So then it’s Saturday early in September, and Bobby and me are in the playground of Lauriston School, with all the other children, all wearing our gas masks on strings round our necks, and a great big label with our names in black ink. (I’ve written Bobby’s label for him. All the children asked me to write their names for them, and to tie their shoelaces. I can’t understand why they can’t do this themselves. They say how come a six-year-old like me can remember all the identity card numbers? I only have to glance at them once, that’s it, and the number has gone in and stuck there, and even Mr. Hitler himself would never unwedge it.) We’re finally going to the country.
We’ve already had a go at trying on the gas masks, fiddling with the straps at the back so they’re tied snug under the chin. I put Bobby’s on him and the eyepiece steams up straightaway so that he looks funny. Like a weird bug. He pushes it off.
“It’s stinky!”
“It’s just the rubber, silly . . .”
But then he finds that if you blow hard, this nose bit, the duck’s beak, flaps around and makes farting noises. He looks for his friend Archie Markham to show him and they make the noise together. That cheers him up.
It made me feel panicky, too, the first time I put it on, like I couldn’t breathe. And the smell was rubber and chemicals, bleach. I threw it down, and Nan was there, watching me. She’d been sewing something. When I did that, she got up.
“Look what I made your little rabbit, gel. Look see what I been and made Bunny. Because we all got to wear one, even him, you know . . .”
Nan showed me what she’d made: a black-material gas mask, a tiny one, with ribbon at the back, to tie on my rabbit. I tied it on him; Nan winked at me. She didn’t make anything like that for Bobby, even though he’s the youngest. It’s our secret, something just for me. Bunny is safely in my bag now. Miss Clarkson’s watching us, and we’re in line with all the other children and she’s checking that we’re standing straight and not poking the person in front.
“These are the actions I must do: salute to the king and bow to the queen, and turn around to the boys in green,” Peggy Burchwell sings, under her breath.
I wonder if Peggy remembered her skipping rope. I haven’t got one. I use Nan’s washing line.
“Rub some soap on your finger, and run it along the mask, that’ll stop it misting up,” Miss Clarkson says to Archie, who is putting his mask away.
“I ain’t got any soap, miss . . .” Archie says, but she’s already way down the line, clicking and snapping at Peggy Burchwell.
“Mabel, Mabel, set the table. Do it as fast as you are able . . .” Peggy sings. Peggy is the best skipper. “Salt mustard vinegar pepper . . .”
“Has Mum got a mask?” Bobby asks now. “What if she gets gassed, in hospital?”
“Yeah . . . oh, I don’t blinkin’ know . . .”
Does Mum have one? What about Nan? We were given ours in the schoolyard a week ago, but I don’t know where Mum is, and I haven’t seen her since the day Vera went to heaven. All I knew is what Nan said to me that morning: “You look after Bobby now, gel. You’re the smartest, you know he’s a few currants short of a teacake. And he’s only little. Stick together and don’t let anyone split you two up, ever, you hear?”
Last night was the first night of the blackout. Nan did it, she drew her curtains and taped up the brown paper, in case the glass all shattered. But later that evening we went outside, me and Bobby, and the streetlights were on, so we could play Knock Down Ginger. Then everything went black. I stood still and looked around me. I put my hand out. There was a sooty blackness and I didn’t dare to step into it. I heard Bobby—he’d been running, and now his footsteps skittered up beside me. If only I’d been quick! I could have pinched something. I didn’t know what, but we were hungry again and Nan had only given us bread and drip for tea. There would have been milk bottles, but I was like a blind man. (I’d have got better at it though.) We stumbled towards Nan’s flat. The darkness was a different kind of dark, and Bobby was scared of it.
He told me he thought he saw Vera’s little head, floating in the stairwell like a pumpkin. We both ran up the stairs howling.
Nan didn’t sleep well last night—I felt her huff and puff in the bed beside me, and at one point she climbed out, and I heard her pick herself a paregoric sweet from a packet she has hidden in the bottom of her drawers, amongst her bloomers, all so big they can “Keep the sun out of her eyes,” she says, and then laughs, and I know it makes no sense but it is funny.
I heard her climb back into bed, putting her dentures—in a glass by the bed—back in her mouth, so that she could rattle the cough sweet against them. I smelled its vinegary nurse-and-hospital kind of smell. Nan lay there for a long time, her nose in the darkness pointing towards the ceiling.
Before we leave she kisses us both, and pulls up Bobby’s socks, tucking a grey handkerchief into them. I rub my cheek, thinking of the crinkly feel of Nan’s papery skin. She gives us our bags with all our things in them, and tells us that the country is a good place, and we’re to take care of one another and not get separated. And then she repeats the thing that seems to have been worrying her the most, which is about this list the teachers gave us, of things to bring with us. “Mackintosh! Petticoat! Two pairs of bleedin’ stockings! Who the bejabas am I meant to get them off of?” She doesn’t come to school with us, she puts us on the bus that drops us at the school playground and she doesn’t see us off.
Now that we’re all in the coach leaving the school, I look again for her, or for Mum, but there’s only one person running along the Lauriston Road beside the coach: it’s Martin Jacobs’s mum, carrying a toddler—a baby about the same age as Vera—and his mum is pretty and young and she’s got a perky little red hat and a navy coat and she’s smiling and lifting the baby’s arm and waggling it, as if the baby’s a doll.
