The Skylarks' War

by Hilary McKay

  When Rupert left them, Clarry’s grandmother went back to Cornwall. Clarry could have gone with her, but she didn’t. She got out her books and the mushroom hat and worked and worked and worked, driven at first by a grim, hungry anguish that waited to clutch every time she paused to think. Even after the pain faded to just a gnawing presence she still went on.

  Her books saved her. Miss Fairfax regarded her Dark Horse with pride. ‘She’s come through,’ she said. ‘She’ll make it now. She’s on the final stretch.’

  The war was also on its final stretch, a great last peak of suffering for everyone involved. The smile of the Western Front had twisted and become jagged-toothed in places, but it was still as insatiable as ever. August passed, and September, and then in early October, just when they could bear no more, another telegram came.

  Autumn 1918

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The Death of a Giraffe

  Giraffes were never designed for trench warfare. Simon the Bony One died at the Western Front, on the last day of September 1918. A sniper shot him, straight through the head. He wouldn’t have known a thing, wrote his commanding officer wearily, although actually, at that final moment, a great understanding had blown through the elated Bony One. He had died with such a certainty of joy and freedom that if he could have he would have shouted out to those who loved him, ‘Hey! It’s going to be all right!’

  But, of course, they knew nothing about that.

  Vanessa couldn’t bear it. She ran from her pain, not to Clarry or her family, but to Peter in Oxford, who had understood Simon first.

  ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair,’ she sobbed in Peter’s arms. ‘Say something! Don’t just stand there!’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ said Peter.

  ‘I can’t bear it any longer! I’ve borne it right from the beginning, and I can’t bear it any more. Simon never should have been there. Why did he have to go? Bloody Rupert,’ wailed Vanessa, answering herself. ‘Bloody Rupert, that’s why! Oh, why did he have to love Rupert?’

  ‘He always did,’ said Peter. ‘Right from the beginning.’

  ‘I know, I know, he told me,’ sobbed Vanessa, weary with tears. ‘And now look what’s happened because of it. We’ve got to manage without him. For ages and ages. For the rest of our lives. For always. And I can’t. I can’t be bothered.’

  In spite of everything, Peter grinned at that.

  ‘Stop laughing! I’ve got to go soon. They only gave me eight hours free. Eight hours, and Simon dead. I’ve got to go back and do the night shift and not fuss and be cheerful. Do I smell of carbolic?’

  ‘Yes, very strongly, but I’m used to it. I suppose you could go to your family for a bit.’

  ‘No, thank you! They’d cling and weep. Cling and weep, and I’d never escape again. I can’t live there any more. When this horrible war is over I’m going to marry the first man who asks me and live happily ever after. Or as close as I can manage. I’ll give it a damn good try.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Peter glumly, not liking this plan, and then a very good idea struck him, and he asked, ‘Vanessa, will you marry me?’

  ‘Yes, of course I will, you idiot,’ said Vanessa. ‘I thought you’d never ask!’

  November 1918

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Armistice Day

  And so they reeled through October, and in November the war ended, and Vanessa, hearing rumours of what was coming, borrowed a motorbike and rode through the night to be with her family at the cottage on Armistice Day. Simon had missed it by less than two months, which was very hard to bear, and for an hour or two they didn’t try bearing it at all. They had reached the cup-of-tea-and-mopping-up stage when Clarry arrived on Peter’s bicycle, saying, ‘Oh, Vanessa! I didn’t know you’d be here! I just came to give them a hug. How are they?’

  ‘Heroes,’ said Vanessa, who had met her on the doorstep. ‘But it’s been very damp. You were wonderful to come, Clarry, but don’t go in just yet. It will start them off again.’

  ‘I brought some sugar for Lucy,’ said Clarry, so they went across the field to find her. Lucy took the sugar ungratefully, looking over Clarry’s shoulder, and they both knew she was searching for Simon.

  ‘Oh, BLAST!’ said Vanessa. ‘Oh, come on, Clarry! There’s no one about for a million miles. Let’s lie on the grass and howl!’

