by Gee, Maurice
‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘you told us about a man in prison for years, and he recited all the poems he knew, all the long ones…?’
‘Paradise Lost.’
‘Yes. So he didn’t seem to be in prison at all. Well, I closed my eyes and I went over all my Britannia speeches.’
Hedges laughed. They had never heard him laugh so heartily. ‘Three cheers for Mrs Bolton!’ he shouted.
They crossed the footbridge and turned up Leckie’s Lane. They said goodbye and Noel and Kitty and Irene turned in at the Wix gate and went inside. Mrs Wix was in the kitchen, and Noel, scenting trouble, went straight through the house and into the garden, where he tried to look as if he’d been weeding all morning. Kitty and Irene faced Mrs Wix. She was still knitting socks for the Belgian Relief Fund, and dropping stitches, and berating the needles and the wool, and herself. She had a strong sense that she would be better employed milking cows or shoeing horses. Kitty and Irene, grimy-kneed and guilty-faced, gave her something to focus her anger on. She listened to their story, and said, ‘The pair of you deserve a jolly good hiding. But you, Miss – ’ to Irene – ‘I suppose you never get touched?’
‘Mum hits my knuckles with a pencil,’ Irene said. ‘It hurts,’ she added, as Kitty sniggered.
Mrs Wix knitted ferociously. ‘It’s the willow stick for you,’ she said to Kitty. ‘And that brother of yours. He needn’t think he can hide in the garden.’
‘I’ve already been locked in a cupboard,’ Kitty complained.
‘It serves you right.’
‘She said I’d never get out.’
‘Did she? I would have had a word to say about that.’
‘She thought I was her daughter. She made me play the piano. It should have been you,’ she said to Irene.
‘She doesn’t have a daughter,’ Mrs Wix said.
‘Lucy. She was drowned.’
Mrs Wix lowered her knitting. ‘That’s right. Lucy Marwick. My mother used to talk about her. It happened on the same day she was married.’
‘What happened?’
‘She was drowned in Girlie’s Hole. Where you swim. Her brother was supposed to be watching her, but he went off fishing with some friends. She must have slipped in the rapids. They found her in the big pool, down at the bottom.’
‘There’s photos of her everywhere. On the mantelpiece and on the piano. She was pretty.’
‘Very spoiled my mother said. She used to see her in town with her mother, always sucking sweets, and dressed up to the nines.’ Mrs Wix looked at Irene as though there were a lesson for her in this. Then she relented. ‘Still, it wasn’t her fault. Her mother was a very social woman. And her father now, he ran for mayor. They had garden parties out there. And a duke and duchess to stay, and they had that bridge built specially for the carriage. That all stopped though, after Lucy drowned. No one saw Mrs Marwick again. She turned all her friends away. And her husband, he was just a sort of shadow of himself, my mother said. He gave up his business, gave up everything, and he soon died.’
‘That’s awful,’ Kitty said. ‘The poor people. Poor Mrs Marwick.’
Mrs Wix started knitting again. ‘She doesn’t deserve to have a bunch of wild things like you running about.’ She looked at Irene. ‘It’s time you weren’t here, Miss. Wait on.’ She took a pin from her hair and pinned up Irene’s where it had fallen loose at one side. ‘We can’t send you home looking like a haystack. As for you – ’ to Kitty – ‘get out into the garden and do some weeding and maybe I’ll forget to tell your father.’
But Kitty went to her bedroom instead. She lay on her bed and thought of Mrs Marwick in fine dresses, at garden parties, and thought of her now, in the parlour with the photographs everywhere and the yellow scales on the piano, and felt very sad, and frightened too, at the danger and dreadfulness of life, and the mystery of time passing by and making things old, and things that happened long ago staying alive and turning people into different shapes. And she thought of Lucy Marwick drowning. Her eyes grew hot and moist, and though tears would not roll on her cheeks, later on she counted it as crying.
