The Skylarks' War

by Hilary McKay

  ‘I’d love to,’ said Clarry, ‘but . . .’

  ‘Do make an effort, Clarry!’

  ‘Of course I’d love to come. Thank you, Miss Fairfax.’

  ‘Whatever is the matter, then?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Clarry, which was not true. What was the matter was clothes.

  In her room that evening, Clarry went through her wardrobe. Her school skirt that had come from Vanessa. Her three school blouses, two of them also from Vanessa. Miss Vane’s blue-striped dress that was, as had been predicted, going on forever.

  No, no, no, thought Clarry, remembering how Peter had burst out laughing the first time she put it on.

  What, then? She had a green velvet Sunday dress, bought by her grandmother two years before, no longer as green nor as velvety as it once had been, and very much shorter too. Two cotton summer frocks with flapping collars. Nothing at all suitable for either a visit to an Oxford college or (even harder to imagine) the speech day that was coming up at Peter’s school quite soon.

  ‘You needn’t worry,’ said Peter, when Clarry asked about this event. ‘I’ve given up expecting Father to bring you along to clap. Don’t look like that! I don’t care!’

  ‘I do, though,’ said Clarry and, the first chance she got, she stopped her father in the hall to ask, ‘Please could we go to Peter’s speech day this year, Father?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ he replied blandly. ‘What would be the point?’

  ‘It’s the last one ever and Peter should have someone there.’

  ‘Let’s not sentimentalize things, Clarry.’

  ‘He’s worked so hard. Aren’t you proud of him?’

  ‘Naturally I’m glad he’s worked, and I’m sure he’s done very well.’

  ‘He said you wouldn’t bother,’ said Clarry rebelliously.

  ‘It isn’t a matter of bothering. It simply isn’t practical.’

  ‘Well, I’m going!’ said Clarry.

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ said her father, smiling his empty smile. ‘This should cover the train fare,’ he added, taking a ten-shilling note from his wallet. ‘And let’s have no more fuss!’

  Ten shillings, Clarry discovered, could hardly have been more accurate. It would pay for the train fare and leave four pennies to spare. Four pennies would not buy so much as a pair of stockings, never mind a new dress . . .

  Mr King refused to buy her silver watch but asked, ‘What about that bicycle?’

  ‘No!’ exclaimed Clarry. ‘Never!’

  ‘You managed without it before.’

  ‘I couldn’t again.’

  Clarry’s world had opened up since Simon had got her riding. She kept the bike in Jester’s stable, away from critical eyes at home, and it had given her a new freedom. Now at weekends she could get out to the cottage to visit Lucy, and Vanessa too, if she was there. On weekday mornings she walked the ten minutes to the stable, strapped her books on the carrier, and was at school in a fraction of the time it had taken in the past.

  ‘Anyway, it’s my brother’s bike,’ she told Mr King, ‘not mine, so I couldn’t sell it.’

  ‘Never bothered you before! Still got that brass-topped table, have you? Easy money, that could be.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Mr King, who had left school at nine years old and worked for his living honestly, and less honestly, ever since. ‘If you don’t want money got easy, you’ll have to do as other folks do, won’t you?’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘Get it the hard way!’

  ‘What’s the hard way?’

  ‘And you a clever grammar-school girl!’ exclaimed Mr King, and went away shaking his head.

  Clarry consulted Vanessa, cycling out to the cottage when her friend was back for the night. Vanessa was more helpful than Mr King, at least. ‘You needn’t worry about catching a train to Oxford!’ she said. ‘You can come with us. We’re all going together to cheer on Simon. I’m driving Dad’s car.’

  ‘I’m driving Dad’s car!’ corrected her mother, coming in from the kitchen. ‘It’s much too far for you. Lovely to see you, Clarry! Have you said hello to Lucy?’

  ‘Yes, she looks wonderful. Any news from Odysseus?’

  ‘How clever you were about Constantinople! No, not a word, but I’m not worried at all. I imagine he’s escaped. A boat over to Greece somehow, and then it’ll just be a matter of time . . .’

