The Wouldbegoods (6 page)

Noel said he would write her a poem, but Oswald had a deep, inward feeling that Mrs Simpkins would not understand poetry. Many people do not.

H.O. said, ‘Why not sing “Rule Britannia” under her window after she had gone to bed, like waits,' but no one else thought so.

Denny thought we might get up a subscription for her among the wealthy and affluent, but we said again that we knew money would be no balm to the haughty mother of a brave British soldier.

‘What we want,' Alice said, ‘is something that will be a good deal of trouble to us and some good to her.'

‘A little help is worth a deal of poetry,' said Denny.

I should not have said that myself. Noel did look sick.

‘What
does
she do that we can help in?' Dora asked. ‘Besides, she won't let us help.'

H.O. said, ‘She does nothing but work in the garden. At least if she does anything inside you can't see it, because she keeps the door shut.'

Then at once we saw. And we agreed to get up the very next day, ere yet the rosy dawn had flushed the east, and have a go at Mrs Simpkins's garden.

We got up. We really did. But too often when you mean to, overnight, it seems so silly to do it when you come to waking in the dewy morn. We crept downstairs with our boots in our hands. Denny is rather unlucky, though a most careful boy. It was he who dropped his boot, and it went blundering down the stairs, echoing like thunderbolts, and waking up Albert's uncle.
But when we explained to him that we were going to do some gardening he let us, and went back to bed.

Everything is very pretty and different in the early morning, before people are up. I have been told this is because the shadows go a different way from what they do in the awake part of the day. But I don't know. Noel says the fairies have just finished tidying up then. Anyhow it all feels quite otherwise.

We put on our boots in the porch, and we got our gardening tools and we went down to the white cottage. It is a nice cottage, with a thatched roof, like in the drawing copies you get at girls' schools, and you do the thatch – if you can – with a B.B. pencil. If you cannot, you just leave it. It looks just as well, somehow, when it is mounted and framed.

We looked at the garden. It was very neat. Only one patch was coming up thick with weeds. I could see groundsel and chickweed, and others that I did not know. We set to work with a will. We used all our tools – spades, forks, hoes, and rakes – and Dora worked with the trowel, sitting down, because her foot was hurt. We cleared the weedy patch beautifully, scraping off all the nasty weeds and leaving the nice clean brown dirt. We worked as hard as ever we could. And we were happy, because it was unselfish toil, and no one thought then of putting it in the Book of Golden Deeds, where we had agreed to write down our virtuous actions and the good doings of each other, when we happen to notice them.

We had just done, and we were looking at the beautiful production of our honest labour, when the cottage door burst open, and the soldier's widowed mother came out
like a wild tornado, and her eyes looked like upas trees – death to the beholder.

‘You wicked, meddlesome, nasty children!' she said, ‘ain't you got enough of your own good ground to runch up and spoil, but you must come into
my
little lot?'

Some of us were deeply alarmed, but we stood firm.

‘We have only been weeding your garden,' Dora said; ‘we wanted to do something to help you.'

‘Dratted little busybodies,' she said. It was indeed hard, but everyone in Kent says ‘dratted' when they are cross. ‘It's my turnips,' she went on, ‘you've hoed up, and my cabbages. My turnips that my boy sowed afore he went. There, get along with you do, afore I come at you with my broom-handle.'

She did come at us with her broom-handle as she spoke, and even the boldest turned and fled. Oswald was even the boldest. ‘They looked like weeds right enough,' he said.

And Dicky said, ‘It all comes of trying to do golden deeds.' This was when we were out in the road.

As we went along, in a silence full of gloomy remorse, we met the postman. He said –

‘Here's the letters for the Moat,' and passed on hastily. He was a bit late.

When we came to look through the letters, which were nearly all for Albert's uncle, we found there was a postcard that had got stuck in a magazine wrapper. Alice pulled it out. It was addressed to Mrs Simpkins. We honourably only looked at the address, although it is allowed by the rules of honourableness to read postcards that come to your house if you like, even if they are not for you.

After a heated discussion, Alice and Oswald said they were not afraid, whoever was, and they retraced their steps, Alice holding the postcard right way up, so that we should not look at the lettery part of it, but only the address.

With quickly beating heart, but outwardly unmoved, they walked up to the white cottage door.

It opened with a bang when we knocked.

‘Well?' Mrs Simpkins said, and I think she said it what people in books call ‘sourly'.

Oswald said, ‘We are very, very sorry we spoiled your turnips, and we will ask my father to try and make it up to you some other way.'

She muttered something about not wanting to be beholden to anybody.

‘We came back,' Oswald went on, with his always unruffled politeness, ‘because the postman gave us a postcard in mistake with our letters, and it is addressed to you.'

‘We haven't read it,' Alice said quickly. I think she needn't have said that. Of course we hadn't. But perhaps girls know better than we do what women are likely to think you capable of.

The soldier's mother took the postcard (she snatched it really, but ‘took' is a kinder word, considering everything) and she looked at the address a long time. Then she turned it over and read what was on the back. Then she drew her breath in as far as it would go, and caught hold of the door-post. Her face got awful. It was like the wax face of a dead king I saw once at Madame Tussaud's.

Alice understood. She caught hold of the soldier's mother's hand and said—

‘Oh,
no
– it's
not
your boy Bill!'

And the woman said nothing, but shoved the postcard into Alice's hand, and we both read it – and it
was
her boy Bill.

