The Girl Now Leaving

by Betty Burton

* * *

  Roman’s Fields was settling down around Lu, and she was beginning to find the quiet less strange and the spaciousness less uneasy, although she didn’t venture beyond the outhouses and yard unless Bar went too. But there was no problem about that, Bar was at Roman’s Fields from early morning till after supper, and gradually Lu was assured that she would not be trampled by horses or chased by cows if she walked over the fields. So Lu began to venture into unsignposted lanes, footpaths through woods and shortcuts. She learned how to tuck straw beneath strawberry plants and saw how bees could be calmed with a smoker and the basic knowledge about the getting of honey and milk, taking everything in through her large eyes with heavy, fatigue-darkened lids and sockets. Bar took her to look at The Swallitt, which was a pond in a wood, and made plans to take a picnic there; another time they went to the stream and brought back tadpoles with little legs.

  On the day of the picnic, carrying their food in greaseproof paper and their lemonade in bottles, the two girls dawdle along the lane that runs by Roman’s Fields, taking back a bill-hook Uncle Ted had sharpened for Mrs Catermole’s gardener.

  Mrs Catermole – old Cat – owns a number of cottages in the village, and earns very good rent from them. This, she considers, entitles her to respect and deference and a right to interfere in the lives of anyone with an income less than hers. Her house stands within a brick-built boundary wall, about a mile away from Roman’s Fields and the same distance from the village.

  Lu, having already heard of old Cat’s rudeness, would have preferred to wait in the lane whilst Bar went in, but that seemed mean seeing that they were running the errand for Uncle Ted, and in any case Lu was daily growing more curious about the many people who inhabited Bar’s gossip.

  She viewed the long drive with misgiving; there was no house in sight but the drive was banked with shrubs and spring flowers. ‘Come on, she won’t eat you. You just don’t have to take no notice of her. She’s just mean from living by her own. She don’t really need me to run errands for her: she got a housekeeper could do that.’

  ‘Why does she then?’

  ‘I expect she wants to have people go and see her, but they don’t because she’s rude to them, and she likes bossing people around, and she’s nosy… She asked me everything about you, but I couldn’t tell her much. Nobody likes going to see her, if she was nice to people, they would. She gives me a ha’penny for going to see if she wants anything from the village, and a penny for getting it. Most days she do.’

  ‘So you get…’

  ‘Sevenpence, usually. It’s a lot, but she can afford it. I have to go and get it on Friday after school, which means she gets a call for nothing.’

  ‘It’s all right though, having sevenpence.’

  ‘I gets more from your aunty. But if I’d a’ know before you come that we was going to be friends, I’d a’ come over and helped get your room ready anyway.’

  ‘I didn’t even know Aunty May knew any girls… I didn’t know anything at all about her really, only that she married my dad’s brother.’

  ‘What’s your dad like? He look like Mr Wilmott?’

  Lu shrugged, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Not your dad?’

  ‘He goes away to sea. He’s been gone years. I think I must of been about seven or eight last time he came home.’

  ‘It must be queer, not knowing what your dad looks like. Perhaps you won’t like him.’

  Lu has already had sneaking thoughts of that. ‘I expect everybody likes their dad.’ She knows a lot of kids who hate their dad.

  Bar nods, not really having considered until now whether she liked her own dad.

  The house suddenly looms into view. Lu is astonished, she had expected Bar’s ogress to live in a gloomy stone house. But this is the prettiest house Lu has ever seen. Built of small red bricks, over the entrance there is an archway of red tiles laid edge-on. The same tiles appear above the diamond-paned windows and again as ledges. On one corner is a small tower with diamond windows all round. The tower is capped by a tall, slender cone of copper.

  The name of the architect would not have meant anything to Lu, but, as Mrs Catermole is forced to make clear to everyone, it was Sir Edwin Lutyens. It will take time and experience before Lu understands why it is that she thinks this is such a wonderful house. If she never knows why, it does not matter; it is enough that it is a beautiful house in its right setting. If she does get to know, then she will know that Mrs Catermole is justified in her boast of owning a house designed on a human scale, marrying beauty and function.

  ‘Fancy having a place like that all to yourself.’

  ‘Do you like it then? I reckon it’s creepy.’

  ‘No, it’s not, it’s the kind of place magic happens.’