Miss Clarkson tuts as the bus stops at the roundabout and the woman’s face is at the window for a second.
“Mrs. Jacobs. We nearly left without you.”
Martin Jacobs is embarrassed. He’s the only one whose mum and sister are coming, too. It’s because his sister is a baby. Vera would have come, too, if we still needed to keep her safe. The bus is all hubbub, chatter. There is a paper packet going around; we’re each grabbing it and then screaming. It’s sweets so we don’t get sick. Bobby’s on the seat beside me, sucking on the barley sugar, waggling his big ears. He’s never had barley sugar before. His eyes are wide, thinking. You can see from the shape his mouth is making that the crispy golden stick is splintering in there, spreading sweetness all over his tongue.
I press my face to the glass. Where’s Mum? Does she even know we’re going away, going to the country, like Dad? Perhaps we’ll be nearer to him . . . maybe we’ll even see him there?
Is this how Dad felt, being taken away from everyone? And not knowing where he was going, like us? (It’s a secret; it would help Mr. Hitler if we all knew where we were being sent, so we’re not to know and Nan isn’t told either.)
I remember Dad then, that day in our house, his hands behind his back, being handcuffed. I remember the way he stood, his legs apart, his head up. His chin was trembling, but it was lifted, hoisted high. Chin up. His eyes moved to the window; he didn’t turn his head but he saw them driving away his lovely ice-cream Chrysler, slamming the door, using his own key, that they’d made him give them. But Dad even grinned, a cheeky grin for the copper doing the handcuffing.
That’s how I’m going to be. Like Dad, not Mum. Look after my little brother like Nan told me to. Chin up, and proud.
The train station . . . I’ve never been to a train station. I’ve never seen the bookstalls with their rainbow stacks of magazines and the little shops with all that mouthwatering fruit and the porters with their peaked caps rushing by, their trolleys of mailbags and luggage, smiling and elbowing each other, nodding at Miss Clarkson, who sniffs and looks away. Best of all: penny bars of Nestles from a machine. Of course we don’t have a penny. Bobby kicks the machine when Miss isn’t looking.
We’re told again to form lines and wait. Then we’re told to “march!” and we rush onto the train making a noise like bees. We fling our bags and gas masks on the racks above our seats and fight for the best places.
“Bobby, you can have the rest of my barley sugar, if you let me sit next to the window,” I shout.
He nods, and I take the tiny pointed stick—it looks like a glass tooth—from my mouth and pop it in Bobby’s. Archie leans over the seat and bats Bobby on the head with his gas mask. Bobby sucks hard on the sweet.
So again, I press my face to the scratched glass. As the train pulls out there are women on the station who wave their hankies at us, and blow us kisses, and shout, “Good luck, me darlings!” and, “Be good now!” and we don’t even know them. Peggy and Patricia rush to the window, holding their bald, stupid-looking dolls, taking their hats off their heads to wave back. I cross my arms over my chest. I don’t have a doll and Bunny is packed away in my canvas bag, on the rack. Anyhow, I don’t want to lose my seat by getting up to stand at the window. I mean, lots of the others just have to sit in the corridors and we might be on this train for hours.
One of the porters on the station, an old man with whiskers on his chin, rubs his eyes, and waves.
I’ve never seen a man crying. A grown-up man as old as Dad. And we’re not even his children.
We all jump up again, crowding round the window and doors; the train is stopping. Is this where we’re staying? We already had a False Alarm, Miss Clarkson called it, where we stopped on a station a while back (with its sign blacked out so no one could know where it was) and there were ladies in flowered aprons giving us sandwiches and half-pint bottles of milk, and patting our heads and some of them crying again. Funny how the grown-ups keep crying.
Bobby keeps going on about these funny lavatories they make us use. All the children are lined up beside these canvas curtains with flaps in them, and behind them is a tin bucket, and as Bobby pees, laughing, you can hear him trying to hit the side of the bucket and make that louder noise, the tinny sloshing sound . . . and his friend Archie competing with him in the bucket beside him and the pair of them giggling away.
Then it’s back on the train again, but this time, the train is slower; we see water, boats, a bridge, a thin line of geese flying together making shapes like letters M and V. I stare at them for ages. They look like they’re writing something in the sky—the geese I mean—and I wonder for a moment if they are, but maybe it’s in a different language out here in the country, one that girls from Lauriston can’t read. The train is slowing down and in the distance is a big, big church, dark and high-up and frightening, with two sticking-up towers, one big and one smaller, that make me think of a snail and its hump, or a castle.
“Look, Miss! A castle!” Pat Beveridge says.
“It’s Ely Cathedral,” Miss Clarkson says, and then quickly presses a hand to her mouth, to push the words back in. We’re not meant to know where we’re going: this station sign has paper pasted over it.
“My dad made that,” Bobby says, looking at the cathedral. I know what he means but Martin Jacobs thumps him and says, “He did not!”
“Did too. We got one in our front room. Ship of the Fens. He made it out of matchsticks.”
Miss Clarkson gets all the children from Lauriston School and claps her hands and blows a whistle to tell us to get off the train and onto the platform. Guards open doors for us and put their arms out to help the girls, and hold the hands of the littlest ones. Some people in uniforms are watching us and they step forward and talk to Miss Clarkson and they are all looking at us and we hear for the first time these new words “billeting” and “billet officer,” and then we’re told to form another line, and we have to set off, across the road and up a hill, with our bags and gas masks strapped on again, towards the giant church.
