When Jean turned up, rather late, she was accompanied by two little sisters, a five-year-old very like herself and a tiny three-year-old called Ellen. Ellen had white hair and a little brown stormy face with an expression on it that said she was going to bite anyone who gave her any trouble. She was alarming. All three girls were dressed in impeccable starched cotton frocks that made me feel rather shabby. I had dressed for the weekend. But then so had they, in a different way.
“Mum says I got to look after them,” Jean told me dismally. “Can you have them for me for a bit while I do her shopping? Then we can play.”
I looked at stormy Ellen with apprehension. “I’m not very good at looking after little ones,” I said.
“Oh, go on!” Jean begged me. “I’ll be much quicker without them. I’ll be your friend if you do.”
So far, Jean had shown a desire to play, but had never offered friendship. I gave in. Jean departed, merrily swinging her shopping bag.
Almost at once a girl called Eva turned up. She was an official friend. She wore special boots and one of her feet was just a sort of blob. Eva fascinated me, not because of the foot but because she was so proud of it. She used to recite the list of all her other relatives who had queer feet, ending with, “And my uncle has only one toe.” She too carried a shopping bag and had a small one in tow, a brother in her case, a wicked five-year-old called Terry. “Let me dump him on you while I do the shopping,” Eva bargained, “and then we can play. I won’t be long.”
“I don’t know about looking after boys,” I protested. But Eva was a friend and I agreed. Terry was left standing beside stormy Ellen, and Eva went away.
A girl I did not know so well, called Sybil, arrived next. She wore a fine blue cotton dress with a white pattern and was hauling along two small sisters, equally finely dressed. “Have these for me while I do the shopping and I’ll be your friend.” She was followed by a rather older girl called Cathy, with a sister, and then a number of girls I only knew by sight. Each of them led a small sister or brother into our yard. News gets round in no time in a village. “What have you done with your sisters, Jean?” “Dumped them on the girl Jones.” Some of these later arrivals were quite frank about it.
“I heard you’re having children. Have these for me while I go down the rec.”
“I’m not good at looking after children,” I claimed each time before I gave in. I remember thinking this was rather odd of me. I had been in sole charge of Isobel for years. As soon as Ursula was four, she was in my charge too. I suppose I had by then realized I was being had for a sucker, and this was my way of warning all these older sisters. But I believed what I said. I was not good at looking after little ones.
In less than twenty minutes I was standing in the yard surrounded by small children. I never counted, but there were certainly more than ten of them. None of them came above my waist. They were all beautifully dressed because they all came from what were called the “clean families.” The “dirty families” were the ones where the boys wore big black boots with metal in the soles and the girls had grubby frocks that were too long for them. These kids had starched creases in their clothes and clean socks and shiny shoes. But they were, all the same, skinny, knowing, village children. They knew their sisters had shamelessly dumped them and they were disposed to riot.
“Stop all that damned noise!” bellowed my father. “Get these children out of here!”
He was always angry. This sounded near to an explosion.
“We’re going for a walk,” I told the milling children. “Come along.” And I said to Isobel, “Coming?”
She hovered away backward. “No.” Isobel had a perfect instinct for this kind of thing. Some of my earliest memories are of Isobel’s sturdy brown legs flashing round and round as she rode her bicycle for dear life away from a situation I had got her into. These days, she usually arranged things so that she had no need to run for her life. I was annoyed. I could have done with her help with all these kids. But not that annoyed. Her reaction told me that something interesting was going to happen.
“We’re going to have an adventure,” I told the children.
“There’s no adventures nowadays,” they told me. They were, as I said, knowing children, and no one, not even me, regarded the war that was at that time going on around us as any kind of adventure. This was a problem to me. I craved adventures of the sort people had in books, but nothing that had ever happened to me seemed to qualify. No spies made themselves available to be unmasked by me, no gangsters ever had nefarious dealings where I could catch them for the police.
But one did what one could. I led the crowd of them out into the street, feeling a little like the Pied Piper—or no: they were so little and I was so big that I felt really old, twenty at least, and rather like a nursery school teacher. And it seemed to me that since I was landed in this position I might as well do something I wanted to do.
“Where are we going?” they clamored at me.
“Down Water Lane,” I said. Water Lane, being almost the only unpaved road in the area, fascinated me. It was like lanes in books. If anywhere led to adventure, it would be Water Lane. It was a moist, mild, gray day, not adventurous weather, but I knew from books that the most unlikely conditions sometimes led to great things.
But my charges were not happy about this. “It’s wet there. We’ll get all muddy. My mum told me to keep my clothes clean,” they said from all around me.
“You won’t get muddy with me,” I told them firmly. “We’re only going as far as the elephants.” There was a man who built life-sized mechanical elephants in a shed in Water Lane. These fascinated everyone. The children gave up objecting at once. Ellen actually put her hand trustingly in mine, and we crossed the main road like a great liner escorted by coracles.
