Crusoe's Daughter

by Jane Gardam

  ‘What!’

  ‘I was the milk boy. The milkman’s lad. I wish I knew you well,’ he said.

  ‘There’s little to know.’ A surging ridiculous blush, and a stumbling over my feet. (And past forty!)

  ‘You live alone, don’t you, except for the school? No family? You never come to services.’

  ‘I think I shall soon. Why don’t you come and see me at the yellow house?’

  ‘You’re always somewhere else. Always working they say at the school.’

  ‘Well, it was time I worked. I must go now. I’ve books to mark.’ I put out my hand and laid it upon his arm. Triumphant.

  ‘How very hot it is,’ he said, and I blushed again as he watched me.

  ‘Goodbye, beautiful Miss Flint.’

  So I walked home, having been called beautiful, and had to unlock the door of the yellow house, for this evening it was—very unusually—quite empty, the boarders being still at the Match and the housekeeper having the day off this particular Saturday.

  I liked the house empty, now that it was so seldom.

  I walked through the light and shadow of the hall with its rows of pegs and children’s clothes and lockers and muddle of shoes and smell of boys and into the kitchen to boil a kettle for tea, thinking of vestal virgins, the dying face of Christ, of Jews, of the beautiful happiness in the world, all seen so sharp now, before the new war.

  I thought of the shabby young priest; and the blush came again, surging up from my waist this time and spreading all about me, and I stopped what I was doing and stood still and thought—I’d suspected it before. Blood again. Disturbance in the blood.

  Ah well, so it’s over. No children now. A thousand years since the Sunday of the sheepskin rug. Yet only a moment. The blush came yet again.

  And I watched the kettle boil and said, ‘It’s over.’

  I cut myself three slices of bread and butter. Thin. I thought of the days of whisky, when food didn’t matter. I went to the sink to wash the butter off my hands and looked out of the window and saw Stanley standing watching me out in the yard.

  He was sharp-edged and clear.

  He wore the clothes in which I had last seen him, over thirty years ago, the week he died.

  His trousers were old-fashioned and long, over the knee, and his tie—which I had quite forgotten—was a string of slippery yellow and green stripes. The row of pencils was there, the ruler in the sock. His eyes were blue and attentive and very clear. He had been watching me for some time.

  Then the ghost was gone.

  It did not fade away. As I looked up, there it was—established. A sharp and definite boy. Then it flicked out and the yard was empty.

  But there had been some command—a direction it would have been impossible to describe and which might have been lost had I stopped to think about it. I dried my hands and put the towel beside the sink. Without a word or a gasp or even a glance out of the window again, I walked from the kitchen to the front door.

  On the mat were letters left by the afternoon postman and I picked them up. One was inscribed with a red cross in the top left-hand corner and seemed to be an appeal for sponsoring Jewish children being brought out of Germany. A circular. I would look at it later. It was rather odd that it had been addressed to me in person. Miss Flint.

  Then I turned to the other letter but needed my glasses. They were in the study and I found them and sat in the window there among all the fat dead files and the dusty books I seldom looked at now.

  The second letter was postmarked Germany. Dusseldorf. And it was from Theo Zeit.

  But I couldn’t read it. His writing, always so small and odd, was here indecipherable. I couldn’t believe it at first—stood up with the letter, pulled the paper tight, peered and peered at it up near my face, paced the room with it, held it to every light.

  It was in German. Here and there I could make out a phrase. ‘Almost ready’, ‘lost, no chance—’, ‘sudden departure’, ‘planned so long’, ‘unable to say’. Near the end I read, written quite clearly, ‘Soon I shall follow them’, and then, ‘With my gratitude, blessings, love always—Theo.’

  I found the strongest magnifying glass in the house and put the letter on the window sill in the last of the sun, but the calligraphy, always so minute and tense, was now so small as to seem scarcely formed. I went for a torch and blazed it on the paper, then put the paper under a bright light bulb in the desk-lamp. It made no difference.

  I put on a jacket to run to the school, but stopped on the step. For all her importance to me I could not take Theo to Alice for interpretation. I turned instead to the other letter.