Alice gave her back the card. She had held on to the woman's hand all the time, and now she squeezed the hand, and held it against her face. But she could not say a word because she was crying so. The soldier's mother took the card again and she pushed Alice away, but it was not an unkind push, and she went in and shut the door; and as Alice and Oswald went down the road Oswald looked back, and one of the windows of the cottage had a white blind. Afterwards the other windows had too. There were no blinds really to the cottage. It was aprons and things she had pinned up.

Alice cried most of the morning, and so did the other girls. We wanted to do something for the soldier's mother, but you can do nothing when people's sons are shot. It is the most dreadful thing to want to do something for people who are unhappy, and not to know what to do.

It was Noel who thought of what we
could
do at last.

He said, ‘I suppose they don't put up tombstones to soldiers when they die in war. But there – I mean –'

Oswald said, ‘Of course not.'

Noel said, ‘I daresay you'll think it's silly, but I don't care. Don't you think she'd like it, if we put one up to
him
? Not in the churchyard, of course, because we shouldn't be let, but in our garden, just where it joins on to the churchyard?'

And we all thought it was a first-rate idea.

This is what we meant to put on the tombstone:

Then we remembered that poor brave Bill was really buried far away in the Southern hemisphere, if at all. So we altered it to –

Then we looked out a nice flagstone in the stable yard, and we got a cold chisel out of the Dentist's toolbox, and began.

But stonecutting is difficult and dangerous work.

Oswald went at it a bit, but he chipped his thumb, and it bled so he had to chuck it. Then Dicky tried, and then Denny, but Dicky hammered his finger, and Denny took all day over every stroke, so that by teatime we had only done the H, and about half the E – and the E
was awfully crooked. Oswald chipped his thumb over the H.

We looked at it the next morning, and even the most sanguinary of us saw that it was a hopeless task.

Then Denny said, ‘Why not wood and paint?' and he showed us how. We got a board and two stumps from the carpenter's in the village, and we painted it all white, and when that was dry Denny did the words on it.

It was something like this:

We could not get in what we meant to at first, so we had to give up the poetry.

We fixed it up when it was dry. We had to dig jolly deep to get the posts to stand up, but the gardener helped us.

Then the girls made wreaths of white flowers, roses and Canterbury bells, and lilies and pinks, and sweet peas and daisies, and put them over the posts. And I think if Bill Simpkins had known how sorry we were, he would have been glad. Oswald only hopes if
he
falls on the wild battlefield, which is his highest ambition, that somebody will be as sorry about him as he was about Bill, that's all!

When all was done, and what flowers there were over from the wreaths scattered under the tombstone
between the posts, we wrote a letter to Mrs Simpkins, and said –

And we signed our names. Alice took the letter.

The soldier's mother read it, and said something about our oughting to know better than to make fun of people's troubles with our tombstones and tomfoolery.

Alice told me she could not help crying.

She said –

‘It's not! It's
not
! Dear,
dear
Mrs Simpkins, do come with me and see! You don't know how sorry we are about Bill. Do come and see. We can go through the churchyard, and the others have all gone in, so as to leave it quiet for you. Do come.'

And Mrs Simpkins did. And when she read what we had put up, and Alice told her the verse we had not had room for, she leant against the wall by the grave – I mean the tombstone – and Alice hugged her, and they both cried bitterly. The poor soldier's mother was very, very pleased, and she forgave us about the turnips, and we were friends after that, but she always liked Alice the best. A great many people do, somehow.

After that we used to put fresh flowers every day on Bill's tombstone, and I do believe his mother was pleased, though she got us to move it away from the
churchyard edge and put it in a corner of our garden under a laburnum, where people could not see it from the church. But you could from the road, though I think she thought you couldn't. She came every day to look at the new wreaths. When the white flowers gave out we put coloured, and she liked it just as well.

About a fortnight after the erecting of the tombstone the girls were putting fresh wreaths on it when a soldier in a red coat came down the road, and he stopped and looked at us. He walked with a stick, and he had a bundle in a blue cotton handkerchief, and one arm in a sling.

And he looked again, and he came nearer, and he leaned on the wall, so that he could read the black printing on the white paint.

And he grinned all over his face, and he said –

‘Well, I
am
blessed!'

And he read it all out in a sort of half whisper, and when he came to the end, where it says, ‘and all such brave soldiers', he said –

‘Well, I really
am
!'

I suppose he meant he really was blessed. Oswald thought it was like the soldier's cheek, so he said –

‘I daresay you aren't so very blessed as you think. What's it to do with you, anyway, eh, Tommy?'

Of course Oswald knew from Kipling that an infantry soldier is called that. The soldier said –

‘Tommy yourself, young man. That's
me
!' and he pointed to the tombstone.

We stood rooted to the spot. Alice spoke first.

‘Then you're Bill, and you're not dead,' she said. ‘Oh, Bill, I am so glad! Do let
me
tell your mother.'

She started running, and so did we all. Bill had to go slowly because of his leg, but I tell you he went as fast as ever he could.

We all hammered at the soldier's mother's door, and shouted –

‘Come out! come out!' and when she opened the door we were going to speak, but she pushed us away, and went tearing down the garden path like winking. I never saw a grown-up woman run like it, because she saw Bill coming.

She met him at the gate, running right into him, and caught hold of him, and she cried much more than when she thought he was dead.

And we all shook his hand and said how glad we were.

The soldier's mother kept hold of him with both hands, and I couldn't help looking at her face. It was like wax that had been painted on both pink cheeks, and the eyes shining like candles. And when we had all said how glad we were, she said –