Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven (4 page)

Even through the summer holidays, Sunday remains a busy day for me. Church is still followed after dinner by Sunday school, which is followed by a unique Sheepcote club called the ‘Sheepcote Commando Cadets', an inspired creation by Mr Fairly from the boys' home to help with the war effort. I am now a fully fledged member of the SCC, which is really just an offshoot of the Sunday school and consists of the same children donning their commando gear immediately after prayers. The uniform, devised by the vicar and Miss Didbury, is a black beret and khaki jacket with black trousers for boys, black skirt for girls. Because only one boy has a black beret, most of the Sheepcote Commando Cadets wear red, blue, green or brown berets, or else woollen bonnets or balaclavas in a selection of interesting colours and patterns.

For most children, this is the highlight of their week. Our activities include map reading, tracking, signalling and first aid. We do collection rounds with an old pull-cart. We leave empty sacks outside people's houses and call back later to pick them up, full of paper, magazines for the air forces, or sometimes scrap metal for munitions and planes. But most interesting of all are the Civil Defence exercises. These are performed in conjunction with the APP and the Home Guard, and usually consist of a mock-up air raid in which numerous German V1 bombs take a notion to give Sheepcote a direct hit. Sheepcote Commando Cadets are needed to play the wounded, and some thirty-odd children are happily dispatched to the four corners of the village and surrounding fields with labels on their coats, and told to wait to be rescued.

My first time I'm sent to lie outside the post office with a ‘badly mutilated torso – severe bleeding' and Tommy has to slump by the baker's with mustard gas poisoning. Miss Didbury has ‘severe burns' and has to be lowered from Mr Tugwell's ‘blazing' upstairs window, which involved Mr Tugwell (the grocer) and Mr Marsh (the milkman) tying her up zealously with ropes. Baggie Aggie Tugwell (who only has ‘mild concussion') looks on enviously. The vicar, who has ‘lacerated legs – delirious', plays his part so well that the Home Guard think he has completely lost it. Miss Didbury is black and blue all over and vows she will never take part in another exercise. The vicar finds screaming at members of his congregation a tremendous release, and looks forward to the next operation. I don't know what a torso is so I hold my leg and roll around on the pavement for a long time, moaning in agony, until Mrs Chudd from the post office tells me she can't hear the telephone, and I'm carried off on a stretcher to the village hall. Poor Tommy comes off the worst. Since the treatment for mustard gas poisoning is to wash the skin, the APP set up screens around the baker's, strip him naked and give him the coldest shower you can imagine. He reckons mustard gas isn't a threat any more and this is just plain barbarism.

On another occasion he is sent to the field next to Lady Elmsleigh's with ‘head injury and severed leg', where he lies for three hours waiting for rescue. Then it begins to get dark, and Lady Elmsleigh spots him and invites him in out of the cold. She gives him tea and drives him back to Heaven House, tartly reassuring Mr Fairly that he would have bled to death by now anyway.

Uncle Jack is dogged by the same fantasy as every man in Sheepcote, and there is something about the long stretch of the war that sharpens its allure. It is, quite simply, to be a hero.

It is all very well for the men in the armed forces. They just have to be absent from daily life to become heroes. For all anyone knows they may be sharpening pencils in some hidden barracks, but they wear a uniform, and that entitles them to the same awe as those who regularly blast Germans to bits and lose body parts. But, for those doing Essential Work, like Uncle Jack on his railway, it's not so easy.

You can see he wants so much to make a difference. He longs for people to look at him the same way they look at the young servicemen who walk indifferently into shops but have women almost genuflecting in respect, awe and lust. If he were to share his thoughts with any number of Sheepcote men he would find he's not alone in his fantasy heroics, for they too probably rescue maidens from pillaging Germans and heave friends from the flames of battle on a daily basis.

The trouble is, Uncle Jack has spent his life preaching against vanity, even though his ambitions to stand at the golden eagle in front of a packed church are fuelled by the very same thirst for glory. Even with his manly composure and the attention of a full nave, he cannot command the same mystique as the American soldiers with their wretched chewing gum. And despite years of striving, it seems he cannot even challenge the indifference of his wife, let alone the utter unamazement of an entire congregation.

Then one day he sees his opportunity, and decides to grab it. It is on one of these very training days, in fact, where men, women and children are proving their potential heroism to a considerable audience.

