Running to Paradise (4 page)

‘
I don’t judge her, I’m simply stating a fact; it was how she was.’

Tentatively
I took her arm, she seemed, all of a sudden, so sad. ‘Come back and have tea. I bought crumpets this morning.’

She
looked up at me and smiled. A strand of dark hair blew across her face in a sudden gust of wind and she pushed it back under her fur hat. ‘Tempter! But no, I must get home and do some work.’ We walked in silence under the bare trees.

‘
How does it go?’ she said. ‘I’ve had the damn thing on the brain for days, but I can’t seem to get it right: that thing about golden girls and lads coming to dust?’

‘
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the furious winter
’s rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:

Golden lads and girls all must

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.’

‘
That’s it,’ she said. ‘How sad, how very, very sad.’ Suddenly she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, her lips were icy cold and she smelt of roses.

‘
Goodbye, get on with your digging, dear old Guy. Who knows what you’ll find.’

‘
I’ll see you again soon? I need your help...’ But she’d gone, lost in the crowded pavements of early evening. It would be dark in a few minutes. I turned up my coat collar and decided to walk back to the flat: I’d leave the crumpets for another day. ‘Golden girls and lads all must — as chimney-sweepers, come to dust...’

4

“Miss Char, come back at once! At once, do you hear, it’s long past tea time.”

So
begins Char’s piece on her meeting with H. A. Elliott, the poet. She wrote it at my suggestion on the occasion of Elliott’s centenary, and we sent it in to the local newspaper. I well remember the excitement when we had their letter of acceptance — they even sent round a reporter for an interview — and the blood, sweat and tears entailed in its composition. Char persuaded me to write the biographical note on Elliott at the end, maintaining my literary style was more suited to such things than hers (her way of saying she couldn’t be bothered). Her account of her early childhood at Renton and the events leading up to the birth of her sister, Rosie, came much later, when Char was already in St Hilda’s. The former was also written at my suggestion and was intended originally to be much longer. I’d got both pieces out to lend to Sophia, then decided to re-read them myself first. Until Sophia asked about them, I’d forgotten their existence.

My First Great Adventure by C. Seymour

‘Miss Char, come back at once! At once, do you hear, it’s long past tea time.’ The starched nurse seethed on the verandah steps. She was a jobbing nanny brought in while my Nanny was on holiday and she didn’t much like the place. A light, summer rain was falling and she wasn’t going to get her clean uniform skirt dirty for the likes of that one. Mr Osborn would be home from the City soon; let him give the child a walloping. That’s what she needed. But with Mrs Osborn’s potty ideas, she very much doubted if that’s what she’d get. Probably some daft stuff about God not liking her to be disobedient, and what had he got to do with it, she’d like to know. The nurse retreated into the shelter of the verandah which ran along the length of the house and was littered with potted palms, lemon verbena, basket chairs, dogs’ hairs and newspapers. She peered angrily through the glass at the tiny figure in the garden: it was raining quite heavily now. No good, she’d have to fetch the minx, but she’d be bothered if she wouldn’t go and fetch a mac first from the cloakroom to put round her shoulders. She hurried huffily through the drawing room, the little watch she wore pinned to her chest bouncing angrily up and down on her bosom. The room was empty this afternoon: Mrs O was sitting on some committee somewhere. Crossing the hall, its parquet floor alive with growling tiger skins, she eventually reached the cloakroom at the end of a long passage that smelt slightly of cat. A few minutes later, arriving back at the garden door, now suitably enveloped in one of Mr O’s voluminous mackintosh capes, she became aware of two things, both of them infuriating. One, it had stopped raining, and two, Miss Char had totally disappeared.

It was the summer of 1907. I was five years old and had just made the enchanting discovery that I could run really fast, and the faster I ran the more fun it was. I didn
’t care a hoot about the rain trickling down my neck through my liberty bodice or even that my knickers felt damp. I was, in fact, quite scantily clad in comparison with most Edwardian children; another of my mother’s fads was that she strongly disapproved of flannel petticoats, button boots and the like, believing them to be restrictive to young children. I had seen with delight the angry Nurse Jump gesticulating from the verandah steps. I must have been a quite awful child, I adored enraging people.

‘
I’m Char Osborn, I’m Queen of the May,’ I sang, jumping up and down, and stuck out my tongue at the luckless nurse. I’d been taken by Nanny to watch the May Day revels in the village and to be crowned Queen of the May, surrounded by suitably adoring attendants, was my current ambition. ‘Naughty little girls are never asked to be Queen,’ Nanny had said dampingly, ‘and it’s only for the village children. You’re a little lady, dear, and don’t you forget it.’ But I didn’t care. I should be Queen of the May if I wanted to and that was all there was to it.

