by Susan Gandar
A deep boom reverberated up towards the sky, the air around her shuddered, and then the warehouse disappeared in a blinding flash of white light.
The light faded to grey. And Sam was left, standing, trembling, in the middle of the road, staring at her father’s car driving off into the distance.
‘Sam, come on now, you’re soaked through…’
How could she explain?
‘I’ll make us some tea.’
It had happened again, just like it had happened yesterday – the slip out of her life into another’s.
‘Why don’t you run yourself a bath? Put on some dry clothes. I’ll make us some breakfast…’
Sam pushed past her mother. She ran up the stairs, along the landing and into her bedroom. She grabbed her mobile. She punched in her father’s number. If she rang enough times, again and again, there was a good chance that he would pull over and answer. But what was she going to say? That yesterday, at the fairground, she’d suddenly found herself standing on the platform of a station where hundreds of wounded were being loaded off a train? That she’d been running towards his car, the road had disappeared and then she was walking down a footpath and there was this plane flying towards her? She couldn’t. He would think that she was crazy.
SIX
‘BUT WHERE IS HE going to live?’
‘I don’t know Sam. He’ll probably rent or share a flat or something…’
Her mother hurtled, without indicating, into the right hand lane of the roundabout.
‘But will I still see him?’
‘Of course you will.’
‘But how? If he’s always away and when he’s at home, he’s not living with us, but sharing a flat–’
‘Everything will be all right.’
‘But how will everything be all right?’
There were so many things that made her parents so different from each other that it was, perhaps, surprising they’d lasted together this long.
Her mother liked her garden to grow wild, so the plants, even the weeds, could reveal their true shape and character. Her father preferred to prune everything into order. Her mother’s idea of heaven was a long, lazy afternoon sipping wine on the terrace of a Greek taverna. Her father didn’t think a holiday was a holiday until he’d ridden the largest wave. Her mother disliked cars and anything to do with cars, describing them as ‘boring, little metal boxes on wheels’, while her father insisted on driving the largest and the fastest.
‘We’ll sort something out.’
‘Like what?’
‘Now what do you want for supper? I could do that new recipe…’
Her mother wasn’t talking to Sam. She was talking at her as if she was a teacher standing on a platform at the front of the classroom and Sam was some rather small, stupid child, sitting down below, squeezed behind a desk.
‘I saw it on the television, on that Saturday morning cookery programme…’
Sam closed her eyes. If she had a brother or sister, there would be someone to talk to, to share all this with.
‘Rosemary chicken with tomato sauce…’
Her father had told her that when she was very small, not more than two years old, she’d had invisible friends. They’d come in the evening, after she’d been put to bed, when her mother was reading a story. These friends weren’t children. When they walked into the room, she would look up, not down. And whoever, or whatever they were, she wasn’t frightened of them. Her eyes would light up and she would laugh and giggle, tugging at her mother’s hand, whenever they appeared.
But it gave her mother the spooks. When her father told her that she should be grateful that their daughter’s invisible friends were at least people, not animals, lolloping, great horses galloping around the place, or heavy-weight tigers whose favourite past-time was lolling around on the sofa, her mother hadn’t found it particularly funny.
She’d taken Sam straight to the doctor. He just laughed and said there wasn’t anything to worry about. All children went through the invisible friends phase and, in Sam’s case, it wasn’t in the least surprising given she was an only child, but they ought to come back if the ‘friends’ were still around when she reached sixteen. Because then there really would be something to worry about.
And then one night, during a thunderstorm, her mother had come into Sam’s bedroom. She had expected to find her daughter curled up, shivering with fear, under the duvet. Instead she had found Sam standing on a stool, in front of the window, waving at the lightning forking through the sky. When, a few seconds later, thunder rumbled and cracked over the house Sam had jumped up and down, clapping her hands. How had she got onto the stool? It was too high even for the most determined two-year-old. And how had she opened the curtains? Which her father swore, again and again, he had pulled, tight shut, over the window before putting Sam to bed.
Her mother had insisted that they move; if Sam’s invisible friends were ghosts, people who had died in the house, they would want to remain where they were, not follow them to their new home. Sam’s father, a committed ghost non-believer, had agreed but very reluctantly.
So they left the two-hundred-year-old cottage, with its dark corners, low ceilings and sloping walls, in the town with a castle, a ruined priory and steep, cobbled streets. And they moved, just a half-hour drive away, to a newly built house, so new that it would be impossible for anyone to have had the time to die in it, on a hill overlooking the sea.
‘Sam, did you hear what I said?’
There was a squeal of brakes followed by an angry honking. Sam opened her eyes. She was still alive. But only just.
‘What would you like for supper? Because I’d like to have a go at that new recipe, rosemary chicken in tomato sauce? The one I was telling you about when you weren’t listening?’