  Bar giggles. ‘Perhaps she magicked the people away and she’s the witch that’s took it for herself.’

  A sharp, shrill voice calls from beyond a line of cordon apple trees, ‘Is that your silly giggling I can hear, Bar Barney? Come here. Come to the garden.’

  Bar pulls a face. ‘She’s got ears like a cony, only she don’t run away like they. Come on, you’d better come and see the witch,’ stifling another giggle.

  The garden is as beautiful as the house, reinforcing in Lu’s mind the notion that people who live in the country have gardens chock-full of flowers and trees. Things planted here don’t give up the ghost as they do in Lampeter Street; here they don’t grow up spindly and thin, or have leaves that look dull and dirty, and bark that oozes gum from damage. Here in the witch’s garden, flowers and trees are not only dense and colourful, they are as clean and bright as a box of scallops. The lawn on which basket chairs and a table are set out looks as green and short as the bowling greens on Southsea front.

  ‘Oh,’ Bar whispers crossly, ‘the blimmen old vicar’s here – he’s her brother,’ and walks boldly barefoot towards him and the old lady, followed slowly and at a distance by Lu. Mrs Catermole is indeed Lu’s idea of a bad witch; everything about her is pointed and sharp and dark, only her glasses are not, these are small, round and silver-rimmed. Waving away the proffered bill-hook to an undefined place out of her sight, she points at Lu, like a school inspector choosing a victim to test for arithmetic. ‘You, child. Are you the Portsmouth girl come to Roman’s Fields?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Speak up, speak up, lift your head so that I can hear you.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Oh, the Portsmouth cockney whine,’ the cross-looking old lady says as she turns to the vicar. ‘Diphtheria. She has been at Death’s door. Half the places in that town are slums – naval towns are all alike. Disease goes through huddled backstreets like wildfire.’ To Lu, ‘Stand close, child’; to the vicar, ’She’s perfectly safe, the contagion has long gone.’

  Lu takes a few steps closer.

  ‘Does your father work?’

  ‘He’s in the Navy, miss.’

  ‘Show me your arms.’ Lu, bewildered and embarrassed, does as she is told. Mrs Catermole pulls up the sleeves of her cardi. ‘Look at that, Compton, sticks. May Strawbridge has her work cut out to put flesh back on those.’ To Lu, ‘Tell your aunt, Mrs Catermole said she should give you eggs every day.’

  Lu feels incensed at being inspected like this and being told what Aunty May should do. At school everybody must submit to all kinds of inspections, especially skin, hair and fingernails, but she cannot see what right this lady and the vicar have to look at her arms and talk about her as though she isn’t there.

  The vicar, who seems to be soft and round in all the same places that Mrs Catermole is sharp and pointed, says, ‘Have you thanked Jesus for making you well again?’

  Lu is astonished. Jesus has his place and time within school – morning and evening prayer, RI, ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’ at Easter, carols at Christmas, and a test on religious knowledge once a year after you leave the Mixed Infants – but not in gardens. She could answer that she has not spoken to Jesus at all, but gu
esses that Mrs Catermole would pounce upon her with that cross voice. Tell a lie and say that she had. It’s not easy to tell a lie to a vicar.

  Suddenly Bar leaps into action, grabs Lu by the hand and drags her stumbling awkwardly away. ‘You got a bloody cheek, asking her questions, and feeling her arms like you feels Duke’s pheasants!’ Her cheeks are red as she shouts angrily over her shoulder, ‘How would you like anybody prodding you?’ She sounds furious. She looks furious. She is furious.

  They have reached the edge of the lawn and they could have easily escaped, but Lu stops, turns and takes a few steps back towards the indignant couple. Her own indignation brings out her best Lampeter Street challenging tone. ‘I haven’t got Jesus to thank for nothing. He didn’t do nothing, it’s our Ray that did it.’

  The vicar stands up, hands on hips, his head stretched forward menacingly.

  ‘And my aunty already gives me eggs, and honey and milk, every day I been here, so she don’t need nobody to tell her.’ Lu, who has learned to stand up for herself in an area where people can be threatening to the point of carrying out their threats with fists and bottles, is only wary now because she doesn’t know the rules out here in the country. The vicar doesn’t scare her. Lena Grigg can scare more than that. Lu stares him down until he turns and joins his outrage to that of his sister.

