Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven (11 page)

It is December and the War Office has decided people need cheering up. There are parties everywhere, and it is generally felt that the war will come to an end at last.

The US signals base nearby throws a party for all the evacuees and Heaven House boys. We are each allocated a GI to take care of us all afternoon. Tommy is in seventh heaven because he was taken by jeep to the nearest airfield and got to sit in a Mustang: in the
cockpit
. I am given a ride on a motorbike and swung up on the shoulders of Ted Pearlman, a huge bear of a man from South Dakota, wherever that is. We eat cake and jam sandwiches, and at the end we are given an apple and sit watching a cine film on the History of the Modern Fighter Plane, followed by a Charlie Chaplin film, with the piano played by a giant GI.

I feel an excitement that is more than just party fever. I like being swung about by Ted Pearlman and I like the size of them all, their easy confidence and their smiles.The towns and villages are depleted of young men, yet here they all are, suddenly, in one big mass. Young men with as much energy each as the whole of Sheepcote can muster on a good day.

They drive us back to the village hall and when the grown-ups come to take us home, Ted Pearlman gives me chewing gum and chocolate and bends down to whisper in my ear.

“Hey, Chipmunk, is that babe with the blonde hair your Aunty Joyce?”

I nod, and he whisks me up in his arms, takes me to his truck where he rummages in a box, and gives me a slim packet of nylons. “You give these to your Aunty Joyce from a secret admirer. Don't forget: a secret admirer.”

“A secret admirer!” I whisper. “Do I get any?”

“No, Chippers, you get the chocs.”

When I deliver the booty, Aunty Joyce beams uncharacteristically, and slips the nylons under some potatoes in her basket.

“You must never,” she admonishes with no conviction whatsoever, “take presents from a stranger.”

Just a few days later there is the Christmas party at the village hall. So many people want to come that it has to be changed to a new venue, and Lady Elmsleigh volunteers her large hall.

The Women's Institute have spent all afternoon making it look festive. Paper chains which have been used at so many previous events that they are crumpled and faded have been strewn from wall to wall, along with wads of ivy, mistletoe and holly.

The hall quickly fills with the whole of Sheepcote, a crowd of RAF, GIs and several husbands and sons home on leave. The music is provided by Ronnie's Razzlers (Ronald Tiffin is an ironmonger from Stroud who knows all the Glen Miller tunes) and the Sheepcote Sugar Quartet (a group of just three land girls singing in harmony).

At first people simply sway around, chatting and making sure they get their drink of cider or ginger beer. But as soon as the ash-baked potatoes and the upside-down pudding have been scoffed, the floor clears for the proper dancing.

The men change everything. There is real dancing – men with women – and the air is thick with sweat and musk. The daydream melodies develop a wolfishness I have never noticed when I hear them on the wireless, and people who usually sit quietly develop an unquenchable desire for movement. And it isn't the cider that turns the women pink – for most of them avoid the cider, which is ‘like paint stripper' according to Tommy – it is some mix of longing and the thrill of the rhythm, along with the barely concealed hunger of lusty young men who are far, far too close for comfort.

Lady Elmsleigh is there too, wearing a paper hat. When Ronnie's Razzlers have a break from playing, she claps her hands and orders some chairs to be placed in the middle of the hall for musical chairs. A record player is wound up and there is a frenzied crush as children bump into each other and into chairs, but it all adds to the excitement as we hurl ourselves around the chairs in a great swarm, joined by every grown-up with a movable bone in their body. When the music starts we scream as we run, the butcher, the grocer, Face-like-a-spud and Baggie Aggie, Mrs Glass with the big fat arse and a GI, all of us squealing in delight to the drowned-out record player and the promise of a pile-up.

When it is established that the music has stopped, bodies are everywhere, pushing and nudging and sitting on top of each other, three to a seat. Because of the lack of chairs, each chair is allowed to hold two people, one on the lap of the other, and the pilots and GIs act swiftly to provide the laps, while the ladies fight feverishly to sit on them.

I find a place on Ted Pearlman, and Miss Lavish (hooting with laughter) is sitting next to me on a GI. The next time, I get to sit on the vicar, and Tommy (the person I was aiming for) is sitting on the lap of Aunty Joyce. I can smell her hot familiar body from underneath her short-sleeved sweater, and I want her to say something to him. I say, “Careful, Tommy, you're crushing Aunty Joyce!” He looks round, but she shows him her profile and her perfect jawline.