Her mother adored food; she talked about it endlessly, read every magazine, watched every television programme, browsed every website. But, after hours of slaving away in the kitchen whatever it was, a fish pie, spaghetti bolognese, even an omelette, would always end up a dried up, burnt disaster. Her father used to joke that if he hadn’t learnt to throw a chop on a plate they would have starved. But the next time he flew back he would not be coming home.
‘We could have baked potatoes. Or pasta…’
Her mother’s phone rang out.
‘Answer it, Sam.’
‘Hello?’
There was a pause and then a voice asked if she was Mrs Rachel Foster.
‘I’m Sam. Sam Foster. Rachel Foster’s my mother.’
The voice asked if her mother was there and, if so, was it possible to speak to her.
‘Mum, it’s someone, a woman, she wants to speak to you.’
Her mother pulled up at the side of the road.
‘It’s probably the office…’
It was rare, very rare indeed, for her mother to get a phone call from work on a Sunday.
‘Hello, Rachel Foster speaking.’
Sam stared out at the road ahead.
‘Michael Foster? Yes, he’s my husband.’
She darted a look across at her mother.
‘He’s been in an accident?’
The smile had been replaced by a tight-lipped frown.
‘Which hospital?’
The knuckles of her mother’s left hand, where she was grasping hold of the steering wheel, were white with tension.
‘Yes. I understand. Thank you. I’ll come straight away.’
SEVEN
April 1916
‘ROCK - A - BYE BABY on the tree top…’
The official looking envelope, addressed to her father, with OHMS printed on the front, had been delivered just three days earlier.
‘When the wind blows the cradle will rock…’
It had arrived on Saturday. Now it was Tuesday.
‘When the bough breaks the cradle will fall…’
Her father had to report to the barracks in Winchester, a train journey away, no later than two o’clock.
&nb
sp; ‘There’s some cheese…’
Her mother’s face was blotched and swollen with crying.
‘And some pickle…’
Her father held her tight.
‘… And down will come baby, cradle and all.’
It was the same lullaby her mother had sung to Jess when she was a baby. And now she was singing it to her brother.
Her father whispered something and then he pushed her mother gently back out of his embrace. He turned to Jess and lifted her brother out of her arms. He’d woken up, crying, in the middle of the night. He had continued to cry into the morning and was still crying now.
Her father bounced the kicking and screaming baby up and down, up and down, singing to him softly. Her brother’s eyes fluttered, once, twice, and then closed – and stayed closed as her father handed him over to her mother.
‘Jess, will you walk with me, just up the hill? Will you come with me?’
They were the same words she had said to her father, almost begged of him, the morning of her first day at school. And he had walked her, his large, strong hand holding her small, trembling hand, up the hill and down into the valley. But now, almost ten years later, as they walked down the path towards the gate, it was her hand that was steady and her father’s that was trembling.
They climbed the white chalk track that led up onto the ridge. It was her favourite place, standing there on top of the world: to the east and west, Mount Caburn, Firle Beacon, Seaford Head, Kingston Hill and Hollingbury Castle; to the south, the English Channel stretching away to France; to the north, the fields and copses of the Weald rolling away, mile upon mile, towards London.
But now, standing there on top of the Downs, her father’s smiling eyes had changed. They were like those of a fox, surrounded by a pack of hounds, knowing there was no escape.
She had seen the end of a chase, just the once, in the field at the bottom of Cradle Hill. She had been beside the stream, collecting firewood, when a fox had limped down towards her. It had sunk down, exhausted, in a ditch just a short distance from where she was standing.
‘Come away now, Jess, there’s nothing you can do.’
Her father had put his arm around her.
‘The day we’re born is the day we die. It don’t matter if we’re rich or poor, man, woman, or beast. When it’s your time there’s nothing you can do about it. We’re all the same…’
Her father had led her away, along the path through the trees, as the hounds streamed down the slope to where the fox sat, hunched, waiting in the ditch.
The same father now stepped forward and put his arms around her. She buried herself in his familiar warmth.
‘Promise me, however bad it gets… promise me, you’ll not give up, not ever. Promise me…’
Usually, when she was standing up on the top of the Downs, it would be silent except for the wind sighing through the gorse bushes and the call of a solitary buzzard or kestrel circling overhead. But today there was a sound she’d never heard before; a low, insistent drumming which was getting, slowly and steadily, louder and nearer. Then, out of nowhere, without any warning, an enormous, white, insect-like object swooped down out of the sky.
She’d heard people talk about them. There had been pictures in the newspapers. But this was the first time she’d actually seen one.
‘Look, a flying machine.’
She raised her arm to wave. Her father took hold of her wrist.
‘Those black crosses on its wings, it’s an enemy plane.’
‘What’s it doing here?’
His grip tightened.
‘Go home now, Jess.’
‘But –’
He pushed her away.
‘Do as I say.’
She went back down the track. Every few paces she turned to look back. Each time her father was still there, exactly where she had left him. When she reached the bottom of the hill she turned and she waved. And he waved back.
She didn’t move. She didn’t turn off towards the cottage. She couldn’t. She just stood there, waving and waiting. And when he gestured with his arm, she knew that he was saying, ‘Go on, you must go home now’. And that is what she did, leaving him, a small, dark figure, standing alone on top of the hill, still waving.
