by Tanya Moir
On the sofa beside me, Ella gives a long, stretching groan — a happy noise, I think. She pushes me away with her paws, then shoves her nose under my feet. For a while, I watch her sleep, snores fluttering on my ankles. She’s out like a light again after the excitement of the boat trip. It used to terrify her, but now she stands with her paws up on the side, leaning out, inhaling the rush of wind like a drug, staring down at the patterns of light flashing in the water, barking when I slow down. It’s no wonder she’s exhausted.
Sooner or later, though, I’ll have to wake her up. Come on girl, let me hold your eyes open, put these drops inside. Don’t flinch. It’s for your own good. I promise.
TWO
‘Euuw,’ says Annabel, in second period science, 1983, as I slice into our frog. ‘Jeez, how can you do that?’
I’ve barely a clue about Ted yet, and I’m still an incision or two away from remembering Harry, so I give her the only answer I have to hand.
‘Well, one of us has to.’
It isn’t strictly true. Over half the girls in 3G have left the room, and can now be heard, in the quadrangle outside, discussing the lyrics to ‘Karma Chameleon’ and the merits of fingerless gloves.
‘It’s not like I killed it,’ I defend myself. ‘It was already dead.’ (Although quite how fourteen frogs passed away just in time for our class may not, perhaps, bear close examination.)
Wayne McKenzie flicks frog gunk across the aisle at me, but I ignore him. Since the night behind the roller rink, I’ve pretty much lost interest in Wayne, despite what my pencil case says. Interesting as having a boyfriend is, it’s looking like Janine 4 Wayne 4 Eva may have been a slight exaggeration.
Mr Wilson leans in over my shoulder. ‘Nice work, Janine,’ he says. ‘You could be a surgeon with those hands.’ He raises his voice, and aims it at the open window. ‘We’ll make a scientist of one of you ladies yet!’
I don’t mention I’m planning to be a chartered accountant. Or maybe a stockbroker. High school is leading me to believe there’s always safety in numbers.
Which is perhaps why I’m deep in a game of Digital Invaders, not the all-too-interesting central nervous system of frogs, after school that night when Grandpa William calls.
‘Janine!’ threatens Maggie, from the range, as the phone continues to ring. Reluctantly, I put my calculator down and get up from the sofa. He’s late tonight — it’s nearly time for the news.
‘Hello Grandpa.’
For once, he doesn’t ask if my mother is there. Instead, Grandpa William wants to tell me all about a place he went to today called Hollylea, though at first I can’t see why.
‘They’ve got a beautiful garden there,’ he informs me. ‘It must be a picture when the roses are out.’
Not just that, but the people are very nice, they really are, and the room has a glimpse of the sea.
‘Your nanny will like that,’ he says. ‘She’ll be comfortable there.’
Too much Digital Invaders must have scrambled my brain. ‘Are you moving?’ I ask him, nonchalantly.
A silence stretches down the line.
‘No.’ Grandpa William clears his throat. ‘Just Nanny. I don’t need to be there. They wouldn’t have room for me.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s the best place for her now.’
‘Okay.’
‘The doctors say she needs proper care.’
‘Right.’
‘I can’t look after her any more.’
‘Nanny is moving into a home,’ I tell my mother, after Grandpa William hangs up.
‘What?’ Maggie stares at me as if I’ve just done something dreadful on the carpet.
‘It’s called Hollylea,’ I explain. ‘They’ve got a really nice garden.’
‘What about Grandpa?’
‘He’s staying at their house.’
Maggie snorts, and prods viciously at a ham steak.
‘The doctors said he can’t look after her by himself.’
‘I’d better ring him back,’ she sighs, in an irritated sort of way. ‘Come on, come and get your dinner.’ She turns the TV back up on her way to the table.
I’m still trying not to think about the frog as I cut neatly into my ham, but it turns out I’m not really hungry. There are pictures of starving children all over the news. ‘Shocking,’ says Maggie, with a shake of her head and a quick glare at my plate. ‘Can you imagine?’
The fate of Nanny Biggs, on the other hand, is just a natural progression.
