Reading by Lightning (30 page)

George, the girl who undertook to talk for me said breathlessly, I've been thinking. You might be all right in the Air Force. You could be a navigator. You could spend your whole day reading a compass. You would be good at it.

You're right, I think I'd be okay, he said, bending his head to dodge the lantern.

But maybe they won't catch up to you, the girl said. She held her coat on her lap, her hands marbled from the cold, ugly and red, and she crossed her legs, willing him to notice how long and slim her legs were, hating her thick lisle stockings, the way they accordioned at her ankles. Maybe you won't have to go at all.

I think I will. They're taking lists from the universities. Or they might just issue a general call for all the 1919s to register. He finally lowered himself into the chair opposite.

So why don't you just enlist? she asked.

He sat thinly with his legs crossed. Red blotches stood out in his white cheeks. Oh, I don't know how to say it, he said. Have you ever heard of Julian Huxley? I wish I had time to read everything he wrote. He was so brilliant. His grandfather was Thomas Huxley, you know, the scientist who defended Darwin. The man who coined the word
agnostic?

He looked at her questioningly. She stared back at him, she stared her disappointment.

Agnostic, he said. It's one of the best words there is. Once he found the word, you could be one, you weren't limited to being either a believer or an atheist.

Julian, she said, meaning,
Get on with it.

Yes, the grandson. Well, in
The Science of Life
he writes all about evolution in the modern age. How it used to be biology that shaped evolution, but now it's culture. We make choices, we don't grow hard shells like a turtle, we invent them, armour and weapons, that sort of thing, and they give us an evolutionary advantage. Although whether it's an advantage to the species in the long run is debatable.

She reached a hand up to her head and felt the grains of sand the wind had left on her scalp. Is this why you won't enlist? she asked.

I guess partly.

And then Jenny came out to the hall. She looked at them with her sharp, irreverent eyes and said, There's cocoa in the parlour, and they got up and followed her in.

He did write to me from Dorset. He did not allude to how awkward things had been between us. It was clear from his letter that he had put the war out of mind as well — he was coming at the problem from a different angle.

Charmouth, 28 May 1939

Dear Lily,

Mrs. Slater's son is home this week and takes supper with us and is very interesting. He's Exeter-educated and he has so much local lore to put together with it, of the days when curiosities lay all over the beach for the taking. He says the local chalk-diggers called belemnites
pencils
— a new one on me. They used to roast limestone here to make quicklime, and every time we pass the forge we picture them feeding intact ichthyosaur skeletons into the flames — a scene Ned Slater swears he witnessed as a boy, although I doubt it.

The field we pegged today is what they call a belemnite battlefield. It looks just like an ammunitions dump. They're all immature specimens, about two inches long and the exact brown of brass bullet casings. Dr. Acworth thinks it was a spawning ground. If so it might teach us something new about how they reproduced. We waited most of the day for the photographer to come to take pictures in situ. I used the time to make a charcoal sketch.

What is odd about these shells is that they're finely etched — like they've been exposed to acid. Here's the theory that popped into my head while we waited all afternoon: it was stomach acid. These belemnites must have been swallowed by a large marine reptile (a dyspeptic ichthyosaur?). It couldn't digest the casings, it puked them out, and that's our belemnite battlefield! Vomit and dung — my life's work. Now to convince Dr. Acworth (i.e., that it was his idea in the first place).

You must be sitting your exams this week. Take a good pen. Try out the one I left in the top drawer of my desk. Also, if faced with a question you don't understand, write with authority about something else.

Pax,

George

For months my mother's letters had featured Phillip and his girlfriend, Betty Stalling. They'd been engaged since Christmas, and he'd been going to Burnley to take his high-school equivalency so he could get into the Air Force if there was a war. But still I was startled when she reported on their wedding, I couldn't seem to keep the two of them together in my mind. In my mind Betty stood in a row of motherless girls, a nine-year-old with an earnest face and a thin white braid hanging down each shoulder. On the off-chance that this news was true, I took two pounds out of my account at the building society and bought a fine black enamelled tray with red birds on it as a wedding gift. The woman in the shop on King Street helped me pack it up for shipping.

In June a letter came from my father:

We're looking forward to you finishing school. Your mother is poorly and Dr. Ross can't seem to say what the trouble is. Betty is a big help, but your mother would like to see you home.

Lying on my bed after tea I read the letter again and decided that this was a ploy that could and should be resisted. I was longing for Sixth Form: for
Othello. Paradise Lost.
The French Revolution. And the French subjunctive, that intriguing mood that would equip me for expressing doubt and desire on the Champs Élysées. When they got over this war idea, when Madeleine and I went to Paris. Within a week I'd come up with my own ploy and wrote back:

Uncle Stanley and Aunt Lucy don't think it would be wise for me to travel this summer with things so uncertain. If I could finish Sixth Form, I could teach after I come home.

