The Skylarks' War

by Hilary McKay

  Odysseus made it to the coast, and followed it west through the countryside, travelling mostly by night. In a few days he came to a fishing port, hid under a pile of nets in a boat and was well on the way to Greece when they discovered him and dropped him over the side to swim. The stars were bright and lovely, and, being a sailor, he was used to navigating at night, and so he set off across the Aegean, and presently the sun rose and he saw a long cloud, with a coastline below it, and knew he had nearly reached Greece.

  Odysseus had been to Greece many times, sailed the coast and climbed the hills and danced at the festivals, so he paused there to dry out for a while.

  He was aided by the kindness of a family, who accepted his help with their grapes and olive trees, and in return gave him a home. They became such friends that it was hard to leave them. Still, he had to go and he promised to return, so one day they waved him goodbye on a fishing boat with a big red sail and a little boy and a man with a broken arm.

  The red-sailed boat ran so beautifully for him that he might have known her all his life. They fished for three days and three nights, and on the fourth day they took him further west. They dropped him off at a harbour where the water was as clear as glass.

  Just as he arrived, a very small boy went scampering along the harbour wall and tumbled off into the sea. Odysseus dived in after him and got him out and then sat him on his shoulder and carried him to his father. The boy’s father took Odysseus home for a lot of dinner with grilled fish and bread and tomatoes and pale cheese and dark red wine.

  With these, and many other adventures, Odysseus passed through the pearly, light-dancing, sea-swirling land of Greece, and then over the Mediterranean in a cargo ship to Spain.

  Travelling through Spain was not easy, but still better than the prison camp where he might yet have been deciding whether the rat for dinner should be boiled or roasted.

  Eventually, with the help of some gypsies who knew the same songs as him, Odysseus arrived in Gibraltar, which seemed practically next door to home. He would have written from there to England, but there happened to be a ship sailing that night whose captain had known him twenty years before, when they were both very young and often seasick. It was too good a chance to waste, so Odysseus didn’t wait, but went aboard and shared the captain’s cabin, all the way to Southampton.

  Odysseus, after disembarking with two borrowed five-pound notes in his pockets and a promise to meet his friend again at the Duke of Wellington on Bugle Street as soon as the blasted war was over, thought, I wonder if my Vanessa is still at that hospital?

  So he went to see, and she was.

  FORTY

  Rupert is Missing

  The return of Odysseus to his loving family could not have been better timed for Clarry and Miss Vane. When they arrived in Southampton they found Vanessa (who was very like him) in a mood to believe that anything was possible. Such was her elation that, unlike Clarry, she ignored the second half of the telegram from the start.

  ‘Missing! Missing!’ exclaimed Vanessa. ‘Rupert missing! Rubbish! What does that even mean? Hello, Miss Vane, I didn’t see you there! How darling of you to come! Go on about Rupert! I’ve got news for you too, but it’ll wait.’

  ‘I told you, we had a telegram, early this afternoon. I had to come away. You know what Father’s like, and the house . . . it’s a hopeless house . . . anyway, I couldn’t bear doing nothing and neither could Miss Vane.’

  ‘So you took to your heels? I would have done too.’

  ‘I thought straight away of hospitals, and you.’

  ‘Does Peter know?’

  ‘Not yet. He will tomorrow; I wrote. You don’t mind us coming, do you?’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind! Come to our little staff room! It’s a hovel, but never mind. Tell me more, and tell it quickly because I have to be on duty very soon. Whoops! Don’t sit on that cup, Miss Vane! No one has time to wash up.’

  ‘Vanessa, we’d have heard if he was taken prisoner, but could he be in hospital, and no one knowing his name?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Vanessa hesitated. ‘Well, Clarry darling, we usually do know their names at least, if not where they’ve come from. But . . . oh, Miss Vane, you don’t have to do that! The sink’s piled! There are dozens . . . well, you’re an angel, that’s all! Missing is so vague, Clarry! But what do they really know? Remember when they told us my dad was a prisoner? That wasn’t true for long!’

  ‘Wasn’t it? What have you heard, Vanessa?’

