July–October 1941
‘It’s too far for you; even if you got there, you’d be too tired to come back.’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’ She looked angrily at Simon, who was, she felt, simply echoing Teddy in the most irritating way. ‘But if you want to be on your own—’ she
said.
‘It’s not that,’ Teddy said quickly: it was against family law deliberately to exclude anyone from an outing. ‘It’s just that I can’t see you bicycling nearly
forty miles.’
‘Camber’s not twenty miles!’
‘Jolly nearly. And we’ve got three-speed bikes.’
‘OK. I can see you don’t want me.’
‘They don’t want me either,’ Neville said, ‘which is much more serious.’
‘I tell you what,’ he said to Polly when the boys had made an uneasy escape. ‘When they’re old and wrinkly and
beg
me to take them out in my racing car, I simply
shan’t. Or my aeroplane, which I’ll probably have for long journeys. I shall just tell them they’re too old for anything nice – silly old farts.’
‘I don’t think you should call them that.’
‘It’s what they are or jolly soon will be. Stupid chaps are farts and stupid girls are tarts. A boy at school told me. Farts and tarts, you see?’
He watched her, hoping she would be shocked. He had grown so much in the last year that his shorts were inches above his bony knees, but his hair still stood up in tufts from his double crown
and his chicken neck made him look in some way vulnerable. Nothing of him seemed of a piece: his second teeth looked too large for his mouth, his feet, encased in dirty sandals, seemed enormous,
his ears stuck out, his thin, egg-brown torso with its tidemark of ribs looked fragile and went very ill with his huge leather belt and sheath knife attached to it. He was heavily marked by trivial
wounds – scrapes, cuts, blisters, hangnails, even a burn on his right hand from an experiment with his magnifying glass. His habitual expression was both challenging and anxious. She suddenly
wondered what it was like to be him, and knew immediately that she would never know.
‘I was thinking of bicycling to Bodiam,’ she said. ‘Like to come?’
She could see that pretending to consider this gave him pleasure. Then in a voice that was a remarkable rendering of Colonel Chinstrap from ITMA, he said, ‘I don’t mind if I
do.’
The gesture turned out to be costly. She got her usual, first-day stomach cramps on the ride there and the rest of the time – their picnic, exploring the castle, stopping him having a swim
in the moat, talking him down from the terrifying height he achieved in an oak tree – was discoloured by her terror of starting to bleed with nothing to staunch it, and frightening and
revolting him therefore. She could hardly bear the ride back, said she was tired and would have to go slowly and he could go on if he liked, but he didn’t. He kept riding ahead, turning round
and coming back to her. ‘It’s a good thing you didn’t try to go to Camber,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You would have had to stop and sleep the night in a field or a church
or something.’
Later, he said encouragingly, ‘It’s not your fault, though. You can’t help being a girl. They do tire easily – I think it’s something to do with their
hair.’
When they got back, she asked him if he’d put her bicycle away for her and he said of course he would.
She staggered upstairs, had a bath and lay on her bed. Her head ached, her stomach ached and she felt rotten; she did not even want to read. But
he
had enjoyed himself, it had been
worth it. Thereafter she decided that she would do one thing every week for someone else and made a list of the people so that she could note the appropriate good deed against each name.
Some, like the Brig (reading aloud to him from the
Timber Trades Journal, crashingly
dull), were easy; some, like her mother and Miss Milliment, were not. In the end, she decided to
knit Miss Milliment a cardigan – a huge enterprise and it would take her months, but it could be a Christmas present on a scale that she would not ordinarily have given. Her mother was nice
about that idea, and offered to find a pattern that would be likely to encompass Miss Milliment’s frame. ‘It will have to be a man’s one,’ she said, ‘which means that
you will have to remember to make the buttonholes on the left side. Do you really think you’ll stick to it? Otherwise it’s a waste of an awful lot of wool.’
