Come the Hour (4 page)

S
ara sat at the table in her little bedroom. She could come back here after tea and stay up a bit later tonight – it was school holidays. Her mum made her go to bed at half past eight on school days, even if the other children were still playing outside. She said sleep fed your brain. Outside in the street she could hear the other children playing, running and shouting. She preferred to stay here and read. She didn’t want to join them. Sometimes she did go out, playing pig-in-the-middle or tag or skipping, but she seemed to have grown out of that kind of play, running about to no purpose.

She had another purpose, one that she could never talk of to the children in the street. They would look at her with bafflement and poke fun at her and call her names. It was going to be bad enough going out in her new school uniform and carrying the leather satchel that was a kind of grammar-school badge. That was if she got there. Her heart seemed to swell in her chest. The longing was desperate. She squeezed her eyes tight. Perhaps if she just wished hard enough it would all happen. She wanted to be a doctor more than anything in the whole world. Meanwhile, there were her books, years of study at her new school. But it wouldn’t be hard – she loved it, loved the endless revelations of endless, thrilling science. There was so much to know and so much to learn. She couldn’t wait. She couldn’t remember when she had first wanted to be a doctor – years ago. Her mum’s doctor was a lady, so it could happen – girls could do it.

Downstairs Nora was cooking what she called ‘tea’ – dinner really – that’s what they called it down here. Fish and chips tonight, it being Friday. She wasn’t Catholic but she had got into the habit back home in
Manchester. Everybody seemed to have fish on Friday: fish, chips and peas. She peeled the potatoes carefully, so as not to waste anything. What is happening, she thought – all this talk of war? She couldn’t bear it. She’d been a child last time. It had never occurred to anybody that it could happen again. The threat had become for her a solely personal thing. A war would be directed right here, to her home, to her Sara. She couldn’t expand the fear, spread it out, include the rest of the world, even the rest of her own country. It seemed to her that the whole purpose of a war would be to threaten Sara.

She stared out of the window, where Sara’s bicycle was propped up against the yard wall. She had never realized what motherhood would be like, never anticipated this degree of loving and caring. Sometimes she wondered whether, if she had known, she would have wanted motherhood at all. This kind of love brought with it a low but constant anxiety – would Sara be all right? Would she escape the dreadful diseases that could kill a child: diphtheria, scarlet fever, TB? Now it was growing into a new fear – fear of a war, and even if there was no war, fear that she might not be able to give Sara what she wanted. A doctor! Her daughter a doctor! It would make up for everything that she herself had missed. Somehow, somehow, they would make it happen. She slipped the chips into the hot fat in the chip pan and the fat bubbled up, crackling and spitting.

Jim came in and kissed her cheek. He took off his jacket and hung it up on a chair-back.

‘Any news?’ she said.

Jim sat down at the table and she gave him a cup of tea. He knew what she meant. She wasn’t talking about a war. Some dangers were closer than a war. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The bosses seem to think the factory’ll be all right. People still need furniture.’

Nora said nothing. Every day she was frightened that Jim would come home and tell her that the factory was closing and he was out of work again. She didn’t know how she would cope if they had to go back on the dole again, back on fifteen shillings a week. Keeping body and soul together would be bad enough, but there was Sara and grammar school – so much to pay for. Thanks to the scholarship there would be no fees, but there was uniform and books and gym clothes
and goodness knows what else. The uniform alone would cost a fortune; the wool dresses for winter and the cotton ones for summer, the blue gabardine mac and the blazer for summer, and the hat with a yellow hatband, the gym tunic, navy-blue knickers, indoor shoes. And then the books. The list of books alone was bad enough.

She pressed her lips together, and turned the fish over in the frying pan. She’d saved enough, she thought, bit by bit, shilling by shilling. The pound notes were slowly growing in the shoebox in the wardrobe. Sara was getting out of this, out of privation and scrimping and saving and getting nowhere. Sara was going to the grammar school if she, Nora, had to starve to death to get her there.

‘Where’s Sara?’ Jim said

‘Upstairs. Reading, I expect.’ She went to the foot of the stairs. ‘Sara,’ she called. ‘Tea’s ready. Your dad’s here.’

‘She’s always reading,’ Jim said. ‘I don’t know why you’re so insistent on that school. She’d be perfectly all right at the ordinary school with the other kids.’

