The Sea Change (3 page)

We kept them away for so long. There was no
reason – other than a war – for us to let them in.

Mama said that, even if there had been no
evacuation, there would have been other wars, other threats that would have overtaken
us. But in my mind we had a course mapped out, which, once lost, could not be caught
again – only ghosted. The men and women we would have married, the children they would
have given us: everything remains locked in some parallel womb of impossibility.

If it hadn’t have been for the war, we
would still be hidden in the Downs with Father, coaxing our living out of the land. Each
meal – dark with the earth from which it had been drawn – would have been as hard-earned
as before. And the water would have tasted all the richer for having half a mile’s
walk sweated into it.

The army could not comprehend why we wanted
to stay. Winter floods and withering summers plagued the valley floor; Imber’s
water arrived in abundance or not at all. It was not uncommon for the Dock that ran
through the village to dry up completely in the summer. Then, come wintertime, we would
watch it bleed and swell into the floors and furnishings of the cottages bordering the
stream. The land was of little use for anything other than sheep farming, a hard
vocation at the best of times. The military watched the fluctuations in the weather;
they saw how little the seasons yielded us; they watched from all four sides of
Salisbury Plain. Then they crept in on us, preying on the precariousness of our harvests
and buying up our farmers’ land, piece by piece, plot by plot.

But even if the crops had died out or the water
had dried up, we would have survived on other things: long draughts of air sprinting
across the Plain; the sunlight snagging itself on each chalk milestone; the spasm of a
newborn lamb in our hands. I think of this impossible valley so often that the light
there has yellowed; the trees have grown fuller and the flowers have turned to glass.
The more I paint it in my mind, the stiller everything becomes. But we were not so
hidden, not so set apart, as to be forgotten by the war.

Aside from fetching gas for our lamps, we
had very little cause to travel to town before war broke out. Seven miles from the next
village, we were not in anybody’s way; and Imber had preferred to be left to its
own devices. It was a meek existence and one that we did not complain about. Even our
parsonage, a sprawling yawn of a house that rivalled Imber Court for size, did not have
its own water or electricity.

My father preferred it that way; he hated
how the grandness of the house set us apart from our neighbours and caused them to treat
our family with a deference that we neither deserved nor desired. When Imber Court
offered him the use of their outside tap, he continued to send Freda and me to fetch
water from the well so that we would not be seen to be distancing ourselves from the
rest of the parish.

Mama stopped short of putting her head in
her hands when on one occasion, while dining at Imber Court, he took issue with Major
Whistler’s complaint about the chalky taste in his tap water. Father was at pains
to remind him that the rest of the village had to walk half a mile to quench their
thirst. Mama laughed away his affront as best she could. Yet behind closed doors my
father knew his place. He instructed us on a regular basis never to go and play in the
grounds of the Court unless invited by the Major. My mother would add, with a wry smile
in his direction, that if we were fortunate enough to receive an invitation, it would be
thoroughly improper to mention their tap.

My sister loved nothing more than to go and
play in Imber Court. She thought the Whistlers a rather superior breed, which she should
emulate wherever possible. She mimicked their mannerisms and their tone of voice and
even purchased a pair of clip-on earrings that she thought resembled Mrs
Whistler’s. When the other girls called her a copycat, she bought a different pair
to distinguish herself – as if they wouldn’t guess and smile archly behind her
back. She hated having to go to school with the rest of us and begged Father for a
governess, like Mrs Whistler had had when she was younger. She needn’t have
bothered asking: Freda would not have been given her way even if we had possessed the
savings for such a thing. My father wanted us elbow to elbow in the local school with
the rest of the village, where we belonged. It was hard on Freda – at fourteen, she had
been the eldest of Imber’s schoolchildren and the brightest, and Mrs Williams, the
mistress, had quickly run out of ways to keep her occupied. She had treated her more
like an assistant than a pupil. It had angered me to watch my sister turn from her own
books to help the labourers’ children with their writing. The little ones loved
her for it but I saw only her pride at having been singled out. She used to tick them
off terribly for not paying attention. It was no wonder their heads lolled with sleep in
class when they had been up before the sun, tending sheep on the Downs. Freda thought
all farmers lacked wit and sharpness and was not afraid to say so. She had not seen, as
I had, the maturity with which an Imber boy could whistle orders to his dog and keep an
entire flock in check. She was too busy copying Mrs Whistler’s jewels.