There’s nothing shocking about getting old. And it’s not in our interests for Maggie and me to imagine a Sarah who brushed her green Maybelline over eyelids that didn’t drag, who wore high heels and swung her arms and could take steps two at a time if she chose, a Sarah every bit as real, as lasting and true, as I will be — as Maggie was — at nineteen.
But thirty years later, I like to remake that Sarah, sometimes. It seems only fair that somebody should. And it’s nice — a sort of desert island escape — to walk alongside her for a while, dewy with ignorance, a piece unaware of its puzzle, frightened of all the wrong things, striding the South Wimbledon streets with no idea what’s coming.
By the end of 1940, Sarah Harding is tired of death. What began with her father refuses to stop, and now all of Europe’s at it. She can’t help feeling, tip-tapping straight-seamed down The Broadway to Boots, that they’ve reached the end of days. That no matter how much they struggle, the world is going down the plughole just as surely as a spider in the bath.
She wants it to be over. But unless she gets blown up herself, there’s only one way it can end. Everyone says England will win the war, but the soldiers who went off in warships came back in fishing boats, and Sarah doesn’t believe it. She thinks maybe nobody does. And the best she can hope for, really, is that one of the less horrid Germans will spot her court shoe sticking out of the rubble of Kings Close and be kind to her, once she’s been dusted off.
Her other life, the one she’d always assumed she’d have, has vanished in so many puffs of incendiary smoke, along with Christmas lights and car rides and oranges and young men in cricket vests and sports coats joking at the bar of the Fox and Hounds. Sometimes — passing the school during gas practice, for instance, or watching the kids from Number 5 try to put a mask on their beagle — Sarah thinks there’s a certain circularity to it all. Her father’s sins raining down on the gardens of Kings Close, where the crusts of buried Anderson shelters break once-neat back lawns like a row of blisters.
But still it doesn’t seem possible that these things could be happening to England. Neighbours aren’t supposed to blow up. London isn’t meant to burn. She never imagined she’d look down from the top of Wimbledon Hill and see the South East in flames. That there’d come this wailing in the night, air-raid sirens and bombs and metal and shock and pain, until the city is one big scream.
And if you hid every time they told you to, you wouldn’t have time to make a cup of tea, let alone to get your hair washed. And you half-wish a bomb would fall on you, because you wouldn’t know anything about it then, and some nights that seems simpler.
The people at Number 14 have sent their children up to Scotland. But there’s nowhere, really, to run. They’re just rats shuffling up a floating plank. The Nazis are all around them. Close enough to be shelling Dover. You can see the flash of their lighters across the Channel at night, so the gunners say.
Even work at the No. 7 cosmetics counter is no escape. They’re nearly out of lipstick. All the lovely shades of red are gone, leaving only a too-bright coral pink that doesn’t suit anybody. She’s had women burst into tears when she tells them. Women old enough to have husbands and houses and sons. There’s a shortage of nerve pills as well.
Poor Sarah. She doesn’t know the gases of warfare sink. The only time she feels safe is when she’s on the Tube, rocking deep in the bowels of the city, a world of bright white light beyond reach of sirens and bombs and the flaming sky. There are nights, like tonight, when
she can’t seem to bring herself to get off, even for the blacked-out hum of Leicester Square.
‘Come on,’ Ivy says. ‘We’ll have a laugh, you’ll see.’
And they do, packed like pilchards into a basement bar on Wardour Street, the cigarette smoke making their eyes water, the four-piece band, despite the crush, hitting full swing. Sarah with Claude’s friend Foxy pressed against her back, hips swaying between his hands. Drinking, after the beer and gin run out, what’s left of the top shelf. A cherry brandy jitterbug shield.
It’s too cold for Green Park, but Ivy and Claude don’t care.
‘Their squadron’s flying soon,’ Ivy says. So many reasons, these days, for a girl not to spend the night in her own bed.
‘You go on,’ Sarah tells them. ‘I’m going to get the last Tube.’
Foxy walks her to the station. Past the burnt-out church on the corner, through the crowds coming out of theatres and bars, matches flaring in unlit streets. The girls like her. The soldiers and sailors and airmen, all the same in the dark, in their battledress and fragility.