The music starts and stops again, and when I'm out I stand on a table at the back swigging ginger beer and watching. There are only eight chairs left and seventeen people. Ted and Aunty Joyce are still in, and he is shadowing her, determined to nestle her behind on his manly thighs. ‘The Chattanooga Choo-Choo' keeps going for a tantalizingly long time, but Ted keeps up his position, and when the music comes to an abrupt halt, ‘…
won't you choo-choo me –
' he plonks himself right down in front of her. She makes to go for the next lap, but Miss Didbury is being snuggled by a farm labourer, and on the other side Betty Chudd is nuzzling a rakish Wing Commander. People start shouting, “In front of you! In front of you!” But Aunty Joyce stays rooted to the spot like someone who has seen a ghost, and Mrs Glass scampers round the whole circuit of chairs to beat her to it.

No one can make it out. People are laughing, calling Joyce dozy, a daydreamer. I feel a sudden pang of protectiveness. Some people in front of me whisper that she's lost it completely since her daughter died. Uncle Jack, standing by the door with the vicar, looks worried. But then I see it has nothing to do with what is going on: probably sorting out the numbers for the Sunday school party, and the vicar is nodding so vigorously that it is clear he couldn't care less.

I see Aunty Joyce heading for the kitchen. I know what she'll do there, and it's strange: of all these people who have known Aunty Joyce for years – even her own husband – not one of them knows why she didn't take the last place in musical chairs, but
I
know. I know for certain when I see her coming back out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her skirt.

At first I think that she's just afraid of falling in love with Ted, or afraid that he might fall in love with her, or afraid that Uncle Jack might get jealous. But now I see it clearly, although I still don't understand quite how it works: Ted Pearlman is contaminated.

It is the last knitting group before Christmas and Aunty Joyce cannot come. Instead I walk down to the village hall with Miss Lavish. I help her to carry the mince pies (except there is no mince so they are apple, and they're cold so we'll have to warm them on the stove at the back of the hall).

“Your Aunty Joyce all right, love?” asks Mrs Chudd.

“I think so,” I say. “Just a bit busy.”

“She looked a bit off colour at the party, that's all. Didn't seem quite herself.”

It's aimed at me, but I say nothing.

“She a bit off colour round the house?”

“Not off colour – just odd,” says Baggie Aggie. “Queer behaviour if ever there was.”

“Did you see it an' all? In that musical chairs? Crumbs, she was daft as a brush, she was.”

“She 'asn't been the same since … you know what.”

There's a murmur of agreement. I'm not sure if I'm completely invisible yet, so I keep my head down, and pretend to count my ribbing.

“Still, we've all 'ad our grief,” says Mrs Marsh with a twitch of her moustache, and she should know.

“And none so much as you, Dot. None so much as you.”

“'Strue,” agree the others.

Needles click quietly for a while.

“Still …” Mrs Chudd ventures, “Our Betty reckons she married the wrong man, and I must say I'm inclined to agree with her.” She purses her lips, awaiting the reaction to her mischief.

“Oh! Jack Shepherd is a good man,” says Miss Lavish.

“Ah, Lavinia, but good for what?”

Chortles.

“Perhaps not good for
her
,” suggests Mrs Glass.

“I remember 'is father, Arthur Shepherd,” says Tosser suddenly from her smelly corner. “Real tosser 'ee wuz.”

But then she goes on to tell us about Arthur Shepherd, ably assisted by questions from the others, and I learn a lot about Uncle Jack. Seems he came from a strong Chapel family in Stroud, his father all hellfire and brimstone and preaching the evils of alcohol and lust. His mother was a compliant woman, a teetotal champion of needlepoint. Jack and his brothers were all brought up bent double with guilt. When Jack married Joyce, a
Church
girl, it was an extreme act of defiance. There were plenty of Chapel girls with no previous record of kissing, good girls with wide hips who could make pies. But no, he chose a church girl from Painswick who could floor a dozen men with a bat of her eyelashes. Whether it was because her generous lips and firm buttocks provoked feelings he preferred to deny or what, but Jack's father never forgave him. So Jack embraced the church instead (a little too tightly, maybe) while his father spent the first eight years of their marriage sulking and shovelling on the guilt, and the remaining years buried in it himself and wishing he had known his lost granddaughter.

Joyce Stringer was not the woman her father-in-law made her out to be, neither did she have the strength he credited her with to bear his contempt.

“Lord, tiz awful.”

“A tragedy.”

“She 'ad plenty o' sweethearts, mind. But see 'er own father died in the Great War when she were – oh, barely four year old I'd say. 'Ee wuz just like God lookin' out of a photograph, 'ee wuz, an' they say she put men on a peddy stool. And Jack, she put 'im on a peddy stool an' all.”

“Ah! There now, that could be true.”

I can see why Tosser is so welcome in the knitting group now. But she only speaks if she chooses, and no one can make her.

“'Course 'er mother's side of the family wuz all inbred.”

“
Never!
”

“Well! That explains it!”

“It explains a lot!”

I can't see how everything is made clear by the fact that all of Aunty Joyce's family were in the baking trade. But I listen intently.

“Joyce's mother seemed all right when we met her last Christmas, mind,” says Aggie.

