Towards Another Summer (9 page)

Life in Wyndham was full of excitement! Ronnie Hadford pushed a bead up his nose and couldn’t get it down again; Mavis Hadford broke her leg and was sent to hospital and when she came home she had crutches and we said—Lend us your crutches Mavis, and she was so mean about lending them, and we tried to use one of Grandma’s crutches for playing broken legs but hers were not the right size, therefore we made ourselves stilts instead, walking up and down Ferry Street on stilts until Isy slipped and a protruding nail tore her shin.

—My shin, she said.

Shin. Shin. The doctor sewed it, leaving a white scar, and for a time my mother talked of another accident which
happened to Isy before I was born.

—When Isy was a baby and drank Jeyes Fluid and I gave her an emetic.

An emetic?

—I gave her an emetic and rushed her to the doctor.

Oh my mother was so brave and so swift! Tommy Lyles was a ganger on the railway, and the train ran over him outside our house and my mother tore up sheets to bandage him, almost as if she had been waiting all her life for an opportunity to tear up sheets. It was always happening; the newspaper was always telling of people who ran to the scene of the accident and tore up sheets. After this accident my mother was not inclined to talk about it. She did not make it another occasion of her life - ‘When Tommy Lyles was run over and I tore up sheets and you were little’, because Tommy Lyles died.

We avoided playing near the railway line where Tommy Lyles was killed, and we looked with awe at the house where he had lived, and we stared at Mrs Lyles because she had been his wife, and once in the night I pulled aside the curtain and looked out of the window at their house to surprise it in the darkness, to see if it had changed and showed the change only at night, but I could see nothing significant about it, it was an ordinary railway house, like ours except that a cabbage tree grew on the front lawn.

For weeks after Tommy Lyles’ death the rumour of death stayed in the air. My mother would suddenly put her hand over her heart, gasp, and look afraid. People seemed to want to say, Look what happened to Tommy Lyles. And we who used to like to go on the side of the railway line to pick the wild sweet peas, stopped going there because Tommy Lyles had been there. Of course we had never called him Tommy. He was Mr Lyles. Sometimes in my mind I heard my father say with a terrible doom in his voice,—Mum, Tommy Lyles died on the way to hospital.

—Don’t, Curly.

You see it was my father who drove the train that killed him.

It was War now, and wounds, not football wounds. Having so many neighbours we now had more visitors, a Mr and Mrs from here and there almost every night, and while my mother talked about children and the government with the women, the men exchanged reminiscences of the War. My father adopted a special voice for speaking of the War.

—Yes, we were in the War. We were in the trenches.

—Oh, the trenches. Don’t Curly, my mother would say, growing pale and putting her hand over her heart. I wasn’t sure what the trenches were but I knew they must be terrible places.

—Mademoiselle from Armentierres,
parley-vu
, my father sang. Pack Up your Troubles in your old Kit Bag and smile, smile, smile. Carry me back to Blighty.

I found it very strange and frightening to be at the War with my father singing

We all knew that when our father sang that song he was at the War; there was something in the song which mattered here, now, in Ferry Street Wyndham Southland South Island New Zealand Southern Hemisphere the World the Universe; the meaning of what mattered showed in the two lines,

When I heard the song I knew by the way my father sang and the expression on his face that he was afraid to die, and when
my mother heard him singing I knew by her face that she didn’t ever want my father to die but she was afraid that perhaps - who knows - look what happened to Tommy Lyles - perhaps he might die, any day, today, tomorrow . . .

—Don’t Curly, she said,—Don’t sing that. You’re not at the War now.

Mostly they talked of the War as if it were a place set far across the sea, like San Francisco or Honolulu, and every few years in history soldiers travelled there to be there and when you talked of all the soldiers who had ever fought in all the years you spoke of them as having been ‘at the Wars’. Many of the fairy-tales began, ‘An old soldier, home from the Wars’. They went away as young boys, they came home aged, with grey hair, wooden legs and walking sticks . . .

