Apple Blossom Time (3 page)

I wasn’t crying. I didn’t know enough to cry. I could sense the threat, but couldn’t understand it. I didn’t know why this heavy-breathing, jostling crowd should have chosen me.

‘You didn’t ought t’ be wearin’ thick.’ Josie Pocknell pointed at the poppy wired around a button on my cardigan.

‘You go’ no righ’.’

‘They’m not for the likes a’ you.’

A hand came out to grab it, but I jerked back. I didn’t know what the poppy was for, but snatching it was as personal as pulling my pigtails. It was pretty and it was
mine.
Tom had given me a penny to buy it.

‘Gi’ ’s it yere, you.’

‘No, it’s mine.’ I clasped both hands over the flower. ‘You’ve all got one, anyway.’

‘Don’t an’ we’ll bash you and git it off’n you anyhow.’

They shoved and poked, not quite daring – not quite yet – to knock down a five-year-old. Everything seemed huge to me, their hands, their boots, their voices. Great open mouths. Great bushes of hair topped by nodding bows. I clung irrationally to my poppy and looked for a gap to escape through, like a rabbit for a hole.

‘Lookin’ for somewhere to run – like your ol’ man?’

My old man? What old man? I didn’t know any old men except Dr Gatehouse and he didn’t belong to me.

‘I haven’t got an old man,’ I said.

And they all laughed. I didn’t know I’d said something funny. I joined in. It must be a joke, then, and they weren’t really going to hurt me.

But then the poking got rougher, from fingers that seemed to be all bone with no childish softness. It began to hurt.

‘Le’s see ’er run, then. See ’ow fast ’er do run.’

The hand that grabbed my poppy this time got it and the button the poppy was wired to and the wool that the button thread was stitched through. All that was left was a frayed hole in my cardigan.

And then I started to howl – more with anger than fear, I like to think now, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Maybe I was scared. And at the awful sound, my tormentors began to look uncomfortable. One or two drifted away, then others. All except one great lad, Dennis Rudge, a gurt bwoy they’d have called him, who grabbed me and shook me. I howled louder, great, gulping, tearless sobs that frightened me with their power, so that I began to cry the first real tears. Maybe he was trying to hurt me. Maybe he was just trying to shut me up. I don’t know. It’s all so long ago.

But I remember what happened next. Dennis was grabbed from behind by another boy and they fell in a thrashing, kicking, biting heap. The ring of children forgot me and circled the fighters, cheering on their favourite, so that I couldn’t see what was happening. I could hear grunts and thuds. That was all.

No-one noticed me sneak away to hide in the outside lavatory, safe until the bell rang for lessons. I shut the door and perched on the seat with my legs drawn up, so that no-one should see my little black boots through the gap below the door. I kept my handkerchief over my mouth to block out the stink from the open drain that flowed through.

And when it was over, when Mr Casemore had separated the fighters and told them to stand outside his study until he was ready to deal with them, my poppy and everything it had seemed to represent to the children had been forgotten, replaced by a more exciting event.

Dennis Rudge was thrashed for fighting. Martin Buckland was sent home to have his broken nose set by his mother in a casing of stiff flour and water paste. And when he came back to school, his face disfigured by two black eyes above a great wedge of homemade plaster, he had been thrashed too.

By then, Armistice Day had gone and everyone had forgotten what the fight was about in the first place. But I hadn’t forgotten. And now Martin was leaving.

*   *   *

I turned my face aside, in case the first tears should fall on the leather and ruin my good work. And then he was there – Martin, thin and brown, crooked-nosed and smiling – as though I’d conjured him up, leaning across the half-door, watching me. He might have been there for ages. And I knew that, shiny blue suit and stiff collar or not, to me he’d always be Martin.

‘You’ll have that polished away to a greasy spot if you go on like that,’ he observed. ‘I thought I’d find you here.’

‘Yes,’ I answered stupidly.

‘I wanted to thank you for the present.’

‘The present?’

‘It was such a kind idea. I know I haven’t got a camera for it yet, but one day I will. So – thank you.’

He dangled the leather case by its strap and the evening sun glossed over the scratches and made it look even smarter than I had remembered.

‘That’s all right. What did Kate tell you?’

‘She said you’d clubbed together to buy it. She said you’d beaten Mr Doughty down from a fantastic price.’

