Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven (23 page)

As you turned into the gate I stood there, panting, blocking the way so that you couldn't help noticing me. You smiled and tipped your trilby hat, rushing onwards.

Did you hear my heartbeat, at thirty feet, like the owl?

You put down your umbrella and then you turned your head a little – just a fraction – as if to check something. You were just turning it back again to face the door when you saw that I too had turned, and you swung your head swiftly round to consider me with your conker eyes. The pulse in my head was soft urgent footsteps on gravel. Your face was much longer and your jaw much wider than I'd known it. There was nothing terrifying about you, and if I was at all frightened it was on account of the raging stew of emotions that I was trying to conceal.

I found myself slowly whispering, “Facky … Nell …!”

You removed your trilby and took a pace towards me.

“Kitty!”

I was willing that space between us to close up, but I didn't know how to do it. The couple of yards of playground seemed like miles and miles. And then there was a hoot from the school window: a boy was leaning out – no, three boys – girls too – the whole class lolling out of the windows, crowding to see.

“G'won, miss!”

“Is it 'im, miss? Is it Tommy?”

“Kiss 'er!”

You smiled. I found that I was smiling too. You kept on smiling, and we seemed to just stand there, simmering, the sound of crude suggestions coming at us from the windows.

I stupidly held out my hand to shake yours, and you took it with your left hand, because your other one was full of umbrella and briefcase. And we stood there holding hands on one side like a couple in a gavotte, only we were shaking them up and down foolishly as if some Charlie Chaplin film had got stuck. All the time you were tracing my face with your eyes, as if you recognized it from drawing it all those years ago.

Up and down went our joined hands, and we waited in the fine drizzle for something to happen. Then you dropped your briefcase and umbrella, and I threw my arms around your neck, and you hugged me back. It was easier than looking at you.

“G'won! Kiss 'er!”

Then, to hide your reddening eyes and perhaps to hide mine too, you did as you were told.

The classroom behind us was in uproar, and children were pulling up plants from the flowerbeds outside the windows, throwing great wads of flower petals at us.

It's been good to catch up with all the news. I can't believe how much has changed: most of the shops gone; and the school will soon be moved to Heaven House; Aunty Joyce and Uncle Jack have
three
children; the village hall has got central heating and a proper stage with velvet curtains; and you are all grown up with a trilby hat and umbrella and a face like Gregory Peck.

No, really. That's how you look.

If I'd only known … Lady Elmsleigh panting up the road that day … Ah Tommy! You'd've been welcome in our house, you know. And we weren't that far away. We moved to Bristol in the end and Maurice got a good job with Wills where he used to work before the war.

It's funny really, what evacuation did. I mean, most people have to wait till they grow up and leave home to take a long look at their parents, but there I was by the age of eight seeing my mother through new eyes. It was like I'd stood back from it all, and could see she wasn't all-powerful, all-wonderful after all. She was just my very blemished, bumbling mum, muddling through and making the most of it. I gave poor Maurice a run for his money, but looking back, I'm ashamed now, really. He was just doing the best he could to get through it all, doing the best he knew for his own child: finding her a mother. And my mum was just doing the best she could for us. They weren't made for each other – and they knew it. But they had that one thing in common: they knew the children mattered. And the funny thing is, they've become pretty inseparable now. They go for long walks on the Downs holding hands like lovers, sharing memories, talking things through. I take my hat off to old Maurice – to both of them – I do really.

And what a hotchpotch it all was for you – the war, I mean. You say it brought you me, and that I changed everything. Me and my big mouth, that would be. Well, I'm glad if I changed everything, but it wasn't intentional. Children do that, don't they? They change everything.

And now you're talking about us having children ourselves.

I don't know … reliving the past has made us both see things we didn't quite see before. Those poor hurt people, with childhoods sabotaged by poor hurt people, with childhoods … all unwittingly …

I know you told me things, but I was only small. I sensed things, like an animal makes out wafts in the air. It's only talking of it now that lets me really pick up the trail. Now I know what made you run.

I'm not saying let's not have children – I'm not even saying let's wait. It's just … Well, there's something that's got to happen first, isn't there? It's no problem for me or anything. I mean, birds do it, bees do it, even educated … okay, I'll shut up.

No – I mean, fall in love. Although
that
as well. The bunny thing. Not that it would have to be quite like the bunnies. Not that I object to that … I wouldn't know whether I would … I mean … please stop smiling and shut me up.

As you say, it's a huge and exciting thing to embark on. The hugeness and excitement of it all is almost too much. But we know things now, you and I, so it can't have been all for nothing.

And Uncle Jack. Crumbs! All that stuff about trying to be someone, trying to leave his mark … When all he needed, to be a hero, was to lift a child on to his shoulders and make her laugh.

If we're lucky enough … if we do … if everything works out …

Yes.

You're right.

Let's not scribble some indelible script on their tender childhood, or allow a single blot on the blank page. Instead, let's take a soft pencil from behind our ear, and lightly sketch something beautiful.

I wanted to write a mystery and a love story, but something gripping, not mawkish. I wanted to move people, but also make them laugh.

Unlike other novels I have written, the entire story of
Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven
came to me one day as I was gazing out of the window. I let it ferment for a year, played around with the tense and narrative voice a bit, but then it just seemed to write itself.

It was sparked by the idea that it might be interesting to look at a dysfunctional couple through the candid eyes of a child. I knew the child would have to be an outsider, because offspring are far too enmeshed in the politics of family relationships to view things with the candour I was looking for. The obvious answer was to make the protagonist an evacuee, a child from an impoverished but loving background, thrust into the bizarre private relationship of an inscrutable couple.

Although I hadn't chosen it deliberately, as soon as I started writing, I knew the Home Front of the Second World War was the ideal setting. Everything was stripped down to basics then: love and death. It was a good, clear canvas to work on.

When I was about three-quarters of the way through the novel, I woke in the middle of the night and scribbled down the last paragraph. It wasn't until I wrote those lines that I realized what the book was really about. It is about how much children matter. In the book we see a whole range of ways in which human beings hurt each other, the deepest and cruellest being those hurts inflicted as children. They range from physical child abuse involving the lonely Tommy Glover to the devastating emotional cruelty suffered by Aunty Joyce at the hands of her mother, and which she subsequently took from her husband. This damage and hurt is passed on from generation to generation, and it takes the unwitting astuteness of a child – the outspoken evacuee Kitty Green – to break the chain.

I found it very easy to slip back into that childhood persona who wants to know everything but is told nothing. I well remember finding out the most juicy information from sitting behind the sofa at home and humming softly so that chatting adults would think I was fully engaged in a game. Similarly, Kitty uncovers breathtaking secrets by keeping her head down at the women's village knitting group. She may not always interpret things correctly, but she is certainly proactive with the information. Everything that happens to us in childhood is magnified one hundredfold in our experience. And yet children are dismissed, talked over, pushed out of conversations and deemed not to feel things which they cannot articulate.

Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven
is a book about the many ways people find to hurt each other, and the immense redemptive power of children, if only we look after them. It did turn out to be a mystery. It is also, by the way, a love story.

J
ANE BAILEY
is the author of
Promising
,
An Angel in Waiting
and
Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven
. Her first novel was shortlisted for the Dillons Prize and she received a Royal Literary Fund award. She was born and brought up in Gloucestershire where she now lives with her two daughters.

Promising

An Angel in Waiting