‘What we are looking for,’ said Lucy, ‘is someone very good-looking, dark, tall, possibly Mediterranean.’
‘What you are looking for,’ said Abigail,’ is someone capable, with clean fingernails, who won’t cough at the customers.’
Gilbert had a very persistent cold and a rather chesty cough. Lucy gave him a sticky bottle of Benylin that Mr Snooke had left behind. It didn’t seem to work. The job poster was taken down and not mentioned, and then Paul finally got around to looking at What to Look for in Autumn and saw the inscription: ‘To Gilbert, on your 10th Birthday, from Mr Dove.’
There could only be one Mr Dove. Paul asked Gilbert about it and found out that they’d been at the same school. About ten years separated them, but they were both alumni of Penshurst Village School (C of E Maintained).
Chapter 28
Mr Dove built the weather station himself to his own design. It looked like a bird table. There was a maximum–minimum thermometer, a barometer, a funnel and a beaker for catching and measuring rainfall, and a weathervane. He hung up long tails of seaweed and pine cones too. The weather had been monitored every day (in term time) since his first week at the school in 1960. A rack of grey and buff exercise books held records of the prevailing conditions in a corner of the school field outside the science-block window. Mr Dove hadn’t missed a single day of his teaching career through sickness. He had been asked several times if he was a Christian Scientist. He wasn’t. He just never seemed to suffer from colds or upset stomachs the way his colleagues did. He was the only male teacher at Penshurst School, and he sometimes wondered if women were more sickly than men, or took time off work more lightly, but he would never have been ungallant or provocative enough to voice these thoughts. Instead, he was punctual and reliable. He poured oil on the troubled waters of many staff meetings. He championed underdogs. He organised the teams for cricket, rugby, football and rounders, and pinned his selections on the green baize noticeboard beside his classroom door. Every morning he swapped his soft green tweed jacket for one of the crisp white lab coats that his wife laundered so nicely. There was always a spare one waiting in his carefully locked science cupboard along with the pencils and exercise books, the rulers and rubberbands, the lime water and copper sulphate solution, the magnets and iron filings, the batteries (which he called cells) and the circuit boards, and the test-tubes, beakers, pipettes, funnels and other pretty glass instruments with their carved wooden racks and metal clamps.
Mr Dove never showed favouritism, but there were some children whom he thought about very often and whom he would remember. Paul Cloud was one of them. Paul Cloud, aged nine, had noticed the pawprints of a fox in the mud beside the weather station and had spent his lunch hour making a plaster cast of them. Paul Cloud found the body of a female wood-boring wasp and brought it in to show him. He had never seen one before. It had taken them all of morning play to identify it. Paul Cloud was a very reliable weather monitor.
Ten years earlier Gilbert was shown how to be a weather monitor. Mr Dove helped him to read the thermometers and measure the rainfall (although the beaker had been practically empty). They’d written down the wind direction (W) together and looked at the clouds (cumulus). A few weeks later Gilbert went to take the day’s readings all by himself. Seven inches of rain. The temperature had ranged from –2 to +28. The wind was blowing from the south. Gilbert wrote it all down and put the ‘Weather Journal’ in the special tray on Mr Dove’s desk, hoping for some words of praise, a Well Done in front of the whole class.
‘What is this, Gilbert?’ For once, Mr Dove could hardly conceal his irritation. ‘Come here!’
Gilbert dragged his sad feet towards Mr Dove’s desk. What had he done now …?
‘Your weather report,’ said Mr Dove. ‘These figures cannot be accurate.’
‘But, sir …’
‘Did it rain last night, Gilbert?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Minus two, Gilbert. Has it been cold enough for ice to form? And twenty-eight degrees. Was it the hottest day of the year? What was the weather like yesterday and last night?’
‘I don’t know. Was it just plain weather?’
‘Plain! What is plain weather? It was cloudy and mild. It was not hot or freezing. I am almost certain that it didn’t rain. Now, Gilbert, tell me the truth. Did you bother to check the weather station or did you just make these readings up?’
‘I did check it, sir. I tried my best to.’
