Mr Mac and Me (11 page)

The wind hits us hard as we step on to the path. ‘Where you off to then?’ he asks me, tugging his cap down over his eyes.

‘Home, I suppose.’ I look at him. ‘You coming back that way?’

Danky winks. ‘I’ll stop this side of the river,’ he tells me. ‘Drop by the Lord Sandwich and wait for dark.’

I look around. There are soldiers in their uniforms walking in groups along the promenade, and the old rugby pitch is lined with tents in the same mulched colour as their clothes. A family of Belgians sit on a bench beside the cannons on Gun Hill, looking as foreign now as they did when they first came, staring back across the sea towards their home.

‘Right,’ I say, although I want to remind him night fishing has been banned, not that he doesn’t know it. Not that he wants to hear about it from me. So I say nothing, walk with him past the town square where Mother and I came to read the rules of Dora, and I glance towards the place where amendments to the act are sometimes pinned, but today there’s nothing new.

Danky trudges on beside me. ‘Best not mention seeing me to Father,’ I say. ‘In the Reading Room and all. You know how he is about the sea.’

Danky touches his nose. ‘We’ll both keep to our own business.’ And nodding in agreement, I turn and run, the wind behind me, to where the last ferry will soon be cranked home on its chains.

I don’t see her at first. But Betty is standing tucked in beside Mrs Penny at the front of the ferry. She has her shawl wrapped right up over her head, but I know her by the narrowness of her shoulders. I edge past the other folk squeezed on board, and make my way towards her. ‘Good evening to you, Tom,’ Mrs Penny smiles across at me, and with the greeting Betty lifts her head.

‘Hello,’ I say before I lose my nerve.

‘Hello,’ she says back, and for once she isn’t laughing.

‘Where’s your sister?’ I ask. And a tear starts into her eye and, swelling, rolls fatly down her cheek.

‘She’s not well.’ The girl bunches up her mouth. ‘She caught her hand with the cutag – the gutting knife. Not so bad. But now it’s swollen, and she has a fever. And Mrs Horrod’s bound it up with cobwebs and given her a brew of herbs but she’s not sure what more there is to be done.’

‘Surely . . .’ I start, and my head spins with offers of advice. An antiseptic from Mrs Lusher’s shop. Or if anyone can find her, the old witch-woman that walked in from the country with her second sight. Surely she’d have herbs, or spells even, stronger than anything Mrs Horrod can provide. But all I say is that I hope she’ll soon be well.

‘Yes,’ Betty gulps. ‘Maybe she’ll be a wee bit better tonight,’ and she wipes away another tear.

We walk together up Fishers Lane, Betty trotting along so fast I have to take an extra, hopping step to keep up with her. She slows when we reach the Blue Anchor but I keep on, past Millside, where I don’t waste a minute looking up at the high windows, and on to Mrs Horrod’s. I wait there while Betty knocks and inches open the door, and I feel I’ll know just from the sight of Mrs Horrod’s face when she answers, how things stand with Meg.

‘Away with you now, Tommy,’ she says when she sees me. And I am right. Meg is no better, but neither is she worse.

The next morning I forgo my inspection of the beach, and watch for Betty. I’m rewarded by the sight of her hurrying towards the ferry, her shawl around her head. I am about to call to her, when Mother asks if I’ve let out the hens, and why I haven’t drawn the water from the well.

I turn away, cursing the unfairness of my tasks while Father snores upstairs, and Ann sits writing yet another letter to Jimmy Kerridge to follow the others that have gone un­answered. But before I can say more I hear our new soldiers rattling on the ladder and I slam out into the morning and clank the bucket down into the well. I listen to the drop of it, the noise of the air rushing by, and the hard flat thud as it hits water. The bucket sits there for a second and then slowly, heavily, it begins to sink until with a last gulp it slips under.

Mother smiles at me as I slosh into the kitchen, and without a word I’m out to release the hens. ‘Morning,’ I say, as I slide open their hutch and I watch them shake their feathers, as one by one they step on to the slatted ramp. When they’re out I duck into the dark stink of the shed. Usually they lay a little later in the day, but some may begin early, and I like to be the first to close my palm over the smooth, hot, newborn shells. Today there are three. I roll them into my shirt and bring them in to Mother who sets them straight into a pan of water on the stove.

