September Starlings (31 page)

Our house was wonderful. There was a huge kitchen with flag floors and a black-leaded range. This room stretched all the way across the back of the house, and we lived in it for much of the time. Mother made a few quips about our rustic existence, but she set about the business of cleaning up, scrubbed out an aged dresser, balanced some plates on a rack above the fire, scraped the dirt off a massive table with bulbous legs and drawers at each side for cutlery.

When the kitchen was clean enough for her, she tackled the two front rooms, made one into a parlour and the other into a kind of study. Sometimes, Dad worked at a desk in the study, and Mother used the same room for her sewing, though never when Dad was working on account books. The sewing was not sensible stuff, as Mother’s seams were about as straight as a dog’s back leg, but she amused herself for a while with tapestry work, cross-stitched pictures of flowers and country cottages. I watched and
waited, knew that the novelty would wear off eventually, wondered where she would go for some adventure.

The upstairs of our house was in the roof, which made the bedrooms odd and exciting. There were two staircases, both of them narrow and tortuous. One led to my bedroom, and the other went up to a pair of interconnecting bedrooms where my parents slept. They no longer pretended to have a marriage, so Dad slept at the back of the house while Mother used the front room.

I loved my bedroom. It had lots of odd little corners, big beams, a shiny wooden floor and two windows, one at the front and the other at the back of the farmhouse. I used to stand in the dormer and stare at the mountains, spent hours wondering about fierce Yorkshire folk with sewn-up pockets and white roses in their buttonholes.

The bathroom was a nightmare. It housed a terrible bath with brown stains all over it and a single cold tap suspended from a bent lead pipe under the window. Above the bath sat a gas heater with a bad temper and an explosive cough. The farmer had been very proud of this acquisition, had demonstrated it to my father some months earlier while the sale was being negotiated. ‘He lit it,’ Dad said, ‘and it sent forth a long blue flame and a shower of sparks. The farmer’s face was black and his eyes looked terrified. I couldn’t remember whether he’d started out with eyebrows, but he had none after his adventure with the dragon. I think we’d better use a tin bath for now.’

The tin bath was where Mother drew the line. Once a week, she travelled on a rickety bus to Bolton and went to the slipper baths. I am sure that she must have gone to the public bath house in disguise, probably with a scarf on her head and dark glasses covering her eyes. When she returned, she was happier for a while, could even be heard humming under her breath. There was no doubt in my mind that Mother had found some entertainment in town, though her temper was always back to normal within twenty-four hours. ‘Laura, get some coal for this fire.
Laura, go to that awful shop for your father’s
Bolton Evening News
, and don’t dawdle on the way. Laura, lay the table, sweep the floor, peel these carrots, find me a tablet for this dreadful headache.’ She clouted me a few times, but the blows were almost half-hearted. I no longer crouched and cowered, refused to hide in the house when the marks of her blows shone bright on my face. As her power diminished, I relaxed, enjoyed my freedom.

Every weekend, I waited at the bridge, looked for Tommo, felt disappointment when he didn’t arrive. Anne came with me, wondered why I lingered for so long in the same spot. I distracted her, played games, fell into the water, cut my head and got stitched up by the local doctor. And he still didn’t come.

There seemed to be no poverty in the country. Everyone was robust and rosy-cheeked, no-one wore nit-caps, no-one sported heavy clogs with irons on the soles. There was no knock-a-door-and-run, no swinging from lamp posts, no fun. When I thought about it, there’d been no fun of that sort since I’d left the gang. And even snerchy Norma began to look vaguely interesting when viewed retrospectively. But gradually I grew used to the pace, slowed myself down, looked around until I found something to attract my butterfly attention. And I had Anne. Anne was the balm for any wounds I might have sustained during the lifting of roots. There were other compensations too, like a sky that was prettier, cleaner and bluer away from all the dust and smoke of a cotton town.

We had no proper pavements near the farm, just muddy dirt tracks and clinkered lanes that seemed to wander in circles that had lost any sense of direction they might once have had. The village street was cobbled, while the narrow pavements consisted of very uneven flags with steps here and there when the single thoroughfare dipped too deeply for paving stones.