  Lu and Bar run down the drive, and when they have reached the lane again, Lu is breathless, her knees are weak and her hands are trembling, but she keeps running until they reach the wicket gate at the top of the Roman’s Fields garden, when they slow down and sink into the long grass.

  Uncle Ted’s voice, coming from the other side of the hedge, surprises them both. ‘Hello, what you two minxes been up to then? I thought you was going picnicking.’ Smiling, he comes round a bend in the path carrying some long-handled tools over his shoulder. ‘Lu, you shouldn’t run like that, look at you, beads of sweat on your forehead…’

  Bar speaks up. ‘We ran away from Mrs Catermole and the vicar.’

  Uncle Ted raises his eyebrows. ‘Oh yes, what you been up to then?’

  ‘Go on, Lu, tell him, or shall I?’

  Lu hunches her shoulders, not wanting to tell; she has seen too many rows and fights between neighbours over children. ‘She made me hold out my arms so the vicar could see, and she said Aunty May must give me eggs.’ Bar, whose nature is more placid than otherwise, is still angry that Lu should be spoken to so rudely, and she’s angry at herself for taking Lu there, she should have known, but she had thought that a visitor at Roman’s wouldn’t get spoken to the way the village children are. ‘She said about the slums… and it was safe to get near her – anybody’d think Lu had horse-scabs! And the vicar said did Lu thank Jesus? They got my blood up for being so rude.’ She exchanges looks with Lu.

  Ted knows about getting the Barney blood up. Eli, always conscious of prejudice against his family, has taught his children to be proud of themselves and to stand for none of it.

  ‘Bar didn’t mean to be rude to them, but she knows I don’t like people looking at my arms now they’ve gone skinny.’ Now Lu feels cross.

  ‘I did mean it! I told her off another time – she asked me if I ever washed my feet. Cheek!’

  Uncle Ted settles down on the grass with them. ‘Your arms are all right. There’s nothing shameful in losing a bit of weight because of a fever, it’s a natural thing, but I don’t think it is up to Mrs Catermole or anybody to assume that they have any right to make comments. Being old doesn’t give nobody the right to ask personal questions.’

  Bar couldn’t leave it, her adrenalin was still running. ‘She said Lu’s been at Death’s door.’

  Neither could Lu. ‘And did I thank Jesus for saving me? It was our Ray who saved me, not Jesus, so I told him, that vicar.’

  Ted Wilmott cannot prevent the flush that reddens his face, but he does keep emotion out of his voice. ‘Is that a fac’? Death’s door… what a daft thing to say.’

  The two girls nod vigorously, and Bar says with as much humility as she can muster, ‘And I cursed at him.’

  Later, when he relates this to May and Gabriel, he will let out the smile that threatens now, but it is not really quite the thing to smile at the thought of that Holy Joe being cussed at by Bar Barney. She is ‘the gyppo’s child’, whose father doesn’t have a great deal of time for vicars. Eli knows to an inch how far Christian charity stretches; not far enough to reach a man who wears a gold ring in his ear and deals in horses.

  ‘Now you two go on your way and enjoy your picnic.’

  The only people who know exactly what transpired at the Edwin Lutyens house are Mrs Catermole, her Holy Joe brother and Ted Wilmott. When Ted returns to Roman’s Fields twenty minutes later, he breathes a heavy, satisfactory sigh and says to May and Gabriel over their midday bread and cheese, ‘I never was a man for having my say unnecessary, but there’s some things – specially when you’ve needed to have ’em out for a long time – feels very satisfying when the chance comes and you can tell people to their face exactly what you thinks of them.’

  Old Cat does not spoil their picnic. Later, beside the brook in the woods, where it trickles over into a dip creating the Swallitt Hole, watching Bar expertly weave rushes, Lu falls into a light sleep. Her initial apprehension about being where there were so few people is fading. She is becoming used to sleeping where sounds were not human or familiar ones; the owl is still mysterious and eerie, but after dark a night-light glows comfortingly in her peach-coloured room.

