The Sea Change (8 page)

‘Apparently not,’ said Annie,
with a wry grin. She paused. Her expression softened. ‘Vi … I
don’t quite know how to say it – and I really don’t know whether it answers
anything – but … there’s another dance on at the military camp tomorrow
night. An ATS girl told me about it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, do you think Pete might be
going?’

‘We both know he hates dancing,’
I scoffed, with slightly too much fervour. I could feel myself whitening.

‘That’s what I thought.’
Annie waved her suggestion away.

‘You don’t think he’s
taking someone, do you? I mean … a girl?’

She met my stare and I held hers. There was
no need for a reply.

Father enlisted on the day after I found
Mrs Shelton’s pig: it was 1942, the year before we were evacuated. His age and
profession were enough to excuse him. But he felt duty-bound. As I listened to him
discuss the matter with Mama, I found myself returning to our conversation in the bell
tower: I had been so frivolous to worry over a pork dinner and a boy when, unbeknown to
me, Father was contending with the prospect of war.
It’s only a matter of
persisting until every knot is untangled, until every rope is smooth
.

‘It’s
their
labour and
their
crops that are feeding us right now,’ he protested to my
mother, as they passed Mr Colton in his field on the way back from the church. He had a
special solemn voice that he put on for this kind of comment, like the ones we heard on
the radio whenever anyone discussed the war. ‘And what am I doing that’s
useful?’

Freda and I listened in as best we could
from behind.

‘But they need you,’ my mother
countered. ‘You’re feeding them different things.’

‘What good are my sermons at a time
like this if I’m not out there pulling my weight? I’m a hypocrite,
that’s what I am.’ He stopped in the middle of the path and turned to face
her. At first, I tried out a smirk on Freda – he had talked in this manner on so many
previous occasions and nothing had ever come of it – but she did not return it.

‘What about us?’ Mama waved
towards Freda and me.

‘I’ll be going to protect you –
protect what we have here.’

‘They’ll take you as a chaplain,
Jack. You know that. How much help can you really be when they won’t permit you to
fire a gun?’

‘It’s my being there that
counts.’

‘You’re not going anywhere.
There’s no need.’

Need or no need, he made himself known to
the War Office and received his call-up within the week. The war had come to him so he
might as well go to it. By then the army had arrived in the village – a scattering of
Tommies occupied a deserted labourer’s cottage, and three evacuees were sent to
the Court to live with the Major and his wife. When I was certain the Major was out on
his rounds, I would peer over the wall at the back of the house to look at the disused
tennis lawn where Freda and I had wiled away so many hours. The net sank in the middle,
sullen under a coat of ivy, and a troop of dandelions marched across the baseline.
Nobody had time for tennis any more. It was the start of an unseen invasion, which crept
so silently over the house and village and church that we barely noticed its presence
until the war was in full bloom.

The military training on Salisbury Plain
became more regular, and the explosions felt closer too, as if they were being detonated
in the soil beneath us. Mama ran out to check the vegetables one night so convinced was
she that a shell had landed in the garden. I joined her in my nightgown and we watched
the sky stutter, like a frantic camera, between coal black and bleached white. The Downs
were taut with mortars, each as prone to echoes as the skin of a drum.

Soon after the arrival of the evacuees, the
real incendiaries started to fall. Before the war, we could come and go as we pleased,
puffing up the chalk on the tracks at any time of day or night, even burning candles in
the windows to guide the farmers home. But by the time Father decided to enlist, our
shepherds were forced to navigate the fields unaided and nobody was to drive with
headlights at night. The Plain became bathed in an unbroken darkness – and we feared
that more than we feared the bombs. Mr Batch’s lad Fred was the first to be lost;
it was a death marked by its silence. The snow came down thick and fast
in November, blanketing the entire Plain in the space of an evening. He had stayed up
with the sheep to make sure none were lost but, with no light to help him, he could not
find his way back to the village. The snow on Salisbury Plain had a way of cloaking the
air in front of you so that north, south, east and west were obliterated; the only mercy
it afforded you on nights like that was a glimpse of the space directly in front of your
feet. Poor Fred must have found that no sooner had he laid a footprint in the snow than
it was deleted. They discovered him two days later in a ditch, half a mile away from the
door of his home.

It was hard to know which was preferable in
those days – snow and fog masking the village, making farming impossible, or a night
free of clouds in which we became a sitting target for the Gerries. When we heard German
engines across the sky, we could do nothing but stow ourselves in the cellar and pray
that there were no lights left on upstairs.

I hold myself responsible for the first
raid. I was worried about Father, who had been kept out late visiting a colleague in
Chitterne, so I left a single candle burning in the upstairs window to help bring him
home across the tracks. I lit it out of habit without a thought for the blackout. Imber
was distant from any town and folded away in a valley – the bombers wouldn’t give
it a second look. But I forgot about the light, leaving it burning long after Father
arrived home. I was in my room when I heard the mechanical cackle of an approaching
aeroplane. My mother came running upstairs with him to fetch me while Freda fumbled with
the trap-door down to the cellar. There was no explosion, just a
bludge
-like
thud on the parsonage roof.

‘Don’t move,’ Father
cautioned us. ‘It’s a delayed-release bomb. The Canadians at the camp warned
me about them. It won’t detonate until it’s disturbed.’

