All The Days of My Life (8 page)

“Can't go on forever, though, can it?” he said. “Families split up. Casualties. Raids every bloody night. Queues – we may not have had much in the old days but at least we had our homes, and a bit of peace and quiet.”

“Peace and quiet to starve in,” said Ivy. “At least the kids are getting their milk and orange juice and dried eggs. People are being looked after, you can say that. That reminds me – Arnie Rose can get us a big,
fat chicken for Christmas – cost thirty shillings, though.”

“Thirty shillings,” he said. “My God, that Arnie's got a nerve.”

Ivy said, “Get to bed, love. See if you can get a few hours' sleep.”

“Fancy joining me?” asked Sid wistfully.

“I've got to go shopping early to avoid the queues,” Ivy said.

Sid went grumpily up to bed.

Down at Twining's, in Framlingham, Christmas was a jolly affair, in spite of Twining's drunken tumble against Mrs Twining's grandfather's clock when he came home from the pub on Christmas Eve. This caused a crash and some shouting downstairs at midnight but the row was over by Christmas Day itself, when there were cries and laughs, big fires to drive off the country dark, and a fat goose from the farmyard on the dinner table. There was Mrs Twining's mother's famous Christmas pudding – “you could climb Mount Everest on it” –there were mince pies and plenty of port, games of cards and drunken songs round the piano. Ian and Jackie, the evacuees, were well pleased with the wooden soldiers and the cricket bat and stumps which had once belonged to the Twining boys. They both fell asleep on the parlour sofa at midnight as the Twinings, Mrs Twining's mother, Twining's brother and his wife, their children and the village postman and his wife, who had come up on bicycles for supper, all stood round the piano singing, “There'll be blue skies over/The white cliffs of Dover/Tomorrow. Just you wait and see.”

But earlier on, up at the Towers, in the afternoon, poor Mary had been crouching in the damp shrubbery at the foot of the lawn. She drew big, sobbing breaths and peeped through the damp leaves at the lights in the sitting room, which had just been turned on. As she watched, the curtains were drawn. She wondered if she had time to make a dash back to the house, before Tom and his cousin Charlie found her. She might, she thought, have to stay in these bushes until bedtime.

In front of the bushes lay the second-hand tricycle, freshly painted red, which she had found under the tree this morning, with her name on a card on the handlebars. They had let her pedal it up and down the corridor and round and round the hall. It was while she was circling the hall, in a state of complete delight, that she had seen Tom and Charlie looking at her nastily through the half open door of the
cloakroom. She had instantly pedalled past the foot of the big staircase which ran upstairs and back into the corridor which led to the kitchen. There she sat on the tricycle, by the kitchen range, looking very worried. When Mrs Gates asked her what was the matter she said only, “Tom and Charlie are going to hurt me.” Mrs Gates had scoffed at her but she knew that she was right. Sure enough, they had chased her out of the house in the afternoon while the adults were dozy with their lunch. Now she crouched, shaking like a robin on a cold twig, in the bushes. The tricycle, her pride and joy, lay just beyond the shrubbery, on the lawn. She could not see how to escape.

“Got you,” said Charles Markham, falling on her through the sopping rhododendrons and shaking raindrops all over her. She felt his hard hands on her shoulders. Then, removing one hand he began to pinch her on the inside of her thighs and – oh – pulling down her knickers. “No, no,” she cried out. “Let me alone!”

Now Tom was holding her flat on the ground by her shoulders as Charlie pulled her pants down to her knees. “Ooh, look, Tom-tom,” he cried in a high voice. “Look at her little bum-bum – and something else besides.”

He had very big blue eyes, red cheeks and a mass of brown curly hair. He was eleven. Mary could hear him breathing in and out heavily.

“Dis-gusting,” said Tom. “That's disgusting – quick, pull up her dirty drawers so we don't have to look.”

Mary, sobbing, felt consuming rage. She would kill them. She would kill them somehow – she knew she would. But Tom was holding her shoulders and Charlie had one big hand on her knee.

“I like looking, though,” said Charlie, in a heavy, rude voice. “Little no-knickers evacuee. Did you like your nice little trikie, then?”

A sweeping, surging rage filled Mary's head. Twisting sideways she bit Tom on his serge-clad arm, sinking her teeth in like a dog, disregarding the thick, stuffy taste of the material and just imagining the white arm beneath. She pictured her toothmarks, with blood spurting out of them.

