The Secrets of the Lake

by Liz Trenow

  Dear Kit,

  Just a note to thank you for such a lovely day on the lake. I really enjoyed seeing all the islands, and Jimmy won’t stop talking about how he’s now an expert at rowing – although I try to explain that he mustn’t tell Pa or Mrs D, in case you get into trouble.

  I expect you are off back to school again now, but it would be lovely to hear from you if you ever feel like writing.

  Yours,

  Molly

  I addressed the envelope to Kit Waddington, c/o Wormley Hall, and wrote ‘PLEASE FORWARD’ in capital letters at the top, hoping it might somehow reach him. And then I waited.

  Every other Saturday morning Jimmy and I went to the church with Mrs Diamond and her rota of other ladies to help prepare for Sunday services. They were a kind lot, and this was the one place, I’d discovered, where Jimmy could be sure of being fully accepted. He was allowed to help with the sweeping and dusting, and they put him in charge of retrieving the prayer books from their cupboard and stacking them on the table by the door in piles of ten – the most he could count up to – ready to hand out as the congregation arrived the following day. It made him feel useful and important.

  It wasn’t expected of us, but it was what Mum always used to do. ‘Those volunteers give their time so cheerfully, and with such love and dedication,’ she’d say when she returned home from her weekly stint, dark hair glistening with cobwebs. ‘They’re the true heart of the church, to be honest, and the least I can do is turn up once in a while and lend a hand. It boosts morale no end, and does wonders for your father’s reputation.’

  That Saturday I was in the vestry, ironing the cotton surplices that we wore in the church choir. The ladies had learned to trust me, and it became my regular job. I found it quite satisfying, seeing that row of beautifully starched and ironed surplices hanging up at the end of the morning, ready for us to wear the following day.

  I’d come to enjoy the weekly ritual of dressing up, filing into our places in the choir stalls and singing as lustily as possible. I knew all the tunes already, of course, which was just as well, because the rows of what looked like black tadpoles leaping about on the staves meant nothing to me. But that didn’t seem to matter, because we didn’t sing any fancy anthems like the choir at St Martin’s. Here, our main purpose was to support the congregation through the hymns.

  ‘We need to give worshippers the courage to praise the Lord with their singing,’ Mrs Timpson would say at our rehearsals, urging us to sing out. Certainly, without us, the hymns would have been a feeble affair, several beats behind the organ and at least a tone flat.

  As I ironed, I listened to the ladies’ conversations – they were always enlightening. By the end of a session I would have caught up with the news of so-and-so’s recovery from an operation for unexplained ‘women’s troubles’, and the fate of another beleaguered soul whose husband apparently disappeared for days at a time. ‘He’s home again,’ they’d say, shaking their heads. ‘Though why she do take him back every time’s a mystery, for sure.’

  That day, over the chatter of the other volunteers, I heard the familiar squeak of the church-door hinges and assumed it was another volunteer arriving, until that familiar voice boomed out.

  ‘Good morning, ladies. Hope you don’t mind if we come in to take a gander at this church window? We won’t get in the way of your work, I promise.’

  Hidden from the visitors, the ladies with me in the vestry left off their mending and lifted their heads to listen.

  ‘That’ll be that nice Mr Blackman, I’ll be bound,’ one of them whispered.

  ‘Ain’t his wife a beauty?’ said the other. ‘The new one, I mean.’

  ‘New wife?’ I asked. ‘What happened to the old one?’

  ‘No one knows exactly. Swapped for a younger version, they say. All happened afore they come here.’

  ‘How long have they been here then?’

  ‘Ooh, just a few years – six or seven mebbe?’

  ‘They do good things for the village, them two. Old Joe works for ’im, as well as Mrs Tebbutt, you know.’

  ‘There’s bin talk about them up at the big house paying for a new stained glass.’

  ‘Mrs Blackman’s an artist,’ was the reply. ‘She’s offered to design it.’

  ‘Well, ain’t that a nice thing to do?’

  The sour smell of scorched cotton reached my nostrils. I jerked up the iron, but it was too late. The cover of the ironing board was stained with a pale-brown mark. I sent up a small prayer of thanks that it was not the surplice itself that I’d ruined.

