Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (11 page)

Sue bounded over. ‘All right, Janet?'

‘Yes, fine.' My foot felt as though it were broken in six places.

‘Still playing?'

Some junior ghouls were gathering and my one thought was to get off the pitch and nurse my foot in peace. I shook my head. ‘Better not – I'm supposed to be on duty anyway.'

I hobbled to the bench where I'd left my raincoat, and Sue hustled her troupe away. I'd just eased off my shoe and was having a tender exploratory feel of my foot when a cool, amused voice said from behind me, ‘I didn't know you went in for these rough games.'

Mrs Bloomfield, of course. It would be.

‘That was positively my final appearance,' I said, hoping that my cheeks weren't as red as they felt.

‘Is your foot all right?'

‘Perfectly.' I rammed on my shoe and regretted it, but I didn't want to make myself look any more of a fool than I had done already. She strolled round to the front of the bench, casual but elegant in a sheepskin jacket and the kind of knee-high boots I'd have given my back teeth for.

‘Well, you know the rules,' she said. ‘All injuries must be reported to the member of staff on duty. I ought to put it in the incidents book.'

‘Please don't.' I thought she probably didn't mean it, but I couldn't be sure. ‘I'm not hurt, truly.'

Mrs Bloomfield laughed. ‘I'll take your word for it. Let's walk, then; it's too cold to stand about.' She strolled away with her collar turned up and her hands deep in her pockets, and I hobbled after her, eager to resume our personal conversation.

‘Did you come to this school from Ashthorpe?'

‘No, we moved to west Suffolk and I went to Saintsbury High School. But I like this area. I was very happy in Ashthorpe, and if I can find a house in the village I'd like to live there.'

‘Would you really?' I couldn't imagine myself ever wanting to go back to Byland to live, once I managed to get away. I was just going to say so when a junior came running towards us, full of anxious importance.

‘Please Mrs Bloomfield, Julie Binns has been sick behind the pavilion.'

We exchanged resigned, adult glances. ‘Is anyone with her?' Mrs Bloomfield asked the girl. ‘Good. You run off and fetch her a glass of water, and I'll be along in a minute.'

‘I'll go,' I offered. ‘I expect it was the fish pie, I had my doubts about it.'

‘I'd better go myself, thanks. I have to remember the incidents book.' She began to walk purposefully towards the pavilion and I stayed where I was, disappointed that our conversation had been cut short. But Mrs Bloomfield beckoned me to join her.

‘What I wanted to ask you', she said as we walked, ‘is whether there are any buses out of Byland on Sundays? Can you get to Yarchester?'

I didn't really know. Going all the way to Yarchester on a Sunday was unheard of. ‘There's a Sunday afternoon bus to Breckham Market,' I said, puzzled. ‘I'm not sure whether it goes on to Yarchester, though.'

‘Good enough. Are you doing anything this coming Sunday? Because if you're not, I'm going with some friends to an evening performance of Britten's
War Requiem
in Yarchester Cathedral. There's a spare ticket, and I wondered if you might like to come? If you can't get a late bus back, I'll drive you home.'

I was flabbergasted. I'd never been to a concert in my life, never been out on a Sunday except to visit relations, never had an adult invitation to anything. I stammered my assurances that I wasn't doing anything else, that I'd love to go. Her next words deprived me of speech completely.

‘Why not come to tea first? About five, if that fits in with your bus? 12 Riverside, the new block of flats just past the town bridge. Know where to find it?'

I nodded. I'd no idea where it was, but that hardly mattered. All I could think of was that I was going to get a foretaste of civilized living at last.

‘See you on Sunday, then.' Mrs Bloomfield disappeared round the back of the pavilion and I turned away, elated.

I wanted to run, punching the air like a goal-scoring footballer, the length of the hockey pitch. But it wouldn't have been a cool thing to do, so it was just as well that my foot hurt too much for anything more than a dignified limp back to school.

Saturday mornings I worked at the shop. I'd have liked to work there most of the holidays too, but Gran Thacker would only pay me for one morning a week.

