Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven (5 page)

Since Uncle Jack's shifts keep changing, our routine in the Shepherd household revolves around the Railway. When he does an early turn a boy comes knocking at the door in the small hours and shouts, “Jack! Jack! You up?” like he's barking mad or something. And since Uncle Jack is never late for anything, he shouts, “Keep your hair on, you noisy blighter!” and stomps grumpily out of the hallway with his boots already laced up.

I don't always wake up with the call-boy, but on the few occasions his knocking has pulled me out of sleep I have had that sense again that my mum has been with me, holding me in her arms. I can almost feel her warmth taken suddenly away from me, and then I become so chilly I can't get back to sleep.

When Uncle Jack comes home after an early turn, Aunty Joyce always complains about the night's banging, and he curiously changes allegiance, explaining that if he
had
overslept he wouldn't have been able to get the engine up to steam on time, and the whole system would be running late. The call-boy, he maintains, is an essential part of the well-oiled machine that is the very Great Western Railway. Other times Aunty Joyce complains that his eight-hour shift has lasted nine hours, and he places his black oilskin driver's cap upon the table, tilts his head back importantly, and explains. “What you've got to understand,” he says, “is there is no such thing as an eight-hour shift with the Great Western.You can't relieve a train halfway between Stroud and Gloucester, or between Cheltenham and Swindon. The driver stays with his train until the journey is complete. Then – and only then – can he finish his shift.” He sits back and taps the flat of his hand on the table. “How would it be if I took a running jump halfway between Stonehouse and Stroud? Hmm?”

Aunty Joyce looks sometimes as though she thinks this might be a very good idea. And although her main irritation is that she can never get dinner on the table at the same time for him, I wonder if she's a little fed up with his evangelical devotion to the Railway and to God, and maybe wishes he would be a little more devoted to her.

Uncle Jack's shifts mean that some weeks Aunty Joyce needs me in the mornings, and sometimes in the afternoons or evenings, so my farm help is never too regular. There are no annual summer holidays for the teachers, and if children can't be at home or in the fields then they're found chores to do at school. Of course, the Heaven House boys flock to the fields, and only the very small ones have to help at school. And since I know I'll end up there too if I can't be of enough use to Aunty Joyce or the farm, I am eager to get some sort of routine going.

When milking is over, Tommy and the others go off to the fields, and I sometimes go with them. But if Aunty Joyce needs me for chores, I stay while the prisoners muck out the sheds and load the heavy churns on to the waiting milk cart, and until Aunty Joyce has finished collecting all the empties on her tray.

After breakfast I sweep the kitchen floor, feed the chickens and pick vegetables from the garden, while Aunty Joyce sits at the kitchen table to consult her second bible,
Gleanings from Gloucestershire Housewives
, before pronouncing on the intended dinner.

The grocer is Mr Tugwell, Baggie Aggie's husband, and he always gives me a wink. Aunty Joyce buys a tin of Spam, some flour and butter or a portion of cheese. She doesn't buy powdered eggs because we have our own, but she never fails to remark on the poor souls in cities who have to rely on the stuff.

“This poor girl never had a fresh egg in her life till she came to us,” she says with a self-congratulatory shake of the head. I soon realize how important it is for the world to see what a fine job she is doing with one of the nation's unfortunate paupers. Sometimes, if there's a crowd, I join in: “I thought cows grew on trees till I came here,” or “At last I'm free of nits,” or, better still, taking off my bonnet and giving my head a good shake, “Look! The nits have almost gone!”

Aunty Joyce usually pats me on the head and smiles at the other shoppers.

She does find it hard to smile, I think. With her curly blonde pageboy hair, her generous lips and wistful blue eyes, there is more than a passing resemblance to Ingrid Bergman. And the butcher, Mr Glass (of wife with very fat arse), often gives her his wrapped pink flesh with a wink and tells her that for a moment he thought he was in Hollywood, even though we are standing ankle deep in sawdust and surrounded by smiling china pigs wearing aprons. She never gives anything more than a wooden smile, but he keeps on trying.

Of course it is hard to imagine why anyone would want to flirt with a man who sports a meat cleaver and wears blood. He often puts his raw bloodied knuckles into my cheek and says, “Hello, my darlin',” and I want to duck. But still, I wish she would loosen up a bit.

I think hard about ways to make her laugh, and start to tell jokes in the shop queues.

“What am I saying, then? Look!” I touch my ear, my eyes and my nose. “What is it then, eh?”

But Aunty Joyce just looks uncomfortable.

“Ear eye nose you!” I blurt out, grinning hopefully. “Get it? Ear, eye nose you! Get it? D'you get it?”

She tells me not to be rude.

“No. See, it's not rude, it's –”

“You're making too much noise!”

