11
RUBY
October–November
Back at the cottage, I put Sam’s drawing in Alfie’s box, folding it into a tiny square and burying the box in my underwear drawer again. Sam’s words echoed in my head and I remembered the day I’d shown Alfie my poems – a day I’d tried hard to forget.
It was a few weeks after the war had broken out and I’d started working at the newspaper. Alfie and I had gone for a walk through town to the gardens; his mother had taken in two evacuees, so he took every opportunity he could to escape.
In my pocket was an old exercise book. I’d spent the evening before going over some poems and short stories. They needed work, but I didn’t think they were too bad. I’d already been quite friendly with Vera by then, and had been wondering if I dared ask her to read them – and if she might know somewhere I could send them when they were finished. To bolster up my courage, I’d decided to show them to Alfie first.
We’d sat down on a bench near the fountain. I’d watched him flick through the pages, half sick with a swirling mixture of panic and hope. What would he think? Were they good enough?
Soon – too soon? – he’d shut the book with a slap and handed it back to me.
‘Are – are they OK?’ I’d asked him.
He’d given me a smile. ‘Oh, yes, they’re fine.’
‘F – fine?’
‘Yes – fine. I mean, it’s something you do for fun, isn’t it? Like knitting. Or whittling sticks.’
I’d known he didn’t mean to be unkind; I’d tried to smile back at him, but all the hours I’d poured into those words between the covers – all those pieces of my soul – had turned to cinders at his words. Back home, I’d dropped the notebook into the stove, my eyes brimming with tears. Apart from my work at the Herald, I’d not written a word since.
I’d wanted to, of course – at times, it felt as if I might burst with it – but every time I thought about trying again I remembered what Alfie had said. Fine. Fun. Like whittling sticks.
The next day, at work, I found an old accounts book, only half used. ‘Oh, take it,’ Vera said. ‘I won’t tell anyone about it if you don’t.’ But every time I opened it, that same old paralysis crept over me, and the unused pages in the book remained blank.
Then the letter from Grandmother arrived.
All our post went to the main house. Father brought the letter home one evening, and I recognised the looping handwriting on the front at once. My stomach twisted. At dinner, I waited, holding my breath, while Father slit the envelope with his butter knife and read the single, thin sheet of paper inside.
‘I’m afraid it rather looks as if Mother is coming to visit,’ he said, handing it to me.
My dearest Cecil, the letter said. I write to you with terrible, terrible news. The Allied forces are coming to Tyneham. They say they wish to use the surrounding area for training, and we are all to be turned out of our homes like vagrants.
When I think of all I have done here and the years I spent in service up at Tyneham House I could weep, but of course that means nothing to the people who have posted horrid notices up everywhere telling us that we must leave by 19th December as it will no longer be safe for us to remain.
I do not know when I will be able to return so I ask that you extend your hospitality to me for as long as you feel able. Of course if you are too busy with your work to accommodate me I shall try to make arrangements to go elsewhere, but where that might be, I do not know.
I eagerly await your reply by return of post.
Yours in hope,
Mother
P.S. I hope the child is well.
The child. She didn’t even mention my name. Inwardly, I sighed; it was no more than I’d come to expect from Grandmother, yet it never failed to sting.
I gave the letter back to him. ‘But where will she sleep?’
My heart sank as I waited for his reply, because I already knew exactly what he was going to say.
He gave me a small, apologetic smile. ‘I’m afraid she’ll have to share your room. There’s nowhere else, not if she’s staying for an indefinite amount of time, and there’s no question of putting her in the main house – we’re full up with patients, and there are more coming in every day.’
I knew it was useless to argue, or to point out that Grandmother had managed perfectly well on a truckle bed in the parlour when she’d visited before. How long would she be staying this time? Until the end of the war, I expected – and who knew when that would be?
‘I shall write back and tell her she must come here as soon as possible,’ Father said, sounding as resigned as I felt, and folded the letter neatly back into its envelope.
*
‘Can’t you put her, I dunno, in your air raid shelter or something?’ Sam said, his breath turning to clouds of vapour in the chilly air. It was the following Sunday; we were sitting in the cave.
‘Of course not!’ I said. ‘There’s no light – no way to keep warm – a permanent puddle of water in the bottom – even rats, sometimes—’
‘I was kidding!’ Sam held his hands up. He had a khaki muffler around his neck, his collar turned up and his cap pulled down low over his eyes. It had been raining steadily all morning. The coast path was cloaked in fog, and although it was dry inside the cave, I was so cold my fingers had gone numb.
‘Oh. Sorry.’ I hunched my shoulders.
‘She’s really that bad, huh?’
I gave a bitter little laugh. Where to start? For most of her adult life, Grandmother, who had brought Father up alone after my grandfather’s death, had worked as a lady’s maid for the Bonds, the family who owned Tyneham Manor. She was still, as she liked to tell anyone who would listen, a pillar of the community, with neatly curled hair – now snow-white – and a penchant for twinsets in muted tones of heather and brown. Although Tyneham was a primitive sort of place compared to Bartonford – there was only one house with running water, and the school had closed years ago because there weren’t any pupils – she kept her cottage as neat as a new pin, the gardens front and back filled with flowers and vegetables.
