The letter arrived at breakfast time, after Grandpa had left for work. It was for Flossie and she scowled so much as she read it that both her daughters watched her with anxiety in case it was something that would bring on an attack of nerves. She read it right to the bottom of the page, paused for a second or two, breathing heavily, and then read it all over again, the fine blue paper trembling in her hand.
Then she began to shriek. ‘Oh! Oh! How could she? The wicked wicked girl!’
‘What’s up?’ Aunt Maud said, buttering bread with her usual calm.
‘Look at that!’ Mum said, hurling the letter across the table into the butter. ‘How could she do such a thing? I don’t understand it.’
Aunt Maud retrieved the letter from the butter dish, cleaned it on her apron and read it slowly, screwing up her eyes and mouth with effort. ‘Oh my lor’!’ she said. ‘Shall you go?’
‘Not got much option, have I?’ Mum said. ‘Whatever are we going to do?’
‘Pray it’s not true,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘That’s what I shall do.’
‘What a blessing Dad’s not here,’ Mum said.
‘He’ll have to know,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘It could affect the cottage, being tied an’ all.’
‘Heaven help us!’ Mum cried. ‘Oh Heaven help us. How could she do such a thing?’ And she put her apron over her head and began to weep, holding the folds of cloth against her eyes.
‘What is it, Mum?’ Peggy asked. It was too awful to see her mother crying and not to know what was the matter, especially as she suspected it was something to do with Joan. Who else could ‘she’ be?
Mum put the apron down at once, stopped crying and glared at her. ‘Never you mind,’ she said. ‘It’s something too shameful to talk about. Too shameful altogether. I don’t know how she could have done such a thing, I really don’t. You’re not to say a word to anyone, either of you. I shall be out all day if I’m any judge. I’d avoid it if I could, as your aunt knows, but that’s something I’m not to be allowed it seems. You can look after Baby, can’t you?’
‘I’m going swimming this afternoon,’ Peggy pointed out.
‘Oh that’s all right,’ Mum said. ‘She can go with you.’
So she’d been lumbered with Baby all day, and Mum had gone rushing off without saying where she was going, and it all reminded her just a bit too much of that awful time when Dad was dying. She’d tried to be sensible, helping Aunt Maud with the scrubbing and feeding the pig and not saying anything, but her anxiety grew by the hour, especially when dinner-time came and Mum wasn’t back.
She and Baby spent the afternoon in the swimming-pool and they were very late home because Baby dawdled back in the most aggravating way, picking wild flowers in the hedges and sitting down three times because her legs were aching. But eventually they arrived at the open kitchen door with the sun warm on their backs and the toes of their sandals white with dust, tired and thirsty and ready for tea. And what they saw and heard in the little dark room made them stop, stand absolutely still and listen with straining ears.
Mum and Aunt Maud were sitting at the table with their heads close together, talking to one another like conspirators and so deep in conversation that they didn’t notice the children were there.
‘So when’ll it be?’ Aunt Maud was saying.
‘Wednesday,’ Mum said. ‘First thing.’
‘The sooner the better. Providin’ they pay.’
‘Oh they’ll pay!’ Mum said grimly. ‘Bein’ it’s their rotten son.’
‘Let’s hope it works. You never know with these things. Sometimes they don’t do the trick.’
‘Don’t even say it, Maud.’
‘How far gone is she?’
‘She don’t know, silly girl. Leastways she says she don’t know.’
‘Is she showin’ yet?’
‘No.’
‘That’s a mercy.’
And at that point Baby shuffled her feet. The conversation stopped like an electric light being switched off. Both women looked up and became artificially bright and cheerful in an instant.
‘There you are!’ Mum said. ‘Ready for your tea, are you?’
It’s something terrible, Peggy thought. She’s hiding it just like she hid Dad’s illness. She never told us he was dying and he was, and now she’s not telling us what’s the matter with Joan, so it must be something really awful. ‘How’s Joan?’ she asked, her face taut with worry and determination. ‘Did you see her?’
‘She’s been a bad girl and lost her job,’ Mum said, still using that artificially cheerful voice. ‘She’s coming home on Wednesday.’
‘Is she ill?’
‘No, she’s not,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘It’ud be a darn sight better for her if she were. An’ that’s my opinion of it.’
‘Well we don’t need to go into all that, do we?’ Mum said, and this time her voice sounded as if she was giving Aunt Maud a warning. ‘I’ll make the tea.’
