Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven Read online

  Then suddenly, to my delight, the old tramp in the corner will break her silence by puckering her warty lip and snarling, “Tosser!” And conversation carries on as if she has merely noted that it is chilly for the time of year. Although she seems like a tramp to me, I soon find out Mrs Galloway has a respectable background as a carrier’s wife and lives in the almshouses, too world-weary to wash at her one cold pump and too adrift from her life to care.

  When Aunty Joyce puts down her knitting and counts how many there are for tea and cocoa there is a rustle of anticipation. As soon as she is in the kitchen they turn their eyes on me.

  “How are you settling in, my love?” “She’s all right, you know, our Joyce.” “Don’t be put off – she’ve ’ad a ’ard time.”

  I tell them that I am fine and that I have had a lovely tea with a real egg, except I had to eat leaves and we don’t eat leaves back home. They all chuckle and call me a card. I think maybe they don’t believe me.

  “You wait till you meet Mr Shepherd. He’s a train driver, he is! He’s a –”

  I am already picturing myself perched cheerily by his side travelling the length of Britain in the driver’s cab, when there comes a snarl from the corner: “Tosser!”

  The first night at Weaver’s Cottage is a complicated one for me. To start with Aunty Joyce shows me a chamber pot veined with tiny cracks and says, “Now you know where it is, there’s no excuse. I won’t have any dirty bed-wetting in this house,” and she shoves the thing under the bed with a look of disgust. I never need a chamber pot at night, and my indignation is softened by the thought of how surprised she’ll be by my clean sheets and empty chamber pot in the morning.

  The next thing I know I’m being shoved beside the bed myself.

  “Kneel,” she says. “We say our prayers kneeling, not in bed like some folks.”

  I look up at her for guidance, and fumble with my hands until my palms are touching. She sighs as though this is yet more confirmation of the horror of taking me into their home. No doubt she’ll tell her husband I don’t even say my prayers and that all Londoners are clearly heathens.

  “Close your eyes. I suppose I’ll have to start you off: ‘Dear Lord, thank you for delivering me safely to Sheepcote, and for the good food on my plate, and the cleanliness of this house.’ There. Now you carry on.”

  I swallow. She seems to have about covered everything. If thank yous are all you’re allowed to say then I’m stumped.

  “Um … Dear God … look after Mum and Dad for me …” I open one eye and see Aunty Joyce nod her approval. “Don’t let Dad be killed and don’t let Mum be killed by a bomb on the munitions factory … or the twins … and may Granny James and Dad and Mum and the twins all live till they’re at least a hundred … that’s it.”

  “Amen.”

  “Our men.”

  She ushers me into bed, pats my arm and blows out the candle before closing the door behind her.

  I’ve been itching for this moment all day, so that I can cry in peace without being seen. But it is not so easy.

  I look into the dark. It is the darkest dark I have ever known. I cannot remember life without blackouts, but there is something different about this, which terrifies me.

  There is no sound of people walking about outside. No steady burr of vehicles going past. There are no merry voices spilling out from the pub next door, no sirens, no one shouting to put lights out. There is just a curious sound of a kettle on full steam coming from outside. It turns out to be the trees rustling. And there is the odd howl of a dog – or is it a wolf?

  After a few hours of terror I hear muffled voices downstairs. There is a man’s voice, and then the creaking of stairs. A few more creaks and clunks, then silence. I fumble for the matches and light the candle and fill the chamber pot. The shadows make me catch my breath. A moth flutters past my face and I let out a little squeak of horror. Everywhere I look there are spiders and moths clinging to the walls. They are within inches of the pillows, moths with wings folded ready to flap flap flap; spiders with enough legs to sprint across your face, down under the bedcovers – anywhere – in the folds of your nightie – anywhere!

  I head for the landing and see the other door. It opens into their room: two mounds in a double bed, a dark wardrobe, a dressing table, and the strange musty wood smell like the inside of pianos. I creep under the covers next to Aunty Joyce.

  In the morning, I wake up in my own bed.