Suddenly, ahead of me on the path, I noticed something that looked like a tiny pile of autumn leaves, only excitingly, it was gently pulsating. I knew at once what it was. It was one of my friends.
‘Hullo, old Toad, and how are you?’ I stroked him gently with one finger. He pulsated even more, glugged and tantalisingly hopped away, his long legs flying out behind him. By this time, need I say, my black stockinged knees were damp and muddy and there was green slime down the front of my pinafore. I looked back at the house to find that Nurse Jump had disappeared. Had she gone to fetch Ma? I felt a shiver of apprehension: Ma was someone to be reckoned with. Then I remembered the latter had driven away in the dog cart after nursery lunch, her red leather despatch case on the seat beside her. She wouldn’t be home for ages. And Pa? He never got home until bedtime: he went away in a train each day to somewhere called the City, where people made money, so Nanny said. ‘Look, Miss Char,’ she would call, ‘there’s your Pa’s train. He won’t be long now.’ And I would run to the nursery window and watch the smoke from the engine trail along the valley below and hear it whistle as it passed the signal box.

I licked the sweet raindrops trickling down from my nose and surveyed the empty rose garden: I was safe! It was then I decided to have an adventure. I started to run: through the wisteria arch, past the potting shed that stood the other side of the high, red brick wall enclosing the rose garden. A magic place the potting shed, and normally one I would love to spend a little time in: dipping my fingers in the sacks of compost, peat and fine sand, pulling at the seed heads hanging up to dry from the roof, peering into the dark recesses of the shed, lifting the lids of the huge crocks set on the earth floor and breathing in the fusty, musty, damp, earthy smell — but not today. Today I wanted adventure, real adventure, such as Tom Kitten experienced when he set off up the chimney, or Alice when she pursued the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole. After all, it wasn
’t every day you discovered you could run. Run really fast, that is: as fast as the foxes pursued so relentlessly by hounds when Pa and Ma went hunting. Past the potting shed came the greenhouses, and after these you could either go through a door in the wall that took you into the kitchen garden, or turn to the right outside the wall, where the path straggled through a small plantation to emerge three or four hundred yards further on at a kissing gate leading on to the road. This latter path was strictly out of bounds. Ragged boys from the town, so Nanny said, came and played on the Common opposite and sometimes tramps or gypsies camped there.

‘
Gypsies steal little girls, Miss Char, so you just watch out,’ Polly the housemaid said. I had asked about the bright, painted caravans we’d seen that morning on the Common as we passed by in the governess cart on our way to the village to see old Mrs Simms.

‘
Why?’ I asked, filled with excited curiosity.

‘
To train them for the circus, of course; make them swing about on them trapeze things, and if they ain’t no good at that, then they eat ‘em for their dinner.’

‘
I should be good, I know,’ I said, and for a moment longed to be stolen by gypsies.

When I reached the door in the wall that led to the kitchen garden, I paused, trying to decide which path to take. The kitchen garden was a temptation, but Smith, the gardener, normally an ally, would be bound to be there and could I trust him not to take me back to Nurse Jump? I took a deep breath and decided to follow the forbidden path that led to the road. If the village boys were at the gate, I could always hide in the bushes, and if there were gypsies on the Common they
’d never be able to catch me now I could run so fast.

I started down the path. Nettles on either side, heavy with rain, leaned forward and brushed my skirt, their brown seeds dribbling on to the muddy ground: everything steamed in the sudden warmth of the sun. It was farther than I had imagined to the road, and I had just begun to wonder if I would ever get there when the path began to diverge from the wall it had been following. One more bend and there in front of me was the kissing gate, set in the thick, hawthorn hedge that bordered the road.

Shivering with excitement, I crept up to the gate and peered through the slats. Before me lay the road, its normally dusty surface running in muddy rivulets. To the right lay the village, where we went to church and to see Mrs Simms and for lots of things; to the left lay the town, where we hardly ever went. A smelly, noisy place, Ma said, and riddled with disease. But it wasn’t the road — in any case deserted — that caused the thrill of excitement that shot through me (a thrill so sharp I can feel it to this day), it was the sight of the strange man seated on the grass on the other side of the road.

