up, hung her over his shoulder, staggered across the rocks, up the steep, sandy path, and lowered her on to the turf. He wrapped his shirt round her, rubbed her back and shouted at her. When he propped her up, she slid sideways, heavy now, and limp as a jellyfish.

  ‘Oh, God, Clarry,’ moaned Rupert, and saw her reach out a hand to comfort him.

  After a few minutes, she began shaking and then crying silently, yet more salt water pouring down her cold cheeks.

  ‘Why didn’t you swim?’ demanded Rupert, suddenly angry, but she only shivered and cried even more.

  ‘Poor little duckling,’ said Rupert, and at last Clarry sat up and wiped her eyes.

  It took him ages to get her home. She kept stopping to lean on things. When they finally arrived, he left her in the hall and knocked on the sitting-room door.

  This time, the grandparents were not so calm as usual. Twice in one summer was too much. First Peter, now this. It beggared belief. Every year their grandchildren were met at the station, provided with beds and catered for with astonishing quantities of food. There was sea and moorland, a town, a garden and a pony. What more could be expected? Where was their common sense? Why on earth couldn’t Rupert be trusted to take care of Clarry?

  ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ croaked Clarry, the first words she had spoken.


  ‘Never heard such nonsense!’ growled her grandfather, and Rupert was sent off to fetch the doctor while Clarry was hustled up to bed in the room next to Peter’s, piled with blankets and scolded.

  ‘What’s happened? What’s happened? What’s happened?’ demanded Peter. They closed his bedroom door tight shut because they had enough to deal with as it was, and then they opened it again because he was thumping on the wall. With the help of his crutches, Peter dragged himself out of bed and went to join the turmoil in the room next door.

  ‘She might have drowned!’ fumed her grandfather. ‘A nice job for me that would have been, telling her father she’d drowned!’

  Peter snorted and said something so outrageous that he was ordered to get out. The doctor arrived, with Rupert in tow. Clarry fell unhelpfully asleep in the middle of him listening to her lungs. She slept for hours and hours. When she woke up, her grandmother was sitting beside her looking terribly bored.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Clarry.

  Her grandmother looked down at her.

  ‘I shouldn’t have jumped. I guessed that really. I just thought . . . I thought . . .’

  ‘Rupert must know best,’ finished her grandmother.

  Clarry nodded.

  Now you know he doesn’t, said her grandmother, not in words, but with an eloquent sniff. She gave another sniff as she picked up the sodden bundle of Clarry’s bathing suit from the washstand. ‘Is that what you spent your birthday money on? What a dreadful-looking garment!’

  ‘It didn’t take all the money,’ said Clarry. ‘Don’t throw it away. I need it.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what for.’

  ‘I’m still going to learn to swim.’

  ‘Oh, are you?’

  ‘Yes, and I heard what Peter said. Father would have minded if I’d drowned!’

  ‘Everyone would have minded, Peter most of all,’ said her grandmother. She got up to go then, but hesitated at the door, and then suddenly came back, stooped, and kissed the top of Clarry’s head.

  ‘You should go to sleep again now.’

  Clarry dropped off almost at once, but she woke in the night gasping with fear and groping blindly into the blackness surrounding her. For a day or two, it hurt her chest to breathe. It rained, and she stayed in her room, reading Sherlock Holmes adventures in faded blue paper-covered copies of the Strand Magazine. Her grandfather had produced them, silent proof that he too was glad she had not drowned. On the third day she felt better, the sun came out and her grandmother handed her the bathing suit, dried out and transformed. The saggy legs had been shortened and edged with neat black bands, the blue bows on the shoulders replaced with black and white ruffles, and all the seams taken in. Most surprising of all, her grandmother had news for her.

  She said, ‘I have been asking my friends. I find that one of them has a grown-up daughter who swims. Also she tells me that there is a part of the bay that is roped off for safe bathing. Would you like me to arrange for you two to meet?’

  So in time Clarry learned to swim after all, and later to dive, not like a duckling but like a slim black seal. Rupert said, ‘See! I knew you could do it!’ and Peter said, ‘You shouldn’t have panicked. Swimming is obvious.’

  ‘Swimming is not obvious!’ said Clarry. ‘Not unless you’re a fish. Or a frog. Otherwise it’s a lot of puffing and managing. Arms as well as legs. And hair in your eyes and being absolutely drenched. Not just wet, absolutely . . . Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. I can do it now anyway.’

  The boys were moderately pleased with her. They were never very good at admitting they were wrong, but she carried on adoring them just the same.

  1912–1913

  SEVEN

  Growing Up

  That autumn Peter went back to his day school, limping slowly away each morning and returning with remedial exercises to do at night. This meant that Clarry had another year of being raced through his homework.

  Mrs Morgan said, ‘Amazing how some folks get their own way!’

  ‘It wasn’t a bit like that!’ said Clarry loyally.

  ‘Oh, wasn’t it?’ said Mrs Morgan. ‘Well, he couldn’t have had much of a summer, I don’t suppose. And what did you get up to while His Majesty was in bed all day?’

  ‘I learned to swim,’ said Clarry proudly.