  ‘Yes, all right, good idea,’ said Clarry, but she didn’t howl; she lay on her front with her fists in her eyes and presently she said, ‘Wouldn’t it have been lovely if there hadn’t been any war? And we were all . . .’

  Then she broke off, and didn’t say any more.

  The November day became quiet again. Under the hedge, a blackbird turned over dead leaves like someone flicking through a book to find the illustrations. The grass was damp, but overhead the sky was a thin crystal blue.

  At last Vanessa sighed and said, ‘The moment has passed. It seems that I can only howl spontaneously. Do you think there are spiders out here?’

  ‘What? Oh, probably hundreds.’

  ‘I can’t lie on spiders. I’m fetching the hearthrug.’

  ‘Don’t. It’ll worry your parents. And spoil the smell of the grass.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Vanessa. ‘I can’t really be bothered anyway. Grass is such an old-fashioned smell! Did they ever smell grass in France?’

  ‘Yes, yes of course they did.’ Clarry sat up and took her friend’s cold hand, and held it warm in her own. ‘Often, and it must have reminded them of home. It is old-fashioned – think how far back it goes. Shakespeare smelt it, flat on his face in the Avon meadows! Arthur, before he pulled his sword from that stone, under the oaks and beeches of the ancient forest . . .’

  ‘Go on, go on!’ said Vanessa, gripping her hand.

  ‘The Romans at the end of a day on their Roman roads, setting up camp. Flatbread and cheese for supper, and raisins and onions.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘The people who raised the henge stones, collapsed, exhausted, staring at what they’d done and wondering if it would last.’

  ‘Hoping the woolly mammoths wouldn’t knock it over,’ said Vanessa, ‘or the dinosaurs. Was there grass in dinosaur days?’

  ‘Not until the Cretaceous,’ said Clarry, so seriously that Vanessa really did howl a bit, but with laughter, not tears. Then they checked each other’s faces and went to the cottage, and were very brave and cheerful. Later, with Clarry’s bicycle hanging out of the back, they all drove into town where they found bonfires and singing crowds and the pubs full to overflowing.

  Vanessa and Clarry leaned wearily on each other and said, ‘I suppose we should feel wonderful,’ but mostly they felt empty.

  FORTY-NINE

  Afterwards

  The years passed.

  They heard nothing from Rupert, who as soon as he was released from active service went straight to India to track down the parents who had abandoned him at the age of three. And when he found them he realized he should never have bothered, but India was different. He travelled further and further north, losing himself in the otherness of the world that he found there.

  Clarry went to Oxford, which she loved more even than Miss Fairfax had guessed that she would. She got her MA and her grandmother came proudly to see her graduation, but her father, when invited, said he’d really rather not.

  The spare key to the cricket pavilion eventually found its way back to England, along with a few other bits and pieces. It absolutely baffled Simon’s mother, who sat rocking and gazing at it for hours some days, until Peter happened to visit, glimpsed it in her hands and exclaimed, ‘I never thought I’d see that again!’

  ‘Do you know what it is?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s the spare key to the cricket pavilion. I gave it to Simon at the end of our last term. It’s the Penrose Bonners Award for Sticking It Out, with Special Commendation for That Time You Didn’t Climb Out of the Window!’

  ‘Oh, Peter!’

  ‘He wore it always,’ said Peter, taking i
t carefully into his hand. ‘He put it on as soon as . . .’ For a moment, the memory of Simon’s incredulous beaming smile as he saw what his friend had given him caused Peter to have to press his fists to his eyes.

  ‘He put it on straight away,’ he continued, after a minute. ‘As soon as he got it. He was the best . . . It wasn’t a joke. There were lots of jokes, but that wasn’t one of them.’

  Then, still holding the key, he told Simon’s mother about clearing the common-room chimney with the rocket, and the way they had sung together in chapel, and the beer bottles under the floorboard, and how Rupert had taught them the fan dance for ‘Three Little Maids from School’, and the way Simon used to laugh until tears ran down his face. And how they had stuck out school together, and how Peter couldn’t have done it without Simon at his side, and that’s why he had been given the award.