‘Yes, we … we…’ I wanted to join in the fiction, to make Martin believe how much Kate and I cared for him, that we’d spent an afternoon together bargaining away our last pennies, but somehow the words wouldn’t come out right. And again the taste of the coconut ice came back to reproach me. If I hadn’t spent my money on that … And Kate had wrongfooted me, as somehow she always managed to do. All those accusations, no less bitter for being silent, that jealousy, when all the time she’d been planning to share with me the pleasure of giving. Didn’t she understand? I didn’t
want
to share it. It was to have been my idea, my present to Martin. I’d rather he didn’t have it at all than share with Kate. I didn’t
want
her to be kind.

I rubbed away at an imaginary dull spot on the leather. My voice was gruff and churlish. ‘That’s nearly right. Only it was Kate’s money, not mine. I’d spent all mine.’

‘Well, anyway – I like it very much. It’s the best present I’ve had for ages. I’ll take it with me everywhere.’

And I wasn’t experienced enough to wonder how much was true and how much was a kind-hearted boy trying to cheer up someone much – well, three and a bit years – younger.

‘Shall you be very famous?’ I asked.

The evening sun was so bright behind him that I couldn’t see if he laughed. His head and shoulders were like a dark portrait in a frame, an end-of-the-pier silhouette cutout. But his voice told me that he was smiling, so I could imagine his face for myself.

‘Don’t wait up for it! I don’t suppose anyone’ll trust me to do more than scrub the darkroom floor for years. One day they might let me out to cover something really exciting, like a fête or a produce show. Look out for pictures of the winning giant marrow – you just might see my name in tiny print underneath!’

‘All those marrows! D’you know – every single one of them was still left at the end of the day. Tom’s compost heap will be submerged in marrows!’

‘It’ll look like a torpedo dump.’

I started to laugh at last. ‘And people will be so offended.’

‘They’ll peer over the wall secretly, to try to identify their own.’

‘They’ll creep in tonight and make off with them in the darkness and in the morning they’ll be able to swank and say that their own isn’t there.’

‘Mr Ruggles climbing out’ll meet Mr Treadwell climbing in…’

‘… and he’ll stuff his marrow up his jumper and talk about the weather…’

Sillier and sillier, our voices rose higher and higher, children again, with tomorrow’s parting forgotten for a while.

‘… and the whole village’ll have stuffed marrow for supper tomorrow night.’

‘And next year the produce stall will be swamped by marrow and ginger jam.’

I giggled so much that my nose started to run, until I knew that I was crying, but nothing would make me admit that to Martin. I was weak with laughing. Oh Martin, don’t go, don’t grow up and leave me here still a child.

At last we couldn’t laugh any more. I could hear Kate’s voice calling me in to supper and, by the exasperation in her tone, I guessed she’d been calling for a while. Martin heard her too.

‘Well…’

‘Yes…’

‘I’m not going far, you know.’

‘No…’

‘We’ll keep in touch.’

‘Yes.’

‘Goodbye, Laura.’

If I’d been older, would he have kissed me? Perhaps. Would he have leaned over the door and pecked me on the cheek? The lips, maybe? No, on second thoughts, he probably wouldn’t. He was much too sensible to do anything soppy like that. And we were both too well brought up. People like us didn’t do that.

But I wondered suddenly what it might be like. I was chilly and tired and miserable and the thought of Martin’s kiss started a little, hot glow where I’d never had one before. It was like the kitchen fire in the early morning, greyed over with ash until Abbie got down on her knees and blew a tiny spark into life.

I tried to say, ‘Goodbye, Martin,’ but the sound wouldn’t come out right. It was just a squeak.

He held out his hand over the door and I put mine in his for a farewell, grown-up handshake. When we had done that, our hands stayed together for a few more moments.

*   *   *

In the tiny cottage living room, filled to discomfort by the piano from Ansty House, Mother was playing, comforting, meandering, evening music that I didn’t recognize. Her hair was turned to untidy, sunlit cobwebs, silver and gold. Her thin, bare arms were striped with dying light. The notes seemed to drop from her fingers like crystal beads. Tom leaned against the piano and tried to catch the remains of the day for his crossword. Their heads were quite close together. The rest of the room was dark, always dark, never brightened by the small square of window. If she had needed music, Mother wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway.

