The Girl Now Leaving

by Betty Burton

  ‘There! I’ll just get the bag. You ready, Louise?’ She puts one arm through the long handles and carries it on the same shoulder, in the way that sailors carry their knapsack.

  Lu nods, hoping Bar will take the lead about which way to go: it would be easy to go off in the wrong direction and find yourself out there in all that space and never finding the right way back. On her way here in Uncle Hec’s lorry, they hadn’t passed any houses for miles and miles, and when Lu had looked out of the window this morning, there were just fields and fields that went on for ever. ‘You want to go round the stile way?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘All right, we can go up through your aunty’s garden then. You been right to the top?’ Lu admits that she hasn’t. ‘It’s e’ so nice, you just got to keep out of the bee-paths, but I’ll show you where they are.’ It is obvious that Bar is getting a great deal of pleasure from being the one who knows what is what. ‘It’s only cuz you’re new. I’m bound to know the place, I been coming up here since I was really little, I just used to run errands for them then, but now your aunty lets me do proper work. She let me do strawing last year and paid me proper money and give me my dinner and tea. Perhaps she won’t want me this year if you’re here. Not unless you an’t feeling well enough.’ She halts, bites her lip and stops her chatter with a brown, cupped hand.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Lu asks.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m wasn’t supposed to go on about your not being well or anything.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Mrs Wilmott said she wants you to forget you ever been bad, and people gets over illnesses if they don’t dwell on them.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lu leaves that to think about later.

  ‘This way.’ Bar leads the way out of the part of the garden that was like the one at The Bells and into a big open, grassy part, bounded on one side with a tall, mixed hedgerow, interspersed here and there with tall trees which Lu will eventually get to recognize as spruce. The only hedges in Lu’s part of the world are some old privets that divide some of the Lampeter Road gardens, leggy because they were seldom trimmed, and seldom trimmed because nobody owned shears; occasionally they were chopped at out of sheer exasperation because children made dens there. After a good chopping, fresh new growth would spring up and fill in some of the gaps. In time somebody will tell her what these flowery sort of hedges are made of.

  Barbara chatters, leading the way like a tracker leading an expedition, pointing out buried stones, fallen branches and holes that could break your ankle. Lu walks behind, admiring her knowledge and assurance, and takes in what she had not before.

  Bar’s black hair is almost frizzy, not like the crinkly Wilmott hair, more a tangle of small C’s. Her dress is dark green, little more than a small tent through which her head and bare brown arms emerge. She is wearing dark blue knickers, one leg of which is clearly visible because it has lost its elastic and hangs down level with the hem of her dress. There is no sign of a bodice or vest or petticoat, which the original wearers of Lu’s Panama hat would have expected. In the world of Bar, Lu and the girls of Lampeter Street, knickers are often the only underclothes worn. Barbara’s feet are encased in heavy black shoes with a strap and button, except that the button of one is missing and a string has been poked through the place where it had been, then through the button-hole where it is tied in a knot. The shoes slock a bit but Bar doesn’t seem to notice and it is only because Lu is sizing up this new person who has suddenly come into her life that Lu notices at all. It is only natural, them being of an age, that she compares.

  Hand-me-downs, Charlotte Street market bargains and charity clothes are normal in the Lampeter Street neighbourhood and, as in other similar neighbourhoods all over the poor parts of town, every item of clothing is circulated, swapped and handed around until nothing can be done with it except to make it into pegged mats, washing-up or floor-cloths. Occasionally new clothes are introduced into the cycle. This is when piecework factory hands earn enough to pay a tallyman or clothing club, usually not until they are sixteen. In the case of dockyard apprentices, often not until they have finished their time, and have apprenticeship papers. Not too many Lampeter Street boys own the papers which are the means of a leg-up. Lampeter Street is in a ‘Slum Clearance Area’, not that children of Lu’s age know what that is; Lampeter Street is just the place where they live.