Yet from the way people talked I knew the War wasn’t a place like San Francisco or Honolulu, it was something which moved like an iceberg or a cloud; it was invisible, not moving in the same direction, like a river or keeping the same shape like a train on the railway line, but always changing, perhaps growing arms and legs and a face then losing them or having them blotted out; perhaps putting down a root into the garden or the road or into water - the sea, rivers, and staying there, growing tall, blossoming, then withering; blown here and there by the wind; entering people, becoming people, stealing from them, adding to them, changing the shape of their lives: that was the War. It pursued forever, while people tried to escape from it; they sang Pack Up your Troubles and Oh My I don’t want to die, I want to go home.

But was there anywhere to go? How could you go home if you were already home?

Or was home some place out of the world?

 

Sometimes I thought it would be comforting and convenient to find such a place.

Especially when

Grace got out of bed and switched off the gas fire. The flames ceased their whispering, the rosy-icing latticework paled, the room was cold as if there had been no fire. The waiting frost fingered the windowpane, slid open trapdoors of glass, crept into the room touching the four corners with a permanent night chill, stroking Grace’s pillow which then stayed cold all night. She switched on the bedlamp and climbed again into the cold bed. Her bones were aching with cold; she drew her breath, gasping, through her teeth. Then unable to bear the discomfort she went to the wardrobe drawer, found an extra blanket and returned to bed, wrapping the blanket around her between the sheets. Ah; her skin began to glow with warmth. Anne and Philip will be warm, she thought. The word obsessed her. Warm. Warmth. She tried to remember a time when the sun had not been absent; it seemed impossible to think of any colours other than grey, white, black. And the children will be warm, she thought, for children have special supplies. I have no rubber bottle, electric blanket; only a cardigan and a woollen blanket between the sheets; human skin is best and simplest.

Yet Grace was enjoying the cold, now that it was barred from entering her bed. Currents of clear cold thought flowed through her head. She remembered that the room and bed belonged to Anne’s father. How often he must lie here, she thought, feeling the cold and not being willing to admit it, gazing at the ceiling and the walls, the New Zealand pictures, Wakatipu, the Southern Alps, Christchurch; tasting the warm wind blowing across the plains; lying here, rigid and stern knowing that a lifetime of memories of one land has shrunk from the vast spaces of mountains, plains and bush-valleys to this white-painted austere room. Surely the few possessions which
he chose to bring from New Zealand must be so burdened with their concentration of memories that at times he cannot bear to inspect them in this remote northern Winchley light, without suffering a corresponding heaviness of heart. Yet how noble he must feel, having made his choice, having reduced the clutter of his life to one room.

 

 

 

 

Grace noted the framed photograph of Anne; rosy,dark-haired, smiling; perhaps a graduation photograph bearing the innocence, the blurred milky naiveté which seem typical of photos taken in your youth, in your home town, and which are never again captured, especially if you leave your home town to spend your life in another country. Grace supposed that Anne might not care for this photo; there was an unsophisticated eagerness about it which was not so much the direct responsibility of the photographer as of the home town atmosphere, which, naturally charged with family history and secrets, and with provincial prides and concerns, had seeped into the photograph in the same way that it spilled in the streets and the houses and their furniture and revealed itself absorbed in the faces of the people.

Grace remembered a first book by an Australian writer, how the photo on the jacket had been eager, innocent as the photo of Anne; again, it was not only the woman herself, it was her home town, her family, her life. When the writer left Australia to live in England and there published another book with her photo on the jacket, how changed she appeared in the photograph, how discreet the camera had been, telling its truth through its small selective lies; freed from the narrow repressive restrictions of home town atmosphere. The writer appeared tidier, more fashionable, sophisticated; you would almost not have known her from other writers, you could have placed her photo beside others of the same type and tidiness and not have been able to distinguish one from the other - like those cemeteries which are planned as Gardens of Rest and when you walk among the
roses and dahlias and gladioli, knowing that so many ashes are buried in the garden, you can’t really allot the dead their correct place - the blades of grass on the lawn seem so much alike, and you can’t pluck the petals from the roses to find which has been nourished by Mary, Henry, George, Wilfred.

