The Skylarks' War

by Hilary McKay

  ‘Yes,’ said Clarry. ‘You must keep yours little forever and ever. And put books on their heads when they start to grow tall.’

  Bea looked up at her in surprise. Clarry slid her to the floor, reached for a book and balanced it on her own head, to show her. Bea copied, with Peter Rabbit. Janey, who was her father all over again, said, ‘I don’t think it will work,’ but all the same picked up a book herself and tried it, just in case.

  Bea laughed and her book slid on to her lap.

  ‘You have to not laugh,’ said Janey solemnly.

  ‘No!’ said Clarry, tipping her own book off at these words. ‘I was wrong. No books on heads! You have to laugh! You have to grow! And I have to go to Cornwall.’

  ‘What is Cornwall?’ asked Janey, and so Clarry told her about the blue and green sea, and the house on the moors, and how she and Janey’s daddy had travelled there every summer on a train, all by themselves, with no grown-ups.

  ‘Can I go?’ asked Janey.

  ‘One day, perhaps.’

  ‘On a train with just Bea and no grown-ups?’

  ‘Do you think you’d like that?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Janey, jumping up and down. ‘Who would meet us at the station?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ said Clarry. ‘You have to have someone very special and wonderful to meet you at the station.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clarry. ‘I did.’

  Later Vanessa said, ‘Listen, Clarry, leave the sorting and things a little while longer, and when Charles is bigger I’ll come with you and help.’

  ‘Would you really? It would be better with two.’

  ‘As soon as he’s a bit less nocturnal,’ said Vanessa, looking across at Charles, tight asleep in his cradle, collecting his strength so that he would be able, explained his parents, to stay awake all night imperiously demanding milk, songs, walking up and down, trips to look at the moon out of the window and as many people as possible to keep him company.

  A month passed, and then another; Vanessa’s parents agreed to come and babysit. Charles’s night-time revels grew no less wild (worse, according to his mother), but suddenly she gave up waiting for him to change and said, ‘Never mind, Peter will cope, he’s brilliant with the children. It’s amazing how he knows how to manage.’

  ‘It’s not,’ said Peter. ‘I just think of my own father and do the exact opposite.’ (Peter’s father, when invited to visit his grandchildren, always blanched and said, ‘Good Lord. Very kind. I don’t think so.’)

  So it was arranged, and a date was chosen, and everything planned except that Vanessa changed her mind over and over between going by train (‘Such bliss to just sit!’) and driving down because a car would be so useful when they got there. But at last she decided on the train, and their bags were packed and their tickets were bought, and the grandparents installed, and Peter drove them to the station. Clarry and Vanessa found an empty carriage and put their bags on the saggy string luggage rack overhead, and the doors began to slam all along the train, and the guard raised his whistle to his lips and Vanessa said suddenly, ‘You know, Clarry, I think I should drive after all!’ and before Clarry could say a word, she’d jumped off, and a second later the train pulled out of the station.

  Clarry sat quite stunned, staring out of the window, and outside, the half-familiar landscape went floating by, and she fought back tears as the memories came pouring in and filled the empty carriage with their clamour.

  At first they overwhelmed her, but as the journey passed she untangled them one by one and held them in her thoughts.

  Her father, handing her the sovereign, stepping back with relief into his solitary world.

  Peter, white-faced and enduring. Happy now at last.

  Simon.

  Dear, gallant Simon.

  Rupert, the bravest and the kindest, who all through her childhood had never failed her once. For years she’d believed she would never see him again, but since the arrival of the twins she had known he still thought of them.

  Perhaps one day, thought Clarry, remembering the telegram of congratulations he had sent back to Oxford, signed off in the old familiar Rupert way: Love to everyone.

  Love to everyone, love to everyone, love to everyone, echoed the train, and Clarry drifted into sleep.

  ‘Got her off?’ Peter asked, reappearing on the platform as soon as Clarry’s train had disappeared.

