by Dawson, Jill
A lady’s voice suddenly.
“But he looks puny. What d’you think, Bert? The one with the ears. What’s your name, boy?”
A man and a woman. The man silent, like a tree, and with so much black hair and big red hands. They stand in front of us, staring at us.
“Bit of a rum lot left, isn’t it,” says the man. I get a sniff of pipe tobacco as he steps over to us; he’s slipping the pipe into the pocket of his jacket but it still peeps out, like a snake’s head.
“At least they’re not Jews! I wouldn’t know what to do with a Jew,” the lady says.
Then to me she says, “What’s your name?” She’s wearing a thick coat, that Nan would call a “camel coat” for the color, and the way it looks like an animal’s skin, and men’s shoes, and her skin has a rough coating on each cheek, like the skin of some apples. I’m wondering what she might be like underneath, if you peeled her with a knife, like an apple?
“Queenie,” I answer.
Bobby stares at me. He opens his mouth a little, like a big fish.
“I don’t think there’s any Queenie left . . . only Beryl, Mary, Robert, Archibald . . .” says the billeting lady, coming over to us. She has a clipboard, a pen parked above her ear, the way Dad does with a cigarette.
“It’s my nickname. Everyone calls me Queenie.” I point to the place on her list where my real name is. Bobby closes his mouth tight.
“And we have to stay together,” I add. “My nan said.”
“It’s the start of the Campaign,” the man says to Bobby. “You’re little . . . skin and bone. Can you work hard?” This man’s hair is long for a grown-up. It sticks up from his head like a brush you use to sweep the hearth. His cheeks have these puffs of hair sprouting from them. I suppose it’s a beard, but it looks more like the stuff you get growing on potatoes when you leave them for too long.
“Yes,” I pipe up. “We’re grand. We’re really good in all—campaigns.” We don’t know what they mean, and Bobby’s mouth is now firm shut, like a letterbox stuck with glue.
The lady in the camel coat laughs. I think she knows I don’t know what the man means, but she likes my cheek. The man and the lady—she’s quite fat, bundled up to the neck in the coat, her apple-skinned face not very smiley—turn to go, as if that decides it, nodding to the billeting officer, and then the man jerks his head towards Bobby to follow them, towards the great big dark doors of the cathedral. I scramble up.
And that’s it. The billeting lady crosses our names off the list and nods at the man and lady, and they lead us out towards the huge doors, with the iron patterns on them, and we hear them clank behind us, like the doors of a castle.
Bobby holds my hand. I wrap my fingers around his fist, feeling through his fingers that he’s still tightly holding his conkers. Somehow we both know that if the brush-haired man and the camel-coat woman saw them, we’d have to give them up.
“It’s ten shillings and eight pence for the first one. How much do we get if we have the girl, too?” the lady asks.
The man says something we don’t hear, and again looks back at us, nodding towards a great big conker-colored horse with a sort of cart behind it, parked across from the cathedral, on a very posh bit of grass. Surely they don’t mean us to get in that? Don’t they know my dad had a Chrysler? The horse is eating the grass near the cathedral and the gardens look so bright and neat that, somehow, I think this must be naughty.
“Just the dregs left,” says the lady, as we scramble up onto the high seat behind the man and the woman. Bobby holds his bag to his chest and bites his bottom lip.
“Call me Auntie Elsie.” The lady sits in front of us and turns over her shoulder to talk to us: “And this is . . . Uncle Bert.”
The horse clops across the marketplace and down a hill that I read is called Fore Hill. There’s a cottage at the bottom near the river, and as I go past it I turn my head, because I have a very strange feeling about it. As if somebody is inside it, someone I know. I turn my head, and think for a minute about saying something to Bobby—did he see anyone at the window, did he have the same funny feeling?—but when I look at his face I see his eyes are like saucers and I know that if I say anything he might burst into tears. A big cloud of geese bursts from somewhere, making this horrible honking noise, a really frightening noise, something I’ve never heard before: they make me think of children, unfriendly children, shouting and cackling at you. Bobby and I watch the geese go over us, over the high towers of the cathedral. But the man and the woman don’t see them.
“Come on, you little old boy,” the man says, jerking at the horse’s reins. The horse makes a loud sharp snort and I jump in my seat. Then I start whistling, in case anyone thought I was scared.