He sat beside a small fire, his back to me, his long legs stretched out in front of him; there was string tied round the bottom of his trouser legs and his feet were bare. He wore a funny, broad-brimmed hat and his black, curly hair straggled on to his shoulders. I could not see his face, but I could see the smoke coming up from his pipe. Beside him on the ground was a large, untidy pack, things tumbling out of it on to the flattened grass. Then, most excitingly of all, I became aware that what I had first thought to be merely a branch or twig seen through the smoke haze of the fire in reality was a live monkey! Scarcely daring to believe my eyes, I watched, fascinated, while the monkey ran round the fire, jumped over the man
’s legs and climbing on to the pack on the ground began to fling things about in a seemingly frenzied search. At last he appeared to have found what he was looking for, a small paper packet, which he seized excitedly with both hands.

‘
Oscar,’ the man shouted, roused from his apparent lethargy by the monkey’s antics, ‘leave my bloody humbugs alone, will you? A fellow must have a few rudiments of civilisation, you know. God knows, a bag of humbugs don’t amount to much in the scheme of things, but it represents a certain humble pleasure.’ My excitement turned to astonishment; the strange man sounded like Pa! Somehow I had imagined that when he spoke he would sound like Smith, or old Bramble, who swept the chimneys, or even Ben the garden boy, but not Pa. Then came a thought. Surely there could be nothing to fear from such a person: someone who talked like Pa wouldn’t steal me or indeed force me to work in a circus, even though he did happen to be the fortunate owner of a monkey. I doubted too if he would eat me. At least, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t. And anyway, come what may, I had to get a closer view of that monkey. So up I got from my crouching position, and after dusting somewhat ineffectually the grass and mud from my knees, pushed my way through the kissing gate.

The man never turned round; he had resumed his smoking, having given the monkey a sharp slap that sent him gibbering with annoyance a few yards away on the other side of the fire. I trotted across the road, my boots making footprints in the fast caking mud, and creeping over the few yards of tussocky grass that separated me from the man, tapped him smartly on the shoulder.

‘What the deuce—?’ He spun round angrily alert and the monkey chattered in fright.

‘
Hullo,’ I said, my voice squeaking with nerves. ‘May I please talk to your monkey?’ The man, by this time on his feet, looked down at me, the fear in his eyes receding to be replaced by wariness mixed with amusement.

‘
He doesn’t like little girls, I’m afraid. Where’s your nurse?’

‘
My nurse is an idjut and I know your monkey will like me. Please.’ I smiled winningly and put on my ‘wheedling’ voice. The man, in spite of his strange clothes, was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. He was old, of course, but not as old as Pa. His face was golden brown from the sun. His eyebrows, thick and black as his hair, slanted in a funny way that reminded me of those pictures of the devil in Nanny’s ‘Jesus’ book, the eyes beneath them green like Augustus the nursery cat’s, but flecked with tiny spots of brown. The bottom part of his face was obscured by a black, silky beard and moustaches and from one ear dangled, fascinatingly, a single gold ear ring. He was tall and very thin.

The man glanced up and down the road and then at the peaceful, empty landscape behind him, as if to see if there was anyone watching, then satisfied, looked down again at me. He laughed, but it was not a happy sound, and suddenly pulled the ancient
‘wideawake’ hat from his head (it was then I saw his poor, mangled hand, the fingers claw-like, a deep gash encircling the wrist like some obscene bracelet) and spun the hat high into the air: it finally came to rest on one of the scrubby thorn bushes that dotted this part of the Common.

‘
Go bring me my chapeau, you son of Satan,’ he yelled at the monkey. I watched, enchanted, while the little creature ran rapidly over to the thorn bush and seized the hat, which he proceeded to place upon his own head, then after executing a kind of jig, he slowly and with a wary eye on me, came towards the man.

‘
The lady won’t hurt you, Oscar, or at least one hopes she won’t,’ he said very softly. And I held my breath as the monkey crept closer and closer, finally coming to a halt directly in front of us, chattering and nervously picking fleas out of his fur. He looked rather like a bedraggled mushroom.

‘
Thank you, Oscar, and now the lady will reward you.’ The man, with one hand, relieved the monkey of his hat, which he replaced on the back of his head, and with the other patted the pocket of his tattered jacket, from which bulged the packet of humbugs. ‘Offer him a humbug,’ he hissed. The bag was sticky and the humbugs had all stuck together, but somehow I managed to dislodge one, and placing it on the palm of my hand (held flat with the thumb tucked neatly in, as I had been taught to do when offering a horse a lump of sugar) I thrust it, trembling only slightly, towards the monkey. Please God, don’t let him bite me. I shut my eyes and waited. Suddenly a movement, a slight scratching on my outstretched hand; I opened my eyes and the sweet had gone. A few feet away Oscar sat examining it with every appearance of delight.