None of them knew what to say and Baby’s mouth turned down as if she was going to cry.
Sister Turner swished to the bed and stooped until her white cap was almost touching the pillow. ‘Mr Furnivall,’ she said. ‘Your girls are here.’
He made a harsh muttering sound and his head rolled to one side.
‘Mr Furnivall,’ Sister repeated. ‘Your girls. You asked to see them. Remember?’
To Peggy’s relief, he opened his eyes and became himself again. Oh those lovely greeny-brown eyes. Neither one thing nor the other. ‘Peggy?’ he said looking at her.
‘Yes, Dad,’ she said, tiptoeing to the bedside. ‘We’re all here.’
Joan followed her, pulling Baby by the hand.
‘Good girls,’ he said, but his voice was harsh and husky as if he had a throat full of spit. ‘Got somethin’ ter say …’
Then he started to cough, and Sister Turner put the spittoon deftly under his chin and supported him with her arm until he’d coughed up a long sticky strand of awful brown spit and wiped his lips with a piece of the cotton wool.
They waited full of horrified sympathy for him.
‘Somethin’ to tell you,’ he gasped. ‘Can’t talk much ‘cause of the … I want you ter promise …’
‘Anything,’ Peggy said as he was panting too much to be able to go on.
‘Anything,’ Joan echoed.
The panting went on as they waited for him, strained and afraid and yearning with pity.
‘Look after yer mum,’ he said. ‘She’s – not strong – with her nerves an’ everythin’. Look after her – eh? – when I’m gone.’
The icy wind blew into every corner of Peggy’s mind and body. She was cold from the hairs on her head to the tips of her fingers. Her dad was dying and there was no way she could either avoid the knowledge or take it in and make sense of it. ‘We promise, Dad,’ she said, passionately. ‘We promise.’
‘All of yer?’ he said, looking at them one after the other.
Joan said yes in a voice that sounded almost as if she was angry, and Baby nodded.
‘Good girls,’ their father said. ‘Give yer ol’ Dad a kiss.’
They kissed him solemnly, one after the other, appalled by the awful smell that was rising out of his mouth and trying not to look at that spittoon, and loving him with a terrible desperation.
Then Sister Turner’s hand was on Joan’s shoulder and they were being suggested towards the door. Peggy followed obediently even though she was torn with the need to run back to the bed and plead with him not to die, to kiss him once more, to tell him she loved him, that she’d do anything to save him. But all she could manage was to look back at him once and briefly before the door was shut between them. And he looked back at her, once and briefly, smiling his lovely old smile even though he was keeping his eyes open with an effort.
‘That’s my girl,’ he said. Long afterwards Joan and Peggy confessed to one another that they had no idea how they got through the rest of the day. They supposed they must have eaten their dinner or Mum would have got shirty and they’d have remembered that, and after dinner they had a vague recollection that they helped clean the parlour, because Peggy could remember smelling the wax polish. But they were numb with emotions too strong for them, terror and pity, revulsion and anger, and lurking most hideously behind them all the monstrous fear of death.
All three of them slept fitfully that night, and Joan and Peggy took Baby into the double bed because she cried so much when she was in the truckle bed on her own. And in the morning they came down to a house even more unreal than the one they’d left when they went to bed.
The curtains were all still closed as though it was the middle of the night and Aunty Connie was in the kitchen making lumpy porridge by gaslight.
‘Your Mum’s gone to the hospital,’ she said when they came quietly into the room. ‘They’re bringing home the coffin at ten o’clock. She’s gone to see to it. Eat up quick. I want to get clear in here before they come.’
Coffin, Peggy thought. Oh Dad. Are you in a coffin already? But although the awful question filled her throat she couldn’t bring herself to ask it.
It was Joan who spoke. ‘Then he’s dead,’ she said flatly. ‘That’s it. He’s dead.’
‘Yes, my dear,’ Aunty Connie said, speaking quite kindly. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you. He is. Eat what you can a’ this porridge. You’ll need your strength today.’
