Great Meadow (19 page)

We parked in Waterloo Square, by the Market Cross, and walked up to Dr Wilmott's house and rang and rang. After ages a grumpy woman came and said Dr Wilmott was playing bridge over at Alciston and it was his ‘night off anyway. There was another doctor who had just moved in,
but
She was a Woman.

So we went to her house. It was all dark, and I was half lying, half standing against our father, and he was knocking and knocking, and it was very dark and terribly cold. Suddenly there was a light in an upstairs window, and a woman's face peered out, and our father shouted it was very serious, so she opened the window but said she couldn't treat anyone because she was ill herself. With scarlet fever. Our father said I had very bad burns and please would she help. So she shut the window, the room went dark, and my father said, ‘Don't worry, she's coming down. There's a light on now in the hall.'

Then we were inside, and it was a little hall-place, with a big wooden chest against a wall. The lady doctor had straggly hair and a fawn dressing-gown, and I heard her make a sort of breathy noise when she saw my arm. She told our father that all she had in the house was a pair of nail-scissors, and that she was probably infectious. Would he take the risk? He said, ‘Yes. Please go ahead.' So I sat with him on the wooden chest, and she got the nail scissors and a bottle of something blue. It smelled awful as she
poured it in a saucer and put the scissors in. Then she cut all the huge, shiny blisters up my arm and my hand, and said that I had to be got to a hospital and properly dressed. (Except for my burned shirt, I
was
dressed.
And
with long trousers on.) But she just said that I could possibly have second-degree burns, whatever that was, and to get me into ‘proper hands' as soon as possible. She bandaged me up, and made a kind of sling, and I didn't blub. So that anyone could see, anyway.

There were pills to take when I got back to the cottage, to make me sleep. It was all pretty awful, and I hurt like anything. But I didn't say so. She was very nice, and said she'd just come to the village and hoped to be able to practise, but Dr Wilmott was against her, and so were many of his older patients. Our father said he'd never be able to thank her enough, and he'd settle her bill as soon as he could, and before she shut the door she called, ‘Good luck! Jolly brave, you were!' Which made me feel quite good. But it didn't stop the hurting.

In my Hampstead bedroom, with the bluetits on the wallpaper, Dr Henderson was jolly bossy indeed with our mother. I just lay in my bed with my eyes closed to pretend not to listen. But, of course, I did. Even though I was hurting like anything.

‘Margaret, you can't possibly nurse him here. The hospital has all the things he'll need, equipment.'

‘No. Absolutely no. He's mine and he stays here. I can cope.'

‘That arm has to be bathed three, or four, times a day, in water as hot as he can possibly bear.'

‘I know that. You have told me already. We have been doing that.'

‘How can you manage? Possibly? What will you bathe it in, elbow to fingertips?'

‘My fish kettle. If it'll take a salmon-grilse, it'll take my son's forearm. He's not leaving this house. He stays. His sister has a raging temperature, and you aren't “sure” as you say. Well, if she
has
to go to the isolation place, if it
is
that, he stays here. I have had enough disaster, no more.'

I quite liked that our mother had said ‘mine', but then Dr Henderson said, quietly, ‘Disaster? Margaret, thank your god on your knees this moment that you are not Mrs Lindbergh!'

And our mother's voice was very cross indeed, and she said, ‘No, but I
am
Mrs van den Bogaerde, and that is all I care about at the moment.'

There was a bit of a silence, so I opened my eyes a squint and saw Dr Henderson packing things into her bag, and then she said, ‘I'll go and see your daughter. If she has contracted the thing, he's almost certain to get it too, with that raw wound. Face up to it, Margaret.'