  Barbara suddenly stops, spreads her arms wide. ‘You have to watch out here. This is one of Mr Wilmott’s bee-paths. The warm weather’s brought them out after the blackthorn, I expect.’ Lu searches the ground ahead but can see nothing but short grass, then Bar points to the right. ‘There’s one lot of skeps over there, see?’ Lu looks and sees three little white houses with no windows but a small door.

  ‘What’s a skep?’

  ‘A beehive, it’s where the bees live, where they go to tell each other where there’s a new lot of flowers opened. Inside they makes their honey and wax, and the queen lays her eggs in the combs, and they all sleep at night – except for the ones that guards the opening. Get your aunty to give you a look in next time she takes the honey. You don’t have to go near them ’less they know you. They know you were coming, your aunty telled them.’

  Lu does not know whether Bar is having her on, but she doesn’t seem to be, except the bees telling each other, and having guards, don’t sound like normal insects, so she gives a non-committal, ‘Oh. Where’s the path you said?’

  ‘There, look.’ She indicates a yard or so ahead at eye-level, where Lu sees a few bees flying purposefully in two directions.

  ‘Yes, I see, I see now, I thought you meant a path on the ground.’

  Bar gives her a sweet, understanding smile. ‘Well if you haven’t never seen a skep, then you wouldn’t know where the bee-paths are. It’s we who has to get down on the grass, unless you want to go right round the back of the skeps.’ Not getting instructions, Bar gets down on her hands and knees and crawls forward. ‘Come on, they won’t bother you if you don’t walk through them.’ Bar having got past unscathed, Lu follows, crawling well beyond the bee-path before turning to see that she is well clear.

  ‘We could go on up past the goat if you like, or get over the stile here.’

  Lu, having got clear of the bee-path, is not yet ready for another new experience, so says, ‘Over the stile.’

  What lies on the other side when they climb the divide seems in marked contrast to the part they have just left with its lush spring grass and plants, hedged around by a variety of shrubs and trees; here it is open, flat, milky-coffee-coloured fields, dappled white and striped green with ground-hugging plants, each row of which follows the small undulations of the land.

  ‘There’s Mrs Wilmott over by the straw bales.’

  Without having to ask a foolish question, she is given the answer as to how strawberries grow – Aunty is in the strawberry beds, and Aunty is cutting open a bundle of straw. She waves and makes a sign that she is mopping her brow. ‘Am I glad to see you, I was just dying for a drink of tea.’ And here is the answer to what Bar has been carrying in a long bag woven from leaves, like the leaves of Palm Sunday crosses.

  Aunty May pats the ground in the shade of the stack of straw bundles. ‘Come and sit by me. Now, pet, did you have your breakfast all right? I’m sure you did, Bar’s really clever in that direction.’

  ‘Yes, Aunty.’

  ‘And she drunk up the whole glass of milk like you said, Mis Wilmott.’

  ‘Well, that is good.’

  ‘Do you want me to lay some straw?’

  May Wilmott considered. ‘If you like, just whilst I have my breakfast, go on along that row where I left off.’

  Bar picks up a bundle of straw under each arm and, on reaching where she has been told, kneels down and, taking handfuls of loose straw, tucks the material around the plants.

  May delves into the rush bag (one of Bar’s mother’s making) and takes out a green-glass bottle containing cold tea, and bread and something wra
pped in a cloth, this having been the traditional meal of agricultural workers for generations. She takes a long, satisfying drink from the bottle, then a bite from two very thick slices of bread toasted on one side, smeared lightly with a little honey and sandwiched together. Lu sits quietly beside her and watches Bar moving quickly along the row. May chews well but eats quickly; there is no master to come and chide her for taking time out, nor has there been on Roman’s Fields for generations, but old habits die hard. When she has eaten, she re-corks the bottle, takes it back to hide in the shade of a hawthorn bush that grows by the stile, and sits back down beside Lu. ‘Were you all right with me leaving Bar to see to everything?’

  ‘Yes. She showed me out of the window where to look for you.’

