Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (13 page)

‘Young Betty Bowden's daughter, eh? When
she
was a nipper, her mother sometimes brought her with her when she came to work at the Hall. Jolly little kid – I always liked Betty. Such a pity … she could have made something of herself if only she'd had the confidence, instead of just letting things happen to her. And poor Vincent Thacker … He did at least get away from the village, but then he came running back as soon as his mother sent for him. Well, I hope you've inherited some guts from someone, young Janet. Not going to spend
your
life stuck in Byland, I hope?'

The smoke from her cigarette was making my eyes water, and I didn't like the look of the grey caterpillar of ash that was waggling at its tip, threatening to drop on to my anorak. Fortunately Miss Massingham noticed it and moved away to tap it into the fireplace, and I took the precaution of putting the table between us before I answered.

‘I'm going to university next October.'

‘University, eh?' She said it eagerly, not patronizingly. ‘That's more like it! Yes, I remember now, Vincent told me how well you were doing at school. He's very proud of you. I hope your mother's pleased, too?'

‘I don't know about pleased, but she doesn't object. Only I cost a lot to keep at school.'

‘It'll be worth it. You tell her from me. She made mistakes, poor girl, but it'll be different for you. I can see that. Get away from the village, that's the thing. Good education, new friends, a career, a different life. That's the stuff!'

She was so enthusiastic that she started coughing again, spluttering through the smoke. I shifted uneasily towards the door, but she beckoned me back.

‘Here.' She took out her wallet again, produced two pound notes, folded them small and pushed them into my hand. I stammered and protested but she closed my fingers over them.

‘Just a present. Old friend of the family, you know. Good luck – oh, and remember me to your mother.' She almost pushed me to the door, and closed it behind me before I gathered wit enough to thank her properly.

I rode crazily back to the village, singing aloud. Two pounds, especially coming unexpectedly like that, was a fantastic present. There were so many possibilities that I couldn't begin to decide how to spend it. Good old Miss Massingham!

Poor old Miss Massingham. I sobered up, thinking of her. Obviously she wasn't well, and from all I'd ever heard of her she hadn't had much of a life either.

The church stood just at the turning where the road joined the village street and on an impulse, remembering that the Massinghams were buried there, I propped my bike against the wall and went in.

In Byland, most people who are religious enough to go to services are chapel-goers, as Mum and I were expected to be when Gran Bowden was alive. There's a service in St Mary's only once a month, and then the parson has to come from another village. But Dad's family were Church when he was young, and he'd heard that when the Massinghams lived at the Hall, St Mary's had been full every Sunday. He took me in once, just before I left the village school, to see the Massingham memorials, and now I wanted to look at them again.

The Massinghams weren't an old-established family in our village. Dad said they were originally Breckham Market people, innkeepers and brewers, and they'd made their fortune out of beer in Victorian times. And then Horace Percival Massingham, Miss Massingham's grandfather, had decided to set himself up as a country gentleman. He'd bought Byland Hall, which was then quite a small place, pulled it down and replaced it with a massive great mansion, all towers and turrets. Gran Bowden used to have a framed photograph of the Hall on her sideboard, with the assembled servants including herself posed in front of it. She was very proud of her connection with the Hall, though as a chapel-goer she didn't approve of the way the Massinghams had made their money. She used to say that the Hall was built on beer barrels, and it was a long time before I realized that she didn't mean it literally.

So the Massingham memorials in the church go back less than a hundred years, and most of them aren't very interesting. The commemorative stained-glass windows are downright ugly, in lurid reds and yellows just like Gran Thacker's cheapest boiled sweets, the popular assortment at a shilling a quarter. But what Dad had wanted me to see were the more recent memorials.

First there was the marble reclining figure of Gwendolen Rose Massingham, wife to Arthur Reginald, the old man's grandson. She had died in 1916, in childbirth, aged twenty-eight. The figure was lifesize, but small and fragile. The features were completely beautiful.