‘No she wouldn’t,’ Nora snapped. ‘We’ve been through all this. She’s clever. She’s going to get on. She isn’t going to be stuck in some dead-end job.’

‘We can’t afford it,’ he said.

Nora put his tea before him with a little thump. ‘Yes we can. I could get a job.’

He opened his mouth to reply but Sara came into the kitchen. She kissed her father on the cheek. ‘Hello Dad.’

Jim smiled at her with affection, and some puzzlement. Where had she come from, this brainy child, and what were they going to do with her? No one in either family had ever been to a university, let alone want to be a doctor. What an idea! There seemed to be no way out of the mess the country was in. She’d be lucky to get a job at all. It was pie in the sky, especially for a girl.

Sara sat down at the table. ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘why did you go to the doctor’s? Is there something wrong?’

Nora glanced quickly at Jim, a faint colour rising in her cheeks. ‘No love,’ she said. ‘Just a check-up. I’m fine.’

Sara took up her knife and fork and carefully dissected her fish away
from the bone, admiring the little vertebrae in the spine, the way they so cleverly locked together. ‘It’s a lady doctor, isn’t it?’

Nora nodded. ‘Yes. Doctor Fielding.’

‘Do you think,’ Sara said, ‘that she might have some old medical books that she doesn’t want? I’d like to read some and they haven’t got any in the library.’

‘I don’t really like to ask.’ Nora frowned. She balked at anything that smacked of charity.

‘Oh please, Mum. Only any old ones that she’d throw away.’

‘I’ll see,’ Nora said. ‘If I go to see her again I’ll see.’

After tea Sara went up to her room again.

‘You shouldn’t encourage her,’ Jim said. ‘This being a doctor idea is crazy. You know we couldn’t afford it.’

‘She’d have to get another scholarship,’ Nora said, ‘she knows that. She works so hard. She might get a county or a state scholarship.’

Jim snorted. ‘And when do they ever give them to people like us – a girl, a working man’s daughter? I just don’t want you to get her hopes up and then be disappointed. People like us don’t go to university.’

‘We never had a chance,’ Nora said bitterly. ‘We’re both intelligent, you and me. I passed the exam to go to the grammar school but I couldn’t go. My mother had seven kids to bring up. You’d have passed too if you’d taken it. We never had a chance.’

‘Who gets a chance,’ Jim said sourly, ‘in this damn country? Not unless you’re rich or one of the nobs.’

‘Sara will.’ Nora poured them both another cup of tea and sat down again. ‘Things have got to change, Jim.’ He made a dismissive noise. Her fears rose again. ‘What if there’s a war, Jim? What will we do?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Do you think there will be one?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘They don’t tell us anything, do they? We’re just the cannon fodder.’

‘They’d attack London, wouldn’t they? Like they did in Spain. Would we go back to Manchester?’

‘There wouldn’t be much point in that, would there? They’d bomb Manchester as well. All the factories there.’

She cleared up the table and started the washing-up, thinking, worrying.

Sara sat at the little table in her room, reading again the latest book she’d got from the library:
The Wonders of Science
. It sat before her, ready to be consumed, like a huge box of chocolates. Every word thrilled her. The first chapter was about the solar system and the planets. How wonderful that the earth rotated and went round the sun, and that explained night and day and the seasons. What was gravity, and wasn’t it wonderful that Sir Isaac Newton had discovered it? Before tea she had moved on to the science of plants. They were just there, all over the place, growing everywhere, and look what they were doing – photosynthesis, changing the energy of the sun into food! And look at them inside; the xylem and the phloem carrying stuff up and down their stems; making seeds, reproducing. Tonight she was starting on zoology, beginning with the frog. She felt an excitement and pleasure that seemed to expand and fill her little room. I want to know everything, she thought. I want to learn everything there is to learn, and then I want to learn some more. The universe opened out in front of her like a flower.

‘Where are you two off to?’ Amy was sitting in the garden, reading
The Lancet
. The twins were stuffing rolled-up towels into their backpacks.

‘Swimming,’ Tessa said, ‘at the new outdoor lido at Hampstead. We’re meeting the gang there.’

‘Can you go in together?’ Amy asked. ‘Isn’t it segregated?’

‘Mixed bathing on Saturday.’ Charlie grinned. ‘So we’ve got to be respectable and take our swimming costumes.’

Amy laughed. ‘Have you got money?’

‘Enough,’ Tessa said. ‘It’s only sixpence to get in, and Mrs Parks has made us some sandwiches.’