‘We must send word, give the others a
warning!’ cried Mama.

‘We can’t. It could be on the
roof but it may have fallen onto
the lawn. And I can’t risk
lighting a lantern to look. We must wait until morning.’

‘We can’t just sit here!’
Freda protested. But Father told her we didn’t have much choice.

When, finally, the night came to an end, he
climbed the cellar steps gingerly and inspected the garden. The bomb was nowhere to be
found. The thought of it nestling among the roof tiles, digging its heels in ready for
the explosion, made my stomach curl. He sent for two soldiers from the army camp and
they climbed up a ladder to disarm it. Just as they were about to make it safe, the bomb
dislodged and rolled down the roof with a rumble reminiscent of the tanks on the Plain.
We watched it drop – all of us – knowing that we had no time to run.

As it landed on the metal of the wheelbarrow
it let out the murkiest of notes, like the mangled clank of a broken bell. There was no
explosion, only an echo. I shut my eyes, expecting to be consumed by flying matter.

We waited, muscles clenched, but the bang
never came. I thought of the Coronation party at Imber Court – how we had all stood
around the bonfire and sung ‘God Save The King’ for George VI and watched,
blithely, as a barrel of tar dislodged from the top and rolled – poker hot and flaming –
into the crowd. As quick as a flash, Albie Nash grabbed a rug from a nearby table and
threw it over the barrel. Then we all laughed, fear dissipating as quickly as the
barrel’s flames.

Perhaps if that first bomb had gone off, we
would have grasped sooner what it was that was enveloping us. But the war remained in
its cask – a threat but never quite an explosion. We found ourselves being eased into
each new peril as if it were no more daunting than that single drum of flaming tar: a
small, conquerable danger that simply required smothering.

We are alone with our own thirst. The sight
of the sea soon becomes too much: void of rescue and empty of anything drinkable.
Everything is easier with your eyes shut.

We lie, like two wings of a butterfly, on
top of his roof. I shake him once, to check he’s still conscious, and he bats me
away as he would a fly. The lines on his face seem as deep as the trough of our wave.
They press together, then pull apart again as he breathes, and I think of the folds in
an accordion. In my head I give him three children: two boys and a girl – the youngest.
His house, before the wave hit, had ice-blue walls, a vegetable patch at the back,
maybe, and a view of the ocean. Perhaps, if we survive, he’ll move up the hill to
a place where he can’t see it, where he’s high enough up to be out of its
reach.

And there was no more sea
.
That’s what it says at the end of the Bible when Heaven comes down from the sky as
a city. When my grandmother died, Mum read it to me: I think she thought I’d like
to know where Nana had gone. I was disappointed, though, to find out there was no sea in
Heaven. To me, it smelt of Saturdays and Sundays and water so cold that it made me
shriek with glee.

But now I see. Useless liquid is all it is.
Liquid you can’t even drink. A surface that’s too changeable to inhabit, too
fluid to be called home. A substance that can muscle into everything you build – wipe it
out as if it were nothing more than chalk on a blackboard.

My grandmother wasn’t like Mum; Mum
kept her sadness buried in her face. But Nana told me things – things Mum only spoke
about with her eyes. She would have liked James. James
never ran out of
things to say, stories to tell, questions to ask. Imber, the war, all the things that
Mum had seen, I heard about them only from Nana. She’d talk and talk, stringing
together whole generations, like lines of laundry. Endless lists of who married whom and
who had which children. As soon as Nana began one of her stories, Mum’s face would
brighten, like a child’s. It didn’t matter how many times she had heard it,
she’d hang on every detail as if it were new. But life for Mum stopped at Imber;
she didn’t listen to me like she did to Nana. She wasn’t bothered about whom
I would marry or what children I’d have. My stories – the ones from school or the
park – would be greeted with a diluted smile, so weak it might almost have been a frown.
The children she might have had in Imber – warless, naïve and grown from home – are what
matter to her. They would have been as rooted and constant as trees: working the land,
reading the weather, borrowing books from that grand old house and belonging to a man
she really loved. A place she really loved.

Had I never known you, such selflessness
would have left me aghast
. Whatever my dad meant by his letter to her, he was
foolish to think my mother selfless. If the war hadn’t destroyed Imber, it would
have crumbled under her love, so tight was her grip on it. And while she set about
trying to preserve its memory, she lost sight of me – I, who was already adrift.

Ravindra sits bolt upright and shouts
something – one word, over and over, flinching round to look over his shoulder. The roof
groans under the shift in his weight. He’s out of breath, sweating.

‘It’s okay,’ I say.
‘It’s over.’

He looks at me, the tension in his face
softening into sadness, as if he has suddenly remembered where we are. Then he lies down
again on his stomach, his hands flat on the roof, wanting to be as close as possible to
his home.

Most people think of a place when they think
of home. But I think of the word – strewn all over the kitchen on cutesy little
knick-knacks. They sit on the fridge, hang on door handles and drape
themselves over the window, spelling themselves out in sickly shades of pink. The first
and only time Mum met James, I told him to buy her one as a joke. She made such a show
of loving it, putting it in pride of place in the window above the sink, fearing all the
while that he’d take me away to places she’d never been.