Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven (2 page)

I am placed in Standard Three, in a shared classroom with Standard Four. Both years are taught together as eight- to ten-year-olds by a young teacher called Miss Hubble. I like Miss Hubble. She is bright-cheeked and alert with a smile for everyone, very thick ankles and a passion for wild flowers. Everyone knows she will make a joke sooner than use the ruler if you blot your work or forget how many pounds in a hundredweight. On my first day she gives me an exercise book, cut in half, for ‘HANDWRITING'. When she discovers my blank page halfway through the lesson, she keeps the sneerers at bay by giving me a foxglove and some campion from a jar on her desk and thanks me for offering to stick them in the book for her. At playtime she whispers that she will help me catch up at the weekends.

Standards Five and Six, on the other hand, are taught by the sour-faced Miss Miller. People say she is a spinster of the Great War and is angry with the whole world because her stock of possible husbands has been blown to bits and used as compost for foreign flowers.

The children in the next two Standards, aged between twelve and fourteen, are taught by the headmaster, Mr Edwards, and they call him ‘Boss Harry'. Boss Harry is no taller than the women but seems a giant. He lost three brothers in the Great War, in which he fought himself, and he keeps a slim pale cane in a cupboard above his desk. These facts together increase his height by a good few inches.

Boss Harry takes us for ‘poetry'. He stands by the window, facing out, and spouts lines about lovers and soldiers, birdsong and heartbreak, in a strong melodic voice that I will later discover is from South Wales. We watch his chalky hands clasped behind his black jacket, and we enjoy not having to do anything but sit. We like it especially when he becomes angry, because it is exciting. No one ever knows for certain what he will do next. And one thing that is guaranteed to make him angry but unable to use his cane is Miss Miller, twice a week. She vents her anger with the world through music. Every Wednesday and Friday she hands out an assortment of percussion instruments and bangs away at her untuned piano to the arbitrary thrashing of triangles and tambourines. Through this ear-splitting racket she entreats her avid class to howl out a song. She shrieks it out, line by wretched line, crashing away at the keys until Boss Harry (whose sensitive ears were made in the Land of Song) is unable to ignore the onslaught coming through the partition wall. He turns the colour of foxglove and has to face the window to avoid showing us his slitted eyes and gritted teeth. She will punish him this way for ever for being the only eligible widower this side of Stroud, and he not willing to give her the time of day.

It's been years since I went to school properly, and I find sitting still in squashed rows very difficult. What with all the evacuees there are three or four of us to every two-seater desk, and our elbows can barely move. I am on the end with my bum half on and half off the bench. And I learn early on that ‘vacuees' are deemed no better than gypsies in the order of things, since it is always a gypsy or an evacuee who is sent to flush the toilets at the edge of the playground. This has to be done three times a day, and I am chosen in the playground by Miss Miller on the very first day. I'm sent with a gypsy boy called Stef who is to show me the ropes.

There, bordering the fields, is a row of holes in the ground with square wooden seats. The cubicles reek of shit and sour urine. I need to use them myself but after Aunty Joyce's boiling, the elastic in my knickers was so limp that she had to tie a knot in it, and now I can't get them down.

“You pull this and the shit gets chucked into the field,” he says, pointing to a handle. “Do it!” And then for no reason he picks up a sharp stone from the filthy floor and holds it close to my cheek: “I could cut you!”

I soon see that the gypsies enjoy the new evacuees because for once they are no longer the lowest of the low. And there are two more groups of children who are grateful for our arrival.

The first are the evacuees who arrived at the beginning of the war. Tired of being the scapegoats for every problem in the village, they relish the opportunity to pick on new arrivals. They make fun of my accent, which was once theirs, my inability to read and write any better than the reception class, and they laugh at my unfitting clothes.

The second group of children who welcome our arrival are those from the boys' home. They can sympathize with us for being brought up by strangers, but only until we get letters from home.

