Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven (15 page)

It is so cold on Saturday morning that Aunty Joyce suggests I stay in by the range and do some colouring, but it is my only chance to see Tommy, so I climb the frozen lane to the milksheds with her.

The cows are steaming in the cold, and we rest our cheeks against them, glad of their warm twitching hides. I wait until Aunty Joyce has popped into the farmhouse before I go down the line of cows and find Tommy. “Wait for me behind the barn!” I hiss. “
Really
important news.
Really
important!” He looks unmoved, as though he perhaps thinks I'm going to tell him my mother is coming or something, so I add, “About your parents!” and dash back to my cow.

He does wait for me, of course, and I draw him back down the lane to be out of earshot of everyone. As we lean on an old wooden gate I feel heady with power. I tell him everything as I remember it, and he hangs on my every word, making me repeat things over and over. When I see his face light up with completely new expressions of joy, I feel I have worked the magic all myself.

“
Doted
on me, you said. Are you sure those were her exact words?”

“She
doted
on you. That's what Tosser said. You can ask her.”

I take him to the village hall and we push open the door tentatively. There is no one there, but the picture is hanging by the noticeboard, where Lady Elmsleigh left it.

“Which one do you think she is?” I ask, overcome with my own importance.

“She's
here
? In this picture?”

“And her mother.”

Tommy lets out a whistle and swallows in anticipation as he looks along the rows of Sheepcote villagers in their outlandish hats and hairstyles.

“Tell me! Tell me!”

I savour the moment. Raising my hand I point slowly to the smiling dark-haired girl and her mother standing by the flowerbed at the edge of the picture.

He seems to stop breathing. He puts his finger on her face and strokes it, over and over.

I thought I was in control, but now I see that I'm not. He doesn't speak or answer me for a long time, and when he moves it is his shoulders, which are shaking, and tears, so powerful I know he is wishing I wasn't there. I am way out of my depth. I try to think of something funny to say to snap him out of it, because I think that's what he'll want me to do. But nothing comes to me. So I just push my head into his chest and give him a hug. He wraps his arms around me and squeezes me for dear life, as if I was his dead mother come back to him.

All through January and February the winds tear at the bushes, wrenching them this way and that, and huge trees are pulled about like seaweed underwater. These are winds so bitterly cold that no one wants to venture out. They slam doors shut, rattle bolts and loosen catches, and they flatten trousers and skirts against us so that every contour of our legs is visible. Still it doesn't snow, but on the highest slopes and Sheepcote woods there is a scattering of white.

The sheep are brought in from the fields and penned up for lambing. Three barns are now full of them, divided according to how many lambs each is carrying. They are due the last weekend in February, and all our efforts concentrate on getting them well provided for with bales of straw, making space in the barns, fixing pens.

Heinrich comes into his own now. He was a sheep farmer in Germany, and knows exactly what's going on. Thumper says he's his best worker and is quite happy to let him take over a little, and you would think he was an old friend of Thumper's and not a German at all.

“Three lems,” says Heinrich, nodding at one pen. “And over here, two lems, and there one lem each.” I am impressed that he can tell what's inside these great woolly boulders, and I smile, taking his hand between mine for warmth. He smiles back. “You will have one, I sink, to hold and feed.”

I run up to the barns every day after school, hoping the lambs have started. The sheep stare at me in that funny way they do, always smiling no matter what I say to them. They are gigantic barrels on twig-like, knock-kneed legs, and it is a wonder they can remain standing at all.

Then, at the very end of February, we hear bleating on the way home from school. I run up to the barns with some other children to see that four lambs have been born in the big barn and the mothers are in separate little pens with them. Thumper takes the children off to see the lambs in the next barn, but Heinrich sits me on a straw bale and lifts out a lamb for me to hold. It bleats a little, then sits very still, as still as me. I am shocked by it being there in my lap, alive, newly born and smelling of hay. I am surprised by the feel of it, like tough carpet, not soft at all. I close my arms more confidently around it, and it bleats and rests its chin on my arm. I can feel its warm tummy moving in and out under my hand, smell the rich, maizy lamb-smell, and I sit immobile, mesmerized by the miracle under my nose.

Its mother honks loudly a few feet away, so Heinrich lifts the lamb and places it gently back by its mother's side. Aunty Joyce comes in with a tray of tea, and Heinrich takes a cup, smiling.

“Watch this one now,” he says, and we both look at a ewe who is lying at the front of the pen. She is rolling her eyes back and her top lip rolls back too.

“Is she all right?” I ask.

“Fine,” he says. “Watch.”

The ewe continues to roll her lip back every now and then, and makes an uncharacteristic sigh or two. Heinrich checks her back legs and takes a piece of cord from his pocket. He puts a little lasso over some hooves which are protruding from the ewe's behind, and tugs gently. With a rush of liquid a lamb shoots out on to the straw. He swings it by the legs and puts it in front of the ewe, who seems to lick life into it.