There are children pouring out of other carriages, from other schools. Jewish children, dark-haired girls, tall, in their posh coats and shined shoes. They stand away from us, with their smart teacher, who is patting their heads and crying. I look round for Miss Clarkson.
She’s powdering her cheeks from a little compact, and snapping it shut, into her bag, and now she’s patting one of the younger children on the head, but not looking at him, or any of us. Now she’s saying something to the guard, and now turning away from us. Her navy coat and clicky shoes disappear down a tunnel towards another platform. She doesn’t look back, and she doesn’t say goodbye or good luck. Her hat bounces with every step. She looks like she’s in a hurry.
I hold Bobby’s hand and tear off my paper name label, which keeps getting caught in the string of my gas mask. Then I step on it, and the heel of my shoe makes a giant black print on it. That’s my old name. Here I’m somebody else and I’m going to have a new one.
Queenie Queenie, who’s got the ball?
Is she short or is she tall?
Is she hairy or is she bald?
You don’t know cos you ain’t got the ball!
That’s what we play in the playground. I’m brilliant at it. I’m always Queenie, and I always do know who’s got the ball. I can read their faces, their shifting about, their shuffling. Queenie. That’s me. A lovely name, I like it much better than my own; why shouldn’t I have it? Marching in a long crocodile towards the biggest blinkin’ building I’ve ever seen, that Ship of the Fens, built for a queen, too, Miss says. Queen Etheldreda: Ely Cathedral.
OK, that might be a fabrication. That’s how I remembered it, changing my name, but you know. I know there’ll be plenty who knew me, knew me later I mean, as an adult and reading this, might say—that’s not right, you didn’t change your name ’til later, when you had good reason to, but this is my story and that’s the way I remember it. In any case, that’s just the detail—was there a pint of milk on the step, was it jugs of milk back then? The facts are just as I told you. First thing I ever nicked was milk. My dad was banged up for God knows what and my mum was depressed, a drinker who through neglect or an accident or—whatever, things I never really knew about properly and were never explained to me—caused the death of her own child. Oh and Dad must have been inside before, come to think of it. That’s why those matchstick models—his Ship of the Fens—produced a loud sigh from Nan whenever she looked at them. We lived in the East End and our fortunes changed constantly and we were sent away during the war. Don’t listen to those who tell you that billeting officers didn’t marshal any evacuated kids in Ely Cathedral. Stick with the facts, as outlined above. It’s all true.
What strikes me now, in any case, is not all of that but this: Bobby’s immediate acceptance of my new name. You’ll see. He opened his mouth once to protest, and closed it again. And after that, he never slipped up. He never called me anything but Queenie, and he never forgot. That tells you a lot about my little brother, that detail. How loving he was. How he let me be who I wanted to be, and never mocked it. He understood somehow. That’s a rare thing: to love someone, not for how you think of them, but for how they think of themselves.
Me and Bobby are among the last to be picked. The crowd of children is now down to a straggle. We’re sitting with our knees up to our chests, on the floor of this most enormous cold church, bigger than any stone dungeon, our bags and boxes at our feet, our bums aching because the tiles are icy, tiles that look like patterns on a checkers board. The place smells of nurse-and-hospital smell, and sweaty feet because some of the boys have taken their shoes off. When we first got here we sounded just like a big hive of bees, or like being at the swimming baths, it was deafening. But now it’s just us and the noise is down to a trickle.
There are some tiny candles lit and they splutter as a new group of people come in, and go over to the billeting lady, and look over at us. Right now I’m staring up at the ceiling, at the colored glass above us with the nudie figures, showing Bobby, trying to stop him from being bored. To stop him whispering about Nan, where’s Nan, when are we going back to Nan?
And wondering, what is it about us, why are we among the last to be picked?
Bobby’s playing with some conkers he picked up on the way over here, jiggling them in his pockets and rolling them in his palm like shiny wooden marbles and then suddenly leaping on Archie and wrestling him to the floor, accusing him of nicking one.
We haven’t eaten since the sandwiches on the station and as ever we’re hungry and tired, and a little picture of Nan pops into my head, back home taping up that blackout curtain like yesterday, and sighing and showing her nylon slip as she stretches up to pin it with pegs to the top of the curtain rail. And she would at least have bought us some tea and the kettle would be whistling and she’d be getting out The Review and settling down with a mug, having made me and Bobby a half cup each, with lots of sugar.
I screw up my eyes tight because I don’t like the leaky feeling in them, when I think of Nan, and imagine sleeping in bed beside her with her rustling hairnet that she wears at night, with little wisps of white hair poking out like the grandmother in Red Riding Hood (only our grandmother smells of paregorics and parma-violets, not apples). Her pink dentures are always beside the bed in the glass and her mouth closes down into this strange gummy line, and sometimes when she’s asleep and I’m not, I stare at it, and want to open her mouth, and look inside at the place where all the teeth used to be.
A lady’s voice suddenly.
“But he looks puny. What d’you think, Bert? The one with the ears. What’s your name, boy?”
A man and a woman. The man silent, like a tree, and with so much black hair and big red hands. They stand in front of us, staring at us.