There was no sense in any of this. The more Peggy thought about it the less she could find. Joan was in trouble. That much seemed plain. But if she was in trouble, then being ill would make things worse not better. And if she’d gone somewhere she’d know where she’d gone. And what was it she was supposed to show? Well she won’t come home on Wednesday, she thought, because Mum said something was going to happen on Wednesday, first thing, so I’ll bet she’s going to court. People usually went to court when they got into trouble and then they got fined or sent to prison. Poor Joan. She’ll never be able to pay a fine, so I suppose they’ll send her to prison. I wonder what she’s done. Perhaps they put you in prison if you shout at people when you’re in service. But that didn’t seem probable, not really. She’d have liked to send her poor sister a letter but she knew Aunt Maud wouldn’t supply the stamp in her present acid mood. It was very worrying.
However on Wednesday morning it looked as though Joan would be coming home after all, for she and Baby were woken up early so that they could take their things next door to the Matthews’ house before they went to school.
‘Your sister’ll need the bed,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘It won’t be for long. An’ you see you behave yourselves when you’re next door. I don’t want complaints. Remember we’re in a tied cottage and we’re in enough trouble as it is.’
All day long, as the lessons droned interminably on, Peggy thought about Joan and wondered what she’d done and how she was getting on in court. When four o’clock came at last, she set off for home at once, dragging Baby by the hand, no matter how much she protested.
Mum and Aunt Maud and Grandpa were all in the kitchen but they weren’t speaking to each other and there was a really terrible atmosphere. Peggy didn’t dare ask if Joan was home or upstairs or anything, in case it made things worse or gave Mum an attack of the nerves.
The two girls ate their tea in an oppressive silence, and washed the dishes without a word being spoken. Then the three adults sat in their chairs and didn’t look at one another. Mum was busy with her mending and Aunt Maud was reading the Bible, which was a very bad sign, for she only read the good book when she was in a bad temper. And after a further hour’s endless silence Mum cleared her throat and told the girls it was time they went next door to bed.
And next door to bed they went, tiptoeing into the Matthews’ cottage as though they’d been told not to make a sound.
It was a double bed but an uncomfortable one with a very lumpy mattress so it took them a long time to settle in it. They were still awake when the shouting began. It came from Aunt Maud’s room on the other side of the wall and although they couldn’t hear what was being said, the anger in the voices was unmistakable. It was Aunt Maud and Mum and Grandpa and they were shouting abuse at Joan, who was crying terribly, on and on and on. Now and then a word would rise out of the bedlam, sharp as a scythe, ‘Slut!’ ‘Trollop!’ ‘Disgrace!’ and once Grandpa’s voice shouted, ‘… better dead!’ which made Peggy shiver with a sudden terrified cold.
The row went on for ages, but at last the door was slammed and the two listeners could hear angry feet stamping down the stairs and descending voices grumbling. But Joan went on crying.
‘Poor Joan!’ Baby whispered.
‘You stay there,’ Peggy whispered back, easing herself out of the bed.
‘What you going to do, our Peggy?’
‘Send her a message,’ Peggy whispered. With her ears strained for any sound of movement from Mrs Matthews in the kitchen below, she crept quietly across the room to the dividing wall and tapped on it with her knuckles, once, twice, three times. ‘I wish they’d learnt us morse code at school.’
The sobbing stopped. Peggy tapped again. Both girls listened and waited. And then to their delight, their sister tapped an answer, faint through the plaster of the partition, once, twice, three times. It was a little triumph.
‘Now we can all go to sleep,’ Peggy said, when she’d crept back to bed again. ‘She knows we’re here an’ she can knock if she needs us.’
‘Are they going to send her to prison, our Peggy?’
‘No,’ Peggy said. Now that she’d sent her message she felt pretty sure of it. ‘They’re not. I ‘spect we shall see her in the morning.’
But they didn’t. And she didn’t come down to supper in the evening either, although after Grandpa had gone off to the pub, Mum took a tray upstairs for her, which Peggy was relieved to see.
Aunt Maud was combing her hair ready for her prayer meeting. ‘I’m off,’ she said, when Mum came downstairs again. ‘Time these children were next door.’
‘I’ll take ’em when I’ve done the dishes,’ Mum said.
‘I’ll do the dishes if you like,’ Peggy offered, feeling quite amazed at how artful she was being. ‘Baby’s tired. Aren’t you, Baby? She ought to go to bed straight away.’
For once in her life Baby had the sense to join in the plot, and even though the yawn she gave was too enormous to be credible, Mum believed her. The minute they were out of the door Peggy took off her sandals and ran up the stairs.
