Great Meadow (14 page)

8
The only existing ‘snap' of Lally, with my sister. Cuckmere, 1930.

9
Mama at the annual Astor Garden Party for
The Times.
Hever Castle, 1927.

10
At Melrose Abbey, 1928.

11
My Parents, in the blue OM. This pre-dated the all-silver one. 1929–30.

12
An aerial view of the cottage and Great Meadow. Taken by my father in 1930.

Walking up slowly through the rows of runner beans and the sprouting broccoli, Lally suddenly said, very nicely, ‘I tell you what. When the parents come back from Germany I shall have a week off to see Mr and Mrs Jane, Friday to the following Monday, and I wonder if you would both like to come with me? You'd have to share the big bed, like always, but I reckon, if you'd like to come, the parents would be delighted to get rid of you and be on their own. Would that cheer you up then?'

Well, she knew it would. After the cottage, Walnut Cottage, Twickenham, was the very best place in the world, so I quickly said yes before she changed her mind.

‘Well, that's that. I'll drop Mrs Jane a postcard just to warn her . . .'

‘About the Weekend, it's all my fault you know,' I said. ‘Really, I mean. If
only
I had left them in the lean-to, and made a sort of umbrella-thing for shade, or
if
I'd made some more air holes, and
if I
hadn't put them on the shelf on the stairs, Minnehaha wouldn't have jumped up on them . . .'

‘If “ifs” and “ands” were pots and pans, there'd be no need for tinkers!' said Lally. ‘No use fretting. You come and have a bit of Mr Wilde's home-cured and then, quick sharp, go and find that dratted cat.'

But no sign. I called and called and called. Nothing. I went to all the places I knew he might have been, lying rolled up in fly-paper, at the back of the privy, in the nettlebed by the rubbish heap, even up in the churchyard behind the Well Beloved and Departed This Life stones, but no. Not a sign anywhere. Not a meow, not a whimper. It was very worrying. But Lally told me to get-a-move-on-do, and while she was adjusting her white halo-hat (only used for Best or Hampstead – there was a black one for funerals or the theatre) she said he'd very likely come back in the cool of the evening, when he got a bit hungry. And not to forget to wear our ‘hates', awful cotton things we had to wear because of sunstroke (I ask you), and that she was only wearing her white because her beret was red, and she didn't want all those heifers, or cows, to come calumping up to her and giving her a terrible turn in all this heat, which would do for her.

‘I've never forgotten those terrible great eyes, rolling about in those huge heads, and all that spittle dribbling down from their frothy mouths! A terrible turn that was.
Don't tell me they aren't mad. Stark staring mad, and I
attract
them. Anything red and I'm done for, anything. Come along now, do . . . we'll keep to the lane side of the hedge down to the Court. Got the basket?'

It was lovely and cool and shadowy in Wilde's the grocer's, and quite peaceful except for all the wasps zooming about the Demerara sugar drawer and the South African sultanas like angry swallows. A lot of them got stuck on the spirals of fly-paper all over the shop, and that was a bit rotten because it reminded me of Minnehaha, but Mr Wilde said he'd be stung to death if he didn't deal with the ‘wapsies' (that was his name for them). Miss Maltravers, who was sitting in her little cage-thing up at the end of the shop (and serve her right, she was such a Nosey Parker), kept fanning herself with a pad of postal orders, and the draft jiggled all the fly-papers round her scales, and fluttered the papers on her counter so she had to put tins of pineapple chunks on them to keep them from blowing about the shop.

‘Well, I do declare! Miss Jane! And you don't often grace our premises, more is the pity for us here.'

‘Too much to do up the top. These children would run wild given half a blink. The cat's got caught in the fly-paper.
He's
lost his white mice. And I don't know what next. I'll have a three-ha'penny stamp please, Miss Maltravers.'

‘It's for Great Britain I take it?' She was tearing a little stamp very delicately out of her big stamp-book. ‘No one abroad? Because, as you know, Miss Jane, that comes extra.'

‘I don't know anyone abroad except a cousin in Hayling
Island, and I believe that is still in Great Britain even though it's an island. Am I correct?'

‘You certainly are! It all belongs to King George, and that's a comfort even if they do say he's really a German. But, you see, a
diluted
German. That takes the fizz out of them, if you follow.'

Then, after thanking us, she began fanning herself again and Lally read out her list of things for tomorrow and we posted the letter in the box in the wall just outside the shop. So that was that. Tomorrow Mrs Jane would get the good news that she'd have to get the big bed ready and aired in the little room looking over the back garden and the old pear, and very likely, if we were really lucky, we'd have Gravesend shrimps and whelks and winkles for tea. And that would be the very best thing of all, with bread and butter and a homemade raspberry sponge after.