  ‘And dodging Calypso,’ added Vanessa.

  ‘Horrible girl, be quiet!’

  ‘All right! I’m taking Clarry off for a gossip. Come up to my room, Clarry! Absolutely you have to be there at Speech Day. It’s the last one ever for both of them. You can’t leave sweet P with no one to clap him.’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ agreed Clarry. ‘Vanessa?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘What do people wear?’

  ‘Posh as possible,’ said Vanessa, who at the moment was gnawing an apple down to its core in a very unposh manner indeed. ‘You can borrow something of mine. I’ve got a lovely cherry-red thing I bought in a sale. It’s too tight. I knew it would be, but I couldn’t resist it. I fell for the swishy silk lining. We’ll turn up the hem and if it bags at the side you can just keep your elbows tucked in. Try it on!’

  Clarry tried it on, and although the silk lining was certainly lovely, it was much too big, whatever she did with her elbows. And also very red. Much redder than cherries . . .

  ‘All right, I admit it’s not you!’ said Vanessa when she had stopped laughing. ‘Especially with those stockings! By the way, I hope you won’t mind, Clarry dear, if I talk to Your Braininess about stockings for a few minutes.’

  ‘If you must,’ agreed Clarry, hanging the red dress back on its padded silk hanger.

  ‘I must. I’ve been meaning to for months. Think of it as a tutorial. Take notes if you like. And while you are listening help yourself to anything that catches your eye in my wardrobe.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Clarry, ‘but if you don’t mind I’ll just concentrate. I may close my eyes sometimes, like I do in Latin.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Vanessa. ‘But this is much more important than Latin. Now, prepare to be amazed!’

  She was the kindest friend ever, thought Clarry as she cycled home that night. And the funniest, and the most generous. And the most ridiculous. If I wore that red dress I’d be the reddest person in the room! And imagine it at Oxford! I’d be the reddest in the city!

  All of a sudden she was tired of living in a patchwork mixture of Vanessa’s donations, Miss Vane’s contrivances and her grandmother’s often-stated belief that it didn’t matter what you wore, so long as you behaved.

  Grandmother is wrong, it matters a lot! thought Clarry.

  It seemed, astonishingly, that it even mattered to Peter. A postcard from him was waiting when she got home. He had sent instructions:

  Don’t call out my name when you see me, he had written. Don’t look too pleased if I win anything. Or too interested. Don’t go talking to everyone like you do. Don’t fuss and don’t wear anything that people will notice.

  Clarry looked regretfully at the brass-topped table, remembering the time that she had disposed of the family piano without a single pang of conscience. As she gazed, she suddenly understood what Mr King, that industrious rag-and-bone man, meant by the hard way to get money.

  I need a job! thought Clarry.

  ‘I would love to come to Oxford with you,’ Clarry told Miss Fairfax on Monday morning, ‘but first I’ll have to find a way to earn some money.’

  Then Miss Fairfax replied, exactly as if she had been waiting for this moment. ‘The Grace twins in Class One missed most of last term through measles and whooping cough. Their mother needs someone to help them catch up. Their father is away, and their mother hasn’t time – she works for the Post Office now, and is never home before six. Two hours every day after school except Wednesdays, and Saturday mornings, nine till one. Twelve hours. There’s a six-ye
ar-old too, who the twins will collect on their way home from school. The family happen to be my neighbours and their mother asked my advice. I thought of you at once. She is offering six shillings a week, which seems fair, although not generous. What do you think? Will you have to ask your father?’

  ‘No,’ said Clarry. ‘I won’t have to do that. Thank you, Miss Fairfax. When can I begin?’

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Key to the Cricket Pavilion

  ‘He was called Osler,’ Peter said to Simon. ‘Professor Osler. He walked right in front of me as I was riding down the street. He admitted it was his fault. I didn’t hurt him – he thought he’d hurt me. I had to push my bike afterwards, and he saw the way I walked. Then we got talking, and I found out he was a professor of medicine.’

  ‘A doctor? So is that what you’ll be?’

  ‘At least I’d be useful.’

