September Starlings

by Ruth Hamilton

  Our school was attached to St Mark’s C of E church, and St Mark’s was also connected to the vicarage. The vicar was a round fat man with a round fat wife. Their plump children had married and wandered off, but photographs of the offspring sat in lines of military precision on a desk in the vestry. Apart from this small symptom of organization, our vicar was a hale-fellow-well-met sort of chap who blundered through life like a drone bee, dependent on others for some pattern to his existence.

  Anne and I were summoned to the Reverend Conley’s presence early on in our career at St Mark’s. Reverend Conley was a favourite with all children. For a man of God, he was unusual, because he was not judgemental by nature. This lovely and loving man was a source of great comfort, because he gave tea parties to boys and girls in the vicarage and encouraged them to talk about anything at all. Troubles, however difficult to talk about, were blown away in an instant by the vicar, and no sin existed that he could not forgive and understand. He was a man of vision who recognized that children are people in the making, and he was there to listen to our opinions in a serious and sensible way.

  He gave us an Uncle Joe’s apiece, a stick of barely sugar between us, and some advice on how to settle to country living. ‘Cows,’ he said seriously, ‘are the ones with milk-bags hanging underneath. Bulls don’t have that particular equipment, but they can be savage, girls. The farmer across the road from you breeds cattle, Laura. Keep your gate closed and your eyes open. Don’t sit in nettles, don’t jump in the crop fields. Clean up after a picnic, say your prayers morning and night, and keep away from the Black Horse on Friday evenings. Labourers are paid on Fridays, and their language can get a bit dreadful after a pint or two of ale.’ He was not a solemn man by nature, so he twinkled at us then. ‘How are you getting along with Miss Armitage?’

  One thing I knew by the age of ten was that I got on better with some grown-ups than I did with most children. They had to be fairly sensible adults, though, and I hadn’t met many of those. In fact, I could count them on my fingers with a few digits to spare for any future encounters that might be lucky. So far, I had collected Uncle Freddie and Auntie Maisie, who were warm and loving, and my father, who was vague, but charming. Then there was Sister Maria Goretti with whom I corresponded on a weekly basis, and Sister St Thomas who was in Ireland with bad rheumatics. I hadn’t forgotten the park keeper who had told me to look after myself, and I had recently met the vicar and our teacher, Miss Armitage. Miss Armitage promised to be secretive and of a romantic nature, so she was interesting. Nathaniel ‘Good’ Evans was dead, but he still counted as dead people didn’t really die … I was running out of fingers. Perhaps I was a lucky girl after all.

  I was thinking about my mother, who was not charming, not sensible, not really an adult, when Anne kicked me on the shin. ‘Mr Conley wants to know how we are getting along with Miss Armitage.’

  I pulled myself together and gave my full attention to the round-faced vicar. ‘Has she been crossed in love?’ I asked sweetly. Anyone could have asked this good man anything at all.

  Anne awarded me another kick and I glared at her. The blow was so hard that it might have propelled me to the other side of the vestry had I not hung on to my chair. To thank her for this favour, I narrowed my eyes, treated her to one of my hard looks.

  The vicar folded his hands across a belly that was pleasantly rounded and comfortable. ‘Funny you should ask that,’ he muttered, as if talking to himself. After a small cough, he raised head and voice. ‘Why do you ask, Laura?’

  ‘It’s the way she dresses, Mr Conley. Frilly bits round the tops of her blouses and lipstick sometimes too. Not on her blouse, on her mouth – a nice, soft pink. She seems … very sad. As if she ought to give up waiting, but she still waits.’ Like I did. On a rusty bridge. For a boy called Tommo with peculiar hair.

  Mr Conley twinkled again. When he smiled, his whole face lit up until the brightness spilled from him into the room. ‘You have an active imagination,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will write stories when you grow up.’ He was so sweet, a real father to the whole village. He turned his attention to Anne, ‘And what will you be, dear?’

  ‘Rich,’ she said. One of the things I loved about Anne was the fact that she never pulled a punch.