Tom screamed. Charlie suddenly realized what was happening and let go of her knee. Mary leaped up, pulled up her knickers and picked a stick from the ground. Running away was useless, for they were faster than she was. Some inspiration made her shout, “I'm telling – I'm telling what you did,” and as Tom stood there, his face twisted with pain and alarm, she began to hit both of them round their faces with the little stick. A moment later Charlie was wrenching the stick from
her hand. Mary, shouting, “I'm telling. I'm telling,” took to her heels and ran out of the shrubbery, across the lawn and through the back door into the kitchen.

Mrs Gates, cutting sandwiches on the table said, “Mary! Whatever's happened to you?” although, by the time the words were out of her lips, she knew without telling, roughly what it was. The sobbing, muddy child, with leaves caught in the back of her hair, was evidence enough.

“It was Tom and Charlie,” said Mary. “They – they pulled down my knickers.”

“Oh,” said Mrs Gates. Then she said, “Oh,” again. “The villains.”

“You tell Lady Allaun,” demanded Mary. “You go and tell her what they did to me.”

“Not now,” said Mrs Gates. It was not just because it was Christmas Day and because there were guests in the house. It was because complaints like this were not made to the gentry about their sons or relatives. The matter would need to be more serious before Mrs Gates would go to Lady Allaun with it.

“I'm going then,” said Mary. “They're naughty boys, Tom and Charlie, and I told them I was going to tell.” And with that, furious, with the tear-stains making dirty tracks down her cheeks, she opened the kitchen door.

“You can't go into the drawing room like that,” said Mrs Gates, holding her by the shoulder. “Let's get you clean first and decide what to do.”

“I'm telling. I'm telling,” Mary screamed at Mrs Gates, as she had at Tom and Charlie. This new restraint, so like being held down outside in the bushes, was frightening her even more. Then they began to tussle, with Mrs Gates trying to hold her back without hurting her and Mary trying to free herself.

Lady Allaun, hurrying towards them down the passageway in a blue chiffon dress and a shawl said, “What is all this?”

“She's had an argument with Tom and Charlie,” said Mrs Gates.

“Really – children on Christmas Day,” said Isabel impatiently. “Well – I suppose it's the excitement. I came to ask you when we might expect some tea, Mrs Gates. Sally Staines is perfectly prepared to help you, if you can't cope, you do know that, don't you? As for the rest – I suggest Mary tidies herself before she comes in for tea. In fact, it might be better if she had hers in the kitchen.” And with that she turned and walked back. Mary, still gripped by Mrs Gates, said, “They took my
knickers down,” but either Isabel Allaun did not hear her or did not choose to hear her. She was soon gone. Mary gasped. She looked up at Mrs Gates. “She doesn't care,” she exclaimed.

“I don't think she heard you, love,” said Mrs Gates gently. “Come along upstairs. I'll help you to sort yourself out.”

She helped Mary to wash herself and brushed her hair. She took her shoes off and put her under the quilt in the big, faded, elegant bedroom and sat with her until she fell asleep. Downstairs there was scurrying and questions asked and answered as Lady Allaun and her downtrodden cousin produced tea for the guests. Mrs Gates looked at Mary's pale face, which still, in sleep, bore an anxious expression. From here she was summoned by Charlie, knocking nervously on the door, to get some attention for his cousin's face. There was a long scrape on it and Mrs Gates was careful to wash it ungently and overload it with smarting iodine. She affected not to notice Tom's clutch on his sleeve, where the bite was stinging. She had noticed the piece of serge fluff caught between Mary's front teeth so she had no difficulty in working out his problem. In fact Tom spent the remaining ten days of the holidays in mounting pain as the bite slowly festered. There is no mistaking the marks of a human bite and he could not explain where it came from without awkward questions being asked. He had to wait until he returned to school to have it treated.

Mrs Gates brought Mary supper in bed later on. She read a fairy story and tried to forget the dripping bushes and Tom and Charlie's bullying. Wriggling her hot little body in bed, she read, stumblingly, “Cinderella was as good as she was beautiful. She set aside apartments in the palace for her two sisters, and married them the very same day to two gentlemen of high rank about the Court.”

The moral to the tale baffled her:

“It is surely a great advantage

To have spirit and courage,

Good breeding and common sense,

And other qualities of this sort,

Which are the gifts of Heaven!

You will do well to own these:

But, for success, they may well be in vain

If, as a final gift, one has not

The blessing of godfather or godmother.” Later when Mrs Gates brought up some hot milk she asked her to explain this. Mrs Gates, almost as baffled as Mary had been at first,
thought about it and then said, in spite of the pain in her legs, “It looks to me as if the man who wrote this knew a bit about the world – you'll understand when you're older. Why don't you get on to an easier bit in your book?”