Hedges and Phil had turned back to look at the telescopes in the observatory. They let themselves through the iron gate and approached the little building on top of the hill. Hedges got a key from under a brick and opened the door. The inside was almost bare – just a wooden table and wooden chair, and a cabinet for charts and the telescope on its stand, angled at the ceiling as if, Phil thought, someone had been searching for flies and spiders up there. The inside of the dome was like a skull, and the thought of spiders in it made Phil shiver, made his skin prickle. Hedges smiled at him and seemed to understand. ‘It’s like a big head, isn’t it? And we’re the brains inside. And this’ –he patted the telescope – ‘is our eyes.’ He ran his hand down it. ‘An optic nerve. It’s my ambition to find a comet. Or a new planet, although I don’t think there’s any left.’
‘And call it after yourself, Sir?’
Hedges turned sharply, but saw Phil was not being sarcastic. ‘I’m not important enough,’ he said, ‘to be floating around in the heavens.’ He spun an iron wheel and a slit opened in the roof. ‘There. The eye comes open after sleep. You can come one night. I’ll show you the stars.’
‘Can’t we look at something now?’
‘There’s a moon up there. But night’s the best time. Still, we’ll give it a go.’ He unfastened a bolt and pushed a handle and the dome of the building began to move, running on a track fixed in the wall. Again Phil had the prickly feeling. It was as if someone was twisting his head on his shoulders. The slit came round from the west and faced north-east.
‘Half a moon. That should be enough.’ Hedges adjusted the telescope and lined it up. ‘All right. Have a look.’
Phil put his eye to the eyepiece and a huge half moon sprang into view, pale as marble and smudged with grey. He gave a grunt of surprise, then drew his breath in at the closeness of it. It seemed he need only put up his arm to embrace it like a football. Then it became strange, almost terrifying. Its size was overwhelming, and a weight seemed to crush on him. Many times he’d seen the moon, full, swollen, yellow as a poorman’s orange, rising over the hills, and that had not made him afraid. He felt there might be things up there watching him.
‘Those are craters, Phil. Made by meteorites. Some of them are hundreds of miles across.’
‘Do you think there’s anyone up there, Sir?’
Hedges laughed. ‘No men in the moon. Lichens maybe. Plants maybe. Micro-organisms. But nothing that needs to breathe. There’s no atmosphere.’
He left Phil at the telescope for another ten minutes. Soon the boy began asking sensible questions. Drawing him away at last, Hedges said, ‘You can come up at night. I’ll show you Mars. And Venus. Planet of war, planet of mystery and love. Roman names, Phil. I’ll lend you a book. Although I prefer Greek myself. Orpheus. That’s what I’d call my new planet. When you look up there at night’ – he gestured at the sky – ‘you can hear a kind of harmony.’ He began to close the slit.
Phil went to the table. He picked up a smaller telescope lying on some charts. ‘Can I look through this?’
‘Yes. Open that window.’
Phil opened a small window in the fixed part of the wall and poked out the telescope. He pointed it up the valley, focussed it, and at once, as startling as the moon, Edgar Marwick sprang into view. He was coming from the door of the farmhouse on to the veranda, carrying something. Phil saw it was a tray with a white cloth over it. Then Mrs Marwick was in the picture. Although sitting down, she seemed to creep in from the side. She was in her wicker chair, with her wide-brimmed hat on her head, and under it, because the sun was strong, an old green tennis sun-visor. Her stick leaned on her knee. Marwick approached her. He put the tray on a wicker table and whisked off the cloth. Phil could not see what sort of food he had brought, but saw a teapot, and watched as Marwick poured tea. He felt he was hiding just out of the picture, at the veranda’s edge,
watching them.
‘That’s a good telescope, that one,’ Hedges said.
‘Yes.’
‘What are you looking at?’
‘The Marwicks.’ Edgar Marwick lifted a lump of sugar with silver tongs and put it in his mother’s tea. ‘He’s waiting on her. Like a servant.’
‘She’s an old lady. Maybe he’s just being a good son.’
‘He’s giving her sandwiches. Beetroot, that’s what it is. It looks like blood.’
Hedges took the telescope. ‘You’ll learn more up there,’ he said, pointing at the sky, ‘than spying down there. Close the window.’
Phil had a last look at the Marwicks, tiny figures on the veranda of a distant house, and pulled the window shut and closed the latch. Hedges put the telescope on the table.
‘Does that one work at night-time too?’ Phil asked.
‘That’s what it’s for. As long as there’s a light source. It’s the light that makes the image, not the telescope. That just brings it close.’
