September Starlings (30 page)

‘So I sent him away. But he’s been hovering about at the end of the avenue. He can be seen from a mile away with that odd hair. Go and send him away—’

‘He’s not there.’

‘Oh yes, he is.’

‘I’ve just come up from the road and he wasn’t there.’

Mother stepped to the window and peered through the curtains, careful not to twitch the cloth in case the neighbours thought she was interfering again, watching their every move. ‘He’s there now. Go and send him away.’

Bernard. That was a Catholic name. One of the priests who visited the convent was called Father Bernard. Of course, Tommo was a Catholic – I’d seen him serving at the altar in St Patrick’s church. Well, if I wasn’t going to be a nun, I’d marry a Catholic boy and have Catholic children. Which would make Mother furious and might turn out to be a wonderful way of paying her back for all her cruelty. Not that she hit me much these days. I was getting too big for her to batter now, too solid to be
dragged about by the hair, too strong and wilful to cower in a corner with my hands over my head and—

‘Why are you standing there? Go and send him away at once. When you come back, you must peel some potatoes, since I’ve had no time at all to prepare a meal. The hairdresser’s was crowded out and smelled awful, because some stupid woman was having a hot perm. She’ll come out like a French poodle … And don’t slam the door.’

I didn’t slam it, but I closed it noisily, just to let her know that I didn’t care, wasn’t afraid. We lived in a quiet street where nobody shouted or banged doors, so my naughtiness was probably noticed by at least a dozen eyes and ears. But I didn’t care, because I was important. Tommo had come for me, so I was very, very important.

‘What do you want?’

He turned slowly and examined me, his expression calm and cold. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Here.’ I waved a hand across the house-fronts. ‘This is where I live.’

‘I know that. Where have you been when you weren’t here?’ His eyes were warming up, as if the kindling had caught beneath a coal fire. ‘We’ve seen nothing of you for months.’

‘Well.’ I thought of saying something interesting, but all my interesting statements tended to be lies. ‘I’ve been at school and doing homework and getting ready to move. My dad’s starting his own factory in Barr Bridge.’

He handed me a mint, one of those clear, glassy ones in clear, glassy paper. ‘Eat it.’

‘I’m saving it.’

‘Please yourself.’ He strutted to the edge of the pavement, looked down Chorley New Road, looked up Chorley New Road. ‘When are you moving?’

‘Next week.’

He stalked back to me. ‘I’ll be coming up to see you. Your mother doesn’t like me, so you’d be best not telling her. I’ll come Saturday or Sunday afternoons, depending
on what I’m doing, and I’ll wait in the bushes at the far side of the bridge, away from the houses.’

‘Why?’

His cheeks reddened. ‘’Cos I want to come, that’s why. Are you as daft as that mother of yours? “Where do you live, young man, who are your parents?” Anyway, there’s no need to ask me why. I do as I please, always have and always will.’

There is something completely fascinating about a truly selfish person. I found myself drawn to him as a moth is attracted to a fatal flame, wanted to climb inside his head so that I might truly know him. Tommo loved himself completely, was a clever boy who was not easily satisfied, who did not tolerate fools. So he must have been an interesting person, or he would not have found himself so totally absorbing. While I processed these confused and confusing thoughts, I found my voice again. ‘I meant why do we have to meet in the bushes?’

‘Because your mother won’t like us seeing one another. I’ve met her sort before. She thinks she’s the bee’s knees, doesn’t she?’

I shrugged, didn’t want to speak for or against the motion.

‘Well, she’ll only make a fuss. So we’ll meet in the bushes – right?’

I didn’t know. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

He fixed his gaze on a point somewhere behind my head. ‘You like me, don’t you?’

‘Well … yes.’

‘So you’ll want to see me.’

It was nice to have a boy wanting to see me. My world thus far had been populated by females, the biggest of which would now be twitching her curtains in spite of what the neighbours might say. Dad loved me, but he had no time for anyone. It might be fun to have a friend all to myself, someone who wasn’t a girl. ‘Will you bring Ginger?’

The fire in his eyes roared with life, seeming to send out
sparks as he glared at me. ‘Why? Do you want him for your boyfriend?’