She promised she would, and she and Clary went to the Watlington shop to choose the wool, but Mrs Cramp turned out only to have baby wools or khaki or navy blues. ‘There’s no call,
these days, for much else,’ she said. In the end, Aunt Villy kindly got some in London after an anxious discussion about which colour would suit Miss Milliment best. The trouble was that
every time a colour was suggested, it seemed to be the worst colour: wine wouldn’t go with her lemony skin, bottle green would make her hair look like seaweed, grey was too boring, red would
make her look like a London bus and so on. A misty, heathery blue was the final choice. Well, that was Miss Milliment, and since it had to be knitted entirely when she was not present, it did not
get on very fast. Her mother was a great problem. ‘The only thing she would really like would be for Dad to stop being in London, and I can’t do anything about that.’ Polly
complained to Clary. Then one day, she went into her mother’s bedroom and found her unpinning her hair at her dressing table.
‘I really must wash my hair,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t possibly help me, could you? It’s so difficult to get all the soap out, and leaning over a basin for ages
makes me feel rather queasy.’
After that, she washed her mother’s hair once a week, on Fridays before Dad came home for the weekend, and she even devised a brilliant method whereby, on the right chair, her mother could
sit with her back to the basin with her hair hanging over it, so she didn’t feel sick at all.
Dad was another problem. She saw so much less of him these days and when she did she could see how awfully tired he was. The tic at the side of his forehead was almost always throbbing when he
arrived at Home Place on Friday evenings looking grey with fatigue. Also, she hardly ever saw him alone: there were so many people in the house, and as she now had dinner with the grown-ups, he did
not come up to say good night to her. At dinner there was usually a lot of war talk: Hitler had invaded Russia so now Russia was on
their
side which
she
thought simply meant that
it would go on for longer.
Then, one Saturday, he asked her to come to Hastings with him: ‘Just you, Poll, because I don’t see enough of you.’
They went in his car because he said he got an extra allowance for business, and it was quite a relief to be off, because so many other people had wanted to come too. ‘You’re
sure
you don’t mind?’ she had said anxiously to Clary.
‘Course I don’t!’
But she knew this wasn’t true, and said, ‘I so want to have Dad to myself for a bit.’
And Clary had given her that unexpected lovely smile and said, ‘Of course you do. I perfectly understand
that
.’
Teddy and Simon had clamoured to be included, but Dad had dealt with them. ‘This is for Polly and me,’ he said. ‘Be off with you!’ as they tugged the door handles. Polly
had put on her pink dress and whited her tennis shoes, but they were still damp and got whiter as they dried on the way to Hastings.
‘Have you got any special plans?’ she asked, as the shouts of ‘Unfair!’ faded.
‘We’re going to try and find a present for Mummy. Who knows? We might find other things. I might see something suitable as a post-birthday present for you.’
‘You gave me my lovely watch.’ It was a bit sloppy on her wrist, and she moved it.
‘We chose that together in Edinburgh at the end of our last holiday – I mean, the holiday we last had.’
She glanced at him, wondering why he was being so pedantic.
‘What?’ He’d caught her glance.
‘I was wondering why you were being so pedantic.’
‘Can’t think. What do you think of the Russians joining up with us? Better than having them against us, wouldn’t you say?’
‘It just seems to make the whole thing more universal to me,’ she said. ‘If only it was
America
on our side.’
‘They’re not exactly
against
us. Mr Roosevelt’s doing his best for us. In fact, we’d have been up a gum tree without him.’
‘But it’s not the same as them actually joining up with us and helping to fight the Germans. After all, they did come in last time.’
‘They may yet. But think, darling Poll, how much you are against war, and then imagine being an American. How would you like it if
they
were having a war and
we
all had
to leave this country and go thousands of miles to fight for them? All the men, that is,’ he added; he did not approve of women going into the services. ‘You might very well feel that
it’s their war, and they should get on with it.’
‘Dad, do you know, I’ve never met an American?’
‘That’s a bit what I mean.’
‘On the other hand, if Hitler wins over here, he will probably set about other bits of the world which might be them and then they would be sorry.’
‘I think he may have bitten off rather more than he can chew with Russia. Hitler’s not going to win,’ he added.
‘How long will it all be, then?’
‘I’ve absolutely no idea. Not for a while yet. But things are better than they were last year.’
‘What do you mean? All the frightful air raids, and rationing and the Fall of France and all those other countries. It seems to me much
worse
.’
