The Sea Change (2 page)

I began the short drive in Tim’s
Cortina through the military firing range – no more than five miles – across land I had
not touched since I was nineteen.

Boreham Down slipped by on the left. As I
drove, the Plain rose and fell into muddy gullies and chalked ridges, like the peak and
trough of a petrified wave.

I could see the bell tower through the
windscreen, pressed into the cushion of Salisbury Plain. But the rest of the village was
hidden – just as it used to be – below the camber of the Downs.

Shooting targets were pinned, like my
mother’s note, to the nape of South Down where they labelled the land’s
anatomy: ‘1’ for the patch where the knapweed grows thickest;
‘2’ for the hill’s hip; ‘3’ for the spot that is last to
capture the sun; and ‘4’ for the valley floor. The corpses of tanks clung to
the side of the ridge, housing flowers and grasses and empty metal cartridges. The hills
seemed to have borne their scars well. Somewhere under the grass, I knew there would be
bullets, hidden like cysts in the soil. But in this morning’s light, I
couldn’t distinguish the marks of the shelling from the indents made by the rain.
The Plain has survived what no city or body ever could.

It is necessary to evacuate the major part
of the valley, including your dwelling.
The letter was so matter-of-fact. And I
had never seen, only felt, the damage that their shells could do. Even before the war,
explosions as far away as two miles would cause our windows to quiver and crack, the
glass falling from its frame, like a cloud emptying itself of water. For months after we
were evicted, I dreamt of rain – metal rain – lodging in the walls of our parsonage and
spidering across the mirrors.

I have driven Tim mad with my quietness
about this place. It is as if, by not talking, I talk about it all the time. He told me
it is because of here – a plain on which he has never set foot – that Alice started to
drift. I boxed her in, he said, with my memories. And so I stood and watched as he
packed her bags and let her drive all the way to India with a man we barely know. Then I
kept silent, so that he wouldn’t drift too.

I don’t talk to him about Imber any
more because I know what he’d think. I’d give him the valley – all its
names, faces, places – and he’d imagine it as something golden and lost. It is not
golden; it is not lost; if it were, I would long since have escaped its ghost. But I can
only ever give him the shell of what it was – a washed-up periwinkle that you hold to
your ear to listen to, only to be told that it’s not the real sea that you can
hear. Just air. A place made of air.

After South Down, the road eased me into the
base of the valley. To the right, I could trace the old divides: the stone walling that
separated one family’s farm from another. The walls reared up high in places and
crumbled in others, leaving the fields half finished. The land around the village
wasn’t tamed in the same way as it had been before. Ivy has been left to run over
man-made things, to knead the angles of the outhouses into unliftable curtains of
green.

I half expected to see the army keeping
guard but they were nowhere to be seen.

Inside the ruins of Seagram’s Farm, I
kicked a gold-coloured
cartridge across the floor and ran a finger along
the graffiti on the walls. Names and dates of squadrons littered the chimney breast.
I saw a ghost called Clara
was carved above the hearth.

Past Seagram’s Farm, the redbrick
skull of the post office gawped across the road at the roofless remains of Parsonage
Farm. If I shut my eyes, I could see how it used to be – the roadside all cobbled and
complete with a ribbon of cottages, villager knitted to villager, like knots on a length
of string. When I opened my eyes, it was like taking the pin out of a grenade: the
memory was left in pieces, the walls reduced to the height of my knees and the doorways
mangled by barbed wire. Inside the post office, the divide between upstairs and down had
all but disappeared so that Mrs Carter’s fireplace looked as if it were built to
heat the sky. I wanted to cover the place up, as one does a body once the life has left
it.

I imagined Mrs Carter standing behind the
post-office counter, sorting letters. When she thought no one was looking, she’d
halt the flick of her fingers and stare at the window. She was not sad or happy; she
just stood there, immersed in thought, until a customer interrupted her and she would
carry on with her day. I would not have picked anyone else to receive the news of the
eviction first; it was hardly a message to which you could put words. And Mrs Carter,
whose hands spent all day ferrying other people’s words from place to place, was a
silent old soul, not one to speak unnecessarily. Her silence, we agreed, was the only
thing fit for that letter.

I was in a queue of customers waiting to
drop off my post when she picked up an envelope with her own address on the front. It
had a military stamp on the seal – the same as the others she had sorted that morning.
She turned away from the counter and we heard her slide her fingers through the paper.
She walked out of the room shortly afterwards. I was sent to fetch her: it was not like
her to forget about the customers. I found her staring into an empty flowerbed at the
back of
her garden – the patch of soil where she could make nothing
grow.

It is hoped that you will be able,
through your own efforts, to find alternative accommodation and, if appropriate,
fresh employment, and that you will be able to make your own arrangements as to
removal.
I took the letter from her, as if robbing a statue of its sceptre, and
ran into the post office to break the news to the rest of the village. We were all
nosing in on the note – everybody wanted to read it for themselves before they believed
it – when Mrs Carter reappeared.

‘Don’t fuss, don’t
fuss,’ she murmured. ‘There’s one for each of you in the
postbag.’

They moved us out in December, a week before
Christmas. I say they moved us – in fact they had very little to do with the evacuation.
It is necessary, it is hoped
. Nobody was going to take the blame.

There was talk of them sending lorries, only
some of which came. The rest of us were left to depend on Major Whistler’s
kindness; Imber Court had a cart at its disposal, which was duly loaded with furniture,
pots and pans and a bath full of Mrs Carter’s crockery. Mrs Carter tried to stay
calm. It was only china after all – not even matching china, she whispered guiltily to
me, as she climbed onto the cart; still, if it could survive thirty years of marriage,
it could endure this. As the horse turned out of the village and down the track to
Heytesbury, the chime of her cups and saucers crossed the Plain. We knew, then, that the
crockery would not make it to town intact.