‘No, I—’

‘Well, he won’t be coming with me.’

I swallowed, began to worry about Mother’s reaction if I didn’t go back soon. ‘What about Art and Enid and Irene?’

‘I’ll fetch nobody.’

‘Oh.’ My lips were dry, so I ran my tongue over them, but the dryness had gone right through me, into my mouth and right through to my soul. He frightened me, but I liked him. I liked him a lot. ‘Well, they’re all in the gang,’ I said.

‘There’s no gang.’ He rattled some things in his pockets, marbles or ballbearings, though Tommo seemed too mature for normal games. ‘If there is to be a gang, it’ll be the two of us. Just you and me, Laura. Just you and me.’

I felt weak as I stood and watched him walk away. It was as if I had just been bought and paid for, as if the boy had actually begun to own me. Yet the positive side still appealed, the idea that I might be wanted just for myself.

When my legs found strength, I walked back to the house and peeled the potatoes. Mother continued to rant and rave, carried on fretting about the packing, the cancelling of the milk, the number of people who needed notification of our new address.

I poked out the eye of a potato and smiled to myself. Tommo loved me. And no-one in the whole wide world knew about it.

Living in the country was, at first, a bit of a bore. The local children were quieter than my contemporaries in town – even the St Mary’s girls had been rumbustious when compared to the simple souls who inhabited the village of Barr Bridge. At least, that was the impression I got early on in my career as a Barr Bridgeite. But country folk were deep, as my mother found out after a month or so.

‘She says these are the only potatoes she has.’ Three sad and greenish tubers lolled in the centre of our kitchen table. ‘We are surrounded by fields and farmers, but that dreadful woman has no decent produce on sale.’

On later shopping expeditions, Mother was refused candles, semi-sweet biscuits, ready-chopped firewood and Craven A cigarettes. The cigarettes were the last straw. The war was over, the fug of Turkish tobacco had cleared, and my mother wanted her rights. ‘Go to that shop,’ she snapped at me. ‘And get whatever the woman will sell you.’ I managed, after very little effort on my part, to come home with candles, a bundle of firewood, half a pound of Marie biscuits and twenty Craven A.

This meant war of another kind. Although I was not present during the battle, I understood that my mother had taken the shopkeeper to task. The village was agog with it all. It seemed that Liza McNally had taken no pains to hide the fact that she was too good for country life. She had never before cooked at a range that was both cast iron and geriatric, had never been forced to live with stone floors, had never patronized a shop as filthy and ill-kempt as Mrs Miles’s General Store. Mrs Miles had heard these
vicious criticisms as they passed from one customer to another, and she chose to deal with the situation in her own way. So Mother got the treatment she deserved.

‘I asked for plums. I could see the plums in a basket by the door. But she would not sell them to me. They were spoken for, she said. John? Are you listening to me?’

‘Hmmph,’ grunted Dad from behind the
Bolton Evening News
. Now that he was ‘a success’, Mother often punctuated her lectures with a request for his opinion, and he was not best pleased by the intrusions.

‘So I asked her straight out, demanded to know why she treats me so badly. And the woman had the effrontery to say that she saves the better stuff for her regulars. So I told her that I might well become a regular, and she simply turned away and said something about not wanting regulars like me.’

Dad had no comment to make, and I dipped a Marie into my tea.

‘Laura, don’t do that. Well, I don’t know how I’m going to manage, really. There’s no electricity – when are you bringing it into the house, John?’

‘Soon.’ His head was buried in the radio listings. He stood up, switched on the wireless, fiddled with a connection. ‘Didn’t you get the charged one brought back?’ He waved the paper at the battery, a huge square thing that was almost as big as the radio it served, twice as heavy as the dresser. ‘Didn’t the man deliver and collect today?’ Dad loved his radio.

She threw up her hands in despair. ‘For goodness sake, I’ve had a boy here all afternoon trying to get a goat out of the coal shed. This is no laughing matter, Laura. And those hens from down the lane came strolling up here again, five of them dripping loose feathers all over the kitchen. That goat was black when it finally ran out to the yard. And it wrapped itself up in my sheets, so I had to start again. Have you any idea how long that copper takes to heat enough water for the dolly tub? And when the electricity comes, I’ll have one of those washing machines
with automatic wringers. That Victorian thing is ruining my nails.’