Joan was in the single bed, lying on her side with the covers pulled over her shoulders. Her face was very pale and her hair hadn’t been combed and there were mauve shadows under her brown eyes. ‘Oh Peggy!’ she said, and burst into tears.
Peggy was across the room in two barefooted strides, pushing the dangling clothing aside with both hands, and then she had her sister cuddled in her arms and was patting her back and kissing her cheeks. ‘You’re all right,’ she said. ‘You’re home now. You’re all right.’
‘I shall never be all right again,’ Joan sobbed. ‘Never ever.’
‘You will. You will.’
‘No, no. I won’t. I’m ruined. You don’t know what I’ve done.’
‘I don’t care what you’ve done,’ Peggy said stoutly. ‘You’re my sister and I love you and I think they were hateful to shout at you like that.’
‘I been dismissed without a character,’ Joan confessed into Peggy’s shoulder.
‘That just shows how hateful they were an’ all.’
Joan sat up in the bed and moved her body away from Peggy’s embrace so that they could look at one another. ‘You won’t say that when you know what I done,’ she said.
‘I shall.’
‘You won’t, Peggy.’
‘Tell me an’ see.’
It took a visible effort of will for Joan to say the next words and the shame on her face was painful to see. ‘I let them kill my baby, Peg. I was going to have a baby. I shouldn’t have been. It was wrong. Only he said he loved me. An’ they sent for Mum. It was awful, Peg. Awful. An’ in the end I let them kill it. How could anyone forgive me for doing that?’ There was no hope for her. She was ruined just like Mum said.
Why it’s like the kittens, Peggy thought, affection and pity for her poor tear-stained sister rising in a flood of warmth to redden her cheeks and make her eyes blaze. ‘Oh you poor thing,’ she said. ‘What an awful thing. Did they put it in a bucket?’
‘What?’ Joan said, stunned by the question. She was still aching and shocked from the brutality of yesterday morning’s medical assault, the long hours of guilty pain that had torn her and the afternoon apart, the searing accusations that had left her weak and wretched all night. Oh if only she’d known all this was going to happen she’d never have let him lay a finger on her. Never. ‘What?’
‘In a bucket,’ Peggy explained. ‘Like the kittens.’
But she could see it was the wrong thing to say while the words were still on her tongue. It made poor Joan cry worse than ever.
‘Never you mind,’ she said, cuddling her furiously. ‘You can have another baby an’ I’ll look after you, an’ we won’t let them kill that one, I promise.’
‘Oh Peggy!’ Joan said between sobs. ‘You are lovely!’
‘I’d better go down now,’ Peggy said. ‘I’ve got the washing-up to do. I’ll knock on the wall when I’m next door.’
‘Don’t tell Baby what I told you, will you?’
‘No,’ Peggy said standing up to go. ‘Course not. How long have you got to stay up here?’
‘A week I think,’ Joan said wearily. ‘That’s what Mum said anyway.’
It was a week, which was the sort of time Peggy told Baby she’d expect for a punishment.
‘What’s she done?’ Baby asked as they walked to school on the following Wednesday.
‘Shouted at someone,’ Peggy lied, ‘so they sent her home without a character.’
‘Gosh!’ Baby said in surprise, for her instincts were telling her it was something a great deal worse. ‘She must have shouted jolly loud.’
‘Well just don’t mention it when she comes down tomorrow, that’s all,’ Peggy said.
‘No,’ Baby said earnestly. ‘I won’t.’
It was the last week of term. In three more days it would be the summer holidays and harvest time. And a jolly good job too, Peggy thought, for if Mum and Aunt Maud and Grandpa were all hard at work in the fields they wouldn’t have the energy for shouting at Joan.
Unfortunately the corn wasn’t quite ripe enough. She walked out into the fields to examine it every day and it was very slow. All that sun, she thought, squinting up at it, and it can’t ripen one field. But at least life in the cottage was quiet now and more or less back to normal. She and Joan took it in turns to sleep on the floor the way they had before Joan went into service, and they helped Mum cook the meals and washed the dishes and scrubbed floors, and Joan worked with the rest of them, and nobody said anything much. In fact there wasn’t any conversation at all, only an awful sense of brooding as though something terrible was going to happen, and that went on and on getting worse and worse until Thursday afternoon.