I leaned against the door frame, suddenly tired, and wondered what it would be like to have someone belong to you as completely as Tom belonged to Mother.

Mother didn’t lift her head, but said, ‘Kate’s out looking for you, darling. Didn’t you see her?’

‘No.’ True – I hadn’t seen her, just heard her.

‘Oh, well – it’s cold supper.’

‘But I warn you,’ said Tom, looking up and grinning, ‘get yourself an invitation somewhere else tomorrow – it’s stuffed marrow.’

Hearts don’t break, particularly young, healthy ones; they just feel like it. He waited for me to laugh and looked surprised when I didn’t.

‘I’m not very hungry. Do you mind if I go up to bed?’

‘Too much sun and excitement, I expect. Well, if you must, you must.’

‘Honestly, Tom! You sound just like some old, Scottish nanny!’ Mother always scolded him like that – loving and laughing and warm. ‘Off you go, Laura love. Have an early night.’

I kissed them both goodnight and the vague, tinkling music followed me upstairs to the room I shared with Kate. I dabbed feebly with a flannel and cold water, cleaned my teeth, got into my pyjamas and climbed into the bed that was tucked under the sloping eaves. Kate must have arrived home – probably hot and annoyed because she’d failed to find me.

I hadn’t wished him good luck. I’d let him go without once saying ‘Good luck, Martin’. I wished it – of course – but did he know that? Did he know what his going really meant to me? How could he, if I didn’t tell him?

The music had stopped and I could hear Abbie with the supper dishes, slopping along the passage in her too-big shoes, singing.

‘Teach me how to kiss, dear, teach me how to squeeze

Teach me how to sit upon your sympathetic knees.’

There was the scraping of chairs and the clink of cutlery. Once Tom laughed his telling-a-joke laugh and Mother protested feebly, ‘Darling…’

It all sounded so far away, much farther than just downstairs. Far, far away and not in the least important. I drew my knees up to my chest and hugged them. Too much coconut ice and Martin was leaving and I had discovered that I was going to grow up to be a convict.

*   *   *

Martin never came back. Five weeks later, his father had a heart attack and his mother moved to Winchester to be near her son’s work. The chances were that I might never see Martin again.

1941

The gypsy, or Mrs Pagett, or whoever she was, had been right. I was behind bars, but not in the way she had meant – or I had thought she had meant, at any rate.

Through barred windows, I looked out on to the side windows of another hut, with its own bars. If I twisted my neck very hard, I could squint along the side of our hut and see a dusty, camel-coloured parade square, almost the same colour as our starched tropical drill, beyond that, a fence of tall, dried rushes that rustled in the breeze off the river. Everything was the same. Even the sky seemed to be the colour of Nile dust, the sun dull and metallic.

‘Well, if this is the Mysterious East, you know what you can do with it,’ muttered Grace, tightening her belt around an already minute waist. Grace was the only one amongst us who’d dared to have her uniform tailored to fit. The rest of us wore khaki sacks, stiff drill skirts and Aertex shirts, that fitted where they touched. She smoothed down the skirt with the palms of her hands. ‘I’ve got sand in my teeth, sand up my nose, sand up my … knickers.’

‘You didn’t say that yesterday.’

‘Yesterday was yesterday and it still had novelty value. Today I feel as though I’ve been stripped and rubbed down ready for a gloss finish.’

*   *   *

Crammed with our kitbags into the back of an open Bedford lorry, we’d been assaulted by Egypt, by its heat, its noise, its smells. Our truck had inched away from Maadi station, threading between laden donkeys and flocks of fat-tailed sheep, taking its turn behind battered Thorneycroft buses decorated with blue beads against the evil eye, creaking carts, staff cars carrying red-tabbed officers, signal-bearing Don Rs on motor bikes.

Delicacies that we’d forgotten even existed spilled on to the streets outside shops no bigger than wardrobes: oranges and dates piled high in crates; vegetables bigger than we’d ever seen before; cans of paraffin; sacks of sugar; bales of silk; bundles of charcoal; baskets of eggs – enough eggs to whip up a mountain of meringues.

‘And not a powdered egg in sight,’ sighed Vee in ecstasy.

Pansy took a deep breath. ‘Smell that? That’s coffee, that is, real coffee!’

‘Smell that?’ Grace giggled. ‘That’s donkey manure, real donkey manure!’