  ‘Well, the thing is, these mornings it starts getting light early, and what with this sudden warm spring, the flowers are coming on fast, I thought I’d better get on out first thing. We’ve got one or two casual workers coming in, but they don’t leave off at their other place till tomorrow. I looked in on you and you were sound asleep, so I got Ted to go and tell Bar to come over early. I hope you like her, she’s a good little thing; always gets on with whatever she’s told, don’t need telling twice. She’ll make somebody a good worker some day.’

  Lu had expected her to say ‘good little wife’ which was the usual compliment to a girl who doesn’t mind hard work.

  ‘She likes to get up here, I could hardly keep her away when I was getting the room ready for you.’

  Lu has a sudden picture of Aunty May and Bar, busy together preparing the room, before she even knew what either of them looked like, then felt a flush of shame as she recalled the way she had greeted the girl who was only doing what she had been told. What you looking at? ‘She was ever so helpful, and it wasn’t her fault that I couldn’t eat much after the toast.’

  Aunty May smiles and nods. ‘I never expected you to. You drank the milk, though.’

  ‘Yes, I did, but it fills you up. Uncle Ted said there wasn’t anything put in it, but it tasted thick. We don’t have that much drinking milk, except at school.’ May guesses rightly that Vera, like a good many mothers trying to make ends meet, buys tins of skimmed sweetened condensed milk which is hardly milk at all, but a concoction of skim and sugar which quickly establishes a taste for it in young children and rots their teeth. There is an Unfit for Babies warning on the label, but May knows that many babies are weaned from the breast with a mush of condensed and stale bread. As well as establishing the idea early on in children’s experience that ‘condensed’ is milk, it solves a problem for the mother in that, once the baby can eat mush, the child can be left in the care of a granny, while its mother is able to return to earning to pay the rent and something off the bill at the corner shop. ‘Did he tell you it was “Cowslip milk”?’

  Lu nods.

  ‘It’s his little joke, he don’t seem to tire of telling it. But the thing is, the milk Cowslip gives is creamier than anything.’ One thing to do with food production about which Lu wasn’t ignorant was milk. The Co-op had let the over-tens go round the dairy and see the milk right from when it was brought in huge churns, through the pasteurizing, the cooling and into the bottles. The man had said Co-op milk was one hundred per cent pure, and soon after that they got free school milk. Not many of them liked it because it wasn’t sweet, but teachers kept watch to see it was all drunk up.

  ‘I did drink it all, honest.’

  ‘I’m sure you did. It will do you the world of good.’ The first time Bar Barney was offered it, she made a ‘eyuk’ sound. In the Barney family, once the children were off Ann Carter’s breast, they drank water. But gradually, over a year or two, Bar had come to take milk until she had come to not mind too much if there was no water to be had. ‘Look, pet, if you don’t mind, I’m going to keep going with this field whilst the weather holds. You understand? If we don’t get on, and this weather keeps up, the buds will be out before we know where we are.’

  ‘No, I don’t mind.’

  ‘What would you like to do? Go back to the house with Bar? She knows where everything is when it’s dinnertime. Do you like cold ham?’ Lu nods uncertainly. ‘If you don’t there’s some of yesterday’s soup left – you liked that, didn’t you.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘You just have what your fancy takes you. Better to eat plenty of what you like than to leave a plateful of what you don’t like.’ She laughs. ‘Nothing gets wasted where Bar is.’ Lu grins, but says nothing. ‘I asked Ted to fix up a swinging-rope in one of the trees where the goat has cropped the grass, and there’s a couple of balls on the shelf next to the big bath in the outhouse. I think we got a couple of tennis bats somewhere, I’ll look them out for you.’ Lu had noticed the balls yesterday when she was sitting in the outhouse on the strange, wooden seat, feeling so apprehensive that she couldn’t make herself pee for ages. ‘Anyway, you sit there for now, and I’ll go on back to work. I’ll let Bar finish the row before she comes back; she tries to see if she can earn more in a week than her brother. Any time you want me, you know where I am. You be all right then?’