Aunty Joyce is sitting on a hay bale next to me, and I jump up to loll over the pen and ogle the newly born lamb. I am so busy marvelling at it that I don't see Heinrich sit down beside Aunty Joyce and put his arm around her.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” I ask, but when I turn there are tears in her eyes, and Heinrich is comforting her. I frown. “What is it, Aunty Joyce?”

Heinrich looks across at me. “It can be very moving, I sink, to see a lem borning.”

I nod sagely, but I have no idea what he is talking about.

That same night I am woken in the early hours by Uncle Jack getting up for his shift. I don't usually wake up, and soon realize there are voices. Aunty Joyce has got up too, and they are moving about downstairs and talking. I hear the front door go, and then footsteps on the stairs. My door creaks open.

“Kitty? You awake?”

“Yes.”

“I'm just going to do teas for the lambers. I won't be two ticks. Stay in bed till I get back.”

I hear the front door close again, but I can't stay in bed. I'm awake now, and I can hear lambs bleating. I lie in bed for a while then look out of my window and see glints of a brazier or an oil lamp glowing inside one of the barns despite the blackout. I want to see more lambs being born. I want to hold one again. I have no intention of missing any of it.

*    *    *  

Aunty Joyce puts a hand on his arm, then takes it away again. They stand looking at each other and saying nothing. And there is something about the way they say nothing that stops me from opening my mouth. It is a very telling nothing they are saying. He is a little bit closer than he needs to be, and she is not at all intending to step back. I can see her face clearly from where I am, but not all of his. She is very flushed and looks down at the floor then up again, each time holding his gaze a little longer.

The next thing I know he has put his hand on her hair, and is stroking the back of her head. She leans into him and rests her head on his chest. I am freezing cold, but I can't bring myself to interrupt. Something tells me this is a significant moment, and I might learn something.

She lifts her head for an instant and he takes it between his two giant hands. He is leaning forward … is he kissing her? … I think he is! I stop shifting my weight from one wellington boot to the other and stare. Heinrich is kissing Aunty Joyce on the lips, and she is letting him!

He runs his hands up and down her back, and then, to my amazement, he passes them over her hips and her bottom. She has taken his neck in one hand and is pulling his face down towards her, pushing her lips on to his like they do at the pictures, only a bit more hungrily. Now he is pushing up her skirt with his hand, and I can hardly believe it of Heinrich. He seems such a gentle shepherd-like person and here he is doing rude things to Aunty Joyce. But she doesn't seem to mind a jot.

I want to interrupt, to tell them to stop, but I find I can't. I am too intent on what is happening to call it to a halt, and so I go on watching.

Now he has buried his hand deep inside the undergrowth of her skirts, and she is crying. In fact, no – she is not crying: she is making little groans, little sighs. He is whispering things I can't make out, and moving his hands gently, and the effect is to make her give little ‘oh's' and sobs and sighs, but she is definitely not crying.

Now he is leading her to the back of the barn and is laying her down on some stacked hay bales and there, amidst the lambing ewes and the air rich with the smell of birth, he lies on top of her.

My view has disintegrated with this move, and I can just make out the tops of Aunty Joyce's stockings, her knees bent, and Heinrich's strange nudging movements against her. It is like nothing I've seen before, except perhaps the caged bunnies. This is it then. This is shagging, and it's ever so rude! One of the ewes bellows angrily, but they continue to move against each other, obscured by straw and shadows and the limit of my chink in the wood. Her sighs turn to soft wails, and she seems to be in pain. Just as I am about to go to her rescue, it stops.There is no sound, no more movement, except one or two indignant ewes kicking the straw and bellowing as though they are well and truly hacked off. Heinrich and Joyce seem to be smiling now, laughing at the sheep and brushing down their clothes. I dash off back down the lane. I can't wait to tell Tommy. In the big barn I have seen birth and I have seen shagging, all within the space of a day and a night. Two of the great mysteries of life revealed under one roof.

Tommy is set to leave school at Easter when he's fourteen. The Top Class children do practically nothing, and Boss Harry seems to turn a blind eye to them. The boys stalk the streets at dinnertime, loaf about with half-smoked Woodbines tucked behind their ears and talk about ambushing girls. The girls, on the other hand, have transformed themselves from the adventurous minxes they were in Standards One and Two. They no longer show all for a Victory V or allow themselves to be examined in a harvest stook surgery with tufts of barley. They are all buttoned up now, soaped and curled and saving themselves for the men they marry. And the boys, bursting with lust, full-grown and aimless, are so tormented by a coy look or a swinging hip that they plot violation.

Only one or two girls can be counted on to break ranks, and in so doing they probably save the virtue of many others. One is Betty Chudd – mother's pride and joy – who is rumoured to have gone all the way with Leslie Capper.

