London Pride (11 page)

‘One of the cats had kittens this morning,' Baby told them. ‘They're ever so pretty.'

‘We'll go an' see 'em after church,' Joan decided. ‘How many's she got?'

There were four, one black, one ginger and two tabby like their mother, who was lying in the nest of straw she'd made herself at the far end of the barn, purring and contented as the little creatures squeaked and suckled, their tiny bodies trembling with pleasure.

Peggy was enraptured by them. ‘They're so soft,' she said, stroking the velvety fur on the black kitten's tremulous back. Soft and defenceless with their tiny scrabbling paws and their eyes shut tight. ‘I can feel his spine. All the little bones. Could we pick them up?'

‘I don't see why not?' Joan said. ‘She don't seem to mind.'

So they each picked up a kitten to cuddle and Peggy
had one of the tabby ones, which she held right up under her chin, thrilled by its tiny warmth and the way its little paws scrabbled into her neck. ‘It's trying to climb,' she said. ‘Oh it's lovely. D'you think Mum would let me have it for a pet?'

‘I want one too if you're having one,' Baby said.

The mother cat was beginning to look anxious, her green eyes very watchful.

‘She wants 'em back,' Joan said, setting her kitten gently down on the straw beside its mother's extended flank.

Baby and Peggy relinquished their kittens too, Peggy very reluctantly, and they all watched while the mother cat washed all four with her harsh pink tongue, gently holding them down with one paw and licking them, from their dear little round heads to their funny little spiky tails.

‘They're the prettiest things I've ever seen,' Peggy said. ‘I shall come and see them every day. An' I'll ask Mum tonight.'

‘Wait till I've gone back then,' Joan said. ‘If you're going to make her shirty I'd rather be out of it.'

‘Will it make her shirty?' Peggy wondered. But she knew it was likely. Mum and Aunt Maud were both the same. They got shirty at the least little thing and they always seemed to be on the edge of having a row. One would start to say something unkind and then stop and make a grimace, and the other one would reply with something equally nasty, and she'd stop half-way too, and shrug her shoulders and look hateful. There wasn't any sense in it.

‘Yes,' Joan said. ‘Either her or Aunt Maud. You know what they're like.'

‘Sometimes I wish they'd have a proper barney and have done with it,' Peggy said.

Joan had her own grimace now, which she put on whenever a grown-up was being silly. ‘I think they enjoy carping,' she said.

‘The only time they agree with one another is when they're hiding something from Grandpa.'

‘I've noticed,' Joan said. ‘Come on, we'd better be
getting in, or it'll be time to set the table and we shan't be there and then we
shall
cop it.'

So they went in, and as the atmosphere round the supper table was rather fraught Peggy decided to wait till next day before she asked about the kitten.

It was a decision she was to regret for a very long time.

The next evening as soon as she got home from school, she left Baby sitting by the stove and rushed off to the barn.

She could hear the kittens squealing as she ran in the door. Dear little things. Then she noticed that one of the farm hands was kneeling in the straw where the mother cat had made her nest. He looked up as she came running in, shifting his body slightly in her direction, and she saw that it was Josh who lived in the end cottage, and that he had all four kittens held tightly in one hand.

‘You won't hurt them, will you?' she said, walking towards him, and worried in case the mother cat was upset by having all her babies removed from the nest at once. They're ever so little.'

‘Hurt 'em?' he said, and he laughed in a rough horrid way, showing the gaps in his teeth. ‘That's rich! Hurt 'em!'

She was suddenly afraid, remembering the pig. ‘What are you going to do with them?' she said.

His answer was immediate and laconic. ‘Why drown 'em, gel. What else? Vermin they are.'

‘Oh you can't!' she cried, her hands to her mouth in distress.

But he was half-way across the barn, with the mother cat mewing at his heels, and already thrusting the kittens into a bucket. She could hear the slop of the water as he pushed them down, and their paws scraping against the tin sides, and their frantic, tiny screams. ‘Oh please!' she said. ‘Don't! I'll look after them.'