And from this melting pot of seething rivalries we bubble over at the end of the day and make our way through the lanes. But walking home turns out to be worse than playtimes. At least at playtime you can play hopscotch by yourself and pretend to be busy. You can make yourself invisible in the playground, provided nobody gets bored and begins to notice those they've excluded. They reckon British Bulldog was banned last year because it always turned into a vicious battle between evacuees and villagers. Children were trampled on, fingers were broken, lips were split. But still large groups of them are always having a go, until Boss Harry spots them from his schoolhouse window and comes down to ring his handbell furiously.

On the way home it's different. There is no restraining bell. Children scatter in all directions. Some go down the road to a neighbouring hamlet, some across the valley to the farms or up the hill to the church. Others, like me, troop on past the church, through Sheepcote, and carry on up to the Fleece, where things start to get nasty.

By now there are about ten children, and a score or so more from the boys' home. I am walking ahead on this first day as fast as I can, but keeping my knees as clamped as possible, because I am now desperate for a wee.

One of the girls runs up behind me and lifts the hem of my skirt. There are hoots and giggles.

“Hey! Droopy drawers!”

I don't look back. Then a boy's voice:

“'Er can't 'ear you! 'Er can't read and 'er can't write! I don't s'pose 'er can
say
nothink neither!”

This time a stone strikes me on the shoulder. It hurts. I try not to feel it, and keep walking. I'm going to wet myself if I don't get home soon.

“What you
doin
'?” booms a new voice. “You can't 'it girls! Get lost – go on! Get on home, you!”

There are a series of whistles and teasing whoops, and the owner of the voice runs up to me. “You all right?”

It takes a few moments for me to pluck up the courage to look at him, in case it's another trick. “I'm okay … fanks!”

He's a much older boy, thirteen or fourteen maybe, and he has kind eyes. He smiles at me, and I look down at the road, at my squirming knees and my heavy feet, which threaten a leak with the impact of each boot.

The rowdiest of the troop seem to have tailed off.

“Where you from, then? London?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey! You seen bombers, then? Seen doodlebugs?”

“I got shrapnel.”

“Hey!”

“Got loads at home. Brought a few bits wiv me though.”

He comes to a standstill. The rest of the group are turning right down a path towards an iron gate marked “Heaven House”, only I don't have time to work out the sign because I am on a mission. I hurry on.

“My name's Tommy, by the way,” he calls after me.

I cannot, I
cannot
stop now. Running, I turn my head, so chewed up with gratitude and guilt, and mutter, “I'm Kitty. I'll show you the shrapnel – you can 'ave it!”

I can already feel the sore heat of it running down my thighs and, as I head up the path to Aunty Joyce's, I leave a dark trail in the stone. Then I stand on the doorstep and let it all come out. When Aunty Joyce opens the door it is over. I greet her in a pool of shame, desperately hoping that the big boy did not watch me running home.

Uncle Jack turns out not to be such a tosser as I expected. At least, not at first, and then later … I'm not sure what I would call him.

The first thing I see is his boots by the door: huge black hobnails with leather like orange peel. They stand on yesterday's
Gloucestershire Echo
in a ten-to-two formation, making them look strangely balletic. Inside the parlour his dark blue jacket hangs on the back of a dining chair like a living thing, its pockets bulging with tins and its arms curved forwards. There is an intense musky smell to it, half sweat, half smoke, and the usual paraffin and sulphurous cooking smells of the parlour are stifled by a waft of vanilla tobacco. There is a man about.

It is a long time since I have lived with a man, and I am nervous and excited by his presence. He comes in from the back door carrying wood, his pipe still in his mouth. He grips it between his teeth and tries to smile at me, but has to deposit the logs and take out the pipe for me to make sense of his greeting.

“Hello! You must be … Kitty, is it?”

“Yes. Kitty Green.”

“Kitty Green!” He holds out his hand and it is huge and warm. His face is smudged with dust and smoke, which makes the white of his eyes gleam a brilliant blue. “Jack Shepherd. You can call me Uncle Jack if you like.”