Then she went away and it was a bit quiet. I saw, through slitty eyes, my mother going to the little window over the garden, and she said aloud that she would face it. If, and when, it all happened. Which was jolly brave of her, because, the night before, when we got back from the cottage, my sister said she was hot and had a sore throat, and that was very worrying. But if she
did
have scarlet fever and had to go in an ambulance, bad mark: I wouldn't be able to see one again. Up close, I mean. And the fish-kettle part was a bit worrying, because our mother had been bathing my arm
with scalding hot bandages and pads, and that was quite bad enough, thank you. But in a fish-kettle! Three times a day.

Sometimes . . . well, often, with the bandages, I had to bite a pencil to stop shouting out, and after I had chewed up two our mother just cut off the spoon part of a wooden spoon and told me to bite the handle bit. That was better because it was harder wood. Once I noticed that her eyes were a bit swimmy, but she said it was the steam from the pudding bowl of hot water. So.

Then Dr Henderson came back and I heard her say, ‘Sorry. She's got it. Scarlet fever . . . and he's sure to catch it now. But I'll call the ambulance and the people at Isolation. I'm sorry. I'll get on to the fumigation people as well.'

So, now I heard the worst, I opened my eyes and asked if my sister would die. And Dr Henderson looked shocked, and said, over my dead body, boy, she'll be well taken care of. And then she said to look after my mother and do everything I was told to do, because my mother was being headstrong and absolutely mad. So I had to help her. I said I would, and then she put her arm round our mother and they went down the corridor to the telephone and to see my sister.

I prayed, very hard, across the room from my bed, to my altar, not to let her die, and thought it was a jolly bad mark not to see an ambulance close to once
again.
But perhaps I'd get the scarlet fever. And that would be very interesting.

But I didn't.

Sometimes, when our father had his holiday in the summer, they didn't go to France for all the time, but spent half of it with us at the cottage. That was pretty good because we often went down to the sea. Our favourite places to go were:
one,
Birling Gap,
two,
Cuckmere Haven and
three,
Newhaven. Bishopstone was pretty interesting, too, because it had some ruined cottages and a big chunk of a windmill. No one much came there because they had to cross a railway line to get to it, and that put trippers off, thank goodness, and the beach was all pebbles.

It was all pebbles at Cuckmere, and all pebbles at Birling Gap, only, there was a bit of a wrecked submarine stuck in the shingle which was very interesting. Our father said it was a German one which had got hit in the war. It was rusty, with holes and barnacles and things. At low tide you could poke about in it for sea anemones and crabs, although our father said it was rotten there for swimming.

Newhaven was pretty good because there was just one big sandy bay below the Ship Inn, under the fort, by the long jetty. When it was low tide it was really good, and not many people went there, but we did. On the other side of the huge jetty it was all pebbles and long wooden breakwaters. Once, years ago, I couldn't swim and Lally said that was rubbish, anyone could swim it was ‘instinctive', like with dogs. So she gave me a bit of a shove and I fell off the breakwater and into the sea. But it wasn't ‘instinctive', or whatever she called it, at all. I went down for miles, and it was all grey and swirly, and I remember seeing a huge bit of wavery seaweed floating past and I really got the wind up. Then a man in red bathing-drawers dragged me out and gave me a terrible telling off for getting
other
people into trouble! I ask you! Honestly! I had just been pushed in! But I was coughing and gasping, so I couldn't tell him. Lally was banging me on the back and thumping me on the chest and I was just hoicking up buckets and buckets of sea water which was foul-tasting, and my eyes were all running and stinging, and I thought swimming was a potty thing to do. If dogs did it easily, well, they were jolly lucky. I couldn't. And didn't.

I mean, I didn't mind shrimping. That was really jolly good. Our father came usually as well, because he liked pottering about in the rocks at Cuckmere. Sometimes
he
went swimming in his grey woollen swimming-drawers with a modesty panel. Which was a bit silly because we knew what he looked like, shaving, with no clothes on, but he didn't like undressing on the beach with strange people. Shrimping was all right because he could just roll up his flannel trousers, and we would get really masses of shrimps, all jumping and twitching, and then cover them with green seaweed to keep them fresh on the journey home.