Things are coming to a ragged sort of end, and people are tidying up, when there is a shriek from the upstairs window of one of the council houses. Looking up, Uncle Jack sees his chance. Young Mrs Nicholas is shouting for help, although the day's exercise is definitely over.

Quick as a flash he grabs the ladder that is being loaded on to the back of the APP van and runs to the small front garden. Up he climbs, fearless as a young officer, turning round briefly to check his audience.

“Watch carefully and observe!” he commands Mr Tugwell, Mr Chudd, the vicar and an assortment of astonished onlookers.

The ladder is a little short, and he is still a few feet lower than the victim when he reaches the top. He approaches the window and grabs the young woman brusquely under the arms.

“It's okay. I've got you!”

Young Mrs Nicholas shrieks again.

“Don't worry, I've got you. You're safe now. Just hold on tight!” and he begins to yank her forward.

She screams and beats her fists on his shoulder blades. “I don't want to be fucking safe!” she hollers. “I'm dusting the fucking windows, aren't I?”

Uncle Jack looks up to see what he hadn't noticed before: a man in a state of complete undress standing behind her. Mr Nicholas is home on leave and, seeing his wife leaning out and dusting the windows, has had the sudden notion to disrupt her daily routine. It is while Uncle Jack is trying to absorb this shocking animal fact that he loses his balance on the ladder which, amply helped by the thumps of Mrs Nicholas, moves like the hand of a clock turning a quarter past.

Women run from all over to crowd around the injured hero, lying in some redcurrant bushes with badly bruised hip and pride. One of the girls from my Sunday school group, Babs Sedgemoor, whispers in my ear, “She was getting it from behind.” I nod sagely, and remember the bunnies.

Miss Lavish stops her tricycle in front of me in a panic. “Whatever's happened?”

“Uncle Jack tried to rescue her,” I explain. “But she was just having a shag.”

In the night I dream I'm being held in my mother's arms. It's so real I can feel my bottom pressed into her warm lap and my cheek resting against the soft inside of her arm. I swear I actually wake up in the dark and know she's there. But when the morning light wakes me through the curtains, she is gone.

There is no sound from downstairs yet, and I lie for a while listening to the birds and the distant bleating of a sheep. The walls of my room are white with leaves of duck-egg blue winding up to the ceiling in stripes on the wallpaper. The curtains are cream with ladies on horseback riding across the folds. They have red jackets and black hats and smile as they race off to the kill with their little patchy dogs. The room is empty apart from the bed, a chest of drawers and a picture of Jesus, which hangs above my pillow. And then there is the door, that other door covered in so many layers of cream paint the panel ridges are just faint hollows. It is the cupboard I cannot open, but by now I am sure it holds some important clue to Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce. I am certain that if I can just find the key to it, all will be revealed. I imagine opening it and finding a body or something. I sort of want to open it, and I sort of don't.

On this particular morning I seem to have woken early, and I am aware of something stirring under the bed. When I find the courage to look, I can see nothing, but I can hear some distinct rustling. There's a cardboard box shoved right against the wall with old magazines in it. I reach out and tug at an open flap, afraid I'll be bitten by a rat. Instantly a paw comes out and swipes me on the wrist.

“Kemble!” I croon, a little annoyed at the scratch. “Kemble, come out and let me cuddle you.” I pull harder at the box and get another blow from her paw. But I know she'll be in for it if she's found upstairs, so I pull the box right out. The sight of four tiny kittens fills me with such awe that I just sit perfectly still and watch them until I hear Aunty Joyce's creaking tread on the stairs down to the parlour.

Even Aunty Joyce's insistence that we cannot keep the kittens does nothing to prevent this new feeling of light-heartedness. I have
four
kittens and Kemble has chosen my bed to have them under.

“Don't go getting too attached,” she says. “They'll have to go.”

“Oh, let her keep them a while,” says Uncle Jack.

“Whatever for?”

“It's not fair to take them from the mother this early. Let her suckle them at least. Wait till they're weaned.”

“Have you gone mad? Why?”

“She'll only pine for them if she loses them this soon. Think of the cat.”

Aunty Joyce slams a loaf of bread on the table, then goes off to the pantry and slams a few tins around on the shelf. Then she comes back and throws a pot of jam on the table.

Uncle Jack looks shifty and says nothing. Aunty Joyce is breathing fire.