Mum had gone off to the pictures in Guildford as usual, Aunt Maud was visiting a neighbour on the other side of the seven acre field, and the three girls were sitting on Grandpa’s little bit of grass in front of the cottage, Baby playing with her doll and Joan and Peggy mending a long tear in Aunt Maud’s patchwork bedspread, when a shadow rose between them and the sun.
It was Grandpa, standing belligerently before them, mud-caked and disagreeable, his legs astride and his field hat pulled right down over his eyebrows like a helmet.
‘Leave that,’ he commanded brusquely. ‘I got somethin’ to show you.’ And the words were as threatening as his appearance.
They followed him the half mile down to Tillingbourne in anxious silence. There was a blackbird singing with tremulous passion in the hawthorn hedge, and the sky was a beautiful, unclouded blue, diffusing sunshine without discrimination on placid sheep, green corn, Joan’s misery and Grandpa’s anger. What was he going to show them? Peggy worried as she followed his furious spine. It’ud be something nasty as sure as eggs were eggs.
He led them to the church, which comforted her a little, for it couldn’t be too nasty, could it, if it was in a church? But they didn’t go into the church, they walked round it instead, past the porch and then along the east wall until they reached the buttress that marked the division between the aisle and the chancel, and there the three girls stood in a line and waited, Joan pale-faced and drooping with fatigue, Baby close to tears, Peggy watchful and worried.
‘Look at that,’ Grandpa said, squinting their attention towards the wall.
They looked.
‘Don’t know what you’re looking at though, do you?’ he said, and his eyes were sharp with mockery.
Joan answered for all of them even though she felt ill. ‘No,’ she said, speaking quietly to deflect his anger.
‘No, you don’t,’ he agreed. ‘So I’ll tell you. High time you was told. That’s the wall of a cell, that is. A cell for a wicked girl’.
Now they could see that there was a shape outlined in brick in the fabric of the wall. It looked like a door that had long since been blocked in, and a very low door too, not much taller than Grandpa.
‘And that,’ pointing to an oblong opening in the middle of the shape, ‘that’s a squint.’
It looked like a letter-box, only bigger.
‘They cut that,’ Grandpa went on, ‘so’s she could see the priest taking communion. Which was all the light she had. Jest that one little hole. There weren’t another openin’ nowhere, not a door, not a windy, nothin’, just the four bare walls of her cell. Come out to about here it did,’ walking the six short feet to the edge of the buttress, ‘an’ that’s all the space she had. Jest enough for a bed an’ a few paces up an’ down. Yes, that’s where she was bricked up.’
Oh how terrible! Peggy thought, staring at the little space where the cell would have been. Bricked up alive. The words snagged her mind with horror, filling her imagination with terrifying images, bricks and plaster being pushed towards her eyes, crushing against her chest, inches from her unprotected head, the airless space full of brick dust and falling debris, the weight of masonry an oppressive force all round her. Bricked up alive. ‘Poor thing!’ she said.
‘Thirteen she was, when they bricked her in.’ Grandpa said. They reckon she wanted to be a saint, put right away from temptation an’ all that sort a’ thing. Saint my eye. I don’t reckon much to that line a’ thinkin’. Nothing saintly about that girl, I can tell you. Oh no! Nothing saintly. She was a slut, that’s what she was. A slut and she knew it. Thirteen years old, Joan Furnivall, and a slut like someone else we know. What’ve you got to say about that?’
Joan stood before him, her head bowed and her cheeks burning, and Peggy noticed with a rush of affectionate pity that her legs were trembling. Oh this was awful. Hadn’t she been punished enough? How could she stop him?
‘Can we go home now, Grandpa?’ she tried. ‘I don’t think Joan’s feeling very well.’
‘No I don’t suppose she is,’ Grandpa said gloating over it. ‘She don’t deserve to feel well, and she’ll feel a lot worse when she’s heard what I’ve got to tell her. There’s worse to come.’
Worse, Peggy thought weakly. How could there be? What could be worse than being bricked up alive?
‘Hadn’t been there more’n a year or two before she up and changed her mind,’ Grandpa said. ‘Which she’d got no business doing, not once she was enclosed. But she did, so you see the sort a’ girl she was. And then do you know what she done? She set to with her bare hands an’ she picked her way out, day by day, week by week, till she made a hole just big enough to squeeze through, and out she come and run off home to her father.’
I’d have done the same, Peggy thought, admiring the tenacity and good sense of the poor little prisoner. It filled her with relief to think of such a sensible escape. I’d have done just the same.