  ‘And they’ll let you?’

  ‘He said so, and I’ve already passed the entrance exams.’

  ‘It’s not what I thought you’d do.’

  ‘It’s not what I thought I’d do,’ said Peter, ‘but now there’s a war and I can’t stand doing nothing.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ said his friend.

  They were standing at the library window looking out over the sports fields, the same fields that they’d stared at the day they met. The view was unchanged – the same mud, the same rain – but they were changed. Peter no longer looked like he was waiting to step off a train for a second time. Simon the Bony One, although taller and bonier than ever, no longer looked as if he were about to fall apart at the joints.

  ‘It’s not been that bad,’ said Peter. ‘I thought I’d die here when I first came. Clarry kept me alive with her letters and her butterflies.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Simon. ‘She used to paint you a new one every time things got bad. Have you still got them?’

  ‘Of course. Five. All the rarest. She never sent a swallowtail because things never got that terrible. Do you remember how we cleared the common-room chimney that time?’

  ‘Yes, and Clarry’s Christmas party. And Rupert climbing the chapel roof. And us singing “Three Little Maids from School” at the concert. Practising in secret. Rupert making us learn the actions with the fans. My dad laughing till he couldn’t breathe, and everyone saying afterwards, I thought you were supposed to be shy!’

  Rain splattered against the window then, suddenly hard.

  ‘It’s not much like summer,’ said Simon gloomily. ‘Look at those idiots out there with that ball! God, I hate outside! Do you ever hear from him?’

  ‘Who? Professor Osler?’

  ‘No! Rupert, of course!’

  ‘Oh. No. Never.’

  ‘I wonder what he’s doing right now. Right this minute. Right this second. Over there!’

  He spoke so passionately that Peter looked at him in surprise.

  ‘You must think about him!’

  Peter shook his head.

  ‘I do. Well . . . I suppose you think I’m a fool.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘What, then?’ asked Simon, slumping into a chair and dropping his head on to a table.

  Peter, with great effort, dragged himself into the Bony One’s elusive, aching world and said, ‘I’m really glad you didn’t climb out of that window. I’m really glad you stayed.’ Then, although he didn’t do human contact much, especially in school, he made a great effort and rubbed his friend between his hunched, bony shoulders for forty-five seconds, which he timed by the library clock. He broke off to laugh.

  ‘Do you remember when he left us three bottles of beer and his spare key to the cricket pavilion?’

  ‘What happened to that key?’

  ‘I’ve got it somewhere. I suppose it’ll be our turn to pass it on soon. We’re nearly done here. Have you noticed any miserable mud-hating first years who deserve it?’

  ‘They all look the same to me. Bellowing and wrestling. I don’t care about them. Let them find their own escapes.’

  ‘All right,’ said Peter. ‘Let them. Clarry will be at Speech Day, did I tell you? She’s coming with your family.’

  ‘I don’t know why my family want to bother,’ grumbled Simon. ‘I won’t be collecting any prizes. Never have, never will. Anyway, they’re only books! What kind of prize is a book?’

  ‘Would you like a prize that wasn’t a book?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon, after some thought. ‘I’d like a prize for sticking it out! I’m not going to university. I haven’t written any good essays. I’ll probably never read a book again. I’ll definitely never kick a football. But I have stuck it out!’

  ‘Yes you have,’ agreed Peter, and later that night Simon the Bony One found an envelope shoved under his pillow. It was labelled:

  The Penrose Bonners Award for Sticking It Out, with Special Commendation for

  That Time You Didn’t Climb Out of the Window

  Inside, on a leather bootlace, was Rupert’s spare key to the cricket pavilion.

  Summer 1917

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  In Flanders

  The line of battle was called the Western Front. It stretched for 440 miles, from the North Sea to the Swiss border. It began in the corner of Belgium, bulged into Ypres, crossed the Flanders fields where later the poppies grew, ran south through the Somme (that nightmare place), swept eastwards in a great curve across the French countryside, and then up into the mountains. It was made of trenches, dugouts, barbed wire, jam tins, boredom, broken woodland, rubble of homes, duckboards, lost socks, latrines, hastily dug graves, love letters, liquefied bodies, sandbags, poetry, nameless machinery, rewritten songs, tank tracks and a thousand other things, the chief among them being mud. No wonder that it hardly moved, through all the years of war.

