Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven (9 page)

It is the thick of summer, a time of heavily leafed trees rustling overhead and lazy love songs predicting lovers returning. I've no idea when I'll see my mum again, and with Tommy banned, I feel heavily rationed in love. I don't know how many times Tommy and I manage to see each other, but those secret meetings seem to fill the summer.

One Sunday, during cadets, eight of us are selected for the paper collection. The vicar opens the shed at the back of the village hall, and Tommy and Will Capper pull out the cart. It's simple enough through the village, but for the farms we tend to split up into groups of two. Neville Adlard, a scruffy Heaven House boy, my age, with long eyelashes, keeps pestering Will Capper about having a go at the cart, and as soon as Will gives way Babs is on at Tommy to let her have a go. Of course Tommy is off like a shot and, grabbing two flattened cardboard boxes from the cart, he signals me to follow him.

“We'll collect up Russells,” he shouts back to the group, meaning the farm on the opposite valley. “See ya!”

And we're off.

Up the lane, over the five bar gate, through the cow field, over the stile, across the smaller stream, up the next field, over the next one, until we're in our field: our valley. It is so steep here that even the war has left it to pasture: sheep on the top slopes, cows at the bottom near the lush grass of the stream.

As soon as we arrive I can feel something almost like music, a galloping through the whole of my body, and instead of flopping down with exhaustion, I whirl about, running circles, arms outstretched. Gallop, gallop, gallop. There is space – so much space. We both spin, we soar, we are airborne.

Gasping, breathlessly we cling on to our oak tree. Tommy knows the feelings I have in this place, and I know from his eyes, darting and smarting and invigorated in the nippy wind, that he shares them.

“Come on!” he says, handing me a flattened box and setting his own on the grassy slope. “I'll race you!”

He sits on the cardboard and pushes with his feet, and before I can do the same he has shot off down the slope, gathering an uncanny momentum on such a crude vehicle. I try to follow, but feel stuck and afraid. I push with my feet and hands, but in the hope that I won't move too far too fast. Tommy's voice is tinny and distant now, and he is climbing back up holding his makeshift sledge. He smiles as he approaches, throws his cardboard down and climbs on to mine behind me. He puts his arms over my shoulders and grips the front edge of the cardboard, and suddenly we're away.

It is slow and bumpy at first. I try not to scream. Then, as we hit a ridge, we are tearing along: flying, soaring, whistling down to the hawthorns by the stream. I scream. He laughs. We come to a halt just inches from the branches.

After a while I become an expert with my cardboard. The more sheep shit it collects and the more journeys it makes, the shinier and more leathery it becomes. And the faster.

Resting up by the oak tree he signals me suddenly to listen. Expecting the sound of footsteps, I hear nothing.

“Listen,” he says again.

A soft cooing comes from the trees behind us.

“A bird?” I ask.

“Simon.”

“Simon?”

“A tawny owl. He was a chick last year.”

I crane my neck but can see nothing, and can't help being impressed that Tommy is on first-name terms with owls.

“You can't see him, but he can see you,” says Tommy, looking up as well. “An owl can hear a mouse's heartbeat at thirty feet!”

“Thirty feet! A heartbeat!”

I put my hand to my own heart, and listen.This is a magical place, and no mistake.

“Will this really be ours one day?” I ask, wanting to hear him talk about our future together.

“Well, by rights, it won't ever belong to no one.”

“I thought you said … after the war …”

“It'll be shared out, don't worry. Just you have to know: the land don't belong to us – not really.
We
belong to the land.” He puts the palm of his hand on the grass and strokes it gently.

I watch him, out of my depth now. “Can we belong to this bit, then?”

“After the war I 'speck you'll be back with your mum and dad.”

“You can come with us – I promise.”

“Well … I'm building a farm right here.”

I feel shut out. “When I'm grown up –”

“You in on it?”

“Yes!”

“Right!”

He lies back and puts his hands behind his head. He looks so thoughtful and competent, I am ecstatic to be included in his plans.

“We'll have sheep, shall we?” I suggest.

“An' cows. We'll have a dozen or so. We'll keep it small.”

“How much do sheep cost?”