We’ll have to look after Mum now, Peggy thought, trying to be sensible. But as she gazed down bleakly at her bowl of porridge, she knew she didn’t have the faintest idea how they were going to do it. The world had become a foreign place, a place where there was no one to protect them, a place full of threats and fears and horrors. Nothing would ever be the same again now Dad was dead. How could she endure it? But even as the question formed itself in her mind, she knew she would have to endure it, because there was nothing else she could do. And she remembered Dad’s voice saying, ‘What can’t be cured must be endured’, and she missed him with a sudden rush of yearning that made the tears brim from her eyes.
‘Eat what you can,’ Aunty Connie said, patting her head. ‘We got to go shopping before ten o’clock.’
None of the girls could eat their breakfast. They were too shocked and unhappy for food, too shocked and unhappy to know what they were doing. They simply let the rituals of mourning carry them along the treadmill of the next few days. They went shopping with Aunty Connie and bought three skirts made of ‘serviceable’ black barathea, and black ribbons for their hair and three cheap black cotton blouses ‘just for the time being’. And they came home quietly and were sent upstairs with orders to change into their new clothes as quickly as they could and then wait in the bedroom until they were told to come down again.
None of them spoke much. What could they say? They stood by the bedroom window in their unfamiliar clothes and opened the curtains just a crack so that they could watch while their father’s coffin was carried into the house, with their mother weeping behind it. And they came obediently downstairs when they were sent for and went into the parlour together to ‘say goodbye’ as though that was their normal behaviour.
The coffin was balanced on a long trestle table in the middle of the room with its lid removed and four white candles set in brass candlesticks at either end of it. But the thing inside the coffin, the thing they’d all been secretly dreading, turned out to be simply a cold waxy image of their father lying awkwardly on a soppy-looking cushion of padded white satin. It was too unreal to be upsetting.
‘They’ve parted his hair the wrong way,’ Joan said as they stood in a row beside the trestle table.
‘It’s not him though, is it?’ Baby whispered, clinging to Peggy’s hand.
‘No,’ Peggy assured her. ‘It’s not him. He’s gone to Heaven. With the angels.’
‘Smell the polish,’ Joan said. ‘I’m glad we got the room clean.’
‘Why’ve they put candles?’ Baby said.
Joan knew the answer to that. ‘To save the gas,’ she said.
It was only when they were out of the parlour and back in the kitchen with Mum and Aunty Connie that Peggy knew how much she missed her father. She suddenly remembered him alive and full of vigour sitting by the stove and showing her the Bible and telling her how she’d been born in the Tower. And she missed him with a raw aching pain in her stomach that made her feel as though someone had been hitting her there, and she had to go upstairs quickly so that she could cry on her own and not upset Mum, because Mum was upset enough already without her making things worse.
For the rest of the day the house was full of Yeomen Warders. They came in one after the other, with their shoulders hunched and their bonnets in their hands, to ‘pay their respects’. Mum sat in the corner of the kitchen and cried and cried, and the three girls kept out of the way as well as they could, retreating into their bedroom or sitting on the stairs, because it made them feel so awful to see Mum in such a state
and because there really wasn’t room for so many people in such a small house. But more visitors kept arriving, all that day and all that evening and all the day after, in a never-ending procession of sorrow and mumbled admiration. And Aunty Connie and Uncle Charlie came in and out to whisper to Mum about ‘arrangements’ and Mrs Jonson from next door took them all in to her house every evening for supper, which was just as well because Mum seemed to have forgotten all about meals.
But after two more bewildered days Mum told them it was ‘the funeral’ and that they were all to be as good as gold. By mid morning the house was full of people again, only this time a lot of them were strangers, all dressed in black and most of them smelling of mothballs. Wreaths arrived and were dangled into the candlelit parlour, and then six Yeomen Warders were at the door in their black cloaks and between them they carried Dad’s coffin out of the house in a waft of ferns and roses and carnations.