  ‘Yes, but her face! I had to leave it to the last half-second in case she ran after me.’

  ‘I’ve just telegraphed that she’s on time.’

  ‘This is easily the most difficult cheer-up yet! The lies we’ve told about poor little Charles! For months he’s been the best behaved of them all!’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Worth it.’

  ‘Is it going to be all right, Peter?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  Clarry awoke with a start. They were nearly there. There were glimpses of sea, brighter even than she’d remembered, and red rooftops in the distance, coming closer, and the train was slowing with great gusts of steam and, despite all that had happened, the familiar joy was growing and growing, so she could hardly wait to tug down the window and open the door, and jump out at the little station.

  And there was someone hurrying over the footbridge, and he reached the train in time to swing her down on to the platform. She could feel him laughing as he held her, and he said, ‘Clarry. Darling Clarry!’

  And it was Rupert.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The World Behind the Story

  Peter, Clarry and Vanessa. Simon the Bony One. Rupert, Odysseus, Mrs Morgan. Violet and Miss Vane. Mr King the rag-and-bone man. They came so alive for me writing this book.

  I think that was because their world was true. It gave them such a solid background that they could stand out against it as real people.

  The time is the very beginning of the twentieth century: 1902. Queen Victoria has recently died, and her eldest son, Edward VII, is surprising everyone by turning out to be not quite as useless as his mother had predicted he would be. There are bicycles (nearly all for men and boys, though), steam trains, a very few cars and a great many horses. There are no aeroplanes or antibiotics, Everest has not yet been climbed and the South Pole has not been reached. There is no plastic. Einstein is beginning to have ideas about relativity, but hardly anyone knows about this yet. Probably a good thing; the general public is only just getting used to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. People are reading books (although not paperbacks yet), and education is no longer just for those who can pay for it. Poor children can still leave school at nine or ten, but now they often stay on until thirteen. After that, for most students, their formal education is over. But for some there are boarding schools, as there have been for centuries, and the new secondary schools are beginning to open. Once again, these are mostly for boys: there are three or four schools for boys to every one school for girls. Clarry and Vanessa are lucky.

  Money is different. Money is real. The coins are made of copper, silver and gold. Top quality silver and twenty-two carat gold! There are twelve big copper pennies to a shilling. Twenty silver shillings to a pound. A pound is a gold sovereign, a very beautiful coin. Clarry has one from her father for her birthday one summer. I don’t think it is a planned present: I think Peter has just hissed at him, last minute, on the railway station platform, ‘Of course, you’ve forgotten her birthday again!’

  The background to the second half of The Skylark’s War is the First World War. This terrible war began in the summer of 1914 and carried on until late in 1918. The suffering of those fighting, the occupied countries and the families left behind who sent the soldiers off to war is beyond my ability to describe. So I will stick to plain facts.

  Where Simon and Rupert fight, on the Western Front, more than four million men and more than a million horses died. (As Michael Morpurgo wrote about in War Horse.) Soldiers were supposed to be nineteen ye
ars old to serve overseas, but it was easy to get around that. Birth certificates were not required to sign up. Simon is eighteen when he goes to France, but some were much younger. There are records of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds fighting in the trenches.

  While so many men were abroad, workers were needed at home. For the first time girls and women were given a chance to show what they could achieve. They made weapons, drove trains and buses and trams, farmed the land, ran the hospitals, worked in factories and offices. Sally Nicholls’s Things a Bright Girl Can Do describes the growing freedom of young women at this time.

  When I am working on a story it helps me to have some ‘real’ things about me as I write. That is why on my desk I kept Clarry’s gold sovereign, Peter’s star book and the key to the cricket pavilion. If you would like to see what they look like, and find out more about this fascinating period of time, log on to my website: www.hilarymckay.co.uk.

  GLOSSARY

  branch line – a subsidiary railway line serving local communities, away from the main intercity lines; most were closed down in the 1960s.