  His laugh was deep and booming. For some unfathomable reason, his chuckle reminded me of dark fruit cake, the sort you get at Christmas with almond paste and white icing. I had to laugh too, because I realized that Anne also had fallen under the spell of this magical man.

  ‘How will you get rich?’ he asked.

  ‘By marriage.’ She had been reading again, I guessed. Something Victorian, probably about a beautiful girl who pined for a poor young man, waited for him to return from a war or something. And when he came back, he was rich after all, so everything ended well. ‘It’s the only way for a girl,’ she continued. ‘If I’d been a boy, I might have become a solicitor.’

  Mr Conley pushed himself away from his desk and leaned back in the chair. ‘You can be a lawyer, Anne. Get your scholarship, go to a good school, work hard. The universities are for women too. Of course, you’ll have to prove yourself once you get a job, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t succeed in time.’

  ‘Oh.’ Anne’s mouth remained round long after the quiet word had been breathed. She studied him closely to assess his seriousness. ‘Is that really true?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘I am a man of God. Would I lie?’

  ‘He wouldn’t lie,’ I said to Anne solemnly. ‘Because if he did, he’d go straight to hell for all eternity in sackcloth and ashes.’ For a child of supposed intelligence, I showed a marked tendency towards confusion. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Conley?’

  His fat fingers looked like a row of pork sausages looking for a pan, all stretched skin and pink blotches. ‘You’ve been to a Catholic school, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, God is more forgiving than you think, my dear. But mendacity is not in my nature, so I do tend to speak the truth. You may look up “mendacity” in the dictionary later.’ He looked at Anne again. ‘Unfortunately, you will have to travel to school next year, when you leave St Mark’s. There’s a secondary school two miles away, but for a grammar education, you will need to go back to Bolton.’

  Anne sucked noisily on her Uncle Joe’s. ‘There’s no bus, no tram.’

  The vicar heaved himself up from the chair, easing the arms away from his heavy body. ‘If I grow any fatter, I shall need a sofa to sit on and a crane to pick me up.’ He walked to the door. ‘Pass your scholarships first, worry about buses when the time comes.’

  We came out into the school yard just as the home bell sounded. In the cloakroom, Anne was pensive as she buckled the belt of her navy raincoat. ‘Your dad is going to have to buy a car,’ she said. ‘Or a van or something.’

  ‘Why?’ My buttons were hanging off again. I would need to remember to sew them back on again after tea, because my mother’s relationship with needle and thread was not an easy one. ‘Why shall we need to have a car?’

  Anne picked up her half of the barley sugar. ‘To get on in life,’ she said loftily. ‘To get to where we are going.’

  Sometimes, my cousin Anne really annoyed me. I was the one who had received the so-called education, yet she was becoming brighter, quicker by far than I was. ‘You can do as you please with your cars and vans,’ I snapped. ‘I’m going to the secondary.’

  She grinned at me. ‘Well, you’d better go in a hearse. Your mother won’t allow you to mix with common people.’

  I smiled back. ‘I’m mixing with you, aren’t I?’

  The other annoying thing about Anne was that she was bigger and stronger than most ten-year-olds. The satchel swiped across my head, leaving me with ringing ears and teeth that felt slightly deciduous. ‘It’ll all even out, Laura McNally. We’ll both go to university and we’ll both get good jobs.’

  We wandered down to the bridge from which the little village had taken its
name. As we dangled over the bars, Anne asked me, ‘What’s university?’

  I wasn’t sure, but I held my ground in more ways than one, made sure that my feet were on terra firma and that my brain was in gear before I answered. ‘Just goes to show how stupid you really are, Anne Turnbull. University’s like a big castle with towers and a lot of rooms and important people and books. It’s where you go to get really clever.’ This was, I thought, the best response I could dredge up at such short notice. Then I remembered something else. ‘And you wear a daft hat, like a flat thing with a curtain tassel hanging from it.’ I’d seen that on a photograph in the corridor at St Mary’s, some ex-pupil with a grim smile in a gilded frame with curly bits on the corners. ‘And you carry rolls of paper with ribbons tied round them.’