After the road to the river, we start to go out on a rough bumpy lane, and it’s quiet, a sort of quiet I’ve never heard. It makes me feel quiet, too. I hold Bobby’s hand and want to whisper to him, but I don’t. Where are the shops and the cars and the smoke and the cinemas and the schools—it’s just flat, as if we’re rolling along on a big flat blanket of green. No cranes or chimneys or buildings at all, just empty. We clop along. Bobby’s hand is hot, and sweaty, so I sing a skipping song and lean closer to him so that he can hear it: “Bluebell, cockleshell, evie, ivy, over . . .”
Beside us the fields stretch away from us in black squares, with the soil all folded in lines and oily looking where it’s rained. Bobby whispers that they look like chocolate, do you think we could eat some? His eyes are big. His voice is very small.
Then he says, “Do you think this is what it’s like where Vera is? Are we in heaven?”
The way he says it, heaven doesn’t sound nice; it sounds empty, and scary. I tell him to shoosh, not wanting Elsie or Bert to hear.
The road we’re on is straight and strict as a ruler. Beside us is a high bank of green, but I somehow know there is water behind it, some kind of river. My bottom keeps jolting on my seat, bouncing me up and down really hard, and bumping me into Bobby. Suddenly, from behind the bank, a big bird appears like a monster—a bird bigger than anything we’ve ever seen, with hunched wings in the shape of a giant pair of eyebrows and a beak like a knife. Bobby screams and flings himself at me. Elsie turns around and laughs.
“Oh, that’s just a heron. You’ve never seen a heron before? He won’t hurt you . . . after a fish, he is, not a skinny little boy . . .”
Bobby straightens up to try and look like he’s not scared, and watches the bird fly off, its wings making a noise like a man flapping his arms in a wet raincoat. It’s so quiet: the clopping of the horse and the rattle of the wheels and the heron’s wings and then . . . nothing. I’m listening hard. There must be other noises in the country, other things? Where are the people?
The journey goes on forever. Bert is smoking his pipe and the only good thing about it is the smell I keep getting, of his tobacco, which smells like my uncle Charlie. We don’t pass a single car or cart or person on the road. The sky turns a peachy pink, but in long, flat stripes like lines in a school exercise book. Bobby’s head bounces against me with every step of the horse’s hooves.
I think of Bunny, in my bag on the floor at my feet, and a song that Nan used to sing: My bunny lies over the ocean, my bunny lies over the sea. My bunny lies over the ocean, oh let’s have a nice cup of tea.
I listen and listen, trying hard to hear the country. It’s not what I thought at all: I had no idea anywhere in the world could ever be this quiet. Just the rattle of the cart. Clop, clop of the horse. Just Bobby’s breathing.
“Not scared of horses, are we?” Elsie asks, suddenly, over her shoulder.
“No,” I say. Then a little more loudly: “Me and him have got a horse at home. We’ve got one in our . . . stables. A white one. She’s called Betty—I mean Betsy.”
Elsie doesn’t turn round to look at me. Her neck stiffens. Bobby continues to rest his head ag
ainst my shoulder, but I know from the way he is holding it that he’s not resting at all, but listening.
“That can be your job then,” Elsie says, after a snort, and a glance at Bert, and a long pause. “To feed the horse. His name is Highflyer. Highflyer was a famous horse, buried near the pub. Pub’s named after him. And our horse is named after the pub.”
“Or the other horse,” I mutter.
Elsie’s a bit stupid, surely. Feed a horse? (I know that Bobby wants to whisper to me, to laugh and giggle and tease me, but I pretend not to see; I don’t want him to break the spell.) I can feed a horse named after a pub. My granddad had a horse like that. Easy-peasy. And I have a beautiful white horse, her soft mane that feels just like the tassels on Nan’s bedspread and her soft munching mouth on my hand as I feed her apples in the stables we own behind our house . . . oh, and a pink silk ribbon round her neck. A little wash of sadness, as the details come to me. I miss her so much, I say to myself. I try her name on my tongue. Betsy.
I sit back in my seat, feeling for Bunny in my bag. Nan will be drawing the curtains at home, putting the kettle on. Don’t they have blackout out here in this flat open moon country? How do they cover up that sky color, now red as the inside of a mouth? Hitler would see that right away. See that big cathedral behind us, black against it.