EIGHT
March 1917
SHE LAY THERE, HUNCHED up beside her mother and her baby brother, underneath the mound of old clothes and blankets they had piled on top of the mattress to try and keep themselves warm.
The three of them shared the same bed. It had been four when her father had been at home; her parents in the middle, her baby brother between them, with Jess curled up on the edge of the lumpy, straw-filled mattress beside her mother. In the summer it was always too hot. Even with the window and the cottage door left open, she would lie there, tossing and turning, the flies buzzing around, desperately trying to get some sleep.
But it wasn’t summer; it was the first week of March and the worst winter in living memory was continuing on into spring. There was still snow on the ground and more was expected. In the morning, the inside of the cottage’s one window was coated with ice, which would melt during the day only to freeze up again when the sun went down. But this winter had been so cold that the ice never melted. It had stayed there, getting thicker by the day. There was no coal around, at least not in the village, and if there had been it would have been too expensive to buy. The only way to keep warm was to stay in bed.
But this morning, there was a glimmer of sunshine, the first Jess had seen for days, seeping through the threadbare blanket nailed up over the window.
She pulled on the boots that had been passed down to her by her mother four years ago. They were too large, had holes in the soles and had never had laces. Stuffed with balled up pages of newspaper, they stayed on unless she tried to run or kick something. She tugged a coat out of the pile of clothing heaped up on the bed. It had been repaired and patched so many times that there was almost nothing left of the original coat her mother had first worn, over twenty years ago, when she went up to London to go into service.
There was no sound, no movement, from the bed. Her mother must be still asleep. Jess walked across to the table. She opened the drawer and took out a knife, its blade tucked inside a leather sheath. She put it in the right hand pocket of the coat – the only pocket without a hole. She hesitated. A lump of stale bread, the size of her fist, was sitting on top of the table. Should she? Or shouldn’t she? It was the only food they had left in the house. She slipped it into the same pocket.
A blast of cold air hit her as she stepped outside. With the sun out, and snow no longer falling, she wouldn’t be the only one coming out to search for food. She slipped and slithered round the side of the cottage to the lean-to where her father kept his tools. She lifted the snare down off the hook, and the club down off the wooden shelf. She put both in a bag made out of sacking.
Down the garden, through the gate, and instead of turning left towards the lane, which led up onto the ridge, she turned right. Each morning her father had been away, and whatever the weather, sun, rain or snow, she’d followed this same path to the old oak that stood, alone and proud, in the centre of the field.
She drew her father’s knife out of its sheath and scratched a line, the length of her little finger, deep down, into the bark of the old tree. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven lines. One more week. Today, it was exactly three hundred and eighteen days, just under eleven months, since her father had left for France.
In the summer, when the ground was dry, Butt’s Brow was just a short walk away. But not today. There was either ice underfoot or mud, sometimes both. One foot slid to the right, the other to the left, leaving her struggling to stay upright. She tried cutting across the middle of a field but the mud was thicker, and even more slippery, than around the edge. One boot was sucked off then the other. She wanted to give up, turn around and go home, but she couldn’t. Not without taking back some food.
The war that should ha
ve been over in four months was now into its third year. And the Germans, the enemy, weren’t just fighting on land. They were also fighting at sea. The shelves in the grocer’s shop were often empty: no sugar, no lard, no flour, as more and more merchant ships were torpedoed to the bottom of the ocean.
Her mother received an allowance of fourteen shillings a week from the government and her father sent home whatever he had managed to save out of his seven shillings a week wage. But the two combined came well below what he had been bringing home when he had worked as a labourer on the local farms. They lived off bread: a slice for breakfast, another slice for lunch and another slice in the afternoon for tea. And, if they were lucky, and her father had been able to send more money than usual, they had potatoes, plainly boiled, for supper. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten butter. But both the bread and the potatoes had doubled in price. A single loaf now cost one whole, precious silver shilling.
Summer, late afternoon, was the best time to catch a rabbit. Today, on this icy cold morning, she would be lucky to get one. But this was where her father always came. And rabbits, like humans, had to eat. Jess set the snare and then placed the bait – the lump of stale bread. She crouched down behind a bush.
Just as the sun was dipping below the trees, a young doe hopped out of a burrow. It sniffed, sniffed again and took another hop forward. It took a nibble at the bread. Its head went through the noose. Another nibble, another hop and it was trapped, the wire round its neck getting tighter and tighter with every frantic kick and wriggle. Jess raised her father’s club. The rabbit thrashed from side to side. The snare snapped. And the pie, soup and dumplings, that would have kept the three of them fed for a whole week, hopped down into a burrow.
Her mother said nothing when Jess showed her the broken snare. When she tried to explain about the lump of bread, how it too had disappeared, with the rabbit, down into the burrow, her mother just turned away. There would be nothing to eat that night. Not for anyone.