“Ah!” says Tosser. “She weren't inbred. Twuz '
er
mother – Joyce's grandmother. An' 'course twuz what 'er uncles tried to do to poor Joyce's mother – Ivy … I've known Ivy when she wuz a littl'un. Not
well
. Tiz no wonder she's disgusted by you know what …”

“But Joyce's father, he would never've let that lot near his family …”

“No! No! 'Ee wuz Ivy's saviour 'ee wuz. But see that's Joyce's problem. When she were a littl'un, she asked 'er father why 'ee wuzn't in the war, so next thing Ivy knows 'er 'usband's gone and joined up. Well, she never saw 'im again. She 'an't never forgiven our Joyce for that. Not ever. Nor never will.”

“Well I never!”

“Tiz cruel to make your own child feel bad like that.”

“Dreadful!”

“That might explain why she's so –”

“Tiz a wonder she don't have more children, though.”

“Perhaps he can't … you know what,” suggests Mrs Chudd with a mischievous look.

“Ah, you know his trouble,” says Mrs Glass. “All that Chapel lot. They want children but they want the Immaculate Conception. He wants a wife who's a virgin for ever!”

“Get away! Well, he won't find many virgins in Sheepcote!”

“Go on! There's always Lavinia.”

Everyone looks at Miss Lavish, but she continues knitting without looking up, and says, “You presume too much.”

People stop knitting and stare. Miss Lavish gets up, counts how many we are, and goes off to the kitchen to put the kettle on and prepare tea. As soon as the door has swung behind her, everyone looks at Tosser, who wipes her nose on her sleeve and decides to explain.

It seems Miss Lavish is a dark horse. She was once in the arms of a handsome young soldier who promised the earth in a whisper. Then he went and splattered his body over a field in France.

Had he married her before he went away, she could have been saved from a lifetime of the dreadful millstone named spinsterhood. But for one simple ceremony she was destined to face the world as a sad, unfulfilled Miss, instead of an aggrieved but worldly Missus. And to think it had been her own idea to wait until the war was over! It had been a foolish idea encouraged by her mother, who was afraid he would leave her widowed. This was before she realized that, in that infamous Great War,
everyone
came back in pieces, if they came back at all, and there would be no spare men to marry in his place.

But Miss Lavish is not what she seems at all. For one night, when he was home on leave, Jarvis Cooksley took her out walking up the woods near the school, and there, under the beeches, they made love.

I wonder how Tosser knows this, but then Tosser knows everything that happens under the stars in this little valley.

Miss Lavish comes in with a rickety trolley of tea things. But we all look at her differently. Sometimes, when children giggle at her tricycle, or when she sees beech-nut shells in the verges, or when she envies other women's domesticity, or when she hears them complain about their dull husbands, or when she senses a look of pity in their eyes, does she perhaps remember her night in the beechwood and think, “I, Lavinia Lavish, am not a virgin,” and does she pedal faster and smile?

On the way home Miss Lavish takes my hand between the hedgerows and guides me through the pitch black.

“You know, you mustn't believe all they say about Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce. They like to have something to gossip about.”

“That's okay,” I say, “I never really listen.”

“Yes, I know. But they tried to draw you in today. I didn't like that. They've no right to ask you questions. None of their business.”

We walk on into the total darkness.

“Lavinia …”

“Yes?”

“Why do you think they're so horrible to each other, Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce?”

“Oh, I'm sure they're not.”

“They are.”

A bit of elder bush swipes me in the face and she beats it out of the way.

“Well … sometimes, I think, things can go so wrong that it's hard for people to show their feelings for each other.”

“Oh, they know how to show their feelings all right. They're just rotten to each other.”

Miss Lavish swaps places with me and walks on the inside, to protect me from stray twigs and branches.

“You know how sometimes at school the boys tease the girls and pull their hair?”

“Yes …” I say, unsure why she's changed the subject.

“Well, what they're really doing, of course, is flirting.”

“Flirting?”

“They'd really like to kiss them.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It's just a way of making contact.”

I think this through. She could be right.

“And sometimes, when people are so badly upset that they don't know how to be affectionate, well … they hurt each other instead.”

“Why?”

“Making each other feel guilty – hurting each other – it may be all they can manage. But it's a way of making contact.”

Grown-ups are all a bit confusing.

“I know they love each other really,” I say.

“I expect they do.”

“Oh, they
do
!” I insist.

“What makes you say that?”

“Well … it's just … she always warms his socks on the range for him. And he … he cleans her shoes every night. Scrapes all the mud off with a knife and a rag, and polishes them. He leaves them in the hall.”

Our eyes have become accustomed to the dark, and we can see the dark outline of Weaver's Terrace next to us. Miss Lavish stops and holds both my hands in hers and whispers, “You know, Kitty, you're the best thing that could've happened to them.” Then she opens our little creaking gate and kisses me goodbye.