Water Lane was indeed muddy. Wetness oozed up from its sandy surface and ran in dozens of streams across it. Mr. Hinkston’s herd of cows had added their contributions. The children minced and yelled. “Walk along the very edge,” I commanded them. “Be adventurous. If we’re lucky, we’ll get inside the yard and look at the elephants in the sheds.”
Most of them obeyed me except Ursula. But she was my sister and I had charge of her shoes along with the rest of her. Although I was determined from the outset to treat her exactly like the other children, as if this was truly a class from a nursery school, or the Pied Piper leading the children of Hamelin Town, I decided to let her be. Ursula had times when she bit you if you crossed her. Besides, what were shoes? So, to cries of, “Ooh! Your sister’s getting in all the pancakes!” we arrived outside the big black fence where the elephants were, to find it all locked and bolted. As this was a Saturday, the man who made the elephants had gone to make money with them at a fête or a fair somewhere.
There were loud cries of disappointment and derision at this, particularly from Terry, who was a very outspoken child. I looked up at the tall fence—it had barbed wire along the top—and contemplated boosting them all over it for an adventure inside. But there were their clothes to consider, it would be hard work, and it was not really what I had come down Water Lane to do.
“This means we have to go on,” I told them, “to the really adventurous thing. We are going to the very end of Water Lane to see what’s at the end of it.”
“That’s ever so far!” one of them whined.
“No, it’s not,” I said, not having the least idea. I had never had time to go much beyond the river. “Or we’ll get to the river and then walk along it to see where it goes to.”
“Rivers don’t go anywhere,” someone pronounced.
“Yes, they do,” I asserted. “There’s a bubbling fountain somewhere where it runs out of the ground. We’re going to find it.” I had been reading books about the source of the Nile, I think.
They liked the idea of the fountain. We went on. The cows had not been on this farther part, but it was still wet. I encouraged them to step from sandy strip to sandy island, and they liked that. They were all
beginning to think of themselves as true adventurers. But Ursula, no doubt wanting to preserve her special status, walked straight through everything and got her shoes all wet and crusty. A number of the children drew my attention to this.
“She’s not good like you are,” I said.
We went on in fine style for a good quarter of a mile until we came to the place where the river broke out of the hedge and swilled across the lane in a ford. Here the expedition broke down utterly.
“It’s water! I’ll get wet! It’s all muddy!”
“I’m tired!” said someone. Ellen stood by the river and grizzled, reflecting the general mood.
“This is where we can leave the lane and go up along the river,” I said. But this found no favor. The banks would be muddy. We would have to get through the hedge. They would tear their clothes.
I was shocked and disgusted at their lack of spirit. The ford across the road had always struck me as the nearest and most romantic thing to a proper adventure. I loved the way the bright brown water ran so continuously there—in the mysterious way of rivers—in the shallow sandy dip.
“We’re going on,” I announced. “Take your shoes off and walk through in your bare feet.”
This, for some reason, struck them all as highly adventurous. Shoes and socks were carefully removed. The quickest splashed into the water. “Ooh! Innit cold!”
“I’m paddling!” shouted Terry. “I’m going for a paddle.” His feet, I was interested to see, were perfect. He must have felt rather left out in Eva’s family.
I lost control of the expedition in this moment of inattention. Suddenly everyone was going in for a paddle. “All right,” I said hastily. “We’ll stay here and paddle.”
Ursula, always fiercely loyal in her own way, walked out of the river and sat down to take her shoes off too. The rest splashed and screamed. Terry began throwing water about. Quite a number of them squatted down at the edge of the water and scooped up muddy sand. Brown stains began climbing up crisp cotton frocks; the seats of beautifully ironed shorts quickly acquired a black splotch. Even before this was pointed out to me, I saw this would not do. These were the “clean children.” I made all the little girls come out of the water and spent some time trying to get the edges of their frocks tucked upward into their knickers. “The boys can take their trousers off,” I announced.
But this did no good. The frocks just came tumbling down again and the boys’ little white pants were no longer really white. No one paid any attention to my suggestion that it was time to go home now. The urge to paddle was upon them all.
“All right,” I said, yielding to the inevitable. “Then you all have to take all your clothes off.”
This caused the startled pause. “That ain’t right,” someone said uncertainly.
“Yes it is,” I told them, somewhat pompously. “There is nothing whatsoever wrong with the sight of the naked human body.” I had read that somewhere and found it quite convincing. “Besides,” I added, more pragmatically, “you’ll all get into trouble if you come home with dirty clothes.”
That all but convinced them. The thought of what their mums would say was a powerful aid to nudity. “But won’t we catch cold?” someone asked.
“Cavemen never wore clothes and they never caught cold,” I informed them. “Besides, it’s quite warm now.” A mild and misty sunlight suddenly arrived and helped my cause. The brown river was flecked with sun and looked truly inviting. Without a word, everybody began undressing, even Ellen, who was quite good at it, considering how young she was. Back to nursery teacher mode again, I made folded piles of every person’s clothing, shoes underneath, and put them in a large row along the bank under the hedge. True to my earlier resolve, I made no exception for Ursula’s clothes, although her dress was an awful one my mother had made out of old curtains, and thoroughly wet anyway.
