Great Meadow

by Dirk Bogarde

  ‘End of October, I reckon. You’ll have to come back at the end of October. From Hampton Court, they are. Took the cutting years and years ago. Afore I spoke for Mrs Jane even. Been here umpteen years.’

  When we were walking back down the path to the long shed, my sister said that did I know that he had actually stolen the bit of vine from King Henry’s Palace. And it was hundreds of years old. I told her she was pretty decent to have remembered to get me a bunch, but she just shrugged and said that if I hadn’t a bunch of my own I’d have to share hers, Lally would see to that. So it was much better if I had my own. So she could have all hers for herself.

  You see? Pretty rotten really. Girls are.

  We all had supper in the kitchen. It was still light outside, so there was no lovely lamplight or a fire in the range. Not until the Last Day of Summer. We had boiled eggs for supper, with fingers, and Mr Jane had some savoury mince at his little bamboo table by the empty range, which had two gas rings on the top so that we had two kettles sighing away for the tea or washing-up. Lally and Mrs Jane seemed to have said sorry, or something, because they were quite nice to each other, and Lally said that we were having the eggs for supper on account of we’d had some pilchards for lunch, and if we so much as whispered that to our father we’d never be allowed to come to Walnut again.

  ‘He’s so against anything in tins,’ she said to Mrs Jane. ‘Ptomaine poisoning, he says. You don’t know how long the things inside have been dead.’ Mrs Jane said, ‘Oh well, bang goes my potted salmon. I thought of that for tomorrow, but what with pilchards today, and he’s so against tinned things, it might be tempting fate.’ So she’d think of a bit of salt beef and salad instead. Lally said that on Sunday she wouldn’t be there, to keep an eye on things, so we could all have whatever we liked to eat and she wouldn’t be witness. When she said that, Mrs Jane looked quite pale and said, where, pray, would she be on Sunday then? We were to stay until Monday? So what was she supposed to do, being left responsible for two energetic children, and Lally said she had it in mind to go to the Regal in Richmond to see Bebe Daniels.

  Mrs Jane set her cup down with such a bang that it splashed the cloth with tea. Even Mr Jane looked up from his plate and said that, yes, he’d quite finished, Mother, and it was very nice thank you. Lally said that was what she was doing on Sunday afternoon tea-time, going to see Rio Rita with Bebe Daniels and, her favourite, John Boles.

  This gave Mrs Jane the most terrible shock, and she got to her feet so quickly that she knocked the milk jug over and I stuck my spoon right through the shell of my egg.

  ‘Father!’ she shouted. ‘Our Nelly has lost her mind!’ When she reached to get his plate he said no, he didn’t want no more, but a nice cup of tea when it was to hand.

  ‘I don’t know! I really don’t know!’ said Mrs Jane scraping the dirty plate with a fork and shaking her head. She looked so sad in her wraparound pinafore and her good shoes with the button straps, and her bun starting to squiggle down with all the head-shaking, and her pince-nez waggling. ‘It’s the Lord’s Day. You can’t defy the Good Lord, my girl. And get that milk mopped up quick sharp.’

  You see, she could’be just as bossy with her own daughter as her own daughter was with us.

  But Lally was busy mopping up the milk anyway. ‘There’s no need to throw a fit, Mother! It’s the law now. It’s allowed, Sunday cinemas . . .’

  Mrs Jane started to clear up her plate and cup and saucer and stack them on a tray. My sister and I just stayed quiet. It was a bit funny hearing the grown-ups being so angry with each other. Then Lally said that if we had finished our supper perhaps we would be very kind and go and lock up the hens, and she’d give Mrs Jane a hand in the scullery. Well, we had finished, and went down the path to the hen run. The sun was just flickering over the roof of the jam factory at the end of the garden and it was still very warm and little spirals of gnats were dancing about under the trees and the hens weren’t really pleased about being shut up, so we had to shoo them into their house with a lot of flapping and my sister trod in their water bowl, so that was another accident.

  ‘Mrs Jane was really jolly cross. Did you see her bun? All shaking loose, and the way her glasses were all glittery. Like a terrible witch’s. Awful!’

