The Skylarks' War

by Hilary McKay

  Peter signed the forms: P. Penrose, in his usual cramped handwriting.

  ‘Shouldn’t you even try and make it look like Father’s?’ asked Clarry.

  ‘No. If you get in, there’ll be more forms to sign sometime or other. Easier not to start faking things. Come on, what’s next? “Employment of Father”. What’ll we put? “Dithers around”?’

  ‘No!’

  Insurance and banking, wrote Peter. Mother deceased.

  They both hated looking at those two words so much they turned to the next problem.

  ‘“Address for Correspondence”,’ read Peter. ‘It’ll have to be here. “Date”. There, done it. You can post it. What about that exam?’

  ‘Vanessa’s going to help. She says Twelfth Night is full of jokes and we can read it together,’ said Clarry. ‘I’m learning all the kings and all their dates – that was Rupert’s idea. I’ll talk to Miss Vane about Scripture, without saying why. Simon said it was bound to be St Paul. He said examiners love St Paul.’

  ‘I’ve forgotten who he is,’ said Peter. ‘Don’t try and tell me. I don’t believe in any of them. The only thing that really matters is maths.’

  Over the next few days, wrapped up in blankets and reeking of eucalyptus, Peter hurried Clarry through a refresher course of long division and multiplication, fractions, percentages and angles of triangles. Unfortunately his father noticed how much he got better during this process. He was sent back to school before he had time to instruct Clarry on the areas of circles. As his train pulled out of the station, he leaned from the window to shout last-minute advice:

  ‘Find out about pi!’

  ‘Pie?’ asked Mrs Morgan. ‘There’s pork and there’s apple and there’s steak and kidney, and now and then there’s rabbit, and when I was a girl there was rook!’

  ‘Rook pie?’ asked Clarry, aghast.

  ‘Dark meat,’ said Mrs Morgan.

  ‘But what did it taste like?’

  ‘Cat,’ said Mrs Morgan. ‘It was very like cat and I didn’t care for it.’

  ‘I found out about pie from Mrs Morgan,’ wrote Clarry to Peter, and Miss Vane was perfect for Scripture and St Paul. She said her father traced his journeys on a map and marked them all with different coloured inks. She showed the map to me. Green and blue and purple. Red for Damascus and black for Rome. Miss Vane said her father was a man very like St Paul. They both wrote letters all the time and both were bald. But Miss Vane likes St Matthew best. She says he may have been a tax collector, but he was the only one who took the trouble to write down what he heard at the Sermon on the Mount.

  When Clarry eventually sat the exam for the grammar school, the Scripture question was the first she read: ‘Describe two saints, giving a brief summary of their lives and their contributions to Christianity.’

  Clarry was so thankful that she smiled.

  ELEVEN

  Grammar-school Girl

  Two weeks after Clarry sat the school entrance exam, a letter arrived, addressed to her father. It said that his daughter had obtained a place and could begin after Easter.

  Clarry’s father was not a shouter, or a banger around. He was a sulker. His silent anger filled the air like a dark and clammy fog. He kept it up until Clarry was reduced to a hovering misery about the house and a whole week had passed. Then one evening, meeting her on the stairs, he looked at her directly for the first time in ages and said, ‘I was not consulted at any stage.’

  ‘Right at the beginning you were,’ replied Clarry bravely.

  ‘I don’t suppose for a moment you considered the extra expense.’

  ‘Vanessa says I can have her old books and her grown-out-of uniform,’ said Clarry, ‘and Grandmother has sent me ten pounds.’

  ‘Did you ask her for that?’

  ‘No, of course not!’

  ‘Why would she do it, then?’

  ‘Rupert told her about me taking the exam. I think she was pleased. She helped me once before, when I wanted to learn to swim.’

  ‘So everyone knew except me?’

  Was he sad? He sounded terribly sad to Clarry. She could hardly bear it. ‘I truly don’t think it will make any difference to you, Father,’ she told him earnestly. ‘I’ll just have to leave a bit earlier in the morning and be back a bit later in the afternoon. Everything else will be just the same.’