  When she opens her eyes again, it is to see Bar has taken off her frock and knickers and is naked except for lengths of ivy draped around her, and her hair stuck all over with flower-heads and silver pussy-willow. She is engaged in some strange dancing game like nothing that Lu – who is an expert of playground rites and games – has ever seen before. Bar is twirling round and round and round on the spot. She looks so different from the Bar who looks short and shapeless in her old dress and droopy knickers. Without her clothes, she isn’t even a girl. Lu is fascinated. She has such a tiny waist, and her chest is swollen into real little breasts, with bigger and blacker circles than Lu has ever seen put into the mouth of any of the babies suckled by their mothers on the doorsteps in Lampeter Street. There is a line of black hair in her armpit, and she has a black triangle of curls that is decorated with more pussy-willow flowers.

  With her arms outstretched and her eyes closed, she tilts her face upwards. She is obviously enjoying whatever she can see behind her eyelids, because her lips are turned upwards into a faint smile.

  Twirling on the spot is a playground activity that comes and goes in its season. The competition is to see who can do it the longest without falling down giddy. But what Bar is doing is nothing so silly and knock-about, but a kind of undulating, spinning dance with her toes not moving from the same spot of grass. She looks lovely, but alarming too. Round and round she spins on, her flowery hair flying round behind her, never catching up with her face. Faster and faster. As her speed increases, she gradually raises her arms. When they are above her head, she crosses her thumbs, puts her palms together, fingertips pointing to the sky, and stretches up to her fullest extent. Then she stops, not breathless, but standing erect. She does not stumble or fall about drunkenly as happens in the playground game, but stands unmoving, and then slowly lowers her arms until her hands, pointing heavenward, are level with her face. Her eyes remain gently closed and her mouth holds its smile. Only her mass of hair is not stilled; it seems to have doubled its bulk and is moved restlessly about by every small current of air.

  Lu sits spellbound, wondering what might happen next. It is as though, for those few minutes, Bar has been changed from her brown, practical self and has become an enchanted figure who might have just been magicked out of the woods.

  Bar opens her eyes. ‘Oh good, you’ve woke up.’ The spell is broken. In a moment she has put on her frock and pulled up her thick knickers over the heads of pussywillow. ‘Look, I found my old pickle-
jar I left here before. I was going to get some taddies to take back. Your aunty wants some more for her old frog-tank she got sunk in the ground for—’

  The rest of Bar’s explanation was lost on Lu, who interrupts, ‘Oh, shut up about frogs, what was that you were doing? That dance?’

  Bar shrugs. ‘I was just getting rid of Old Cat,’ she says off-handedly, poking a stick into the pickle-jar to fetch out a rotted leaf, then she looks up and giggles. ‘Oh, Lu, you do look queer, are you grumpy or what? I was trying to get it out of you too.’

  ‘A’ course I’m not grumpy. What about Old Cat? What were you doing to her?’

  ‘Not to her, just the bad feelings she give us. We din’t want them rotting away inside us, did we? So I got rid of them.’

  What with the ivy fronds, the flowers all over her hair and her flushed cheeks, she looks pretty in a way Lu has never seen anyone else look. It is as though the old frock and knickers are a disguise. ‘Don’t be such a blimmen tease, Bar Barney. Nobody does things like that without their clothes on. You’re just pretending it wasn’t nothing.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s special, and I wanted you to see, only I din’t know if you’d think it was daft.’ She comes and settles herself down beside Lu again, ferrets around in the picnic bag, and brings out a couple of sandwiches, one of which she gives to Lu, who eats hungrily. ‘It’s just… well, don’t go thinking it’s magic or anything like that, anybody can do it… Still, you’d best not try till you got all your blood strong again. That stuff Mr Gabr’l give you will do that in no time.’

  ‘What is it? A spell?’

  ‘I told you it wasn’t nothing like that. It’s just dervishing. You starts turning round slow with your arms out till you got your balance, then you closes your eyes, and when you got the proper way of whirling, you just keep going until you’ve got as fast as you can.’ She takes a swig from her water-bottle. ‘Was I going fast?’

  ‘Ever so fast, couldn’t you tell?’

  Bar shakes her head. ‘It’s like there’s a thread or something hooked on to the sky, it goes down through the top of your head and out between your legs, and it’s like you been set off like a spinning top, and you just keep going as long as you like, then when you’re ready to stop you catch hold of the thread between your hands and the dervishing stops.’