I resented having to scrub my hands and face
after school and put on my best dress to go to Imber Court, particularly when they asked
us to play tennis. Mrs Whistler loved to see the old court being used by the children
but I was bewildered as to why anyone would want to fill an entire afternoon by hitting
a ball back and forth over a net. She seemed to have forgotten that, in the rest of the
village, there were harvesting and rabbiting and
shearing to be done. I
sat at the side of the court for most of the matches and let Freda play with the Dean
children from Seagram’s Farm. She used to dance through her games, stretching out
her long limbs and nursing the ball neatly over to the opposite side of the court; I was
convinced Harry Dean let her win only because she was pretty. It became a ritual of mine
to ignore the pop, pop of the ball on the grass and pick out underneath it the slow
grind of a tractor somewhere on the Downs. The farm workers told me that tennis was an
idle sport for people who had nothing better to do. I wanted to be out in the fields
with them, in the midst of the seasons, ushering livestock through winter and spring and
reaping the rewards of summer. I wanted to be with Father, not playing silly games with
the Deans. He would be the first to roll up his shirtsleeves and lend his help in the
lambing season to any farmer in need of it. I would beg to go with him in the hope of
trying my hand at birthing lambs and loading the mangers in the barns with hay. Provided
I wasn’t engaged for an afternoon at the Court, he would always give in, despite
protests from Mama. We would push a bottle of hot tea into one of Father’s woollen
socks and pass it around the labourers when we found them on the Downs.

He didn’t treat me like a normal
little girl. He knew I was different from Freda. When the military widened the road
through the village and channelled the Imber Dock through stern, concrete pipes, Freda
caught me red-handed, up to my knees in mud, trying to crawl from one end of a pipe to
the other. I tried to explain that the schoolmistress’s son had dared me to do it
but Mama was furious when she found out. She said I had disgraced myself in front of the
entire village. Father, however, ran a hand through my muddied hair and told me not to
get caught next time.

He might not have cared about having his own
well, but he was not averse to craving some of the superfluities that life in Imber did
not afford: he longed for a telephone line. The dark
arcs dissecting
the skies of Salisbury and Warminster fascinated him; I often caught him running his
eyes along them on our journeys into town, as if he were trying to listen in on the
conversations sealed inside the wires.

Not even Imber Court had use of a telephone.
When a line finally arrived, it was installed with Mrs Carter in the post office. It was
to be a public telephone, which, much to my father’s glee, we were all at liberty
to use.

On its first day of operation, the queue for
the telephone stretched all the way down the road to the smithy. My school friends Pete
and Annie were sent across to Chitterne to receive calls from those of us who could not
think of anyone beyond Imber to telephone. I remember nervously slotting in the pennies,
waiting for the voice of the operator and pressing button A with a giggle, just as Mrs
Carter had instructed me to do, as soon as I heard Pete’s voice all small and
compressed and ticklish in my ear. But when I think back to those first words whistling
through the wires to places beyond the Plain, I can’t help but feel that we
entered into an irrevocable bargain: wired for ever to the outside world, we could never
again know what it was to be fully alone.

I have begun to trace the roots of the
evacuation back to that sprawl of unsightly wires. What if we had stayed separate? Kept
ourselves to ourselves. Maybe then they would have left us alone, firing shells from one
side of the valley to the other without even knowing we were there.

