The Beacon (2 page)

Because their lives were already hard, the war brought nothing very much worse, and indeed, in some ways it
was easier because it brought extra help on all the farms, in the shape of prisoners of war and even land girls, though the latter were never sent to the Beacon. The Prime family were better off for food than many others – the men shot rabbits and there were always fruit and mushrooms for those who knew where to look.

May was three when her grandfather died and she remembered nothing of him but the smell of his tobacco which seemed to come from the pores of his skin and the hair of his head and be woven like another layer of thread into every item of his clothing. When he died, John Prime moved into his shoes and the only difference was that now he gave instead of took the orders. The work was just the same. But there was never any question of John and Bertha moving out of the attic down to the big bedroom and the large bed. If the widow had ever felt it was her place to give them up now to the next generation, as others would and had in her position, she said nothing and did nothing and so everything remained as it had and Bertha could not ask. It was another ten years before Bertha attained the large room and the biggest bed, and by then she had forgotten that they had once been so prized. The attic was hers. The attic was where her marriage had begun, the attic was her marriage’s own private space, her small world, and in
the end she was reluctant to leave it. But by then Colin and Frank needed a bigger room and May moved into theirs, and so everything changed and life went on with only a pause for the shifting of mattresses.

They kept dairy cows and a few beef cattle, sheep and pigs and chickens, with geese and turkeys for Christmas, and they grew wheat and barley and potatoes, and as the land was partly on the side of the hill that stretched away from the Beacon and partly on the plain running down to the river, the work was both varied and never-ending. After the war they stopped using horses and bought a tractor and the milking gradually became more mechanised, but that did not shrink the working hours and the weather was against them for seven months of the year in this distant and uphill place.

May had fragmented memories of growing up at the Beacon, like a series of pictures in an album except that sometimes the pictures had sound or came with their own smell and taste. Someone from the village brought a grandchild of the same age, Sylvia, and Sylvia and May had wandered out into the strawberry patch and eaten the fruit warm from the sun until their mouths were scarlet and their stomachs ached. The taste and the smell of the berries and the straw
they rested in and the earth beneath it were there for the taking for the rest of May’s life if she read or heard the single word ‘strawberry’.

The pain in the back of her legs after climbing the hill and the feel of the rain and wind stinging her face.

Her grandmother’s smell when she was old. May had not liked to go near her in the chair or in her bed because of the smell which was of something both decaying and oddly sweet.

She had gone to school on the bus from the end of the track, but memories of school were even more fragmented. The feel of a wooden ruler in her hand and, once, being told that a girl in her class had measles very badly, and then next, that she was dead.

The shiny green tiles in the washroom. The cold water that made your teeth ache when you drank it from the tap, cupping your hand and filling it first then scooping the hand to your mouth.

But there were no really bad memories and that was important. Later, when she had to sit down and go step by step through her life – their lives – from far back to the present, she could not conjure up anything that was more than a passing unpleasantness that went with everyone’s childhood – pain in a tooth or a boil or disappointment over something postponed. Life had simply gone on uneventfully until, when she was six, her sister and the last child had been born and
christened Berenice. Sheila had been their grandmother’s chosen name; John Prime would have gone along with anything. No one quite knew where Bertha had found the name Berenice.

From the beginning, May had loved her with a protective and slavish intensity, spending every moment she could hanging over the cot and the pram, answering her cries with an urgency that everyone said would be regretted. The baby had seemed complacent and self-absorbed and as she grew up had taken her sister’s attentiveness so much for granted that it had warped her character. But May had continued to love and serve, and secretly, Bertha had found it a relief not to have more work, more calls on her attention. She had realised very quickly that the baby could be left to May.

May Prime was clever. That had been clear when she had picked out letters on the back of her father’s newspaper as he held it up and then found the same letters in the family Bible and in the stock book and in the books from the glass case in the sitting room. She had found pencil and paper and copied the groups of letters until they formed words and asked for the words to be read and whispered them over and over, staring at the marks until they gave up their secret to her and she could read. That had been before she
went to school and was a thing unheard of in the family, though both her grandmother and Bertha Prime read books during the winter and her father went through the paper from front to back every day after dinner.

She had loved to read and later to take the arithmetic books from her brothers and try to work out the exercises, though numbers did not make the same sense to her that words did. There was a globe of the world in the front room, beside the single glass-fronted case of books – Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, an encyclopedia, a dictionary,
Everyman in Health and Sickness
, the prayer book,
The Ready Reckoner
. She sometimes took down the globe and twirled it on its stand and read the names of the countries aloud.

By the time she went to school with Colin and Frank she could read and had an odd, random confetti in her brain of bits of knowledge which floated about and changed shape like the tiny shards of bright glass inside her brother’s kaleidoscope. In the end the fragments would come together in a linear form, though some would prove incorrect or useless and others were lost altogether.

She loved the school from the first moment of walking into the cloakroom and finding her own name on a piece of card slotted into a little metal holder above a peg. Her name. She loved the smell of
the entrance and the different, wood-dust smell of the hall and the smell of the classrooms which were placed all around it, a different smell again, of chalk dust and of other children.

She fell into schoolwork. She loved the exercise books she was given, one of which had times tables, rules and measures on the back, the other lists of the principal rivers and mountains of the world, of Kings and Queens, of Important Dates and Capital Cities and the Constellations. She learned them by heart without trying because she looked at them so often, read them so many times, that her mind, almost her skin, simply absorbed them.