‘You’d best be off then,’ she tells me. I’ve had my porridge, and a slice of bread – the eggs are for the soldiers – and she moves towards me, her arms out for a squeeze. ‘I’m going,’ I tell her, and I slip away from her fingers, and I’m halfway down the street before I remember to tuck away my smile.

Chapter 28

As soon as I sit down at the wheel George Allard begins fretting. ‘They want to bury the cannons on Gun Hill. They think we’ll be safer with them out of sight. When what’s the point of having them all these years if now that we finally need them, they’ll be out of use?’

‘Bury them? How?’ I imagine a row of men, heaving sand up from the beach to turn them into castles.

But Allard isn’t listening. ‘Those six guns were presented to the town by Butcher Cumberland in 1746, given to the people of this region for helping him win the Battle of Culloden in which so many Highland folk were slaughtered.’

‘Really?’ I lift my head. And I imagine Meg and Betty, and possibly Mac too, their faces smeared with dirt, fighting for their lives.

‘At least that’s how people think they got here.’ Allard smiles, as if he has fooled a whole gathering and not just me. ‘Although there are some who date the guns from the time of James the Second, because they bear the Tudor emblem of the Rose and Crown. But this is not true either.’ I begin to drift away, wondering how Meg is faring, how Betty is managing her quota of herring alone. Whether they have found another girl to help her fill the barrels or whether the tall squint-eyed packer is helping with the load.

‘The real story’, Allard pulls me back, ‘is that the guns were cast in 1705 and given to the town to protect it from the Common Enemy. And Southwold has always needed protecting. In 1299,’ he mentions the date as if it was only last year, ‘the Earl of Gloucester’s fleet was attacked and sunk whilst moored there, and in 1624 pirates seized the Blyth ferry boat and left it stranded at Margate.’

‘Margate!’ I want to laugh at the thought of the chain ferry clanking all that way south, and then I remember the ferry used to be a simple rowing boat, with one man at the oars, and if you wanted to take a cart and horses across the river, you’d have to drive six miles round by road.

‘Two years later,’ Allard is deep in history now, ‘a French privateer captured a ship off this coast and fired its own guns back into the town. Destroyed two buildings on the front, killed a baby when the ceiling of its house fell in. But that could not happen now. Not with our cannons, eighteen-pounder muzzle-loading culverins. Although, it’s true, they’ve not been fired for over seventy years, last used to mark the birthday of the Prince of Wales.’ He starts walking backwards, as if finally remembering why we are there, and to keep to his pace, I begin slowly turning the wheel. ‘But the story of that day is too sad to tell.’ And it takes the rest of the morning to get it out of him. How a volunteer coastguard in charge of the first gun looked into the muzzle to see why it wouldn’t fire, when at that moment it went off. He had a wife and three children and all efforts to obtain a pension for them failed. Allard frowns, remembering those children who might have been saved, the mother who was forced in to the workhouse, and I look away from him as I turn, watch the rope instead, twisting fine and strong between his fingers.

I wait for Betty to get off the ferry, and I walk with her up to the house. She doesn’t speak and neither do I. But she seems to accept my hurrying along beside her. This time Mrs Horrod’s face when she comes to the door is full of worry, and Betty puts a hand to her mouth and rushes away towards the stairs. ‘Poor little thing,’ Mrs Horrod says, ‘she’s very bad.’ And she scuttles away too.

I stand at the open door with no one to tell me what to do. After a minute I step in and pull it to behind me. Mr Horrod is there, sitting in his chair. Too tired from a day’s labouring to move once he gets home. I nod towards him but he doesn’t seem to see me, so I stand and listen to the noises above, footsteps shuffling, voices low. Mrs Horrod appears again and goes to the kitchen where she calls for me, and I’m so glad to be of help I almost trip over in my hurry to assist her. ‘Bring that up, would you,’ she says, ‘careful.’ And promising myself I won’t spill a drop I carry a bowl of water up the twisting staircase while Mrs Horrod follows with a poultice of herbs.