  She stared at me for a moment. ‘He was watching you last Saturday.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What would Auntie Liza say if she heard you saying “eh”?’

  ‘Who was watching me?’ She was at it again, savouring a secret.

  ‘That boy with pink hair. He was hiding in the bushes and you were standing on the bridge for hours.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘You were. Anyway, he seemed pleased that you were standing there, because he smiled before walking away.’

  So. Tommo had been hiding and watching me waiting for him. I would never wait again. Why had he come all the way from Bolton without speaking to me?

  ‘University sounds a bit daft to me,’ pronounced Anne. ‘And that Tommo’s daft too. Come on, I’ll race you home.’ And she did, of course.

  I was the ink monitor, while Anne was in charge of milk. Ink was all very well as long as you didn’t spill it, but milk was another matter altogether. The real problem was the milk mats, woven circles of raffia with bacteria and matured cheese threaded into every frayed strand. As newcomers, we were the victims of Miss Armitage’s kindness, so we got these awful jobs as perks. Miss Armitage laboured under the delusion that children like to be helpful, and she beamed on us most magnificently when we agreed, albeit reluctantly, to accept the dubious honour that was monitordom.

  On Mondays and Thursdays, I arrived ten minutes early to do battle with a cardboard carton of navy-blue powder, a chipped enamel jug and water from a tap of uncertain temperament. This monstrous outlet either dripped slowly like Chinese torture, or erupted in a fashion violent enough to warrant the building of a second ark. I learned to equip myself with sou’wester, Wellingtons and raincoat when mixing ink for our class.

  When powder and water were united in relative harmony, I transferred the resulting potion into brown bakelite inkwells that sat in holes on each age-wearied desk. The writing in our classroom depended on the mood of the tap and the extent of my patience, a virtue I did not possess in abundance at the age of ten. Sometimes, our work was runny and covered in blots. On other days, the ink would be so glutinous that a trowel would have served better than a pen, and we would need to reduce the glue in our wells by topping them up from the ever-present enamel water jug.

  Anne got fed up with the milk mats. One Thursday morning, she arrived extra early, accompanied by me, a large apron, a scrubbing brush, a wedge of carbolic and a very determined expression. ‘I’m going to wash them,’ she announced. I stood back and watched as she wound her mother’s pinny twice round herself. ‘Don’t laugh,’ she warned me before fixing a peg to her nose. ‘Your job’s easy cobpared to bilk. Dothig is as bad as bilk.’ The ms and ns had been squashed out of her vocabulary by the dolly peg that pinched her nose flat. The tap splashed angrily, was in volcanic mood. Water bounced from the shallow slopstone and drenched her within half a second.

  My recipe sat to one side, a newly mixed batch of reasonably malleable ink. The smell of stale milk was overpowering as she lowered mats into the metal washbowl. She scrubbed energetically for ten minutes or so, her face rosy from exertion and lack of oxygen. ‘I could do with breathig through by dose,’ she gasped. ‘But I cad’t stad the sbell.’ Even at that age, I was given to levity when a situation became grave. As the milk mats disintegrated and floated to the surface, I indulged in a bout of giggles that bordered on hysteria. ‘They’re ruined,’ I offered at last. ‘Miss Armitage will have a pink fit, she’ll probably faint and need a doctor.’ We imagined that Miss Armitage was of a delicate disposition on account of all that waiting for love.

  Completely unfussed, Anne tossed the soggy mess into a waste basket, then removed the peg from her nose. ‘I shall be back in half an hour,’ she pronounced with rather too much dignity for a girl with white marks where the clothes peg had pinched. ‘Tell Miss that I have gone on important business.’ On her way to the ‘important business’, she tripped over the hem of Auntie Maisie’s voluminous apron and knocked all my new ink down the drain. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’ll give you something to do when you’ve stopped laughing.’

