The Monkey Puzzle Tree (7 page)

“It’s in all the Everyman books. It means that a good book is a friend and teacher for life.”

Gillian read the words again:
In thy most need to go by thy side.
It sounded better than Jesus. “Is it true?”

“As true as I’m sitting here, Gillian. Everything you need to know is in books.” Mrs. Farrell took the book in her hand. “And there’s another thing. When I’m reading this book, for example,” she held it up, “as I’ve done many times, I may seem to be sitting in this room, in the middle of all this,” she waved the book at the shabby room, “but in my mind, I’m in another place and another time, in the world of this book.”

“I know! And you don’t want to come back! I was like that with
The Wind in the Willows
when I finished it.”

Mrs. Farrell smiled at her as if she had known her all her life. Looking like someone called
The Blessed Damozel
in a book at home in Swansea, she glanced down at the sleeping baby. “But now, Gillian,” she said, “Vanna says that you’re living here in Tregwyr with your grandparents because of the war. Tell me, do they not mind that she is Roman Catholic? I know the feeling is against us in the village.”

“Um, well …”

The back door burst open, and Vanna rushed, white-faced, into the room. “Everything’s gone!” she cried, “The baby, and the bed, and the fire, and everything! And it’s all my fault! I’ve lost the baby Jesus!” She began to sob, yanking fiercely on her plaits.

Her mother stood up. “Calm down, Vanna. Don’t be so dramatic. You shouldn’t have taken it, but it’s not the end of the world. Did you look all around?”

Vanna shook her head, gulping.

“Well off you go to have another look.”

“I’ll never find him! Never! Now our whole crèche is spoiled! It’s no good without Jesus! I’ve ruined all our Christmases
for ever!
” She wrung her hands, sobbing and gasping.

“I’d go look, Mama, but I don’t know where.” Tears spilled down Francis’s cheeks.

“We’ve lost the baby Jesus!” wailed Bridie, followed by howls of “Jethuth! Jethuth!” from Patrick, and screams from the startled baby.

Mrs. Farrell picked up the baby and fetched a small packet of Smith’s Crisps which she began to dole out, one at a time. When they had all stopped crying, Gillian slipped out of the back door and ran to her grandparents’ house.

She found her grandmother and Tommy weeding the front garden.

“Grandma!” She stood as tall as she could. “I’m going to Vanna’s house right now. And I’m taking Tommy with me. Come on, Tommy.” She grabbed his hand and glared at her grandmother. “We’re going to help Vanna and Francis find Jesus.”

Her grandmother, open-mouthed, but speechless for once, stared at Gillian over her glasses.

Hand in hand, Gillian and Tommy ran down the garden path and up the road. When Gillian looked back from the corner, she saw that her grandmother had come out onto the pavement and was standing, trowel in hand, still staring.

W

Vanna got up to light
another cigarette. “We did have some happy times together there in Tregwyr, didn’t we? For years really, until all that Eleven Plus business.” Her face became somber. “I know I did well enough for myself in the end, but I totally believed then, of course, that passing that exam was going to be my only ticket out of poverty.”

Gillian put down her teacup. “I know. That’s what everyone said. You had to pass if you were ever going to make anything of yourself.” She sat back. “You know, I never did understand what happened to you then, Vanna. It was all very strange.”

W

In their last year
at elementary school, Gillian and Vanna had thrown themselves into being Miss Thomas’s star pupils. They read and swapped every novel they could find, the latest being
Ivanhoe
from Mrs. Farrell’s collection, and
Anne of Green Gables
from Gillian’s. They wrote sensational stories and deeply affecting poems, which they read to each other, and to anyone else who would listen. They drilled each other before spelling and vocabulary quizzes and tested each other relentlessly in mental arithmetic, firing quick questions out of nowhere such as “Seven times thirteen?” or “fifteen plus eight, plus seven, divided by six?” which had to be answered almost as quickly
.

Gillian’s father would sometimes play this game with her at weekends, unlike Vanna’s father who always told them to “piss off.” Her mother, however, until the new baby came, would find time to read their compositions, giving equal attention to Gillian’s efforts. She encouraged them both to take the exam very seriously. Their whole lives might depend on it, she said, a theme that was echoed by their teacher.