  ‘You should put it on a new string and wear it sometimes,’ he said as he very gently gave the key back and stood up to go, and she said, ‘Yes, I will. I will do. I will.’

  After Peter had gone that day, Vanessa and Simon’s mother and father (whom Clarry had named Odysseus) told each other how thankful they were that Vanessa was marrying Peter, and how good it would be to have him and Clarry in the family forever, and after that they began to get better.

  There were lots of weddings. Violet borrowed Clarry’s pink hat again. It was her ‘something borrowed’.

  ‘I look washed out in white and I’m not wearing a veil!’ she said, very jaunty in pink beret and high heels. Miss Vane, however, had snow-white silk, with Clarry and Violet for bridesmaids, and she invited Mrs Morgan.

  Mrs Morgan rose magnificently to this peace offering, and gave the bride a lucky horseshoe, one of the collection of those she had made herself.

  She gave another one to Peter, when he and Vanessa married.

  ‘I never thought I’d see the day!’ she said as she handed it over, and Peter said neither had he. He and Vanessa nailed their horseshoe over the door of their small, cheerful house in Oxford. There, they lived together very happily, with a room for Clarry in the attic whenever she wanted it, and a great many books, the most wonderful being the one that Peter and Clarry wrote together. It was called:

  Origins of Nomenclature

  in the Animal Kingdom

  Clarry Penrose, MA (Oxon)

  and

  Peter Penrose, D.Phil (Oxon)

  It was a book that they had planned to write together when Clarry was eleven.

  Clarry was a teacher. She loved it, as she had done ever since the first Grace twin had exclaimed, ‘Now I understand!’

  Peter eventually became a professor, which did not surprise anyone. His home was filled with children, as well as books – first Janey, after Peter’s mother, and then Beatrice, after Vanessa’s, and then, at last, little Simon, who came with a surprise twin brother. The moment Clarry heard of the second baby’s arrival, which was about three minutes after he was born, she exclaimed, ‘You will have to call him Rupert!’

  And Vanessa and Peter, still blinking with shock, recovered and agreed.

  The arrival of a new Simon and Rupert for the world to enjoy caused Vanessa such pride and delight that she put a notice of their birth in The Times in the hope that Rupert might see it.

  Penrose, to Peter and Vanessa (née Bonnington).

  Twin boys, Simon and Rupert

  (Clarry said we had to call him Rupert).

  21st June 1924.

  Vanessa went to this expense in the hope that somehow the news would reach Rupert in India.

  At this time Rupert was working on a tea plantation at the foothills of the Himalayas. It was very beautiful there and he thought how much Clarry would love it. He thought of Clarry often, more and more of the happy times, and less and less of their last dreadful day together when she had begged him not to go back to France and he had told her to stop clinging and walked away and left her.

  In those days, for the British in India, a large amount of the news from home came via The Times newspaper. It was read and passed around, ringed in pencil and underlined, and scrutinized for familiar names by everyone from England who got hold of it.

  So it wasn’t surprising that someone said to Rupert, ‘Oi, is this you?’ and there, circled in blue, was his name, with Peter and Vanessa, and Simon, who had loved him, and Clarry, who it seemed had forgiven him after all.

  So he sent a telegram back to England saying:

  Congratulations, and love to everyone.

  Re: Simon and Rupert

  Perfect.

  FIFTY

  Love to Everyone

  Not long after the birth of the latest Penrose baby (Charles, after Charles Darwin), Peter and Clarry’s grandmother died. For the last few years she had lived in Oxford, within reach of Clarry and Peter and the children, and with Lucy, now aged twenty-nine, in a small field close by. From the very beginning she had loved being a great-grandmother. She had named herself Great-Granny and adored her great-grandchildren so completely and uncritically that she had astonished herself.

  I never used to be like this, she thought sometimes. I’ve mellowed!

  But now she was gone, and she had left the house in Cornwall to Clarry and Peter. It hadn’t been lived in for years and years, and it was still full of her things – not just furniture, but all the letters and clothes and old-lady belongings that she hadn’t wanted to bring to Oxford.

