BILLY’S LETTER CRACKLED IN his father’s pocket as Amos picked his way back home through the gathering dusk, the sheep all accounted for until the morning. The oaks were starting to fill out, this time of year, and lime light spread through them and up over the spruce-flanked ridge Amos would have to climb to get home. Behind him, the sheep grazed peacefully down the hill. The ground beneath him was still just about purpling from the last of the bluebells, but it wouldn’t be long now before it withered back to the brown of last year’s leaf fall.
Amos brought up a fist, joints swollen with the damp, his eyes smarting with the last of the sun’s rays. Bess trotted faithfully ahead, the collie showing no signs of tiring even after a day of herding and rounding the straggling ewes.
Amos jutted the tip of his crook into a birch root and heaved on up the slope. No need to bring the letter out – he knew these words better than the nightly prayer he’d got his Billy saying. But he’d keep this one close until the next one arrived, keep the lad safe and out here in the forest with him.
When Amos had walked Billy to the train up in Cinderford on that day two months ago, the boughs were still bare. The earth and bark of the forest had been scrubbed away from the boy too, replaced with starched white-and-blue, the smell of serge and carbolic soap. Amos shuddered, turned his gaze outward again.
Wouldn’t be long until shearing time now. You could see it in the branches, feel it in the softening underfoot. The leaves were unfurling again and winter had mulched away those great big drifts that the sheep liked to wander into. All very well until they did turn around inside the leaf piles and start panicking. The daft blighters didn’t seem to learn from one year to the next, and it was hard to find them when mist thickened the spaces between the trees. Fourth year of the flashlight ban and he still hadn’t got used to it. As if Jerry was ever going to find them down here, let alone bomb them. Taken seriously though, the ban was; every week in the Dean Forest Mercury he saw more and more notices of people brought up before the county court accused of shining lights where none should be, slapped with fines people down here could ill afford. So instead Amos had to examine every last shadow, standing still beside the briar to judge if that shape or this was sheep or bush.
Amos didn’t set much store by wishing for things; that was only a way of borrowing trouble from tomorrow, far as he could see. But it ran through him like a seam of ore, this deep longing that by the time the oaks were stripped of leaves again, this war would be done and Billy would be back where he belonged. Everything had its season. But it was all off-kilter nowadays. People didn’t leave the Forest; why would they? All the life you’d need was right here.
What had he done to make Billy want to leave? It stuck to Amos like a burr. What had he missed? The boy had seemed contented all right, grafting in the mine, sitting outside on a summer evening with him and Frank and a pint of cider. But sometimes if you looked at a thing every day, you stopped seeing the changes.
Amos skirted the remains of a fire pit. Started earlier by those new Eyetie prisoners and their funny ways, no doubt. No Forester would build a fire in the middle of a copse to keep warm. But now the forest, his forest, was being overrun with evacuees, with POWs, with GIs. Worse than the last war this was an’ all, far worse; seemed like there’d be no rest until half of England was crammed in amongst the trees, and it just weren’t intended that way, the forest. Women were coming on their own, too. It weren’t right; anyone who knew the forest could see that.
According to Joyce, who did make it her business to know everything, these incomers were flocking to the two forest towns demanding things never needed in forest homes before: inside lavatories, water from a tap. They might as well ask for the forest drift mines to yield gold instead of coal, or for them to have them fancy elevators the deep mines did have ’stead of being built for walking into. Forest homes were two up, two down, built with stone from the quarry to fit the family as originally lived in it, more often than not. Even in Cinderford and Coleford and the towns you wouldn’t find anything fancy. Forest folk didn’t have need of them things.
In the centre of the fire pit, amber and ochre splashed against grey embers, molten tongues of ash and yew singing their scent into the crackling air. Amos tutted again, poking smouldering sticks with the tip of his boot. He arced patterns in the ash with his crook, strewing the embers over the base of the fire, making sure each last flame was extinguished.
Amos whistled to Bess and trudged the final steps home. There they were, his cottage and Frank’s, where they’d been for generations, ever since their grandfathers had worked together to build the two of them, laying stone and digging gardens where before had just been a rough gap in the trees. You could do it like that then, mind.
The door didn’t want to open again tonight so he put his shoulder to it. The weather was in the wood, swelling the door, making it uncooperative. Not likely to get proper rain, they weren’t, not this late in spring, but you could tell where it had been, despite the onward march of the forest down through the seasons.
The fire had long since died in the grate and his breath puffed white into the gloom of the hall. Amos hung his coat up on the peg beside Billy’s, hooked the stick beneath it. It bodged Billy’s and the hall filled up with the smell of the boy, of dust and apples and horses and bits of straw. Nothing else to fill it up, mind. The house was as empty as it had been nineteen years ago, a sweltering summer when May lay dying at the infirmary up the road in Cinderford and Billy was in isolation whilst the doctors waited to see if scarlet fever would claim him too. Heartsick and scared to his bones, Amos had tended the sheep day and night, same as he ever had. Weren’t nothing else he could do. It hadn’t helped, but that weren’t the point of it. Every teatime he’d cut a bit of bread and walked up to the Dilke to look in on May and Billy. Then he’d gone back into the woods to get the sheep sorted out before coming home to a house ghosted with absence.
He glanced up at the pictures above the coats. The paint was lighter around the edge of May’s photograph, marking time where the silver frame had once held it. ‘I tried to stop him, May, honest I did. Tried talking to him but it was no use. What did he have to go off to war for?’ He nodded at Billy’s picture, pinned up beside May, just barely touched his fingers to it, then moved away.
