Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (26 page)

Some hearty stamping and whistling followed, and a shout of ‘Give us another!’ Eileen and I didn’t exchange a glance, but we loved each other now. We found the music of ‘Danny Boy’ and began to give it all our emotion, dawdling dreamily among the fruitier chords and scampering over the high bits; till the audience joined in, using their hymn-singing voices, which showed us the utmost respect. When it was over I returned to my seat by the stove, my body feeling smooth and beautiful. Eileen’s mother was weeping into her hat, and so was mine, I think…

Now I was free to become one of the audience, and the Entertainment burgeoned before me. What had seemed to me earlier as the capering of demons now became a spectacle of human genius. Turn followed turn in variety and splendour. Mr Crosby, the organist, told jokes and stories as though his very life depended on them, trembling, sweating, never pausing for a laugh, and rolling his eyes at the wings for rescue. We loved him, however, and wouldn’t let him go, while he grew more and more hysterical, racing through monologues, gabbling songs about shrimps, skipping, mopping, and jumping up and down, as though humouring a tribe of savages.

Major Doveton came next, with his Indian banjo, which was even harder to tune than my fiddle. He straddled a chair and began wrestling with the keys, cursing us in English and Urdu. Then all the strings broke, and he snarled off the stage and started kicking the banjo round the cloakroom. He was followed by a play in which Marjorie, as Cinderella, sat in a goose-feathered dress in a castle. While waiting for the pumpkin to turn into a coach, she sang ‘All alone by the telephone’.

Two ballads came next, and Mrs Pimbury, a widow, sang them both with astonishing spirit. The first invited us to go with her to Canada; the second was addressed to a mushroom:

Grow! Grow! Grow little mushroom grow!

Somebody wants you soon.

I’ll call again tomorrow morning – See!

And if you’ve grown bigger you will just suit ME!

So Grow! Grow! Grow little mushroom – Grow!

Though we’d not heard this before, it soon became part of our heritage, as did the song of a later lady. This last – the Baroness von Hodenburg – sealed our entertainment with almost professional distinction. She was a guest star from Sheepscombe and her appearance was striking, it enshrined all the mystery of art. She wore a loose green gown like a hospital patient’s, and her hair was red and long. ‘She writes,’ whispered Mother. ‘Poems and booklets and that.’

‘I am going to sink you,’ announced the lady, ‘a little ditty I convected myself. Bose vords und music, I may say, is mine – und zey refer to ziss pleasant valleys.’

With that she sat down, arched her beautiful back, raised her bangled wrists over the keyboard, then ripped off some startling runs and trills, and sang with a ringing laugh:

Elfin volk come over the hill!

Come und dance, just vere you vill!

Brink your pipes, und brink your flutes,

Brink your sveetly soundink notes!

Come avay-hay! Life is gay-hay!

Life – Is – Gay!

We thought this song soppy, but we never forgot it. From then on, whenever we saw the Baroness in the lanes we used to bawl the song at her through the hedges. But she would only stop, and cock her head, and smile dreamily to herself…

After these songs the night ended with slapstick; rough stuff about babies, chaps dressed as women, broad Gloucester exchanges between yokels and toffs, with the yokels coming off best. We ached with joy, and kicked at the chairs; but we knew the end was coming. The vicar got up, proposed a vote of thanks, and said oranges would be distributed at the gate. The National Anthem was romped through, we all began coughing, then streamed outdoors through the snow.

Back home our sisters discussed their performances till the tears dripped off their noses. But to us boys it was not over, till tomorrow; there was still one squeeze left in the lemon. Tomorrow,very early, we’d go back to the schoolroom, find the baskets of broken food – half-eaten buns, ham coated with cake-crumbs – and together we’d finish the lot.

So quiet was Jo always, so timorous yet eager to please, that she was the one I chose first. There were others, of course, louder and more bouncingly helpful, but it was Jo’s cool face, tidy brushed-back hair, thin body, and speechless grace which provided the secretive prettiness I needed. Unknowingly, therefore, she became the pathfinder, the slender taper I carried to the grottoes in whose shadows I now found myself wandering.

I used to seek her out on her way home from school, slyly separate her from the others, watch her brass bracelet dangling. Was I eleven or twelve? I don’t know – she was younger. She smiled easily at me from the gutter.

‘Where you going then, Jo?’

‘Nowhere special.’

‘Oh.’

It was all right so long as she didn’t move.

‘Let’s go down the bank then. Shall us? Eh?’

No answer, but no attempt to escape.

‘Down the bank. Like before. How about it, Jo?’

Still no answer, no sign or look. She didn’t even stop the turning of her bracelet, but she came down the bank all the same. Stepping toe-pointed over the ant-heaps, walking straight and near and silent, she showed no knowledge of what she was going for, only that she was going with me.

Close under the yews, in the heavy green evening, we sat ourselves solemnly down. The old red trees threw arches above us, making tunnels of rusty darkness. Jo, like a slip of yew, was motionless; she neither looked at me nor away. I leaned on one elbow and tossed a stone into the trees, heard it skipping from branch to branch.

‘What shall we do then, Jo?’ I asked.

She made no reply, as usual.