  The plan for the new window moved quickly. Pa was keen to spread the good news in the first-ever edition of the revived parish newsletter, grandly titled The Wormley Village News. The copy was all written, he said, but Miss Calver needed help with the printing, so I gladly offered, so long as Mrs D could look after Jimmy for the morning.

  Miss Calver – I knew from Mrs D that her first name was Violet, but she never invited me to use it and insisted on calling me ‘Miss Goddard’ – lived alone in a tiny end-of-terrace cottage towards the top part of the village. She ushered me into a small room over-filled with furniture, every surface overflowing with books and papers, and without a further word of small talk, began to explain our task for the morning. As a first edition, it was to be a modest affair: a single sheet of paper, double-sided and folded in two. We were to print three hundred copies, one for each house in the village. It would be reproduced on the hulking metal contraption lurking in the corner of the room, which she called a ‘Gestetner’.

  The content included the list of services, the volunteer rota for cleaning and flowers, and the very brief column of ‘Hatches, Matches and Dispatches’ of which, since our arrival, there had been no weddings, two deaths and only a single birth. ‘We’re a declining breed,’ she commented drily.

  There was a short letter from Pa, saying how pleased he was to have been chosen to be the vicar of such a beautiful village and thanking everyone for making him and his family so welcome. And on the back page was this:

  NEW STAINED GLASS FOR CHURCH WINDOW

  Some residents will recall the terrible night when a German bomber dropped its load onto our village, killing two residents, destroying four homes and blowing out the windows of several others, including the beautiful medieval stained glass in the east transept of All Saints Church.

  Now, through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Waddington of Wormley Hall, the stained glass will be replaced in the East Window. It will be dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in two world wars, and a memorial plaque will honour Captain David Burrows, Mrs Waddington’s brother, who died in 1944 while fighting to liberate Italy.

  We are especially fortunate that local resident Mrs Melissa Blackman, a gifted artist, has offered her services to design the glass, free of charge.

  Miss Calver had already typed the content onto two fragile-looking waxed stencil sheets. One of these was attached to a drum pressed onto an inky pad, against which we would have to rotate three hundred sheets of paper twice, once for each side. Then we would have to fold them.

  ‘What do you think about this stained-glass plan, Miss Calver?’ I asked, panting slightly with the effort of winding the heavy handle as the slightly smudged sheets flicked out into a slowly growing pile.

  ‘It’s not my job to have an opinion,’ she said, with a wry smile. ‘Our job is to report, as truthfully as possible. First law of journalism, young lady.’ She refilled her whisky glass and took a long slug. ‘But if you want my personal view, I wouldn’t trust anything that man is involved in.’

  ‘Mr Blackman?’

  ‘“The Blackness”, they call him.’

  I looked up at her. ‘Crikey, that bad?’

  She lit a cigarillo. ‘Tell your father to take care around that man,’ she said, batting away clouds of smoke with her spare hand.

  ‘But he’s the church treasurer . . .’

  ‘Indeed.’ The word hung in the room
, weighted with meaning.

  ‘And is that a problem?’

  ‘Let’s just say we go back a long way. But I like your enquiring spirit, Miss Goddard,’ she said, laughing now. ‘Come on, girl, no slacking. You’ll never get those copies through if you slow down. Let’s get this job done, shall we?’

  After we’d finished, she made me a cup of tea and poured herself another glass of whisky. ‘Shall we sit outside? It’s a lovely day, for a change.’

  The house might have been in need of a lick of paint, but her garden was immaculate: filled with colourful spring bulbs, with a large patch dedicated to vegetables and a small orchard of fruit trees covered in lacy blossom. In the shelter of the outhouse was an ancient bench, where we both sat in the unaccustomed warmth of the sunshine.

  ‘Your father says you’d like to be a writer, Molly,’ she said, lighting another cigarillo.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ I said, feeling my cheeks colouring.

  ‘It’s the best age to begin,’ she said.

  ‘Why? When did you start, Miss Calver?’