They locked the observatory and hid the key and walked down to the town. Phil was still excited – by the moon, by the Marwicks? He did not know.
‘I’d like to be an astronomer, Sir.’
‘Perhaps you will. There are all sorts of universes, Phil. Little Irene Chalmers wants to explore one with her piano.’
Phil didn’t like that comparison. His excitement was of another sort, and letting Irene Chalmers in made it ordinary. He walked by Hedges’ side, disappointed, and thought of beetroot sandwiches and started feeling hungry. There wasn’t much at home for lunch. He wished he’d stuck with Noel Wix. He might have got another pie.
Hedges turned with him towards the town centre. ‘I’m going your way. To Frau Stauffel’s.’
‘The piano teacher?’
‘You sound surprised.’
‘No, Sir.’
‘Because she’s a German? And I’m going to lunch with her?’
‘We’re fighting the Germans, Sir.’
‘And you think because of that I should hate this lady?’
‘If she’s German.’
‘Then she’ll hate me. And we’ll have a little war here in Jessop, to go with the big one overseas. We can do without that, Phil, don’t you think?’
Phil didn’t answer. He thought Hedges was just being tricky. He knew sometimes why people didn’t like him.
They came to Frau Stauffel’s gate. She was working in her garden, but came to Hedges, pulling off her gloves, and shook his hand.
‘Frau Stauffel, this young fellow is Phil Miller.’
Phil said hello awkwardly, shuffling his feet. ‘I’ve got to go, Sir.’
‘Yes, on your way.’ Hedges watched him run off. ‘He’s a good boy, but not sure he should talk to Germans.’
Frau Stauffel took his hand again and pulled him through the gate. ‘Will you see something, Thomas?’ She led him to the front door. There, crudely lettered in red paint, were the words ‘Dirty Hun’.
Hedges sighed. ‘When did it happen?’
‘Last night.’
‘Well, my dear, it could be worse. It looks like a bit of yahoo stuff to me. Young fellows. I’ll paint it off. You’ll be all right as long as the men don’t start. Come inside now. Play me some music. That’s the right answer for this sort of thing.’
They went inside and left the words, crooked, red, shining on the door.
Chapter Ten
Britannia Meets the Kaiser
Mrs Bolton came to the cast of the pageant under the lime trees, holding a letter in her hands.
‘Children! Children! Listen. Stop that, Miller.’ (Noel was jabbing Phil’s behind with the spike of his Prussian helmet.) ‘Now, listen, I’ve had a letter from Mr Jobling. He’s coming next week. That’s a whole week early. And so we’ve got to do the pageant then. That means practise and practise. And boys, you’ve got the sets to build. Girls, you must sew and sew. I’ve asked Mr Hedges to let you off classes.’
‘We can’t learn it all in a week, Mrs Bolton.’
‘Can’t is a word I don’t know, Wix. I’m sure Irene knows her part already.’
‘She hasn’t got as many words as me,’ Phil said.
‘Believe me, Miller, I’d give someone else your part if there was time. Now, boys over to the trade school. And girls to the sewing room. And remember, we’re not doing this for ourselves.’
‘We’re doing it for Bolters,’ Irene whispered.
They went off to their work, and built and sewed: costumes for Britannia and Belgium, India, Egypt; wooden rifles, a wooden trident and a wooden shield, and panels for the scenery to be painted on. They practised their lines morning and afternoon, and learned their songs and movements, and had only two or three lessons a day – arithmetic and English. The dress rehearsal went off without too many mistakes. In spite of Mrs Bolton, the children enjoyed themselves.
On the day of the pageant, Thomas Hedges told them to forget about it until they actually climbed on the stage. ‘There’s just one thing. Some of you are still not speaking properly. You have to throw your voice at the back of the room. Choose someone back there and throw it at him like a cricket ball.’
‘What if he drops it, Sir?’
‘Very funny, Wix. Phil, you need to open your mouth. The voice-box, the tongue, the lips, they’re a musical instrument. Think of a trumpet. Think of a grand piano.’
‘Is the voice-box really shaped like a box?’ Kitty said.
‘No, it’s more like a harp, and like the bagpipes.’ He seized a stick of chalk and drew larynx and vocal cords on the blackboard and told them how the cords were tightened or loosened and how different sounds were made by forcing air through them.