There was just one shop, the place where Mother was not welcome, and it seemed to sell everything from postage stamps to lamp oil. The keeper, Mrs Miles, wore
fingerless gloves all the year round and sported a long black skirt that swept the floor as she walked. The shop was so dirty that Anne and I decided that Mrs Miles’s skirt served two purposes – one to cover her thin, bent frame, the other to gather the worst of the mess from her filthy floors.

This remarkable lady was a relic from bygone days, the sort of figure that was usually seen only in books about the Victorian era. Her hair was scraped back so tightly that it stretched the skin of her forehead, made it almost smooth, though the flattened wrinkles still showed and looked as if they had been drawn with a greyish pencil. She would have been tall except for the stoop, and the rounded shoulders were always covered by a fringed shawl that dangled in butter, sugar and any other commodity that required weighing and bagging. Anne and I liked her because she was weird – her individuality appealed to our romantic souls.

After a very short time, Mother refused outright to be insulted by the keeper of the village store, so she travelled to Bolton more frequently. The Bolton coach ran twice a week on market days, and my mother sat in its ramshackle front seat as it bounced to and from the metropolis on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

Auntie Maisie, a gregarious soul, was quite content to do her buying in Barr Bridge. The village took to her, and she was quickly on nodding terms with most of the inhabitants, on cup-of-sugar terms with her immediate neighbours in the row of cottages that climbed up the hill towards our house. As Auntie Maisie’s cottage was fastened to Mrs Miles’s shop, she never wanted for anything, even when the store was closed. So sunny was my aunt’s nature, that she soon melted old Ma Miles’s frost, became the aged crone’s nearest and dearest within a fortnight. ‘She’s mortallious troubled with her back, poor soul,’ said Auntie Maisie a few days after our arrival in the district. ‘So I’ve got her some of John’s liniment.’ Auntie Maisie would have fitted in anywhere with the
possible exception of hell, as she was a good Christian woman.

Of course, we had to go to school. Until now, education had been one of the elements in the tragedy we called life, a necessary poison that could not have been sweetened with a thousand sugar canes. I’d made friends among the holy women at St Mary’s, but the endless lists of places and battles and French verbs had been too much for a mind already saturated by images found in
Heidi
and
Little Women
. Because of my grounding in a ‘crammer’ school, the Barr Bridge centre of education made easy going for me. I became lazy and complacent, concentrated on the social aspect of school, learned little or nothing in my short time at St Mark’s.

Our school was attached to St Mark’s C of E church, and St Mark’s was also connected to the vicarage. The vicar was a round fat man with a round fat wife. Their plump children had married and wandered off, but photographs of the offspring sat in lines of military precision on a desk in the vestry. Apart from this small symptom of organization, our vicar was a hale-fellow-well-met sort of chap who blundered through life like a drone bee, dependent on others for some pattern to his existence.

Anne and I were summoned to the Reverend Conley’s presence early on in our career at St Mark’s. Reverend Conley was a favourite with all children. For a man of God, he was unusual, because he was not judgemental by nature. This lovely and loving man was a source of great comfort, because he gave tea parties to boys and girls in the vicarage and encouraged them to talk about anything at all. Troubles, however difficult to talk about, were blown away in an instant by the vicar, and no sin existed that he could not forgive and understand. He was a man of vision who recognized that children are people in the making, and he was there to listen to our opinions in a serious and sensible way.

He gave us an Uncle Joe’s apiece, a stick of barely sugar between us, and some advice on how to settle to country
living. ‘Cows,’ he said seriously, ‘are the ones with milk-bags hanging underneath. Bulls don’t have that particular equipment, but they can be savage, girls. The farmer across the road from you breeds cattle, Laura. Keep your gate closed and your eyes open. Don’t sit in nettles, don’t jump in the crop fields. Clean up after a picnic, say your prayers morning and night, and keep away from the Black Horse on Friday evenings. Labourers are paid on Fridays, and their language can get a bit dreadful after a pint or two of ale.’ He was not a solemn man by nature, so he twinkled at us then. ‘How are you getting along with Miss Armitage?’