  ‘About your age. I sent articles to my local newspaper under a boy’s name. John Calver’s “Stories from the school gate”,’ she said dreamily. ‘Dear John did quite well for a while.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘They twigged that I was a sixteen-year-old girl and told my parents. And that put a stop to that. But I’d got the bug by then, and after college I went back and badgered them till they let me make coffee and type up copy. Later I got to be their first-ever woman war correspondent. Best days of my life, Molly. So keep up the writing, my dear. And if you ever want someone to read your stuff, I’d be happy to help.’

  I thanked her for her kindness, but knew that was many months away, even years. I was nowhere near being ready to show anyone my dragon story – except for Jimmy, of course.

  That weekend Jimmy and me delivered the newsletter, walking the streets and pathways of the village, reaching hidden-away cottages you’d hardly know were there, and steeling ourselves to open letter boxes behind which barked fierce dogs. We even went down to the Hall and I plucked up the courage to ring the bell, hoping for a chance to ask whether they had been able to forward my letter to Kit. It had been three weeks now, and I’d received no answer. But the bell rang hollowly inside and no one came to the door, not even a maid, so I had to post the Village News through their letter box.

  Why hadn’t Kit replied to my letter? Had he even received it? Perhaps he was just a terrible correspondent. Most boys were, Dinah tried to reassure me when, in desperation, I finally confided in her. Or perhaps he really didn’t care and had forgotten all about me? The thought was almost too painful to bear. I took refuge in reading yet more romance novels, weeping in sympathy with the heroines as they nursed their sorrows. He’d broken her heart and walked out of her life without so much as a flicker of remorse in those haunting eyes.

  The next day we arrived home from completing the newsletter deliveries to find Pa at the dining-room table.

  ‘Come and take a look at this,’ he called.

  We hastened in. Covering nearly the whole table was a large sheet of paper held down with books at either corner. It took a few moments to realise that we were looking at the reverse side of two strips of wallpaper pasted together to create a canvas more than a yard wide and treble that in length. A complex drawing covered the whole of the paper, coloured in with water paint.

  The design was divided lengthwise into what I now saw represented the two panes of a church window, separated by a stone pillar – the ‘mullion’ was what Pa called it. On either side of it were portraits of two knights, a man and a woman, both in full medieval suits of armour. She was holding a shield decorated with the red cross of the English flag. He had a sword in one hand, and in the other a set of scales that appeared to be balancing an effigy of Christ on the cross against what looked like a proper fire-throwing dragon.

  ‘Is he weighing Christianity against heathen legend?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Pa said with a shrug. ‘Let’s have a look at the rest.’

  When he unrolled the lower end of the scroll, Jimmy shouted, ‘Croc . . . croc.’

  Sure enough, at the feet of the two knights was an extraordinary scene. In the background a castle stood on a hill; to the right a lady kneeled with her arms beseechingly outstretched and, on the left-hand side, a knight was mounted on a rearing white horse. He was holding a very long stick striped like a barber’s pole and seemed to be attempting to poke out the eye of a vast, bright-green and very vicious-looking crocodile, with a malevolent eye and rows of pointy teeth – nothing like the friendly dragon character I’d imagined for my story. Dangling from its lips were two thin, pale legs, apparently still alive and waving, even though the rest of the body had been fully consumed.

  It was a scene so graphic that it was almost comical, and I actually laughed. ‘That’s a bit gory, isn’t it?’

  ‘Melissa Blackman says the crocodile – or should we call it a dragon? – terrorised the villages of St Mary’s and Wormley for years and years, until they persuaded a knight to come and kill it.’

  ‘What do you think, Pa?’

  He pondered for a moment. ‘I’m not entirely sure, my darling. We’ll have to run the design past the diocese first, in any case.’ He rolled up the scrolls of paper, put them to the side of his desk and gave a deep sigh. ‘To be honest, I could do without another ruddy problem right now.’

  10

  In May and June the evenings grew longer and the trees and hedgerows bloomed even more abundantly. To Jimmy and me, used only to whatever nature the city could provide – plane trees, wild buddleia blooming on bomb sites and neat planting in the parks – the sight was astonishing. White borders of delicate cow parsley laced every verge, and with the help of the colour illustrations in Mrs Diamond’s Wild Flowers of the British Isles I could soon tell the difference between dandelions, daisies, primroses and cowslips. The country names stirred my imagination, each one so descriptive and evocative: cranesbill, loosestrife, meadowsweet, foxglove, stitchwort and willow herb.