I started biking down to the shop with Dad on Saturdays just as soon as I was big enough to be useful. I thought of it as helping him, and I didn't mind what I did, fetching and carrying at a run all morning. It didn't seem like work and I looked forward to the Saturday shilling he gave me and the bar of chocolate Gran Thacker handed me grudgingly as I left, though I usually had cause to feel guilty because I'd already nibbled some currants or a sliver of cheese when no one was looking.

As soon as I was fifteen, though, Dad said, ‘That's it, our Janet. You're of working age and you're not coming to work at the shop unless Mother pays you properly.' He did his best to make his chin look determined. ‘I shall speak to her about it.‘

The next Saturday Gran Thacker beckoned me into her little office behind the shop. I always hated going in there. She had a paraffin heater on full blast, and the windows were kept tightly closed whatever the weather. There was a permanent smell of stewed tea and old ladies'woollens.

‘You're wanting to get paid, I hear.' There was no doubt that she wasn't in favour of it.

‘Yes, please,' I said. It was rather like visiting the headmistress at school, so I was very quiet and respectful. Gran pawed through the papers on her crowded roll-top desk, muttering and clicking her false teeth. Eventually she produced an official Wages Council leaflet and ran her finger along the columns of figures.

‘How old are you?'

‘Fifteen. Gran,' I added for extra politeness, but she looked at me as sharply as if I'd been cheeky.

‘Full-timers at your age get three pounds fourteen and six for a forty-two-hour week,' she announced with disapproval. ‘No wonder there's no profit in shopkeeping! Well, Miss, what's that per hour?'

Questions like that always floor me. Instead of trying to work them out in my head I just stand there saying to myself, ‘How on earth do I know?'

‘I'll get a pencil and paper,' I offered.

‘Don't bother,' snapped Gran, ‘I'll do it myself. Staying on at school, are you? Need to, by the sound of it. No proper schooling these days … One and ninepence an hour, as near as I can make it. Saturday mornings only, half-past eight to twelve, take it or leave it.'

‘I'll take it, please.' I couldn't work that one out in my head either and I was anxious to get it down on paper.

‘And I expect real work for it, mind. No idling about. A good morning's work for a good morning's pay, and if I catch you eating any of the stock there'll be trouble. That's theft, and it's a crime.'

I hoped she wouldn't notice my blushes.

‘What's she paying you?' Dad asked when I went back into the shop.

I scribbled the figures on the back of a cardboard price-ticket. ‘It'll only come to just over six bob,' I concluded, disappointed. I'd expected at least ten for a morning's work.

‘That's about what I thought.'

‘It isn't very much.'

‘Well, now you see why you've got to stay on at school and qualify for a really good job. Still, six shillings is better than nothing, eh?'

It certainly was. By the time I was seventeen I was earning eight shillings a week at the shop, and that money was my lifeline. Most of the others in the sixth form at school had ten bob just given to them as pocket money, and some of them even had an allowance for buying their own clothes, but I knew that our family budget didn't run to such luxuries. Dad slipped me something extra whenever he had it to spare, and Mum bought me whatever I needed in the way of basic clothes out of the money she earned in the fields.

My main job in the shop was filling up the shelves. Once or twice, when Dad was extra busy, I'd tried to help him by serving behind the counter, but I hated it. It was very difficult to remember the prices of everything and I was hopeless at adding up in my head. I had to write it all down in a long wavering sum on the back of a price ticket, and even then I was liable to get flustcred and make mistakes, while some of the customers made sniffy remarks about my being so bad at arithmetic when I was supposed to be so clever. I was the only one from the village, girl or boy, who'd passed the exam for the grammar school for several years, and I had to put up with a lot of needling on account of it.

So what with one thing and another I didn't much enjoy serving the customers. Anyway, Dad knew their habits, and what they wanted. ‘My usual, please,' some of them would say. Or ‘A piece of cheese,' and when I asked which sort and how much of it, they weren't sure: ‘
He
knows what I have,' they said. So it was really easier all round if I left the serving to him.

Instead, I dusted the two long mahogany shop counters, the grocery side and the drapery side, and I lugged cases of baked beans and sugar and cornflakes from the outside warehouse to the stock-room at the side of the shop, and I emptied the cases and checked the contents for damage. Then I filled up the shelves behind the grocery counter, being careful to rotate the stock as Dad had taught me and put the new things at the back and the earlier tins and packets in the front. In winter I carried the customers'paraffin cans out to the yard and filled them from the big tank. I swept out the stock-room and tidied the warehouse, and dusted the things we didn't have much sale for, and shook the creases out of the drapery goods and changed the window displays and tried hard to avoid Gran Thacker, though I was always respectful to her when we did meet.