Amos sat down in his chair and stared again at the letter from Billy, in case the words had changed. ‘I couldn’t stay put.’ Amos shook his head at the page. Billy should be here now, talking about how them new lambs were doing up near Drybrook, not so many miles up the Severn he might as well be in Timbuktu.
The sudden banging nearly made him rip the letter clean in two. Right ruddy state that would have been. Bess pricked her ears but it wasn’t an animal; she slumped back down. Shouldn’t have the dog inside, really, working collie like that, but Billy had always snuck Bess in and Amos didn’t mind the company, truth be told.
The front door knocker banged again. Couldn’t remember the last time anyone’d used that. The noise blasted down the hall, carried on empty air.
‘Keep your hair on; I’m coming.’ He was slower up than he used to be since his Billy had gone. His feet didn’t want to move anywhere once he’d made it home of an evening.
‘Joyce. Don’t expect you at the front door, all formal like.’ Funny to see her in her coat this time of evening, though her hair was still tucked into its headscarf as usual. She filled the doorway like she always did. Bonnie woman, Joyce: you knew when she was in a room.
She was wearing that look that Amos had come to know all too well over the years. She wanted something, did Joyce, and she’d stay put until she’d got it. He steeled himself. Two could play at that game.
Some raggedy young woman was splayed beside her like a half-terrified yearling trying to put a brave face on it.
‘Amos.’ Joyce had one hand up already. ‘I know Frank spoke to you last week but I’ve been up at that site today and things are out of hand. Frank needs the help.’
Joyce shoved the girl forward and she smiled at him, hope in her eyes. Amos twisted away from her.
‘I told your Frank, and I’m telling you, Joyce. That’s our Billy’s room and it’s no being taken over by no wench. Someone else can have her.’ He folded his arms, elbows firm against the doorjamb.
Joyce wasn’t having any of it. ‘Now listen, Amos. The whole forest’s full up. Frank needs this, you know he does or I wouldn’t be here. If we had the space we’d take her ourselves, but we don’t. The spare room’s full to bursting with all the sewing I’m taking in, and the longer we have to Make Do and Mend, the more stuffed that room becomes.’
Amos’s bunions were giving him gyp, all this standing around. ‘I’m not doing it, Joyce. It’s our Billy’s room, and that’s that. The war’ll be over soon enough.’
That brought a splutter from the girl. Full of kerfuffle she was, for someone who evidently had no home to go to.
Joyce came in closer and he drew back, away from the doorway. ‘You can’t go keeping that room as a shrine; it doesn’t help anyone. If I know you, you haven’t touched a thing up there since Billy’s left, have you? Bet the door’s shut tight to keep all of him in.’ She was in the hallway now, the girl as well, bunched up like ewes trying to get through a gate. That young woman was more like a goat in the sheep pen, come to think of it. She was jittering about as if figuring out who to butt next, too brash, too colourful, in that bright lipstick of hers. His eyes hurt.
Joyce nodded up at the pictures of May and Billy, tugging at the belt of her coat as if missing the cardigan she would normally wrap around her. ‘What would May here think of this? All these years you’ve kept your Billy alive, brought up that lovely strong man we all love, and now you’re acting like he’s dead already, keeping his room all shut up like a mausoleum.’
Joyce had a point, but Amos was darned if he was going to admit it. If May were here she’d be on at him to fill the blessed room, especially if it was to help out Frank and Joyce. He ran a forefinger over the rough edge of the photograph, looked up and saw Joyce had caught it. Eagle-eyed, that woman was; didn’t miss a trick.
‘When May passed away and it looked like your Billy was going the same way, we did help out, didn’t we? Gave what we could to keep that baby in the hospital until he was cured. Just like you helped out me and Frank when his leg got trapped under that oak and he couldn’t work for months.’
Joyce put her hand on his arm. His body strained with the effort of not moving it away. ‘Nobody’s asking you to sell any more silver, Amos. All we need is a roof over this Connie’s head, stop her getting any more daft ideas about sleeping in Frank’s forestry hut. She’s a good little worker, Frank says, and he doesn’t make those claims lightly, as you know. You know how riled up he is about all these extra timber quotas sent down by them blokes who don’t know how to manage a forest. Frank needs all the help he can get at the moment, and that includes keeping this one here, so it seems.’ Joyce smiled briskly at Connie and the young woman returned her smile.
Wasn’t often he saw Joyce plead, however used he was to her notions. His firm intentions mulched. That girl must have something going for her, if Joyce could see past the sickly scent and the bright lips.
‘You have to have her, Amos. Can’t leave her to her own devices out there. We wouldn’t if she was one of ours, would we?’
There was no point arguing the toss with Joyce, not when she’d got her teeth into something.
‘Can she cook?’
‘Doubt it, but I’ll teach her a few bits. Least I can do.’
‘Aye, you do that. Want someone who can pull her weight a bit.’
Amos tipped his head at the stairs, led the way up. His hand shook on the banister. Joyce was right; this was what Foresters did, gave each other a hand. But it felt all wrong. What if something dreadful happened to Billy out there in that war of Mr Churchill’s because Amos had moved life on without him? He wasn’t sure he’d be able to bear it.
Amos pushed open the door to Billy’s room, nodded the women in, his head aching slightly. He couldn’t pretend Billy was coming back any time soon. And that didn’t sit right, didn’t sit right at all.