  ‘He wasn’t a prisoner for five minutes!’ said Vanessa triumphantly. ‘I’ve been bursting to tell you! I saw him off on the train to Mummy this morning! Tiddly as a fish!’

  ‘He’s back? Oh, how wonderful!’

  ‘Escaped, just like we knew he would. Came back through Greece and the Med. Had a wonderful time. So you see!’

  ‘Yes, I do! Vanessa, listen! You know thousands of people in hospitals . . .’

  ‘Hundreds,’ said Vanessa modestly.

  ‘Ask them, and ask them to ask their friends, and ask their friends to ask their friends two things. I’ve worked it out.’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Have they ever, in say the last month, heard of anyone in a military hospital whose name isn’t known? And, has anyone heard about Rupert? Rupert Penrose. I’ve written down the last address I had, and his regiment and number and anything I could think of that might be useful. He started off in a Devon battalion but then he changed a year or more ago.’

  ‘I’ll ask people, Clarry.’

  ‘And I need a list of military hospitals where he might have been sent. But, Vanessa, what if he’s still in France, too ill to move?’

  ‘Well,’ said Vanessa sensibly. ‘He’ll still be taken care of. And, as soon as they can, he’ll be sent over here.’

  Miss Vane, enterprisingly drying teacups on her handkerchief, looked around to say, ‘Families of very sick soldiers are invited over to France if they can travel. The Red Cross arranges it.’

  ‘But if he was in hospital anywhere you’d have been told,’ said Vanessa. ‘Unless he was too ill to talk and had lost his ID. I suppose in that case he might easily not have reached England yet. They have to be stable enough for the journey before they’re sent back home.’

  ‘Then we need to ask the French hospitals too.’

  ‘Clarry, do you know how many hospitals there are in France and Belgium?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There must be a hundred. Base hospitals, where they’re brought from the field stations, before they get here. You’d never manage it, you’d need a passport, and if you did, you’d never get round a tenth of them.’

  ‘I know, but I could write. And, if I heard anything, work out a way to get there. And meanwhile there’s still the hospitals here.’

  ‘I wish I could go overseas,’ said Vanessa. ‘I applied, as soon as Simon went. They won’t let me, though. You have to be twenty-three and they check! Now, listen, Clarry, promise me something. You mustn’t tell Simon about Rupert being missing!’

  ‘I’ve been worrying about that too.’

  ‘He couldn’t bear it. He’d believe the worst. I’ll do anything I can to help you, as long as you don’t tell Simon. Promise?’

  ‘Promise. But he might hear anyway.’

  ‘Not yet. Perhaps not for ages. It’s hell over there right now. You must make Peter promise too. He will; he’ll understand.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Good! Here’s Emma! Emma, this is my great friend Clarry and darling Miss Vane! They’ve lost lovely, lovely Rupert!’

  ‘Good Lord, look at our teacups!’ said Emma. ‘Not your lovely, lovely Rupert, Vanessa?’

  ‘I borrowed him! He wasn’t mine! I was just trying to cheer him up!’

  Never, thought Vanessa remorsefully, must Clarry know the lengths to which she had gone, trying to cheer Rupert up. Or Peter. Peter must never know. It hadn’t worked anyway.

  ‘I know he wasn’t really yours,’ said Emma cheerfully, reme
mbering her own brief fling with Rupert. ‘He had lots of girlfriends, he told me! From Ireland, London, all over the place! Anyway, what do you mean, “lost”?’

  ‘Stop talking rubbish and listen, Emma! Clarry is Rupert’s cousin. She and her brother are his next of kin. They’ve just had a telegram.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ said Emma, looking absolutely stricken. ‘Oh, it happened to us, last year, my brother . . .’

  ‘Not the same, not the same!’ said Vanessa impatiently. ‘Emma, will you look after Clarry and Miss Vane for me? I can’t be late. I already owe Matron for this morning, seeing Dad off from the station. Clarry, where are you staying?’

  ‘Anywhere. Somewhere cheap.’

  ‘I’ve an aunt who does rooms,’ said Emma. ‘If it helps.’