When Dad first showed me the figure on the tomb, I'd thought that it was in fact Gwendolen Rose's body, petrified. Now, though I knew it was only a sculptor's handiwork, I still approached it with reverence. I knew that the face was too beautiful, too much idealized, but twenty-eight didn't seem very old to die. I traced my fingers over the cold forehead and the gently swelling cheeks and lovely lips, and wondered whether her husband had ever had the opportunity to come in alone and do the same. The air inside the church was mustily cold, but the shiver I felt was one of sadness, because poor Arthur had had very little time to mourn. A memorial tablet on the wall above his wife's tomb recorded his death in action at Passchendaele in 1917.

Miss Massingham, Dad had said, was Arthur's only sister. She had been left to bring up a little orphaned nephew and there he was, commemorated on another tablet: Major John, died of wounds in Burma in 1943.

I sat in a pew and tried to grasp the full extent of Miss Massingham's tragedy. Bad enough to lose her brother and her sister-in-law, but to bring up their child only to lose him in another war, and then to have her home taken over and burned down, and to move to an isolated gamekeeper's house and grow old and ill alone, was desperately sad.

But what I hadn't noticed when Dad first showed me the two memorial tablets was the text at their foot. I didn't see how anyone with that load of loss could keep any kind of religious faith, but the fact was that Miss Massingham wasn't miserable or sorry for herself. Ill as she was, she'd been cheerful and full of enthusiasm and encouragement, and I could see that the text made the memorials uplifting instead of depressing. I didn't know whether I believed it myself, but if Miss Massingham did, then she wasn't in need of any sympathy from me.

I read the text over again, aloud: ‘
I know that my Redeemer liveth
.' Then I patted Gwendolen Rose on the cheek, and went home for my dinner.

Saturday dinner was always fish and chips. Mr Jessup's van came bumping up the lane, chimney puthering, soon after one o'clock, and the smell of frying fat clung round the hedgerows long after it had passed. Mum reckoned to buy a piece of cod and sixpennyworth of chips for each of us, and to give Mr Jessup a cup of tea by way of thanking him for coming.

Mrs Crackjaw had to budget more carefully than Mum, but she always took a big enamel bowl out to the van and had it filled with chips covered in salt and vinegar for herself and the younger kids. She bought a piece of fish for Ziggy, to be reheated at whatever time he came home from the White Horse, and if any of her older children happened to be at home she bought fish for them as well. That wasn't very often, because their household wasn't the kind that even the Crackjaws wanted to linger in any longer than they had to. Andy had left home to work on a construction site somewhere near Yarmouth. He reappeared occasionally, but if we happened to meet we just ignored each other.

Dad didn't get home from the shop until nearly half-past one, so Mum kept his fish and chips hot beside the fire. When he'd sat down to his dinner, I told them about Miss Massingham. They were both very impressed when they heard about the two pounds she'd given me.

‘You're sure you didn't beg it off her, though?' said Mum.

Some of the things she says make me want to jump up and down and shout rude words at her. But then I remembered that I'd told Miss Massingham that I cost a lot to keep at school, so I felt a nag of guilt.

‘She said it was because she was an old friend of our family,' I snapped. ‘And she asked to be remembered to you.'

‘Did she?' Mum was chuffed. ‘Well, my poor mother worked hard enough for the Massinghams when she was alive, and that's a fact.'

I'd have liked to find out what Miss Massingham had meant when she mentioned Mum's mistakes, but I thought I'd better not ask. Then I remembered something that had puzzled me in the shop that morning.

‘By the way, Dad – what's a double Durex?'

He nearly choked over his fish and chips. ‘A what?' said Mum, thunderstruck.

‘A double Durex,' I repeated. ‘Mrs Farrow was making a joke about it in the shop.'

Mum's ears and neck went so red they were practically humming. ‘That woman! She would!'

‘What is it, Dad?'

He looked unhappy. ‘Well, it's the same as Andrex. Only more durable.' He shovelled chips into his mouth.

‘It can't be, I'm not that stupid. Come on, what was the joke?'

He shook his head and pointed apologetically to his bulging cheeks. ‘Never you mind,' said Mum. ‘You'll know when you're old enough.'

