My Real Children (3 page)

“Adam!” Patsy said, quickly before Oswald could answer such an easy riddle. “And Eve was the lady!”

Oswald laughed. “She doesn’t understand, Dad.”

“But you do, don’t you? You know what I’m saying. Look at it this way, did Lady Leverside bring up her children herself? No, she chose your mother to do it. You’re having the same upbringing they had.”

One of the other children came to ask Dad a question about the pulpit and he got up to help. Patsy sat still, crinkling her toes and feeling the sand scrunch up under them. Lady Leverside’s children had seemed as far above her as the sun and the moon. Mum never said Patsy was better than they were at anything, never even as good. It was always “The Honourable Letitia would never have spoken with her mouth open…” or “forgotten her cushion…” or “come downstairs with her hair unbrushed.” Patsy was used to thinking of them as paragons. She considered Dad’s view that she was as good as they were, and potentially even better. Yet she knew they had six of everything, all of the best, and if they grew out of any of their clothes they had more right away, ordered from John Lewis’s. She and Oswald only had one set of best clothes at a time, and only two other sets of clothes, and they were forever outgrowing them or tearing them. She tore hers climbing trees and Oswald tore his playing football or fighting with boys.

“When I’m thirteen they’re going to send me away to school,” Oswald said, plopping down on the sand beside her.

“Will they me?” Patsy was alarmed, even though thirteen seemed impossibly far away, almost the whole length of her lifetime.

“I don’t think so, because it’s really expensive and you’re a girl,” Oswald said. He wasn’t looking at her, he was tracing a complicated design in the sand with his finger. “I think they’ll send you to a day school.”

“Why will they send you then?”

“Because of what Dad just said about getting on. Dad left school when he was fourteen and he’s been sorry ever since. He wants me to be a gentleman, just the same as Mum does.” He didn’t look up, but he piled up the sand wildly over the pattern he had made.

“Like Adam,” Patsy said, and for the second time didn’t understand why she had made somebody laugh.

“But it’s all such tosh,” Oswald said. “I’d a hundred times rather be brought up by Gran and get a job at fourteen than spend my life trying to ape something I’m not.”

“Why don’t you tell them so, then?”

“Oh come on Pats, you know there are things you can say and things you can’t.”

She did know. It seemed she had always known. She wanted to do something to comfort her brother, but there wasn’t anything. Gran would have hugged him, but in their house hugging was discouraged. She put her hand out again for him to shake, and he shook it solemnly.

“Come on,” he said.

“Where?” she asked, getting up at once expectantly.

“You’d come anywhere with me, wouldn’t you, Pats?” Oswald smiled down at her. “I must go down to the sea again!”

“The lonely sea and the sky!” she shouted.

“Anything less lonely than the sea in Weymouth on a hot Sunday morning in July is difficult to imagine,” Dad said.

Later, after a bathe where she had swum ten strokes without Dad holding on, she ran on rubbery legs up to Mum’s deckchair. Mum was reading the paper and looking very serious, but she put it down when she saw them and got out the towels and their clothes so they could dress nicely for lunch. Mum had sewn brightly striped beach towels into little tents with elastic around their necks so that they could take their wet things off underneath and didn’t have to go into the changing huts, which were smelly and besides cost money.

Dad dried his back with a big flat towel. “Patsy’s really learning to swim,” he said. “You should enroll her for lessons at the baths when we get back to Twickenham. It’s easier to swim in the baths,” he said over his shoulder to her. “There aren’t any waves to smack you in the face.”

“All right,” Mum said. “If she’d like it. Oswald started going when he was about this age.”

“Have you had a nice peaceful morning?”

“Lovely,” Mum said, though how it could be lovely sitting still in a deckchair reading Patsy couldn’t imagine.

“Is there any news in the paper?” Dad asked.

Mum tutted, which she did when she was going to report on something of which she disapproved. “It seems as if the Nazis in Germany have banned all the other political parties—made them illegal just like that. Theirs is the only party. Goodness knows how they think that’s going to work when they have elections.”

“I don’t suppose they’re planning to have elections,” Dad said. “It looks to me as if that Herr Hitler intends to be Führer for life.”