  Hepzibah and Rebecca Zeit, the daughters of Dr Theo Zeit of Dusseldorf, are expected on the refugee train from Dusseldorf on Wednesday, May 8, 1939. Their sponsors—cousins who escaped from Germany a year ago—have waited as long as possible, but have had, at last, to leave for America where there will be work. They have run out of money. Dr Zeit has been contacted with the greatest difficulty and he has given the name of Miss Polly Flint of Oversands as temporary sponsor. He will follow the children with the rest of his family as soon as possible. He is only waiting for his last documents. It is thought wise for the children to leave as planned and very quickly. Their train leaves Dusseldorf on Tuesday, May 7 and will carry several hundred Jewish children. Will Miss Flint please be at Liverpool Street Station in London to meet this train and send word at once on receipt of this letter, also sending a guarantee of sponsorship.

  I went out then, not to the school, but along the esplanade. And along and along it until it turned inland. I came to The Hall Estate to find the postmaster. His wife opened the door—she was one of the church ladies of the afternoon and I remembered that she’d asked me if I’d like to come to a get-together that evening. ‘Well, I never! She’s come,’ she cried.

  ‘Now, what about this? Miss Flint’s here. She’s come to have a sing. Now come inside, Miss Flint. The kettle’s just this minute boiled.’

  ‘It’s the telephone,’ I said, ‘I need the telephone. Very quickly. Could you put a call through for me?’

  She looked so disappointed that I said, ‘Of course I’d love to come to the get-together afterwards.’

  ‘Well, of course you can use the telephone. Dickie will see to the number.’

  ‘It’s two numbers. One near York and the other one in Germany.’

  ‘Germany? Well, I don’t know that we’ve done a Germany. We could manage a York. Dickie, we’ve done calls to York?’

  ‘Well of course we have. What’s this then? Sit down and we’ll have a look. Well, the Thwaite’s possible all right—that’s a Pilmoor Junction number, reached through Trunks at York. It’ll maybe take an hour. The Germany, we’ll have to enquire. Is that the number?’

  Theo’s address and telephone number were printed on his letter-paper. The postmaster departed.

  I sat in his tiny front room with the get-together, knee to knee, twelve of us on hugely-stuffed chairs and a sofa. It was extremely hot. In the corner sat the post-master’s daughter who wasn’t right in the head. Her mouth was open. She nodded and gaped and her hands tried to stroke me. Her hands were very cold. She seemed another mystery of this haunted day.

  ‘We were just singing hymns,’ said the postmistress, ‘verse by verse, passing the book. Shall we go on until the call comes through?’ Someone gave a note and the mad girl became even more excited and two old men began to sing,

  ‘Old folk, young folk, everybody come

  Join the donkey Sunday School and make yourselves

  at home’

  and I thought: ‘This is enough,’ and got up and made for the door where the postmaster was suddenly standing to say with quiet pride that Thwaite was on the line.

  ‘Mr Thwaite? It’s Polly. No—everything is very well. I think. Mr Thwaite—there has been a letter. I am to take Theo Zeit’s children. He has asked me. To live with me. Yes. They are coming on a train full of Jewish refugees from Dusseldorf. On May 8th.�
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  ‘The connections should be quite easy,’ said Mr Thwaite. ‘I have the International Bradshaw beside me.’

  ‘Mr Thwaite. Of course it’s going to be absolutely marvelous to have them, but—’

  ‘I liked old Zeit,’ said the faint thread of voice, ‘I enjoyed it when old Zeit was still about. I liked the boy too. Indeterminate for a Jew–but a good boy.’

  ‘It’s just—Mr Thwaite—I have never been to London.’

  ‘Oh, I shall come with you.’ The thread vibrated and crackled in the thundery night. ‘I shall join you at York. You can get to York safely?’

  ‘Certainly not. I mean, yes, of course I can get to York safely. But you mustn’t think—’

  ‘I shall be there. The Tuesday. We shall catch the eleven forty-three from platform four, which means you take the eight forty-five from the marsh to be safe for your Darlington connection. King’s Cross six-fifty as I remember. I shall arrange accommodation.’

  ‘Mr Thwaite you are too—You aren’t strong enough.’

  ‘I should like to see London again,’ said the thin voice; ‘it may soon be greatly changed.’