  ‘Witches don’t wear glasses,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you know what I mean anyway. And Mrs Jane is so sweet and pretty, she couldn’t be a witch really, but she just seemed like one, she was so flustered.’

  ‘Well, I do think it’s a bit awful. Going to the pictures on a Sunday, even if it is allowed.’

  My sister bolted the hen house door and pushed the half-empty water bowl under the stand-tap with her foot. ‘Think of the germs too! Germy people everywhere.’ She turned on the tap. ‘The “wrong sort” of people go to the pictures on a Sunday. I know that. It’s so wicked that only really horrible people bother to go. No wonder Mrs Jane was so angry.’

  ‘Upset.’

  ‘Well, upset then. No wonder. Germy people breathing everywhere.’

  ‘We weren’t asked. So you needn’t worry. She’s going all by herself, with no hair.’

  ‘I’m not worried. I wouldn’t go anyway, even if she did ask us. Silly old Bebe Daniels and that soppy man. I wouldn’t go. I’d be petrified. It’s vile, that’s what.’

  But I don’t think she really meant it. I didn’t say anything, and we walked back to the house and they were still talking quite loudly. We could hear them easily by the outside lav and the old enamel bath used for rainwater, next to Mr Jane’s show auriculas.

  ‘I really don’t know . . . everything is changing. I don’t care if it is all The Thing to cut your hair off, and take a trolley bus, or whatever they call them, to Isleworth or Richmond, but I do care about the Lord’s Day and His Rules, and I’m shocked. Very shocked in a daughter of mine. You wait till I tell Brother Harold. And Ruby. You wait, my girl.’

  Well, we knew now she really was very angry because of the ‘my girl’ part, and it was pretty worrying about Brother Harold and his frizzy-haired wife Ruby, because he was jolly big and a policeman, and Lally wasn’t very keen on him, we knew. Perhaps it might put her off?

  But when we got into the kitchen she was setting all the washed-up cups and plates back on the dresser and Mr Jane was dozing and Mrs Jane was folding the tablecloth, and we didn’t say anything. Then Mrs Jane said, had we shut the hen run, and we said yes, and she thanked us and put the cloth in the table drawer and tucked her hair back into her bun.

  ‘Anyway, Mother,’ said Lally, untying her apron at the back, ‘anyway, I could have gone and never mentioned it. Said I was going over to Teddington to see Mavis and Dolly, never mentioned going to the Regal, and you’d have been no wiser. I could just have told a lie. You’d never have known/She hung the apron behind the door, and Mrs Jane sighed.

  ‘No. You never lied to me. That you didn’t. Never you tell a lie, children,’ she said, wagging a finger at us kindly, but you could see she was still sad-looking. ‘Nothing is worse than a lie. You tell a lie and it’ll be round the world before the truth has got its boots on,’ and she turned the gas off under the kettle.

  But no one was interested in my voles. So I just shut up.

  Our father was sitting on a little camp-stool in the long grass, with his travelling easel and his paintbox beside him. I was allowed to sit near him, but a bit behind him, not in the ‘eye line’, because he said I fidgeted about and it put him off. So I sat very still, watching. And it was a quite good painting of the view down to the Daukeses’ cottage, with trees and grass and everything, and in the distance the humpy shape of Windover Hill. I mean, you could easily see that and know where it was, and then, when he was washing out a brush in the jam-jar of turps, and wiping it on a piece of old curtain, I asked him if it had been very nice in Germany when they were there, and he said no, not very. When I asked him if he had bought the machine-things for The Times, he said no, too expensive, but another English paper had bought them inste
ad. You could tell he was pretty fed up that The Times was not rich enough, but all he said was did I like the things our mother had bought in Germany, and so of course I said yes. What else do you say? I got three quite funny corks with carved people’s heads on top. They were to stopper our Tizer, she said. Only we never left enough Tizer to stopper. One of the faces was a chimney-sweep, with a top hat and a black face, another was a fat lady with a bosom and long blond plaits, and the last one was of a dreadful old man with a red nose and a mouth laughing with no teeth. They were all laughing, and they all had red noses and I thought they were pretty daft, but our mother had thought they would be ‘amusing’. So we said that they were. My sister got a very nice little box with a huge church painted on it, and when you opened the lid it played a tinkling tune which our father said was the German National Anthem and wasn’t really suitable. It was pretty gloomy, but didn’t go on for long. And they brought Lally a record for her ‘collection’ and there was something called ‘I’m One of the Nuts from Barcelona’ on one side and ‘Trink, Trink, Trink, Brüder Trink!’ which was pretty silly, and anyway we couldn’t understand it. But she also got a nice little doll, all made of pine cones and feathers, which was quite interesting. If you liked little dolls. Which I didn’t. But Lally made a lot of enjoying sounds, so I suppose that she did.