‘What d’you say.Jo?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Come on – you tell.’

‘No, you.’

The pronouncement had always to come from me. She waited to hear me say it. She waited, head still, staring straight before her, tugging gently at a root of weed.

‘Good morning, Mrs Jenkins!’ I said breezily. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’

Without a blink or a word Jo lay down on the grass and gazed up at the red-berried yews, stretched herself subtly on her green crushed bed, and scratched her calf, and waited. The game was formal and grave in character, its ritual rigidly patterned. Silent as she lay, my hands moved as silently, and even the birds stopped singing.

Her body was pale and milk-green on the grass, like a birch-leaf lying in water, slightly curved like a leaf and veined and glowing, lit faintly from within its flesh. This was not Jo now but the revealed unknown, a labyrinth of naked stalks, stranger than flesh, smoother than candleskins, like something thrown down from the moon. Time passed, and the cool limbs never moved, neither towards me nor yet away; she just turned a grass ring around her fingers and stared blindly away from my eyes. The sun fell slanting and struck the spear-tipped grass, laying tiger-stripes round her hollows, binding her body with crimson bars, and moving slow colours across her.

Night and home seemed far away. We were caught in the rooted trees. Knees wet with dew I pondered in silence all that Jo’s acquiescence taught me. She shivered slightly and stirred her hands. A blackbird screamed into a bush…

‘Well, that’ll be all, Mrs Jenkins,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back again tomorrow.’

I rose from my knees, mounted an invisible horse, and cantered away to supper. While Jo dressed quietly and dawdled home, alone among the separate trees.

Of course, they discovered us in the end; we must have thought we were invisible. ‘What about it, young lad? You and Jo – last night? Ho, yes! we seen you, arf! arf!’ A couple of cowmen had stopped me in the road; I denied it, but I wasn’t surprised. Sooner or later one was always caught out, but the thing was as readily forgotten; very little in the village was either secret or shocking, we merely repeated ourselves. Such early sex-games were formal exercises, a hornless charging of calves; but we were certainly lucky to live in a village, the landscape abounded with natural instruction which we imitated as best we could; if anyone saw us they laughed their heads off – and there were no magistrates to define us obscene.

This advantage was shared by young and old, was something no town can know. We knew ourselves to be as corrupt as any other community of our size – as any London street, for instance. But there was no tale-bearing then or ringing up 999; transgressors were dealt with by local opinion, by silence, lampoons, or nicknames. What we were spared from seeing – because the village protected itself – were the crimes of our flesh written cold in a charge sheet, the shady arrest, the police-court autopsy, the headline of magistrate’s homilies.

As for us boys, it is certain that most of us, at some stage or other of our growth, would have been rounded up under present law, and quite a few shoved into reform school. Instead we emerged – culpable it’s true – but unclassified in criminal record. No wilder or milder than Battersea boys, we were less ensnared by by-laws. If caught in the act, we got a quick bashing; and the fist of the farmer we’d robbed of apples or eggs seemed more natural and just than any cold-mouthed copper adding one more statistic for the book.

It is not crime that has increased, but its definition. The modern city, for youth, is a police-trap.

Our village was clearly no pagan paradise, neither were we conscious of showing tolerance. It was just the way of it. We certainly committed our share of statutory crime. Manslaughter, arson, robbery, rape cropped up regularly throughout the years. Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad; some found their comfort in beasts; and there were the usual friendships between men and boys who walked through the fields like lovers. Drink, animality, and rustic boredom were responsible for most. The village neither approved nor disapproved, but neither did it complain to authority. Sometimes our sinners were given hell, taunted, and pilloried, but their crimes were absorbed in the local scene and their punishment confined to the parish.

So when, in due time, I breathed the first faint musks of sex, my problem was not one of guilt or concealment but of simple revelation. That early exploration of Jo’s spread body was a solitary studying of maps. The signs upon her showed the way I should go, then she was folded and put away. Very soon I caught up with other travellers, all going in the same direction. They received me naturally, the boys and girls of my age, and together we entered the tricky wood. Daylight and an easy lack of shame illuminated our actions. Banks and brakes were our tiring-houses, and curiosity our first concern. We were awkward, convulsed, but never surreptitious, being protected by our long knowledge of each other. And we were all of that green age which could do no wrong, so unformed as yet and coldly innocent we did little more than mime the realities.

The girls played their part of invitation and show, and were rather more assured than we were. They sensed they had come into their own at last. For suddenly they were not creatures to order about any more, not the makeshift boys they had been; they possessed, and they knew it, the clues to secrets more momentous than we could guess. They became slippery and difficult – but far from impossible. Shy, silent Jo scarcely counted now against the challenge of Rosie and Bet. Bet was brazen, Rosie provocative, and together they forced our paces. Bet was big for eleven and shabbily blonde, and her eyes were drowsy with insolence. ‘Gis a wine-gum,’ she’d say, ‘an I’ll show ya, if ya want.’ (For a wine-gum she would have stripped in church.) Rosie, on the other hand, more devious and sly, had sharp salts of wickedness on her, and she led me a dance round the barns and fowl-houses which often left me parched and trembling. What to do about either – Bet or Rosie – took a considerable time to discover.