It was an old-established village shop, going back 150 years at least, one of the properties bought by Dad's father in the 1920s. It must have been old-fashioned then, and it couldn't have changed much since except that Dad usually spent his holiday fortnight repainting the woodwork while Gran grumbled away doing the serving.

Dad longed to be able to modernize the shop to appeal to the younger customers. He wanted to get rid of the counters for a start, but Gran wouldn't hear of it. I overheard them once, arguing about whether Gran should buy a deep-freeze cabinet.

‘The customers want frozen food,' said Dad. ‘They see things advertised, and if they can't buy them from us they'll go elsewhere. We've got to move with the times.'

‘Frozen muck's no good to anybody,' snapped Gran. ‘And I don't hold with all that advertising, putting ideas into people's heads. Customers were thankful in the war to take what was offered. Your father always sold fresh food, and what was good enough for him is more than good enough for you.'

Acutally, though, she did give way over the deep-freeze, and fairly quickly, because her rival Mr Timpson at the top shop installed one and Gran's customers started making loud comments about how handy it was to be able to get frozen food in the village, and how good Mr Timpson's bacon was. That really upset Gran because she prided herself on her bacon. She never let Dad prepare it but always boned and rolled the sides herself. She couldn't bear the though of losing any of her bacon customers to Mr Timpson, so she ungraciously gave Dad the money to buy a second-hand deep-freeze, and within a couple of weeks she was eating fish fingers like the rest of us.

I agreed with his ideas about modernization. Counter service was hopelessly inefficient, because customers had to stand about waiting to be served while poor old Dad was run off his feet trying to keep them all happy.

The older customers were very patient; quiet, respectable countrywomen who believed in keeping themselves to themselves, who managed on very little money, never asked for credit and never complained. They called Dad Vincent, because they'd known him all his life. There were some customers, though, those who'd been at the village school with Dad, who always called him Ginger. It was understandable, with his hair, but they managed to say it in rather a sly, unpleasant way as though they were making fun of him.

‘Come on, Ginger,' they'd say, ‘hurry up, don't keep the ladies waiting,' and they'd snigger while Dad blushed. I wished that I could defend him in some way, but I didn't know how. Even their kids called him Ginger, and that made me mad. I'd been brought up to call their parents Mr and Mrs and I didn't see why they shouldn't be equally polite to my father.

Saturday was the shop's early-closing day and the morning was always busy. Dad was often harassed to death, particularly when any of his least favourite customers happened to be in there, chivvying him and making obscure jokes at his expense. If I were Dad I'd have thrown them out of the shop, but he just went on patiently serving, pale and quiet. And as if the customers weren't enough there was Gran Thacker, forever calling out to him from her office regardless of whether or not he was busy.

‘Vincent! Did the tinned pears come in?'

‘Vincent! Have we got any children's socks left?'

‘Vincent! Did you hear me?'

It was a real madhouse in there sometimes. But every now and again things went quiet, and some customers who came in during these quiet patches would settle down to talk to him, taking it for granted that he had nothing else to do. One of the most persistent was Mrs Marks, a recent incomer with a sharp London accent who always wore high heels. She trotted into the shop every day, to buy cigarettes if she wanted nothing else, just for the sake of having somebody to talk to, and Dad behind his counter was a captive audience.

You could almost feel sorry for the Markses. They'd paid an astonishing price for one of the few bungalows in the village, but if they'd imagined it would be worth it to retire to the peace of the countryside they were soon disillusioned. Mrs Marks kept complaining to Dad how noisy Byland was, with tractors and haulage lorries roaring about at all hours, cockerels waking them at five, and church bells spoiling their Sunday morning lie-in. She said the village stank of pigs, which is true when the wind blows from Mill Farm, and she was always grumbling about the price of vegetables and saying how much fresher and cheaper things were in London. As Dad could have told her, except that he was too polite, food in the country is fresh and cheap only if you grow it yourself.