Peggy couldn’t understand much of the funeral service except that the chaplain said how brave Dad was, ‘Valiant in war and dependable in peace’ were the words he used, and they sounded lovely even though she wasn’t quite sure what they meant. And then their black visitors shuffled out of the church, looking solemn, and they were all driven off to a churchyard in a parade of black cars and stood round the grave like black crows making silly remarks, and afterwards they all came home again and Aunty Connie produced cups of tea and plates and plates full of sandwiches to feed them. Which Joan said was downright unnecessary.
Peggy was most upset by them, because they were all talking such nonsense and none of them were thinking about Dad at all and some of them were laughing in a horrible high-pitched way. But she tried to be sensible. I mustn’t cry, she told herself, even if they are horrid, because someone’s got to hand round the sandwiches. But they were horrid, just the same.
There was a bad-tempered old man that Mum said was their grandfather, and a woman with hardly any teeth, who was their Aunt Maud, and a large man with a red face and sandy hair who was their Uncle Gideon. He was a very jolly man with a booming voice, but to Peggy’s horror he’d lost the top joints of the two middle fingers on his left hand.
‘Chopped ’em off fer sausage meat,’ he said cheerfully when he saw her looking at the stumps.
‘Really?’ Baby said, most impressed.
‘Gideon!’ Aunt Maud warned. ‘That’s quite ènough, if you please!’
What a nasty man, Peggy thought. Fancy chopping off his own fingers. And she went off at once to serve sandwiches to the people on the other side of the room.
But at last the long peculiar day was over and all the guests had gone away and Flossie and her daughters had washed the dishes and returned borrowed crockery to their neighbours and swept the house clean, and now they were alone together in a curiously empty kitchen. Peggy felt completely exhausted.
‘We’ll just enter it in the Bible,’ Mum said, ‘and then we can get to bed.’ She spoke sharply as if she was cross with them. ‘Lift it down if you please, Joan.’
So Joan put the family Bible on the kitchen table, and Mum got the ink stand and took up the pen and wrote: Company Sergeant-Major Joseph Furnival died Thursday 27 July 1922. ‘Ah well,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘Off to bed all of you.’
They went to bed obediently but none of them could sleep and Peggy cried all night. Watching his death being entered in the Bible had upset her terribly. It was all so final and it made her realize that she would never see him again. Oh Dad! she mourned inside her head. How are we going to manage without you?
CHAPTER 5
The fortnight that followed was very subdued. The three girls ran errands and helped with the housework and kept out of the house as much as they could, although there wasn’t anywhere particular for them to go because they’d broken up for the summer holidays. And gradually, day by miserable day, they got used to living without their father even though his absence was a perpetual numbness in their minds.
And then one day they came home at dinner time to find a travelling trunk in the kitchen.
‘What’s that?’ Joan asked.
Mum answered her brusquely. ‘We’re packing,’ she said.
‘What for?’ Joan said, scowling at her.
‘We’re going to live in the country with your grandpa and your Aunty Maud. It’s all arranged.’
‘Leave the Tower?’ Peggy said. Oh they couldn’t leave the Tower. They couldn’t possibly.
‘Don’t start!’ Mum said. ‘If I say we’re going to the country, we’re going to the country.’
‘But why?’ Joan said.
‘Your father’s gone an’ they’ll need the house for the next Yeoman Warder,’ Mum said. ‘We’ve had a fortnight’s grace. Now it’s up.’
‘But…’ Joan began again.
‘Set the table,’ Mum said. ‘Can’t you see my nerves are in shreds? D’you want to make me ill next? Is that what you want, you horrible girl? You just set the table.’ And she banged out of the room and up the stairs.
Joan and Peggy laid the table quickly.
‘I don’t want to live in the country,’ Joan said.
‘Nor do I,’ Peggy said miserably. This sudden news was so dreadful she could hardly bear to think about it. To have no Dad to look after them and then to be told they were going to leave the Tower. It was as if the earth had been snatched away from under her feet. All safety and security was gone.
‘Nor do I either,’ Baby echoed.
They sat round the table unhappily and waited.
‘It was your birthday,’ Baby said to Peggy. ‘You was eight, only you never had it.’