  Her father sighed.

  ‘And when I grow up,’ she added anxiously, ‘I’ll be able to get a job and earn my own money and you won’t have to work so hard.’

  ‘I hope I have never complained about that, Clarry.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, and sighed again. ‘Well, I suppose you must do as you please.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Clarry. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you! Would you like to come and see it, Father?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘The school. So you know where I am.’

  ‘Thank you. I do know the location, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Vanessa says there are concerts and things, when parents are invited.’

  ‘We’ll see, Clarry.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to make you angry.’

  ‘I’m not angry, just disappointed. However, you must tell me if there is anything you need.’

  There were many things Clarry needed, but nothing would have made her say that to her father just then. With Grandmother’s ten pounds and Vanessa’s help she gathered together the essentials: three school blouses, a pleated blue skirt that Vanessa had outgrown and a mushroom hat with a gold-and-blue ribbon. She also became the owner of eleven brown-paper-covered textbooks, which she carried backwards and forwards each day, sometimes sparing a penny for a bus if the weather was dreadful, usually walking, often reading a book as she trudged. As time went by, it was as if she wore an invisible track across the town. She grew a little taller, the books changed and the new ones were heavier than the old.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Peter, inspecting them when he came home from his own school. ‘A bit different from the rubbish you were doing with those old bats in the attic.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Clarry.

  ‘What does Father say about you being there now?’

  ‘I don’t think he really notices.’

  ‘I bet he never went to see it, did he?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘He never will,’ said Peter, and Clarry could understand why he was bitter. Their father had never visited Peter at his boarding school once. Not at the beginning when he had vanished into a misery so deep that Clarry thought he must have died. Nor for the winter concert when (dressed in tissue-paper kimonos) he, Rupert and Simon the Bony One astonished the whole school into wild applause with their performance of ‘Three Little Maids from School’. Not even recently, when scarlet fever had raged through the classrooms and corridors, and Peter had been one of the victims.

  ‘I don’t mind Father not bothering about my new school,’ said Clarry. ‘I truly don’t. It’s better in a way. It saves him worrying too much.’

  ‘It saves him moaning too much, you mean,’ said Peter, grinning.

  ‘No, I don’t! Well, only partly. And it’s more private this way.’

  Clarry had had private worlds before, but they had all been in her head. She had never had a private world with real live people in it. Now she had. At the new school she was not Peter’s nuisance sister, Rupert’s little cousin, her grandparents’ youngest grandchild, Mrs Morgan’s kitchen helper, Miss Vane’s Good Deed or her father’s personal destruction.

  At school she was simply Clarry Penrose.

  People noticed her smile and her too-long skirt, her quietness, her chopped-off hair, and the speed with which she could climb a rope in the gym. She became a person who walked miles to school, could be asked about maths, honestly loved Latin, would remove unwanted spiders and never had any money. A bit of an oddity, but so were many others. It was a good school, and accepted oddities as long as they had brains.

 
It was in every way different from the Miss Pinkses’. There was a rose garden in the front; a gravelled drive; long, light corridors; and bare, cold classrooms. There was a library with a polished floor and blue-curtained windows that held window seats, a gym with wall bars and ropes, a chemistry lab with Bunsen burners and a whiff of sulphur and explosions, a biology room with a field mouse family in a tank.

  Every morning began with assembly: one hymn, one Bible reading, one prayer and a list of announcements. These covered everything from the correct place to store outdoor shoes to Those in Our Thoughts Today. Those in Our Thoughts Today only ever made the list once; the following day they were expected to have got over whatever it was that had caused their mention. The school motto was ‘Quaere verum’, which meant ‘Seek the Truth’. It should have been ‘Do Not Fuss’.

  Not fussing was the basic expectation of every girl, and came in very useful when it was time for the midday meal. This was either mince and two boiled potatoes, fish and two boiled potatoes, or cold meat and two boiled potatoes, and was always followed by half a hard green apple and an optional portion of rice pudding. If you didn’t eat your midday meal, no fuss was made. You simply went to a little room by the gym and signed a book to say you were fasting. Fasting people were given a spoonful of cod-liver oil and a glass of lukewarm milk, a combination so appalling that people seldom signed the book twice. Clarry, ravenous after her hurried bread-and-butter breakfast, long walk and five morning classes, managed her dinner with no problem at all.

