Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven (13 page)

At around half past nine on Christmas morning, Aunty Joyce's mother turns up in a horse and cart, driven by a neighbour from Painswick who is also visiting relatives.

“I'll be back this afternoon!” shouts the man at the reins. “I want to be home before dark, look.”

In she comes with a blast of cold air, carrying a carpet bag full of knitting.

She has the same features as Aunty Joyce, but more extreme. The eyes are paler and bluer, the cheekbones more widely spaced. But the full lips have collapsed a little with age and the hair is almost white, the curls piled on top like Queen Mary's. As soon as she comes in, the house is different.

She refuses a comfortable chair by the range and takes a seat at the table, from where she can watch us preparing vegetables.

“I see you got the littl'un working,” she says, sucking the side of her cheek.

I smile from my carrot scraping, but Aunty Joyce just looks flustered.

“You're doing a good job there, love,” she says to me.Then, under her breath, she mutters, “You wanna watch she don't pack you off fishing.”

Aunty Joyce slams down her potato knife and glares at her mother. There is a silence in which Mrs Stringer carries on knitting with eyebrows raised in total innocence, and in which Aunty Joyce is clearly deliberating about something.

“What did you say?”

Mrs Stringer looks up a little surprised and tugs at her wool. I am about to repeat what she said for Aunty Joyce – because I heard it quite clearly – when I realize that this is something grown-up and unpredictable, and I had better keep my mouth shut.

I am relieved when Uncle Jack comes in from the back with a scuttle full of coal.

“You're looking well!” he says, smiling at his mother-in-law. “Journey all right?”

“Not so bad. That horse of Gill's've seen better days, mind. Bump, bump, bump all the way!”

The kettle whistles on the range, and Uncle Jack pours some water into the teapot. There is a silence even louder than the ones I'm used to at the tea-table here, and the sounds of the water going into the pot and the scraping of vegetables seem to thunder through the whole room.

“'Twill be bump, bump, bump all the way back an' all,” she says at last.

“I'll sort out something soft for you to sit on,” says Uncle Jack.

Aunty Joyce is chopping my carrots, aggressively, with a mouth clamped very shut.

“I 'ope you're not doin' them all like that. Great fat slabs o'carrot. You know I like mine fine.”

There is a silence again, just the shuffle of coals as Uncle Jack stokes the fire.

“Sorry,” says Aunty Joyce and, to my amazement, she starts to cut carefully, producing delicate rounds of carrot without a trace of malice.

At first I think it is a little battle between the two of them, but soon I see there is only one winner. As Uncle Jack pours the tea, Mrs Stringer pipes up: “You got him well trained then!” And she just can't seem to help herself from adding, “Always did know how to twist a man round your little finger!” And then she just can't resist patting his hand: “You watch she don't pack
you
off to the war, Jack.”

Aunty Joyce does not rise to it. She carries on, subdued, wrestling with the carrots and potatoes, her pretty mouth beginning to lose the radiance it had at breakfast.

At dinnertime we bring out a beautifully roasted half of chicken. Miss Lavish has had the other half and taken it down to the school house, where she, Miss Miller and Boss Harry are having their Christmas meal together.

“I 'ope this isn't one of yours,” says Mrs Stringer.

“Certainly is,” says Jack, smiling. “Only we couldn't bring ourselves to do it, so we got Thumper in on it.”

“Well, all I can say is what a waste! All them eggs it could lay for you every week and you throw it all away on one meal!”

Aunty Joyce starts to carve it reluctantly, but Uncle Jack takes over. “Here, let me.” I can't work out if he is cross or not. But if he is, it is certainly not with Aunty Joyce, and he is hiding it very well.

“The war will be over soon, and what on earth will we do with all these chickens then?” He smiles at me, and I smile back.

“They said that last year, and look what 'appened,” she says.

“Breast?” Uncle Jack holds up the best meat, poised above the tablecloth, and his mother-in-law nods.