He props himself on an elbow. “What we need is a copy of the
Farmer and Stockbreeder
. Then we'll be able to work out all the costs.” He looks excited. “I'll have to get some work first to save up for it all. But we need to work out costs.”

“Where can we get a
Farmer and Stockbreeder
without any money?”

We both light up at the same moment. We jump up and start running, but by the time we reach the lane the cart has made its way back to the village hall shed, laden with newspapers and magazines.

Another group of children is sorting the paper into piles, and we volunteer to help.

It's not long before Tommy finds what we're looking for, but he says we must keep going.We need two or three farming journals at least if we're to sort out all the different stock. I feel so important leafing through the piles of paper, and so joyously mischievous.

Suddenly my contented grin droops at the sides. Tommy notices straight away and catches my eye. “What?”

I say nothing and show him what I have found.

“What is it?” he asks gently, still not understanding.

It is a painting of a knitting group. A masterpiece.

“I gave it to Aunty Joyce.”

He takes the picture from me and looks at it. “It's lovely,” he says kindly. And then, to make me feel better, he declares, “I've never seen anything like it!” I try to smile, but feel utterly winded and lifeless. Tommy looks at me anxiously, and then says more tenderly than I have ever heard him, “Please, can I have it? I'd love to put it on the wall by my bed. It's the best picture I've ever seen. Honest.”

I don't care what anyone says about him. I don't care what on earth he's supposed to have done. I love Tommy Glover and I always will.

In mid-August a parcel arrives for me. It is my ninth birthday, but I have never received a parcel before, and I dance around it after breakfast, hardly daring to break the string or spoil the thick brown paper.

“G'won – open it!” says Uncle Jack, full of curiosity himself. “It won't bite you!”

I can see from the writing on the label that it's from my mother, but if I open it, the parcel will be gone for ever, so I sit and stroke its crinkled pre-used paper, lift it up and smell it and weigh it and run my cheek along the knotted string, as if I might hear it speak to me.

“I might wait till dinnertime,” I say.

Aunty Joyce sighs. “You're a funny old thing.”

I smell it again, pushing my nose into the paper and inhaling deeply. “It's just I never had a parcel before …”

Uncle Jack raises an eyebrow thoughtfully at Aunty Joyce. “Well, whoever sent it wanted you to open it, I'm sure of that.”

I take a deep breath and start to unknot the string. Then I unravel it and lay its yard length on the table, and Uncle Jack winds it up neatly and puts it in the pocket of his jacket which is hanging on the chair. Inside the brown paper is a box. More suspense. And inside the box is tissue paper, and under each piece of tissue paper is a red shoe. Two new red shoes with a bar and a buckle!

There are gasps and hoots all round as I try them on. I waltz up and down the room and feel like a film star. Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce think I must be the luckiest girl alive, and I do too, although there is a little something niggling me.

At teatime there is a jam sponge cake with my name on and a candle, and Aunty Joyce and Uncle Jack sing ‘Happy Birthday' to me and I feel like a queen.

But at the end of the day, after I've vainly worn my shoes in the lanes and spattered them with mud and risked scuffing them on stones, all for the joy of wearing them to the grocer's and the post office and round to Babs' house, I sit down on my bed and take them off and I know what the trouble is. At first there was just a hint of it, and I ignored it because I wanted to. But all through the day it has been getting worse, and now there is no escaping it: they are too small.

Aunty Joyce says I'm silly for wearing them out – we could easily have sent them back and my mum would've changed them. When I look wretched she apologizes because she thinks she has said the wrong thing. But that's not what I'm thinking at all. “See how fast you're growing!” she says, in an attempt to comfort me, but this is exactly what is tearing me apart. It seems that with every inch taller I grow, and every shoe size, I grow that much further away from my mother. My toes have been stinging all day and now they are red and raw and screaming out to me that I am growing so fast that by the time this war is over I shall have grown out of my childhood and out of my mother's arms and I will never fit back there again.

*    *    *

When we return to school towards the end of August I get caught up in the excitement of a new term. I will be in Standard Four now, but still taught, along with Standard Three, by Miss Hubble. Let them try keeping me away from her now! Ha!