“And such horrible things,” Mum said. Then she changed her tone completely and turned to Patsy. “Aren’t you dry yet? They’ll be laying out our lunch before we get back if you don’t hurry. We don’t want to make extra work for Mrs. Bonestell.”

Oswald pulled off his towel, revealing his neat shirt and shorts underneath. “I wish we could have a picnic on the beach.”

“Not on a Sunday,” Mum said, reprovingly.

“We got the pulpit built,” Dad said quickly. “Mr. Price will be able to get right up there and preach, and we can all sing hymns as loudly as we can. Patsy was saying he’d convert any heathen on the beach.”

“I hope you built it in the right place this time,” Mum said.

“We took proper notice of the tide,” Dad said. “Don’t worry, there won’t be any of that King Canute preaching this year. Are you dressed under there yet, Patsy?”

Patsy had got her dress twisted up somehow so she couldn’t find the hole for her right arm. Dad held the big towel up and Mum rapidly sorted her out. “Now let’s go up and get some Sunday dinner,” Dad said. “Lunch, I mean. Come on!”

Twelve and a half more days of holiday, Patsy thought, and swimming lessons when she got home. Even if Oswald did have to go away to school it wasn’t for three years, and even if the Germans were acting peculiar they were a long way away. Mum and Dad were smiling at each other and Oswald was carrying the bucket and both spades, and if they were lucky there might be tinned salmon and tomatoes for lunch.

3

Oystercatchers: 1939–1944

In the end it was the same as if she had been sent away to school, because she was thirteen in 1939 and her day school was evacuated. Patty spent the war years in safe but miserable deprivation in Carlisle. There was never enough of anything, until they grew used to it and did not expect there to be. The days before the war began to seem like a utopian dream. She learned Latin and French and how to do sums in pounds, shillings and pence, she learned long division and A. E. Housman. She did well academically. She made friends but no close friends. The comparative wartime poverty of them all highlighted rather than erased the class differences. She remained athletic but not good at team sports. She excelled in tennis and rowing and swimming, which gained her some popularity as she moved up the school.

In due course Oswald left his minor public school at seventeen, and went straight into the RAF, where he ended up in Bomber Command. He was killed in the autumn of 1943 flying a raid over Germany. Patty went home to Twickenham that Christmas, all heartiness and perpetual appetite, in the middle of a late growth spurt. She found her mother trying to be proud of her heroic son but succeeding only in being desolate. Her father looked ten years older. She knew she was no compensation to them for Oswald’s loss, and did not try. Her own loss was constantly with her.

On Boxing Day she dragged her father out for a walk. “Come on, Dad, got to blow off the cobwebs!”

He was almost silent as they walked their familiar circuit, up through the park, where they had collected conkers every year, around the church and back down the hill, past the bushes where they always picked blackberries. The absence of Oswald was almost deafening. “How are you doing, old girl?” her father asked at last.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “How about you, Dad?”

“I do miss that boy,” he said, and his face crumpled up.

“And how’s work?” she asked, embarrassed, desperate to change the subject.

“You know I can’t talk about my war work!” he said.

It was the last time she saw him alive. He was killed a few months later by a direct hit from a V-1, on the day she took the Oxford entrance exams. She went up to Oxford for a visit and was awarded an Exhibition to St. Hilda’s College, which would provide her with enough money to live on while she studied, without need for parental support. She called to see her mother on her way back to school, spending an uncomfortable night in her old room. There was very little for her to eat, and she had a long complicated train ride ahead of her. Her mother took the triumph of having been accepted and awarded the Exhibition entirely for granted. “They’ll be taking more women because so many men are out because of the war,” was all she said. After Patty’s obligatory words on meeting, her father was not mentioned.