Going down Sloop Lane to the river and the bridge, Lally told me to carry the basket while she counted the change in her purse. ‘There it lies!' she said. ‘I was wondering about that spare ha'penny. Never can be sure, they sweep them up before your very eyes. A penny ha'penny for a postcard . . . I ask you!'

‘You put it in an envelope, so it went like a letter,' I said.

‘I know I did. Postcards are for everyone to read, and Miss Maltravers has gimlet eyes, as we all know, and I am not about to have her spreading it all over the village that I have my week off soon, and please to make me an appointment at the barber's, and that you'll both be coming with me. That's our affair. Anyway, I had to let Mother know: can't give her a Scarborough warning, can
I, not with three of us and the big bed to air. She's not a girl any longer. Oh no . . .'

‘What's a Scarborough warning?'

‘I don't know, so don't ask, but I don't want to give her one. All I know is they can give you a regular fright. Ask no questions, you'll hear no lies . . .'

So I shut up, and we all crossed the white bridge over the Cuckmere.

The long shed at Walnut Cottage went all down the brick garden wall. The roof was just ripply tin, and one side, looking on to Mrs Jane's drying-lawn and the big pear tree, was all windows. Different sorts of windows, joined together, which Mr Jane had collected from places where he had worked. Inside, it was dusty and dim, because the windows were cobwebby. There was a long work-bench nicked and scarred with saw marks, and rusty tins of paint and creosote. It smelled of winter onions and corn for the hens, wrinkled apples and boxes of shallots. Up on the brick wall there was a snarling fox mask, which terrified my sister, who said that it watched her wherever she went, and sneered at her. It couldn't possibly because it was just a mask, just an old head, stuck on a wooden shield. There was a stuffed pike and some perch, with orange fins, which I rather liked, and a big set of wooden drawers, but quite small ones, with printed labels on them saying ‘Hinges' or ‘1/2 in. Screws' or ‘Tacks' and that sort of thing. Mr Jane was very tidy when he wasn't being forgetful, which Mrs Jane said was getting more and more ‘frequent'. I think she meant more often.

He was setting a lot of things down on the work-bench and I had to say what they were. It was a bit boring, but he was very nice really and he said I had to know how to ‘handle things'. I didn't much want to, but I was a guest after all. So.

‘What‘s this then? This thing?'

‘A spoke-shave.'

‘Yers. And this?'

‘A hammer.'

‘Ar . . . but what kind of hammer? Got to be clear.'

‘A claw-head hammer?'

‘Is right. This yere . . .?'

‘I don't know. Yes I do. A kind of saw . . .'

‘If you know,
what
saw is it?'

‘Jig.'

‘Got ‘im. And this yere? Different saw, you know it?'

‘Yes. For keyholes.'

‘And this then, what about this?'

And it was a small box-thing, with spotty brown paper on its back, and a lot of dust, and when I turned it round it was the most marvellous thing I'd ever seen. Well, for a very long time. Since we'd arrived anyway. It had two stuffed voles in it. Real, but dead. Little water voles, and they were sitting on a piece of paper riverbank stuff, with tufts of dried grasses and a bit of fern, and one vole was poking its head out of a hole, and the other was eating a nut or something. It was really terrifically exciting. I mean, they looked so real and everything.

‘What's them then?'

‘They are voles. Water voles. Stuffed.'

‘Yers. See the date, down the bottom? Fallen off, has it?'

He sounded anxious, but it was all right because it hadn't fallen off, it was just a bit squinty, and it said, in gold letters, ‘Pair of common voles. May ‘88'. Mr Jane said a friend of his did a bit of stuffing in the old days and this pair had been taken down at Strawberry Hill before all the
building had started. But then it was just fields and only the park when he was a lad. He said he was sorry to hear that my pets had ‘gorn', and would I like to have the voles because he didn't want them and Mrs Jane wouldn't have them in the house because of fleas or bugs. I thought it was very decent of him to think of Sat and Sun and to give me the voles, and I shook his hand and thanked him. He smelled of cough-drops, even though it was summer, and then blew the dust off the glass case and said it was mine. So I took it and went off to the house to show everyone and just when I got into the yard the yard door opened and someone came in pushing a bike and holding the door into the front garden wide open. Then it slammed shut and Mr Jane said who was that young chap banging around? And it wasn't a young chap at all. It was Lally. With no hair. Well, anyway, not much. We just stood staring down the yard, and she waved, and leant her bike against the walnut tree. She smoothed down her skirt and then, of course, you could see it was not a ‘young chap' at all.