‘Well, Gilbert,’ said Mr Dove kindly. ‘Either you need more practice as a weather monitor, or somebody unkind has been playing a trick on you.’ Mr. Dove scanned the classroom. Thirty-two heads were bent over their books. Two pairs of shoulders were shaking. Sheila Pye and Theresa Welch. A spiteful pair.
‘Sheila and Theresa, what are you finding so funny?’
‘Nothing, sir,’ they spluttered. How could old beaky Dove know that they’d been there after netball practice with an ice cube, matches, a cup of water and Sellotape for the weather-vane?
Gilbert would never forget those words, would now always doubt what his senses told him.
‘Either you need more practice as a weather monitor, or somebody unkind has been playing a trick on you.’
Chapter 29
Gilbert’s teeth were a chipped, yellow monument to a life alone, a life without love. A Stonehenge To Neglect. He had a huge, scruffy, pinkish toothbrush with splayed bristles. It had given years of faithful service. It hadn’t occurred to Gilbert that he had no dental records to be used in the event of the Wayside burning down or his body being fished out of the Itchen. His last brush with the dental health services had been twenty-nine years ago: a stern school dentist had urged more frequent brushing, and given him a free toothbrush, some paste and a number of fillings. Vestiges of these remained. Sometimes a bit of filling or tooth would break off and cause him some pain for a while, but it generally went away.
Gilbert had never known his father, but he took after his mother, Lily Runnic, as far as teeth went. Her brittle teeth had led indirectly to her early death. She’d been on her way home from the chemist with the week’s supply of oil of cloves when she collided with a milk float, banged her head on the kerb, and never regained consciousness. The air at the scene of the accident had hung heavy with the scent of cloves for days afterwards, she’d been getting through three or four bottles a week. It turned the milkman’s stomach at that corner every day until he had taken early retirement. The dairy had sent a wreath of milky-white chrysanthemums to the funeral. It had been the only one, no lilies for Lily. Gilbert hadn’t known about floral tributes and things like that, and nobody told him how things were normally done.
In Mr Dove’s classroom, the science room, there were posters of molecules in liquids, solids and gases. Gilbert read it as ‘mole cures’, medicine for moles. They did experiments with felt pens and filters (paper chromatography it was called), and lime water and carbon dioxide. This was before there was a hole in the ozone layer. Science and Nature were Gilbert’s favourite lessons.
Gilbert always arrived at least an hour before school started. His mum gave him two slabs of bread and paste, breakfast and lunch. He sat on top of a concrete tunnel in the corner of the playground to eat the first one, neatly round and round the edges, to leave a perfect pink disc. The other children played, ignoring him. Gilbert had warts on his knees and prickly fingers with chewed nails and grimy plasters. Mr Dove saw this sad leprechaun each morning when he and his wife arrived at the school, rolling towards the staff car park in their green Morris Traveller with its window stickers from Canada and the Bluebell Railway, Mousehole Seagull Sanctuary and Gweek Seal Rescue Centre.
This morning the children sat cross-legged on the floor of the hall which was also the dinner room and the gym. They could hear the canteen ladies behind the hatch. Tinned tomatoes, soft watery quiche and boiled potatoes, and semolina with blobs of strawberry jam today. The teachers sat on a neat row of chairs at the back, Mrs Dove (PE and M
aths) grimly knitting. Mrs Ford, the headmistress, was standing on the stage saying that everybody must be kind to Gilbert because his mother had been killed in an accident.
Mr Dove’s chair, on the end of the row, was empty. He was walking round and round the football pitch with Gilbert who was aware that he, the last to be picked for any team, had finally been chosen for something. There was a fairy ring beside the goalposts. Gilbert pointed it out to Mr Dove who said, ‘Yes, yes.’
When Mr Dove said: ‘I expect you’ll have some time off school,’ Gilbert said: ‘But I’m meant to be a weather monitor again next week!’
The boy didn’t seem to be grasping what had befallen him. Mr Dove felt a depression descend. When their next circuit passed the fairy ring, Gilbert kicked over all the tiny toadstools to make it rain.
‘They have an underground network, Gilbert,’ Mr Dove couldn’t resist telling him. ‘Hyphae of mycelium.’
