The Sea Change (6 page)

We were the first family in the village to
hear about the war – the only household other than Imber Court to own a wireless. Freda
and I were peeling potatoes in the kitchen with Mama, having just returned from the
morning service at the church. I tried to peel mine into one long strip so that it
copied Freda’s hair, which helter-skeltered down her face opposite me. Her hair
was curly; mine was straight; we both wished we had been born with the reverse of what
we had been given. I could hear Father pacing the floorboards of the neighbouring study,
dissecting the sermon he had just preached.

‘Throw me a potato to deal with,
Freda. It will take my mind off it,’ he called down the corridor towards the
kitchen. Freda stood up and tried to throw one under-arm through the doorway towards
him. It barely reached the threshold between the kitchen and the hall, nosing at the
wall sluggishly.

‘Freda, you throw like a girl!’
I laughed. She sat back down at the kitchen table, thrusting her arms together in a fold
across her chest, then immediately standing up again to tuck her skirt underneath her in
case it creased. I took a potato from the tub in front of us and raised my arm.

‘Don’t you dare, Violet!’
My mother turned from the sink. ‘One is enough!’

I swung my hand into a cricket bowl as she
spoke and watched the potato fly towards Father. It bounced at his feet and he caught it
low off the ground.

‘See! That’s the way to do
it.’ I smirked at my sister.

‘I don’t know what you’re
so proud of, Vi. Mama told you not to.’ Freda dropped another bare-faced potato
into the bucket as
she spoke so that the water in it splashed me.
Ignoring my indignation, she stared mournfully down at her hands. ‘Mama, why
can’t we keep a cook? Look at the state of my fingers! People in town will think
you’ve sent me to the workhouse.’

I rolled my eyes at my mother, who caught my
meaning but refused to be drawn, instead walking across to the stove to stir the
stock.

‘I’m being serious, Mama!’
Freda moaned. ‘Why can’t we have a cook?’

‘Freda, that question has grown rather
tired over the years, has it not? You know very well my answer.’ Mama drew circles
in the liquid with her spoon and, rather than turning to face Freda, directed her words
into the pan. ‘The living here is plenty,’ she continued. ‘It always
has been. And your father couldn’t possibly impinge any further on the diocese.
Many of his colleagues at Wycliffe would consider themselves blessed to be in his
position.’

‘I heard Edward Bramley practically
lives in a shed at Berwick!’ I chipped in. Mama gave me one of her chiselled looks
and I lifted up my hands in innocence.

‘And so, Freda, no, we shall not keep
a cook, or a parlourmaid for that matter.’

‘Do you mean to say, Mama, that Freda
will be peeling potatoes every Sunday for the
rest of her life
?’ I
brought my fist down on the table in mock outrage.

‘Enough,’ clipped my mother. She
put down her spoon, rubbed her hands across her apron and glided down the corridor to
the study. Father had propped himself up absent-mindedly against the doorframe and was
studying his potato intently, as if its divots and moles were islands on a globe.
‘Jack, you shouldn’t encourage them to throw potatoes.’

He met her stare as she spoke and, once she
was close enough to him, placed his two hands on her waist. I watched the muscles in her
back relax through the white of her shirt. Even though she
was facing
away from us I could tell he had freed a smile from her. ‘I stumbled over my point
about St Peter walking on the water. I know I did. Did it make sense?’ he asked
her.

‘It made perfect sense! What does it
matter now, anyway? It’s been and gone.’

‘It matters to me.’

‘Don’t worry, my love, it came
across well, didn’t it, Vi-vi? Freda?’ She turned back to the kitchen to
look at us.

‘It was brilliant, Father. Even the
Major liked it!’ I shouted through.

‘It’s quite a distraction to
have him in the front pew,’ he fretted to Mama. ‘I know he needs to be there
as much as the rest of us but – oh, I don’t know, it is a trifle off-putting. I
never felt that way with Tom Dean …’ and on he went. My mother sauntered back
to the kitchen as he spoke. She glanced at me and pretended to turn the wireless switch,
showing me what I must do. So I meandered into the study and looped my arms around my
father’s shoulders.