‘Don't be daft,' he said, prodding into the bucket with a broom handle. ‘Always drown kittens we do. Tha's the way of it. We'd be overrun else. You wouldn't want that.'

But she would, she would. She couldn't bear this awful, unnecessary, lingering death. And the mother cat crying so terribly too.

It seemed hours before the little mewing cries finally
stopped and then it was so quiet in the barn that she could hear her own heart beating. The farm hand trudged out of the door swinging the bucket in his hand. ‘Shove off home,' he said to her as he passed. ‘You got no business in 'ere.'

But she stayed where she was. She was too shocked and miserable to do anything else, and besides somebody had to look after the poor mother cat, who had crept back to her empty nest and was licking her swollen teats. Didn't he understand how awful it was to see your babies being killed? He could at least have left her one. He didn't have to drown them all. It was too cruel. Weeping with pity, she crept into the straw beside the little cat and began to stroke her back, very very softly.

‘If I was grown up,' she said passionately, ‘you could be my cat. I'd take you away and keep you somewhere safe and you could have as many kittens as you wanted and I wouldn't drown
one
. Not
ever
. You poor thing.'

But she wasn't grown up. She was only eight and she had no power at all.

After that she took tit-bits out to the cat whenever she could, although she was very careful to do it when there was no one about to see her, just in case Josh came back and decided to drown the mother as well as her babies. And the kittens died again and again in the misery of her dreams.

If only we could go back to London, she thought, when she woke wet-eyed and grieving. If only Mum would make up her mind and take us all back. Joan wouldn't have to go on working in the kitchen and getting burnt and Mum wouldn't have to go on living here and arguing with Aunt Maud, and we could take the cat with us and let her keep all her kittens.

But Mum showed no signs of wanting to go back to London. She never ever mentioned the place. And that was because she very rarely thought of it.

For although none of her daughters knew anything about it, Flossie Furnivall had found an escape from her cramped existence in Grandpa's cottage and it was an escape that suited her extremely well.

Once Joan had been settled at work and Peggy and Baby were both at school, life on the farm had been undeniably dull and difficult. She and Maud spent all their time in the house, scrubbing, sweeping, washing up, feeding the chickens, feeding the pig, placating their father and cooking endless, boring meals. And they really didn't get on. There was no denying it. There was always a row hanging in the air between them, like a perpetual unspoken complaint. After three weeks of the same unvaried repetition and the same nerve-racking, halfspoken disapproval, she felt she couldn't face another day of it. Something would have to be done about it. And just at that moment a letter arrived with the Postal Order for her widow's pension. She put half of it away in Joe's old wallet for her keep and decided to spend some of the rest of it on herself. It was high time she had some pleasure in her life. She'd been dull long enough.

‘I think I'll go into Guildford,' she said to Maud when the girls had left for school and they'd finished doing the washing-up. ‘Buy a few bits and bobs. Candied peel, some nice dried fruit perhaps.' She took her compact out of her handbag and considered her face thoughtfully. What a very long time it had been since anyone had told her how pretty she was.

‘Today?' Maud said, emptying the washing-up bowl so crossly that the dirty water splashed over the edge of the sink.

‘Why not?' Flossie asked, stroking her eyebrows.

‘Can't see the point,' Maud said, wiping her soapy hands on her apron. ‘It's not as if you …'

‘Make a nice change,' Flossie said, starting her make-up.

‘All that tittivating,' Maud mocked, as her sister powdered her nose, tilting the compact towards the window so that she could see what she was doing. ‘Anyone'ud think you was royalty.'

‘When I lived in the Tower a' London,' Flossie said, ‘I'd never have dreamed of going out without looking my best. None of us would. We had standards to keep up. Which is more than I can say for …'

‘Standards my eye,' Maud said. ‘You're in the country now, gel.'

But criticism only made Flossie more determined. She put on her brightest lipstick and her best hat and caught the very next train in to the town. Guildford had been an escape route fifteen years ago. Perhaps it would be an escape route again.