He looked at her, raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ve oiled the wringer,’ he said.

‘Oh, I know you’ve oiled it, because most of the oil is on my best pillow slips. Laura, stop dipping those biscuits in your tea. I can’t carry on here, I really can’t.’

He lowered himself into his favourite chair, an old wooden rocker that had been left behind by the previous householder. ‘Well, you can always go back to town, I suppose.’

She stormed out in a huff. I watched him for a while as he reached across and fiddled with the wireless knobs, listened to his tut-tuts when he failed to get anything except the noise of half-hearted and power-starved static. Then I wandered outside and looked at my new stamping ground.

The land that used to belong to Ravenscroft Farm had been split up and sold to neighbouring farmers. We still had a large lawn at the front, a piece of rough land at the side, and a vegetable garden at the back of the house. To the right of the house, alongside the patch of weed and thistle, were a few sheds and a greenhouse with broken windows. A path led away from this side piece to the barns where Dad was making his Cooling Tea. Most of the workers came from Bolton, were brought up each morning by coach, then taken back in the evening.

Mother had made much of the workers’ travelling arrangements. ‘Laura could travel down on the coach in the morning when it goes back empty, then the driver could bring her home each afternoon.’ But Dad refused to allow this, as I would have been early for school and late home every day. He was beginning to put his foot down, though they seldom argued. There was no fire in the marriage, so quarrelling was not necessary.

During my first few days at Ravenscroft, I wandered about and studied things, because I’d never seen so much green stuff except in the Bolton parks, and even there
the green was contained behind railings and gates. Here, it seemed to go on for ever, dipping and rising eastward into the mists that formed over foothills of the Pennine Chain. ‘That is the backbone of England,’ my father said to me on our first day. ‘In more ways than one, it’s the spine. We’re a fierce lot, Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen, built to last like the mountains that divide us. We fought one another for a long time, you know. There’s a white rose and a red rose, and we are the reds. That war never really ended. Somebody married somebody, then everybody pretended to be satisfied. But never cross a Yorkie and never expect him to pay his way. A Yorkie’s like a Scot with his pockets sewn up.’

‘Are they selfish, then, the people from over the mountains?’

He smiled at me and placed a hand on my head. It always felt good, having his hand on my head, as if things were safer and surer while he touched me. ‘It’s a myth. Some Yorkshiremen are tight with their money and some aren’t. But the fact remains that we’re made of good stuff up here, so never regret your roots. There’s money down south, money and not much more. The Government keeps the south safe and out of trouble, because trouble down there would be trouble in Parliament’s back yard. So all the fretting and fuming goes on up here. We don’t know the difference between a depression and a boom, because ordinary folk here are usually poor no matter what the state of the country. But it’ll not last for ever. One day, the southerners will need us and we’ll be too busy feeding ourselves to worry over them and their fancy houses.’

I felt so grown-up when he talked to me like this, when he told me about politics and money and people. ‘You don’t like them from London, then?’

He chuckled. ‘I use them, Laurie. I use their money and their big ideas, pay them back a bit for their trouble. But on the whole, they’re nowt a pound.’

This was really funny, because Dad hadn’t much of an
accent and wasn’t given to the use of colloquial speech. I thought it was a shame that he had no respect for the people from the cities – the funeral men, as I called them. Like many from the north, he was proud and angry, had clear memories of poverty, filth, dying children and men who marched on the capital with empty bellies and no boots on their feet. Although I was sad about his anger, it was good to know that he felt strongly about something.

He wasn’t around very often, so I explored the countryside with Anne. There were all kinds of creatures, slugs and frogs and creepy-crawlies, rabbits, hares, farm animals, dogs and cats. Solomon was still living with Anne, though she always called him ‘Laura’s cat’, so I still had no real pet of my own. Instead, I adopted everything I met, had a special affection for Monty, a billy goat from up the road. He used to live on our farm in one of the sheds, and he returned to base with a frequency that was monotonous and infuriating for my mother. She hated and feared him, but I fed him on vegetables from our garden and steered clear of his horns.