That did it. With a remark like that from Mum, it was obviously something to do with sex. I was doubly furious, with them for refusing to tell me and with myself for exposing my ignorance.

‘I
am
old enough,' I yelled. ‘I'm seventeen, for heaven's sake stop treating me like a kid! Everybody else knows these things, you just don't care whether I look a fool or not.'

They both kept their heads down, munching, and I pushed away from the table and slammed out to the kitchen. The walls were so thin that I could hear what they were saying just as well as if I'd stayed in the room.

‘You ought to tell her,' said Dad reproachfully.

‘You're the one she asked. Tell her yourself.'

‘How can I? It's your place.'

‘And a fat lot I know about it, don't I?' said Mum bitterly. She scraped back her chair, and I dodged away to the cupboard and busied myself by getting out the cups and saucers.

It was no use hoping for any information from my parents about anything to do with sex. Not that I could expect it from Dad, and of course I wouldn't have badgered him about Durex if I'd known there was any connection. But Mum was ultra-respectable. She seemed to think that sex was something that wouldn't appear if you didn't encourage it, so she'd never attempted to explain anything. The start of my periods in my second year at the grammar school seemed as much of a surprise to her as it was to me.

‘There now! I was going to tell you about that, lovey,' she'd said, when I showed her why I needed a clean pair of pyjamas in the middle of the week. I was bewildered and a bit frightened, but when the only explanation she offered was, ‘You'll be like the big girls now,' I realized that at least it wasn't anything I'd have to go to the doctor with.

‘Oh, I know all about it,' I said airily. ‘We've done it at school in biology.' That wasn't true, we'd only got as far as rabbits and even then I didn't understand how the buck actually set about fertilizing the doe, but I wasn't going to let on to anybody.

Even with my best friend Sally, in and out of school, I'd never talked about sex. We were too friendly. It would have been easier to talk about it to someone I didn't like. Sally did once say, embarrassed, that it must be an advantage to be a country girl because you saw animals mating and producing their young, but either I was completely unobservant or our livestock waited modestly until I wasn't there, because I never saw a thing. As far as I knew, our rabbits and hens bred by way of spontaneous combustion.

In the sixth form, of course, we discussed the subject frequently, but on a global scale: over-population and the pill, abortion and the Pope. We didn't mention the practical details, and I didn't see much chance of finding out about them until I got away to university. Roll on October!

Meanwhile, it was a waste of time to row about it at home, so I shut up and made a pot of tea.

We liked to be idle after Saturday dinner. There were always plenty of jobs that needed doing, particularly when Mum was on field work, but we didn't believe in rushing at them. She'd been out lifting carrots that week, and had spent Saturday morning doing the bedrooms and washing the sheets, but the day was too damp to dry things out of doors so the bedlinen was now draped over the clothes-horse, steaming away in front of the fire. The living-room and kitchen both needed a good clean, but we all wanted a break before we started, so we lingered at the table over the debris of fish and chips and jam tart and cups of tea, reading. Dad read the
East Anglian Daily Press
, and while Mum lapped up the local weekly paper I took the opportunity to read her
Woman's Weekly
.

I wouldn't admit to enjoying the magazine, of course, but it was perfect relaxation after a week of schoolwork. It's full of exciting knitting patterns and recipes for happy family meals, and powerful new serials about doctors and nurses and their misunderstandings before he takes her in his arms for the first time and proposes marriage before he kisses her. It's entirely pure and cosy, so no wonder the problem page is filled with bleats from girls whose boy-friends have turned out to be neither. Their problems make fascinating reading, but it's pathetic that they feel the need to pour out their troubles to a magazine. I felt a bit sorry for them, but I couldn't understand how they let themselves get into such stupid messes in the first place.

‘The bingo report's in,' said Mum, pleased as anything. She loves reading her own name in the paper. ‘Listen – “
At a bingo evening held in the Coronation Hut, Byland, on Saturday last, the prizes were won by Mrs G. Firmage, Mrs V. Thacker
–”