I smile weakly, not sure what is expected of me, and afraid to break any unspoken rules.

“You'll be well looked after here, at any rate,” he says, sinking into one of the two armchairs by the range. “Joyce is a good cook – I dare say you've never eaten anything like it, have you? Pass me that box in my pocket there, will you?”

I go to his jacket and reach in the right-hand pocket, but he shakes his head and indicates the left one. I reach in my hand and feel string and paper, two-inch stubby pencils and something cold like a screw. I close my hand around the tin and take it over to him. I flinch as he knocks his pipe sharply on the stone hearth around the range. Then I watch as he opens the tin and out springs a ginger tress of tobacco, which he expertly tugs at and stuffs little wisps into the bowl of his pipe. The smell takes me back to the waiting room at Paddington station, where my dad – home on leave – said, “Remember, you show them toffs. Behave yourself, be kind, and no fackin' swearing! You show 'em!” Then it wafts me back to my Uncle Frank and Aunty Vi's, where we stayed for two years before my mum had the twins and before Aunty Vi went doolally and got sent to a home. It wasn't Uncle Frank who smoked the pipe, but his mate George who used to come round sometimes. It smelt a lot like this. Suddenly I am there, in that soot-smelling living room and the bedroom with the damp encrusted wallpaper and my mother's arms around me all night. Before the twins she used to do that. Dad had been in the army so long I couldn't remember any different.

Uncle Jack looks young enough to be in the army. There is no grey in his brown curly hair and under his blue overalls he looks quite sturdy.

“Now you're to help your Aunty Joyce, mind. Up at the farm in the mornings and weekends, and help with the housework after school. Isn't that right, Joyce?”

He calls, but Aunty Joyce is in the pantry. She holds open the beaded fronds that separate the pantry from the parlour and says to me, “You better come and help me, then.”

I help her prepare tea. Before the week is out I will know how to scrub potatoes, boil eggs, top and tail beans and make pastry. But on this particular evening she makes a point of everything I can't do, as if emphasizing to Uncle Jack how useless I am, and he looks up from his paper with sympathy, as if to agree with her unspoken assertion that I am lucky to be with them, considering the hovel I must have come from where everyone says ‘cor blimey' and they don't even have a change of knickers or know what a vegetable is.

I suppose I don't actually think this, but in that instinctive way children have, I know it.

Uncle Jack works ten-day shifts: any time from two o'clock in the morning to ten o'clock at night. Whenever he comes home after 2 p.m., or as near as train times will allow, Aunty Joyce always insists on having dinner at teatime, to allow her husband a full hot meal. So on this first evening with Uncle Jack we have liver and onion, potato and cabbage.

When we sit down to eat, I still have not let go of my mother's arms around me in Aunty Vi's spare room, and I am not hungry. Nonetheless, I pick up my knife and fork like Aunty Joyce did yesterday, to show willing. Uncle Jack instantly clamps a large hand on mine and forces my fork to the table in a frightening rebuke. He looks at me intently and his frown turns to a sort of sympathetic smile, as if to say he understands my impetuous animal need to scoff anything on my plate, but here we do things differently.

He bows his head and Aunty Joyce does the same, clasping her pretty hands together against the tablecloth.

“For these and all Thy bounteous gifts, oh Lord, we give Thee our thanks. Amen.”

“Amen,” says Aunty Joyce.

“Our men,” I agree.

We tuck in, only I have even less will than ever to tackle the liver now that I have so much to live up to. I watch from the corner of my eye to see how they hold the meat down with the fork, then saw at it with the knife. I try to do the same, but it is tough, and a piece of liver flies off the plate and speckles the tablecloth with gravy. Aunty Joyce rolls her eyes, and gives Uncle Jack a distant “You see what I have to put up with?” look, to which he replies with a magnanimous look which says, “We cannot expect too much of her.”

By now, the dissected liver – whose name was enough to put me off in the first place – is sprouting little tubes, which fill me with such revulsion I move on to the potatoes.

“Well, have you made any friends at school?” he asks me with his mouth full of liver.

