by Tim Pears
Leo leaned forward against the railings. Below, children played on the sand and shingle beach. Parents or others lounged. They looked to the boy indescribably bored. He could not understand why they did nothing. When a woman all in white rose from a bench behind him and moved away, Leo took her place. From there he watched boats of different sizes move lazily across the great wide bay, and out on to the ocean. He thought of what the hermit had said. The ships looked like they were skating slowly across the surface of the sea, but he knew this to be an illusion. They were huge, heavy vessels, half-submerged in the water. And the ocean was deep and vast.
He did not know how long he sat there. Perhaps he dozed. He considered returning to the safety of the wood. To live as Rufus had lived, the tenant of Mister Devereaux. How easy it would be to live in the clearing, to sleep in the shelter of the beech tree. No one to hurt or bother him. He could be alone there.
When he realised he was shivering he looked about him and saw that many of the sightseers had gone from the seafront. He rose and followed the smells of cooking and bought fish and chips, served in newspaper, and a lemonade, which he consumed sitting on a wall.
As it grew dark Leo walked back into the town and saw through a gate a large house surrounded by gardens. Those nearest to the house were formal, those closer to the wall around the outside were relatively untended. He climbed over the gate and found a shed full of mowers and tools and other gardening implements. The shed still held warmth from the sun. In a corner he found canvas sacking and lay down and was soon asleep.
*
In the morning the boy walked back to Market Jew Street and to the tailor. The suit he had ordered was ready. He tried it on and the tailor told him it was a good fit, there was a little room for growth which was just what a lad of his age required. Leo did not know enough to do other than agree. The new serge was a little scratchy on his skin. He bought a shirt, socks, and underwear and put them on in the changing cubicle. When he emerged the tailor told him all he needed now was a tie. Leo thanked him, but said that he would rather do without. His cap and his boots would also last him longer. This, the man said, was a shame, for they spoiled the effect of the new clothes. Leo shrugged. He paid the tailor what he owed him and left.
A little further up the street Leo found a cafe, and bought a pasty and a mug of tea. He asked the woman who served him where the post office was and she sent him in the right direction. There he made enquiries and was passed from one person to another until he stood before a man of middle age who reckoned to know most of the adult population of the town, if not personally then at least by their address. Leo told him his mother’s name, Ruth Penhaligon, and age, which he judged to be thirty-seven years. The postman wondered whether she was a daughter of Captain Richard Penhaligon of Leskinnick Terrace, who died not three or four years back. No, Leo said, that was not possible. Both her parents had died years ago.
‘Of course,’ the postman said. ‘Did she have a brother name of Thomas?’ When Leo nodded to indicate that it was so, the postman said, ‘I’ll show you where she lived. It be just down from where the Royal Mail coach is sat. There be no Penhaligons there now, mind. Nor been none for some while.’
They walked up past the Market House which the postman pointed out and past the Public Buildings and St John’s Hall and out of the centre of the town into Alverton Street. A pair of Royal Mail coaches stood outside the First and Last Inn. The postman said their horses were fed and watered in the stables at the back, and their drivers inside the inn likewise. They walked on a hundred yards and stopped in front of a terraced house of two storeys and dormer windows in the roof.
The postman left him and Leo stood before the house. The front door had a decorated stone lintel and surround. Large sash windows were on either side. A three-sided oriel window jutted out above the front door, with sash windows on either side as below, so that the facade of the house had a pleasant symmetry. It must belong, Leo reckoned, to people of some standing. He understood all at once his mother’s airs, her desire for her children’s education and betterment, her frustration at their failures. Why she had left Penzance in the first place, how she had made her way across two counties, to settle with an ill-educated horseman, became no clearer than it had ever been.
Leo knocked on the blue door of the house next door. There was no response so he rapped hard once more. After some time an elderly lady answered and demanded to know who was making this racket. She wore a black lace cap upon her head, and a black dress. When Leo began to tell her who he was and the purpose of his intrusion she yelled at him to speak up, and so he began again.
‘I know my mother had a brother,’ he finished. ‘I wonder if you know where he went, missis?’
The woman squinted as she studied the boy’s face. ‘You look nothing like a Penhaligon,’ she said. ‘Nor speak like one. Yes, I know where Thomas went. Up there.’ She pointed a bony finger towards the sky. ‘He was a good man who respected his parents and his neighbours and loved God, who took him to His bosom.’
Leo stared at the old woman. He asked her when and how Thomas had died.
‘Pleurisy,’ she said. ‘Tuberculosis. Pneumonia. The poor fellow.’
‘Did he have children?’ Leo asked.
The woman shook her head. ‘He was frail,’ she said. ‘No wife. No children. You’ll find no more of your Penhaligons hereabouts. Now leave me. You should be ashamed of yourself disturbing a lady in her rest time.’
‘Where shall I go?’ Leo heard himself ask, though he thought he meant only to ask it of himself. It came unbidden from his mouth.