“Bit of a rum lot left, isn’t it,” says the man. I get a sniff of pipe tobacco as he steps over to us; he’s slipping the pipe into the pocket of his jacket but it still peeps out, like a snake’s head.
“At least they’re not Jews! I wouldn’t know what to do with a Jew,” the lady says.
Then to me she says, “What’s your name?” She’s wearing a thick coat, that Nan would call a “camel coat” for the color, and the way it looks like an animal’s skin, and men’s shoes, and her skin has a rough coating on each cheek, like the skin of some apples. I’m wondering what she might be like underneath, if you peeled her with a knife, like an apple?
“Queenie,” I answer.
Bobby stares at me. He opens his mouth a little, like a big fish.
“I don’t think there’s any Queenie left . . . only Beryl, Mary, Robert, Archibald . . .” says the billeting lady, coming over to us. She has a clipboard, a pen parked above her ear, the way Dad does with a cigarette.
“It’s my nickname. Everyone calls me Queenie.” I point to the place on her list where my real name is. Bobby closes his mouth tight.
“And we have to stay together,” I add. “My nan said.”
“It’s the start of the Campaign,” the man says to Bobby. “You’re little . . . skin and bone. Can you work hard?” This man’s hair is long for a grown-up. It sticks up from his head like a brush you use to sweep the hearth. His cheeks have these puffs of hair sprouting from them. I suppose it’s a beard, but it looks more like the stuff you get growing on potatoes when you leave them for too long.
“Yes,” I pipe up. “We’re grand. We’re really good in all—campaigns.” We don’t know what they mean, and Bobby’s mouth is now firm shut, like a letterbox stuck with glue.
The lady in the camel coat laughs. I think she knows I don’t know what the man means, but she likes my cheek. The man and the lady—she’s quite fat, bundled up to the neck in the coat, her apple-skinned face not very smiley—turn to go, as if that decides it, nodding to the billeting officer, and then the man jerks his head towards Bobby to follow them, towards the great big dark doors of the cathedral. I scramble up.
And that’s it. The billeting lady crosses our names off the list and nods at the man and lady, and they lead us out towards the huge doors, with the iron patterns on them, and we hear them clank behind us, like the doors of a castle.
Bobby holds my hand. I wrap my fingers around his fist, feeling through his fingers that he’s still tightly holding his conkers. Somehow we both know that if the brush-haired man and the camel-coat woman saw them, we’d have to give them up.
“It’s ten shillings and eight pence for the first one. How much do we get if we have the girl, too?” the lady asks.
The man says something we don’t hear, and again looks back at us, nodding towards a great big conker-colored horse with a sort of cart behind it, parked across from the cathedral, on a very posh bit of grass. Surely they don’t mean us to get in that? Don’t they know my dad had a Chrysler? The horse is eating the grass near the cathedral and the gardens look so bright and neat that, somehow, I think this must be naughty.
“Just the dregs left,” says the lady, as we scramble up onto the high seat behind the man and the woman. Bobby holds his bag to his chest and bites his bottom lip.
“Call me Auntie Elsie.” The lady sits in front of us and turns over her shoulder to talk to us: “And this is . . . Uncle Bert.”
The horse clops across the marketplace and down a hill that I read is called Fore Hill. There’s a cottage at the bottom near the river, and as I go past it I turn my head, because I have a very strange feeling about it. As if somebody is inside it, someone I know. I turn my head, and think for a minute about saying something to Bobby—did he see anyone at the window, did he have the same funny feeling?—but when I look at his face I see his eyes are like saucers and I know that if I say anything he might burst into tears. A big cloud of geese bursts from somewhere, making this horrible honking noise, a really frightening noise, something I’ve never heard before: they make me think of children, unfriendly children, shouting and cackling at you. Bobby and I watch the geese go over us, over the high towers of the cathedral. But the man and the woman don’t see them.
“Come on, you little old boy,” the man says, jerking at the horse’s reins. The horse makes a loud sharp snort and I jump in my seat. Then I start whistling, in case anyone thought I was scared.
After the road to the river, we start to go out on a rough bumpy lane, and it’s quiet, a sort of quiet I’ve never heard. It makes me feel quiet, too. I hold Bobby’s hand and want to whisper to him, but I don’t. Where are the shops and the cars and the smoke and the cinemas and the schools—it’s just flat, as if we’re rolling along on a big flat blanket of green. No cranes or chimneys or buildings at all, just empty. We clop along. Bobby’s hand is hot, and sweaty, so I sing a skipping song and lean closer to him so that he can hear it: “Bluebell, cockleshell, evie, ivy, over . . .”
Beside us the fields stretch away from us in black squares, with the soil all folded in lines and oily looking where it’s rained. Bobby whispers that they look like chocolate, do you think we could eat some? His eyes are big. His voice is very small.
Then he says, “Do you think this is what it’s like where Vera is? Are we in heaven?”
The way he says it, heaven doesn’t sound nice; it sounds empty, and scary. I tell him to shoosh, not wanting Elsie or Bert to hear.
The road we’re on is straight and strict as a ruler. Beside us is a high bank of green, but I somehow know there is water behind it, some kind of river. My bottom keeps jolting on my seat, bouncing me up and down really hard, and bumping me into Bobby. Suddenly, from behind the bank, a big bird appears like a monster—a bird bigger than anything we’ve ever seen, with hunched wings in the shape of a giant pair of eyebrows and a beak like a knife. Bobby screams and flings himself at me. Elsie turns around and laughs.