  I think that was the day when I realized that my cousin Anne was a rather fine character. Where she acquired such presence of mind, I shall never know. But she returned halfway through long division, her father limping behind her. Uncle Freddie, rather rosy in the face from exertion and because we were all staring at him, placed a large box on the floor next to Miss Armitage’s desk. ‘Quarry tiles, Miss,’ he said, removing the tweed cap from his dripping brow. ‘They’re heavy in a lump, but all right a few at a time. They’ll be more hygienic as milk mats, because all the spills can be wiped away.’

  ‘Very kind,’ simpered Miss Armitage, who always simpered when a man came in, even when the vicar arrived to tell us one of his Jesus stories.

  ‘We’ve done the workshop floors with them,’ he explained. ‘And our Anne thought they’d be just the job, these spare ones.’

  Anne was rewarded with a huge smile from the teacher and a knowing nudge from me as she took her place by my side.

  Miss Armitage looked fondly at her two ‘town girls’. ‘Very thoughtful,’ she said. ‘And so clever. You may arrange the flowers in the church this Friday, Anne. Laura, will you give out some more squared paper? After sums, I shall continue with our story.’

  Storytime was always a real treat. Miss Armitage should have been on the stage or in films, because she made us laugh, cry and live every line of ‘The Little White Horse’. But first, we had to make our solitary journeys through the maze that was long division, a skill I would never master in a month of Sundays.

  I reached the back row with my bundle of squared paper, froze as my eye was caught by something across the road. It wasn’t Uncle Freddie, though I could see him limping his way back towards our farmhouse. Again, I saw a flash of colour, stood still for a second until I was sure. He was there. It wasn’t Saturday, wasn’t Sunday, but Tommo was near the bridge.

  When I sat down to do my sums, Anne nudged me. ‘You’ve gone all red,’ she whispered.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘Have I seen who?’

  ‘The boy with pink hair. He’s outside.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Sometimes, you are very silly, Anne Turnbull.’

  But I was the one with the glowing face, the one whose heart was hammering in uncertain rhythm. Why? Why was he out there when he ought to have been at school? He was old enough for senior school, old enough to know better. And why did he keep coming and staring without ever speaking, without ever coming near me?

  Well, I was a girl who had been forced to make the ink twice, a girl who was useless at long division. But outside, a boy looked for me, stood for endless hours until he caught sight of me. Perhaps long division didn’t matter, because I had an admirer, someone who travelled miles, probably on foot, just to catch a glimpse of his princess.

  ‘Laura?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Armitage?’

  ‘Are you ill? Your face is rather flushed.’

  Anne kicked me. ‘She’s not ill, Miss. She’s just excited about having ten whole long divisions to do. Laura loves doing long division.’

  Miss
Armitage, who was nobody’s fool, nodded wisely. ‘Then perhaps you might get one or two of the sums right this time, Laura. I shall take a special interest in your efforts afterwards, when I mark the work.’

  I bent my head, kicked my poor cousin again, got on with my work. Life was waiting for me outside. As I struggled with a seven fours are twenty-eight and carry one from the other column, I wondered whether he would always be there on that bridge. Encouraged by such perfect devotion, I went on to get nine out of ten sums right. Anne took top marks, but I still felt superior. My knight in shining armour had arrived at last.

  Chapter Ten

  It was like an extraordinary meeting of some governing body, perhaps a ministry of defence that was about to turn itself into a war office. And I had caused it, was standing near the door in our kitchen while everybody’s eyes bored into what was left of my soul. Of course, there wasn’t much soul left, because I had done the unforgivable. I had deliberately and with malice aforethought failed my scholarship examination. In fact, I had failed both parts, plus the common entrance paper. I knew as I stood there that I was the only person in the world to have committed such a pernicious crime.

  ‘Laura.’ Mr Conley’s face was at its gentlest, no blame, no accusation, just sympathy trimmed with deep concern. ‘You are one of the cleverest girls we have ever had at St Mark’s. What went wrong, dear?’

  I shrugged my shoulders and wished that Tommo could have been here. He had the right attitude and the bravery to back up his opinions. Education was all right in the long run, especially for boys, but grammar school meant more years at my books, an endless stretch before getting away from home, away from the woman who was wringing her hands and crying softly and prettily into a scrap of lace-edged cotton with roses embroidered on a corner.