“No need to use disgusting words like that,” she adds.

The food is dished out with the quiet clinking of cutlery. We munch and hear each other munching.

“No holly on the table this year, then?” asks the old goat.

Aunty Joyce puts a hand to her mouth. “I'm sorry!” She sounds devastated. “Oh hang, I completely forgot! I've got some out the back –”

“Sit down,” says Uncle Jack calmly. “Enjoy the meal.”

More munching.

“Sprouts are a bit crunchy,” Mrs Stringer observes. “'Ow long you do them for, then?”

“Twelve minutes.”

“Twelve minutes? I always do mine for fourteen. Like bloody rock they are otherwise.”

Aunty Joyce apologizes again. “Everything else all right for you?”

“Oh yes. Yes … tiz lovely …” Mrs Stringer sucks her cheeks a little. “Mind … the gravy's dreadful thin – you never could make gravy, though, Joyce.” Joyce looks down at her plate and seems almost to shrink.

“No …” continues her mother, “never could make gravy for tuppence.”

I don't recognize the Aunty Joyce I see before me: shrunken, defeated, utterly wrong-footed at every turn.

“I think it's a
lovely
meal,” I say suddenly. “I've never tasted a meal like it!” I smile at Aunty Joyce, desperate to raise her spirits. She looks at me and smiles weakly, but full of gratitude.

‘Well, 'course you would say that, wouldn't you, my darlin'? Don't 'spose you eat food like this back in London, do you? Lucky to get bread up there, I 'speck.”

“Well, I –”

“Now you make sure our Joyce takes care of you.” She smiles at me mischievously. “She tends to be a bit careless with little girls, do our Joyce.”

Now, you'd expect Aunty Joyce to throw the rest of the gravy at her mother, or the bread sauce, or the delicious Brussels sprouts she has been growing for months in the back garden. But no, she just puts the carefully prepared food into her mouth and eats it painfully slowly, as if the meal she has planned with such love and foresight is making her nauseous, and as if she is unworthy of every mouthful.

I am glad when the horse and trap comes to take Mrs Stringer away, but she has left Aunty Joyce crippled with bad feelings way beyond my reach. As soon as she is gone the washing starts. Not just the washing up, which I help her with while Uncle Jack lights his pipe and listens to the wireless, but washing the taps, washing her arms, washing her clothes, washing her face, washing the taps again, cleaning her shoes, scrubbing her nails, washing the door handles, washing her hands again and again and again …

My mother was supposed to come at Christmas, but she didn't and no one says a thing about it. Two days after Boxing Day Aunty Joyce tells me to put on my coat, she gives me mittens, straightens my woollen bonnet and takes me off to the bus stop.

The battering winds have strewn the lanes with twigs and branches, and the sad hedgerows, empty of leaves, show the old nests of song thrushes, blackbirds and warblers, all trilling indignantly at their secret haunts laid bare. The leaves of autumn are now a thin brown paste spread over the road. We tread crisply along the stony patches, avoiding the yellow puddles near the verge.

When the bus comes no one gets off, but we get on. The bus conductress comes over breathing smoke and winds us tickets with blue fingers. One and a half return to Cheltenham. She shakes her leather bag and the coins shuffle richly.

“Shoppin' then?”

“Yes,” says Aunty Joyce.

She takes me to Ward's and lets me choose half a yard of ribbon for my hair. When we buy it the money is put in a tube which is sent rocketing down a chute like magic, only to return with the exact change.

We go up in a lift and down in a lift. We giggle at the stiff snooty models and feel all the fabrics. We go into Cavendish House and put Shalimar on our wrists, try on hats and pop the handbags open and shut. We listen to the Salvation Army playing carols, put a penny in their tin, and then walk up to Suffolk Parade to queue up outside the Daffodil where
Dumbo
is showing.