Vic’s old room is narrow, with an iron bedstead pushed into the corner. The paper Mrs Horrod pasted up over the walls is peeling at the edges. I don’t see handprints on it, but there is a dark and oily smell, herring mixed in with the scent of fever, hot and high. I flash a quick look over to the bed and there’s Meg, her hair uncovered, her face waxy under a sheen of sweat, one hand red and misshapen, a cut in it, like a mouth, weeping yellow at the edges. She raises herself up, as if in search of something, and Betty takes a cloth and dips it in the water. ‘Shh,’ she whispers to her and she presses it against her forehead as she mumbles words to her in their own thick speech. I look away. I shouldn’t be here. And when Mrs Horrod sets the dish down on the table and moves to the door I follow her, and in silence we tread slowly down the stairs.

‘Tell your mother’, she says as I reach the door, ‘I’ll call for her if she gets worse.’

‘I will,’ I say, thankful that she’s not already worse, and I run back down the street.

Chapter 29

Runnicles has written a new list of battles on the board. Battle of Masurian Lakes. Battle of Bita Paka. Battle of the Aisne. Battle of Albert. We copy them down. ‘I was wondering . . .’ Ned Walpole from Flixton puts up his hand, ‘how long it will take before we win?’ And Runnicles looks at him in silence until we all begin to squirm. ‘That is a good question,’ he says eventually. And no one asks another.

I don’t go to Thorogood’s shed after school, but wait at home in case Mrs Horrod calls for Mother. But Mother stays where she is, kneading dough for three large loaves, and setting me chores each time she catches sight of me. Before the day is done I’ve swept out the fire, spliced a stack of wood and trimmed the hairy ropes of beard from a muddy bowl of beetroot. At dusk I creep up the street and stand outside the Horrods’ house, straining for a sign of life from Vic’s old bedroom window, but all is quiet and still, and I wander home again.

It’s Sunday before I gather any information, for I’ll not ask Mother for a crumb of news and risk my blood betraying me. Instead I roam out over the marshes, gathering leaves and flowers for Mac who has abandoned his aster and moved on to a stem of winter stock. I find a clump of clover, their tips tinged purple, and rather than pick one and watch it wilt to nothing in my palm, I lie down, sheltered by a wall of gorse, and taking out my notebook and my pencil I try and make a likeness of it. But simple as it looks, it seems I’ve chosen something impossible. There are a thousand little stems all making up this one smooth hood of colour and each one needs to be drawn in for it to look like itself. I’m slicing splinters off a pencil when I feel footsteps treading towards me over the grass. I look up and there’s Betty herself, as if I’ve dreamed her, eyes streaming, walking blindly into the sun. I lie still. I don’t want her to catch me watching. But just as she is about to pass, she stops, and covering her face with her hands she bends forward in a silent curl of pain. I don’t speak. There’s a chance she’ll straighten up, and continue on, but after a minute her voice seeps through the slats of her fingers. ‘They’ve taken her away,’ and a sob bigger than herself rips open her chest. I carry on sketching, wishing all the time I could put out my hand. But instead I count the tiny greeny stems, and before I’ve even planned it, I’m putting each one in. I’m still drawing when Betty unfolds herself and sits beside me and I feel in my pocket for a handkerchief that I know I won’t find there. ‘Sorry,’ I say. And I catch her red-rimmed eye.

‘It’s all right.’ She has her own handkerchief, already sodden, and she blows her nose and scrunches it up and balls it into her fist. ‘I wanted to go with her but they said no.’ And a stutter of small sobs tilts her forward again. I scratch away, and I’m surprised to find that now I’ve stopped thinking so much about the clover it seems to be forming itself.

‘Could you draw a likeness of me, do you think?’ she asks then, with a sniff, and I’m tempted to flip over my pages and show her the picture I’ve already made – herself smiling, the pale hair escaping from her scarf. ‘Maybe,’ I say. And with this new permission I look straight at her. For a moment she holds my gaze. Her eyes, so flat and fearless. The freckles standing out against the paleness of her face.

‘So,’ she gets up and shakes out her skirt, ‘I’ll meet you here next Sunday,’ and I watch her as she sets off along the path, walking fast, her shawl pulled tight around her.

On Sunday I wake early and slip out before church. I have my notebook, a pencil, my penknife and two hard-boiled eggs I set on the stove myself. I take a pinch of salt and twist it into paper, and packing everything into my pockets I’m out through the back gate.