Mary had already put Isabel Allaun's Christmas present to her under the pillow and was fast asleep.

Meanwhile the war went on. A shabbier, greyer population felt the worst of the danger receding although the streets were still full of uniformed men, the bombing went on, the rationing went on and no street was without its cratered, brick-laden gap, where a house had been destroyed. But the Germans had been beaten in Russia and, the previous year, men and women had been hopeful enough about the future to queue for a government report recommending that a national attack should be made on what it described as five giant evils – “want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.” It was as the Allied Forces were preparing for the attack on Sicily that Isabel Allaun led Tom, Charlie and Mary up Scoop Hill to the top of the Common, where the midsummer fair was being held. None of them were thinking about the war, still less the reconstruction afterwards. It was a brilliant day. A skylark sung overhead in a sky of clearest blue. They puffed up the last part of the path and got on to the plateau-like bit of heath, which had been a hill fort in the Bronze Age and a meeting place for the local witches' coven in mediaeval times and had always, through the ages, been the private spot where lovers went to lie down in peace.

The music they had heard, dimly, lower down the path, was louder as they got over the top of Scoop Hill. There were roundabouts and swings, coconut shies, a Punch and Judy, stalls selling lemonade, a rifle range. Beyond the fairground, towards the further edge of the hill were the brightly painted gypsy caravans.

Mary was awestruck by the transformation of the barren stretch of grass and fern. She was struck by the noise, the bright colours of the roundabouts, especially the wooden horses, with their white coats, black spots and red reins. She was impressed, but frightened, by the gypsies themselves – the long sallow faces, the black drooping hair and the bright, long skirts of the women, the swarthy looks and bold stances of the strong gypsy men. One of them, she saw, actually wore gold earrings in his ears. And she thought she would die if she did not
have a ride on one of the white horses, going round and round with the music.

“There's a lot here have never heard of the call-up,” she heard Rabbity Jim mutter to Mrs Gates as they stood by the rifle range, watching a tall gypsy keep his hand in by firing at playing cards pinned up at the end of it. The prizes, Mary saw, were pottery dogs and dancing ladies in red and black Spanish dresses.

“What's a call-up?” Mary said clearly.

“Be quiet if you're staying with us,” Mrs Gates said sharply. The gypsy grinned round at Rabbity Jim. Jack glared at him. They were in the same trade really – poaching, picking up a country living.

Threatened with dismissal, Mary took Mrs Gates's hand. She had slipped away from Isabel Allaun, and Tom and Charlie, recognizing that Lady Allaun's response to the fair might be chilling and knowing that she would not have any fun going round with Tom and Charlie. After the Christmas holiday they had not reappeared. They had spent the Easter holidays at Charlie's house and had only arrived at Allaun Towers a few days before, in the freshly-polished Bentley. Ever since, Mary had been waiting for trouble. She did not know that after her threats to tell Lady Allaun about them and Tom's difficulty in explaining the festering bite-mark to the matron of the school, they had tacitly agreed to leave her alone. Next time, they thought, there could be even worse trouble. But Mary, on her side, felt utterly unprotected. Mrs Gates had not defended her. She was still not sure if Isabel Allaun had heard her, that afternoon in the passageway. Being a child Mary could accept the fact of things heard but not understood, facts deliberately ignored and half-truths told, but her nature ran counter to ambiguity. Her fragmentary memories of life in Meakin Street did not include evasions and wilful ignorance – just Ivy noticing all too plainly that Sid was drunk, and accusing him loudly, just rows about the rent and embraces exchanged. Tact, discretion and blind eyes turned were not part of the Meakin Street experience – and even if she had totally forgotten all of it her brother Jack, hater of secrets and hypocrisy, even at ten years of age, would have been a perpetual reminder. However, on that day, the day of the fair, she forgot all this, dodged Tom and Charlie and sank into the bliss of the rides, the lemonade, the blue sky and the organ playing “Show Me the Way to Go Home” and “Just a Song at Twilight.” The local people jostled, chatted and threw coconuts at plywood models of Hitler and Goring in order to win a plate with the King and Queen's heads on it. They rode
on the merry-go-round, ducked into a tent to see the bearded lady, the mermaid or the fortune teller, drank gritty lemonade and, if they were young enough, put their arms round each other, giggled and gave each other pinches.