  B.T.M. – a slang term for ‘bottom’.

  carbolic – an antiseptic, anti-bacterial soap made with carbolic acid (or phenol), developed in the later nineteenth century.

  coal scuttle – a scooped container used to contain the coal needed to stoke household fires and kitchen ranges in the days before central heating and gas or electric ovens.

  Columbine – a female pantomime character, in love with Harlequin.

  Encyclopaedia Britannica – a multi-volume alphabetical dictionary of knowledge, first published in the eighteenth century, which went through numerous revised editions, and which was widely distributed in twentieth-century middle-class households.

  farthing – a bronze coin to the value of one quarter (or ‘fourth’) of a penny. At the time The Skylarks’ War is set, there were twelve pennies in a shilling, and twenty shillings in a pound.

  field telephone – a battery-powered telephone, developed in the 1910s.

  ‘For those in peril on the sea’ – the chorus of the so-called ‘naval hymn’ (written in 1861, and then popularized by the Royal Navy), ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’.

  gramophone – a nineteenth-century device for listening to pre-recorded music, using wax cylinders and, later, brittle discs – or ‘records’.

  half-crown – a silver coin to the value of two shillings and sixpence (a ‘crown’ being a silver coin worth five shillings).

  liberty bodice – a close-fitting sleeveless undergarment for women and girls, made of soft fabric, introduced in the late 1800s as an alternative to the more constricting and uncomfortable corset – thus ‘liberating’ the wearer.

  lucifer match – a match that ignited by its friction against a rough surface (as opposed to modern ‘safety matches’ that can only catch fire when struck against a prepared surface).

  MA, D.Phil – postgraduate university degrees – ‘Master of Arts’ and ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ (which is called a ‘Ph.D’ almost everywhere except Oxford University)

  Morse code – a system that translated the letters of the alphabet into a series of short and long signals (‘dots and dashes’) that could be transmitted as radio signals.

  Odysseus – the hero (also known as Ulysses) of Homer’s ancient Greek epic The Odyssey; after fighting in the Trojan War, Odysseus spent ten years enduring a series of adventures, returning home to Greece.

  Oxon – the Latin abbreviation of ‘Oxford’ (in the same way that ‘Cambridge’ is abbreviated to ‘Cantab’). The first women’s colleges in Oxford University were founded in 1879 (ten years after Girton College in Cambridge), though it was not until the 1920s that their degrees were formally recognized.

  pony trap – a light, wheeled carriage pulled by a pony, seating two to four passengers.

  postal order – a means of transferring money securely across distances by which the named recipient of a filled-in printed form could exchange it for cash at post offices. During the First World War they were treated as equivalent to bank notes.

  railway porter – the employee at a railway station who once used to assist passengers with their luggage.

  Red Cross – an international humanitarian organization, formed in 1870, dedicated to neutral and impartial aid.

  St Matthew – the author of the first of four Gospels of the Bible, which contains the full version of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

  St Paul – the early convert to, and evangelist for, Christianity whose missionary work is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and his various Epistles in the Bible.

  sand shoe – a canvas shoe with a rubber sole, later known as a ‘plimsoll’.

  Sherlock Holmes – the immortal detective invented by the Scottish writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who first appeared in his novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) and, between 1891 and 1927, in a series of further short stories and novels published in the monthly Strand Magazine.

  Sunday School – weekly classes in religious instruction held for local children.

  ‘Three Little Maids from School’ – a song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1885 comic opera, The Mikado.

  Twelfth Night – a tragi-comedy by William Shakespeare, written around 1602.

  Voluntary Aid Detachment – a system, established in 1909, by which civilian volunteer nurses – the majority of whom were women – administered care to wounded military personnel.

  Zeppelin – a form of rigid air-balloon conceived in the 1890s, and named after the German general who developed it, which was used for aerial bombing during the First World War (and of British cities from 1915).