  I asked him if Germany was very far away and he said not far enough, and that I was a lucky boy not to live there and to live instead where I did. I said I knew that, and I jolly well did. Nowhere was better than the cottage and Great Meadow, and just as he was mixing up some greenish paint I asked him how he painted the sky. And he said he couldn’t paint skies, they were very difficult, and so he was going to paint a tree and would I please shut up and go and see what sort of trees there were in the hedge just below us. Which was silly really, because he could easily see for himself. But he told me to go off and bring him back a leaf from every tree and bush I could find. A different leaf! I said it would take ages and ages, and he said that is exactly what he hoped, and when I had got them all I could have a penny for something scrumptious, he said, at Baker’s. So I went off.

  Anyway, it was very nice to have them back again. Our mother was pretty and funny, and she and Lally were talking and laughing up in the vegetable garden. I could hear them clear as clear, and our mother said it was wonderful to be back in England again, and how were the aphids and thrips this year? And Lally said she didn’t rightly know, and they laughed and I heard my mother beginning her ‘Silly Song’. Anyway, that’s what my sister and I called it because she used to sing it whenever our father was somewhere near. It was called ‘Always’, and we thought it a bit disgusting, because sometimes we would see them walking up the path from the O.M., arm in arm, and she’d be just singing this daft song. It made me feel really a bit embarrassed. But then I suppose they didn’t know we were watching.

  Clambering about in the hedge for the leaves for our father, I could hear her plain as plain. She was hanging out some things on the clothes-line in her gypsy-sort-of dress, and Lally and my sister were looking for one lettuce which hadn’t bolted, and my mother was singing away, ‘I’ll be loving youoooo . . . always . . . With a love that’s trueoo . . . always . . .’ But it did feel really pretty good having them back. They had liked my voles very much indeed, and my father told me that the river bank in the box was made of paper machey. And when I asked him what that was he just said to ask him tomorrow. But he really was most interested. So that was all right.

  You could hear the rattle and clatter of the reaper right up the path, and when we got to the end of the lane and crossed the chalk road everyone was there and had bagged the best places in the shade. It was terrifically hot, even so early in the morning. Well, early for us. I’d heard the distant clattering through my bedroom window, and the sun was already up, so we were a bit late, but Lally had said what’s the hurry then, I haven’t got your basket ready, and eat your Bemax, and so on. So we did. And all the time they were all down in the field called Long Bottom, which was quite rude except it was the big field at the foot of Windover. We walked along the hedge under the elms and found a place where no one else was. People put their bags and baskets and the bottles of cold tea to keep cool in the shade, so we knew not to intrude, because even if we did live ‘up at the Rectory’ we were still Foreigners, even after all those years. Well, quite a lot. Five or six, about.

  So we put our basket under a big ash tree down at the bottom, and my sister just had a look to see if the wet cloth round the ginger beer bottle was still wet, and then we went out into the very edge of the field, where the reaper had already cut, and where everyone was busy gleaning – Winnie Moss and Beattie Fluke and Mrs Daukes. All round the edges of the corn, where it had been cleared, the men stood here and there quietly each chewing a bit of straw, their rifles sort of drooping over their left arms, but really ready to swing up and bang off at a rabbit. The rabbits and mice and things all ran into the middle, and Winnie Moss, who waved at us and came to have a ‘cool down’ in the shade, said that they did think some old fox had run bang-slap into the centre, and they were all waiting for the reaper to trim it all down.