  And by the way, if you never go to school …

  I am placed in Standard Three, in a shared classroom with Standard Four. Both years are taught together as eight- to ten-year-olds by a young teacher called Miss Hubble. I like Miss Hubble. She is bright-cheeked and alert with a smile for everyone, very thick ankles and a passion for wild flowers. Everyone knows she will make a joke sooner than use the ruler if you blot your work or forget how many pounds in a hundredweight. On my first day she gives me an exercise book, cut in half, for ‘HANDWRITING’. When she discovers my blank page halfway through the lesson, she keeps the sneerers at bay by giving me a foxglove and some campion from a jar on her desk and thanks me for offering to stick them in the book for her. At playtime she whispers that she will help me catch up at the weekends.

  Standards Five and Six, on the other hand, are taught by the sour-faced Miss Miller. People say she is a spinster of the Great War and is angry with the whole world because her stock of possible husbands has been blown to bits and used as compost for foreign flowers.

  The children in the next two Standards, aged between twelve and fourteen, are taught by the headmaster, Mr Edwards, and they call him ‘Boss Harry’. Boss Harry is no taller than the women but seems a giant. He lost three brothers in the Great War, in which he fought himself, and he keeps a slim pale cane in a cupboard above his desk. These facts together increase his height by a good few inches.

  Boss Harry takes us for ‘poetry’. He stands by the window, facing out, and spouts lines about lovers and soldiers, birdsong and heartbreak, in a strong melodic voice that I will later discover is from South Wales. We watch his chalky hands clasped behind his black jacket, and we enjoy not having to do anything but sit. We like it especially when he becomes angry, because it is exciting. No one ever knows for certain what he will do next. And one thing that is guaranteed to make him angry but unable to use his cane is Miss Miller, twice a week. She vents her anger with the world through music. Every Wednesday and Friday she hands out an assortment of percussion instruments and bangs away at her untuned piano to the arbitrary thrashing of triangles and tambourines. Through this ear-splitting racket she entreats her avid class to howl out a song. She shrieks it out, line by wretched line, crashing away at the keys until Boss Harry (whose sensitive ears were made in the Land of Song) is unable to ignore the onslaught coming through the partition wall. He turns the colour of foxglove and has to face the window to avoid showing us his slitted eyes and gritted teeth. She will punish him this way for ever for being the only eligible widower this side of Stroud, and he not willing to give her the time of day.

  It’s been years since I went to school properly, and I find sitting still in squashed rows very difficult. What with all the evacuees there are three or four of us to every two-seater desk, and our elbows can barely move. I am on the end with my bum half on and half off the bench. And I learn early on that ‘vacuees’ are deemed no better than gypsies in the order of things, since it is always a gypsy or an evacuee who is sent to flush the toilets at the edge of the playground. This has to be done three times a day, and I am chosen in the playground by Miss Miller on the very first day. I’m sent with a gypsy boy called Stef who is to show me the ropes.

  There, bordering the fields, is a row of holes in the ground with square wooden seats. The cubicles reek of shit and sour urine. I need to use them myself but after Aunty Joyce’s boiling, the elastic in my knickers was so limp that she had to tie a knot in it, and now I can’t get them down.

  “You pull this and the shit gets chucked
into the field,” he says, pointing to a handle. “Do it!” And then for no reason he picks up a sharp stone from the filthy floor and holds it close to my cheek: “I could cut you!”

  I soon see that the gypsies enjoy the new evacuees because for once they are no longer the lowest of the low. And there are two more groups of children who are grateful for our arrival.

  The first are the evacuees who arrived at the beginning of the war. Tired of being the scapegoats for every problem in the village, they relish the opportunity to pick on new arrivals. They make fun of my accent, which was once theirs, my inability to read and write any better than the reception class, and they laugh at my unfitting clothes.

  The second group of children who welcome our arrival are those from the boys’ home. They can sympathize with us for being brought up by strangers, but only until we get letters from home.