Peggy had forgotten all about birthdays. During the last two weeks there’d only been Dad and that awful empty feeling. ‘When?’ she said.
‘On the Saturday,’ Baby told her. ‘After the funeral.’
Peggy tried to remember dates and couldn’t do it, but Baby was probably right. It was certainly well into August by now. ‘Perhaps you don’t have birthdays when your Dad’s dead,’ she said reasonably.
They all thought that very likely. But it didn’t solve the problem of their banishment to the country.
‘We shall hate it,’ Joan said. ‘I don’t think we ought to go:
But young though she was, Peggy knew they would have to put up with it no matter what they might think. ‘Perhaps it’ll be all right,’ she said, trying to look on the bright side.
But it wasn’t. It was awful.
For a start, it went on and on and on for miles and miles and miles and everything about it was either green or greeny-yellow, which was dreadful after all the different colours in London. There were green fields of grass and yellow fields of something she supposed was corn, green hedges bristling, green trees as tall as houses, and hills everywhere curving one behind the other, green and yellow, on and on and on like the waves of the sea. Even the sky looked green, although that could have been the dirt on the windows of their awful racketty train. But worse than the green was the fact that everything was so empty.
Even when they finally arrived at a station labelled Gomshall, of all funny names, that was empty too.
The train went clattering off almost as soon as they climbed out of it. Peggy watched it caterpillar round the bend and disappear, and after a very few seconds she couldn’t even hear it any more. They were all on their own with no Dad to protect them in a green foreign world. Even the porter had disappeared and it was so quiet they could hear birds singing.
‘Come on,’ Mum said, picking up her suitcase and opening a little wooden gate beside the platform. ‘Look sharp or it’ll be dark before we get there.’
‘Where’s the tram?’ Baby said.
‘You don’t have trams in the country,’ Mum said. ‘You walk.’
So they walked, past a busy coal yard where the air was peppery with the smell of coal dust and colliers were at work loading scores of horse-drawn carts, and downhill along a muddy path lined with black dust, and bordered by untidy bushes and bramb
les with long grasping claws. It smelled like a river down there, a dank mixture of damp earth and rotting vegetation.
‘Is it far?’ Baby said anxiously.
But Mum didn’t answer. She just went plodding on ahead of them, through the main street of a tiny village, over a bridge where there was a higgledy-piggledy house made of white planks with a river flowing right through the middle of it – what an amazing thing! – past a pond on the other side of the path full of white ducks and grubby children who stopped paddling to stare at them, and then uphill along another dusty path between even more trees. And eventually they came to a house, standing all by itself in a clearing.
It was a grey ramshackle terrace with a black pump before it and a muddle of hens and cabbages behind, and it appeared to have been put together by many hands and at many different times, for although the entire building was topped by a single green thatch, there were several front doors, windows at a variety of levels and in a variety of shapes and sizes, two non-matching gables set side by side at the further end, and a wooden outhouse more or less attached at the rear. It was obviously very very old. The thatch was growing weeds as though it was a field, the grey walls bulged and split like old flour sacks, and there was a musty, elderly smell about it.
‘Is this it?’ Joan said in disbelief.
‘This is it,’ Mum agreed, knocking on the bare wood of the nearest door. ‘We’re home.’
There was no answer to her knock but that didn’t seem to worry her. She gave the door a push and they all trooped in.
They were in a dungeon, a dark awful room, standing awkwardly on stone flags between very dark brown walls among furniture as black as a rack, a dresser that looked as though it was frowning, a gnarled table, several ill-assorted chairs. And sitting by the sink, wiping his hands on a grimy dishcloth, was the cantankerous old man they’d met at Dad’s funeral, the cantankerous old man who was their grandfather, Grandpa Potter. In the poor light his face was scored with black lines, down his cheeks, across his forehead, over his chin, and running as deep as pits between his long nose and a mouth that looked even narrower than they’d remembered it. There were two deep frown lines between his spiky eyebrows, and they deepened when he glanced up and saw them hesitating before him.
London Pride Page 6