I have never seen anything like it. I laugh and laugh at the stork letting the baby elephant slip through the clouds, and Aunty Joyce laughs too. I hum to the music of the little train, and she looks at me in the flashing shadows and smiles. We all stop breathing when the circus tent comes down, and we all say “Aaah!” when Mother Elephant gets locked in a prison caravan.

Later, there is a scene where Dumbo goes to see his mum and they get to touch trunks. She puts her trunk out through the bars of her prison and he reaches his trunk up to meet it. My face and neck ache with grief, and when Mother Elephant starts to rock her baby on her trunk and sings ‘Baby of Mine' I feel the tears messing up my cheeks.

But Aunty Joyce is
laughing
. I can't believe it. I can hear her laughing next to me. Other mother animals are rocking their babies to sleep – giraffes, tigers, monkeys, even hyenas – and I am all choked up trying not to burst and Aunty Joyce is laughing.

Then I glance at her, and see that her hand is clutched over her mouth not to stifle giggles but wails of despair. I stare at her pale face flickering in the dark. She is sobbing loudly now, and I have no idea what to do.

I grab the free hand in her lap, and squeeze it gently.

On the way home she says nothing of the little episode, and she is chattier than usual, perhaps to make sure I don't refer to it either. But when the bus gets out into the countryside, and the dark is so dark the driver could not drive unless he knew the road from childhood, then I take her hand again and give it a squeeze. Let her think I am afraid of the dark. Let her think what she likes. It felt good to hold her hand in the cinema, so I'm doing it again. And she lets me.

It is a freezing night. I wake up a couple of times as I turn in bed, trying to shift a hot-water bottle cold as a slab of haddock.

Just before the call-boy comes I awake in a delicious cocoon of warmth. Behind me and all around me is a body; I am wrapped up like a baby in its mother's arms, like Dumbo in Mother Elephant's trunk. I lie very still, afraid that if I move it will all disappear. This is not a dream. The bedclothes send up a deep musky smell of grown-up. I am in heaven.

With the rapping on the door Joyce gets up quickly and I turn to see her. She informs me matter-of-factly that I went into their room for a cuddle because I was cold, and that she came to warm me up and must have fallen asleep.

Too many details. And anyway, I know she is lying, because I haven't ventured out of bed all night. She talks in that crisp tone of hers, as if cuddling me were a complete mistake, which she won't make again.

My mother does turn up, but the day before New Year's Eve, and she has to dash back because she's helping to organize the New Year's Eve party at the munitions factory. She comes without the twins, though, so at least I have her to myself. She has stopped breastfeeding so her friend Dot is looking after them, and she did the same for Dot's kiddie yesterday.

Somehow it isn't the day I wanted it to be. My mother spends ages admiring Aunty Joyce's needlepoint and her crockery and her pies and her rug and her smocked apron and her chickens and her home-made jam. I wanted to be proud of her, but instead I am ever so slightly ashamed of her rough language and her daft accent and her adulation of everything that isn't hers. I have no idea that it is she who has the very thing Joyce wants most in all the world.

I want her to show Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce what real loving is, but she just witters on and on and doesn't seem to appreciate the gravity of any situation at all. She gives me a few sound hugs and the rest of the time plays the guest. Uncle Jack is kind, and makes her a cup of tea, which he never does for Aunty Joyce.

She brings me two presents: a bar of chocolate and a woollen tam-o'-shanter. I could've knitted one better myself, but I say nothing and look delighted. I take her for a walk to the farm in an effort to get her alone, but it all backfires in the mud and muck.

“Gawd! What ya trying to do to me? These are the only decent blinkin' stockings I got!”

So she goes, paying Joyce and Jack far more attention than they deserve, and telling me how grown-up I am. And I am left in an ugly torment, wondering if I will ever be little girl enough to get my fair share of cuddles again. I throw the tam-o'-shanter in the hall, shut myself in my room and play disloyally with the knitted doll instead, turning her back and forth from one woman to the other.

No one bothers to wonder what Uncle Jack makes of it all. He is a man and probably doesn't have feelings, but he cleans the mud off my little shoes and leaves them polished in the hall like he always does.