  And from this melting pot of seething rivalries we bubble over at the end of the day and make our way through the lanes. But walking home turns out to be worse than playtimes. At least at playtime you can play hopscotch by yourself and pretend to be busy. You can make yourself invisible in the playground, provided nobody gets bored and begins to notice those they’ve excluded. They reckon British Bulldog was banned last year because it always turned into a vicious battle between evacuees and villagers. Children were trampled on, fingers were broken, lips were split. But still large groups of them are always having a go, until Boss Harry spots them from his schoolhouse window and comes down to ring his handbell furiously.

  On the way home it’s different. There is no restraining bell. Children scatter in all directions. Some go down the road to a neighbouring hamlet, some across the valley to the farms or up the hill to the church. Others, like me, troop on past the church, through Sheepcote, and carry on up to the Fleece, where things start to get nasty.

  By now there are about ten children, and a score or so more from the boys’ home. I am walking ahead on this first day as fast as I can, but keeping my knees as clamped as possible, because I am now desperate for a wee.

  One of the girls runs up behind me and lifts the hem of my skirt. There are hoots and giggles.

  “Hey! Droopy drawers!”

  I don’t look back. Then a boy’s voice:

  “’Er can’t ’ear you! ’Er can’t read and ’er can’t write! I don’t s’pose ’er can say nothink neither!”

  This time a stone strikes me on the shoulder. It hurts. I try not to feel it, and keep walking. I’m going to wet myself if I don’t get home soon.

  “What you doin’?” booms a new voice. “You can’t ’it girls! Get lost – go on! Get on home, you!”

  There are a series of whistles and teasing whoops, and the owner of the voice runs up to me. “You all right?”

  It takes a few moments for me to pluck up the courage to look at him, in case it’s another trick. “I’m okay … fanks!”

  He’s a much older boy, thirteen or fourteen maybe, and he has kind eyes. He smiles at me, and I look down at the road, at my squirming knees and my heavy feet, which threaten a leak with the impact of each boot.

  The rowdiest of the troop seem to have tailed off.

  “Where you from, then? London?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey! You seen bombers, then? Seen doodlebugs?”

  “I got shrapnel.”

  “Hey!”

  “Got loads at home. Brought a few bits wiv me though.”

  He comes to a standstill. The rest of the group are turning right down a path towards an iron gate marked “Heaven House”, only I don’t have time to work out the sign because I am on a mission. I hurry on.

  “My name’s Tommy, by the way,” he calls after me.

  I cannot, I cannot stop now. Running, I turn my head, so chewed up with gratitude and guilt, and mutter, “I’m Kitty. I’ll show you the shrapnel – you can ’ave it!”

  I can already feel the sore heat of it running down my thighs and, as I head up the path to Aunty Joyce’s, I leave a dark trail in the stone. Then I stand on the doorstep and let it all come out. When Aunty Joyce opens the door it is over. I greet her in a pool of shame, desperately hoping that the big boy did not watch me running home.

  My Uncle Jack

  Uncle Jack turns out not to be such a tosser as I expected. At least, not at first, and then later … I’m not sure what I would call him.

  The first thing I see is his boots by the door: huge black hobnails with leather like orange peel. They stand on yesterday’s Gloucestershire Echo in a ten-to-two formation, making them look strangely balletic. Inside the parlour his dark blue jacket hangs on the back of a dining chair like a living thing, its pockets bulging with tins and its arms curved forwards. There is an intense musky smell to it, half sweat, half smoke, and the usual paraffin and sulphurous cooking smells of the parlour are stifled by a waft of vanilla tobacco. There is a man about.

  It is a long time since I have lived with a man, and I am nervous and excited by his presence. He comes in from the back door carrying wood, his pipe still in his mouth. He grips it between his teeth and tries to smile at me, but has to deposit the logs and take out the pipe for me to make sense of his greeting.

  “Hello! You must be … Kitty, is it?”

  “Yes. Kitty Green.”

  “Kitty Green!” He holds out his hand and it is huge and warm. His face is smudged with dust and smoke, which makes the white of his eyes gleam a brilliant blue. “Jack Shepherd. You can call me Uncle Jack if you like.”