  ‘Yes, Aunty.’ Already she feels confident enough to say so, even though here she is out in the country, with not a single house in sight, not even Aunty May’s and Uncle Ted’s, and the only people visible are Aunty May and Bar. The presence of these two happy, friendly people is reassuring. She leans into the pile of straw which smells nice and which, although a bit prickly, is warm and comfortable. Bar waves, and Lu waves back and watches the two figures as they get smaller and smaller.

  * * *

  Back at the house, Bar’s brother had seen the signal (a blue rag tied to the gate) that meant they wanted him to call at Roman’s Fields. There were several houses where similar signals were put out, all offering him an hour or so’s employ. He answered to the name of Duke, which wasn’t the one his father had given him, but the only one he would answer to.

  Duke Barney was older than Bar, a bit taller, a shade browner, and his mop of curly hair shorter. He wore a pair of dungarees that had seen better days, and apparently little else except a long-sleeved workman’s vest. His feet were bare. He didn’t look very clean, but that was misleading, because even after a wash with soap the downy black hair on his arms and around his mouth kept him looking much the same as before. His feet actually were dirty, which wasn’t surprising: he had already gone errands in the village, cutting across the fields rather than going round the lanes. He rattled the door-latch at the Roman’s Fields house and gave a short, piercing whistle. ‘Anybody ’ome?’

  Gabriel Strawbridge called out from his room, ‘Is that you, young Duke?’

  ‘Yes, Master Strawbridge. Shall I come in?’

  ‘How’s your feet?’

  ‘Dusty, but no dung.’

  ‘Come on through then.’

  Duke knew his way through the passageways to the room Mr Strawbridge slept in. The door was open and the old granfer was up and dressed in his everyday out clothes, even to his boots.

  ‘Ah, good, Duke, I hoped you wasn’t going to be too long. Have you got Pixie?’

  ‘She’s tied up by the hedge.’

  ‘Good, then get out the little governess cart.’

  Duke looked delighted. ‘The cart! You and me going out then?’

  ‘What did you think we’re going to do, with Pixie harnessed to the governess cart then, m’lad?’

  The youth grinned, ‘I’d say we was going out, Master.’

  ‘Down to the village. Now get along and don’t be long.’ By the time Gabriel had taken money from his cash-box, and made his way to the yard, Duke was waiting with Pixie and the governess cart. Gabriel Strawbridge’s governess cart was something out of the ark and, had it not been for the fact that he was old and respected, the tableau would have drawn smiles as he, his knees bent double, his large body seeming to overflow the driving seat, held the useless reins whilst Duke, riding Pixie bareback, guided them along.

  It was a bright
, fresh, beautiful morning. Even before dawn, birds had been singing and twittering, building, mating. The trit-trot of Pixie’s dainty hooves was by far the better accompaniment to their voices than the green single-decker that came hourly along the main road to the village. But Duke and his passenger went along narrower roads: Frith Lane with its hedges and oak trees, into Mill Lane with its gravel surface and the rushing River Meon, into Bridge Street, ancient and narrow, then turning into the broad village square where Duke jumped down outside the chemist’s shop and took the reins from the old man. At the time when the cart was new, there had been plenty of hitching posts and mounting stones, but with modernization had come tarmac and buses, then every assistance to the traveller with live horse-power removed.

  No sooner had the doorbell clanged than Mr Farnsworth junior came forward and said, ‘Mr Strawbridge, what brings you out today? I heard that you were house-bound.’

  ‘Well, young sir, if you believe only half what you see and nothing of what you hear, then you might get somewhere near the truth of it. I am very well, as you can see. I’m expecting soon to go and see a man who does good work on cataracts.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, Mr Strawbridge, but you know what this village is like for gossip.’

  ‘If I don’t after eighty-odd years, then I don’t know who does.’

  ‘You’re right there. Now what is it I can do for you, Mr Strawbridge?’