‘This time last year we were damn nearly invaded. That would have been worse. And we only just won the Battle of Britain. I can tell you now, Poll, that I used to have nightmares about
that happening, and me being stuck in London and unable to get to you all.’
‘Oh, Dad!
Poor
you! I see what you mean about it being better.’ She felt very pleased that he was telling her important things like his nightmares. ‘I didn’t
know grown-ups had them,’ she said.
‘Oh, darling! All kinds of things are much the same when you are grown up. On a lighter note, I think we’ll visit Mr Cracknell first. And there is quite a good jewellery shop we can
try thereabouts too.’
When they were nearly in Hastings he asked, ‘How are they all at home, then?’
‘All right, I suppose. Who especially?’
‘Well – your aunts – and your mother for a start.’
‘Aunt Rach has an awful back.’
‘I know,’ he said quickly. ‘She says a lot of the time she is like an old deckchair that has got stuck. I make her go to that very good man in London, though. And I think she
likes working in the office.’
‘Aunt Rach loves to be
needed
,’ she said. ‘More than most people.’
‘Quite right, she does. And?’
‘And what? Oh – the others. Well, I think Aunt Villy is bored. I think she’d really like to be doing some terrific war job. Doing Red Cross work and teaching people first aid
and working in the nursing home at Mill Farm isn’t enough for her.’
‘My word, Polly, you are perspicacious.’
‘But Aunt Zoë, on the other hand, is actually quite happy. She looks after two people now in the nursing home – reading to them, and writing letters for them – things like
that – and, of course, she absolutely adores Juliet.’
Hugh smiled, his tender, approving smile that was largely reserved for babies. ‘Of course she does.’
‘What about Mummy?’ he said after a silence. ‘How is she, do you think?’
Polly thought. ‘I don’t know. The trouble is, I don’t think she feels very well a good deal of the time. She loved her holiday with you, but it seemed to make her even tireder.
She went to bed for two whole days when she got back.’
‘Did she?’
‘Don’t tell her I told you that. I shouldn’t have. She didn’t want you to know.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I got awfully worried when she had to have an operation. But it all turned out OK, didn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said heartily. ‘Very OK. But people sometimes take a long time really to get over that kind of thing, you know. Here we are! Hastings, here we come!’
Mr Cracknell’s shop was rather dark, and everything in it seemed dusty, but it contained some fascinating things. Furniture, of course: Dad bought two chairs that had ears of wheat carved
up their backs. ‘I can’t resist them,’ he said. But there were also a number of wooden boxes, some inlaid with mother-of-pearl, some with brass. Inside they had ruched satin or
velvet in crimson or dark, bright blue; some had little cut-glass bottles and pots with silver lids. Some were sewing boxes, with tiny little spools – again made of mother-of-pearl, round
which strands of rich and faded silk were wound. Pairs of steel scissors and books of steel needles, and a sharp, pointed tool for making holes in things were arranged on the top layer inside, and
some of the boxes had a secret drawer at the bottom that sprang open when you pressed a button. She was entranced by them, and explored each one carefully, imagining which she would like most. Then
she found a plain rosewood box that, open, proved to be a little writing desk: ‘It was for travelling,’ her father said. ‘Ladies took them on visits.’
When open the box made a gentle slope that was covered with thin dark green leather. Underneath the slope there was a place to keep papers. ‘Clary would love this,’ she said.
‘Dad, do you think it might be not more than twenty-five shillings? Because that’s all I’ve got.’ It seemed a lot to her, but she knew that things that were in shilling amounts
weren’t a lot to him.
‘I’ll find out. Come and look at this.’ It was a small octagonal table with an elegant pedestal. The table top was very pretty, with the wood laid in sharp triangles, so that
the grain looked like a flower. Her father pressed something and the table lid opened to reveal a conical interior lined with paper that had minute bunches of roses on it – like wallpaper for
a doll’s house, she thought. Mr Cracknell emerged from the back of his shop holding a shallow octagonal tray papered in the same way, but made with numerous compartments. ‘I’ve
been repairing the tray,’ he said and fitted it carefully into the top of the cone.