Hannah & Emil (11 page)

The schoolhouse was just at the end of the lane leading out to the fields from the Walton-Joneses' house, in the building I had earlier mistaken for a chapel. The boys dawdled over bees and ladybirds in what was left of the hedgerow. Benjamin wanted a piggyback but a group of children were coming along behind us, so I refused. As the children reached us I saw that there were more behind them. They stared openly as they passed, as though they were cows and we their only entertainment for the day. I wondered if they were a little slow. Uniform appeared to be optional, some wearing grey shorts or pleated tunics and some boys wearing miniature versions of what their fathers would wear in the fields, dull brown trousers and shirts, the girls in homemade floral sundresses. I felt a little stiff suddenly in my boater and pressed pinafore from St John's.

We followed the other children into the school grounds and waited at the door until the teacher, Mr Bailey, appeared in front of us. My first impression was that this was an old man; I registered the halting gait of a tall adult pass us by as we waited. Then I saw with surprise that he was very young, almost like one of us, an older brother perhaps with smooth skin and an unlined brow. I saw in his profile a large sad eye in a face still slightly soft along the jaw and cheekbones, and that he walked with a cane. In London, young men who moved like the old meant only one thing. He caught my eye, saw my brothers behind me, a little silent group amid the others who shouted and pulled at each other, not noticing that he had arrived. ‘You must be the town children,' he said, just loud enough for us to hear, while the others went on with their jostling. ‘Hannah? Geoffrey? Benjamin?'

He gave us his mournful smile, leaning towards us, and a little jolt passed through my heart. One of his eyes did not move along with the other.
It is glass!
I said to myself, involuntarily squeezing the elbow of Geoffrey's jacket, a little pit of horror opening up in my stomach. I caught myself. ‘Sir,' I said in what I believed to be my discreet voice, ‘were you injured in France?'

Well, I must have been speaking more loudly than I imagined, because the class fell quiet at my back. The teacher gave a little cough. ‘Egypt. Observant of you to notice.' His accent was from the West Country. Well-spoken, but with soft edges to his words. He was the most romantic figure I had ever encountered. ‘Let's go inside, shall we, children?'

‘
Hannah!
' Geoffrey whispered, pulling his arm away from me with a jerk. Behind me, someone flicked my ear.

I flinched, but refused to look. ‘What? I was right, wasn't I?'

‘You're not supposed to ask people that.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Mother told me.'

‘Well, why didn't she tell me?'

‘She did. She told all of us. You weren't listening.'

‘But how should we know he was in Egypt if I didn't ask? Anyway, he didn't mind. Adults admire a little spirit. Ask Father.'

We were inside now, nudged in by the tide of children, hanging up our satchels on the hooks by the door with the others. There was only one room in the dark building and it smelled largely of sawdust, overlaid with a whiff of manure from the fields drifting in through the window. The teacher gestured to an empty desk to one side of the room, where the older children sat. Benjamin was quickly settled at the back on a communal table and was soon scribbling with a wax crayon on newspaper. He was beaming at a little girl with blonde curls. Geoffrey was looking around him from the other side of the room, where he was seated next to an enormous farm boy in a hand-knitted pullover. My brother wore a deep scowl. The bigger boy pinched his arm. Geoffrey leaned out from the desk, away from him. I saw myself rising from my chair, walking the breadth of the room in front of an astonished class and teacher, and slapping the giant simpleton, leaving his great jowl to tremble like a slavering bulldog. I would place my hands on my hips and say slowly: ‘I imagine it was you who flicked my ear, too, wasn't it, you brute?' I forced my gaze away from Geoffrey to our teacher, who now introduced himself wearily as Mr Bailey, for the benefit of the town children.

Oh, that was a long day in my life. My shoe scuffing the floorboards, the slow intoning of the alphabet by the little ones, a song the children sang at home time, prompted only by Mr Bailey clapping his hands together once, saying, ‘Now, ready, children?' I did not know the words of course and so I set my eyes on a row of jam jars filled with hollyhocks on the window ledge behind Mr Bailey. I wondered who had picked them. They trembled in the breeze, their petals shifting from light to dullness as the shadows of clouds drifted across the schoolyard and the children sang:

Summer suns are glowing over land and sea;

Happy light is flowing, bountiful and free;

Everything rejoices in the mellow rays;

Earth's ten thousand voices swell the psalm of praise . . .

I dared a glance at Mr Bailey's face. He was staring out towards the door, beyond our heads. His lower lip creased at its centre briefly. He paused for a moment when they had finished singing, before telling us to collect our things, and that he would see us in the morning, bright and early. He seemed to gather himself before saying the ordinary, hopeful things that adults said to children all the time to jolly them along, to keep them unthinking and obedient. I felt that I would like to sit in a room with him and ask him questions about himself and his life for hours on end. I would know the story of his troubles, and he would feel better for having talked to me about it. If only I were not a child, I wrote later. Why must childhood go on for so long? I had read many books on all kinds of subjects. I would understand his story too. I had prepared myself for such things.