I turn my head back for one last look at it. It doesn’t seem to matter how far you go in the country, you can always see the cathedral; it’s higher than everywhere else, it’s like it’s sitting on a cloud. It does look like those models Dad makes. Men in prison make them. Boats. Cathedrals. All made out of matches, thousands and thousands of them, every last bit, every little window and porthole (you have to soften and bend them for those, really carefully, so they don’t snap), so that Nan always says, “Gawd, Tommy, you had time all right,” and sighs when she sees them. Why did they send us away? Are we really so safe here? I feel like we’ve gone back in time, to the olden days before houses and buildings. I feel like we’ve gone to the moon, and I’ve changed forever. I’m different here: my name is Queenie and I’m not scared of horses or giant birds, or dogs. I’ve got a white horse, all of my own, back home in the stables we own. A really really pretty horse, and her name is Betsy.
Weeks go by and it doesn’t feel so strange. There are noises at last. I hear owls hooting at night and guns going off in the morning, and the clang of a milk pail. There’s thunder sometimes and the horse whinnying at night, and the rattle of the honey-spinner in the kitchen and the thump thump thump of Bert chopping wood and the dog barking tied up outside the house and the swish of Elsie sweeping. We get a bit used to it, I suppose. Bobby more than me. Bert teaches Bobby to shoot rabbits. At night, Bobby teases me, lying on his side in the dark to sing: “Run rabbit run rabbit run run run run . . . don’t let the farmer use his gun . . .”
But what about Bunny? “Poor rabbits,” I say to Bobby. “I ain’t never going to eat them . . . you’re just mean.”
They wake Bobby up when the air’s all crackly and dark, to work on the Campaign. We work out what the Campaign is: they just mean help in the fields picking up the sugar beets, walking behind the horse with this long sharp thing, poking it at the sugar beets, and then chucking the smelly things into the back of the tractor. But I refuse to do it, scream and shout when Bert tries to wake me, flap my arms and then go all stiff so he can’t get me out of bed, and has to give up on me.
Later that morning I put my coat on over my nightie and go out into the fields—Bert calls it the Fen—to see what they’re doing: Bert sitting on another kind of cart that the horse is dragging and Bobby lifting and picking and throwing into the big box behind him. Bobby’s cheeks are pink, and the tips of his ears, too, and his eyes shine. He wants me to laugh at the beets with him, see how rude they look, dirty and pointy, like a giant pile of big rude willies. But I turn around and stomp back indoors. I don’t want to see Bert and Bobby take them to the river to heap them on the boats. I’m going back to bed.
Elsie has been calling me, so I put my head under the pillow. She shouts that my breakfast has been on the table for hours and it’s stone cold now and she’ll throw it in the bin if I don’t come soon. I’m hungry, I’m so hungry, but I can’t seem to make myself get up. I think I fall asleep again: I’m sure Elsie must have thrown it in the bin by now. Somewhere, between falling asleep and hearing her call, I think she said she’d wallop the hide off me.
Next time I wake up, it feels like it could be dinnertime. The sky is bright in the window, and I stand and stare out until a spider falls onto my shoulder and startles me. I brush it off and it plops to the floor like a tangle of brown cotton and suddenly I feel a bit more awake, so I get up and put a jumper on, hoping that Elsie might have gone out. I tiptoe down the stairs, but I can hear her, pounding something in a bowl, and I want to go right back upstairs again but she’s heard me, and now she’s out in the hall, and shouting again.
“If you’re not going to help Bert, come and help me in here; you can’t spend all day in bed . . .”
“I want to go to school. Ain’t there no school in the country? I like school,” I tell her, from halfway down the stairs. Not too close to the open kitchen door. I can hear the radio but it doesn’t sound cozy.
Elsie comes into the hall to look at me, still holding the bowl and spoon.
“School? School’s six miles away. No one goes to school when the Campaign’s on. You’re needed here.”
She gives me a brush and a bucket, and pushes me out towards the backyard. I spy my breakfast on the table, a plate of stuck-on bacon and eggs, but she’s already flicking it into the pig bucket, with nasty scraping noises. I won’t show her that I mind.