‘Can we listen to the wireless,
Father? Please?’

He sighed and then, after a pause, gave me
the answer I had hoped for.

‘All right, then, darling, it’ll
probably take my mind off it.’

Mama, aware of her victory, returned to the
stove and hummed contentedly to herself.

The usual fuzz sounded as I turned the dial.
It took a good few minutes to settle on the right station. None of us expected to hear
the Prime Minister’s voice.
This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin
handed the German government a final note …
My mother came running in with
Freda, who still held a potato – cold, like a lump of meat – in her hand. We all stooped
to get closer to the speaker … 
Consequently this country is at war with
Germany
.

Is. At. War. With. He had separated the
words, each one boulder-heavy on the ears.

My father took hold of my mother’s hand.
I know that you will all play your part with calmness and
courage … You will report for duty in accordance with the instructions you
will receive.
Freda held her breath and glanced across at Father.
Now, may
God bless you all, and may He defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall
be fighting against: brute force, bad faith, injustice …
They were grave
words and, for a while, I believed they were only meant for faraway places – sprawling
capitals like London, Paris and Berlin. Fighting
against
bad faith. I pictured
St Peter stepping out onto the water to fight off his doubts.

Bad faith.
Someone somewhere had
started to sink.

I waited. And waited. But the war did not
arrive – at least, not in the guise that I expected. Rationing tightened its grip on the
village as the months went on. But, aside from our meals, it was easy to forget that
anything had changed. Most of the village remained at home to farm the fields. The
events in Europe seemed, at first, to be sealed inside the wireless, like a story we
listened to at night.

Pete, who by now was some years settled in
Imber, began smuggling all sorts of paraphernalia into
the village –
things a thousand coupons couldn’t buy. Whisky, tobacco, bags of sugar the size of
your belly. I don’t know who he got it from and what he did with all the money –
squirrelled it away somewhere, I suspect. He showed no sign of being any better off than
the rest of us. Yet he must have been – the amount people would pay for sugar. He
wasn’t best liked by Mrs Tippets at the grocer’s. Ever keen to play her part
in the war effort, she dealt strictly with our coupons, measuring our supplies to within
a hair’s breadth of the nearest ounce. When Pete began undercutting her prices and
handing out whole bags of sugar to whoever coughed up enough coins, Mrs Tippets’s
trade dwindled and, the only grocer in the village, she grew suspicious. He was banned
from the shop and it was only her deep-seated loyalty to the rest of the village that
prevented her calling in the warden. Pete was looked after, though. Imber’s wives
hated the thought of a farm boy going unfed: it wasn’t long before he had enough
dinner invitations to last him a month. Even the most patriotic among us were wise
enough to know a good thing when we saw it. When Mrs Tippets’s back was turned,
respectable farmers would ply Pete with meat and milk eked from their coupons, knowing
he would reward them with whisky when he next got his hands on a barrel.

‘What’s a boy like you getting
involved in things like this for?’ my mother would ask, when he turned up at her
door with sugar. She would glare at me as if it were my idea.

‘Hold your hand out, Mrs
Fielding,’ he’d say, and, rolling her eyes, she’d oblige. Then
he’d hoist up the sack and pour a pool of crystals into her palm. ‘If
you’re not at ease with buying some, then at least have a taste.’

She’d lick her finger, dip it into the
heap on her palm and a patch of sugar would stick to it. Then she’d lift her
finger to her mouth, shutting her eyes to savour the taste. ‘You’ll be the
death of me,’ she’d mutter, rummaging in her skirt pocket for a few coins.
And I’d be there breathing a sigh of relief behind her. She could easily have
reported Pete to the warden or, worse still, refused the sugar. Annie and Pete would
have been going on about cake and biscuits for weeks while Freda and I made do with
bread pudding.