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  (with thanks to Jim!)

  I could not have written The Skylark’s War without the following books and sources:

  Addington, Scott, World War One: A Layman’s Guide. www.scottaddington.com, 2012.

  Adie, Kate, Fighting on the Home Front (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013).

  Adlington, Lucy, Great War Fashion: Tales from the History Wardrobe (Stroud: History Press, 2013).

  Brittain, Vera, Testament of Youth (London: Virago Press, 1978).

  Clare, John D., First World War (I Was There) (London: Riverswift, 1994).

  Dent, Olive, A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front (London: Grant Richards, 1917).

  Gilber, Adrian, Going to War in World War One (London: Franklin Watts, 2001).

  Grant, D. F., The History of ‘A’ Battery 84th Army Brigade RFA, 1914–1918. (Brighton: The Book Guild Publishing, 2013).

  Hansen, Ole Steen, The War in the Trenches (Lewes: White-Thomson Publishing, 2000).

  Jones, Nigel, Peace and War: Britain in 1914 (London: Head of Zeus, 2014).

  Langbridge, R. H., Edwardian Shopping (Newton Abbot: David & Charles (Publishers) Ltd, 1975).

  Mayhew, Emily, Wounded: From Battlefield to Blighty, 1914–1918 (London: Bodley Head, 2013).

  Picture Taking with the Brownie Camera No. 2. (Toronto: Canadian Kodak Co. Limited, n.d. [pre-1923]).

  SSAFA, The Great War, 1914–18: SSAFA’s Official Guide to World War 1 (London: CW Publishing Group, 2014).

  Tait, Derek, Plymouth in the Great War (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2014).

  Williamson, Henry, How Dear Is Life (Stroud: Macdonald & Co., 1954).H

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hilary McKay is a critically acclaimed author who has won many awards, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for her first novel, The Exiles, and the Whitbread (now the Costa) Award for Saffy’s Angel. Hilary studied Botany and Zoology at the University of St Andrews, and worked as a biochemist before the draw of the pen became too strong and she decided to become a full-time writer. Hilary lives in Derbyshire with her family.

  Praise for

  ‘Vivid, hilarious and heartbreaking . . . possibly the finest writer of our time’ Elizabeth Wein, author of Code Name Verity

  ‘McKay at her finest . . . both a thrilling family adventure and a truthfu
l, heartbreaking examination of the impact of war . . . [an] exceptional historical novel’ Fiona Noble, Children’s Book of the Month, The Bookseller

  ‘Winning as ever, with a Secret Garden feel’ Kirkus Reviews

  ‘Hilary McKay is surely the heir to Mary Wesley. The Skylarks’ War is just lovely’ Charlotte Eyre, The Bookseller

  ‘I thoroughly enjoyed The Skylarks’ War. The story is at once intimate and sweeping, with Clarry the shining heart of it all’ Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, author of The War That Saved My Life

  ‘Hilary McKay’s novel is about love as much as war . . . McKay is incapable of writing an uninteresting character or a dull scene . . . I loved it’ Mary Hoffman

  ‘What a wonderful story, beautifully told . . . a book I’ll not forget’ Lauren Wolk, author of Wolf Hollow

  ‘McKay couples warmth and grace with wry humour like nobody else out there’ Katherine Rundell, The Guardian

  ‘A family book, like those of Noel Streatfeild or R. F. Delderfield . . . I find it hard to imagine anyone not enjoying it. You will smile, and you will cry . . . You will recognise yourself and your friends’ Adele Geras

  Also published by Macmillan Children’s Books

  Straw into Gold: Fairy Tales Re-Spun

  (Previously published in hardback as Hilary McKay’s Fairy Tales)

  First published 2018 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published 2018 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-9497-0

  Copyright © Hilary McKay 2018

  Cover illustration by Dawn Cooper

  The right of Hilary McKay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.