“All right,” I whisper, “how about this one? One bloke goes to another bloke, ‘My wife's on 'oliday,' and the other bloke goes, ‘Jamaica?' and he goes, ‘No, she went of her own accord!'”

She frowns sternly. My voice has risen steadily and I find I'm belting it out.

“D'you get it?”

Maybe she would tell me off good and proper if she didn't notice the other women in the shop tittering.

“My, she's a card, en' she?”

“You got a right cracker there, Joyce,” “Lovely to hear them happy, ennit?” and, from Miss Lavish, “How are your knickers, Kitty?”

“I got plenty more of them up my sleeve,” I say, basking in the attention. “Not knickers – jokes!” Everyone laughs. I am a success. “D'ya hear the one about the bear with piles …?”

The shop is in uproar. I am as high as a kite, and Aunty Joyce, praised for her highly entertaining protégée, still only manages to roll her eyes at their mirth.

Back home the day's spoils are lined up on the kitchen table and put into the larder. Now we prepare the vegetables. I am not allowed to do any chopping, but I scrape the carrots and new potatoes and wash the cabbage or lettuce in the sink in ice-cold water.

Before she lets me do anything Aunty Joyce makes sure my hands are clean. She ties back my hair with a fat kirby grip and sets to work scrubbing my nails for me. Then, to my bewilderment, she washes the tap. In these days of shortages, of thin slivers of soap to serve whole families, Aunty Joyce
washes the tap
. She does this “to stop the germs”. I have it in my head that germs are something to do with Germans, so I'm happy to enter into the spirit of things, at first.

“It's no good cleaning your hands if you then go and turn off the tap which you turned
on
with
dirty
hands.” She looks at me with wide eyes: “
Recontamination
, Kitty!”

After the cleaning rituals she takes down her book from its shelf and reads aloud the recipe for the day's dinner. I always feel important when she reads out to me, and sometimes she even asks me for advice.

“Small tin of corned beef – have we got that, Kitty? Two or three onions?”

I nod gravely.

“A small quantity of lard?”

“It will have to be small,” I say.

“Okay. Cut beef into slices and place in bottom of dish …”

After reading, she announces one day that Mr South has killed a pig and promised her the head. She starts flicking pages.

“Brawn … mmm … I fancy a bit of brawn.
Half a pig's head that has been salted or pickled … one or more pig's tongues … clean out the eye part. Put the head and tongues into a saucepan, cover with water, and bring slowly to the boil
.”

Facky Nell!

I take some newspaper from the shopping basket, sit at the table and begin cutting it into squares.

“What are you doing?”

“Cutting it for the lav.”

“We don't use paper that's been
used
, Kitty. We use clean newspaper, that's been
read
.”

I stop cutting and look up. “It's all going on your bum, isn't it?”

“Don't be disgusting!” She looks at me with utter repugnance. “Ah! Here we are:
Headcheese: the pig's head is singed, then soaked in salt water for twenty-four hours. It is then taken out, scrubbed and cleaned. A red-hot poker is thrust into its ears and nostrils
… blah … blah …”

I put my hand to my mouth and close my eyes tightly. Aunty Joyce goes on for some time about simmering and liquid. “…
take note that the eyes which in boiling will be removed from their sockets are taken out and thrown to the hens.The ears are chopped with the other meat.
”

“I ain't feeding no eyeballs to hens. I ain't eating no chopped-up ears!” I run to the sink and retch.

She looks faint. “Lord above! Now I'll have to disinfect the sink!”

“Please, I wasn't actually sick. You needn't worry!”

“There was a dribble! I saw it! As if I haven't enough to do without all these extra germs!”

She looks so wretched that I begin to feel sorry for her, as well as feeling deeply guilty for having brought so many extra germs into the house.

As the weeks pass, however, I do wonder if Aunty Joyce isn't perhaps a bit barking mad. This household germ invasion seems to keep her more occupied than the German one which is bothering everyone else.

It's one particular event which first arouses my suspicions. I've been up in the fields earthing potatoes and return home to find the house empty. I'm aware of making great clods of earth on the front path, so I leave my shoes outside the front door. There may even be some cow dung on them, for I've been in the cowshed earlier with Tommy. At any rate, I stand by the range in my stocking feet and wonder what I should do. The parlour is spotless, so there's no point in tidying. I go into the front room and open the window to see if Aunty Joyce is coming. There's no sign of her, so I take a newspaper, place it on the front room sofa, and sit down on it tentatively so as not to leave a trace of dirt. I pick up a magazine from the rack on the floor. Mrs Sew-and-Sew is looking smug next to some refooted stockings, and so is a boy whose mother has cut off his overcoat to make him a hideous jacket. I wouldn't be so chuffed if I were him. I'm having real trouble with some of the words, when there is a grunt from the window. I look up and see Aunty Joyce trying to open the window wider with her elbows, her fists clenched tight in front of her. I rush over to help her.