  I smile weakly, not sure what is expected of me, and afraid to break any unspoken rules.

  “You’ll be well looked after here, at any rate,” he says, sinking into one of the two armchairs by the range. “Joyce is a good cook – I dare say you’ve never eaten anything like it, have you? Pass me that box in my pocket there, will you?”

  I go to his jacket and reach in the right-hand pocket, but he shakes his head and indicates the left one. I reach in my hand and feel string and paper, two-inch stubby pencils and something cold like a screw. I close my hand around the tin and take it over to him. I flinch as he knocks his pipe sharply on the stone hearth around the range. Then I watch as he opens the tin and out springs a ginger tress of tobacco, which he expertly tugs at and stuffs little wisps into the bowl of his pipe. The smell takes me back to the waiting room at Paddington station, where my dad – home on leave – said, “Remember, you show them toffs. Behave yourself, be kind, and no fackin’ swearing! You show ’em!” Then it wafts me back to my Uncle Frank and Aunty Vi’s, where we stayed for two years before my mum had the twins and before Aunty Vi went doolally and got sent to a home. It wasn’t Uncle Frank who smoked the pipe, but his mate George who used to come round sometimes. It smelt a lot like this. Suddenly I am there, in that soot-smelling living room and the bedroom with the damp encrusted wallpaper and my mother’s arms around me all night. Before the twins she used to do that. Dad had been in the army so long I couldn’t remember any different.

  Uncle Jack looks young enough to be in the army. There is no grey in his brown curly hair and under his blue overalls he looks quite sturdy.

  “Now you’re to help your Aunty Joyce, mind. Up at the farm in the mornings and weekends, and help with the housework after school. Isn’t that right, Joyce?”

  He calls, but Aunty Joyce is in the pantry. She holds open the beaded fronds that separate the pantry from the parlour and says to me, “You better come and help me, then.”

  I help her prepare tea. Before the week is out I will know how to scrub potatoes, boil eggs, top and tail beans and make pastry. But on this particular evening she makes a point of everything I can’t do, as if emphasizing to Uncle Jack how useless I am, and he looks up from his paper with sympathy, as if to agree with her unspoken assertion that I am lucky to be with them, considering the hovel I must have come from where everyone says ‘cor blimey’ and they don’t even have a change of knickers or know what a vegetable is.

  I suppose I don’t actually t
hink this, but in that instinctive way children have, I know it.

  Uncle Jack works ten-day shifts: any time from two o’clock in the morning to ten o’clock at night. Whenever he comes home after 2 p.m., or as near as train times will allow, Aunty Joyce always insists on having dinner at teatime, to allow her husband a full hot meal. So on this first evening with Uncle Jack we have liver and onion, potato and cabbage.

  When we sit down to eat, I still have not let go of my mother’s arms around me in Aunty Vi’s spare room, and I am not hungry. Nonetheless, I pick up my knife and fork like Aunty Joyce did yesterday, to show willing. Uncle Jack instantly clamps a large hand on mine and forces my fork to the table in a frightening rebuke. He looks at me intently and his frown turns to a sort of sympathetic smile, as if to say he understands my impetuous animal need to scoff anything on my plate, but here we do things differently.

  He bows his head and Aunty Joyce does the same, clasping her pretty hands together against the tablecloth.

  “For these and all Thy bounteous gifts, oh Lord, we give Thee our thanks. Amen.”

  “Amen,” says Aunty Joyce.

  “Our men,” I agree.

  We tuck in, only I have even less will than ever to tackle the liver now that I have so much to live up to. I watch from the corner of my eye to see how they hold the meat down with the fork, then saw at it with the knife. I try to do the same, but it is tough, and a piece of liver flies off the plate and speckles the tablecloth with gravy. Aunty Joyce rolls her eyes, and gives Uncle Jack a distant “You see what I have to put up with?” look, to which he replies with a magnanimous look which says, “We cannot expect too much of her.”