“Oh, that’s just a heron. You’ve never seen a heron before? He won’t hurt you . . . after a fish, he is, not a skinny little boy . . .”
Bobby straightens up to try and look like he’s not scared, and watches the bird fly off, its wings making a noise like a man flapping his arms in a wet raincoat. It’s so quiet: the clopping of the horse and the rattle of the wheels and the heron’s wings and then . . . nothing. I’m listening hard. There must be other noises in the country, other things? Where are the people?
The journey goes on forever. Bert is smoking his pipe and the only good thing about it is the smell I keep getting, of his tobacco, which smells like my uncle Charlie. We don’t pass a single car or cart or person on the road. The sky turns a peachy pink, but in long, flat stripes like lines in a school exercise book. Bobby’s head bounces against me with every step of the horse’s hooves.
I think of Bunny, in my bag on the floor at my feet, and a song that Nan used to sing: My bunny lies over the ocean, my bunny lies over the sea. My bunny lies over the ocean, oh let’s have a nice cup of tea.
I listen and listen, trying hard to hear the country. It’s not what I thought at all: I had no idea anywhere in the world could ever be this quiet. Just the rattle of the cart. Clop, clop of the horse. Just Bobby’s breathing.
“Not scared of horses, are we?” Elsie asks, suddenly, over her shoulder.
“No,” I say. Then a little more loudly: “Me and him have got a horse at home. We’ve got one in our . . . stables. A white one. She’s called Betty—I mean Betsy.”
Elsie doesn’t turn round to look at me. Her neck stiffens. Bobby continues to rest his head against my shoulder, but I know from the way he is holding it that he’s not resting at all, but listening.
“That can be your job then,” Elsie says, after a snort, and a glance at Bert, and a long pause. “To feed the horse. His name is Highflyer. Highflyer was a famous horse, buried near the pub. Pub’s named after him. And our horse is named after the pub.”
“Or the other horse,” I mutter.
Elsie’s a bit stupid, surely. Feed a horse? (I know that Bobby wants to whisper to me, to laugh and giggle and tease me, but I pretend not to see; I don’t want him to break the spell.) I can feed a horse named after a pub. My granddad had a horse like that. Easy-peasy. And I have a beautiful white horse, her soft mane that feels just like the tassels on Nan’s bedspread and her soft munching mouth on my hand as I feed her apples in the stables we own behind our house . . . oh, and a pink silk ribbon round her neck. A little wash of sadness, as the details come to me. I miss her so much, I say to myself. I try her name on my tongue. Betsy.
I sit back in my seat, feeling for Bunny in my bag. Nan will be drawing the curtains at home, putting the kettle on. Don’t they have blackout out here in this flat open moon country? How do they cover up that sky color, now red as the inside of a mouth? Hitler would see that right away. See that big cathedral behind us, black against it.
I turn my head back for one last look at it. It doesn’t seem to matter how far you go in the country, you can always see the cathedral; it’s higher than everywhere else, it’s like it’s sitting on a cloud. It does look like those models Dad makes. Men in prison make them. Boats. Cathedrals. All made out of matches, thousands and thousands of them, every last bit, every little window and porthole (you have to soften and bend them for those, really carefully, so they don’t snap), so that Nan always says, “Gawd, Tommy, you had time all right,” and sighs when she sees them. Why did they send us away? Are we really so safe here? I feel like we’ve gone back in time, to the olden days before houses and buildings. I feel like we’ve gone to the moon, and I’ve changed forever. I’m different here: my name is Queenie and I’m not scared of horses or giant birds, or dogs. I’ve got a white horse, all of my own, back home in the stables we own. A really really pretty horse, and her name is Betsy.
Weeks go by and it doesn’t feel so strange. There are noises at last. I hear owls hooting at night and guns going off in the morning, and the clang of a milk pail. There’s thunder sometimes and the horse whinnying at night, and the rattle of the honey-spinner in the kitchen and the thump thump thump of Bert chopping wood and the dog barking tied up outside the house and the swish of Elsie sweeping. We get a bit used to it, I suppose. Bobby more than me. Bert teaches Bobby to shoot rabbits. At night, Bobby teases me, lying on his side in the dark to sing: “Run rabbit run rabbit run run run run . . . don’t let the farmer use his gun . . .”
But what about Bunny? “Poor rabbits,” I say to Bobby. “I ain’t never going to eat them . . . you’re just mean.”
They wake Bobby up when the air’s all crackly and dark, to work on the Campaign. We work out what the Campaign is: they just mean help in the fields picking up the sugar beets, walking behind the horse with this long sharp thing, poking it at the sugar beets, and then chucking the smelly things into the back of the tractor. But I refuse to do it, scream and shout when Bert tries to wake me, flap my arms and then go all stiff so he can’t get me out of bed, and has to give up on me.
Later that morning I put my coat on over my nightie and go out into the fields—Bert calls it the Fen—to see what they’re doing: Bert sitting on another kind of cart that the horse is dragging and Bobby lifting and picking and throwing into the big box behind him. Bobby’s cheeks are pink, and the tips of his ears, too, and his eyes shine. He wants me to laugh at the beets with him, see how rude they look, dirty and pointy, like a giant pile of big rude willies. But I turn around and stomp back indoors. I don’t want to see Bert and Bobby take them to the river to heap them on the boats. I’m going back to bed.