Ever since I was old enough to notice the way she looked at me – suspicious and watchful, like a cat with a mouse – I’d known she wasn’t a bit like other people’s grandmothers. She didn’t hug me, read me stories, or bring me toys or sweets. I was the reason her son had the unbearable burden, as she had had, of bringing up a child alone. But even worse, I was a girl, one who carried the double affliction of being clever and plain. ‘Look at her with her nose in a book!’ I’d heard her complain to Father on more than one occasion as I sat in a corner, trying not to be noticed. ‘She’ll never marry, that one!’
I tried to explain some of this to Sam. It sounded rather feeble, but he nodded, as if he understood. ‘Maybe you should lock her up in that hospital somewhere,’ he said. Another wry smile told me he didn’t mean that either; not quite.
I tried to smile back.
‘You’re shivering.’ He stripped off his coat and wrapped it around my shoulders. It smelled like him: a comforting blend of damp wool, cinnamon gum and tobacco. ‘Here.’
I tried to give it back. ‘I can’t – you’ll freeze!’
‘I’ll be fine. I need to toughen up anyway, for when…’
He trailed off.
‘Do you know when you’ll be going over to France?’
He shook his head. ‘Next year sometime, I reckon. No one’s telling us anything much.’
I frowned. After the British Army were evacuated from Dunkirk three and a half years ago, the trickle of patients arriving at Barton Hall had, briefly, turned into a flood, and although Father always discouraged me from having any contact with the patients, it had been impossible to avoid them. I’d see them in the grounds or the workshops, or being wheeled about by nurses: men with arms and legs missing, or their faces half hidden by bandages to cover terrible wounds and scars. Then there was the ones Father treated – the ones so traumatised by their experiences that it was their minds that had broken. What if that happened to Sam? What if he was maimed or killed? What if he was driven mad?
Some of this must have shown on my face, because Sam shrugged and said, ‘Anyway, I’m not gonna worry about it. Whatever’s happens, it’s ages away.’
Then he sneezed three times in quick succession.
Despite his protests, I made him take back his coat. ‘We can’t carry on meeting here,’ I said. ‘It’d be fine if the weather was warmer, or if there was a stove we could light or something, but if we carry on like this we’ll both end up with pneumonia!’
‘Couldn’t we light a fire?’
‘Someone might see the smoke. Anyway, isn’t it dangerous to light a fire inside a cave?’
‘Where can we go, then, if you don’t want anyone seeing us?’
I tried to think. Town was out of the question, of course. And I couldn’t go up to the camp on my own, even during the day – tongues would soon start wagging. If word got back to Father about Sam…
‘Of course!’ I cried. ‘The old lodge! Oh, why didn’t I think of it before?’
‘Where’s that?’
‘At Barton Hall, from when it used to be a house. It’s at the edge of the grounds, well away from the main hospital and the staff cottages – no one’s lived there for years and years, but I think the roof’s still OK. And at least we’d be inside, and dry.’
‘How do I get there?’
‘I’ll draw you a map.’
‘Here.’ He took his sketchbook from his coat pocket, and a pencil. ‘Better do it now. They open our mail sometimes – not that I ever get any, but if they find a map they might start asking questions.’
Although I still couldn’t feel the ends of my fingers, I managed to sketch a passable diagram of Barton Hall’s grounds. ‘The main drive, where you come in off the lane, goes right past the main house and the staff cottages where I live, so that’s no good,’ I said, pointing. ‘If anyone sees you they’ll want to know what you’re doing. You’ll need to come through the woods at the edge of the estate, over here. There’s a track that leads off the coast path and then there’s a wall – it’s broken down in places so you should be able to get over it. If you do get caught you can just say you were going for a walk and got lost.’
‘Got it,’ Sam pocketed the sketchbook again, one corner of his mouth quirking up in a smile. ‘So, where’s this poem you were gonna write me?’
My shoulders sagged. ‘I… I haven’t managed anything yet. Sorry.’
‘Hey, don’t worry. You don’t have to do it. Just don’t let other people stop you doing something you love, that’s all.’ He sounded so fierce, I looked up. Our gazes met, and there it was again: that zing of electricity. I wasn’t imagining it, was I?
The wind picked up, sending an icy gust howling into the cave. Sam sneezed again. ‘Dammit. We’d better get going, before we really do catch pneumonia or something.’
‘I’ll go and look at the lodge as soon as I can,’ I promised.
I called Toffee, clipping his lead back onto his collar. As always, I left first, so if there was anyone out on the path above the cove they wouldn’t see us together. As I walked away, I glanced back to see Sam standing in the cave entrance, watching me. He raised a hand in farewell and I waved back. Even though I was wet and cold, and Grandmother’s imminent arrival was hovering over me like a dark cloud, I smiled, because just for that moment, none of that mattered at all.