  ‘You never did!’ exclaimed Mrs Morgan, looking impressed at last. ‘That’s something I can’t do. But then I never had nobody to show me. Your cousin Rupert teach you, did he?’

  ‘It was his idea,’ said Clarry, after hesitating for a moment. ‘His and Peter’s.’

  ‘Them two’s your heroes!’ said Mrs Morgan amiably. ‘Can’t do no wrong nor ever could. I was never like that with my brother.’

  ‘Weren’t you?’

  ‘I was not! I used to think, well, I’m as strong as him. Stronger! I’m as hard a worker. Harder! I’ve got as good a brain as him. Better by a long way. I’m just as good as him, for all he’s a boy. So I used to think things out for myself.’

  Mrs Morgan gave Clarry a very significant nod, as if to say, And so should you!

  Clarry ignored it. She was already beginning to think things out for herself.

  It was the great falling away of illusions that was the start of growing up.

  A year passed.

  In the autumn of 1913, Peter was sent to boarding school, white-faced, sulking and beset by black-hearted rage. He did not expect to survive. It made no difference that Rupert had been there for years, or that there had hardly ever been a boy who did not survive. (Appendicitis not reported soon enough, and the loose guttering on the chapel roof, which never should have been climbed. Could the school be blamed for that? No.)

  Already Peter was much later to go than he should have been, the direct result of stepping off a moving train. It had saved him for a year, but it could do no more. It was not, as Rupert had once remarked, an escape route that could be taken twice. Anyway, Peter had brains; he should go to university, and for that he would need a scholarship. His day school was not the sort of place that got university scholarships. This boarding school was. And so an old trunk was dragged down from the attic and packed with school uniform, a lot of it passed on from Rupert. Clarry and Miss Vane filled a tuck box with gingerbread, peppermints, pots of jam and potted meat. Mrs Morgan brought him a tub of eucalyptus ointment to rub on his chest. His father gave him a leather purse containing four half-crowns, five silver shillings and ten sixpences.

  ‘At least you’re being paid!’ said Clarry when she saw it.

  A train ticket was bought, and that was that. There was nothing left for Clarry to do for him except stuff his pockets with brown paper bags. Peter, limping (one shoe built up to make his bad leg long enough to match the other, stiff at the knee and twisted at the ankle), climbed on to the train and entered another world.

  This was school, and everything he’d feared. Barren, jarring, stale, always lonely and never alone. He had known it would be bad, and it was.

  For the first few weeks Peter existed in a state of numb isolation. Rupert could not help him. Clarry’s letters were collected but unopened. It was the longest and most intense sulk of his life, but finally he began to notice people. First, the small blond boy in the next bed. They even had a conversation. At the end of it the blond boy asked Peter a question:

  ‘Where would you run away to,’ he demanded, ‘if you were running away?’

  ‘Cornwall,’ said Peter.

  Even Peter, who hardly noticed anything, noticed the swift, intense glance the blond boy gave him then. It was the last time he saw him; he disappeared the very same day. Peter did not tell anyone about their conversation, but, all the same, he wondered. Had the boy made it to Cornwall? Was he happy there? If he wasn’t, would he come back? Peter found himself wishing that he would. He thought of questions he would ask him if he did. He regretted not having taken more notice of the blond boy. Thinking like this, Peter felt his numbness begin to wear off, a painful process. He longed for it to ret
urn, but it would not. He felt very exposed now, and took to scuffling around, like a small animal under a big sky.

  After a few more days had passed, a new person was given the blond boy’s bed. Bonnington. The boys called him ‘Bonners’, shortened to Bones, as they called Peter ‘Penrose’, shortened, though he did not know it, to Penny (Rupert being Rosy). Peter privately labelled Bonners ‘the Bony One’ in his head. The Bony One was tall and thin. He had either more bones than most people, or bigger ones, or both. It showed especially around his eyes, and in his enormous hands that looked like bundles of shaking firewood.

  Despite the Bony One’s extra bones he was not tough. He said to Peter, ‘I hate PE. Hate it.’

  ‘So would I,’ said Peter. ‘If they made me do it.’

  ‘Mud. Football boots. Training on the Big Field. Showers in the Hut. You escape. You’re lucky.’

  It was true, Peter knew it, he was lucky. He did escape. He couldn’t play football or rugby or cricket. He couldn’t join in the long, sodden cross-country runs and he couldn’t climb ropes in the gym. He spent the times when other people were taking part in these activities huddled beside the lukewarm radiator pipes in the hardly visited library, together with the boy with the dicky heart and the one with asthma.

  ‘What do you do, while we’re out there doing games?’

  ‘I go to the library.’

  ‘What, on your own?’

  Peter told him about the boy with the bad heart, and the one with asthma, and the Bony One looked at him with eyes like those of a hungry dog.

  He said, ‘I suppose you have to be born with a bad heart?’

  ‘S’pose so,’ agreed Peter.

  ‘Asthma’s not catching, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  The Bony One looked at Peter’s leg and the built-up shoe.

  ‘It’s not that wonderful, being out of PE,’ said Peter defensively. ‘It’s nothing special, hanging around a cold library.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said the Bony One.