Elsie has been calling me, so I put my head under the pillow. She shouts that my breakfast has been on the table for hours and it’s stone cold now and she’ll throw it in the bin if I don’t come soon. I’m hungry, I’m so hungry, but I can’t seem to make myself get up. I think I fall asleep again: I’m sure Elsie must have thrown it in the bin by now. Somewhere, between falling asleep and hearing her call, I think she said she’d wallop the hide off me.
Next time I wake up, it feels like it could be dinnertime. The sky is bright in the window, and I stand and stare out until a spider falls onto my shoulder and startles me. I brush it off and it plops to the floor like a tangle of brown cotton and suddenly I feel a bit more awake, so I get up and put a jumper on, hoping that Elsie might have gone out. I tiptoe down the stairs, but I can hear her, pounding something in a bowl, and I want to go right back upstairs again but she’s heard me, and now she’s out in the hall, and shouting again.
“If you’re not going to help Bert, come and help me in here; you can’t spend all day in bed . . .”
“I want to go to school. Ain’t there no school in the country? I like school,” I tell her, from halfway down the stairs. Not too close to the open kitchen door. I can hear the radio but it doesn’t sound cozy.
Elsie comes into the hall to look at me, still holding the bowl and spoon.
“School? School’s six miles away. No one goes to school when the Campaign’s on. You’re needed here.”
She gives me a brush and a bucket, and pushes me out towards the backyard. I spy my breakfast on the table, a plate of stuck-on bacon and eggs, but she’s already flicking it into the pig bucket, with nasty scraping noises. I won’t show her that I mind.
One teatime, weeks later—well, I think it’s weeks, but who knows? We don’t have calendars or newspapers and we’ve no idea really how long we’ve been here; it feels like forever and the nights are getting dark at five o’clock and the blackberries we find are small and screwed up, like old men’s faces. Anyhow, one time, Elsie makes us a pie and it has plums in it, so sour that I can hardly eat them. I take the stones out and put them on the side of the plate, counting them up. “What shall I be? Lady, baby, gipsy, queen. What shall I wear? Silk, satin, cotton, rags.”
Elsie hears me and says, “Eat up your pie.”
“It’s nasty,” I say, without meaning to.
“Nasty?” Elsie whirls around and snatches the plate from under my nose.
“So grand, aren’t we?” she says.
I’m still counting stones. “How shall I get my wedding clothes? Given, borrowed, bought, stolen.”
“We have bread and jam for breakfast,” I say. It’s just me and Elsie—the others aren’t here—but she acts like I haven’t spoken.
“My dad’s got this proper shop called Cookes Eel Pie and Mash Shop. In Dalston. My dad’s the boss of it. My nan says it’s the Buckingham Palace of mash shops. When you go in you can see the eels in this wooden drawer at the back, all alive and wiggling. You can catch them with a little net and eat as many as you like. Well, I can. Or we can, me and Bobby. Because our dad’s the boss.”
“I thought your family owned a stables? Pie and mash shop now, is it?”
Elsie stands with her back to me, so that I’m staring at the tied string of her red-checked pinny and her grey-skinned elbow. I wait for a minute, chewing my lip, and then say, “Both.” When she says nothing to this, I add, “And I can go in anytime I want. And I can eat how many I want, with parsley sauce,” and that’s it, that does it, at last. Elsie whirls around and says in a strange voice, “You’re funny.”
This is the first time she’s really looked at me. She crouches on the kitchen floor in front of me with her knees creaking and wiping her hands on her pinny, and looks hard into my face. I feel scared, but I don’t blink, or move away. I feel glad, too. I wanted to know how bad Elsie could be, and now she’s going to show me.
“I heard your baby sister died. I heard your mum’s a drunk and can’t look after you, and your dad’s—well, the less said about where he is, the better, eh, Queenie?”
I kick her then. Not a hard kick. I run at her and just stab at what I can reach. I’m short, and my leg flings out, and I’m not even wearing shoes so it’s just my foot bumping up against her fat woolly stockings. Still, it does the trick. She limps off out of the open kitchen door and towards Bert, out in the yard to where Bert and Bobby are now fiddling with some farm machinery, fixing something. The black dog chained up outside barks and strains, his mouth dribbling. His eyes are red and he’s a Fen Dog, Bert says. You should Watch Him.
I hear Elsie’s voice, out in the yard. Nasty like those geese that first day. She’s had enough of the little townie bastards. Bert will have to get himself into Ely and talk to that old mawther, the billeting lady. They’ve tried human charity. They’ve tried home cooking. Out of the goodness of their hearts, they’ve let those East End slum kids into their home. But, I ask you. Enough is enough.
I run inside and grab my case from under the bed. My heart is pumping. I’m sure Bobby will be cross with me, because in some funny way, he seems to like Bert. Or like doing things with Bert, who says so little and lets you be around him, as long as you’re working. And Bert is in the same mood every day: calm. Pipe smoking and slow talking.