  She became friendly with a lot of people very quickly. Friendly, but not friends, except for Vanessa, much older and seldom seen beyond a cheerful wave now and then. Friends her own age at school meant more than Clarry could manage: tea at each other’s houses, birthday presents and shared outings at weekends. Even so, there were a lot of people to call ‘Hello, Clarry!’ in the mornings, and ‘See you tomorrow!’ at the end of the afternoon. ‘Yes, tomorrow!’ Clarry would call back as she turned towards home.

  Somewhere along that hour-long trek, schoolgirl Clarry was left behind. She would enter the door of the tall stone house as quiet as a shadow, scuttle upstairs with her books and her mushroom hat squashed under her coat, and re-emerge in her old blue dress, as if the long school day had never happened. She was often hovering on the stairs when her father came home, sometimes with a book, sometimes with the knitting Miss Vane had recently introduced to her Sunday School pupils. ‘It’s a square for the Sunday School blanket,’ she told her father once. ‘Miss Vane is collecting them and sewing them together. We have to hand in one a week.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said her father.

  ‘When she has one hundred and sixty, it will be a whole blanket for a poor family,’ said Clarry, encouraged by his approval. ‘We each have a colour, but it has to be a dark colour because of not showing the dirt. I’m maroon.’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Mrs Morgan made a stew this morning and I’m hotting it up for our supper and there’s greens and some apple pie from yesterday. Do you think it would be nice to eat it in the kitchen? It’s warmer there.’

  ‘Eat yours in the kitchen by all means,’ said her father cordially. ‘A very good idea! I will have mine in the dining room, as usual.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Clarry. ‘Oh. Would you rather I was . . . rather I stayed . . . would you like me to keep you company?’

  ‘Another day I would be very pleased to have you,’ said her father. ‘However, just now . . .’

  ‘You have some thinking to do,’ finished Clarry, and her father nodded and looked pleased, as if relieved that she had understood at last.

  Clarry understood very clearly. I have some thinking to do had been the standard dismissal of her childhood, and of Peter’s too. When she was small, it had impressed her. She had tiptoed past her father’s closed door, and wondered what important thoughts were whirling on the other side. He might be writing poems, or working on inventions. A quiet private detective, she speculated (after reading Sherlock Holmes). Or a secret hero, planning his next good deed. Perhaps he worked out plans for battleships. Perhaps he was a sort of spy?

  ‘Oh, what!’ Peter had exclaimed, exploding with scornful laughter when Clarry at last got around to confiding these ideas. ‘Father? A spy? An inventor? A poet? He does accounts all day at work, and then he comes home and just sits!’

  ‘He doesn’t.’

  ‘Messing about with that pipe!’

  Clarry resisted the temptation to point out, ‘Sherlock Holmes had a pipe!’ and said instead, ‘He writes things in a notebook!’

  ‘That!’ said Peter contemptuously. ‘I read it not long ago. It said: Mrs Morgan re: proper receipts. Vane re: C’s appearance. School fees. Query. No poetry at all!’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘I’ve seen it often,’ said Peter relentlessly. ‘He leaves it behind his tobacco jar. You should look yourself!’

  ‘I’m not so sneaky!’ said Clarry angrily, and inexplicably tearful too. ‘And I don’t believe you either!’

  But over time she had come to accept that Peter was right. Her father did just sit. I have some thinking to do meant Take yourself away. He had to put up with her because she couldn’t, without ridiculous expense, be disposed of to boarding school, but, still, she could take herself away.

  Separate meals became their usual pattern; Clarry in the kitchen with her books for company, her father in the dining room with his thoughts.

  However, on Sundays they ate together, discussing, with a strained sort of politeness, knitting, the weather, the latest letter from Peter, whether Clarry was happy (‘Yes, thank you, Father’), whether her father was happy (‘Yes, thank you, Clarry’), and whether Peter was happy (‘It really isn’t relevant at this stage of his life’).