“What is it? You okay?”

She seems surprised to see me.

“Could you hold the curtains right back?” she asks, a terrible expression of pain and confusion in her face. Then she begins to ease herself on to the window ledge and, huffing and puffing, she manages to get one leg over. “Don't let me touch the curtains!”

I hold them back as far as I can, and something shiny and heavy slips out on to the carpet from the curtain hem. She is so busy trying to squeeze through the window without touching anything that she doesn't notice it, and I slip it into my dress pocket.

After launching herself through the window and hurling herself like a paratrooper on to the carpet in front of me, Aunty Joyce completes a small roll and sits up, fists still clenched, relieved. She lets me help her up by the elbow, and when I follow her into the kitchen and she asks me to turn on the tap, I begin to work something out. By now I am fluent in the language of germs, and I see that I'm not the one who's contaminated. I can't pick germs up from the dirt around me: it is Aunty Joyce. She is afraid of touching things – not just because they will contaminate her – but because
she
will contaminate
them
. Dirt affects
her
– not other people – and she alone bears the responsibility for keeping it to herself.

In my pocket is a key.

It fits, of course. I prepare myself for a dangling skeleton as I unlock the cupboard, my blood pumping so hard I'm sure my head must be nodding back and forth like one of the hens.

It is difficult to say whether I'm disappointed or relieved. For there, hanging up, is a row of neatly pressed girls' clothes. A yellow gingham dress, a pink floral one, a blue plaid one and a selection of cardigans. There are pastel summer ones in four-ply and winter ones with collars and pockets in double knit. There is a small pair of corduroy trousers too, and a row of little shoes. I pick one up. It is a red leather strapped shoe, as pretty as can be, but second-hand. I try it on. Although it is slightly too wide, it almost fits in length and is more comfortable than my boots. I try on its partner, and walk up and down the room. Indignation starts to bubble inside me, and I take in deep breaths as I look at this little treasure trove locked away from me for so long. It is quite clear that these were meant for me. Some kind soul like Miss Lavish or Baggie Aggie or Lady Elmsleigh – or maybe even Aunty Joyce herself – got these in preparation for my arrival. But somehow I have not lived up to expectations, and Aunty Joyce has thought the better of it. She was expecting a little girl with glossy ringlets and clean nails, a girl with good manners who never said twat or facky Nell. That I have been a huge disappointment to them is obvious, but I am so hurt I forget that I am precisely what they
were
expecting: a girl from the East End, warts and all. Or if it does dawn on me for an instant, I shove it aside in the fury of realizing that I am not good enough, not worthy enough in some way for these beautiful clothes. Only one thing is clear: for some reason, she does not like me. I have always suspected it, but now I know.

I plod up the lane to the farm sick with self-pity, aching for someone to talk to, to undo the knot of emotions which is tightening around my throat. But my mum is making weapons and my dad is using them somewhere in Burma. There is a loneliness in being away from those you love, and there is another quite different loneliness, of not fitting in, of standing on the outside of everything around you, with alien smells and alien accents and alien emotions. The smells of muck and dung and sap and silage taunt me as much as the frenzied attack on every wrong word I say. And the sun can shine and the flowers bloom and the birds trill all they like, but the withdrawal of touch is like a prison cell. I am eight years old. To live with a woman who recoils from me is the loneliest thing on earth.

I find Tommy on the way to the fields, and we bunk off together, heading to the woods to the west of Sheepcote. As we enter the woods he takes my hand – just sort of holds it out slightly for me, so that I could miss it almost, if I weren't so longing to hold on to someone. We walk through a tangle of low vegetation. I still can't quite believe the way that plants grow. Nothing seems to stop them, and they are everywhere, letting off a stink of juice and sap and pollen. There are tall, indestructible leaves like rubber (he calls these lords-and-ladies) and colonies of leathery leaves, tough as oilskins (he calls these wild garlic); there are stinging nettles with leaves the size of my hand; there are a few ugly spotted orchids that make me catch my breath in horror for fear they might sting (he calls these ‘bee-orchids'), and things that spring out at you from nowhere. There are pretty white star-shaped flowers called wood anemones. Tommy says they're sometimes called ‘smell fox'.

“Smell fox?”

“Yep. Know why?”

“Foxes like 'em?”

“No. 'Cos they've got poison in their stems. Can give you blisters. Sly like foxes, see.”

Tommy reckons that plants were here millions of years before man and will be here millions of years after we're gone.

“They're the most powerful living things on the planet,” he says, and I believe him. “Hold the answer to all illness, they do.”