Sarah wonders where Eddie is tonight.
She lets Foxy feel her breasts on a park bench in Leicester Square. It seems the least that she can do.
Underground, the platforms are crowded. She sways home through stations packed tighter than cellar bars, blanketed bodies shoulder to shoulder among the cigarette butts and old newspapers and half-eaten chips, and it could be a mortuary, but it’s not, it’s life, in all its smelliness and hope. People sleep on as the train doors open and close, and Sarah wonders if in time they’ll turn black as Tube mice. Skitter out when the coast is clear, foraging among the ruins, shadow to shadow, under a bomber’s moon.
Two little boys in pyjamas get on at Kennington and stretch out at opposite ends of the seat. As the train picks up speed, she sees, through the window behind them, a man and a woman, their blanket fallen away, bare buttocks heaving together, ugly and vital as rats.
At South Wimbledon, she picks her way out, stepping over suitcases and outstretched limbs, the wayward arm of an old lady cradling a teapot, along the platform and up the stairs to the street. The last train rumbles away under her feet. In its wake, they’ll dim the lights and turn off the rail, and the people will take over the tunnels as well, mile after mile of them, a vast black burrow under London.
It’s a long walk home, but Sarah doesn’t have any fear to spare for the empty streets. Who’s left down here to do her any harm? If she walks quickly, it’s only because of the cold. Because the cloud is lifting, and the moon’s on the rise. She can hear the ack-ack guns away to the east, and she knows that if she looks over her shoulder, there’ll be an orange stain on the sky.
Number 7 Kings Close is as dark as all the rest. But inside, the lights are on. Sarah walks into the kitchen, hoping for a cup of tea. Instead, she learns that Betty’s fiancé is dead. Betty, swollen-eyed, coughs into a sodden handkerchief. ‘We just got back from his mum’s,’ she says.
Sarah and Ivy don’t see Claude and Foxy again. Months later, out dancing with other airmen in another bar, Sarah hears, in a break between sets, that Claude’s bomber was shot down two nights after Ivy left him in Green Park. And there’s nothing for Ivy. No telegram, no last letter. Claude’s mother didn’t ring.
‘Have you been to Smith yet?’ Jake asks from the other side of the room, where he’s leaning with his broad back to me in the frame of my french doors.
‘No,’ I admit. Then add stupidly, ‘Is the food good?’
‘So I hear. Friends of mine went last week — they said it was amazing.’
This time I stay quiet.
‘We should go some time.’
I watch his shoulders, the line of his back. They look quite relaxed. ‘Yeah,’ I say, as negatively as I can.
What am I supposed to do? I can hardly be busy all of some time.
(Doing nothing is so often underestimated. If evil triumphs when the good fail to act, then surely the reverse is also true. It’s high time the Hardings — my black-hatted, moustache-twirling tribe — let the day slip. That we stayed in, and locked the door.)
‘You know, you could lose the world here,’ says Jake, happily, still looking through the doors. ‘Forget it existed.’
I look up from my glass, follow his gaze outside to the lawn, now catching the last of the winter sun, the old trees rising like battlements at its edge, and beyond them, the soft empty light of the sea.
He’s probably right. You could, if you tried. Then again, the currents might bring anything here. Bottled up sins, discarded opportunities, drifting back. Old wreckage, floating slowly down from another hemisphere. You’ll find all sorts of things snagged in the mangrove roots if you look carefully. It’s best to be prepared. Who knows what the next high tide will wash up at the door?
Sarah is painting her legs with Bisto when Eddie brings Will Biggs home. Despite stringent precautions, she slipped a nail through her last pair of stockings almost two years ago, in the spring of ’42. Her sister May, on hand to draw in Sarah’s seams, drops the eyebrow pencil at the first sound of Eddie’s voice and hurtles off downstairs.
When Sarah makes her entrance — seamless but at least even-legged — some minutes later, her mother is already wiping her eyes and brewing up the last of the week’s tea ration, and the moment seems to have gone.