‘Her father,’ Grandpa said, gloating again, ‘he weren’t none too pleased to see her when they all thought she’d been settled once and for all. Her father, well he naturally thought of all the shame she’d bring down on his head, the little slut. He didn’t want the bailiff coming down to see him, did he? So d’you know what he done? I’ll tell you what he done. He took her straight back to the priest and had her bricked up all over again. And quite right too. That’s what ought to happen to all sluts, didn’t it, Joan Furnivall?’
Joan licked her lips. Her eyes were bolting with distress and there was no colour in her face at all. ‘What happened to her then?’ she whispered.
‘You may well ask,’ Grandpa said, stepping towards her until his face was no more than six inches away from hers. ‘She went mad, Joan Furnivall. She went mad and died.’
‘Oh please,’ Joan whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to … I didn’t know all – this – would happen. I’m not a slut, Grandpa.’
‘Oh yes you are,’ Grandpa said, bullying her with his face. ‘You’re a dirty, filthy, shameless little slut. You brought shame on this family and the bailiff down on my head an’ all. If I had my way I’d …’
But none of them ever heard what he would do because Joan slumped to the ground in a dead faint.
Then several things happened in rapid succession. Baby began to howl, Peggy dropped to her knees beside her sister and tried to lift her poor groaning head from the gravel, there was a swish of long skirts approaching along the path, and Grandpa disappeared like a rabbit into a hole.
‘If you will allow me to lift her up a little, we can put her head between her knees and that will bring her round,’ Reverend Beaumont said.
Peggy was limp with relief to see his good honest face looking down so kindly at them. ‘She’s not very well,’ she said.
‘No,’ Reverend Beaumont said, as Joan groaned and opened her eyes. ‘I can see that. It’s lucky my car is in the road.’ And he picked Joan up in his arms as if she were a baby and strode off with her towards the road, his cassock swinging.
Peggy and Baby followed at his heels, trotting to keep up with him, for despite his burden he was walking very quickly.
‘Here it is,’ he said, stopping by his car and lowering Joan into the passenger seat. ‘Get in and I will take you home.’
Which he did, driving them the long way round through Gomshall and up the farm path they’d climbed on that first day, so long ago now. And when the path stopped, he parked the car neatly beside the hedge and escorted them right up to the kitchen door.
Aunt Maud opened the door.
‘I return your niece to your care, Miss Potter,’ he said. ‘If you will allow me to advise you, I think you should put her to bed as soon as possible. She had a fainting spell in the churchyard and she still isn’t at all well.’
Aunt Maud thanked him in some confusion. ‘Very kind of you, Father.’
‘Not at all,’ the reverend gentleman said. ‘Treat her gently, Miss Potter. I really do think she’s been punished enough, wouldn’t you say.’
Aunt Maud didn’t say anything, but her face was rigid with a combination of suppressed anger and fear, because it sounded as though he knew what Joan had done and how they’d dealt with it.
‘Come in,’ she said grimly to her nieces, when the rector had swished back to his car. ‘What your grandfather will say when he hears about this, I do not know.’
‘He knows about it,’ Peggy said, fighting back to protect her sister. ‘He was the one took us down to the churchyard. He was the one made Joan faint.’
If she’d hoped to gain any sympathy, she was badly mistaken. ‘Don’t you dare say such a thing about your grandfather,’ her aunt roared, red-faced with anger.
‘It’s true. He did.’
‘You say another word,’ Aunt Maud said furiously, ‘an’ I’ll wash your mouth out with soap and water. The shame of it! I shall never hold my head up again. For the Father to know! The shame of it!’
The three girls stood awkwardly before her in the kitchen, not knowing what they were supposed to do or say, Joan ashamed, Baby afraid and Peggy burning with anger because it was all so unfair.
And grandfather kicked into the kitchen, boots first, red in the face and breathless as though he’d been running. ‘Where’s your damn mother?’ he roared. ‘Always out galli-vantin’, God damn it.’ And he pushed at Baby who was the nearest to his anger. ‘Get out my way, dammit.’
‘Leave her alone!’ Mum said, arriving home just in time to see the shove and running in through the open door to fold her precious child in her arms. ‘What’s she done? It’s not her fault. It’s that wretch you should be shoving about.’ Glaring at Joan.
Baby burst into tears to show how hard done by she was. And then all three grown-ups began to shout at the same time and at the tops of their voices, not listening to one another.