  FORTY-ONE

  The Great Search

  That was how the great search for Rupert began. Practical things kept them busy. Clarry remembered how Peter had the picture of their mother reprinted, and she got out her photograph of Rupert. They had it turned into postcards: a hundred, for thirty shillings.

  ‘Please give me one for old times’ sake,’ begged Emma when she saw them.

  By the end of the first week, Clarry had the addresses of sixty base hospitals in France and Belgium, and she and Miss Vane had written to every one of them. Also the Southampton hospitals had been checked, and a long chain of nurses, VADs, patients, ex-patients and friends had been contacted by way of telegram and postcard, and asked to send back news. As well as all this, Violet, stalwart tram conductress and dedicated packer of gloves and socks, had been contacted and had reported back on the state of the cats. (Stuffed, but your dad’s in a shocking mood, Clarry! Let me know when you have to come home and face the music, and I’ll come along with you to see fair play!)

  Miss Vane’s energy seemed endless. In between everything else that had to be done, the little staff room at Vanessa’s hospital had been polished to gleaming point, all the cupboards turned out, and the paintwork washed.

  ‘Please stay forever!’ many people begged her, and Miss Vane had to earnestly explain about her cats.

  Peter wrote, Yes, I’ll go round the local hospitals, but I can’t pretend that I don’t think it’s hopeless. How is Vanessa? Are you managing for money? What about your school? Have you told them? I’m enclosing fourteen pounds, afraid I had to borrow most of it. (‘I love your brother!’ said Vanessa when she read this.) I don’t see how anyone could lose his ID tags, whatever happened to him.

  Vanessa said that to an up-and-well-enough-for-light-duties patient and got a sideways look.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, you’d know if you’d ever been out there.’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘I don’t want to upset you, but not everyone gets found.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Supposing . . . I’m not saying it happened, but supposing I was out after a charge or a lot of shellfire or something, and I came across . . . across some poor chap and I thought I should take his tag, let someone know.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it was raining, deep in mud, and I had maybe a minute to get back out of it. Probably dark coming on, or dark altogether; you wouldn’t be out there if it wasn’t. His tags are on a cord. You’ve got to get it out from under his jacket or whatever, pull it over his head, or cut it with something. Take one off, leave one behind, that’s what you’re supposed to do. And you’re thinking all the time you need to get back, you need to get back!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vanessa compassionately, seeing the fright in his eyes. ‘Come on, sit down, you’re out of it now. Thank you so much for telling me.’

  ‘I don’t mind. It’s in my head anyway. But you can see how things go wrong?’

  ‘So easily now.’

  ‘Good! There’s other ways too, things get mixed. You see, chaps write a letter, give it to their friend. Send that home if I don’t come back! Then the wrong one cops it, and he’s got a letter in his pocket that gets sent back to England. Goodbye, pat the dog for me, you were the best, sorry about all the swearing. Only it’s not his letter – it’s his mate’s, and his mate’s not dead after all. Now I’ve upset you!’

  ‘I am never upset,’ said Vanessa. ‘Never. How’s the arm?’

  ‘I can still feel it.’

  ‘Everyone says that.’

  ‘Always wanted to drive a car. Never be able to now.’

  ‘You absolutely will!’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Like to know how.’

  ‘Next time I get a weekend off I’ll bring my dad’s car back here and we’ll take off in it for a ride. You driving.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Dare you!’

  ‘You wouldn’t!’

  ‘Wait and see if I wouldn’t,’ said Vanessa, back in her normal state, and prepared, as usual, to do anything, absolutely anything, to cheer someone up.

  Later she related these examples of confused identity to Clarry, with some of the details omitted.

  ‘You see!’ said Clarry triumphantly. ‘We’re going to London tomorrow. Miss Vane’s got a map, and a list of possible hospitals, all marked on it in different coloured inks.’

  ‘She’s wonderful; she’s loving this.’

  ‘So many people have been wonderful. You and Emma and Violet. Violet’s going to brave my father and see if any letters have arrived.’

  ‘You’ll hear more,’ Emma had told them. ‘When we lost Tristram, so many people wrote. His officer and a nurse who’d treated him for a day or two. His friends. A chaplain.’