  ‘I shall have to go and sort them out,’ said Clarry unhappily to Vanessa. ‘And don’t say Peter will help because he’d be useless, and anyway Great-Granny would hate him poking through her things. She was a very dignified old lady.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Cornwall; there was never time after the babies started arriving,’ remarked Vanessa. ‘Peter said you used to love your summers there.’

  ‘They were perfect,’ said Clarry, her voice a little unsteady. ‘Perfect, from the moment we arrived.’

  ‘What made them so wonderful?’ asked Vanessa, who was always on the lookout for ideas to make life wonderful for her own children. ‘I hope whatever it was is still there. Perhaps one day we could . . . Oh, I’m sorry, Clarry!’

  For Clarry, quite suddenly, was rubbing tears away.

  ‘I’m an insensitive hag,’ said Vanessa repentantly. ‘Poor Great-Granny. But she was very old, Clarry darling, and happy, right to the end.’

  ‘I know. It’s not Great-Granny,’ said Clarry, sniffing damply. ‘I was just remembering. Everything. Everyone . . .’

  Vanessa looked at her thoughtfully and, when Clarry did not continue, picked up a child from the floor and handed it to her to cuddle. Then she waited a tactful minute or two before asking kindly, ‘Is it Rupert?’

  ‘No,’ said Clarry miserably, after glancing down to look. ‘It’s darling Bea.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Clarry! I can actually tell my children apart. And you know quite well what I meant!’

  ‘Yes, I do. Yes, it is. Rupert. All right there, Bea?’

  Bea nodded. All Vanessa’s children were used to cuddles, especially at times like this: the sleepy end of the day between supper and stories. Bea put her thumb in her mouth, and tucked herself comfortably under Clarry’s chin. She was a warm, solid child, very comforting, and Clarry hugged her as she continued slowly, ‘Cornwall and Rupert are all mixed up together, and it was so long ago, and magical. It’ll be all changed now, but it was the best place in the world. We longed for it all winter, the moorland and the sea and the little town, and the train pulling into the station.’

  ‘That will still be pretty much the same, Clarry.’

  ‘And Rupert, waiting there.’

  ‘Blooming Rupert!’ said Vanessa.

  Clarry did not argue, just dropped her head a little.

  ‘Did he always matter so much?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clarry. It was very difficult to describe what Rupert’s sunlit welcome had meant after the long unloved winters of her childhood, but nevertheless she tried. ‘The grandparents
were so remote, you see. Most of the time Peter lived in his own world too. And Father . . .’

  ‘Neglected you completely,’ said Vanessa calmly. ‘According to Peter.’

  ‘It wasn’t that bad. But it was lonely, and then Rupert, every summer, so pleased to see us. Such a welcome. Laughing. Kind, and funny and fun. It was so blissful to be talked to, and teased, and hugged, and bothered about. I was a bit invisible, I suppose, and Rupert made me visible. And it wasn’t just being kind because he was sorry for me. We were proper friends.’

  ‘You were. I remember you both at that Christmas party. And afterwards through so much. Girlfriends . . . War! Even me!’

  Clarry laughed, lifting her face from Bea’s red curls.

  ‘That must have stung.’

  ‘A bit. Mostly for Peter.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was nothing. Not compared to the day that telegram came. Or when I found him in France, so broken.’

  ‘But you got him home again, and he got better.’

  ‘I thought so, but I was wrong. Inside he wasn’t better. He couldn’t live with himself.’

  ‘There were a lot like that, Clarry,’ said Vanessa, who never had a day without thinking of the boys in the beds. ‘They felt guilty for surviving.’

  ‘He told me he was going back, and then we stopped being friends. We smashed it all up.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I didn’t try to understand. I argued. I fought him. I cried. He said I clung. He shouted, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” and shook me off and ran away, stumbled away, with that stick.’

  ‘Oh, Clarry!’

  ‘So I did leave him alone. I helped Peter write to him, after Simon, but I didn’t sign my name and we didn’t hear back. Simon must have been very hard for him. Rupert knew why he was there.’

  ‘Simon was an idiot,’ said Vanessa crossly. ‘No, he wasn’t. He was just terribly young. They all had to grow up too soon.’