Mrs Dove had never especially liked Gilbert; but then he wasn’t a particularly likeable child. She sat through the special assembly, knitting. She dropped three stitches in annoyance when she saw her husband walking back towards the hall and Gilbert carrying a balled-up handkerchief, an initialled one that the twins had given Ian, and she herself had ironed. How typical of the boy not to have his own with him. She retrieved the stitches and jabbed the needles into the ball of wool, even though a friend of hers had insisted that it could lead to pilling and hobbling later on in the life of the garment. She marched off to make herself a cup of tea. Her navy T-bar shoes clicked across the staffroom floor.
And yes, it turned out that she was quite right to be annoyed. Ian came back with some nonsensical scheme about fostering and then adopting Gilbert. She soon put a stop to that. They’d had their children, a set of twins, who were in their second year at Cambridge, reading Medieval History and Biochemistry.
So it turned out that nobody came to Gilbert’s rescue, nobody took him in, nobody helped. Nobody ever does.
Gilbert’s Auntie Vi arrived to organise the funeral, but she had to get back and she wasn’t taking Gilbert with her. He was sent to ‘The Elms’. For the next eight years he rarely wore an outfit twice.
The clothes were kept in tea chests. It was first come, first served, and by the time Gilbert fought his way to the front there was only ever a bizarre jumble of things left. He once had to wear a girl’s blouse. He rolled up the flouncy yellow sleeves to disguise it. Luckily it wasn’t a PE day.
There was a big TV in the sitting room. When it rained they all watched Blue Peter and Scooby Doo and Vision On. Gilbert wished that he had a grown-up to help him make some of the things they showed. Collecting boxes and paper and things was really hard. He wished that he had some paints and some glue.
The Elms had a garden, though. There were some huge sighing trees where wood pigeons lived, and a shed with a window and a bench where Gilbert could sit. Sometimes he saw squirrels.
Chapter 30
Maggie Cloud (capable hands, neat polished nails) shredded orange tissue paper into pretty ribbons for Paul and his sister, Kate, to use to pack their harvest boxes. Mr Dove organised the collection, and after a special assembly the children took the baskets of goodies to local old folks.
‘Mum, Mr Dove wouldn’t mind brown paper,’ Paul told her.
‘What’s this?’ Kate asked.
‘Asparagus. It’ll be a special treat for someone.’
There were two pots of Maggie’s home-made raspberry jam, two jars of her green-tomato chutney, two warm fruit cakes, decorated with concentric rings of almonds, two oranges, six apples, four bananas, two tins of Baxters Scotch Broth, two very small marrows and two jars of peaches preserved in brandy, all for the pair of them to pack.
‘Isn’t it a bit good, Mum?’ Kate asked, as she did every year. She knew that her friends would bring damp cardboard boxes with cans of S&B baked beans and Smedley potatoes and butter beans, tins of custard powder and packets of Bourbons. For some clever children, Harvest Festival was an occasion for ridding the store cupboard of hated groceries. Tins of carrots, tins of prunes, whole cabbages and packets of blancmange found their way into the boxes. Mr Dove once retrieved a half-empty bottle of banana-flavoured antibiotic medicine from a harvest box. It was sent home with a note.
At the beginning of the Harvest Festival the children marched across the stage and plonked their boxes on the trestle tables that Mr Dove and Mrs Field (Music) had covered with greengrocers’ grass. This grass would endure for ever. It could withstand a nuclear strike. It was just as sharp, bristly and shiny as when ten years earlier Gilbert had brought his own harvest basket. It was a soap-powder box, one side cut off, almost all of the washing powder gone. Inside were some bendy leeks, a packet of biscuits and some windfalls. His mum had helped him. Her nail scissors had made deep pink ditches on his pudgy fingers as he’d tried to cut through the heavy card. In the end he’d sawed out a panel with the breadknife.
But the next year his mum was dead and he had nothing to bring. The kitchen ladies at The Elms said that there was nothing spare, even if it was for Harvest and God. He was summoned to see Mr Dove. He didn’t want to tell him that he had nothing to bring, but he’d have to.
‘Ah, Gilbert. Come in.’ Mr Dove’s plain, calm face appeared around the door of the science cupboard. ‘Could you help me with these please, Gilbert?’