‘Sluts! Harlots!’ Grandpa roared, puce in the face and stamping his feet with every word. ‘I should never have taken you in. Dirty sluts, the lot of you! You deserve everything that’s coming to you. You should never have been born …’
‘Nobody cares for me!’ Mum shrieked. ‘My nerves are in rags! Rags! How could you do this to me? I simply don’t understand. Don’t you care that you’ll make me ill? For a poor widow woman to be treated so …’
‘The entire village knows, I hope you realize,’ Aunt Maud shouted. ‘The entire village. We shall all be ruined. I shall never hold my head up again. If the Father knows. He came here, right to my door. You’re not even safe in your own home …’
The noise of their anger was so dreadful it made Peggy’s stomach shake. This is what it must be like to be in a war, she thought, stuck in the trenches with the enemy firing their guns at you and not able to run away or fight back or anything. Oh please God, make them stop.
And as if in answer to her prayer Mum and Maud both stopped shouting and now it was only Grandpa’s voice ranting on. ‘… you and your filthy brood, Flossie Furnivall. I’m glad you ain’t a Potter no more an’ that’s a fact.’
‘If you hadn’t taken ’em all down to the village no one would’ve known,’ Mum said bitterly. Which showed that she must have heard some of the things Maud had been saying. ‘I kept ’em in, I hope you realize.’
‘And now you can take ’em all out,’ Grandpa said viciously. ‘That’s what you can do. Take ’em all out.’
‘What d’you mean?’ Mum said. ‘Take ’em all out where?’
‘Out a’ my house,’ Grandpa said. ‘That’s where. I’ve had the bailiff up to see me, I’ll have you know. You’re to be out by the end a’ next week, he sez, or I lose the cottage. That’s what he sez. Be lucky if I don’t lose me job an’ all. You’re to get out. You an’ your shameful brood. Before we start the harvest. That’s what he sez. Now you know.’
‘But we can’t,’ Mum wailed, changing in an instant from open-mouthed abuse to pathetic whining. ‘Where would we go? I’m just a poor widow woman. You know that. I need someone to take care of me. Where could we possibly go?’
‘Should ha’ thought a’ that before you let that trollop loose.’
‘You must let us stay,’ she insisted. ‘We shall be homeless.’
‘By the end a’ next week,’ Grandpa said. ‘That’s all there is to it. I’m off out.’
‘What about your supper?’ Aunt Maud said.
‘Give it to the pig.’
‘Oh, that’s nice!’ Mum said, weeping. ‘Walk out on us, I should. You don’t care what happens to anyone, you hateful man. You don’t care for me. You never did. Or poor Baby. What did she ever do? Oh! Oh! I shall be ill and it’ll be all your fault.’ And as her father crashed out of the front door and crunched off along the path, she blundered through the door to the stairs and stumbled up to the bedroom.
The kitchen was suddenly and horribly quiet.
‘And you lot can stay in the yard,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘I’ve had enough for one day.’
They sat in the barn with Peggy’s cat and talked things over. And over and over.
‘Where will we go?’ Joan said. ‘Oh God, Peg, this is all my fault. Where will we go?’
‘Wherever Mum takes us I expect,’ Peggy said.
But as they were to discover in the next few fraught days their mother had opted out of the situation altogether.
‘I can’t get up,’ she said to Aunt Maud next morning, lying in the tangle of the bedclothes with her eyes shut. ‘I’m far too ill. I should collapse.’
Her illness didn’t impress Grandpa. ‘You can roll around in bed all you like, gel,’ he called up the stairs to her. ‘Don’t make no odds to me. You’re out of here next Friday. That’s all there is to that.’
The weekend came and went and she was still in bed.
‘If we’ve really go to get out when Grandpa says, where are we going to go?’ Baby worried, when Monday morning brought no change.
The three girls were out in the vegetable garden, weeding, Joan and Peggy with hoes and Baby with a rather useless trowel.
‘I don’t know,’ Joan said wearily. ‘I don’t know what’s to become of any of us.’
The weight of a necessary decision finally settled on Peggy’s shoulders. ‘I’ll see to it,’ she told her sisters. ‘I promised Dad I’d look after Mum, an’ if she’s ill she can’t look after herself.’ And Joan was too low to know what to do and Baby too young. ‘You carry on here and I’ll see to it.’
‘What will you do?’ Joan asked. ‘Where will you start?’
‘I shall write to Uncle Gideon in Greenwich.’
She wrote that very minute, taking pen, ink and paper up into the bedroom for a bit of privacy.
‘Dear Uncle Gideon,’ she said.