And then I went on to tell them that I'd had an essay on the life of George Eliot published in the school magazine. (I
wonder who that fellow is?
I pictured them saying to each other.) All designed to show my mother I was out of her reach, and it seemed to work, because it was a long time before I heard from them again.

That summer Stanley was named to the ARP — as an Air Raid Precautions warden. He would do this on a volunteer basis until war was declared, and then he would leave the mill. Aunt Lucy was not in favour. He already had varicose veins from wearing puttees in the last war, and all the ARP wardens did was walk. Nevertheless he wound his puttees on and went to the first ARP meeting, where they gave him a coupon to pick up a blue overall, a tin helmet and a whistle at a depot in the precinct. After that first meeting he set to work making wood and canvas shutters for the windows. The window over the front door, the fanlight, he painted black.

This war will be fought in the air, he said.

Oh, Stanley, that's ever so ugly, said Aunt Lucy. What will we do afterwards?

If
there's an afterwards, said Uncle Stanley with satisfaction, we'll break it out and get another.

Uncle Stanley rolled sticky tape over the fanlight in a cross-hatching pattern. Then he fished a little screwdriver out of his pocket and took the glass face off the mantel clock. The mirror in the front hall had to go as well. (You girls won't be primping, he said. You'll have better things to think about.) All of these deadly missiles he packed into a crate destined for George's shed. Then he went down to the shops and picked up a new bucket and a jute bag of sand. If a bomb landed in the hall, we were to hold the sandbag in front of our faces as a shield while we ran up to it. The bucket was for water to put the fire out if the sand didn't do the trick.

Aunt Lucy said we should each have a new frock while you could still get fabric for that sort of thing. Her own was well advanced and Nettie Nesbitt came over to hem it. It had a full skirt with buttercups sprinkled over it, and the bodice was pale green like willows in the spring. Talking around the pins in her mouth, Nettie Nesbitt told us about working at the munitions factory at Chilwell in the Great War and how the sulphur in the TNT turned her skin yellow. I was just as yellow as that, she said, picking out a bright patch at the centre of a buttercup in Aunt Lucy's skirt. She was only sixteen at the time, younger than all of us girls. She was called a canary.

Oh, my poor dear, said Aunt Lucy. Well, you'd never know it now. You have skin like a rose (which could not have been further from the truth). Aunt Lucy stood on a kitchen chair, her own face flushed pink from the cry she'd had that morning, revolving slowly while Nettie crouched below her. When Nettie got round to the beginning again she stuck the last of her pins into the pincushion on her wrist and sat back on her heels and sang,

There's no uniform so dinky As the girls' munition blue She's working hard for the coming home Of the boys at the front so true.

Dinky? laughed Madeleine from the floor, where she lay on a carpet of the
Oldham Chronicle.
She caught my eye and made a droll face. Listen to this, she said, bending over to read out:
Sir: I wish to call the public's attention to the grave risk posed by individuals of Teutonic origin residing in our midst. Allowing such individuals free access to bicycles and roadway maps is the height of folly and a threat to the security of the British people.
Mr. Schwartz at the pharmacy! she cried. He has a bicycle.

Oh, they do go on, said Aunt Lucy, still standing like a queen on her chair. Nobody living in Blighty today would side with the Germans.

Don't you believe it! cried Nettie Nesbitt. She hoisted herself to her feet and looked passionately about. There was them working for the Huns right in Chilwell. In 1916! Why do you think our lads had such a wretched time at the Somme? Their shells was duds! Not one in three would fire proper. It was them devils at Chilwell lost the war for us.

No one bothered to correct her. Aunt Lucy put her hand on Nettie's shoulder and stepped down. I've enough to plague me without being frightened of my own neighbours, she said. She had a glazed look, as though she'd been sitting up all night at the bedside of a dying loved one. Everyone was waiting. I could not be afraid the way Aunt Lucy was because I had no idea what was coming. None of our ways of seeing this was right — that's what I felt. If you see the funnel of a cyclone twisting across the fields towards you, you don't have any idea what you should fear, but you know that it will teach you.

That summer was as hot as home. We girls went around with no stockings. Out on Oldham Edge there was a breeze, and I tried to get Madeleine to bring her embroidery hoop and work outside, but she would not, she said it was common. I went out alone, walking through the prickly gorse, sweat trickling down from my hairline, and looked out at the dry brown Pennines. Remembering snow, a fantastic notion, the wetness and coldness of it, the way it blew into a sculpted frozen sea my last winter at home. I thought of snow and one night I dreamt of it, the field between our place and the Feazels' lying glistening in moonlight.