The old woman pointed down the street, west, away from the town centre. ‘Follow that road you’ll come to Land’s End,’ she said. ‘From there it’s a short swim to America.’ Apparently pleased with herself at this witticism, the woman grinned, showing an almost full set of yellow teeth, then closed the door.
Leo turned east and followed the road back to the centre, down Market Jew Street and out of the town and away, and on, to walk back across Cornwall, towards the port city and the boatyards of Plymouth in the County of Devon.
Part Nine
DUCK BREEDING
Lottie, Summer 1915
The girl walked to the cottage in the early morning. Birds greeted her from the trees and though she could identify few she whistled their songs back at them as best she could. When she reached the cottage she let herself in through the front gate and walked around the side to the garden behind.
Even before her arrival the ducks were quacking loudly to demand their release. When they heard her, the volume increased. She did not oblige them but lifted the flaps at the back of the shed to see how many eggs had been laid. One after another she counted them. Six. Two more still to come.
Lottie went instead to the hatching shed. There, on clutches of duck eggs, sat hens. She was not yet accustomed to this surrogacy. Chickens incubating ducks. It tickled her. Each hen could manage a dozen eggs. Lottie took their tin hoppers to the feed shed and refilled them with corn. Then she took the waterers to the well.
Florence Wombwell opened the back door of her cottage and came hobbling out on her sticks. She asked Miss Charlotte as she did every morning if she would like a cup a nettle tea. Lottie declined. The girl renewed the waterers and took them back to the hatching shed. None of the hens moved but remained where they were, peering silently at her from their gloomy nests inside orange boxes, one hen in each of three partitioned sections. Each hen would sit upon her clutch for four weeks.
Lottie closed the door of the hatching shed and returned to count again the duck eggs laid that morning. The clamour of the ducks to be let out had risen. She counted seven eggs. Still one more.
From one of the three duckling sheds came a fainter quacking than the full-grown ducks’. From another a twittering sound. Each shed housed ducklings of a different age. The fourth was still empty, for the breeding season was only three-quarters through. Lottie lifted the portals and the ducklings came out in
to their runs. These were shallow pens made of thin boards eighteen inches high, fixed tightly in place with stakes. From the run with the oldest ducklings, Lottie selected the one she reckoned the largest. It would be ten weeks old. She lifted it with one hand around its neck then put her other arm under its body to take its weight and carried it to the plucking shed. She returned to the pen and selected three more likewise.
Lottie checked the eggs again. The last one had been laid. She went around to the front and opened the door, and the white ducks shoved and tumbled out of their captivity. Within moments, however, the drake assumed his place in front and the eight female ducks settled into a line behind and they set off at as fast a pace as they could, waddling comically like rollicking sailors just stepped upon dry land.
Florence Wombwell was in her kitchen seated upon the stool, her sticks laid against the wall. She had two pans of water on the stove, one with chickens’ eggs boiling, the other with rice.
‘We shall soon need more boards from the sawmill, Miss Charlotte,’ she said.
‘Yes, Mrs Wombwell.’
‘And we shall need more sittin hens. I used a get em from Ruth Sercombe over Manor Farm. Lovely heavy crossbreeds they was, with nice feathers on the legs.’
Florence Wombwell’s elder son had gone as soon as he could. Her younger son was the only provider for his crippled mother and did not have to go, but Lord Kitchener’s campaign had persuaded him and he soon followed likewise.
‘The little chicks all there?’ Florence Wombwell asked. Lottie assured her that they were, she had counted them. Mrs Wombwell said the trouble was a chick was vulnerable to almost any animal. ‘I once saw a wood pigeon take one,’ she told the girl. ‘Twenty year or more ago, so pigeons might a become more peaceable creatures since then, but I shouldn’t bet on it.’
They shelled the eggs and chopped them up with the rice and added a little fine meal. Lottie carried this mixture to the duckling runs, along with scalded greaves. These were residue from the tallow-chandler, dried skin and glutinous shreds of animal matter from which the fat had been squeezed or rendered to make tallow for candles and soap. The greaves were mixed with a pollard of wheat bran and a little barley meal. Lottie shovelled this into bins in the runs and the ducklings waddled over and gorged themselves upon it. They put on weight almost as she watched them.
The four full-grown ducklings she had selected were quacking in the plucking shed. Lottie herself called it the killing shed, though not out loud. When she’d first helped Mrs Wombwell some weeks earlier she could hardly bear to watch her kill them, with her arthritic, clumsy fingers. Yet she had soon grown used to it and when she volunteered herself it was clear her young hands were better suited to the task. More efficient. Perhaps what afflicted Mrs Wombwell’s legs had spread to her upper limbs. Now Lottie preferred to perform all the daily slaughter herself so as to minimise the poultry’s suffering.
She picked up the first duck and took it back outside. With her left arm she held the duck tight against her body, her left hand around its neck. With the other hand she gripped its head behind the skull, with her thumb under its beak. The girl stretched the neck of the bird and pressed her knuckles into its vertebrae and pulled its head back. Then she swiftly yanked the head, dislocating the duck’s neck, in as confident and abrupt a manner as she could.