‘We have got to get out of the cottage by the end of the week. There has been a row. Please could you find us somewhere to live in Greenwich. Mum has a pension and Joan will go to work.
‘I am sorry to trouble you.
‘Your ever-loving niece, Peggy Furnivall.’
Aunt Maud pulled a sour grimace when she came downstairs with the letter but handed over the address almost at once.
‘Greenwich,’ Peggy said as she wrote the word. ‘Where is it, Aunt Maud?’
‘Well bless me, don’t you know that,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘It’s in London. Right in the heart of London.’
‘London!’ Peggy thought with a wonderful rush of relief and hope. But what a marvellous thing! If Uncle Gideon’ll only help us we can all go back to London. I’ll take the poor cat.
She was aware in one part of her mind that her mother wouldn’t approve, but she pushed the thought away. It was high time the poor thing was rescued from that awful Josh and if they were going to London it would be all right in the end.
‘You won’t get much joy from Uncle Gideon,’ Aunt Maud warned as she put her address book back in the dresser. ‘Keeps hisself to hisself, he do.’
But this time she was proved wrong. That Friday, on the very day they were supposed to be leaving, ten minutes after Grandpa had grumbled off to work, and just when Joan and Peggy had given up hope of answer, Uncle Gideon came down to the farm, in person and his employer’s butcher’s van.
‘He give us a lend of it,’ he said, breezing into the kitchen all red-faced and bulky and dependable. ‘Good bloke our Mr Pearson. ‘Lo Maudie. You kids’ll have to sit on the floor. There’s only the one seat next to the driver. You packed are you, Flossie? I got you a place in Paradise Row.’
Mum had drifted down the stairs wearing an old dressing-gown and a bewildered expression.
‘Oh gor’ blin’ ol’ Reilly!’ he said, with exasperated affection. ‘What you doin’ in that rig? I promised I’d be back by three o’clock.’
Mum was gaping like a goldfish. ‘Back?’ she said. ‘Where we going, Gideon?’
‘Greenwich,’ her brother said.
‘Nobody told me,’ Mum complained.
‘Your Peggy wrote to him,’ Maud said. ‘Have you really got ’em somewhere, Gid?’
‘Only if they look sharp,’ Gideon said, ‘so get your skates on, Flossie.’
The realization that her impossible problem had actually been solved lifted Flossie’s spirits into a thistledown gaiety. ‘I can’t guarantee skates,’ she said, ‘but I shall have my clothes on in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you see if I don’t. Oh Gid, it is good of you to look after us. Can you take a trunk?’
‘If it’s packed in half an hour,’ Gideon said, grimacing at Peggy and Joan. ‘Two minutes more an’ I’ll go without you.’
It took three quarters of an hour to pack the trunk but it was done with such cheerfulness that it hardly seemed a minute. The china tea-set had never been unpacked and neither had the dinner service or the cutlery, so they were lifted out of the trunk still in their packing cases, dust and all, and carried off into the butcher’s van straight away. Then the three children set about gathering up their belongings. Flossie had never been any good at packing, and now her inefficiency was a positive talent. She threw things into the trunk with cheerful abandon.
‘It’s only an old saucepan,’ she cried, and ‘Don’t bother folding. We can iron when we’re there. Poke the flat irons down the corners. That china dog can go in me spare shoes.’ They were all so happy it was as if they were going on holiday. Even Joan was smiling and that really was a wonder because she cried so much these days.
While the last few things were being muddled into odd corners of the trunk and Aunt Maud was saying they’d all have to sit on the lid to get it shut, Peggy took one of Mum’s old hat boxes from the cupboard under the eaves, picked up a jug half full of milk from the larder and a saucer from the dresser and sneaked off to the barn to find her cat.
It was crouched on one of the crossbeams watching the straw for mice, but when it saw Peggy it stood up at once, stretched and came leaping down.
‘We’re going away from here,’ Peggy told it, stroking its back as it lapped the milk. ‘Your next kittens are going to be Londoners and none of them are going to be drowned. It’s all going to be quite different now.’ And while she was talking her mind was busy working out the best way to get the cat into the box before it could realize what was happening or start fighting.
When the saucer was clean she picked the cat up in her arms the way she often did, then holding it firmly with both hands, and still murmuring, she lowered it quickly into the box. The cat was instantly alarmed and began to growl, clawing the sides of the box, and Peggy’s restraining hand, in a frantic attempt to scrabble out, but Peggy held on and jammed the lid on tight just before its head could push up and out. She was panting with effort and there was a long angry red scratch on her left hand but the job was done. She tied the lid down with an old piece of rope, poked air holes in the lid with a stick and then picked up the box and strode off with it to the van, which had now been driven off the path and over the rough grass and was standing incongruously right in front of the door.