It would be different if Annie and Pete were
around: they would anchor me, stop me keeping everything behind glass, in a snow globe,
as if it can never be retrieved. But they’re not here. Annie married a northerner,
and Pete – it’s enough to say he’s gone too. They did not suffer the trouble
that I had in moving away. I can still imagine their faces pressed into the black
lacquer of the telephone receiver, Pete holding the earpiece, Annie trying to grab it
from him, as they made their first call.

Annie, a small, pale sprig of a girl, was
scared stiff of my sister. She was in awe of the dresses that she wore at weekends and
would do anything she could to avoid being frowned upon by her at school. She found it
difficult to keep up with the others; I would watch helplessly as Mrs Williams called
her to the front of the class to solve sums and conjugate verbs: she would always
flounder over the answers and I wished Mrs Williams would stop asking her in front of
everyone. I’d try to mouth the answers to her. But Freda always caught her
squinting in my direction, which only made it worse for Annie. She feared Freda’s
scorn more than she did the schoolmistress. Annie didn’t have any sisters of her
own; if she had, she would have realized that, by choosing to become my friend, she was
placing herself directly in Freda’s line of fire.

Nevertheless, we became inseparable.
Everybody else thought her a foolish, bashful girl but I saw her spirit. Annie had a
good heart and that, to me, was more important than arithmetic, spelling or a
well-trimmed dress. With Annie by my side, I felt as if I could do anything. Imber gave
us the confidence that we might have lacked in larger, grander climes. Only in Imber
could a parson’s daughter roll up her skirt and dig a hole, take a pair of shears
to a sheep or play cricket. I hear stories, now, of girls who wept at the end of the
war; they said the fighting bought them their freedom. But I was already free. I
didn’t need their explosions, their calculated invasions, the gradual erosion of
what I had known.

Pete understood why I needed Imber. He knew
I depended on it in a way that he never had to. I’d catch him looking at me
knowingly when I tried to help with the thatching or stone walling. In any other place,
I would have been made to stay inside, like a proper parson’s daughter. It
unsettled me – the way he seemed to want to try to work me out with his eyes. But he was
too quick-witted to be made an enemy so I swallowed my inhibitions and made sure he was
my friend.

Out of all the boys in Imber, Pete was the most
practical – he fitted into other people’s families like a key cut for a door; it
didn’t matter if it was lambing or ploughing or firing a gun, he picked it up
quickly and became the best there was at it. It was the same with places: I took a long
time to settle into Wilton after we left Imber but it was only a week before everyone
knew Pete. He possessed an ease with the outdoors that showed itself in his shoulders
and limbs, a strength that everybody knew he would carry with him into adulthood. I
tried to ignore his good looks by joining in with the jobs he performed around the
village, casting myself as an ally rather than standing back and asking to be admired,
like the other girls. Annie was the worst: she played with her hair and pretended not to
hear his questions, just so he would ask them again. He was not the kind of boy with
whom I wanted to fall in love; every girl in the village had her eye on him – I hardly
needed to add my admiration. But I couldn’t help myself. I knew I saw something in
him that the others failed to see: the way he raised his eyebrows in a questioning
fashion every time somebody spoke to him. Or the manner in which he stood listening with
one foot always slightly ahead of the other, as if he were about to bolt at any minute.
He was always poised, never settled. He worked the land with vigour, as if striving for
something.

I was never presumptuous about his opinion
of me. Even when I happened to meet his eye, I was quick to stifle the thought that he
had looked at me first. It was fanciful. I was making it up.

The only small indulgence that I allowed
myself was his letters. Back in Imber, Annie and I would write a letter a week to Pete
even though he lived only half a mile away down Dog Kennel Lane. Mrs Carter must have
thought we were mad, spending all our pocket money on stamps and ink and envelopes that
would travel just a few hundred yards up the road. It was Annie’s idea to send him
letters. At first, I convinced myself that I was intervening simply to save her from
embarrassment. I would
correct her spelling and ensure that she limited
herself to the facts of the day: the weather, the lambing, the bus ride to Warminster.
Eventually she persuaded me to write my name next to hers after ‘Yours’.