Things livened up a little on our second day in the country. The oafish boy who had pinched Geoffrey, who had pale eyebrows and an Old Testament name like Jonah or Noah, lay in wait for us when we turned down the lane towards the schoolhouse. The first we knew of him was when a sharp-edged rock hit Geoffrey in the back of the head. He yelped and crunched forward, clutching his neck. Then the fat boy was running by us, laughing, soft white flesh rolling at his midriff where his shirt was not properly tucked. I stuck out my foot without more than a second of forethought and he jammed hard against my leg, tripped, went straight down, head smacking into the muddy road, his considerable weight behind it. Unfortunately for him the road was grooved into hard, gravelled ridges by farm vehicles and as he sat up, forlornly surprised, we saw that blood was running from a cut in his forehead and that little stones had embedded themselves like huge freckles in his soft cheeks.

‘What happened?' Geoffrey asked me as we watched the boy in the mud, the lane filling with children. ‘I didn't touch him.'

‘I tripped him,' I said quietly.

‘Hannah! You're a holy terror!' Benjamin exclaimed.

‘Shhh, Ben,' Geoffrey whispered.

But it was too late. Here came Mr Bailey, getting up speed as he pushed his cane down into the track, vaulting himself along towards us, children parting to let him through. And Jonah/Noah was pointing a finger at me. ‘Her!' he said. ‘That town girl done it!'

For the entirety of that day I sat at a little desk to the side of Mr Bailey, away from the other children, scarcely believing that this was regarded as punishment. I was on the side of his glass eye and I was at liberty all day—as he spoke to the class, marked exercise books at his desk, gazed sadly out to the fields—to observe the way it sat still in his face as around it muscles twitched minutely in his brow and jaw, and his other eye performed the subtle movements of real, living tissue.

At home time, though, Mrs Walton-Jones came for us. Some message had been transmitted and she gusted into the room as the bell sounded with a hand thrust forward to take hold of mine. ‘Thank you, Mr Bailey,' she said loudly. ‘I'll manage this from here.'

The boys gathered around her as she pulled me outside. In the yard children lingered, waiting to see what would happen. She leaned down towards my feet, as though she were about to do up my buckles for me, and slapped me on the calf. No such thing had ever happened to me before. It barely hurt, but I found the intimacy of it shocking. Take your hand OFF MY LEG, I wanted to shout. I caught myself, but only enough to ask, ‘What on earth are you doing?' as she straightened to her full standing height. Once more we were providing a spectacle for the village children.

‘When my boys misbehaved, they were smacked. You are no different. And you must leave that boy alone. It's not his fault, poor thing.'

‘But, Mrs Walton-Jones, he threw a stone at Geoffrey. It hit him right in the head!'

‘That boy fell flat on his face!' Benjamin said, at her back. ‘Whack!' He clapped his hands together. Geoffrey was regarding me sheepishly from under his thick black curls.

She took my hand and Benjamin's, Geoffrey following close behind me, and led us across the yard to the gate, our audience scattering before her heavy stride. ‘He's not right, you know. None of them are, those Shipmans.' She dropped her voice. ‘Difficult births. Brain damage. She should have stopped at the first.'

I might have stepped into a Victorian novel. I forgave her the smacked leg instantly for this bit of Gothic gossip. She seemed entirely to have forgotten my disgrace, justice having been served. No one threw any more stones at the boys' heads, either.

I woke one morning having dreamed of the changing of the guard and smelled charred meat. My stomach flipped with hunger. I dressed quickly and tumbled down the stairs to the kitchen. There was only Mr Walton-Jones there, reading yesterday's paper with a pot of tea and a mug in front of him on the table. I hovered in the doorway, thinking I would retreat until Mrs Walton-Jones was up, but he had lowered his paper and was looking at me with a slightly puzzled expression on his face.

‘Good morning—Hannah?'

‘Good morning, Mr Walton-Jones. What is that smell? I thought something was cooking.'

‘Ah, bit nasty. I'm afraid there's been a fire at the aerodrome. Bomber came in with its tail alight and went down amid the horses. Pilot and several horses perished.'

‘You mean, that smell is horses . . . cooking?' And a pilot, I thought, but did not say. I was testing the value of my very occasional capacity to leave a thought unsaid.

‘Not to put too fine a point on it.' He picked up the paper again.

At school, there was silence as we sat down at our desks, but Tessa Donald, a girl whom I had easily vanquished as top of the school in every subject and who loathed me with an intensity I found natural and even comforting, put her hand up immediately after register. ‘Oh, Mr Bailey.' He turned his sad gaze upon the girl. ‘Father says the injured horses are to be shot this morning.'

I waited with relish for him to set the barbarous little horror straight, but his expression did not change. It rarely did. It was just variations on rueful.

‘Yes, of course,' he sighed. ‘They must be put out of their misery. It would have been seen to immediately but Mr Emery must be fetched from the fields so he can bring his rifle.'

Benjamin burst into tears across the room. I knew it was him; he snivelled rather a lot when crying, and if he continued he would get the hiccoughs, but I did not turn around. I was waiting to see if there was something else, something I had missed.

‘Now, Benjamin. There is no other way. There is no rest home for horses, you know.'

A picture formed in my mind instantly of this thing he had conjured, a rest home for horses, lying in their beds, heads on the pillows, cups of tea on trays in front of them, more of them sitting in easy chairs in a library, hoofs holding books in their laps. What does this man know of rest homes? I wondered. What injuries has he seen? What can happen to a man's body and yet leave him alive? I saw figures on beds with cannon holes where their insides should be, half their heads missing, no one with hands.