In September 1944, at the beginning of their last year at that school, Miss Thomas spoke seriously to the top class. “In May of this year,” she looked slowly around the room, “you will all be sitting the new examination. You’ll be tested to see if you should go on to the grammar school, and then possibly to university, or if you’d be better suited to a secondary modern or technical school.”

The children shifted in their seats and looked around at each other.

“You must start working hard
now
,” Miss Thomas went on. “You may think eight months is a long time, and that you needn’t worry yet about preparing for the exam. But I promise you, my dears, the time
will
pass, and one day, if you’re spared, each of you will be sitting here, in this very room, with the test paper on your desk.” Gillian and Vanna smiled smugly at each other. They were not worried. They had everything under control.

As the months went by, Gillian missed her talks with Mrs. Farrell now that there was another baby taking up all her time. When she told her grandparents that Mrs. Farrell had given herself a black eye bumping into the newel post, they had puzzled her by exchanging a meaningful glance and rolling their eyes. To Gillian’s relief, however, her grandmother had softened towards Vanna, even allowing her in the house at times. Gratified by her reaction to the story of Little Jim, and disarmed by her sobs on hearing
I’ll Take You Home
A
gain, Kathleen,
she had said, “That poor little girl! You can bring her here more often, Gillian. Perhaps she can learn something from spending time in our house.”

Gillian chose not to think about what her grandmother was up to, happy that she and Vanna could spend time together in the parlour in the evenings and on weekends. Whenever Vanna’s mother could spare her, they would settle down there together, among the antimacassars and china dogs, to do homework, read, and talk.

In time, however, Gillian became increasingly annoyed by Tommy who would barge in to sit, cross-legged and open-mouthed, staring at Vanna, apparently mesmerized by her hair, her freckles and her accent. Vanna did not seem to mind; she was used to worse things, Gillian knew, but it drove Gillian crazy. It seemed as though she was never free of him. He followed them everywhere, listening to them talking, telling tales if she went out of bounds or was mean to him. It did not help, either, that he had palled up with Francis. Next thing, she supposed, Francis too would be in the parlour with them of an evening. Her grandmother was already talking about his beautiful eyelashes.

As the class sat at their desks
,
back straight, feet crossed, pens and blotting paper at the ready, waiting for the first part of the Eleven Plus exam, the Composition question, to be given out, Gillian remembered with a start Miss Thomas’s words, way back in September, about time passing. She had understood, of course, in theory, about the passage of time, but had applied the principle in a day-to-day way only, not to large chunks of time. To have everything happen exactly as it had been foreseen months before came as a shock. Miss Thomas had spoken true: the time had passed, all eight months of it, and here they were, sitting at their desks, just as she had said, waiting for the test papers to be handed out. Gillian nodded her head, registering the momentous fact, and lifted her eyes to their teacher standing at the front of the room, her white blouse stiff with starch, the line of her parting straight as a ruler, the test papers in her hand.

In the next desk Vanna, freckles standing out on her sharp white face, sat with her hands tucked under her arms. She was not wearing any socks, and there was a purple bruise on her arm. She would be all right, though, Gillian thought; she nearly always had full marks for composition.

Gillian checked that there was plenty of ink in her inkwell and put a new nib in her wooden pen as Miss Thomas moved around the room, placing the papers face-down on the desks. Three-quarters of an hour later, after checking her composition for spelling or punctuation mistakes, and reading it through one more time, she put down her pen with a satisfied sigh. She had written about “My Favourite Place,
”
the Ilston Valley, with its successive waves of snowdrops, primroses and violets, and bluebells.

Feeling as if she had just woken up, she looked over to see how Vanna was getting on, and saw, to her dismay, that she had written only a few smudged lines. She was looking dopily into the distance, the shadows under her eyes matching the ink stains on her paper.

“I couldn’t think,” she said as they fetched their milk in the playground. “My bloody pen nib had a bloody hair in it, and I couldn’t get it out, and I didn’t have another bloody nib.” She downed her milk in one go and slammed the bottle back in the crate. “Ouch!”

“Why didn’t you tell Miss Thomas?”