Mum and Aunt Maud and Uncle Gideon were struggling out of the cottage with the trunk, and Mum was still giggling even though Aunt Maud was cross.
‘All aboard,’ Uncle Gideon called out cheerfully. ‘Soon be off.’
So she climbed into the van. It was dark inside and smelled of raw meat and dried blood. There was dirty sawdust on the floor and there were flies everywhere, crawling the walls and buzzing and bouncing about the ceiling.
‘What’ve you got there?’ Baby said from the shadows. She and Joan were sitting on the packing cases.
‘The cat,’ Peggy said, settling her swearing burden in the corner furthest from the door.
‘You’re not bringing a cat!’ Baby said in surprise.
‘Yes,’ Joan said firmly, understanding and supporting at once. ‘We are. And anyway it’s nothing to do with you.’
‘I’ll tell Mum,’ Baby started. ‘She’ll be ever so …’
‘You would, wouldn’t you?’ Joan said. ‘You’re a horrid little thing sometimes.’
‘You do,’ Peggy said, sitting down beside the horrid little thing and flexing her fingers menacingly to make her meaning quite plain, ‘an’ I’ll pinch you all the way to London.’
The trunk was heaved aboard. Baby kept a wary eye on Peggy’s fingers and said nothing. The doors were closed, leaving them with the flies in a horrid foetid twilight. Mum and Uncle Gideon climbed into their seats, making the van rock as though it was going to fall over sideways. The engine coughed and spluttered. Aunt Maud called goodbye. They were off.
Apart from Mum’s incessant chatter, it was a quiet journey, once the cat had stopped swearing. Joan was feeling depressed and guilty and Peggy and Baby were too busy with their thoughts to want to talk much.
Baby had spent the last week trying to puzzle out the meaning of all the odd things that had been happening in their family ever since that letter arrived. She couldn’t do it because nobody had explained anything to her, not even Peggy, but she’d gleaned enough from half sentences and meaning glances and innuendo to be aware that Joan’s sin – and it was a sin, Grandpa had said so that awful time in the churchyard – Joan’s sin had something to do with letting a man touch you – and she knew that because Aunt Maud had warned her about it.
‘Don’t you never let a man touch you, gel, never,’ she’d said, sternly. ‘It ain’t worth it.’
And Baby had given her solemn promise. ‘No, Aunt. I won’t.’
And now here they all were running away from Tilling-bourne because ‘everybody knew’. But what did they know? That was the question nobody would answer. In fact that was a question that was so awful she couldn’t even ask it. Men must be terribly dangerous to cause all this, she thought. And yet they didn’t look dangerous. Grandpa was frightening when he got in a temper and shouted. And Josh wasn’t very nice when he kicked the cats. But most of them looked soppy really, especially when they were dressed up for the pub. It was all very worrying. Sins you weren’t supposed to commit and you didn’t know what they were. Men all round you who were dangerous and you didn’t know how they were going to be dangerous, so you couldn’t protect yourself. Well one thing, she thought, I shan’t let any of them touch me. Ever.
Over in the other corner of the van, Peggy was thinking too. She was on her way back to London at last so she should have been excited and happy, but she wasn’t. She was glad they were going, of course, but what she was feeling was really no more than a vague satisfaction, like a shadow in the back of her mind. Over and above that she felt weighed down with all her newly-accepted responsibilities. It was all her doing that they were moving to London. What if it was the wrong thing? She’d taken over the care of her mother, which she’d had to do because she’d promised Dad and there wasn’t anyone else to do it. Joan couldn’t help her yet because she was still so unhappy. And Baby was worse than useless. What if she couldn’t manage to look after them all properly? Mum could be ever so difficult. And then there was the cat. It was stifling hot in the van and the poor thing was still tied up inside the hatbox. It could be suffocating for all she knew and yet she couldn’t untie the box and let it out, because it would be frightened and it would probably run all over the place and then she’d never be able to get it back in the box again to carry it safely out of the van and into the house.
Sighing, she clung to the edge of the trunk, as the van jolted over the pot-holes and the flies buzzed angrily at being disturbed. Never trouble trouble, till trouble troubles you, she reminded herself. It’s silly to worry before you have to. We’ll be in London soon and then everything will be all right. I wonder how far it is?