But fifteen years is a very long time, and if she had a vague hope that she might meet up with another attentive soldier to pay court to her that day it was squashed the moment she set foot outside the railway station, for although there were plenty of soldiers about, the women they were escorting were very, very young, little more than girls really, not thirty-two-year-olds with grown children.

Never mind, she comforted herself, as she crossed Town Bridge and headed uphill towards the centre of the town, there's still the shops. I've still got money to spend and it's better being out here than stuck in the cottage with Maud. The pavements were crowded and there was a brass band striding down the High Street making a proper racket. If she couldn't find something to amuse herself in a town like Guildford she'd have to be deaf and blind.

She'd walked in to North Street to buy her groceries and some more nerve tonic and treat herself to a new pair of stockings, and when her shopping basket was pleasantly full she strolled on uphill towards the market in North Street to see what the fruit and vegetables were like, and there, just around the corner in Woodbridge Street, was a queue of people patiently standing in line. They were waiting outside a new building that looked like a fairground kiosk with coloured lights all round the entrance. Intrigued, she turned aside into Woodbridge Street to see what it was. ‘New Cinema' it said and plastered right across the front of it was the biggest poster she'd ever seen. It caught her eye and her imagination at once.

A beautiful girl with a mane of thick curly hair and enormous eyes were gazing adoringly at a tall impossibly handsome man who was looking straight down at her parted lips for all the world as if he were just about to kiss her. The sight of it made her go quite weak at the knees. ‘Romance of Redwood' the legend said, ‘starring Mary Pickford'.

Flossie had been to the pictures now and then with Joe,
usually to see the newsreels, which she found rather boring, or one of Charlie Chaplin's comedies, which were funny but not as funny as she expected. But this picture looked like something quite different. Does he actually kiss her? she wondered. Do you see it? And she knew
she
would like to see it, if he did, and if she could.

The queue shuffled forward several paces, excitement warming the faces of the women as they trotted to the ticket office.

Why not? Flossie thought, hugging her shopping basket. I've earned a bit of pleasure after all these weeks, and I'm sure Joe would want me to. He always said ‘all work an' no play' so he wouldn't want me to stint myself. Suitably justified, she joined the end of the queue, which was moving again.

It was the happiest afternoon she'd spent in years and years. To sit at ease in the plushy darkness and be carried effortlessly away into another world was a luxury beyond her most luxurious dreams. And such a world it was, a fantasy coming true before her eyes, where a dashing hero rescued the beautiful heroine and foiled every dastardly deed just in the nick of time, as the audience sighed and caught its communal breath in longing. And when the last reel was finally running and the hero bent his handsome head to take the kiss he'd been promised all through the picture, tears of sentimental joy rose into Flossie's eyes and she let them fall in exquisite abandon. Oh it was sheer bliss, that's what it was. Sheer bliss.

She travelled home still wrapped in fantasy, reliving the romantic swooning pleasure of that kiss, fancying herself in Mary Pickford's pretty shoes, entirely and vicariously happy. From then on her dreams were full of impossibly handsome men who would do anything for her, who vowed their everlasting love for her, who begged to kiss her, but never spoiled themselves by wanting to do anything else. There was never any nasty sex with her dream lovers. They were all gentlemen to the ends of their brilliantined hair.

After that first rapturous experience she went to the pictures every Thursday afternoon. She saw
Good Women
and
Under Northern Lights
and
The Story of the Jaguar
.
She laughed quite a lot at Charlie Chaplin in
The Fireman
and she very nearly swooned away when she watched Douglas Fairbanks in
The Three Musketeers
because he was more handsome and dashing than anyone she'd ever seen.

Now, no matter how dark and difficult life in the cottage might be, she had her dreams to sustain her. The weeks passed quickly, the chores were soon done, Christmas came and went, it was the New Year, the spring, but none of it meant very much to her. There was only that gleaming screen and the romance of the black and white world that flickered upon it. If she could enjoy that once a week, she could endure anything.