‘Have a good time.’ Amy watched them leave, both so well, so contented. I’ve got to do what Dan said, she thought, and stop worrying. Otherwise she might set them off too. This was no time to be worrying them about anything. They were both facing perhaps the most important change in their lives – leaving school, joining the adult world. Please God, she thought, let that be all it is.

The twins took the tube to Kentish Town and walked down Highgate Road and Gordon House Road.

‘Good job it’s a warm day,’ Charlie said. ‘I bet the water’s icy.’

‘And I bet it’s crowded,’ Tessa said. ‘Lots of girls in swimming costumes for you to ogle.’

‘I don’t ogle,’ he said blandly. ‘I never learnt. There wasn’t much chance at school. The youngest female there was Miss Blake the French mistress, and she was at least thirty.’

Tessa laughed. ‘Goodness, what an age. How ever did she survive that long?’

They paid their sixpences and went in.

‘Wow,’ Tessa said. ‘It’s lovely. It’s huge.’ The blue glazed bricks lining the pool sparkled in the water and the ornamental fountain glittered in the sunshine. It was crowded, young people in swimming costumes everywhere, sitting on the beige tiles around the pool or on the grass.

‘Go and change,’ Charlie said, ‘and I’ll meet you out here and we’ll go and find the others.’

Tessa changed into her blue costume and put her clothes in a locker. She went out again into the sunshine, carrying her towel and a white rubber bathing-cap. Charlie was waiting in his black costume, his towel around his neck. Their friends, two boys and two girls, waved to them from across the pool and they walked round to meet them.

‘Is it cold?’ Tessa tucked her hair into her bathing-cap.

‘Freezing,’ one of the boys said, ‘but it soon wears off.’

Tessa dived into the pool, enjoying the shock of the cold water. It seemed to draw her body together, concentrate her form and energy into a contained package of being young, being fit, being happy. She turned over on to her back, floating, squinting up her eyes against the bright sunshine. I’m starting soon, she thought. I’m nearly there. She had wanted to be a doctor for as long as she remembered. It was going to happen. A small cloud drifted slowly across the bright sky. It had a shape; it looked like a bird, like an eagle. Surely they couldn’t stop her now, she thought, even if there was a war? They would need more doctors, more women in medicine. Her mother had once told her how the British army had refused to use women doctors at the beginning of
the last war. Surely things had moved on? Surely women had proved themselves? She turned over and swam back to her friends.

‘What have you been doing, Charlie?’ Rob, one of the boys, was thin, with dark-brown eyes that didn’t seem to focus without his thick
horn-rimmed
glasses. ‘We haven’t seen you for a week or two.’

‘He’s been in Germany.’ Tessa took off her cap and shook out her hair. ‘In Berlin.’

Both the boys sat up quickly and stared at him. ‘Berlin?’ Rob said. ‘What were you doing there? What was it like? What was happening?’

Charlie tried to arrange his thoughts, to describe it as it was, without adding his own impressions and judgements. But there wasn’t any way to avoid the reality. ‘It’s stiff with military,’ he said, ‘everywhere you go, and Hitler has got a complete stranglehold. Nobody dares to disagree with him, or you get into trouble with the police. There are swastikas everywhere and that salute. There are huge air-raid shelters and an air ministry like a fortress. They mean business.’

The boys still stared at him, saying nothing, but one of the girls gasped. ‘You can’t mean it,’ she said. ‘You’re just scaremongering.’

‘I didn’t say they want war,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m just saying they’re well prepared, I suppose in case anyone attacks them. They seem to be much better prepared than we would be.’ He paused. ‘But they look to me as if they’re spoiling for a fight.’

There was a silence, a question hanging in the air. ‘What would we do?’ Rob said. They all knew what he meant.

Charlie shrugged. ‘What we’re told, I imagine.’

Rob frowned. ‘I suppose we’d all have to join up.’ His voice was quiet, self-deprecating, disappointed. ‘I don’t know what I’d do, with my eyesight.’

‘I’m sure they’d find you something,’ Charlie said. ‘You’re clever. You’ve got a scientific mind. We’d need brains as well as brawn.’ Hitler, he thought, doesn’t want his soldiers intelligent – he wants them brutal. But we’d need brains. Brains always won in the end. Britain had always had brains, always been inventive, ever since the steam engine. Surely they would come up with something…?