“No, not yet. Well – there's a bigger boy called Tommy. He's my friend.”

They exchange glances. Aunty Joyce puts down her cutlery and I swear she flares her nostrils at Uncle Jack. He, in turn, points his fork at me: “Don't go messing with Tommy. Do you hear me? Keep well away from that boy.”

“But why? He was kind to me. I –”

“There are no buts. You do as I say or you'll find yourself in Queer Street!”

I never do find out where Queer Street is, but in my dreams it is always a bit like Weaver's Terrace in Sheepcote.

They move on quickly to another topic and, although they occasionally lob me a question or fill me in on local information, most of the time I am able to assume my knitting club pose, and make myself completely disappear.

It seems there is a Lady Elmsleigh they do not approve of because her father would have done things differently, she doesn't go to church and she smokes. She is a ‘naytheiss' and worst of all she is a ‘soashliss'. Then there is a man called Mr Fairly who looks after the boys' home, and he is a good, God-fearing man and a ‘lay' preacher. Apparently Uncle Jack is going to become a ‘lay' preacher at the church too (I imagine him brooding on a pile of hymn books), although before he married Aunty Joyce he used to be a ‘methodiss'. I am not sure if it was a downwards move marrying her or not, but he is now Church of England, because his family wouldn't let him be a methodiss any more. Whenever things go a bit wrong or whenever someone gets upset, Uncle Jack towers up and quotes things Jesus would say in this situation.

One thing I soon learn about Uncle Jack anyhow is that he seems to know God really well. Sometimes he says things like “God wouldn't turn his nose up at your liver and onion, even if it has gone cold now! No! God would have no qualms about cabbage!” or sometimes, if he is offered a flagon of cider by a neighbour, “God isn't a prude! Oh no! God is a kind, friendly God, who'd enjoy a good pint along with the next man, as long as it wasn't on a Sunday!”

Indeed, God and Jesus are ever present in the Shepherd household and seem to pop up in every room on a regular basis. And although I labour hard at Sunday school to work out the difference between the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, God and Jesus seem remarkably interchangeable at Weaver's Cottage. Usually, if he can't find a good quote from Jesus on any particular subject, Uncle Jack will attribute it to God.Thus God likes rice pudding, God enjoys sums, God does not think it a good idea for thirteen-year olds and eight-year olds to play together. God likes clean nails and God did not waste his time going to the pictures to see Betty Grable.

But the things that God finds most abhorrent are ‘the sins of the flesh'. They are talked about an awful lot by Uncle Jack, and for me they recall only the limp pink meat wrapped in bloodied paper for a ridiculous number of ration points.

Uncle Jack is really quite a jolly man, I conclude, after a week or so. He has a reassuring certainty about him. He is whatever he is with absolute conviction. He blunders his way through biblical references with such cheerful evangelism that he could convince even the most cynical eight-year-old. Most of all, he is a tonic after the dour, uncertain world that Aunty Joyce seems to inhabit.

Nonetheless, neither of them is quite ready for me. When the liver is cleared away (I help take the plates to the sink) they have ‘afters'. I can hardly believe my eyes when a giant wedge of cake is put on my plate.

“Facky Nell!” I say.

“
What?
”

“Facky Nell,” I repeat, a little more cautiously.

Uncle Jack is momentarily lost for words. Aunty Joyce stops cutting the cake mid-movement. I look from one to the other. Uncle Jack swallows hard.

“We do
not,
” (his voice starts as a whisper and gets louder – very loud) “I repeat
not
, use language like that in this house.”

“Like –?” I begin.

“Go to your room!”

I look wistfully at the wedge of cake, my eyes filling with tears and my firmly closed lips beginning to move this way and that on their own.

In my room I see the cupboard door in the corner and think I might hide in it, but it is locked. It was locked the last time I tried it too. I am so shut out of everything and utterly lost. I sink on to the cold bed and cry and cry until my face is sore with tears. Then I fall asleep under the moth-spattered walls.