When all four ducks had been slain Lottie laid them on the bench in the plucking shed and went to the cottage and told Mrs Wombwell the birds were ready. It was as if it was now the cottager who had become squeamish. Florence Wombwell said that she would go and dress them now. Lottie said that she would be back later. She went out of the door and walked around the side of the cottage and back to the big house.
Breakfast awaited, and then lessons. Lottie had not gone to Weimar. Instead her governess, Ingrid, had with great reluctance returned to Prussia. Lessons now were intermittent. William Carew had been teaching Lottie Latin and Greek until he’d left for france some months ago. Once a week the vet Patrick Jago tested her knowledge of anatomy and gave her instruction in veterinary medicine. Her father read history with her until one or the other of them nodded off. Gibbon, Carlyle. Her stepmother Alice tutored Lottie in playing the piano and sketching, though it was clear the girl had little aptitude for either.
*
At midday Lottie returned to the cottage. She changed the straw in the ducks’ shed and filled their feeders with corn then asked Florence Wombwell if this was a good day to take the half-grown ducklings to the pond. Mrs Wombwell said it was.
Lottie raised one of the wooden boards. Those ducklings nearest spilled out of the pen and others swiftly followed. The girl guided them to the lane and she followed behind. They were not hard to control for all wished to keep close together. Those on the outside of the phalanx did not allow themselves to be separated from the main body and pushed their way back into it, condemning others briefly in their turn. The girl copied the sound the little birds made, breathing in through her teeth as she did so, while the gang bustled along.
The pond was at a midpoint between three of the six farms upon the estate and a number of the cottagers or farm workers bred ducks who spent their days there. As soon as they saw the water Lottie’s ducklings quickened their waddling pace. Those breeding ducks and drakes who were already on the pond saw them and made towards the water’s edge in welcome. The ducklings rushed into the water. They swam and dived and flapped their wings with the appearance of familiarity or custom, as if this visit to the pond were their regular indulgence, yet it was their first visit and last. It would supposedly help them to feather properly.
Later the girl herded the ducklings home again. When she had secured the wooden board she heard the sound of trundling wheels and went inside the cottage. Florence Wombwell sat in the chair beside the stove.
‘He’s here,’ Lottie told her. ‘You stay there. I’ll fetch them.’ She went to the cool chamber or larder where Mrs Wombwell, having cut off their heads and feet and plucked them, had placed the carcasses of the four dressed birds in a hamper. The duck man came to the door. He took the hamper from the girl and gave her an empty one, and an envelope. Lottie went back inside and gave the envelope to Florence Wombwell and took the new hamper to the larder. When she came back out Mrs Wombwell requested that the girl allow her to give her something at least of the money for her trouble, but Lottie refused. She told Mrs Wombwell that her sons were heroes. And that if she were a boy she would like to have joined the cavalry, and be now in northern France as they were. She said she would be back later to shut up the drake and ducks after they had made their return journey, and the ducklings likewise.
*
In the afternoon the girl saddled her horse. A warm rain fell, as it had not done for many days. Everything that grew – each flower, tree, weed, vegetable, shrub, cereal, grass – grew from the soil. The rain fell lightly on the thirsty land and the roots of all the plants absorbed its life-giving moisture. The smell that rose into the air held all this information, somehow. Lottie rode her pony Blaze out to the gallops. Closing her eyes, she raised her face to the rain and relished it upon her skin. No one else was there, but in her mind the boy Leo Sercombe rode beside her.
Patrick Jago had told her that thousands of horses and mules were shipped out to the South African war and died there: some from bullets and bombs but most from sickness, starvation, ill treatment. He told her that in this present war they were of no use in battle, not against machine guns. She did not believe him. When she reached the gallops she reined Blaze in and leaned forward and told her she was the finest and the bravest horse in all the Allied lines. The German trenches were a hundred yards distant. Lottie told the pony she must not be afraid of the explosions or the smoke. Then Lottie drew her sword. It was a wooden copy of her great-grandfather’s sabre made for her by the estate carpenter. She would have liked to use the iron original but it was too heavy. Leo, and many others too behind them now, awaited her order. They drew their swords. She spurred he
r mount and as Blaze cantered towards the enemy lines, Lottie raised the wooden sword and pointed it forward, yelling for the world to hear the one word: ‘Chaaaaarge!’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading.
Thanks to India Vaughan-Wilson at the Morrab Library and Katie Herbert at Penlee House, in Penzance, for attempting to clarify what the town’s seafront was called in 1914.
Romany Routes periodical was vital, as was Tales of the Old Gypsies by Jennifer Davies.
Trevor Beer’s Naturewatch series of books were inspiring, and provided wonderful material, from a true observer of nature.
The Edwardian Lady by Susan Tweedsmuir, Good Neighbours by Walter Rose and Wild Flowers by Sarah Raven were also useful.
The grizzly bears are borrowed from Beartooth by Pascal Wick.
Many thanks to Bloomsbury people, Madeleine Feeny, Philippa Cotton, Angelique Tran Van Sang, Francesca Sturiale, Lynn Curtis and Katherine Ailes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