One thing I knew by the age of ten was that I got on better with some grown-ups than I did with most children. They had to be fairly sensible adults, though, and I hadn’t met many of those. In fact, I could count them on my fingers with a few digits to spare for any future encounters that might be lucky. So far, I had collected Uncle Freddie and Auntie Maisie, who were warm and loving, and my father, who was vague, but charming. Then there was Sister Maria Goretti with whom I corresponded on a weekly basis, and Sister St Thomas who was in Ireland with bad rheumatics. I hadn’t forgotten the park keeper who had told me to look after myself, and I had recently met the vicar and our teacher, Miss Armitage. Miss Armitage promised to be secretive and of a romantic nature, so she was interesting. Nathaniel ‘Good’ Evans was dead, but he still counted as dead people didn’t really die … I was running out of fingers. Perhaps I was a lucky girl after all.

I was thinking about my mother, who was not charming, not sensible, not really an adult, when Anne kicked me on the shin. ‘Mr Conley wants to know how we are getting along with Miss Armitage.’

I pulled myself together and gave my full attention to the round-faced vicar. ‘Has she been crossed in love?’ I asked sweetly. Anyone could have asked this good man anything at all.

Anne awarded me another kick and I glared at her. The
blow was so hard that it might have propelled me to the other side of the vestry had I not hung on to my chair. To thank her for this favour, I narrowed my eyes, treated her to one of my hard looks.

The vicar folded his hands across a belly that was pleasantly rounded and comfortable. ‘Funny you should ask that,’ he muttered, as if talking to himself. After a small cough, he raised head and voice. ‘Why do you ask, Laura?’

‘It’s the way she dresses, Mr Conley. Frilly bits round the tops of her blouses and lipstick sometimes too. Not on her blouse, on her mouth – a nice, soft pink. She seems … very sad. As if she ought to give up waiting, but she still waits.’ Like I did. On a rusty bridge. For a boy called Tommo with peculiar hair.

Mr Conley twinkled again. When he smiled, his whole face lit up until the brightness spilled from him into the room. ‘You have an active imagination,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will write stories when you grow up.’ He was so sweet, a real father to the whole village. He turned his attention to Anne, ‘And what will you be, dear?’

‘Rich,’ she said. One of the things I loved about Anne was the fact that she never pulled a punch.

His laugh was deep and booming. For some unfathomable reason, his chuckle reminded me of dark fruit cake, the sort you get at Christmas with almond paste and white icing. I had to laugh too, because I realized that Anne also had fallen under the spell of this magical man.

‘How will you get rich?’ he asked.

‘By marriage.’ She had been reading again, I guessed. Something Victorian, probably about a beautiful girl who pined for a poor young man, waited for him to return from a war or something. And when he came back, he was rich after all, so everything ended well. ‘It’s the only way for a girl,’ she continued. ‘If I’d been a boy, I might have become a solicitor.’

Mr Conley pushed himself away from his desk and leaned back in the chair. ‘You can be a lawyer, Anne. Get
your scholarship, go to a good school, work hard. The universities are for women too. Of course, you’ll have to prove yourself once you get a job, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t succeed in time.’

‘Oh.’ Anne’s mouth remained round long after the quiet word had been breathed. She studied him closely to assess his seriousness. ‘Is that really true?’ she asked eventually.

‘I am a man of God. Would I lie?’

‘He wouldn’t lie,’ I said to Anne solemnly. ‘Because if he did, he’d go straight to hell for all eternity in sackcloth and ashes.’ For a child of supposed intelligence, I showed a marked tendency towards confusion. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Conley?’

His fat fingers looked like a row of pork sausages looking for a pan, all stretched skin and pink blotches. ‘You’ve been to a Catholic school, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, God is more forgiving than you think, my dear. But mendacity is not in my nature, so I do tend to speak the truth. You may look up “mendacity” in the dictionary later.’ He looked at Anne again. ‘Unfortunately, you will have to travel to school next year, when you leave St Mark’s. There’s a secondary school two miles away, but for a grammar education, you will need to go back to Bolton.’

Anne sucked noisily on her Uncle Joe’s. ‘There’s no bus, no tram.’

The vicar heaved himself up from the chair, easing the arms away from his heavy body. ‘If I grow any fatter, I shall need a sofa to sit on and a crane to pick me up.’ He walked to the door. ‘Pass your scholarships first, worry about buses when the time comes.’