One teatime, weeks later—well, I think it’s weeks, but who knows? We don’t have calendars or newspapers and we’ve no idea really how long we’ve been here; it feels like forever and the nights are getting dark at five o’clock and the blackberries we find are small and screwed up, like old men’s faces. Anyhow, one time, Elsie makes us a pie and it has plums in it, so sour that I can hardly eat them. I take the stones out and put them on the side of the plate, counting them up. “What shall I be? Lady, baby, gipsy, queen. What shall I wear? Silk, satin, cotton, rags.”
Elsie hears me and says, “Eat up your pie.”
“It’s nasty,” I say, without meaning to.
“Nasty?” Elsie whirls around and snatches the plate from under my nose.
“So grand, aren’t we?” she says.
I’m still counting stones. “How shall I get my wedding clothes? Given, borrowed, bought, stolen.”
“We have bread and jam for breakfast,” I say. It’s just me and Elsie—the others aren’t here—but she acts like I haven’t spoken.
“My dad’s got this proper shop called Cookes Eel Pie and Mash Shop. In Dalston. My dad’s the boss of it. My nan says it’s the Buckingham Palace of mash shops. When you go in you can see the eels in this wooden drawer at the back, all alive and wiggling. You can catch them with a little net and eat as many as you like. Well, I can. Or we can, me and Bobby. Because our dad’s the boss.”
“I thought your family owned a stables? Pie and mash shop now, is it?”
Elsie stands with her back to me, so that I’m staring at the tied string of her red-checked pinny and her grey-skinned elbow. I wait for a minute, chewing my lip, and then say, “Both.” When she says nothing to this, I add, “And I can go in anytime I want. And I can eat how many I want, with parsley sauce,” and that’s it, that does it, at last. Elsie whirls around and says in a strange voice, “You’re funny.”
This is the first time she’s really looked at me. She crouches on the kitchen floor in front of me with her knees creaking and wiping her hands on her pinny, and looks hard into my face. I feel scared, but I don’t blink, or move away. I feel glad, too. I wanted to know how bad Elsie could be, and now she’s going to show me.
“
I heard your baby sister died. I heard your mum’s a drunk and can’t look after you, and your dad’s—well, the less said about where he is, the better, eh, Queenie?”
I kick her then. Not a hard kick. I run at her and just stab at what I can reach. I’m short, and my leg flings out, and I’m not even wearing shoes so it’s just my foot bumping up against her fat woolly stockings. Still, it does the trick. She limps off out of the open kitchen door and towards Bert, out in the yard to where Bert and Bobby are now fiddling with some farm machinery, fixing something. The black dog chained up outside barks and strains, his mouth dribbling. His eyes are red and he’s a Fen Dog, Bert says. You should Watch Him.
I hear Elsie’s voice, out in the yard. Nasty like those geese that first day. She’s had enough of the little townie bastards. Bert will have to get himself into Ely and talk to that old mawther, the billeting lady. They’ve tried human charity. They’ve tried home cooking. Out of the goodness of their hearts, they’ve let those East End slum kids into their home. But, I ask you. Enough is enough.
I run inside and grab my case from under the bed. My heart is pumping. I’m sure Bobby will be cross with me, because in some funny way, he seems to like Bert. Or like doing things with Bert, who says so little and lets you be around him, as long as you’re working. And Bert is in the same mood every day: calm. Pipe smoking and slow talking.
With a wild feeling, a funny feeling, strong and strange like the way I felt towards that house at the bottom of Fore Hill when we first arrived, like a memory when it couldn’t really be a memory yet, I suddenly picture something I saw in Elsie’s bathroom. She didn’t let us go in there, but I’d sneaked in one day. I hated the lavatory outside with the squares of newspaper hanging on a nail and all the spiders . . . I wanted to see Elsie’s proper lavatory, and her best china jug and bowl with the blue flowers on, for washing in. So I snuck in, and there on a little dish was a bar of pure white soap, just sitting there like a princess on a throne. When I put my face up close to it, it smelled even better than it looked. It smelled of all my favorite things: lemons and roses and cleanness and specialness, of Betsy my perfect white pony (yes, pony, surely that was the word I wanted before?), of Bunny and her silky ribbons, and Nan’s parma-violet cheeks, and money.