  ‘Dusseldorf’, said the post-master, ‘is, alas, a different matter. Calls to Germany are not easy just at present. I have booked it in for you tomorrow morning—tentatively. And I fear that it will cost a great deal.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll pay for York now. May I come and wait here tomorrow?’

  ‘As long as ever you like, Miss Flint.’

  The get-together was watching me with interest. ‘We could go on with the hymns,’ said somebody, ‘if Miss Flint would like?’

  ‘I’ve some Jewish children coming from Germany,’ I said. ‘They’re coming to me. It’s sudden. To live at Oversands. They’re refugees.’

  They had all heard the telephone conversation in the back of the shop but put up a fine show of surprise. ‘The more the better, the more the better,’ said the postmistress; and her dotty daughter nodded her head. ‘Poor souls, poor little homeless objects. There’s none of us knows here one thing about what’s going on out there. None of us. You’re a lesson to us, Miss Flint. I suppose you don’t play the harmonium?’

  So I ended the day when you needed me, my love, playing a harmonium and singing hymns in the street that had grown over Delphi’s stable yard and the mausoleum of long ago.

  *

  ‘I sat three days in the back of the post office,’ I said to Mr Thwaite and Maitland as the train rocked out of York station, ‘but I never got through to Germany.’

  The three of us sat in a first-class carriage on bluebell and grey plush, our heads against little lace-edged cloths with L.N.E.R. intertwined in satin stitch, but rather less starched somehow than the ones from Wales when I was six. Mr Thwaite’s ancient Don Quixote figure gave the carriage a patrician look. No one would divide a meat pie in it.

  Maitland sat very straight in black, on her head a shiny straw-hat with a feather held on by a golden pin. Mr Thwaite was in button-boots and a silvery herring-bone coat, rather long for a hot day; a tall coke-hat sat on the rack above his head and his yellow gloves and silver-topped stick lay on the smaller rack below it. Holiday people in shorts and knapsacks looked in with interest at us as they passed along the corridor. I was probably looking rather queer, too, for I have never quite understood about clothes. They are always wrong. But my stockings were silk.

  Mr Thwaite gazed about him with enormous composure and Maitland’s mouth was tweaked up very tight which signified emotion, her fingers clutched up on a pouchy portmanteau which she kept on her knee.

  We trooped to the dining-car for coffee and chocolate biscuits; we trooped to it again for luncheon and drank ‘a bottle of bone’ which turned out to be wine. We ate roast beef and ginger pudding and custard. Maitland said that the railways always made a nice ginger, and how she was not sure, for a ginger took a good hour or two to steam. The custard she thought passable, though boiled up and not baked. But we were thinking of the children on the other train, starting and stopping, clanking towards Holland.

  Mr Thwaite, watching the weather above Selby, pointing out the Abbey as an afterthought, said that a boiled railway pudding eaten in Doncaster could have been initiated in Edinburgh where the train started. He added with pleasure that we should still be on board for tea.

  We drank our after-luncheon coffee, poured by a magician who didn’t spill a drop as we flew through flat Lincolnshire. Quiet fields, quiet villages. ‘They should be over the frontier now,’ said Mr Thwaite, ‘if they left Dusseldorf on time.’ We all saw faces of parents left behind. ‘Safe now in Holland,’ he said.

  Giants made of cardboard walked in the fields of Rutland. They were decorators carrying a ladder between them and on the ladder the name of some sort of paint. ‘Miss Polly’s still a child,’ said Maitland, ‘looking and looking.’ Mazawattee Tea seemed to be the name of all the stations, or Oxo-Bovril-Oxo, and sometimes a gold-and-pink girl would spring out at us from a huge frame box set up beside the line, great sheaves of corn painted all around her and a steaming cup and saucer at her feet. ‘What a lot of beverages we have to choose from these days,’ said Mr Thwaite. ‘We are really very fortunate.’

  The countryside slid quietly by, quicker and quicker. Newark was anonymous, Peterborough invisible. Tea-time was scones and jam, tea in pots with rose-buds round the lid, cups squat and wide like chamberpots. They sat deep in their saucers, unrockable in the pleasant afternoon. Outside basked the bland and peacetime South, with three months remaining. Hertfordshire: cows and large trees.

  ‘What huge trees, Mr Thwaite.’