Sarah stands in the kitchen doorway and says, ‘Hello, Eddie’ quite calmly, as if he’s just been out for a packet of Woodbines. Then he gets up and gives her a hug, and it’s all there, three years of fear and loss on his skin, and he’s warm and whole, just like the old Eddie.
When he sits down again, though, she can see that he’s not. It’s as if he’s been picked up and given a shake, and all the old bits are still there, but they’ve come down in different places. He’s baked stiff and hard-edged as leather under all that foreign sun, and the only time he looks really at ease is when he turns to his friend, who is shaky and gauche and doesn’t say much, and who you might suspect wasn’t all there if you didn’t know what he’d been through.
Corporal Biggs is tall and dark, but not particularly handsome. Sarah feels sorry for him, because he’s poorer than them, and he hasn’t had much of a welcome home, so she doesn’t mind having to go out with him too much, even though he’s only an infantryman and grew up in Haldwyn Street.
Besides, it’s the first time she’s been invited out with Eddie and Kate, and May is dark with envy. Sarah feels, despite her gravy browning and odd shade of melted-together lipstick ends, like a sophisticated woman.
They go to a supper dance at the Berkeley on Saturday night, riding the Northern Line up through stations almost empty except for passengers getting on and off the train. Some stops still have bunk beds on the platform, much to Eddie’s and Will’s amusement. But the Tube sleepers have gone back to their homes, and despite the vast improvement in smell, it feels a bit lonely down here without them, clinical and overly bright, like school corridors outside term-time.
They sit opposite each other, Kate and Eddie, Sarah and Will, and swap funny stories, over the rattle of the train, about being under fire. Kate is wearing a short red dress, and Sarah watches Will Biggs looking at her in the way men do, Kate with her Betty Grable legs tucked between Eddie’s knees and the unmistakeable sheen of real silk on her thighs. Sarah doesn’t mind.
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when things change. Perhaps it’s to do with Will’s transfer up to Pinewood. The thought of the newly promoted Sergeant Biggs sauntering in through the studio gates, which in Sarah’s head are tall and golden as those of heaven. Or perhaps it’s when Will takes out his camera.
She can see, as he makes the three of them bunch up on one side of their booth, that he’s good at this. This glamorous machine, its mysterious workings. She can see him outside the Empire in Leicester Square, trenchcoated and trilbyed, calling film stars by first names. And she can see that when he holds the camera up to his eye he goes somewhere, somewhere beautifu
l, she thinks, and in the pop of the flash-bulb she can almost glimpse it herself.
Poof! go Sarah and Eddie and Kate and battered, smoking London. Through Will’s lens they are stars in a Hollywood diner, shining, young and lovely and alive. As he lowers the camera, the image remains, for a second, in his eyes.
Sarah, daughter of scientists, doesn’t recognise art. But she knows an alchemist when she sees one. So she leans forward, out from under Eddie’s arm, and she looks at Will and smiles.
There’s not much of Nanny Biggs left by the time we get to Nelson. It’s the day before Christmas Eve, and Sarah’s down to her last functions. Even my suspicious mother can see why she had to be put into a home.
‘I didn’t know,’ Maggie-who-never-comes-to-the-phone tells Grandpa William, ‘she was this bad.’
Grandpa William says nothing. The box of cherries we’ve brought up from Central weighs on the room like a poor joke.
The old woman in the bed is thin and dishevelled and her arms and legs don’t sit the way they should. It’s difficult to tell if Nanny Biggs is there inside. Her muscles are making their own decisions now, lazing around or running amok like fourth formers on the last day of term, and she can’t even look at us, let alone say anything, and when her eyes close we don’t know if she’s gone to sleep or is lying awake and blind. I can see, now, how they would help. All Grandpa William’s shiny words for dying.
The only things Nanny Biggs can still do by herself are breathe and swallow and think, and once you’ve spent ten minutes with her it’s hard to see any of those as a blessing.
Her eyelids open again and her mouth begins to twist. Dystonia? Or is there something my grandmother wants to get off her chest?
‘Mum?’ Maggie tries. But Sarah can’t meet her eye.