I went with him once, all the way to West
Lavington to smuggle supplies sent from Devizes. I shouldn’t have gone but I
wanted to know how he did it. We met at two o’clock in the morning. The sky was
low and thick – no stars. It was so dark that even the lumps of chalk lining the path
appeared blackened in the night. I could not trace the noises I heard – a disturbed
bird, perhaps, or the blur of the wind through a copse. If it were not for the scuff of
the track under my feet, I could have been forgiven for fearing that we had cut
ourselves adrift from the
land and were stranded on a barren stretch of
anonymous sea. How Pete worked out which direction to take, I will never know.

Once we had found the edge of Salisbury
Plain, we climbed a hill – I could not say which one – and wove our way through a wood
that backed onto a snatch of cottages. Pete picked his route with ease, his feet
pressing noiselessly on the foliage beneath us. I, on the other hand, made quite a
racket, snagging my skirt on the bushes and rifling through the undergrowth. But he was
patient, waiting for me to reach him, then shepherding me through to the other side. I
felt his hand on my back, as we emerged from the trees, lingering slightly longer than
required.

In the churchyard, he retrieved a sack from
behind the grave of a Mr Alfred Stash.

I started to giggle. ‘It’s a
little bit …’

‘What?’

‘Margery Allingham.’

‘Who?’

‘You know, Albert Campion,
Death
of a Ghost
 …’

He let out an impatient sigh.

‘Oh, you know what I mean! Hiding your
loot behind the grave of a man named Stash. It’s … well, it’s
obvious!’

‘What do I care what the poor fellow
was called? I just come to where I’m told to come.’ He lifted the sack onto
his shoulder as he spoke. ‘Anyway, keep quiet, won’t you? You’ll get
us caught!’

He set off into the thicket and I followed.
At the other end of the wood, a half-moon emerged from behind the clouds. It lit
Pete’s back with a watery light and set it against the expanse of the Plain –
‘second-hand sunshine’, my father used to call it. The Downs now decorated
the horizon with dense silhouettes, making it easier to find our way home. I watched
Pete cradle the sack across the fields as if it were a sickly lamb that needed taking to
the barn for warming. Then I picked up my
pace to close the gap between
us, all the while wondering what was inside the sack.

Pete wasn’t the only one going behind
the wardens’ backs when it came to rationing. Word spread through Imber that the
Sheltons, who leased the land up the side of Long Barrow, were planning to slaughter an
extra pig.

To this day, I do not know who called the
warden. Everybody agreed that the Sheltons’ idea was unpatriotic, but we
weren’t about to take the side of some toffee-nosed official sent by the military
to check on us. Besides, the Sheltons had six little mouths to feed and a seventh on the
way. They needed all the food they could get.

When the warden stopped at the parsonage to
ask for directions to the Sheltons’, I ran ahead to the farm to alert them. I took
the back route, looping through the ash trees at the end of our garden and sprinting
down the gully that ran immediately parallel to the church. In the summer the smell of
hay starched itself into the air here; it seemed to reach right up into the attic of
your head when you inhaled it, forcing you to remember it long after the season had
gone. I had turned up my nose at it when I was younger. But after the evacuation, I used
to walk all the way up to the farms at Compton Chamberlayne just to fill my lungs with
its dryness.

‘Mrs Shelton!’ I exclaimed,
arriving breathless at her garden gate. ‘Forgive the intrusion. I thought I should
let you know that the warden is on his way. You have about ten minutes to hide the
pig.’

‘Pig? Goodness, my girl, what makes
you think we’re keeping back a pig?’ She smiled at me in a way that told me
the rumours had in fact been true. To my amazement, she remained kneeling before her
vegetables, as if I had interrupted a prayer she wished to finish. There was no frantic
rush. She simply angled her trowel back into the ground and unearthed another leek. Soon
enough, the warden arrived at the gate, eyeing me suspiciously.