Going upstairs early to bed, clutching a hot water bottle for warmth in the cold spring, she quietly opened the door to Oswald’s old room and found it stripped bare even of the furniture and carpets. Only the paler patches on the wallpaper where his photographs had hung showed that he had ever been there at all. In her own cold bed, where there was not enough light to read, she wondered how much of a mark Oswald had left on life. He had broken their parents’ hearts, and helped her grow up. (Almost eighteen and newly accepted at St. Hilda’s, she felt thoroughly grown up.) He had probably cheered his comrades in the RAF. She wondered if he had had a girlfriend. She had seen so little of him in the last few years, both of them away from home, and the war. And of course, though she didn’t like to think of it, he had thoroughly changed the lives of the people whom he had bombed. She thought of factories destroyed that would not make bombs that would not kill people the way her father had been killed. She thought of planes damaged by Oswald’s attacks so that raids took place later and killed different people, or didn’t take place at all. She tried not to think of houses in Germany falling and crushing their inhabitants like the bombed-out houses she had seen in Twickenham and Oxford. Oswald had done his best, as her father had in two wars now, while she had done nothing. She had been a child, but the war was still on and she was proposing more study, not war work.

The train journey the next day was even more gruelling than she had expected. The main line north had been bombed and not yet mended, so the train crept around by branch lines, last in priority after troop trains and even goods trains. At Rugby an American soldier got on and tried to flirt with Patty, who had no idea how to respond and stood frozen until he apologized and said he had thought she was older than she was. She was about to have her eighteenth birthday. She knew other girls her age flirted and joked and were at ease with men.

At Lancaster, which should have been five hours from London but which had been eleven, the train came to a permanent halt. She stood on the platform of the Victorian station, part of a group of stranded travellers. “There’s nothing going north tonight,” the guard said. “Not unless you want to go around by the Cumbrian Coast line. There’s a train just starting for Barrow, and it’ll go on up that way. But you’d do better stopping the night here.”

“Does it go to Carlisle?” somebody asked.

“Yes, all the way round the coast to Carlisle. It’s slow like, but it gets there in the end.”

Patty climbed into the little train which rattled along the rails. It was full of workers in overalls making for the Vickers yards at Barrow-in-Furness. One of them, a gray-haired man with a lined face, prodded his younger companion into giving Patty his seat. “Can’t you see the young lady’s tuckered out?”

Patty sat gratefully. “I am. I’ve been travelling all day.”

“Where have you come from then?” the man asked.

“London.”

“That’s a step! What took you there?”

“I had an interview yesterday at an Oxford college, and I spent the night with my mother just outside London.”

“Oxford!” The man was gratifyingly impressed. “An Oxford scholar! You must be a brainy one then.”

Patty smiled. “They’re taking more women because the men are off at the war. I’ve been wondering whether I should go even so, or whether I should be doing war work.”

“If you have the chance to better yourself you should take it,” he said, and though his manner was completely different he reminded her of her father. “I’m a fitter, and I’ve done as well for myself as I can. Now our Col who gave you his seat, he’s a fitter too, but he’s taking night classes and after the war he means to get on.”

“Your son?” she asked.

“My nephew,” he replied, and was silent a moment, then changed the subject. “Now, where are you going tonight? Are you going to school?”

“Yes, back to my school. It’s been evacuated to Carlisle.”

“Carlisle! You won’t get there tonight!” As if to emphasize his words the train slowed to a stop.

“The guard on the platform in Lancaster said this train went around the coast to Carlisle,” Patty said.

“Well, so it does, but not until tomorrow. I don’t know if we’ll be in Barrow before midnight, but whenever we get there the train will stop there until the morning and go on to Carlisle then. Tom, what time does the train go out to Carlisle in the morning?”

The man addressed had a little rabbitty moustache. He pulled a booklet out of his pocket. “Ten oh eight,” he said after a moment’s perusal. “Why’s that, Stan, what do you want with going to Carlisle?”

“It’s not me, it’s the young lady here. They told her in Lancaster she could get to Carlisle by this train, but it’s not so is it?”

All the men looked at Patty, who blushed under their attention.

“Well, whatever they told her she won’t get further than Barrow until ten oh eight tomorrow morning. You’d have done better to have stopped in Lancaster, lass,” Tom said.

“Don’t worry, you can stay with my Flo and me,” Stan said reassuringly. “Flo will make you up a bed in no time and find something for your supper too, as I expect you’re hungry.”