  It was populated by (among others) Britons, Germans, French, Canadians, West Indians, Prussians, Australians, Irish, Dutch, two cavalry divisions from India, horses, rats, dogs, lice, pigeons and fleas. Birds flew over it. Cats had more sense than to go near it, except a few of the most curious and brave. They were very much loved by whatever nationality they found themselves among. The line was lit by flares, stars, the usual sun and moon, rockets, shells, bullet flashes, firebombs and carefully shielded lucifer matches. It smelt of earth, rum, death, smoke, urine, tinned beef and hot metal. Guns thumped like intermittent heartbeats, and the barbed wire rattled and jangled in the wind. There were other sounds that made their hearers stop their ears till they were over, but the echoes stayed in their memories for as long as they lived.

  The line was the shape of a long, lopsided smile. A ravenous, expectant smile. A greedy, unreasonable smile, considering how very, very well it was fed.

  On either side of the line were the armies. Neither was winning, although not because they didn’t try. They tried very hard and when one way didn’t work they tried another. The Germans were the first to use poison gas, and the British were the first to use tanks. Perfectly reasonable people, the sort who in their previous lives let wasps out of windows; read storybooks to children, doing all the proper voices; flinched at flat notes; and hardly ever shouted, got drunk or forgot their mothers’ birthdays – absolutely ordinary people – made considerable efforts to kill other absolutely ordinary people whom they had never even met.

  Things didn’t get better; they got worse.

  It was all quite normal to Rupert now. It was 1917; he’d been there from the start; he was one of the unshakables. He’d moved about a lot, but now he was back almost where he’d begun, in Flanders, on the left-hand curl of the smile. There was a feeling in the air of a job well done, because the British had just managed to blow up nineteen huge mines, right under the German front lines. They had other plans in mind too, equally uncivilized. First, however, they had to prepare the ground. That meant Rupert had spent the hours of darkness (never long enough at the end of May) crawling around in front of the trenches, cutting barbed wire. Barbed wire was wicked stuff. It caught men like fish
in a net. Both sides used it in great tangled coils, held up by fence posts, all along the trenches. In some places it was so thick you could hardly see through it. They didn’t try to cut those dark masses; they went where it was thinner and looser. It was a horrible job. It rattled as you pulled it away. They’d tried cutting it with machine-gun fire, but it didn’t really work. The coils would lift and bounce down again, more or less intact.

  Rupert had survived the night, got back to the trench just before dawn broke, eaten a sustaining but indigestible breakfast of tinned beef, rust-coloured tea and a slice of somebody’s birthday cake from home, found a dugout with an empty bunk and crawled inside. When Simon had looked out of the rainy window and wondered where Rupert was, that was the place.

  Fast asleep with his boots on.

  Away from the front, where the supply lines ran, there were rest camps and first-aid stations, and even patches of farmland. Often at that time of year you could hear skylarks over the fields. Soldiers remarked how strange it was that the birds should be there, but in fact the birds had been there for centuries.

  The really strange thing was that the soldiers were there.

  Another thing that people thought odd was that the skylarks sang in the language of their homes. In English for the English, in French for the French, and in Dutch for the Dutch.

  More puzzling still, on the other side of the trenches, a few miles away, the skylarks were singing in German.

  It was a war where absolutely nothing made sense.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Violet and the Pink Beret

  It was the weekend, and Clarry had a list of jobs she ought to do. They included, among other things, her weekly letters to Rupert and Peter, and somehow organizing proper food for the next day. Clarry’s father, despite his weekday absences, expected Sunday lunch to appear in a well-dusted dining room at one o’clock promptly, no matter what was happening in the rest of the world.

  Clarry could hardly spare the time for cooking and housework any more. The twelve hours a week she spent being a mother’s help could not have been happier, but they made an awful hole in her days.