With a wild feeling, a funny feeling, strong and strange like the way I felt towards that house at the bottom of Fore Hill when we first arrived, like a memory when it couldn’t really be a memory yet, I suddenly picture something I saw in Elsie’s bathroom. She didn’t let us go in there, but I’d sneaked in one day. I hated the lavatory outside with the squares of newspaper hanging on a nail and all the spiders . . . I wanted to see Elsie’s proper lavatory, and her best china jug and bowl with the blue flowers on, for washing in. So I snuck in, and there on a little dish was a bar of pure white soap, just sitting there like a princess on a throne. When I put my face up close to it, it smelled even better than it looked. It smelled of all my favorite things: lemons and roses and cleanness and specialness, of Betsy my perfect white pony (yes, pony, surely that was the word I wanted before?), of Bunny and her silky ribbons, and Nan’s parma-violet cheeks, and money.
I’m chucking my gas mask into its box, into my case, and that makes me remember Miss Clarkson saying that you need soap to stop the lens misting up. And if we’re going to see Nan again she’ll need some soap, won’t she, for her gas mask. The bar in my hand is cool, smooth. I think it must be brand new. There are no suds on it, or black veins in it, like the only soap I’ve seen before.
That phrase. East End slum kids. Hearing it made my skin prickle. Then I felt something else. Not shamed, as Bobby always called it. No, not me.
She hates us. She can tell we’re poor and she hates us. I don’t know how she can tell because I didn’t tell her but somebody must have done. I picture Elsie’s skin, its scaled redness. Outdoor skin, hard and nasty. Elsie doesn’t need it, does she? Nothing will make her beautiful. But lovely Nan, with her soft crumpled face. Nan, at home right now, knitting and clacking her gobstoppers. I close my eyes and I can see Nan so clearly, lifting up the soap and sniffing it and smiling. Yes. This lovely perfect thing is surely hers?
So we arrive back at the billeting lady’s house, and because there are so many unhappy children, and unhappy people looking after them, it seems quite a few of us are going home. She can’t think what else to do with Bobby and me, she says, if a decent home like the Salmons’ at Drove Farm isn’t good enough for us.
(We’ve never heard Elsie and Bert’s name before. “Salmon’s a fish!” Bobby says. That explains it then. She was a cold fish, with scaly red skin, not an apple after all.)
“Didn’t you even like the horse?” the billeting lady asks, fetching her whistle and getting us to line up outside her front door. “Mr. Salmon’s the best horseman in the Fens. You were spoiled indeed. I was so touched when he brought that splendid Suffolk Punch with him to show you, that very first day—how kind was that?—and I remember neither of you batted an eyelid . . .”
I’m not listening to her. I’m surprised to hear from some of the others now marching down Fore Hill in a crocodile towards the station, that they’ve had letters, sixpenny postal orders and even visits from their mums and dads. It’s cold now, and the leaves aren’t conker-colored; they’re gone altogether, just skeleton trees. It’s hard to hear what Peggy Burchwell is saying, but I can make out the tune, and I know the words. It’s “Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put the teachers at the top. Put Miss Clarkson in the middle and we’ll burn the blinkin’ lot” until we get to Ely station and are allowed to mill about a bit, like a bag of marbles that’s been opened. We can roll out and bump into each other.
Archie Markham is carrying a funny thing that’s as big as him. It looks like a vase made out of a basket, which Bobby is jealous of, because it’s an eel hive and Archie can use it back home to catch eels; the man he’s been staying with is an eel catcher and he let Archie bait the hives with dead cats and rats and horrible stuff like that, and this makes Bobby more and more jealous, until Bobby says, “If your eel catcher likes you so much why is he sending you back?” And then Archie bursts into tears and they start a fight, which they have both missed a lot.
Archie tells Bobby that he smells of beets and farts and they laugh and make up.
Archie whoops then—he’s spied some Beech-Nut on the floor. He shares it with us, biting the piece in three, and then says that anyway this is only a “phony war,” and hasn’t been a war at all, no bombs falling, all our families are hunky-dory. We’ve only been away three months. We’ll be back in time for Christmas.
That word though. Bombs. I’ve managed not to think about them until now. Bobby and Archie love talking about them, running about with their arms out, like airplanes, making bombing noises. Is our house—Nan, I can’t think of Nan—all blasted to the ground then or bursting into flames? My fingers curl around the bar of soap in my pocket. I lift my hand to my nose to secretly sniff the silky smell and then hold it again, feeling its smoothness, turning it over and over. How happy Nan is going to be with me. She’ll never want to leave, or go anywhere at all, after she’s got the soap.
And then—horrible!—here’s Elsie bustling onto the platform in her dreaded camel coat. We’re on the train, we’re just sitting down, the billeting lady is going to travel to London with us, and she stands up as she sees Elsie, and rushes to the window, lifting the curtain and pushing the window down: I think she’s worried that it’s something important, something forgotten. But I know what it is and my heart nearly stops. Elsie’s found out. She’s coming to get her blinkin’ soap back! I clasp my hand tightly around it and begin singing, loudly as I can, so that no one will hear what Elsie is saying: I’m going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried line!
The guard blows his whistle and the train slides away. When I look down, the tracks are blurring into lines. Elsie is hurrying beside us on the platform, mouthing something and waving, but it’s hard for her to keep up. She doesn’t give up. She’s breathless and redder than ever and at last I hear what she’s saying, just as the train is picking up speed.
“Bert! Uncle Bert sends you his love! He says goodbye.”
What, she ran all the way to tell us that?