I have not seen Tommy to speak to since the nativity play, and I miss him. As I plod down the lane to the village hall I see Heaven House in the distance and wonder which window he might be sitting at, wonder if he is lonely or sad, or having exciting adventures with the other boys, which I would not be allowed to join in with. The grey-golden walls of that handsome house begin to thrill me every time I walk by. The sorcery of the ivy-clad balconies, the tantalizing studded green door, the knowledge that he is in there somewhere: I start to feel excited just catching a glimpse of it.

The mud has gone today, and the lane is hard, every footprint and hoof print filled with ice. There is no knitting group as such, but we have sorting to do, because so many of Our Boys will be home for New Year and they are all to receive knitted comforts to warm them in foreign lands and remind them of home. Personally, I can't imagine anywhere foreign can be as cold as Sheepcote. Even in the village hall we breathe smoke. But conversation soon perks us all up, and we forget about our numb fingers as we contemplate the New Year's Eve party.

“Tiz very kind of Lady Elmsleigh to have it up the 'ouse again,” says Mrs Glass.

“Oh yes!”

“Yes.”

“Well,” says Mrs Chudd, “I don't
know
. It was her behind all that prisoners in church stuff last week, and you can say what you like, but our boys shouldn't have to mix with the enemy like that, not while they're home. She's got some funny new-fangled ideas, she 'ave, an' I don't like it.”

“'Strue.”

“Well, there
is
that.”

“Oh, Tabs,” says Mrs Glass, “but it is kind of her. We'd never be able to fit much of a party in here. And if it's her house, she can have who she likes.”

“That's it though, she don't think about how it feels for people what've lost loved ones at the hands of these people.” Mrs Chudd purses her lips decisively and matches two socks.

“I think you're forgetting something,” says dear Miss Lavish. “She's lost a husband and a son at the hands of ‘these people', and what's more she has a second son missing. Which one of us would feel like throwing a party for the world and his dog –
two
parties – if we were in that position?”

“She's right, you know.”

“There
is
that …”

“Come to think of it …”

“I'm only saying,” says Chudd, sick with defeat, and whispering under her breath, “it don't seem right to
me
, Germans in our church.” But she won't give up. “This year we get a brown baby as Jesus, next year it'll be doing a Nazi salute!”

“Oh,
Tabby
!” There are giggles.

Then Mrs Marsh picks up a pullover and holds it against her chest, ready to fold. “All I can say is, if it were
your
son taken prisoner, how would
you
want him to be treated by the locals?” There is a respectful hush. We would all like to think some kind German gave each of Mrs Marsh's sons a slice of cake and a cup of tea before they passed away.

Conversation moves on to soap and stain removal.

“Anyone tried Rinso? Supposed to cut out the need for boiling.”

“Aunty Joyce has,” I venture, because it's true. “She tried it on the nappies in the summer. I think it worked.”

“Nappies?”

“
Nappies?”

I have to explain about the twins, and Aunty Joyce sending the nappies by post, but I have opened a can of worms.

“For a moment there …”

“D'you think she'd ever …”

“She'd suit another baby …”

“How was she?” demands Mrs Chudd. “With your little'uns?”

“Fine,” I say.

And then, even more dangerously, “Do you think she might ever have another herself?”

I shrug.

“Don't she ever talk about it?”

“Tabs,” says Miss Lavish.

“P'raps he can't get it up.”

“
Tabs!
” says Miss Lavish, and this shuts her up.

“Only wondering …” she tapers off, disgruntled.

But it starts me thinking, and I think it would be a very good idea. After all, the war is nearly over – everyone says so – and I won't be here to keep them company much longer. And when I go, what will they have to do? I make a plan.