As she moved up from class to class everything became more interesting and the exercise books now had algebraic and chemical formulae and French and Latin verbs. The beginning of each term, when she wrote her name on each book, filled her with a huge excitement for the knowledge that was waiting for her, the exercises to come.

Yet she was a friendly girl too; she learned skipping games and five stones and catching rhymes and huddled against the wall hearing tales. She played rounders because she had an excellent ball eye, though her running was awkward. She could jump higher than any other girl in the school and played the recorder well enough to be in the band.

When she was seven she acquired a particular friend who had come to the school that term.

Patricia Hogg’s father was the new gamekeeper to the big estate on the other side of the hill, across the valley from the Beacon, and for a time, May, Patricia Hogg and a girl called Geraldine were always closeted together. But, three being a crowd, Geraldine was edged out, and May and Patricia Hogg were left to sit together, eat lunch together, walk part of the way home together. Patricia Hogg was a reader like May and in spring and summer they took their library books and sat in the sun on the wall or on the grassy bank, skirts hitched up above their knees so their legs would brown.

Patricia Hogg had none of May’s fire for learning and the books she read were always school or fairy stories, but they formed a comfortable pairing.

Once, May was invited to stay with Patricia Hogg at the gamekeeper’s cottage, which sent Bertha into a spasm of uncertainty and alarm, for no member of the Prime family had been to stay at the house of anyone who was not a close relative as far back as anyone could remember, so that there was the worry of what state May’s clothes were in and how she should carry them and if presents ought to be taken.

But in the end this was sewn and that was mended and everything was clean and a canvas bag found in
one of the upstairs trunks and a jar of honey and a slab of home-cured bacon wrapped in greaseproof and settled among the cotton knickers and white socks.

She had left with Patricia Hogg after school, walking importantly out of the gate carrying the canvas bag. They walked to the opposite end of the village from the one which led to the Beacon, and waited in the sun for a bus. When it came it was full with people coming back from the market and they had to stand, holding onto the cracked leather seat backs and swaying about as the bus went round the bends. She could remember the feel of the leather in her hand, years afterwards.

The cottage was on the very edge of the estate and backed onto the woods. It was small and dark with low ceilings and you went in straight from the street. There was no porch.

There were five of them living in the cottage with the indoors dog and two cats, and with May it was crowded and felt more so when the gamekeeper came in from work. He was a huge man. They were all huge, with large hands and feet, and Mrs Hogg had a great, wide backside which seemed to fill half the kitchen when she bent over.

May slept in the same bed as Patricia. She had never in her life slept in a bed with anyone else and crept to the far side and held onto the edge in case
their legs touched. To May, sharing a bed was a strange and unpleasant thing to do, and hot, too, under the heavy quilt.

The Beacon was never completely silent because of being high up and always troubled by a wind, but here the woods seemed to press into the house like baize, so that no air could get through and the light was oddly green. She could not get to sleep for the stillness and the odd shrieks of creatures out in the darkness, and then she began to want the lavatory. She tried to ignore the pressure of it but in the end she had to whisper to Patricia, and not knowing what to say, asked, ‘Has your dad locked up downstairs?’

The toilet was outside at the bottom of the thin garden close to the trees.

‘Why, what are you frightened of?’

‘I’m not frightened. I need to go to the toilet.’

‘There’s something under the bed for that.’

May had been mortified. There were pots under the beds at home too, though also a proper flush toilet in a lean-to beyond the scullery. The idea of using a pot with someone else in the room, even in the dark, was quite shocking. She lay absolutely still on the far edge of the bed and in spite of the discomfort eventually slept. She woke sometime later. It was still pitch black, and Patricia was making tiny snorting sounds. May slid inch by inch from the bed onto the
floor and then felt around for the pot on the rough boards, praying for the other girl not to wake.

In some ways everything at the Hoggs’ cottage was familiar. The dark. The fact that the outside world seemed to be inside too, the sounds the pigs made and the smells. Otherwise, it was entirely strange, denser and closer, as if everyone and everything was packed tightly together, bodies and clothes, china and pans, cats and chairs and the gamekeeper’s guns and sticks.

There were the indoor dog, and two cats, but no animals other than two pigs and the gun dogs which lived in outside cages and the ferrets, and the wood came right to the fence and one day might have marched into the house like a wood in a fairy story.

May learned an early lesson about people, which is that they can change according to their settings and how they fit into them. Patricia Hogg at home was not the same as the one she knew at school. At home she took the lead and was not always friendly, sulked and was cocky. She was the eldest child of three and the only girl.

They went for desultory walks and sat in the fringes of the wood among leaves and pine needles with their backs against the tree trunks. May had brought a book but Patricia did not want to read. She did not seem to want her here and there was nothing to talk about.
They had been shooed out of the house after breakfast.

It was a dismal three days and May felt that she was doing wrong simply by being her usual self, but she had no other self to present and found herself, for the first but not the last time, without resources and unable to mould herself to blend with her surroundings or to fit in with the expectations of others. She had no idea what those expectations were. The difference in the other girl was both a shock and a puzzle and she did not know how to relate to this new Patricia Hogg.

She finished her book and asked if she could borrow another but there was only the Bible in the cottage, so she found herself reading Exodus and Isaiah and Revelation by the light of the oil lamp at the kitchen table while they drank beakers of cocoa and Mrs Hogg banged the iron down onto sheets and shirts. Always after, that biblical language was associated for May with the smell of the hot flannel and the dusty taste of cocoa so that wafts of one or the other came to her if she was in church or heard the Bible being read aloud anywhere.