Sometimes he would make one of his little fires in the pebbles with driftwood and we would boil the shrimps there and then, all fresh from the sea, and eat them with bread and butter. That was really the best part. Even my sister didn't mind it because Lally said that fish were coldblooded and couldn't feel anything horrible. Mr Jane had
told her that. He used to go fishing up at Teddington Lock and Eel Pie Island, and he said they never felt a
thing.
So if he said so (and he caught thousands of fish), it must be right. Anyway, it made it easier to enjoy beach-boiled shrimps.

Our mother didn't much like the seaside part. She always had a huge Japanese paper parasol, never took off her dress, and just sat in the shade reading her novels. Honestly, she might just as well have stayed at home. And she thought so too, but she quite enjoyed the tray of tea our father and Lally carried down the cliff-ladder from the café at Birling Gap. It was just a wooden shack-place, and smelled of varnish and the same blue stuff which the lady doctor used for my burned arm. There was a huge hissing tea urn on the counter, shiny buns under a glass dome and, sometimes, if you were early, sandwiches, only my father said that they tasted of good-quality linoleum, so not to bother. But you could get Fry's chocolate bars, Lally's very favourite, and coffee fudge, which our mother liked, or buy postcards of the Seven Sisters (those were the white cliffs above) and the Birling Gap Hotel. But the tea, in little metal pots, was best, with a sixpenny deposit for the tray; in case you didn't take it back. Really, that was the best part about Birling Gap. Getting down the cliff-ladder was a bit difficult, and Lally and our mother shrieked terribly when the wind blew their skirts up, but that was all part of the seaside.

It made it feel very like a holiday. If you went to Cuckmere you had to put your car in the big barn at Exceat Farm, then cross the road, through the five-barred gate, and walk all along the windey river to the beach. It
was a bit of a fag, really, because we had to carry all the picnic things, the hamper, kettle, spirit stove, plus all our mother's cushions for sitting on the beach, and the shrimping-nets and bathing-towels. It was like an Arabian caravan, our father said, and it felt like it. Walking all along the riverbank . . .

There wasn't time for me to really peer into the water and see all the amazing things in the shallow streams trickling off the Cuckmere. There were little green crabs and efts and tiny flounders which skipped about in the mud, and sometimes a huge heron splashed and plashed about in the reeds, but every time I stopped to watch they all screamed out not to dawdle. So I had to hurry up, quick sharp. A bit boring really.

Except one day when we were down on the rocks, just my father and me. He was poking about in one pool, and I had the net and bucket, when he said, ‘I want you to come to Newhaven tomorrow, just you, no room for anyone else. We'll go to meet the
Pevensey Castle
from Dieppe. Now, there
may
be some people we have to bring back to the cottage for a little stay. Not long. They might have luggage, so that's why I can only take you to help with things. All right?'

So I said all right, and were they friends of his and he said yes, they were very nice. He'd got a message on the telephone from
The Times.
It was all a bit of a surprise, but our mother and Lally had made the arrangements for beds and so on. So I said that was quite interesting and he said he didn't know exactly how many there would be, perhaps four, but they didn't speak any English . . . well, not much . . . but we'd have to manage for a few days, I
said what do they speak, and he said, ‘German. Your mother and I stayed with them in Cologne that year, remember?' Then he said that if we had enough shrimps we should get back to the others, so we walked up the beach, and he said that our mother would have told my sister, so everyone would know what was happening. Except he didn't say names or anything, just some friends.

Well, it was a funny sort of day. Lally was setting out the cups and things. Our mother was unwrapping sandwiches and singing to herself. My sister was looking at me with her I-Know-A-Secret face, a sort of smile, so I nodded at her so she would know that I knew about the people who were coming, and our father suddenly called out, ‘Kettle!', which was boiling away on the stove, and I thought it was all pretty curious and secret-sounding.