  Jimmy was never happier than when we were out in the woods and fields, exploring new routes and discovering wonderful, secret places. One Saturday we took a picnic up to the copse of Scots pines that topped the hill overlooking the valley. Local folk knew it simply as The Pines. It consisted, back then, of just a dozen or more ancient trees, but in their position at the very pinnacle of the hill they could be seen for miles around.

  ‘Go to see Eli now?’ Jimmy said, as I packed up the picnic.

  ‘We can check whether he’s at home. I don’t see any smoke,’ I said.

  We took the path downwards to the junction, then followed the whitewashed stones. There was no one there, the hut was locked. But a few seconds later we heard whistling.

  Sarge appeared first, his tail wagging like a flag in a stiff breeze. He didn’t bark any more. We were old friends now. His master followed close behind, and Jimmy ran forward to greet him. If he’d had a tail, he would have been wagging it as furiously as Sarge.

  ‘Well, well, well, who do have we here?’ the old man said, grinning widely as he ruffled Jimmy’s hair. ‘Thass a sight for sore eyes. I’m right ready for a brew and a biscuit. How’s about you?’ He went to the side of the hut and reached under the arch of the wheel, pulling out a key. ‘Come on, laddie. Let’s get that ole kettle on.’

  He showed Jimmy how to lay the fire in the black pot-bellied stove that sat on four legs near the doorway, its chimney reaching up through the ceiling. First he screwed up coils of newspaper – ‘not too tight or it won’t catch’ – then topped it with twigs of fine kindling, carefully stored in an alcove to make sure they were good and dry. On top of this careful construction he placed a small log.

  Then he reached up to the shelf and took down a large box of Swan Vestas. ‘Now come the magic,’ he said, lighting the newspaper coils at each side before closing the door. ‘We’ll let that draw for
a minute or two, then we can add a big ’un when it get going.’ Jimmy watched, fascinated, as the fire caught and the flames flickered red behind the fan-shaped vent in the stove door.

  While they were lighting the stove I took a moment to glance round the rest of the hut. An arched ceiling made the single room appear larger than I’d expected. At the far end, curtains of old army blankets were drawn back to reveal a bed with drawers beneath. A cupboard and shelves held a few cooking utensils – wooden spoons, blackened saucepans and a battered frying pan. There was no sink, but a large metal milk churn stood by the door, filled with water. It was a shock to realise that Eli had to haul every pint that he needed either from the stream or from a tap in the village. A kettle rested on the hob.

  I hadn’t considered that Eli would be much of a reader, but a quick glance at the bookshelf proved that his interests were varied: a few Agatha Christie mysteries, Pride and Prejudice, A Christmas Carol, a book of collected English poetry, a small encyclopaedia and The Countryman’s Book of Birds. Propping them up at one end was a pile of London Illustrated News magazines and, at the other, a box-file marked ‘Land’.

  ‘That ’on’t take long now.’ Eli showed Jimmy how to fill the kettle with water from the churn using a large soup ladle, placing it back on the hob. It sizzled immediately and began to hum. Before long we were sitting outside, enjoying mugs of scalding hot honey-sweetened tea, with Eli teaching us how to distinguish different birds from the cacophony of song in the woods that day.

  The chiffchaff was the easiest, because the song simply consisted of repeating its name over and over again. Robins, blackbirds and wrens were more tuneful, but to my ear they all sounded much the same. The cuckoo, on the other hand, was unmistakeable.

  ‘Me heart allus lifts when I hears the first one each spring,’ Eli said. ‘It tells me I’ve survived another winter.’

  ‘Don’t they sing in the winter?’

  ‘Happen they do, but not here,’ he said. ‘They only stick around a few months, then they fly south, like the swallows. To Africa, so folk believe. They’s naughty creatures, though, laying in the nests of littler birds and pushin’ out them fledglings. But their song do cheer me up, all the same. Brings good luck, but only if you hears it with your right ear.’