If my father had been with us, we would
never have left in time. He would have fussed endlessly over his books. My mother put me
in charge of packing them; she could not have borne it herself. I did my best, placing
heavier volumes at the bottom of the case so as not to damage the lighter ones. It
pained me to think of the books packed away in their boxes without Father to read them.
‘Don’t you worry, my girl, they’re
all up
here,’ he said, giving his head a tap. But I knew better. I had seen the way he
pored over each cover, smoothing down the pages with care as he read and returning the
book with the precision of a pharmacist to its designated spot on the shelf. Had he not
been ordained, I half wondered whether he would have become a bookbinder – not that
there was any need for such a thing in Imber. It was a blessing that he wasn’t
around to see the fate of Imber Court’s library, from which he was a frequent
borrower. The lack of lorries left the Major carting clocks and books and desks down
into the cellars. He would never have said anything but Pete had gone to the Court to
ask about moving Albie Nash, the blacksmith, whom he had found hunched over his anvil,
weeping. He found the servants cradling piles of books quietly down the stairs like
sleeping children. Pete offered to help but the Major reddened and, in a hushed voice,
asked after Albie.

My father’s books were the last thing
we packed. I took them in their boxes and placed them with our other possessions in a
pile outside the parsonage door. It wasn’t until it came to leaving that I saw how
much there was that I couldn’t take with me. Walking into my sister’s empty
room, I tore off a loose piece of her rose-patterned wallpaper and placed it in my
pocket; I had always been secretly jealous of it. Having spotted it in a shop window in
Wilton, she had pleaded with Father for weeks to buy it for her eighteenth birthday. My
father often joked that she would have been better off being born in the city: she
battled constantly against the mud that gathered in strips under her fingernails and in
clods on the soles of her shoes. And she could not pass through the parsonage hallway
without noting the thin grey skin of chalk dust that coated the floor. I used to tell
her there was no escaping the land – it was in our name. I don’t think Freda liked
‘Fielding’ much: it was too plain. The name was a better fit for me: I spent
more time on the Downs with Pete than I did in the house.

With the scrap of my sister’s wallpaper
in hand, I took in the view of the Plain from her window – another thing that I
couldn’t take with me. The grass looked bleak at this time of year, stretching its
rags over the chalk. It used to pain me so much to see it like this that I would pull
out Father’s botany pocket book and reel off the names of the flowers that
sprouted there in the summer, as if the colour in their syllables could stir up some
magic in the bones of the hill and beckon in spring. I would miss the shiver of ash
trees that flanked the right side of the garden. The fullness of their branches in the
summer almost masked the Plain from us entirely.

Having taken up his post during the summer
of 1931, my father could not understand the need for the trees; he loved the view of the
plain as much as I did and was in half a mind to take an axe to them. But the other
villagers were quick to warn us against it and, come winter, we were glad of their
advice. The winds rattled the house to its core throughout February and we became used
to these small fracas, putting up shutters and sometimes even taking refuge in the
cellar. Later, when the bombs fell in Wilton, I thought of Imber’s winds and how
we rode them out underneath the house with nothing but a candle and a song from
Freda.

At the window that day, I tried to convince
myself that I’d soon come home to see the ash trees clothed again, drinking in all
of August’s light; I would come back for my father’s sake. But the gap in
the line of ashes – where we had felled his tree – told me otherwise. Like the shadow of
a sinking Zeppelin, the war had started its descent. Only Martha Nash was resolute in
her insistence that we would return within two years. She had to be, I guess, for
Albie’s sake.

After I had finished packing I left the
parsonage in search of my mother who, I knew, would be in the church. I found her in the
tower, staring up at the bells.

‘They will look after it, won’t
they?’ she asked after a while,
running her eyes down a bell rope
to meet mine at the base of the tower. Her birth, her marriage and the beginning of each
week had been marked under the peal of these five instruments. ‘No one ever wishes
for death, Vi-vi,’ she told me, ‘but there was always comfort in knowing you
would bring me here when it did come.’ I didn’t like to hear her talk as if
we weren’t coming back. She wasn’t old. She had no reason to think she would
not return in her lifetime. Not like Albie. But ever since the accident she had handled
her days so carefully, aware that they could evaporate at any minute.

‘Will they let you bury me
here?’ she asked me. She had always been like that, posing questions that were
beyond my reach, as if she were the child and I were the mother. I would scramble in
vain for an answer and always came up short.

The Major’s wife appeared at the door.
‘Are you the last?’ Her voice skimmed across the nave.

‘We’re just waiting for the ATS
girls to come back from Langton,’ my mother replied, standing up.

‘Where are they housing you?’
she enquired.

‘We don’t know. Somewhere in
Warminster, I expect. Perhaps Wilton.’

‘Oh, Warminster … I
see.’ She picked at the doorframe as she spoke. ‘I’m sorry to have
disturbed you. Only I thought you might like to leave a note. I have paper.’

‘A note?’ I queried, my mother
squeezing my hand as a way of telling me not to pry.

‘Yes. I thought he would want
–’

My mother stared at the slip of paper that
was held out to her. ‘But … what would he have me say?’ she asked,
her question floundering in echoes around the four walls of the tower.

The years have yellowed the note, curling
it up at the edges as if to check what is underneath. I push the church door open, the
last word, ‘kindly’, on repeat in my ears. The hinges turn in
their sleep and I stand in the base of the tower – this time without
my mother. The air next to me where she would have stood is as cold as a tomb. There are
four bells missing from the cages above; only one remains. The wind’s chorale
enters the tower from the Barrow. It disturbs the ghost of each bell and carries their
peal in silence across the Plain.