Lady Elmsleigh's New Year party is much like Lady Elmsleigh's Christmas party: an excuse for some merriment and expertly organized. This time the children have their own rooms, with a magician laid on (he is actually Mr Tugwell, but we all pretend not to notice), and a room full of mattresses and cushions for the very small children to fall asleep. I am not a very small child, and I sneak into the large hall to execute my plan.

Aunty Joyce is having an orange passed to her from the butcher's chin. Mr Glass is deliberately making a hash of it so he can nuzzle her neck as long as possible, but Uncle Jack is talking to the vicar again and doesn't seem to notice. Then she has to pass the orange to Ted Pearlman, the GI, and I watch with interest as he stoops gently to receive the fruit. Very briefly, she puts a hand on his arm to steady herself, but it is hastily withdrawn and the whole orange delivery is over more speedily than most. Their team has won, whilst Miss Lavish is still struggling with Thumper in the next team, and Aunty Joyce conceals the slight flush to her cheeks with a grin of victory.

The music starts, and Ted Pearlman asks me to dance. I feel very grown up.

“You come here often?” he jokes, as we waltz around. “I asked myself, ‘
Who
is that babe with the cute face and no partner?'”

I am very, very happy dancing with Ted, even if I am perched on his toes. Uncle Jack is looking at me now and, although he doesn't look exactly cross, he is not looking at Aunty Joyce, and that is simply not good enough.

When the music stops, Ted bows melodramatically, and I curtsey.

I notice Nancy, the land girl, is leading Uncle Jack by the hand on to the dance floor. I blow the air up my face in exasperation. This was not supposed to happen.

Now Uncle Jack is being foxtrotted around at a merry old pace by the very pretty Nancy, who knows how to handle a tractor and certainly knows how to handle a man. To my surprise he seems to be enjoying it. His face is all smiles, and he does cut quite a dash with her, I must admit. Of course, he glances over at his wife – to check her reaction, maybe – and she looks down at the tiled floor and scratches her nose.

I tug at Ted's sleeve and stand on tiptoe. “Why don't you dance with Aunty Joyce?” I whisper.

“You think she'd let me?” he whispers back.

“Try it!”

He does, and she accepts. Even I am surprised. A full-blooded man, heavily contaminated, and she agrees to touch him and be touched.

Now I am quite pleased that Uncle Jack is dancing with Nancy. She can get any engine going, and she can get any man going too. His face is pink with excitement, so pink and so excited that he looks for Joyce again (to check that she's looking? To check that she isn't?) and can't find her. Back and forth they go, she so expertly weaving him about that he has the happy illusion of being a fine dancer.

This will do nicely. I lean back against the wall and snaffle a paste sandwich.

Ted is so tall next to Aunty Joyce. She turns her face up to his now and then, and looks so pretty I wonder he can stop himself kissing her. He has his large hand firmly on her back with the fingers spread wide, and he is holding her very close as they sway quickly to the rhythm. Her lips are very red tonight, and her cheeks quite pink, but as the dance wears on I watch them grow an even deeper pink.

At one point Nancy almost hurls Uncle Jack into them, for she is going quite wild now, whirling him all over the shop and getting dangerously close to his cheek. But he has seen his wife, and the smile loosens a little round the edges, and he keeps looking over.

The dance ends, Aunty Joyce gives a nervous little ‘thank you' with her head hung low, and Ted gives a nod before returning to the sandwiches.

The next dance is a fast one, and Nancy looks for all the world like she might make another grab for Uncle Jack. But I step in fast.

I take Uncle Jack's hand and pull him away.

“Oh no!” he says, laughing. “No more dancing, Kitty!”

But I keep pulling him, and lead him over to Aunty Joyce.

He looks at her and raises his eyebrows like a naughty boy waiting to be scolded. I take Aunty Joyce's hand, place it in his, and give them a good shove towards the dancing. They both look at me in exasperation, and Aunty Joyce rolls her eyes.

“I can't jitterbug!” protests Uncle Jack.

“Then do something else!” I say firmly. “Go on!”

They sort of shrug and sort of smile, and to my utter delight, they dance.