Since Leslie is a couple of years older than anyone at school and works at the sawmill, no one can really verify it, although his younger brother Will is convinced. And anyway, everyone can testify to Betty's loose ways – except for her mother who can't see the wood for the trees – and it is Betty who becomes the trophy that lures them on, even if it is the lowered lashes of some other girl that really fuels their frenzy.

I can't imagine that Tommy will be affected by anything so daft (especially now that I know what it entails). Even so, he does seem to grow in height each time I see him, and his voice – a varying reedy-rusty-bray when I met him – now seems to have settled to a deep, liquidy bass which I adore. And then one day something happens to threaten the easy friendship we have, threatens to change things for ever.

It is the weekend, and I have spent the morning stone-picking up at the farm, and the afternoon daydreaming with Tommy amongst the snowdrops, which have appeared slyly in the woods. Tommy and I are wandering back home across the fields, a little wary of being seen together, but too busy chatting about Aunty Joyce and Heinrich to care. As we reach the lane that links the village to the farm, Betty Chudd comes out of nowhere like a fox, leaning suddenly on a gatepost beside us, and twisting her toffee-coloured curls around her fingers.

“Comin' up the lane then, you?”

Tommy turns from my strong protector into a clumsy oaf. His arms and legs seem suddenly not to fit his body, and his head seems too heavy to hold up straight on his neck. It lolls hopelessly, rolling from one shoulder to the next, as his eyes take in the panorama from the gatepost to his boots.

“Might then,” he mumbles.

“When?” she presses, wrapping both arms backwards over the five bar gate, so that her breasts stick out and pull at her dress buttons.

I assume he is just being nice, using the ‘maybe' as a means of escape. So now I wait for something that will send her politely packing. But he folds his lips, then glances at her briefly, and says, “When 'er's gone.”

I am horrified. There is no doubting, from the slight nod of his head in my direction, that ‘ 'er' is me. I simply can't believe Tommy can do this, and I plant my wellingtoned feet in front of him and stare for an explanation. His avoidance of my eyes confirms my worst fears: he is putting
her
before
me
. But there is worse to come.

“G'won then. Wunt wait f'rever.”

She's up to something, in my opinion. Her cardigan has fallen completely open and, apart from her brown buckled shoes, her legs are entirely bare, as though imitating stockings. A daft thing to do in February. She looks like she'll catch her death of cold, if you ask me.

“I'll walk 'er back, then I'll be up.”

“The little'un can walk 'erself back, can't she?”

“Wunt be long, look.”

“What, you 'er lover or summut?”

He exhales as if desperate, then swallows earnestly. I am beside myself. Not only are they talking about me as the ‘little'un' and 'er', but
worse
: they are talking about me
as if I'm not there.
I should stomp off, I suppose, and leave him to the Sheepcote trophy he is longing to grab. But I let him walk me back and say goodbye, shooting him a wounded look, hoping to stop him. All I do, possibly, is inhibit his pleasure as he races back up the lane in the growing shadows of a late February afternoon.

It is a savage lesson to me; for all our intimacy and mutual security, there is a huge, burgeoning, crucial part of him that I cannot share. Not yet, at least.

The days slip bleakly into March. The skies are a blank grey-white and the lanes full of mud. There is nothing to look forward to, now that Tommy is lost to me. I don't know if it is jealousy, fear or just plain callousness that fuels my cunning, but I have a way to make him notice me. A way, at least – as Miss Lavish would say – to make contact.

“I need to ask you something in private,” I say, as I catch up with him in the lane one morning, with some other big boys.

“What's up then?” he asks, tousling my hair, but still walking.

“In private!” I hiss.

He grins at his mates and stops for a while. “What?”

I watch until they are out of earshot. I glance at the hedgerow and then at him, doing my best to adopt a pained, confused look. “What does ‘have his wicked way' mean?”

He breathes a laugh.

“Who's havin' their wicked way, then?”

“No one.”

“Where d'you hear it, then?”

I shrug innocently.

“Oh … it's nothing … just someone said Mr Fairly had his wicked way with your mum.”

His face turns ghostly. Now I have his full attention, but it's not what I expected.

“Who said that?”

“Just someone.”

“Who?”

I swallow, uncertain: “Tosser …”

He looks up to the sky then bends almost at the waist, burying his head in his arms as if it is all too bright for him. “No!
No
! Please God, NO!”

I am aghast at what I've done, and not sure how to undo it.

“She only said, ‘Some folks say …' It may not be true …”

But Tommy is making strange grunts of pain, wails of misery. “You don't understand, do you? You're too young to see what this means!” He turns away from me, not towards the boys, but towards a gate, and he runs like a hare across the fields.

I am the person who makes Tommy decide to run away from Sheepcote. So what happens next is all my fault.