  Other more interesting topics introduced by Clarry, such as the acquisition of a kitten (‘I don’t think so’) or what one would buy first should one be left a thousand pounds by a stranger (‘I really don’t have time for such silliness’), always resulted in Clarry’s father leaving the table before pudding, saying, ‘Do carry on without me. I have a great deal to do.’ It might have been lonely for Clarry, but it wasn’t because of the vast amount of homework school expected her to accomplish. No one could be lonely with Latin and French to translate, chemistry practicals to write up, literature to analyse and endless quantities of maths.

  I am so glad I moved to my new school, wrote Clarry to Peter and Rupert.

  I knew you would be, replied Peter smugly. About time you started using your brain.

  Rupert also wrote back to her: Congratulations on surviving so much education! The trick is knowing when to stop. My whole aim now is to ESCAPE!

  He was eighteen, and finishing school just as Clarry was beginning. He had endured twelve years of it, but the grandparents had no intention of allowing him to escape. Oxford was their next plan for Rupert, Oxford University, whether he liked it or not, because it was a family tradition.

  Count me out! wrote Rupert to Clarry. Family tradition be blowed! I’ve done my share. Twelve chalk dust years of ‘Sit there and learn this!’ Twelve years of clammy morning chapel! Twelve years of listening to inky men in flapping black gowns tell me what to do! TWELVE ENDLESS STULTIFYING YEARS AND THEY THINK THEY’LL MAKE ME GO TO UNIVERSITY! NO, THANK YOU!

  More and more, as she grew older, Clarry was the person to whom Rupert wrote with his dreams and schemes and startling ideas. Clarry tried hard to understand, even when she didn’t agree, especially about school and university. After all, it was wholly her fault that Rupert had been sent away to boarding school when he was only seven.

  I think Oxford would be wonderful, she wrote back, but I do see what you mean, because sometimes I dream I am back at the Miss Pinkses’ and in my dream I run away down and down and down the stairs, but I am always still there. The grandparents are furious with you, though. My father says you are the first in the family for three generations not to aim for university.

  ‘What,
girls too?’ I asked, and he said, ‘Obviously not counting the girls.’

  ‘I don’t think obviously not counting the girls is fair,’ I said. ‘Why should the girls never go, even if they would like to do, and the boys always go, even if they would rather not?’

  So Father went away.

  Most of the time there is only Father and me in the house, me in my room right at the top and him in his room right at the bottom and all the empty rooms in between, but yesterday was lovely because Vanessa came and stayed the night. She said, ‘Give my love to Rupert whenever you write.’

  Mrs Morgan says to tell you it’s a load of nonsense to go to university. You’ll have to be done learning one day, she says. She thinks you should be on the stage!

  I have been thinking about our summers in Cornwall. Peter and I, and the long rail journey and the feeling of getting closer and closer. Then, towards evening, the train stopping at last at the little station, and we’d look out and there you were, waiting and waving. It was the best moment ever. Perhaps you might like to be a railway porter, Rupert. You’re good at meeting trains.

  I have other plans just now, replied Rupert, by way of a cheerful crumpled postcard. However, one day I may be a railway porter, but only at one station and I will only meet one train, which no one will be allowed to travel on except Peter (perhaps) and you.

  Usually Clarry shared her messages from Rupert, not this one. The breezy jokes were typical Rupert, but ‘other plans’? she wondered, and put it away privately, under her pillow, where it gave her uneasy dreams.

  At the end of Rupert’s last term of school he didn’t go back to Cornwall. He had a friend whose family lived in Ireland, a fiery-headed footballer named Michael who had won the Latin prize. Rupert went home with him instead.

  ‘Is he nice?’ Clarry asked Peter.

  ‘I suppose so,’ admitted Peter grudgingly. ‘Everyone said he was a bit mad, but I think they say that about a lot of people. He was very brainy. So brainy he didn’t get expelled when he stole a car.’

  ‘Stole a car! Whose car?’