“She said no disturbances, remember, stupid?”

Worried, Gillian slurped the last of her milk with a straw. “Maybe you’ll ace the other tests.”

“I’m not doing them. There’s no point.” Vanna stumbled out of the playground in an awkward, knock-kneed run, the laces of her canvas shoes trailing.

After the tests were over, Gillian went to Vanna’s house. She knocked their special knock on the back door, but no one answered until Bridie opened the door a crack. “Vanna doesn’t want to see you,” she hissed. “She says to go away.” She banged the door shut.

Gillian stood there, biting her lip. Why was Vanna angry with her? It was not her fault that Vanna’s nib had a hair in it. Why hadn’t she brought a spare nib anyway, or asked Miss Thomas for one before the test started? She knocked on the door again, jumping back as Vanna pulled it open and stood blazing before her.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” White-faced, her red-rimmed eyes glaring, and her unloosed hair springing out around her head, she looked like that Medusa in their book of myths who could kill at a glance. “I expect you’ve come to gloat because you know you passed.” She stamped her foot. “I’m sick of you! And I’m sick of your grandma telling me about Jesus being her personal saviour and giving me cabbages to take home as if we were a charity case. And I’m sick of Tommy always mooning around after me. I hate the lot of you!”

“I thought we were friends.” Gillian swallowed miserably.

“How can we be friends? You’ve got so much more than me, and now I’ve got no chance to catch up.
Ever!
It’s just not fair! It’s not fair! Fuck off!” She burst into tears and slammed the door in Gillian’s face.

Shocked, Gillian walked slowly back to her grandparents’ house. She had never heard anyone she knew say that word out loud, not even Mr. Farrell. It was true, though. It was not fair. Why should she herself have a nice, comfortable place to call home, enough to eat, a good chance of getting into the grammar school, and everyone in the village being nice to her, when all Vanna had was the whole village looking down their noses at her and her family, which was from the wrong place and had the wrong religion. She had to live in that dark, cramped house too; full of little ones she had to mind, with not nearly enough food to go round, and a mean father to boot. She did have a lovely mother, though, Gillian told herself, but at the thought of Mrs. Farrell, her beautiful hair going grey and a yellow-green bruise around her eye, surrounded by hungry, crying children and the books Mr. Farrell said he was going to burn to save money on coal, she began to cry herself.

“Don’t tell me you spoilt your chances at that old exam?” Her grandmother put her arm around her and gave her a rock cake. “Never you mind,
cariad
! Your daddy will see you right, whatever.”

Gillian told her it was not that, and told her about the hair in the nib, and Vanna running away from the playground, and, omitting the ‘fuck-off’ bit of course, about her saying she hated Gillian, and slamming the door on her.

“Those Irish!” Her grandmother slapped invisible specks of dust off the Welsh dresser with a dishcloth. “Feckless, that’s what they are. There’s no helping some people. Why couldn’t they have sent the poor child to school properly prepared like you? I don’t suppose she even had a good breakfast.”

“But, Grandma, they’re so poor! And there are so many of them!”

“Well that’s their own fault, isn’t it?”

Gillian looked at her in surprise. “What, being poor? Or having so many children?”

“Both. They should work harder and look after their money better. And they should control themselves. We managed. Why can’t they?”

Asking herself how Mrs. Farrell could manage better, and what good controlling herself would be, and finding no answers, Gillian took her rock cake out to the garden, planning to sit in the elderberry tree, now in full flower, and try to calm down. About to perch on the usual branch, she saw that the bark where she wanted to sit had come loose, and tugged at it with her free hand. She leapt back with a yelp, dropping the rock-cake. Woodlice, each about a third of an inch long, swarmed over the exposed limb, crawling away into crevices on their multiple hair-like legs, or curling into serrated grey balls and dropping off the tree into the dirt. Shuddering, she ran back into the house. She would retreat to her bedroom and read something, anything, as long as it was not about insects or exams, or people being mean to each other. Shutting the bedroom door, she took
Five Run Away Together
off her bookshelf in the vain hope of putting Vanna’s strange behaviour out of her mind. “Why did she fail?” she kept asking herself, “Why didn’t she even try?”