There was a happy scramble into the water, mostly to the slightly deeper end by the hedge. Terry was throwing water instantly. But then there was another pause.
“You undress too.” They were all saying it.
“I’m too big,” I said.
“You said that didn’t matter,” Ursula pointed out. “You undress too, or it isn’t fair.”
“Yeah,” the rest chorused. “It ain’t fair!”
I prided myself on my fairness, and on my rational, intellectual approach to life, but . . .
“Or we’ll all get dressed again,” added Ursula.
The thought of all that trouble wasted was too much. “All right,” I said. I went over to the hedge and took off my battered gray shorts and my old, pulled jersey and put them in a heap at the end of the row. I knew as I did so why the rest had been so doubtful. I had never been naked out of doors before. In those days, nobody ever was. I felt shamed and rather wicked. And I was so big, compared with the others. The fact that we all now had no clothes on seemed to make my size much more obvious. I felt like one of the man’s mechanical elephants, and sinful with it. But I told myself sternly that we were having a rational adventurous experience, and joined the rest in the river.
The water was cold, but not too cold, and the sun was just strong enough. Just.
Ellen, for some reason, would not join the others over by the hedge. She sat on the other side of the road, on the opposite bank of the river where it sloped up to the road again, and diligently scraped river mud up into a long mountain between her legs. When the mountain was made, she smacked it heavily. It sounded like a wet child being hit.
She made me nervous. I decided to keep an eye on her and sat facing her, squatting in the water, scooping up piles of mud to form islands. From there, I could look across the road and make sure Terry did not get too wild. They were, I thought, somewhat artificially, a most romantic and angelic sight, a picture an artist might paint if he wanted to depict young angels (except Terry was not being angelic and I told him to stop throwing mud). They were all tubular and white and in energetic attitudes, and the only one not quite right for the picture was Ursula, with her chalk-white skin and wild black hair. The others all had smooth fair heads, ranging from near white in the young ones, through straw yellow, to honey in the older ones. My own hair had gone beyond the honey, since I was so much older, into dull brown.
Here I noticed how big I was again. My torso was thick, more like an oil drum than a tube, and my legs looked fat beside their skinny little limbs. I began to feel sinful again. I had to force myself to attend to the islands I was making. I gave them landscapes and invented people for them.
“What you doing?” asked Ellen.
“Making islands.” I was feeling back-to-nature and at ease again.
“Stupid,” she said.
More or less as she spoke, a tractor came up the lane behind her, going toward the village. The man driving it stopped it just in front of the water and stared. He had one of those oval narrow faces that always went with people who went to chapel in the village. I know I thought he was chapel. He was the sort of age you might expect someone to be who was a father of small children. He looked as if he had children. And he was deeply and utterly shocked. He looked at the brawling, naked little ones, he looked at Ellen, and he looked at me. Then he leaned down and said, quite mildly, “You didn’t ought to do that.”
“Their clothes were getting wet, you see,” I said.
He just gave me another mild, shocked look and started the tractor and went through the river, making it all muddy. I never, ever saw him again.
“Told you so,” said Ellen.
That was the end of the adventure. I felt deeply sinful. The little ones were suddenly not having fun anymore. Without making much fuss about it, we all quietly got our clothes and got dressed again. We retraced our steps to the village. It was just about lunchtime anyway.
As I said, word gets round in a village with amazing speed. “You know the girl Jones? She took thirty kids down Water Lane and encouraged them to do wrong there. They were all there, naked as the day they were born, sitting in the
river there, and her along with them, as bold as brass. A big girl like the girl Jones did ought to know better! Whatever next!”
My parents interrogated me about it the next day. Isobel was there, backward hovering, wanting to check that her instinct had been right, I think, and fearful of the outcome. She looked relieved when the questions were mild and puzzled. I think my mother did not believe I had done anything so bizarre.
“There is nothing shameful about the naked human body,” I reiterated.
Since my mother had given me the book that said so, there was very little she could reply. She turned to Ursula. But Ursula was stoically and fiercely loyal. She said nothing at all.
The only result of this adventure was that nobody ever suggested I should look after any children except my own sisters (who were strange anyway). Jean kept her promise to be my friend. The next year, when the Americans came to England, Jean and I spent many happy hours sitting on the church wall watching young GIs stagger out of the pub to be sick. But Jean never brought her sisters with her. I think her mother had forbidden it.
When I look back, I rather admire my nine-year-old self. I had been handed the baby several times over that morning. I took the most harmless possible way to disqualify myself as a child minder. Nobody got hurt. Everyone had fun. And I never had to do it again.
The Origins of Changeover
This introduction was specially written for the 2004 reprint by Moondust Books of Diana’s first published novel. An oddity in Diana’s body of work, Changeover is neither fantasy nor written for children. Instead, it is a satire set in a small African nation that is about to achieve independence from Britain. Changeover displays all Diana’s trademark quirky humor and intelligence.
Reflections: On the Magic of Writing Page 28