‘Can you see that on a skeleton, Sir?’
‘No, it’s cartilage. It doesn’t last.’
‘Can we see Miss Perez?’
‘Not today.’
‘Those bumps you were telling us about on people’s heads?’
‘Yes, Kitty. Do you remember the word?’
‘Phrenology. When someone like the fire-raiser stops lighting fires, do his bumps go down?’
‘He hasn’t stopped,’ Bob Taylor cried. ‘He’ll light some more, I bet.’
‘Well then, Miller and Wix can put them out,’ Hedges said. ‘But no, Kitty, to answer your question. Phrenology is just mumbo-jumbo. People’s heads don’t change shape. And the fire-raiser doesn’t have special bumps.’
‘Beethoven had a big head, Sir,’ Irene said.
‘Beethoven was a German,’ Melva Dyer said.
‘Sir,’ Ray Stack cried, ‘that town the Russians captured. How do you say it?’
‘This one?’ Hedges wrote ‘Przemysl’ on the blackboard. ‘I don’t know. But it’s here.’ He pointed it out on the map. ‘Important because it’s on a river.’
‘The Russians are bombarding the Bosphorous, Sir,’ Phil said.
‘Sir, when we fight again, will it be the Germans or the Turks?’ Noel asked.
‘I don’t know. The Turks, I think.’
‘They’re no good,’ Ray Stack said. ‘We beat them easy in Egypt.’
‘Some of you boys,’ Hedges said, ‘seem to think it’s a game. Men are dying out there. Thousands of them. All because we haven’t got control of what’s in here.’ He tapped his skull, but saw they did not understand. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can make fine speeches about it tonight for Mr Jobling. For the moment we’d better do some arithmetic.’ And he started writing sums on the board. Yes, he thought, Beethoven was a German, and so was Bismark, and so’s the Kaiser. And Shakespeare was English, but so was Butcher Cumberland. He wasn’t sure he understood himself. Was there any chance these children would make sense of it one day?
St Andrews Hall stood next to the church. It was a narrow, tall-roofed building of weatherboard, and it stood behind a wrought-iron fence and a strip of lawn. In the dusk it had a yellow glow, quickly fading. Over the box-like entrance a banner made clapping sounds in the breeze. TONIGHT. P
ATRIOTIC PAGEANT BY THE CHILDREN OF JESSOP MAIN SCHOOL. PROCEEDS TO THE BELGIAN RELIEF FUND.
Noel and Kitty, with their costumes over their arms, came down the street and hurried inside. They went up the central aisle, through chairs and benches for 200 people, and climbed the steps to the stage, hearing a clatter and buzz behind the curtains. Mrs Bolton was helping boys place backdrops painted on panels. The centre one showed green fields, red poppies, yellow cows: the fields of Belgium. On the left were the white cliffs of Dover, with blue sky and a little church. On the right a forest of dark trees was bending in a storm. Clouds like grey pumpkins rolled in the sky, where black crows with open beaks were flying. Noel, in his part of Kaiser, grinned with satisfaction. His backdrop was best.
Irene, in peasant skirt and cap and blouse, ran up to Kitty. ‘How do I look?’
‘Marvellous.’
‘Hurry and get changed, Kitty. I want to look at you,’ Mrs Bolton said. Her face was so damp and anxious, Kitty felt sorry for her. ‘Yes, Mrs Bolton.’ She went to the changing room, past India and Egypt looking so strange and beautiful she began to regret her own plain costume, and the drum and fife boys in their belts and glengarries. Noel went to the boys’ changing room and found a place in a corner. He could scarcely move for Canada, Australia, Hun soldiers and a Ghurka and a Turk, and Wipaki in a grass skirt, with a spear. Phil had not arrived yet. ‘He’ll be late,’ Bob Taylor said with satisfaction; and out on the stage Mrs Bolton was crying, ‘I knew I should never have trusted that boy.’
Irene, looking through the curtain, said, ‘Here he is, Mrs Bolton.’
Phil came up the steps on to the stage. He had his costume wrapped in newspaper, and a pair of shoes on his feet tonight. Mrs Bolton ran at him and slapped his head.
‘You’re late. Where have you been? Mr Jobling’s here.’