He stops now and then to show me a butterfly, and sketches them quickly in his notebook, which he carries in his pocket. When he's finished he tucks the short pencil behind his ear like the grocer or the bread deliveryman. Today there is a tortoiseshell, a wall brown, a meadow brown and a large skipper. There are moths too, wings folded horizontally on the tree bark. I treasure their names like jewels: pale tussock, burnished brass, rosy rustic. There is a buff-topped one that looks like a stick and he makes me hold one, so that I won't be afraid any more at night.

Out of the woods, it is the unbroken horizons that impress me most. There are no jagged edges like in cities, since the villages are nestled into the slopes, and their ageing stone merges so well into the landscape that a thin mist can hide them altogether. Some mornings a whole hill can disappear under the mists.

Even with the arrival of jeeps and combine harvesters, chewing gum and jitterbugging, this little pocket of Gloucestershire seems secluded in spirit. Tommy says the hills were nothing but sheepwalks once, and the land nothing more than herbs and wild grasses to feed the famous – the glorious – Cotswold sheep. Now the drystone walls remain, but the fields are being stuffed with wheat and barley, potatoes and mangolds, and every bit of fallow pasture is ploughed up for the war effort. It's all wrong, according to Tommy. He says we'll never get the fallow land back, and it's storing up problems for the future. The land needs to breathe, to rest, to renew itself. He shakes his head. He's afraid his good earth is ruined for ever.

When the church bell strikes ten o'clock and I'm certain Aunty Joyce will be out, I take Tommy down to the back field behind our house to play with the kittens.

Kemble is lying slumped in a patch of sunlight behind the shed, and two of her kittens are suckling. The other two are bouncing and leaping around the garden, falling over each other and attacking imaginary foes.

Tommy's face lights up. He can't stop smiling.

“Look at that one – he's bonkers!”

The black kitten is doing a somersault over a leaf he has found, then pushing the leaf with his paw so that it moves and he can attack it all over again.

I laugh too. “He can be yours, if you like.”

Tommy looks at me, open-mouthed. “You're allowed to keep 'em?”

“We're keeping them till they're weaned. Uncle Jack says so. You can have Bonkers and I'll have Boomer and Heinrich is mad about the little tortoiseshell. He calls her Kitty!”

I pick up Bonkers and give him to Tommy to hold, then hold Boomer up and smile into his dear kitten face. I try to detect a smile on Boomer's face, but he looks off into the middle distance and wriggles free.

“Best not get too attached,” says Tommy. “They won't let you keep him.”

I consider this for a moment. Whatever happens I will continue to see Boomer. I'll visit whoever owns him every day, or else I'll hide him.

“It's Aunty Joyce,” I say, biting my lip. “She doesn't like me.”

“What makes you say that?”

I pick at a few tufts of grass and hold them up to the kittens. “She doesn't like you and she doesn't like me. I know she doesn't like me. She had a whole load of girls' clothes hidden away – nice stuff – and she makes me wear this, and I know what's going on because it's all the right size, and the reason she hasn't even let me try it on is obvious!”

“What?” He looks strangely worried. Almost panic-stricken.

“There's just something about me she can't like, no matter how hard she tries. What is it, Tommy? What's wrong with me?”

He breathes out a long sigh and smiles. “It's not you.” He shuffles up closer to me by the wall and puts his arm around me. “These clothes weren't meant for you, look. She collects things.”

“No she doesn't.”

“Old family stuff, she does. And look, I can promise you, you're very lovable, you are.” He gives my shoulder a squeeze, and I flop into it, taking grateful wafts of his woollen sheep-smelling jacket.

When it is teatime I have an idea. I go upstairs and take out the little key from my curtain hem, where I've hidden it. I open the door and select the yellow gingham dress and try it on with the pair of red shoes and a lemon-coloured cardigan. I creep into their bedroom and look at myself in the dressing-table mirror, turning this way and that and smiling at my reflection. It is dinner at teatime today, and I can't wait to see the surprise on Uncle Jack's face when he sees how smart I can look. And Aunty Joyce will wish she'd thought of lending them to me sooner.

It seems foolish now, I know, but that little eight-year-old simply doesn't guess. I blunder in there in the full party frock of their dead daughter and wonder why Aunty Joyce drops the runner beans all over the floor and opens her mouth in slow motion and narrows her eyes and lets out the most terrifying howl anyone has ever aimed at me before or since. I wonder why she leaps on me like a mad woman, tears off the cardigan and orders me to “Get it
off
!
Get it
off
. You
wicked
girl!” I wonder why she screams, “How
dare
you?” so many times, and why Uncle Jack just keeps repeating, “Joyce! Joyce! Joyce!”