  ‘Ah yes. You will find the trees huge. It’s a pity you can’t see a southern spring. I should like you to see a spring in Italy one day, Polly.’

  ‘I hope they will have warm clothes,’ said Maitland; ‘it’s very cold with us in winter.’

  ‘They ought to be getting well through now. Almost to The Hook,’ said Mr Thwaite, looking at his silvery-gold pocket watch.

  Eight wild tunnels. We screamed through them, then slid and settled into booming, hissing King’s Cross. The porter couldn’t hear our voices. They were lost in the echoing great arc above us and I couldn’t understand him. He sounded like a foreigner. But he found us a fat taxi like a coach or a pram in which we sat in a row once more and from which we were bowed to Brown’s Hotel.

  Mr Thwaite went quickly to bed and Maitland and I were asleep soon too, and at seven the next morning were again in a taxi to meet the German train. ‘If we are first there,’ said Maitland, ‘we shall be first away. The poor things—oh, they will be so exhausted.’

  ‘It will be a four-hour wait,’ said Mr Thwaite, ‘from seven until eleven. Before they even arrive.’

  ‘But if we can sign the papers or whatever we do—there’ll be some sort of desk set up, I suppose—in, say, half an hour,—we might just get a train home this afternoon.’

  ‘It would be too much in one day for Mr Thwaite,’ said Maitland.

  ‘Oh, not at all. Not at all.’

  ‘Shall we take all our luggage with us to the station?’ I asked them. ‘And leave directly from Liverpool Street to save time?’

  ‘I shall have a word with the Hotel Manager,’ said Mr Thwaite and reported that the Manager felt that we ought perhaps to reserve rooms for one more night, just in case—and a further room for our guests.

  ‘Guests?’

  It suddenly dawned that the children to be collected would be guests. People.

  Children.

  Distraught children, perhaps sick children, and certainly wretched.

  ‘We’ll get them quick home,’ said Maitland, ‘quick as we can. Get them in their beds by midnight and journeying done. That’s my feeling—home to-day.’

  But Liverpool Street Station, at seven in the morning, was very quiet when we arrived and there was a blackboard covered with copperplate writing saying that the train from Dusseldorf would be arriving twenty-four hours late.

&
nbsp; ‘We ought to look at things,’ said Maitland, ‘Miss Polly’s never been to London.’ But we were reluctant to look at anything, reluctant to leave the station.

  ‘What if they come and we’re not here?’

  Vociferous Jews were talking in clumps. ‘Certainly not today,’ said a man with a long floaty beard and a round black hat, which I thought must be a joke. ‘We should all go home.’

  ‘Perhaps at least we should go and look at Westminster Abbey for Polly,’ said Maitland, so we all took a taxi to Parliament Square and there were sandbags piled about in fortress walls all along the buildings, about the cathedral itself. It looked dusty inside, subdued, disappointing. There were a great many people praying. Everyone quiet. We walked a little way down Victoria Street and saw the noble doorways of The Army and Navy Stores. ‘Oh, it’s where Aunt Frances went,’ I said, ‘to get her missionary things for India. I wonder if they still sell things like that?’

  ‘I’d think not very many at present. But we might have luncheon there, and see,’ said Mr Thwaite.

  We made our way after luncheon to the department of missionary equipment and it was very empty indeed. On display was a fortress of cabin trunks with brass ribs, a skyscraper of pigskin camp-stools, tiger-proof tents, chromium and crocodile water-bottles and gleaming elephant-guns.

  ‘Poor Frances,’ said Mr Thwaite. ‘Elephant-guns. So unlike her.’ He took a solar topee and stroked it and set it on his head. ‘I have always rather desired one of these things,’ he said, standing to willowy attention.

  ‘Twelve shillings and sixpence, sir,’ said an assistant.

  ‘Ah—Alas—’

  ‘Mr Thwaite,’ I said, ‘I want to buy you the solar topee.’

  ‘I don’t expect I’d wear it much. It’s rather a waste of money. In Yorkshire. In view of the coming war.’

  ‘But still, you shall have it,’ said I.

  Then, as the assistant went to see to the wrapping of the box, Mr Thwaite said what seemed to be a very frightening thing.

  ‘I am going to leave for Thwaite,’ he said.