Elsie’s round face through the window is strange, worried. I remember that when I first met her I didn’t think her expression unfriendly. She has big eyes, chocolate-drop color, like her dog’s. I see in them now something very puzzling, a thing I’ve not seen in anyone’s eyes before. Mum has never looked at me like that. Nan has no reason to. Although it’s new to me, I suddenly know exactly what it is, and a feeling like a spanner turning over in my stomach locks it away. I think it’s going to be useful to me. I’m going to store it up. Like the way I know who is hiding the ball behind their back, in the Queenie game. My way of reading people. Ah, I think. I want to smile. Elsie feels guilty. That’s what guilty looks like. Even so. That Lux soap is in my pocket.
On the train home, I’m sick in a paper bag that the billeting lady holds out for me. She makes me stand near the open window in the corridor for the rest of the journey, eyes on me like a hawk. She thinks I’m “sickening for something,” but I know better. It’s just thinking that’s doing it. Of Mum. Where is Mum? Of the hospital, if we have to go there. Of the house with no furniture in it and no Dad there to shout “watcha!” up to us and sweep me off my feet and tickle me with his scratchy beard and put his hand in his pocket and find a sixpence for me. The sick feeling from thinking about Vera again. Vera in a white bonnet, string tied under her chin, and a grey blanket, like a wet bandage, all soaking on her. Vera is a horrible, fearful thing, too ugly to look at or think about, and doing it makes my stomach turn over again and hotness creep up from my belly and rush at me.
They must have had the funeral without us. Nan mentioned it before we left. Vera’s with the angels now, learning to play a harp. There must be a mini-sized coffin somewhere with soap-colored satin inside it and a boiled empty baby, like a penny guy. And Dad will never see her again, and maybe we’ll never see him again. And if we don’t watch out we’ll all go exactly the same way. Boiled up in a big pot until our heads burst like steamed puddings in a cloth.
I know that’s what happened, really. I don’t think anyone’s ever going to tell me, but I know it was Mum’s fault. She didn’t want any more blinkin’ babies. Children made her go a bit doolally, Nan said. So she did something so wicked, or stupid, no one would believe it. Put Vera in a pot. Cooked her up. Or dropped a kettle of water on her. It’s like when Nan used to cry, “Moll, what’s got into you?” Has something got into Mum? A devil maybe. And now we’re going to see her again, because the billeting lady says she’s written to our mothers and they’re going to be at the station to meet us.
I feel sick again.
But as the train chugs into that busy London station with the high church roof with all the windows in it like Ely Cathedral and all the pigeons flitting about up there, I’m grabbing my bag from the seat and pulling faces at Bobby, and suddenly I see him. He’s grinning through the window of the train and just holding a cigarette at his mouth in that way he has, his silver-blue eyes smiling, smiling. He has a smart black hat on and braces and a tie and a new-looking jacket, and he’s chipper, that’s what Nan would say, or is it dipper? Or maybe it’s dapper? Anyway, he’s one of those words, she really would say it, and he’s dark and smart and sparkly; he’s the loveliest, newest, most shiny thing I’ve ever seen.
“Daddy!”
He’s wheeling me and wheeling me, and kissing my hair and kissing Bobby’s head as Bobby ducks away from him, and he takes a hand each and he’s nearly crying as he hugs us; I can really tell how much he’s really missed us, the way he keeps his mouth buried in my hair for a long time, until the billeting lady comes up and says, all rude and stiff, that she has instructions to hand the children over to a Mrs. Ida Dove and Dad says that’s our nan and signs something and he gives the billeting lady a wink, which sends her away all fluttery like the pigeons. And clippie-cloppy on her shoes. When her back is turned, Dad makes this little movement, rubbing his hands behind her, as if her backside is hot. We’re so happy that we’re squealing, me and Bobby; we sound like the pigs when Bobby pulled their tails.
Dad says he knows a shop where you can get five donuts for just five pence, and let’s go and buy them—and eat the lot! Or Sally Lunn’s, he says. You choose, kiddo.
“Can we go down Romford Market and see the eels in their buckets, getting the heads cut off of them?” Bobby asks. He’s obsessed with eels since Archie Markham got that eel hive. Dad just laughs.
“We’d better go see your nan. Tell her I’ve been and got you.” He puts his face close to Bobby. “Tell her the old scallywag’s out and about again!”
We both know better than to ask. Out from where? For how long? Any case, we’re thinking about buns and eels and Sally Lunn’s. I’m thinking of the soap in my pocket and Nan’s face when she sees it. And Dad with his sweet-smelling hair, glossy with the cream he slaps on it. The prickly feel of his face with all his stubble, like kissing a hedgehog. And a new toy—he says he’s got something spanking new that he says we’ll love. He promises to show us when we get home.
Where’s Mum? I want to ask. Is Mum out, too? Which house are we going to? Is the house all bombed away or do we have another one? Why were you away so long? I fight these questions. Squish them down.
Dad loves me best though for my best skill: keeping mum, he says. Keeping my lips sealed. I can do that. He’s so tall and so swingy, he can “show out” as he walks along, with all the ladies looking at him, and he has something new: a limp, and as he limps by, the ladies cock their heads at him like little birds, their hands on their hips and smiling, so, so sweetly, and kindly. He’s like something royal, like a prince or a soldier as he limps quickly through the station, touching his hat here and there to people. The dog’s bollocks, Mum would say. Or a dream.