If photos of the writer, of Anne, and of Grace herself were taken now, Grace thought, all would show this discretion of which Death is master; one might grieve for the old home town photos, but the new had their advantages . . .

 

Grace had been reaching to switch off the bedlamp when Anne’s photo had distracted her; now she settled back into the darkness, snuggled into the woollen blanket, pulled the bedclothes almost over her head and closed her eyes. No sound from the children’s room. Philip and Anne had not yet gone to bed.

What were they talking about, down there by the fire?

Grace tried not to think of her failure to communicate by speech; she traced her part in the evening’s conversation. If only she had said this, if only she had said that! Why did she always seem to stop in midsentence and not know how to continue because her words and ideas had vanished?

She began to cry, quietly, and cried herself to sleep.

Once or twice she woke, drew the bedclothes down to free her arms and turned from the wall to the dark glistening shape of window. Immediately the chilling air surged near her, touching spears of icicles upon her skin; she lay entombed in ice; anyone coming into the room would have seen the oblong coffin-shape of ice resting upon the bed containing deep within it the smoky darkening-blue feminine shape of a comfortless weekender, migratory bird, lying in the penultimate home of an elderly New Zealand sheep-farmer. Country darkness fills the bowl of light to overflowing; in city darkness little silver lights swim like fish in and around the pool. Winchley at night was dark and lonely. No sound. No moreporks, hedgehogs, cats, no sea crashing over the breakwater, town-clock striking the quarter-hour. No people; only now and again from the children’s room the small restless whimpers which children make in their dreams - Don’t take it from me, it’s mine, Mummy, Noel’s got it, and it’s mine, I want this, I want this, but it belongs to Sarah, No No I want it, Mummy look what Noel’s doing, Daddy what’s Grace-Cleave staying here for, where’s my baby Jesus and my angels: whimpers for things broken or stolen or put out of reach; things things.

 

No sound from Philip and Anne; they must be deep asleep. They must have accepted their sleeping, performing the ritual of it with the deceiving simplicity of mime, like film stars on the screen - each entering the room, undressing, each drawing back the blankets, lying neatly on the appointed side of the double bed, resting the head just so on the pillow, apart, as if poisonous thorns lay between them; then reaching to switch off the lamp, calling a sporty Cheerio, Night-Night; the eyes closed; the two unmixed in instant sleep. Grace used to imagine, when she saw
such modest films, that as soon as the camera had left the scene the bedmates flicked open their eyes, like dolls, and seeing in the dark, sprang towards each other, arms and legs locked like complicated mechanical toys, blood-red and snow-white twisted and exposed, revolving like the colours on a barber’s pole. Grace knew that more often it was the unreal film which was real, that a man and woman climbed into bed, arranged the bedclothes considerately with each having a fair share, put out the light, said Ta-Ta or Bye-Bye or See You Tomorrow, and slept, stretched like corpses, as if each were thinking of death and of the trouble and expense that would be saved if they died in the night with their bodies discreetly and properly arranged each to fit its own coffin.

Now and then Grace heard a sigh or murmur from Philip or Anne; something spoken in a dream. I am the perpetual eavesdropper, Grace thought; always with my ear to the wall of other people’s lives; such a vicarious existence does not seem possible. I feel that if I were human and not, now, thankfully, a migratory bird, I should be one of the first programmed human machines, with my cold eyes flashing their lights at stated intervals, and my mouth emitting its cardboard code.

Reluctantly she got out of bed and used the chamber, a big roomy vessel with deep white walls like the cliffs of Dover. The British, she thought, are so hospitable.