  ‘Oh, Emma, how kind!’ Clarry had exclaimed.

  ‘It helped,’ Emma had said. ‘It helped us face it.’

  In the darkest parts of the night, when the blackout blotted the windows and Miss Vane was snoring gently on the other side of the room, Clarry faced it. Rupert dead. And she couldn’t believe it. She thought (as Emma’s mother had thought when she lost Tristram, as people had thought since the beginning of time), If he were dead, I’d know.

  FORTY-TWO

  Mr Rose

  To lie out straight, with clean sheets and a solid roof, thought the young gunner in the French hospital. To know that for you it was over at last, and for nothing more than the cost of an eye and a broken shoulder. Worth it. Cheap at the price. The pretty nurses. He’d sent a message home. His family could stop worrying now.

  But the chap in the next bed wouldn’t shut up.

  Droning.

  Or singing. Very quietly, not moving his lips, a hardly changing note, the same phrase over and over.

  Like a mosquito.

  ‘Three little maids who, all unwary . . .’

  ‘Could you have a word?’ he asked a passing nurse.

  ‘What? I’ll be back in a minute.’

  She was back in ten, saying, ‘I’m sorry, we’re terribly rushed. Is it your head? Are you in pain?’

  ‘No. Yes. It’s him in the next bed. Is he all right?’

  She hurried as if it mattered then, bent over to look, checked a pulse, and asked, ‘Why did you worry?’

  ‘He was sort of singing,’ he said, not liking to say, He was driving me nuts. ‘He’s stopped now.’

  ‘Mr Rose,’ he heard her say, very clearly. ‘Can you hear me, Mr Rose? Squeeze my hand.’

  Mr Rose lay immobile and silent.

  ‘Why do you call him that?’ he asked, but she frowned at him and shook her head and carried on holding Mr Rose by his wrist, looking at her watch, and counting. As a matter of fact, she didn’t know why he was called Mr Rose. She’d arrived only two days before and she hadn’t had time to speak to anyone properly. She didn’t know that when he’d first arrived, before they’d done anything about his fractured skull, someone had asked, ‘Can you tell me your name?’ and quite a while later he’d croaked, ‘Rosy.’

  The patient who’d called her over was pretty stable, she knew, but this one worried her. And puzzled her. And suddenly she realized why.

  There was a p
ostcard in the entrance hall with a label above it asking, Do you know this man?

  And she’d unpinned it that morning to read the back, a family plea for someone lost. How desperate had they been to write like that? she’d wondered, halfway through. And why choose here, out of all the hospitals in France and Belgium? And then she’d read the end and found a line that explained that they hadn’t just chosen this one; they’d written to them all. Poor souls. And his name had been a Cornish name, just as her own name was. Penrose.

  Rose.

  Mr Rose.

  It was a five-minute walk back to the entrance hall, and there were only three staff on the ward and sixty beds, all full, but all the same she went, almost running.

  The picture showed a tall, curly-haired boy, smiling at someone, eyes squinting against the sun. The patient in the bed in front of her had a head wrapped up into a great white bundle, two black eyes swollen shut, and lips all cracked with fever from blood poisoning. He was immobilized from a broken pelvis too, and scattered with bits of shrapnel, but that was the least of his worries.

  ‘Rupert Penrose,’ said the nurse, taking his hand again. ‘Rupert. There’s a message for you here from Clarry.’

  Then she knew her guess had been right, because he smiled, and it was the smile that she’d seen in the picture.

  FORTY-THREE

  A Friend with a Boat

  The telegram came to Emma’s aunt, because that was the address on the postcard. Two travel passes followed, arranged by the Red Cross for relatives of patients who were critically ill. They were for in three days’ time.

  ‘Three days be damned!’ roared Vanessa’s father, as Vanessa had known he would when she telegrammed the news. He thought very highly of Clarry, not least because she had named him Odysseus and turned his exile into hope. ‘Three days be damned!’ repeated Odysseus, and drove down in full naval uniform, commandeered a friend with a boat and took them across himself: Clarry and Miss Vane, because Clarry, being under sixteen, needed a guardian. ‘You’ll be the guardian?’ he asked Miss Vane.