But we're in for a surprise. It is not Miss Hubble's rosy face that greets us as we troop in, nor are there any jars of lavender and marigolds on the desk. It is a new teacher, Miss Priddle, who takes the register and appoints the ink and coke bucket monitors. She is pleasant enough in her pale rayon dress, and shows us how to defy Hitler by making nutritious meals from the school garden vegetables, but she is not Miss Hubble, and there are no clues as to why our smiley young teacher has left without at least a goodbye.

I have to wait till break time, when Betty Chudd tells Babs Sedgemoor who tells me: Miss Hubble ‘got into trouble' and can't come back. Babs and I both imagine she's been arrested and spend the next few days plotting to rescue her from behind iron bars.

It's the knitting group which eventually disabuses me.

“Whatever she gonna do with a baby round 'ere?”

“Tiz such a shame to see our girls lettin' theirsels go so easy.”

“Tiz awful.”

“In my day we waited till we wuz married …”

“That's not what I 'erd …”

“Oooh! You devil you!”

“Tiz possible someone 'ad their wicked way against 'er wishes.”

“There's no one'll 'ave 'er now, poor soul.”

Then Lady Elmsleigh announces that she's staying with her for the time being. She has plenty of room up at the house. And everyone shuts up.

I have all the information I need, and I tell Babs. The prison rescue is hastily replaced by a plan to knit baby clothes in secret, but I can't help wondering how poor Miss Hubble can have allowed herself to be treated like that rabbit in the cage, and the image haunts me for the rest of the term.

No sooner has school started again than we're allowed time off for the harvest. This is a strange new experience for me, and like having a holiday all over again.

The fields around Sheepcote are difficult, sloping fields to harvest, and most of them were pasture before the war. Whole families I have never seen before seem to appear in the fields all of a sudden, along with soldiers and airmen off duty, land girls, prisoners of war, refugee Norwegian whalers and any of us children tall enough to stack a bale of corn.

Up in the field behind the house one of the land girls drives the tractor back and forth, put-putting loudly past our ears, then purring off into the distance. Thumper works the binder, and we crowd round it, heaving the sheaves to form stooks.

We work in pairs or threes, under a relentless sun, our legs streaked with stubble scratches and itching from head to toe with harvest bugs. There is something noble about our joint venture, something moving about the way the land girls sweat and toil and swig cider in exactly the same way as the prisoners and the soldiers and the refugees and the farmer and the gypsy children and the Heaven House boys and us evacuees.

I stack sheaves with a toothless old farm worker and a pretty land girl called Nancy. When we finish our stook, old Gum-face starts up another and Nancy and I bring the sheaves over from the binder, our fingers and palms burning from the binding twine, and resisting a desire to scratch every nook and cranny of our skin.

I catch sight of Tommy and he comes over to me. No one is here who will care, no one will tell on us.

“Meet us after?” he says.

“Okay then.” But he is not looking at me all the time. He keeps stealing quick glances at Nancy, whose bra straps can be seen through her open blouse, whose milky cleavage is turning rapidly pink in the sun, whose breasts are speckled in tiny droplets of sweat. Nancy wipes her arm across her wet brow and seems unaware, but I know she knows, like all the land girls, just how explosive are their open-necked shirts and their bare bruised knees amidst the men and the stacking corn on hot, never-ending days like these. I long to be Nancy, and am angry with Tommy that I'm not.

“I'll see ya then,” I say decisively.

“Yeah.” He looks at me and Nancy. “One of the men in our lot's got some cider, look. Come over next break.”

Nancy smiles. I put a sheath down in front of me and try hard not to pout. “Maybe.”

When there's a break everyone slumps down in the shade of a corn stook or over by the oak tree. There are sandwiches and cider and extra rations distributed for the harvest. These don't amount to much, but make us feel important. Then there is a long soft lull of birdsong, voices that melt into silence, a quiet that is all the more intense after the noise of the binder and the tractor, a hush of bodies outstretched in the heat, all itching for one reason or another.

The harvest goes on for ever, days of gold and warmth and musty sweet smells that will always conjure up that summer in 1944 when I first began to learn the many secrets and surprises of creation and procreation. It was a time both enlightening and full of light: the yellow corn, the deep ochre of the stones scattered in the soil, the sky as blue and tranquil as a picture book and, apart from the occasional miaow of one plane chasing another, barely a hint of a war.