And there on the bench between the gas taps and the sink was a cardboard box and a green canvas holdall of provisions.
‘There’s paper here for you to decorate the box; scissors, glue, coloured pencils. Make sure you put them back in the right trays. You should have plenty of time.’
There was half of dinner play left. Gilbert wouldn’t be missed on the football field or by the groups playing trumps or jacks or French skipping.
‘You can leave the box here tonight where it’ll be safe. Collect it before assembly tomorrow.’ Mr Dove pushed his stool under the bench where it couldn’t constitute a tripping hazard.
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘It’s the very least I could do, Gilbert.’
And Mr Dove wanted to hold that small, breakable boy. To stroke his unbrushed, unwashed curls, to make things all right. But he didn’t.
‘And, Gilbert,’ he said, ‘if there’s any way that I can help you, please come and find me.’
Chapter 31
The Badger Centre Management Committee met on the second Wednesday of the month. Their meetings were watched by the newts, rats, ants, wood mice and assorted freshwater fish and creatures of the Solent Estuary, the Centre’s permanent residents. Paul always felt that they should be listed in the minutes as ‘in attendance’ along with the other non-voting members of the committee. The minutes were printed on a special type of recycled paper, unique to the Centre and guaranteed to jam any copier or fax machine. It had been made by a workers’ cooperative of local wasps. The committee was chaired by Cllr Bette Doon (Lab). The first time Paul had seen her, he thought that she was a female impersonator. She seized every opportunity to squeeze people’s arms and give hefty, jocular pats on the back. Paul always tried not to sit or stand anywhere near her.
There was only one item on the agenda that really interested Paul: ‘This Month’s Sightings’. He didn’t give a damn about ‘Staffing Issues’ or ‘Fund-raising’ or ‘Treasurer’s Report’.
‘A pair of goldfinches have been seen eight times feeding in the heathland area. Cuckoos have been heard on numerous occasions. Fifteen pairs of tufted ducks are nesting beside the cemetery lake. This month there are twelve known cygnets, the highest number since records began six years ago.’ Paul fell into a reverie. The meeting continued. Some minutes later he heard himself agreeing to take part in a sponsored whittling event for the Badger Centre and the New Forest Owl Sanctuary.
‘What a hoot!’ quipped Cllr Doon.
Hoots of derision from Lucy, Paul thought. He wondered who he could ask to sponsor him. He decided that he’d just have to invent the s
ponsors and donate all of the money himself.
Outside in the Centre grounds a hedgehog trundled across a tiny bridge, briars twisted above a path, making a bower for a silver tabby cat who was waiting for mice, or perhaps to take part in the Official Government Bird-Ringing Project. That afternoon Lucy and Paul had sat on one of the many ‘In Memory’ benches, and Lucy had silently vowed that henceforth she would wear only the colours of the hedgerow.
Old man’s beard, old man’s beard, thought Paul to himself, But what is its real name?
Someone was lurking in the bushes, waiting, waiting for the meeting to end. A rustling of greaseproof paper and the reflective strips on the arms of her anorak betrayed her. She was wishing that she’d brought along a flask of Horlicks, there was nothing really warming about her piccalilli-and-paste sandwich. The damp was seeping through her plimsolls and socks, and underneath her skirt, her calves were blue and mottled.
Cllr Doon always seemed surprised to see her, even at the Councillors’ Surgery where Mavis dropped in each Saturday now, with something new to report on her windows, her housing benefit, the terrible state of Kingsland Market, there was always something to talk about.
Cllr Doon had noticed that some of the newer councillors didn’t hold surgeries, they just said that they would visit people in their own homes, and who would want that? She was thinking of dropping her surgeries, or at least her St Mary’s one which Mavis now thought of as her own. She had once scolded Mavis quite harshly for trying to bar the way to a group of young mums who wanted to see her about the closure of the After-School Club. Mavis was saying that the double buggies would block the exit and be a fire risk, but Cllr Doon knew that Mavis just wanted the time all to herself. She’d barked, ‘Be quiet, Mavis! Stand back. Let the little children come to me!’ Mavis had sulked outside eating Wagon Wheels.
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