“Oh. Think of the cat! Think of the ruddy cat, why don't you? She'll lose her blessed kittens! Imagine how she'll feel! Don't ever ruddy well think of me!” She kicks the range door shut with her foot. I feel I ought to point out to someone that if twat is a swear word then I'm fairly certain ruddy is too, but she has slammed out into the back garden and Uncle Jack does not look at me. He puts on his boots and goes out of the front door without speaking. Her tantrum is not mentioned again, but I'm pretty sure she never has to wash her mouth out with soap.

Summer arrives in full flood. The road outside the cottage has halved in width as the hedgerows expand fatly along its sides. That summer of 1944, working in the fields and the barns, loitering in the lanes, is the summer I remember most of the whole war. I spend it with the other children earthing up potatoes, picking up stones, cutting thistles and rat-catching, or swapping stories against the knobbly trunk of an old oak tree with Tommy.

In the early mornings we're sent off to Farmer Hawking's, up behind the back garden, whose foreman ‘Thumper' gives us jobs to do. It takes me nearly a week to learn to milk.

“First you wash them,” Thumper says, giving me a wet rag, “then give us a shout an' I'll show you how to hold the udders.”

A few minutes later one of the prisoners of war, Franz, starts laughing, and a couple of the land girls join in.Thumper comes back down the line of cows to see how I'm getting on and stands looking at me, his head on one side, smiling.

“What?” I ask.

“Still washing?”

“It takes ages,” I look up at them all, and can feel the red of my cheeks and little drops of sweat around my hairline.

“I'm not surprised! You're supposed to wash the udders, not the whole bloody cow!”

There are hoots of laughter all round, but the German prisoner on the other side of me leans on his cow's back and says kindly, “It is a good thing you do. She likes it I sink.” He smiles at me. “She gives you more milk, you will see.”

My whole body aches with milking, and my fingers grow so stiff I can hardly move them. All I manage is a tiny squirt that barely wets the bottom of the pail. As the days pass my squirts become rhythmic and strong, and Heinrich, the kind German, can find less and less in each udder as he finishes the cows off for me.

When milking is over we all gather in the barn and Aunty Joyce brings out a tray of tea with bread and dripping. The prisoners talk to each other in one corner, although I notice Heinrich is often quiet. He seems to look over at me and Aunty Joyce a lot. I look at her as she puts down her tray and blows the air up her face so that the blonde wisps dance aside. She is flushed, and with her sleeves rolled up and her heavily patched wellingtons pulled over her droopy corduroys, she looks radiant. I have been so tied up in trying to understand her that I forgot for a while how beautiful she can be.

On the way to the fields from the cow barn is the short lane leading back to Weaver's Terrace, and the trees bordering it are in full bloom, forming an arched tunnel of green. On our first day of fieldwork Tommy flies on ahead of me with the other children, calling to me to hurry up. But I stand in the middle of the lane, feet planted firmly on the yellow track, and stare upwards. I am so awed at the plumpness of a full-blown summer, the rampant sticky stems and the sweet woody smell of the air, that I forget to move. My insides pummel at me like a rabbit in a sack, and I don't know if it is homesickness or the overwhelming shock of tender green that makes my face wet with tears.

At dinner time, in these first few weeks, I find an excuse to slip home so that I can check up on my kittens. Aunty Joyce moved them out of the house straight away and stuck them in a tool shed near the lav. I cuddle each one in turn and they let me, until they spill out of my grasp, light as air, and on to the grass. Some days, if Aunty Joyce is not there, I take them into the house. There is a little black and white I call Boomer who always runs up and down on the piano in the front room. Since I've never been invited into this room, I guess it is somewhere I shouldn't go, a bit like Aunty Vi's front room, reserved for visitors only. When Boomer runs up and down the piano it's a devil of a job to get him back out because the door doesn't shut properly. He knocks over the wedding photograph or leaps into the knitting basket and plays with the wool. I can see he's going to be a handful when he's older, but he's definitely my favourite.

Sometimes Heinrich comes with me to see the kittens. He leans over the back wall from the field and looks wistful.

“Ket!” he says sometimes.

“And kittens,” I say.

“Is like you. Kitty! You are a kitty, I sink.”

I laugh. It is always the same joke, but it is his attempt to make contact. And when I give him a kitten to stroke, he caresses it so hungrily I can feel the great hollow he is desperate to fill, and it is just like mine. We kiss and cuddle the kittens, snuggling their soft fur to our cheeks and necks with matching greed.