  It was quite nice walking along in the stubble because I was wearing my old Wellingtons and no socks, and my sister was a bit daft and she was wearing her sandals without socks, so pretty soon she got all cut and scratched around the ankles, because the new-cut stubble was sharp as a razor. But I didn’t bother to say anything, even when I saw the blood and the scratches. We just went on gleaning away, although where we were gleaning was where all the others had been gleaning before we got there. So it wasn’t much, just the stalks here and there. But Lally had said don’t intrude, and so we didn’t. Winnie Moss said she had already gleaned enough corn for a ‘best brown’ and she’d have to be there for a month of Sundays before she had enough gleaned to make half a dozen loaves. I said well, why was she doing it now, and she said what a silly question. It was the ‘old way’, and the old way was going, and anyway, who would glean the stuff left over? What with corn so expensive she reckoned to bag a sack by evening for her chickens, so I said that we hadn’t got any chickens and so she could have what we gleaned, and she said that was really kind of us.

  And then Miss Aleford came galumphing along in a straw hat and gaiters, and said we were welcome to join in. It was her field, so I suppose she was being polite. Then she said no more capers with harvest mice this year! I was a bit surprised that she had remembered stamping on one of mine last year and squashing it flat, but I didn’t say anything. I just laughed. Well, you do when people say difficult things, and I wasn’t going to tell her about my voles. I didn’t care about harvest mice after Sat and Sun had gone. Dead and gone, Lally had said, so that was that.

  My father had told me that it was very difficult to paint a sky, but he would have had a wonderful time down in Long Bottom because all around us were the Downs, at the back the hedge and the elms and ash trees, in the middle just the golden corn square, getting a bit smaller all the time with the old reaper chugging round and round, and high above (well, where else would it be?) was the sky. Just blue. Blue as blue. No clouds, not even a bird, nothing. Sparkling blue for ever. And hot.

  Beattie Fluke had settled herself down in a clump of dock leaves and tall grasses and was fanning herself with her beret. She laughed to us, and that was proof that she really hadn’t got any teeth at all, and our father was right when he said that ‘all her intake was liquid’. Which I didn’t really understand, but seeing the no-teeth part now I think that he actually meant that she couldn’t chew things. Only drink things. It was a bit worrying, because she was jolly fat, but very nice really, and she had a face exactly like the stoppers our mother had brought from Germany. All laughing and red.

  ‘What you got in your ditty-bag, then?’ she called. I said I didn’t really know what a ‘ditty-bag’ was and so she told me, and said it was clear as clear I wasn’t a sailor-boy, and laughed like anything. So I said only ging
er beer, and she said leave out the ginger and she’d be happy. So it was all a bit of a worry, and then I went down the field and began gleaning with my sister, who had quite a huge sheaf which we carried up, with mine later, to Mrs Moss.

  All you could hear down in the middle of the big field was the rattle of the reaper and the distant talking of women, or children laughing and, now and then, the crack of a rifle when one of the men took a shot at a rabbit. And then, when it really seemed to be terribly hot, the reaper stopped with a clanking and shudder, and a huff of smoke wandered into the blue, and the men jumped off, and everyone came back up the field, past the two big horses swishing their tails by the pink and blue waggon standing in the shade. Everyone settled down under the trees among the campion and ox-eye daisies, while the women opened bottles and unpacked the food and called to the children.

  We sat up in our part under the ash tree and my sister took off her sandals and her feet were all cut and bloody. Serve her right. But there was ginger beer and cold pigeon pie, a chunk of Double Gloucester and slices of apple tart. It was really quite decent. Except for the flies and the wasps. The men were all lying in the grass with their arms across their eyes, and they had strings tied round their trouser legs to stop the rats and mice from running up their legs, and that suddenly reminded me of Sat and Sun and, even though I was very happy among all the people and under the huge blue sky which you could just see through the leaves of the ash tree, I felt a little bit miserable. But then Len Diplock from the Court came past with a pole over his shoulder and six rabbits hanging by their crossed legs, and he offered them to Winnie Moss, fourpence each, and to Beattie Fluke, who was sitting with Mrs Daukes and another lady, and they all screamed with laughter and said who did he think they were? Gordon Selfridge or the Prince of Wales? And they wouldn’t have one, not if he made them a ha’penny! ‘Vermin!’ said Beattie Fluke. ‘Vermin that’s what, nice in a stew, good in a bake, but not at fourpence, what with a pint of beer more than a penny!’